Life and Associated Annoyances – Page 23

News from the Briney Deep

A mystery solved.

Well it looks like they found the Sydney, and only a day after the Kormoran. Nice work!

Really that’s about all I’ve got to say. Didn’t do much over the weekend, just did some cleaning and watched five straight episodes of Stargate Atlantis so I could return the DVD box set I borrowed from Daniel at work. I also managed to hurt my shoulder somehow – it’s quite painful, I may need to get it looked at.

Oh, and Sam didn’t make it in on Friday (sick apparently, although she may have just been sick of us 🙂 so she’ll finish up some time this week. Don’t know if we’ll do the lunch thing or not.

That is all (ain’t my life just fascinating?).

We Gotta Move These Colour TVs

Foam related antics and reckless endangerment of compact cars.

OK, well I haven’t made an entry in ages, so I figured I’d better jump on and make some attempt at doing so, lest the Wyrmlog turn into one of those abandoned relics from the golden age of Blogging that litter the web like the tumbled ruins of an ancient civilisation (there, that’s a good start).

So it’s the Labour Day public holiday, and I’m celebrating by labouring – that is going into the office and catching up on some work. But that’s OK – I’ll get paid for both the holiday and the time I’m giving up, and with no one else in the office I can fire up some internet radio and listen to cheesy 80’s music with no complaints.

The more observant of readers may have noticed that it was my 32nd birthday last week. How very depressing, I’m practically ancient now. To celebrate, the family went out to Savinni’s in Mount Lawley on Saturday night. The food was excellent (as it usually is) although the service was a little bit dodgy – but then they were extremely busy, so I can forgive them. Katie (who isn’t technically family, but might as well be *Lest anyone get over-excited by this statement I would like to point out that she’s practically family because we’ve known each other for decades – we’re just friends people!) wanted to go dancing/clubbing afterwards, but even in the unlikely event that dancing/clubbing was something I’d actually enjoy (as opposed to regarding with unreserved horror :)) I was far too tired after helping Fabian move all day.

Now that was a fun way to spend the day. Matt, Ryan and Myself turned up to Fabian’s place mid-morning and spent about the next two hours hauling trash down his precipitous driveway in the blazing sun, while he was out and about dealing with some kind of “IKEA emergency”. Well, actually I jest, he turned up not long after we started and joined in. We then spent the better part of a half hour debating on what we wanted for lunch (we ended up settling for kebabs as none of the local fish and chip places seemed to be open), and then drove around in a two car/one trailer convoy picking up new furniture from various places, one of which kept us waiting for about 45 minutes before informing us they didn’t actually have what we’d arranged to pick up from them. (This journey was made all the more exciting by my salvaging some extremely large sheets of foam insulation that someone was throwing out and having no other place to put them than in the passenger cabin of the ute I was sharing with Ryan)

We then hauled said furniture over to Fabian’s new mansion. I say mansion because it has about five bedrooms, two bathrooms, a gigantic kitchen and dining area, and a home theatre room with built in projector. Oh, and a small chandelier in the hallway. That counts as a mansion in my book. Ryan and I had great fun testing out the acoustics by bawling bits of opera at the top of our lungs, while Matt and Fabes cringed (as Fabian observed, Ryan’s version of Oh Sol Le Mio would be a great introduction to his new neighbours, many of whom are probably Italian and could therefore fully understand the rather obscene version of the lyrics he was using).

It was then back to Fabian’s place to load as much furniture, boxes and other junk into the ute-with-trailer as we could for one last run over to the mansion. Unfortunately I needed to get home to prepare for dinner, so Matt and I had to leave before the improvised “bed sheets and three bits of rope” baggage containment system we devised to hold everything in was put to the test (I hope it worked, otherwise the roads would have been littered with Fabianallia for miles).

The trip home was once again complicated by foam, as we passed the same house that was throwing out sheets of the stuff, and Matt decided to grab the quite substantial pile of it that I’d left behind. Unfortunately he was driving a rather small and beaten up Hyundai rather than his usual beast, and the only place the stuff would fit was rammed through the back, filling the rear of the vehicle from floor to ceiling with the hatchback wide open – the general dearth of rope once again coming back to haunt us. He successfully managed to make it all the way down the freeway to my place though without crashing or getting pulled over for reckless endangerment of a compact car – so that’s all right then.

So, a good day was had by all (except possibly Fabian’s new neighbours) and Fabes should be more or less moved in by now (there was still moving planned for today apparently).

Well my self determined lunch break is now over, and I’d better get back to it. People waiting on emails, expect them soon!

Happy New FEAR

Work all year and what do you get, another year older and deeper in debt…

Two weeks into the new year and not an entry to be seen. Shocking I know. I’ve got an entry summing up the best music of the last year almost ready to go but it’s taking a long while to get finished and out the door. So I figured I’d better write something, lest everyone think I’ve died or something.

So yeah, it’s a brave new year. Yippee-kiy-o. I’m not that fussed to be honest. I’m kind of glad to see the back of 2007 – it wasn’t the most enjoyable year of my life – but I’m not terribly convinced that 2008 is going to be wildly better. Hmmm.

But at least I’ve been doing plenty of stuff. Yesterday I caught up with Rebecca, Dom and Jakob in Mount Lawley. On Thursday night I met up with Katie in Subiaco and we had dinner at Wagamama. We also almost got free tickets to the opening night of “Keating the Musical” – although I really wasn’t up to it and we had to turn them down. I’ve also caught up with Fabes and Ryan a bit – we’ve been working on a project that I can’t really say much about :). And of course I’ve been working on a few projects of my own…

I’m also back at work, which after two weeks of getting up at 9:00am is a bit of a blow.

Hmmm, that’ll do for now. I’m too tired to try and be interesting. But check out this rather amusing webcomic.

A Return to Form

General ramblings

Well, it’s been a while hasn’t it? I just haven’t really been in the mood for writing lately – too much on at work, figuring out what to get people for Christmas, that kind of thing. I have been doing stuff, I just haven’t been very motivated to write about it.

Let’s see if I can throw together some edited highlights. Had a Thanksgiving dinner with the parents’ next door neighbours (they’re Americans, they didn’t just decide to celebrate Thanksgiving for the hell of it :). It was most enjoyable – much to my surprise pumpkin pie is actually fairly delicious – although I was slightly disappointed that we didn’t go around the table saying what we were thankful for. Television has lied to me once again!

I’ve been up to Fabian’s place a few times and done some workouts on the $8000 or so home gym he’s invested in. Let me tell you, he’s a pretty hard taskmaster when he gets into personal trainer mode. His mantra is “failure is success”, meaning that you keep working until your muscles completely fail and you have to curl up in a sobbing ball in the corner for a few hours. I’m thinking of making up a 1984 style poster for his wall FABIAN’S GYM: “War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength; Failure is Success.” 😀

I was actually up there again last weekend for another session of the Wild Southwest game I’m running (it’s only been, oh, three years or so since the last one). It didn’t go as well as I planned because I’m so horribly out of practice at GM-ing, but everyone seemed to have a good time, which is the main thing. I’m hoping to run the next session in the new year – that one should go a bit smoother now I’m back in the saddle.

We actually played until about 11:00 at night, which takes me back to the AD&D games we played in high school. We’d play until 2:00am, collapse wherever seemed convenient, get up at 8:00 and keep playing. I’m obviously getting old, because this time around I was a complete wreck the next day 🙂

The new Government is yet to do anything really annoying, and has actually some some things I really approve of (signing Kyoto for instance). This puts me in a kind of weird place – for the last 11 years being angry with the Government has been part and parcel of my daily existence. I mean, they’re sending the Navy out to chase the Japanese whaling fleet for crying out loud! How can I possibly get all mad and righteous about that!? Sooner or later they’d better stuff up, or I’ll have to find another hobby.

I’ve caught up with Rebecca and Dom a few times, young Jakob seems to be doing well and is actually sleeping now, so they’re getting some decent rest (well, decent for new parents anyway). I’ll be going over to their place for breakfast on Christmas day, I’ll have to check the exact time they want me to show up I suppose.

In health news I managed to contract food poisoning from an extremely dodgy chicken wrap I bought from the supermarket over the road from work. I’ve been buying food there for almost seven years now with no problems so I decided not to dob them in to the authorities over just one case of almost killing me. I’m not eating their chicken again though.

Well, that’s probably enough to be going on with for now. Hopefully forcing myself to write this will get me back into the blogging habit. Hopefully 🙂

The Power of the Internets

What you can achieve when you have the internet and nothing sensible to do with your time.

I woke up this morning with a song in my head which I haven’t heard in years. I thought to myself “You know, I think I’ve got that in iTunes somewhere”, so I hopped on to the computer and dug it up. After listening to it (and quite enjoying it) I thought “I wonder how all the lyrics go?”. So I jumped onto Google and tracked them down. After reading them through I realised that the song – which I’d always presumed was about a girl who’d been dumped but never got over it – could actually be about a girl who’s guy went off to fight in World War II and never came back. A moment’s musing suggested that the video clip might settle it one way or the other. So I went over to YouTube and found the video. Sure enough, the clip confirmed my theory (although on a less positive note it also made me realise that my idea of what’s attractive in womens’ fashion is firmly grounded in the early 90’s).

I achieved all this in under fifteen minutes, and before breakfast. What an age we live in! 🙂

(Extra points to anyone who can figure out what song I’m talking about from the clues above ;))

So as planned I went out to dinner with Rebecca and Dom last night. We dined at Sen5es restaurant at the Novotel, which as it happened was hosting a high school formal. This was good because it meant we had free entertainment, watching all the fancy cars pull up and disgorge gussied-up and over-excited teenagers. We were able to make a number of observations…

If you decide to have a ‘Masquerade’ theme for your school formal, make sure the student body understand that this involves masks – otherwise only the staff and nerdier students will turn up with them.
It is apparently ‘cool’ nowdays to bring your younger siblings to the school formal – as long as they bear an uncanny resemblence to you, Mini-Me style.
Anyone wearing a top hat to the school formal is an Emo, whereas anyone wearing a top hat and carrying a cane is a Goth.

So we had entertainment while we eat. We also had miniature teacups full of leek and potato soup that we didn’t actually order – they didn’t seem to bill us for them though, so that’s OK.

So how was the food (apart from the soup, which was quite nice)? Well, that depends. Rebecca and I had the penne pasta with mushrooms, tomatoes and spinach, which was extremely tasty and so filling neither of us could finish. Dom on the other hand had the special chicken dish of the day, which in his own words consisted of “gristly chicken, overcooked potatoes and completely inedible mushrooms”.

Now, Dom is hardly the kind of person to sit in a restaurant curling his lip and sneering that the pâté foie gras should be at room temperature and the wine list is no better than you’d expect – so for him to come out against a meal so harshly it must have been pretty awful. As such Sen5es is now off our list of places to dine at – even when it’s running a $25 special.

After dinner we took the secret Catholic shortcut down to McIver railway station and got the train back to our respective domiciles. Much to my disgust my place was still like a furnace – although it did cool down by the early hours of the morning, so I was able to get some sleep eventually.

OK, that’s it. Entertain yourselves now! 🙂

Love’s Labours Lost at Lamonts

Marron and embarrasing recollections at Claisebrook Cove

You know, I seem to be suffering from awful amotivational syndrome at the moment. Now that’s usually a term used to describe the effects of pot consumption, which certainly isn’t the case here, but it’s a fairly accurate description of how I’m feeling. Mentally dull, detached and completely unmotivated to do anything at all.

Which is a problem because I’ve got to go to work tomorrow. I mean I’ll go, but I don’t know how well I’ll be able to concentrate. Guess I’ll just have to suck down the caffeine and manage as best I can.

I have had a reasonably busy weekend. Went around to Rebecca and Dom’s new place in East Perth then we went out to lunch at Lamonts at Claisebrook Cove. I had the marron which was nice, but involved a fair bit of work because (Lamonts being such a classy joint) they serve them in their shells and you have to dissect them before you can eat them. This to my mind is the kind of thing they should handle in the kitchen, but then what do I know about the lifestyles of the rich and famous?

Anyway it was a good day out, although one odd note was that one of the waitresses seemed awfully familiar. She kept glaring at me too, although I don’t know if this was because she recognised me, or if she objected to my continual glancing at her to try and figure out who she was. I strongly suspect she was a girl I went to high school with, a girl that I shall refer to as Sam.

Sam wasn’t at St Francis’s for very long, I think she was there for about a year, year 9 or 10 perhaps. She was actually the cousin of and shared a surname with one of the more dominant Rebels, which (to my somewhat deranged mind) gave her a certain edge – a frisson of danger if you will – although hardly knowing anything about her I can’t say whether this impression was in the least bit accurate.

Of course as with most of the girls at my high school that weren’t actually physically deformed I thought Sam was pretty cute and had a bit of a crush on her. However any vague hope I had of getting to know her was ruined by a totally ridiculous – and in hindsight fairly funny – incident that took place one day after school while waiting for the train at Central Terminal.

There were a bunch of us who used to hang together on the train. Justin Simes, Carl Taylor and a few others, occasionally including the unpredictable semi-bully Megsy. We’d sit up one end of the carriages (these were the old diesel belching monsters that ruled the rails before electrification) in what was almost an old fashioned compartment between the passenger doors and the inter-carriage door. You could comfortably seat eight people in there who would be pretty much hidden from the rest of the carriage. We got up to all kinds of chaos on those trips home – the most memorable being Mike Harris’s mooning the cars at the Farnborough level crossing – although I was usually more of an uneasy bystander than a real participant.

On this particular day most of the gang were absent. It was just me and Justin waiting for the train. And surprisingly – to me at any rate – Sam. I don’t know if she and Justin were friends, or if she was just bored, but she wandered up and started a conversation – a conversation including the both of us.

I did my best to be cool, although on the inside I was doing the usual geek “oh my god oh my god she’s talking to me oh wow oh wow don’t blow this man just be cool man just be cool” thing. The three of us chatted for a minute or two, and then she suggested we moved further down the platform where there were some seats free. We assented, and I bent down to pick up my bag.

Now you need to know some things about the equipment I used to carry to and from school. My bag for instance. It was one of the standard, shapeless, green, zip-up bags with two straps and the school crest on the side that we all had to use (in my last two years they expanded the rules to include green backpacks with the school logo, but I never had one of those). In any case mine was fairly old and beaten up, and the zipper was so temperamental that I often left it unzipped.

And you need to know about the files we used. Everyone was required to have a large lever-arch file to store their school work in. I could never be bothered to actually clip anything into it, I’d just shove it in, resulting in it acting merely as a cover for a huge pile of loose leaf papers (my year nine social studies teacher used to take great joy in grabbing it off my desk, taking it up to the front of the room, shaking it out in front of everyone then making me pick it all up – but then he was a sadist who called people ‘gecko-head’).

Anyway on this particular day on the railway platform with Sam and Justin I grabbed my unzipped bag – containing my file – and swung it in a carefully calculated cool and nonchalant motion up to my shoulder…

Unfortunately I only happened to grab one of the straps. Also my file was sticking out the top, paper side uppermost. The bag swung around in a graceful arc, and right at the top of its ascent launched my entire term’s work out in a high velocity wad that quickly separated and landed gently all over the railway tracks.

I stood there in shock, with an expression on my face not unlike that of a stunned mullet. Sam burst into immediate hysterical laughter, as did numerous standers by. Much to his credit Justin immediately jumped down onto the tracks and started gathering everything up (this being quite safe as the station was the end of the line and you could see trains coming for a good kilometre away). I chased down the papers on the platform and before long everything was back under control. But any small chance I might have had of not looking like a complete dork in front of Sam was totally shot, and I never spoke to her again. She left the school not long afterwards.

So that’s one of many incidents of humiliation from my high school years, brought back to mind by possibly running into the girl involved. At least I can actually laugh about it now 🙂

Yes, well…

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

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 🙂

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 🙂

(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 🙂

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 🙂

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 Muñoz) 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!

Zzzzzzzzzzzzz

I planned to make a lengthy entry today. In fact I planned to do quite a few things today. Unfortunately I haven’t really been able to do much. This is down to a combination of two things.

1) The play I saw last night (which I shall write about in due course) which meant I didn’t get home until 11:00pm (oooo! so late! 😉

2) The alarm (house? shop? car? I dunno) down the street that went off at 11:30pm and wasn’t turned off until about 6:00am.

The problem with the alarm wasn’t volume, as long as it’s dark I can sleep through almost anything (as living at this place has proved ;-). It was the fact that instead of going “beeeeep beeeeep beeeeep” continuously, it would go “beeeeep beeeeep beeeeep” for about ten seconds, then pause for ten seconds, then start up again. It’s impossible to sleep through that because as soon as it stops you lie there hoping it’s stopped for good but waiting for it to start up again. Which it does.

I think I got about an hour of fitful dozing (featuring some very odd dreams about the Baldwin brothers) in during the entire night. Then, when it finally stopped at about 6:00am I fell into a deep and dreamless slumber that lasted until almost 12:00.

Even then I was still dead tired, but the light and noise outside was too much to sleep through.

So, I’ve had a very truncated day. And not done a lot. And I have to go to work tomorrow. *sigh*

I’ll write more when I’ve had some sleep 🙂

The Pornographers were ripped off!!!

I had a rather weird dream last night. It was an episode of a new sitcom about a bunch of people taking a university course together (actually I think it might have been the second or third season premiere, since there were some implications of some cast members having left and other new ones joining). It was kind of like that old Head of the Class show, you know the one that featured Billy Connolly for a while? Anyway the weird thing was it had an ensemble cast of characters from other sit-coms. The class was made up of Dr Frasier Crane from Frasier, Phoebe from Friends, Linda from Becker and… well Andy Dick (no matter what he’s in Andy Dick only ever plays one type of character and they’re all completely interchangeable, so we’ll just say Andy Dick). Lisa and Beth from Newsradio and Finch from Just Shoot Me might have been hanging around at the back, I can’t quite remember. In any case the teacher was the guy from According To Jim.

Not a lot happened really. Frasier acted like a pompous ass, Linda and Phoebe got into a prolonged and bewildering conversation about some inane subject, and Andy Dick made some stupid Andy-Dickesque comments about the teacher’s new PDA. Oh, and the teacher accidentally spilled the contents of his bag on the floor, and Frasier leapt from his seat and started picking them up in a blatant attempt at currying favour. But that’s about it. WIERD no? 🙂

I suppose all the Newsradio stuff had to do with a documentary on the archeology of Alexandria I watched before going to bed (one of the Archeologists looked surprisingly like Maura Tierney), and this week’s TV guide has a photo from the last episode of Friends which would account for Phoebe, but the rest is completely beyond me.

Anyway I had a pretty busy week socially (for me that is). On Tuesday night I went to the Sunset Cinemas at King’s Park with Ryan, Justin and Marika. They were playing that French bird film that everyone’s been raving about for the last years or so, so after work I caught the train down to Victoria Park and walked to Justin and Marika’s new place. As usual with Justin we were a bit delayed getting going (we had to make pizzas so as to have something to eat which took a while to cook) but we only missed the first ten minutes or so, so that was OK.

The Sunset Cinemas are held in the open air, you sit on the grass and watch the movie on a big screen held up by scaffolding. It was really good actually, the weather was perfect (although it got a little bit chilly by the end) and the film was amazing. Three bits in particular stuck in my mind, a gaggle of geese wandering around the Arizona desert (on their migration from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada, they didn’t just truck geese out to the desert for the shoot – or at least I hope they didn’t), some grebes running across a lake in Oregon (they looked like penguins speeded up five times, it was hilarious!) and a baby snowy owl waddling across the tundra looking like a disgruntled overweight hobbit with a backpack. The pizzas were great, Ryan bought a gigantic heaped platter of grapes (some of which we fed to the ducks while packing up, they couldn’t get enough of them!) and all in all it was a really fun night. I even got a pot plant as a belated Christmas present. It’s a succulent, which is great because it only needs to be watered about once a year which is about as often as I’d remember to 🙂

On Saturday night I headed down to the Red Orchid with Rebecca and Dom, just to catch up. We ended up sitting outside in the little courtyard at the back, which was great because it wasn’t as crowded as out the front, but didn’t have the appalling acoustics of indoors (in order to look cool and trendy the interior has a whole lot of bare concrete and girders, it echoes like crazy). As usual the food was excellent, although the service was a bit sloppy. We were asked for our orders twice, had to ask for a carafe of water twice, and the lemon lime and bitters I ordered with my meal failed to appear until I asked for it again. Oh, and we were offered desert and coffee menus three times, but by that point they may have been trying to get rid of us 🙂

The weird thing is that people kept coming out to sit at the table adjacent to us, then changing their minds and moving indoors. We figured we were doing something to drive them away, although we couldn’t quite figure out what.

So yeah, that was my week socially.

Today of course is the Australia Day/Invasion Day public holiday, depending on how you look at it. There’ll be the big firework display over the river tonight, but I’m not going. To get a decent seat you have to go in at about nine in the morning, and then spend the entire day sitting out in the sun surrounded by even increasing numbers of other bored people, all for fifteen minutes of fireworks choreographed to mindless top 40 tunes which you just know will feature Guy Sebastian. Then you’ve got the hassle of getting home through the thousands of other people all trying to get home. I can do without it frankly.

There was some kind of fireworks display last night as well, to judge by the noise. Either that or an artillery attack of some kind. It was probably over at Gloucester park or something, although I did entertain myself with the thought that the barges for tonight’s show might have caught on fire and the display was going off 24 hours early with no-one to watch it. Haven’t heard anything on the news though, sad to say 🙂

This being Australia Day means that yesterday was of course the Triple J Hottest 100 countdown. All in all it wasn’t too bad, although once again Powderfinger got way more placings than they actually deserve. The New Pornographers didn’t get in at all which annoyed the heck out of me, we could have taken out a few Powderfinger tracks to make room – no one would have missed them!

I would list the top ten here, but Triple J haven’t seen fit to put the results on the website yet. I can say that number one was Are You Gonna Be My Girl by Jet, and two was Hey Yah by Outkast. The Royskopp (which is not how you spell it I’m sure) remix of Coldplay’s Clocks was at about five, and… um I can’t quite remember the rest. A full update when Triple J does one I promise 🙂

As for the songs I voted for, a big chunk of them failed to get in alltogether. That’s what happens when you limit people to ten songs I guess, stupid policy that it is. Let’s see…

Biftek – Read To Me – Didn’t make it in!
Downsyde – El Questro – Didn’t make it in!
Eels – Dirty Girl – Didn’t make it in!
Electric Six – Gay Bar – Got in at about 26, which is good
Nofx – Franco Un-American – Made it in
Screamfeeder – Ice Patrol – Didn’t make it in
The Herd – 77% – Made it in
The New Pornographers – All For Swinging You Around – Didn’t make it in!
The New Pornographers – The Laws Have Changed – Didn’t make it in either!
The Waifs – Lighthouse – Got in at about 12, yey!!

Of the other four I would really have liked to vote for, they all made it in except for Spencer Tracy. They played the ‘Armageddon’ version of ‘Bomb the World’ I’m happy to report by the way, which is the far superior version of the song. A lot angrier than the normal one. Oh, and two songs I maybe would have voted for if I’d remembered them are Growing on Me by the Darkness, and Man of Constant Sorrows by the Soggy Bottom Boys. Now they rock!

Well that’s that for another year then *g*

Finally I should mention that Wyrmworld has undergone a major revision and re-arrangement. I’m aiming to reformat the entire site over the next few months, lord knows it needs it. Next on the horizon are the Tales of the Geek Underclass, I’ve got a design worked out, it’s just a case of finalising it and converting all the files. *sigh* so much work, so little time.

OK, I’m shutting up now 🙂