Month: July 2003

Gah! This society is so auto-centric. If you don’t have a driver’s licence you’re a bloody second class citizen.

Not only can I no longer cash my paychecks at Bankwest without providing a driver’s licence, I was unable to close down my Commonwealth bank account on Friday without having one either. Oh, sure, if I had my ATM card they would have shut it down, but I handed in my ATM card about four months ago the first time I asked them to close it. They didn’t do it then apparently because there were still payments coming out of it for Greenpeace.

Now in this situation I would have though the sensible thing to do would be either send me a letter advising me of the situation, or just cut off payments to Greenpeace, and let them contact me about. But no they just let things run on until I was more than $100 overdrawn, and then sent me a nasty letter about it. You’ve got to admire their devotion to the environment, but still.

So now I’ve got to traipse in again on Monday with sufficient ID to prove that I am in fact me and not some devious criminal planning to take over the world by paying off people’s overdrafts. Sheeze!

Combine all this with the fact that under new anti-terrorism legislation you can’t send parcels overseas without photo-id and someone who doesn’t drive is well and truly screwed 🙁

OK, OK, I know the sensible thing to do would be get my licence, but why should the fact that I’m not particularly interested in driving around a big stinking chunk of metal make me unable to carry out ordinary day to day functions? And I haven’t got a licence by choice, what about people too incompetent to obtain one?! It’s f-ing ridiculous!!

Gah!!

Anyway I’ll make a more coherant (and less furious 🙂 entry tomorrow. Probably. In the meantime I thought I’d padd this out by posting the lyrics to my latest favourite song The Laws have Changed by Canadian popsters the New Pornographers – chiefly because I can’t seem to find them anywhere else online. So, here goes…

1: Sounds like “sing” but could well be something else.
2: Prevailing opinion is that this word is “blood”, which would match up well with “bone”. However the initial ‘b’ sound seems to be missing. Hence it could also be “love” or possibly even “life”.
3: Thanks to Mark James for pointing out this lyric change (from “From the Line”).

(In case you’re wondering, it’s apparently “a parable linking primogeniture of pharaohs and the collapse of democracy under the Bush dynasty” – so there you go 🙂

PS: When I turn on the TV in the evening I do not particularly want to watch footage of babies projectile vomiting to the sounds of Rage Against the Machine. Thank you Australia’s Funniest Home Video Show!

PPS: Don’t go searching for anything including the word “Saxon” on Google Australia at the moment. You end up with nothing but Big Brother sites.

From my inbox…

Dimensional Warp Generator Needed

Hello,

I’m a time traveler stuck here in 2003. Since nobody here seems to be able to get me what I need (safely here to me), I will have to build a simple time travel circut to get where I need myself. I am going to need an easy to follow picture diagram for a simple time travel circut, which can be built out of (readily available) parts here in 2003. Please email me any schematics you have. I will pay good money for anything you send me I can use Or if you have the rechargeable AMD dimensional warp generator wrist watch unit available, and are 100% certain you have a (secure) means of delivering it to me please also reply. Send a separate email to me at: [email removed because this guy is probably some kind of evil spammer].

Do not reply back directly to this email as it will only be bounced back to you.

Thank You

What the?!?

Depressed. Self medicating with large amounts of chocolate, sleep and mind numbing prime-time TV. Will write more when I’m feeling better.

Well, first of all congrats to Helen *g*. I have actually congratulated her via email but I figured I’d better say something officially on my blog. Couldn’t happen to a nicer person. The only problem now is that I’m going to be all jealous ;-D

Anyway, I’m sure I had something to blog about, but I can’t think of it. So I’m going to blather on about other stuff in the hopes I remember 🙂

Last week I watched the MTV Movie Awards. This was not because I think they’re of any importance or significance, but because I heard Yoda won one (for best fight sequence) and the people at Lucasfilms has done up a pretty amusing CGI of him making his acceptance speech. I wasn’t disappointed 🙂 The two highlights were in the middle when he broke off thanking people to sob “Would not cry I promised myself!”, and then when the music started up before he’d finished. He looked up from his speech in annoyance and made a small gesture with his hand. The music stopped dead. “Play off Yoda no one does!” he commented and continued reading his list 🙂

I was also fairly entertained by the Matrix Reloaded themed intro they knocked together. The upside was they’d actually got some of the real actors (or at least people who looked so like the real actors you couldn’t tell the difference) to reprise their roles, and then mixed in footage from the actual film to create a sort of alternative Matrix thing. The downside was it stared Justin Timberlake and that other idiot, the one from the American Pie films.

In any case the best bit (I thought anyway) was when the two aforementioned jokers found themselves in the middle of the big Zion dance sequence. After getting doused with a bucketload of sweat, they get talking to one of the dancers (played by Andy Dick of Newsradio fame). “Where the hell are we?” they ask. “You’re in Zion!” answers Dick, dancing around with glow sticks. “What is this place?” they continue. Dick replies “Well Duh! It’s obviously an underground city where the last humans live and the robots are coming to kill us! Doesn’t it make you wanna party! Wooooo!!!”. At this point footage from the movie shows Morpheus walking out onto his ledge. “Oo! It’s Morpheus!” comments Dick “I LOVE YOU MORPHEUS!!!”.

“ZION, HEAR ME!” shouts Morpheus. Dick chimes in sotto-voice “After the speech we’re all going back to his place for a big orgy. At least that’s what many of us have heard…”. We cut back to Morpheus “It is TRUE what many of you have heard!”. The crowd goes wild 🙂

Then Andy Dick speaks up. “Morpheus! Hey! Morpheus!” he yells. Morpheus looks across at him. “What can we expect at this orgy of yours?” asks Dick. “MACHINES!” answers Morpheus. The entire cavern falls silent in concerned shock 😀

Well, I found it amusing! 😉

Oddly enough though I have some other Justin Timberlake related news. Rebecca arrived out of the blue *g* to stay this week while she did some more management stuff at uni. During the week she purchased a copy of New Weekly which featured a remarkably hideous pull out poster of Mr Timberlake lying around in a car with his shirt off and holding a toy gun in the vicinity of his crotch. We had a good laugh about this and joked about her hiding it somewhere in the flat when she left so I’d stumble over it some time and get a nauseating shock when I least expected it.

The thing is she’s gone now and while the New Weekly is still where she left it, the poster is nowhere to be seen 🙂

I haven’t come across it yet. I don’t know if Rebecca’s been particularly devious in concealing it, or if she was even more devious and took it with her, knowing that I’d suspect it was hidden somewhere and that not being able to find it would drive me mad. I may launch a full scale search this afternoon, or on the other hand I may hold her make-up bag and phone recharger (both of which she left behind) to ransom until she tells me the truth 🙂

(Congrats to Dom on the kickarse new job by the way)

On the subject of New Weekly though I realy am stunned at my own stupidity. On looking through it I discovered that George from The Secret Life of Us is played by the same actress who played Chiana in Farscape (Perth’s own Gigi Edgley of course). How this escaped me for so long I have no idea. I mean she even has the same hairstyle (more or less) for crying out loud! The only explanation I can come up with is that George has normal human coloured skin (and hasn’t got an annoying, whining American accent *g*). So, if you want a disguise I can’t penetrate, painting yourself blue would be a good start, apparently 🙂

Oh yeah, Barry White. He’s dead. That kind of sucks. In a weird twist of fate Ryan downloaded a whole load of his music off Kazaa the day before he croaked. For reasons of science I’ve asked him to repeat the experiment by downloading everything he can find by Tatu. Strictly for scientific purposes you understand 🙂

He brought round a bunch of MP3s last week and I’m listening to them as I type. At the moment it’s The Raven by [Dr Evil] the Alan Parsons Project! [/Dr Evil]. Hmmmm, I think they would have been better off building a giant laser on the moon 🙂

Ah, Sting. That’s better.

Hmmmm, I haven’t been up to much else. I whiled away a couple of hours last weekend when I should have been doing other things tracing a photo of Alisen Down in Illustrator to make a graphic novel style wallpaper for my computer. I (no doubt looking through the eyes of love, or at least persistent infatuation ;-D) think it’s not bad. Ryan on the other hand maintains it looks like a guy (although he has since amended his description to “frighteningly androgynous” :). I will let you the readers, form your own opinions…

There you go. See, if you squint and pretend it’s a photo, it looks nothing like a guy. Right? Right? Oh c’mon! Bah! I give up with you people! 🙂

Hmmm, the Alan Parsons Project strike again. Ammonia Avenue. This is slightly more listenable. Sort of like Queen meets Ben Folds meets Goodbye Yellow Brick Road meets Little Mouse. Sort of 🙂

Gah! This pasta I’m eating for lunch is burning my mouth. It’s shell shaped, and while the sauce surrounding the pasta has cooled to a quite edible state the sauce trapped inside the shells has maintained an infernally high temperature. Ah well, it tastes good. On those parts of my tongue that haven’t had the taste-buds scorched off 🙂

OK, I still have no idea what I was going to blog about, but it’s probably covered in there somewhere. So I’ll shut up now 🙂

The KLF have now left the building!

PS: I bought some frozen “chicken tenders” from the supermarket the other day, this led me to make up a really pointless joke.

PPS: “What’s a chicken tender?”

PPPS: “A boat that resupplies chickens!”

PPPPS: See, I said it was really pointless 🙂

PPPPPS: I swear I’ve heard Neko Case’s voice before. But I can’t figure out where! Grrr! 🙂

At a raw materials level, some of the songs on Electric Version have so many hooks that they become bouillon — listen to how “The Laws Have Changed” keeps kicking in, over and over. Added to water, it would yield three perfectly good pop songs.

Hell yeah! 🙂