Yes, well…

The frequency of my blog entries getting back to normal eh? So much for that idea πŸ™‚

There’s been a lot of stuff to get done at work before I finish up, and there’s still a lot of stuff to be organised for the trip, and as a result I’ve been busy as all get out. And as a result of that I’ve been too tired to do much in the evenings except throw something in the microwave and collapse in front of the TV (and an unremitting diet of microwave dinners is probably not helping anyway). So keeping up with blog entries has sort of fallen by the wayside. But they should pick up sooner or later – maybe πŸ™‚

A few quick notes on things though.

Justin and Marika

I caught up with Justin and Marika last week. We went out to dinner at Kailis Brothers in Leederville (where I had a very nice salt and pepper squid) and then walked up to the Luna to see some film I’d never heard of but which Justin and Marika said was a documentary about a family who’s house was stormed by the police and FBI in the middle of their thanksgiving dinner – sort of a social justice/abuse of power by the authorities type thing. In actual fact it turned out that the police and FBI stormed the place because the father of said family was a paedophile trading in child porn, which was frankly not what I’d been lead to expect. But it was interesting anyway, in a somewhat unsettling way. I’ll probably have more to say on it later.

Oh and it turned out that the reason Justin and Marika didn’t turn up to my birthday dinner back in February/March was because they’d just found out Marika was pregnant – and were in severe shock at the time. They’re extremely happy about it now, so congratulations guys!

The Charmed Season Finale

Gideon is dead. Good. You do have to wonder where Leo picked up the ability to shoot lightning bolts from his hands Emperor Palpetine style though. And since when was Chris telekinetic? They did a very good job in the adds of suggesting that Piper was going to die (not that I figured she’d stay dead of course, name one Halliwell sister who hasn’t been dead at some point or other) but in the end it turned out that they killed off Chris, which is fair enough because the entire temporal paradox of his very existance was rapidly becoming an embarrasment. Ummm what else? Oh yes, Barbus. It’s good to see him back. Every TV show needs a demon of fear who looks like a cross between David Bowie and Tom Waites and speaks with a Tennassee accent (Tennasse? I dunno, somewhere like that). And his turn as the Demon of Hope in the mirror universe was hilarious. Actually speaking of the mirror universe it was nice to see that they kept to the convention of the guys all having pointy little beards and the girls done up as goths – just so we could tell who was who πŸ™‚

(Oh yeah, normally I’d regard Rose McGowan done up as a goth as a dream come true, but they went way overboard with the hair – it looked like she was wearing three wigs on top of each other – so no dice πŸ™‚

Ummm, sure there was some other stuff I was going to write about, but I’d better get on with some real work (I’m in the office early again today) . So, farewell until I get myself together enough to write again, which could be sometime in November at this rate πŸ™‚

Cool Air

It’s 7:22am and I’m in at the office trying to figure out what the heck is happening with one of our clients (I’ve managed to track it down to a problem with the mail server). But that’s not what I’m here to write about, I’m here to write about the totally insane bus ride I just had getting here.

When I come into work early I catch the first number 97 bus of the day, which leaves Subiaco railway station at 7:00am – at this time of year just before sunrise. It was particularly chilly last night, and by the time the bus arrived even I (who generally prefers the cold) was looking forwards to getting inside where it would be a bit warmer. So I step into the bus and BLAM!! Struck down by a blast of icy cold from the air-conditioning. It was colder inside the bus than out!

Now when I say it was cold in that bus, I mean cold. Not cold like a chilly morning, cold like the air that comes rushing out when you open your freezer. Everyone flinched getting on, and a few muttered about it quite loudly under their breath, but the driver (who may well have been named Dr MuΓ±oz) completely ignored them. He set off with the air-con still on full blast – it was like travelling in the back of a refrigerated goods van.

OK, I’ve just checked a weather site which suggests that the temperature at 7:00am was about 4C. Which means inside the bus it must have been down around freezing.

Now I don’t expect bus drivers to be the most sane of people, but c’mon! That’s just ridiculous!

I Have a Cave Troll

I’ve decided that I have D.I.Y. Stigmata. Not “Do It Yourself” in the sense that I gouge holes in my hands and feet every Easter and run around shouting “Miracle! Miracle!” until I collapse from blood loss, but in the sense that any time I do anything even remotely handyman oriented I end up with bloody cuts gouged into my hands and fingers that I can’t remember inflicting! I mean if you tear a large strip of skin off the base of a fingernail you’d think you’d notice, right? Not carry on blissfully sawing or nailing until you notice the blood everywhere. But no! Not me!

So I figure these mysterious cuts have to be hardware engendered stigamata of some kind. I start doing some woodwork, and spontaneous bleeding wounds open up all over my hands. Probably that dratted gypsy curse again. Hmmm, I should probably write to Fortean Times about it or something.

Actually talking of Fortean Times there was a report I found particularly amusing in this month’s issue (that is to say the May issue, it takes a while to get out here). Well actually there were a few (like the archeologists in Fife who carefully excavated part of a ‘Viking settlement’ only to discover it was a 1940’s era sunken patio and the great deal of excitement over an ‘alien antenna’ deep under the south Atlantic that turned out to be a sponge) but this one was a real stand out. I quote…

In Colorado, Betty Parker spied on her neighbour, Gary Clowes for weeks, convinced he was conducting rituals. She saw people dressed in “robes of the devil” sacrifice animals and heard them utter unintelligible chants. Betty then pursuaded members of her church to break into the Clowes home with crosses, stakes and prayer books only to find a dramatic group rehearsing Shakespeare’s Julius Caeser. Unfazed, Betty still insists they were “the children of Satan”.

Well, I suppose they could have been a satanic dramatic group, but still πŸ˜€

Actually it reminds me of a similar story dating from the SRA panic in the UK some years back. A woman accused her neighbour of being a satanist after seeing “strange black robes” and an “inverted cross” through his window and hearing “strange occult music” coming from his house. These turned out to be (in order)…

  1. Ecclesiastical garments, her neighbour being the local vicar
  2. A kite hanging on a coat hook
  3. Holst’s Planets Suite

Honestly! πŸ™‚

Anyway what I’ve been doing handyman-wise is cutting up some sheets of particle board (I’d do my particle board/Particle Man gag here, except I think I did it the last time I mentioned particle board so now it’d just be old). This is in aim of two projects. The first is making a Labarat board – Labarat being a chess like game I’ve invented for my entirely fictional Zurvár language/culture (hey, do I give you grief about your weird hobbies? πŸ™‚ Anyway I’ve made the pieces, now I just need a board to play it on. I figure I’d better actually try a few games before publishing the rules on the Zurvár section of the site – you know, to make sure it actually works. Anyway more news on that when I get the board all painted up (which will take a while).

The second project is a display piece for my Lord of the Rings models. This was inspired by the quite remarkable model of Helms Deep (or more accurately the Hornburg – Helms Deep is the valley, the Hornburg is the fortress – just poke me with a stick if I’m boring you πŸ™‚ the guys at Games Workshop put together as a gaming table. I was planning to do them one better and build my own version that’s more accurate to the novels, but after much messing around with rulers, calculators and Karen Wynn Fonstad’s Atlas of Middle Earth (an excellent book for the Tolkien Fanatic in your life – although try and find an older edition before she went slightly nutty and started including all the stuff from the History of Middle Earth series) I realised that this would require a board at least twice as big as the one I had (not to mention the fact that storing it would be a nightmare). So I scaled my plans down to building part of the fortress, and then scaled them down further when I realised how much work even that would take. So now I’m just going to model the main gate and some of the battlements on a reasonably sized base which will provide a convenient place to stick what models I actually get around to finishing.

On that point I decided to splash out and buy myself another large model (after the one of Sauron Ryan got me for my birthday – which is assembled and undercoated but not painted yet). So I got a cave troll (with spear). He’s all built and looking not bad so far, although the painting is going to take a while. I’ve made a few customisations to him too – mainly because I have a habit of mixing up too much green stuff when filling gaps. So we’ll see how that turns out (not well probably πŸ™‚

I bought said troll on Thursday, which I took off work to go and pay for my plane tickets. Because I forgot that the banks don’t open until 10:00 these days (lazy so-and-so’s) I had an hour to kill over at Morley, so I got my hair cut. I got a somewhat different cut this time around (being sick of looking like some throwback to the sixties), a fairly short short back and sides. It doesn’t look good, but it doesn’t look any worse than usual either so I count that as a win. I may get it cut again before going to the UK, or I may just let it grow out. I haven’t decided yet πŸ™‚

Anyway I eventually got enough money from the bank to go and pay for my tickets, so my plane seat is booked! Scary stuff !

Ummm, was there anything else I was going to mention? Almost certainly. I suppose I could comment on the death of Ray Charles, which I was going to do when he actually died but didn’t have the energy. Ummmm, well it sucks that he’s dead, obviously. And the weird thing is I can’t get used to the idea that he is dead. He always seemed like such a remarkably alive person somehow – for him to be dead just seems ridiculous. Bah πŸ™

I guess I’ll sign off with some more songs that have been catching my attention lately, since I still haven’t fixed the music section. Let’s see…

  1. Ready to Wear – Felix da Housecat
  2. Hair – Lazaro’s Dog
  3. Take me to the Hospital – The Faint
  4. Nearer than Heaven – The Delays
  5. Wicked and Weird – Buck 69
  6. Lifting the Veil from the Braile – The Dissociatives
  7. Passing of Peace – Catalyst (Coolism Remix)
  8. I Love Total Destruction (Soldier in Love) – The Nectarine Number 9
  9. Mass Destruction – Faithless

OK, I’m done. Go and make your own entertainment!

PS: What? I missed international kissing day?! There was an international kissing day and I WASN’T INFORMED!?! (need I point out that all the preceding should be read in tone of extreme sarcasm? πŸ™‚

PPS: Kevin Sorbo?!?!? I’m sorry Mark but it’s definitely time for an intervention!

PPPS: I should obviously read Ali’s blog more often πŸ™‚

PPPPS: Get well soon Rebecca!

A break from all the deranged screeding :)

As observant readers may have noticed I’ve made a few changes around the place over the last few days. For instance rather than just redirecting to Space Net, www.wyrmworld.com is now a domain in it’s own right (finally). Which explains why the page you’re reading with your grape-like eyes now has a URL of www.wyrmworld.com/wyrmlog/. No more frames or redirects or other stupidity, hooray!! πŸ™‚

This sudden change is down to the fact that I finally got around to getting the server guys to set me up some webspace on the company server. Free, quota unlimited company webspace! Hmmm, I suppose I’ve really got a good reason not to get fired now huh? Well, as opposed to not getting paid any more obviously.

In any case over the coming weeks Wyrmworld will gradually migrate it’s way over to the new address, leaving nothing but a horde of redirect pages and dead links over on Space Net. Then after a while I can look at dumping them completely and getting an ADSL account with someone else – if I decide that it’s worthwhile that is, which it probably will be.

Oh, and of course I’ll be setting up some new email accounts (probably this week) then dropping my old spam riddled space.net email like a gun. I’ll also be doing my best to keep my new address completely off the web – thus avoiding the spam issue completely. I hope πŸ™‚

Anyway I’ve also been making some changes to the Wyrmlog itself, as can be seen by the large white boxes down there. Inspired by something I saw on someone else’s blog (sadly I can’t remember who or I’d give them full credit) I’ve set up some funky looking styles for quoting with.

For instance, if I wanted to quote from a book I’d use my new quoteBook style. Let’s say for the sake of argument I was quoting Steven Pile’s Book of Heroic Failures I would do it thusly…

Few broadcasters have given more unalloyed pleasure than Lieutenant Commander Tommy Woodroofe. He leapt to public prominence with his now famous commentary on the illumination of the fleet at Spithead in 1937.

Before the broadcast the Commander had joined in celebrations with slightly too much enthusiasm. The result was an exquisitely incoherent talk punctuated by pauses of anything up to eleven seconds.

And were I to quote the good Commander himself I’d use the quoteQuote style (for quoting things people actually said)…

At the present moment, the whole fleet is lit up. When I say ‘lit up’ I mean lit up by fairy lamps. It’s fantastic. It isn’t a fleet at all. It’s just… It’s fairyland. The whole fleet is in fairyland. Now if you’ll follow me through … if you don’t mind … the next few moments you’ll find the fleet doing odd things.

[lengthy pause]

I’m sorry I was telling some people to shut up talking.

[The fleet turn off their lights to shoot rockets]

It’s gone! It’s gone! There’s no fleet! It’s… It’s disappeared! No magician who could ever have waved his wand could have waved it with more acumen than he has now at the present moment. The fleet’s gone. It’s disappeared.

[pause]

I was talking to you in the middle of this damn [cough] in the middle of this fleet and what’s happened is the fleet’s gone and disappeared and gone…

ANNOUNCER: That is the end of the Spithead Commentary.

[Half hour of unscheduled dance music]

Or maybe I wanted to quote a website, then quoteWeb would be employed…

When the English ships full of troops were in sight, a foppish tart by the name of Paul Revere rode through all the towns screaming at the top of his lungs until he was arrested by the constable for disturbing the peace, and is remembered by the Beastie Boys song of the same name.

If the web was a Blog, then of course quoteBlog would be appropriate…

I can’t really think of anything to blog about, it’s not like I’ve been doing anything exciting. Maybe I should do something exciting. I can’t even think of anything exciting to do though, can’t be bothered, oh well, I’ll stick with the apathay and general laying around playing on the computer.

Ali

Lyrics have the special quoteMusic class…

Arrivederciby Shivaree

Arrivederci I’m cutting my hair,
Tell Fish and Tracy the weather’s fair,
Been eleven hours we’re on a dare,
Arrivederci to my old chair,

I’ve been told that the old who bargain and save,
They get sold for the gold on the little kings grave,
So goodbye to screamers and goodnight Irene,
A salty whisker won’t hurt anything,

…and so on and so on. Obviously I’ve gotten way too carried away with this, but what’s new? πŸ™‚

Next on the agenda is getting those pop-up comments to work again. I’m trying to think of a new and funky way to do this that doesn’t rely on opening new windows and such – ideally a tooltip kind of thing. I’ve got a few ideas but need to develop them fully.

Then I guess I’ll come up with a nicely styled replacement for the old music and reading sections. Oh, and the links to other people’s blogs I suppose which should really be a much higher priority because after all they’re linking to me aren’t they? Or they were last time I checked.

Hmmm, never ends does it?

Oh well, back to transcribing the deranged Foxtel related ravings of that guy on the train I guess…

Actually hang on, I must mention a great link Stephanie put me onto. It’s a page that displays the last 30 images uploaded to liveJournal…

http://www.dreamwill.net/ljimages.php

It’s a magical gateway into the human peepshow that is the web! πŸ™‚

(It should be noted that people upload all sorts of stuff onto liveJournal, including porn and – even worse – 30 meg digital photos of inane things like sports cars and 1930’s telephones that hog your bandwidth to the exclusion of everything else until they’ve fully downloaded – so be warned! πŸ™‚

OK, really going now.

Continued Dispatches from the ‘Insane Screed Department’

“An Open Letter to Rupert Murdoch” by “A____”: PART TWO

AND A MESSAGE TO “MANAGEMENT”

“You will go to jail for everything you’re putting me thru (sic). When your ‘superiors’ find out (and I know you have superiors) you’ll regret putting me thru all this. How long do you think these ‘participants’ will go along with this, once they realise that I actually really do get held down and needles stuck in me? That actors taunt me to a point of breaking, over and over? Then they’ll realise I get antisocial for a reason. You can’t fool people forever that this ‘program’ is justified. I will get out. Even with all the bad ‘footage’ of me. How long do you think that will delay you going to jail? And I’m telling you, ‘you will go to jail‘. You’ve used and abused me way too much, for too long. Do you think it’s too late to ‘arrange’ an unfortunate ‘accident’ for me? You can still ‘arange’ it right? One small problem. Now that I am so close to seeing my children for the very first time. That I am so close to starting a genuine life. Do you think anyone could possibly believe that I’d ever harm myself? I don’t think so. This ‘program’ is about to end. Whatever happens it’s because you ‘arrange’ it all, or let it happen. You will all go to jail you absolute m_____f_____g c___s”

‘Actors taunt me to the point of breaking over and over’ – must have been watching Two and Half Men. Part three coming as soon as my eyes recover from reading all that tiny, tiny, tiny printing!

From the ‘Insane Screed Handed out on the Train’ Department

“An Open Letter to Rupert Murdoch” by “A____”: PART ONE

Someone please get this past ‘Management’ to Mr Murdoch

OPEN LETTER TO RUPERT MURDOCH

Dear Mr Murdoch,

You should know that this whole program was exposed to me by convicted drug dealers N.S. & his son John, employed within your ‘Management’.

Your immediate attention is required when the reputation of Foxtel ‘Management’ becomes so highly compromised. How people like these were employed to ‘influence’ me and my environment, and continued to be employed even with ongoing drug charges, is just unbelievable. I see a problem when this whole “program” has the full cooperation of the police department, yet convicted drug dealers have positions within ‘Management’. And what are they doing now? Unbelievably still trying to get involved in my life. Something is very, very wrong when I change residence, the home phone rings and unbelievably it’s John. After I tell him that I never want anything to do with him (something that I’ve done repeatedly in the past), I ask “How the hell did you get this number?” (there was absolutely no possible way)

He replied “Er… Well…, if you want I can just lose it.”

HE MIGHT AS WELL HAVE JUST SAID

“Well, I know that outside this program there would be no possible way to get this number from just thin air, but here, since my drug dealing father is in ‘Management’ and wants me to appear on screen with you and continue ______g, exceptions are made. Hey, we don’t need to play by any rules whatsoever, we’re in ‘Management’. Just try to forget that my dad actually told you that we’re f_____g your girlfriend, ____y. Hey A____, we needed you to go psycho, so we could get some real bad footage of you. Until then, things were made nice for you, and with a nice personality people were starting to object to you being totally used like this. So we arranged certain scenarios. Remember J.Q____y? The coffee you had 25 minutes before was laced to the max. J.Q____y really did almost run you off the road twice, but you didn’t actually start ramming into him. That’s what we were expecting. So we had him follow you and almost crash into you a third time, and harass you till you totally snapped. You never had a clue that we had you totally drugged, did you? Even we thought we added to (sic) much “_____” when we saw how totally crazy you got. We got some real bad footage of you there, and we actually play it now and again to get people to not like you. And we had actors absolutely everywhere, even so called friends “disrespect / abuse / provoke / assault / publicly beat” you as much as possible, day in, day out. By the way, that footage was never shown, so in the eyes of the public ‘it never happened’. After weeks, and weeks of this we ‘conditioned’ you into the most antisocial person known. So much so that no-one, and I mean no-one, cared about you anymore. Who the hell’s going to help you get out now? (how’s that for ‘strategy’. We couldn’t stop people (that liked you) from trying to get you out, so instead we ‘conditioned’ you so bad that people didn’t like you anymore. Now no-one’s going to help you. Lawsuit avoided.) From all this ‘conditioning’ you ended up saying things… well… people just didn’t know what to think about you? We know what your intention was, you became ‘aware’ and was (sic) trying to get out. No point trying to explain yourself to actors A____. You haven’t done anything we can lock you up permenantly for. But it’s OK because here, with everyone lying to you, you can’t take any legal action anyway. Now would you like us to ‘arrange’ people/’girls’ to ask you for drugs, and we can ‘arrange’ random people to offer/supply you, just like we ‘conditioned’ you? Hey, if the girl wants it, you’ve got to ‘provide’, right? And you make money too. Don’t forget, there are sexy, ‘willing’ girls involved here, just like a long, long time ago. Temptation like that we know you can’t resist. Girls, good times and entertainment. Hey, A____, did you know we’ve fooled everyone around you to think that’s how things are for you still. they have no idea how much you seriously want out. That’s why they all smile for the cameras while you’re desperately trying to inform as many people that you want to start a genuine life, and see your children. And as for the police? Hey, here in Perth we tell the police what to do. We’ve got senior police to ‘facilitate’ this whole program. The drugs, the violence you experience, the forced ‘escorts’ from them, everything. It’s all ‘facilitated’. Now you’re handing out pamphlets. How pathetic A____, if anyone even indicates that we should end this what must be a real nightmare for you, every skeleton in your closet is also in our videotape cabinet, and we selectively show them too. Just 30 seconds of ‘footage’ of you at your very worst and hey, people don’t care what happends (sic) to you. And those very, very few people that actually believe in ‘human rights’, they take a little longer, but in the end… Well let’s face it, you’re still here aren’t you?

A____ realise:

  • ‘Your life will go exactly the way we in ‘Management’ dictate it.’
  • ‘We’ve told everyone that your (sic) ‘unstable’ so now no-one even takes seriously anything you say (or hand out) whatsoever’
  • ‘As for a wife or a genuine family it will never, ever happen’
  • ‘You will never ever see your children’
  • ‘You and your children will die with everyone lying to you just like thoughtless zoo animals in pretty suroundings’

So stop trying to get out. You’re here for the ‘Corporation’ till death. This is how it’s going to be. You will smile for the cameras, tell jokes, pitch ‘particular’ products, take/deal the drugs, and shut up about Foxtel. There is absolutely no other option for you. None whatsoever. We decide who you can interact with, not you. We will put you on screen every day, (even if you don’t co-operate, we’ll just play nice recordings from the past and no one’s ever going to be any the wiser.) And we’ll keep convincing everyone that this ‘program’ is totally justified. Now shut up and conform to the ‘program’.

And not one single person will ever be honest with you for the rest of your life. This will all continue until you die, just accept it.”

Mr Murdoch I think you realise from what I’m communicating to you, that I am fully aware of my situation.

Find out who employed N.S. & John because whoever did is probably still accepting drug money from them, for them to continue what they do.

Make sure that I’m no longer still subject to harassment from these or any other drug dealers whatsoever?Please do something because because there is something definitely very wrong within ‘Management’.

I sincerely do not want to be part of this program, and I would very much like to discuss a solution to this whole situation.

I have my doubts but still hope this message has reached you unaltered.

Thank you.
Yours sincerely.
A____ ________

‘You and your children will die with everyone lying to you just like thoughtless zoo animals in pretty surroundings’ – Wouldn’t that just look great on a t-shirt? Tune in tomorrow for more on Foxtel, Rupert Murdoch and ‘Management’!

PS: I think I dislocated my jaw today – I was eating a chocolate bar and a particularly large piece of nut filled chocolate got wedged between my upper and lower teeth right at the back of my mouth. I bit down hard to crush it, and my right jaw joint went sort of “click-click” as if popping out then popping back into alignment. It works fine, but it’s been hurting like heck ever since. Typical eh? πŸ™‚

Kim Deal Loves Us – Every One

It’s 9:23am on Tuesday the 29th of June and rather than being hard at work in at the office I’m sitting in front of my computer at home waiting for a plumber with a stopwatch to come and time how long it takes for water to dissapear down my drains. This somewhat surreal exercise is the latest in the longrunning saga of the totally screwed up drainage that plagues the lower floors of the building – the strata company apparently deciding not to fix the problem, but at least to find out exactly how much of a problem it is.

Somewhat ironically Charmaine at L.J.Hooker (apparently Josie decided that my ongoing requests for a working bathroom sink and Rebecca’s continuous demands for the strata fees to be paid on time were just too much trouble) got a plumber out to fix my bathroom sink two weeks ago, so everything is draining pretty well. Or at least draining, which after a good four or five months of no draining at all counts as “pretty well”.

Now I could be at work – I could have left a key with the caretaker – but I decided to take the morning off instead. I was planning to take the whole day off, but there’s just too much work to justify it. And I forgot that I had a meeting over at the Alzheimer’s Association yesterday morning which pretty much meant that I only got a half day’s work done on Monday. So as soon as the plumber has been and gone I’ve got to iron some clothes and drag myself into the office. Bah!

Ah well. At least I got to sleep in a bit πŸ™‚

Anyway for wont of anything else to write about (or at least wont of anything else I feel like writing about πŸ™‚ I figured I’d mention some songs I’ve been listening to over the last few months. Normally I would have put these in the music section, but I haven’t got around to putting the music section back in yet after the great Blog Disaster. So I have to put them in here instead.

OK, let’s see… (I’ve been scribbling them down on a piece of paper and now have to try and decipher my handwriting)… OK. First of all Wasted and Ready by Ben Quelar (if indeed that’s how he spells his name). Nothing too important to say about this one except it’s mildly catchy and the chorus is great to sing along to. Looking Good by Frenzel Rhomb – very sharp lyrics in this one, very tightly written with regards to rhymes and meter. And quite funny in an extremely dark way.

Mighty Little Man by… uh… that guy from “Blue’s Clues”. Really great song with a kicking chorus. The Begining of the End by Gentle Ben and His Sensitive Side. Apparently these guys are from Brisbane but the lead singer (presumably Gentle Ben himself) sounds so like Jarvis Cocker that it’s not funny. I mean if you took the bit where he says/sings “What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?” and played it to 100 Pulp fans, at least 92 would identify it as a Jarvis sample. Uncanny.

Of course I can’t talk about recent musical releases without mentioning the first new Pixies release in 32 years (as one website I read put it – 12 years is a bit more accurate πŸ™‚ Bam Thwop. To be frank I didn’t really like this when I first heard it (blasphemy! :). Much too poppy and inane. But it’s grown on me since. I guess I was expecting some kind of opus like Debaser or Letter to Memphis, but when you think about it they’re hardly going to release their strongest material first up. And also it’s a Kim Deal track which means it’s going to be different to most of the rest of their catalogue anyway. It actually works a lot better if you think of it as a Breeders track with the rest of the Pixies sitting in as guest musicians.

Anyway as I said it’s grown on me a lot. When you ignore the lyrics and actually listen to music it suddenly sounds a lot more like a Pixies track – that distinctive barely-in-control guitar sound is right there. And the insane organ break in the middle isn’t like anything I’ve ever heard on any of their other tracks, but fits right in as the kind of thing you’d expect the Pixies to do. When you consider the song in those terms it suddenly sounds a whole lot better.

So, my final conclusion on Bam Thwop? A big thumbs up πŸ™‚

Anyway it’s now 10.00 and there’s no sign of the plumber. I suppose I’d better iron those clothes anyway. *sigh*

Thoughts on Watching “Doctor Who: The Curse of Peladon”

  1. The guys responsible for King Peladon’s costuming managed to pre-empt the complete New Romantic movement by an entire decade
  2. AAA-GAAA-DOR! DOR! DOR! Push the statue crush the Doc, AGA-DOR! DOR! DOR!…
  3. What the heck happened to Day of the Daleks?

(Work’s still insanely busy and I spent much of today fighting a migraine – so still no energy for a major update *sigh*)

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