The Continuing Search for my Nemesis

Television Redux

You know, I’m really enjoying Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles which started its run here a few weeks back (it’s fair to say that it’s the closest we’re ever likely to get to River Tam Beats Up Everyone). Unfortunately however it’s already begun the slow slide towards the early hours of the morning suffered by all sci-fi on Australian TV. It began in a blaze of glory at 8:30pm Tuesday nights, stuck there for three episodes, went AWOL for a week, then came back at 9:30 this week. Before long it’ll drift to 10:30, then 11:25, and before long it’ll be on at 2:10am alternate Wednesdays and Tuesdays – when not bumped by repeats of the Red Shoe Diaries.

I’m also quite enjoying That Mitchell and Webb Look on the ABC (sorry! ABC 1!). Entertaining English sketch comedy with a touch of the surreal. There’s BMX Bandit and Angel Summoner, the Bad Vicar, the Lost Tribe of the Garden Center, and (best of all) the Surprising Adventures of Sir Digby Chicken Caesar. I find the latter so amusing that I can hardly keep from bursting into gales of laughter every time I’m waiting to be served at Sumo Salad (which no doubt says much more about me than it does Mitchell and Webb).

Still on the subject of television, Channel Nine is rerunning Friends at 6:00 nightly. Sad to admit I was quite a fan of the show in its original run, so it’s nice to get home from work and turn it on in the background. For some reason though (probably to do with the earlier time slot) the powers that be at Nine are butchering the hell out of any even slightly risque content, leaving rather jarring jumps in its place…

Ross: What is the name of Chandler’s father’s all male drag review?

Rachel (leaping up): Viva Las!

(cut to Chandler looking disgruntled amongst uproarious audience laughter)

Chandler: Unfortunately that’s true.

…rather hard to follow I think.

On a more personal note I’m feeling rather disgruntled myself this week. Sam – who’s been doing a traineeship with up for the last 18 months or so – had decided to leave the company, tomorrow being her last day. This means that the office is going back to a dead-boring all male environment. In a previous entry moaning about the now-departed cute girl at the supermarket over the road I commented that starting the day with a smile from a pretty girl makes work a lot more bearable. It seems that that’s even more true when you’re actually working alongside said pretty girl. And in addition to any totally inappropriate pulchitrudinous aspects Sam is smart, efficient, a quick learner and generally pretty cool (not to mention that from the all important giant-personal-ego viewpoint she laughs at most of my jokes) so while I’m going to miss her on a personal level the company is going to miss her too. But hey, lunch on the company budget tomorrow, so it’s not all bad 🙂

Additionally on the upside, feeling sad about something real – as opposed to just being generally depressed – is actually quite refreshing.

Well, now I’ve potentially opened myself up to all kinds of sexual harassment suits I suppose I’d better go 🙂

PS: A quick web search suggests that while, strictly speaking, “pulchitrudinous” retains its meaning of “physical beauty” it has in the last few decades… taken on a connotation of, shall we say, a much earthier kind of appeal (thank you Wikipedia). For the sake of clarity I would like to state that in this particular instance I intended “pulchitrudinous” as a humerous, faux-pompous substitude for “attractiveness” and nothing more. You know, just to be perfectly clear 🙂

PPS: The missing word is “Gaygas”

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!

Hands of Blue, Two by Two

A big damn new start

So, I’m going over to Fabian’s place tomorrow, and he’s insisting that I bring my still-in-development Firefly card game, Plyin’ the Black (apparently people like it – I’m as surprised as anyone). So I fire up Open Office to print out a new copy of the rules. It tries to open the rules document as an ASCII file.

“That’s weird” I think, but I figure that if the .odt file is corrupt, I always have the .pdf version I saved. So I go to open that. No dice, Adobe won’t recognise it as a valid pdf.

Suspecting that something is up, I check out some of the other files in the directory. Then all the files in the directory. They’re all corrupt!

There’s only one explanation. I’ve been got at by the Hands of Blue!

Now normally I’d be in complete despair at this point – months of work down the drain. But I’m actually quite blase about it. All of the core mechanics of the game are in my head, and this gives me the opportunity to start over again without the baggage of all the arbitary rules I made up to get the game working in the first place. So Plyin’ the Black will rise from the ashes! (insert obligatory comments about big damn heroes, doing the impossible and being mighty. Oh and she’s our witch.)

(The only downside is I’ll have to type out all the rules again in an authentic Firefly accent. Last time I was talking like a cowboy for a week!)

In other news I have a new monitor. A 22″ HD LCD, which takes up a lot less room and has a much sharper and brighter image than the decrepit old CRT I was using. I’ve still got to get the resolution and colours completely calibrated, but it’s a major improvement. I’ve finally joined the 21st century! (in terms of monitors at any rate 🙂

Satellite Archeology

I would have called this ‘Satellite of Love’, but Dr Alice Roberts wasn’t at the dig 🙂

The ABC (sorry, as of last week it’s ABC 1) is currently playing repeats of Time Team on Tuesday nights, and tonight it was the Castle Howard episode. So I was watching, and decided to have a look at the place on Google Earth. I head to Yorkshire, and do a search which takes me right there. I zoom in to have a look at the walled garden they’re digging in….. Are those trenches!?

Yep! A big trench right across the walled garden!

So I zoom out to the west lawn. More trenches!

Has the Google satellite captured Time Team at work?

It sure looks like it! 😀

Now I won’t swear it’s actually the Time Team dig. But the trenches are in the right places, and seem to be the right shape. In fact (given that the trenches in the walled garden have been extended, but there are none on the north lawn) I’d be willing to date the photographs to the morning of day three. There’s a bit of a mystery in that one of the trenches (trench 2?) is missing from the west lawn, but possibly they closed it and replaced the turf before opening up the north lawn.

So yeah, how about that then?

(The location is  54° 7’14.46″ N  0°54’34.09″ W for those who want to take a look)

Big day tomorrow!

Faith in the Listening Public Restored!

A summing up of the best music of 2007, and the Triple J Hottest 100

(It should be noted that this entry has been modified and annotated through the day as the results have come in, so if there’s some weird inconsistencies, that’s why 😉

Once again we find ourselves celebrating that most important day of the year, the Triple J Hottest 100! (Hmmm, I have a vague idea that there’s something else on today, something to do with the founding of a country. Austria maybe? I’m not sure…).

In any case this gives me a great excuse to post my list of the best music of 2007. And because this is the 21st century and we’re all Web 2.0 and such, I figured I’d link each song to that pinnacle of video excellence, Youtube!

(I’ll also annotate each song with where it came in the countdown – if it gets in at all).

So with no further ado, here’s the 10 songs I voted for – by default the 10 best songs of 2007…

Bloc Party – I Still Remember (Number 40, what!? Just 40!?) – As far as I’m concerned this track tied with Silverchair for the title of best song of 2007. An instantly recognisable guitar riff, a great tune and arrangement, and a clever video clip involving trains (remember the trains, they become important later). Bravo Bloc Party!

Chemical Brothers – The Salmon Dance (Number 21) – Fish rap. That’s about the only way to describe this. The video clip is one of the best ever made, with a beat-boxing blowfish and Busby Berkeley style fish choreography, and did you know that fish pay attention to the moon? Probably the third best song of 2007.

Decemberists – Yankee Bayonet (Didn’t get in, what’s wrong with folk rock I ask?) – A folk rock duet about the American Civil War. There doesn’t seem to be an official video clip, so here’s a live performance.

Jamie T – Sheila (Didn’t rate, even with the monkeys) – White rap wonderboy Jamie T and monkeys! Monkeys!! What more do you need to know!? (Oh, and Betjeman of course, how could I forget him?).

Joanna Newsom – Sawdust & Diamonds (Didn’t get in, too subtle for the common palate) – This is the kind of song that you either love, or hate. It drones on an on with bizzare lyrics about bells and wells and stairs and hares and taxidermy. But every now and then she jumps up an octave and it’s like a sledgehammer in your heart. Great stuff.

M.I.A – Paper Planes (Number 17) – A song that courts controversy because it features gunshots and M.I.A is the daughter of a leading Tamil Tiger. But it’s actually (or so she claims) about getting through US Border Control. In any case I don’t care because it’s got a great tune 🙂

Muse – Invincible (Number 58) – An over the top love anthem with one of the best video clips of the year and an awesome, over the top guitar bit in the middle. Knights riding dinosaurs fighting robots baby!

The Shins – Phantom Limb (Didn’t get in, another victim of the great folk rock boycot of ’07) – A sweet song from the masters of whiney folk rock. The video clip features possibly the best school play ever with Aztecs, cannibals and Joan D’Arc.

Silverchair – Straight Lines (Number 2) – As far as I’m concerned this is tied with Bloc Party for the best song of the year. And the video clip features trains. You see! It all makes sense! Trains = Kickarse song! Rocking. 🙂

Vampire Weekend – Mansard Roof (Didn’t get in, I suspect Argentinean involvement!) – A late but extremely catchy contender with lyrics that seemingly make no sense at all. Unless maybe there are a lot of mansard roofs in the Falklands…

Here Endeth the Votes. Now we’re onto the songs that still rocked, but I had to cut from my list because Triple J limits you to just 10. Bah!

Architecture In Helsinki – Heart It Races (Number 19) – A Caribbean influenced song that I didn’t like at all the first time I heard it, but which seriously grew on me. The video clip is just insane – the band dancing around Mexico wearing muppet suits – but what do you really expect?

Clare Bowditch & The Feeding Set – When The Lights Went Down (Number 90 but deserved much better) – A really catchy song with an extremely slick video clip. In fact it’s probably the slickest Australian video clip of the year.

Dan Le Sac Vs Scroobius Pip – Thou Shalt Always Kill – Another one of those songs where some guy just rants and rants about things. But it’s got a good beat behind it, and I agree with most of his points (although what’s he got against the OED?).

Dizzee Rascal (Feat. Lily Allen) – Wanna Be – I’ve always enjoyed Dizzee Rascal’s work because he has such a ridiculous voice. He’s like Shaggy, except that you can actually understand what he’s saying most of the time. He’s also got a good ear for backing music, as this piece shows. Throw in Lilly Allen and a bunch of lyrics totally deriding the gangsta lifestyle and you’ve got pure musical gold (but apparently no video, so you’ll have to put up with a karaoke vid put together by someone who can apparently neither spell nor type).

DJ Eurok – This Is DC – A hard hitting piece of hip-hop about corruption, racism and other such problems in Washington DC. Not available on Youtube, no doubt due to censorship by the Man.

Feist – 1234 (Number 34) – A simple, yet catchy tune with “whoa-oh-ohs” and expert choreography.

Hilltop Hoods – Recapturing The Vibe (Restrung) (Number 26) – Like many other acts before them (or at least Metallica) Adelaide hip-hoppers the Hilltop Hoods got together with a symphony orchestra and re-recorded a bunch of their tracks, including Recapturing the Vibe. The end result is fairly awesome – although the only clip I could find of the full recording (including the sort of overture thing they put on the front) is some home made Kingdom Hearts thing.

Josh Pyke – Fed And Watered – Josh Pyke is really rather good. It’s a shame I couldn’t squeeze any of his songs into the pitiful 10 JJJ allow us. Not only does this song feature the lyric “They can keep you around like a head on a stake, I guess the industry found a use for my namesake” (get it?) but the video clip features the coolest race day ever.

Josh Pyke – Lines On Palms (Number 79) – Another great one from Josh Pyke, with a fairly awesome video clip. I seem to recall hearing somewhere that it was all actually done with strings and cardboard cutouts, not with CGI, which makes it even more impressive.

Kaiser Chiefs – Ruby (Number 13) – Nothing special to say about this one, it’s just a good, old fashioned rockin’ track.

Kenneth Bager (Featuring Julee Cruise) – Les Fleurs – A strange song about filthy hippies featuring some woman from Twin Peaks. I like it just for it’s weirdness frankly. Hmmm, would you believe I can’t find it on Youtube? What is this!? The Middle Ages!?

M.I.A – Jimmy – Bollywood/Tamil cheesy disco. How could I not like this song? 🙂

Missy Higgins – Steer (Number 53) – I wasn’t hugely keen on this one until I heard a live version that JJJ recorded. I had a look to see if I could find that performance on Youtube, but couldn’t, so here’s a live version from Rove. I find that Missy’s work always sounds better live – studio production seems to kill it somehow.

Muse – Knights Of Cydonia (Number 1! By an incredible 13 votes out of 700,000!) – This one is so crazily over the top that you can’t help but like it. Epic silliness with an epically silly video clip to match.

Puscifer – Queen B – Dirty funk with an incredible, chess based video clip. Youtube rates it as “adult content” (not without cause) so you need to log in to see it.

Red Jezebel – Kicking Deadly Sins – A catchy rock tune from Perth’s own Red Jezebel.

Regina Spektor – Better – Well this is one of my favourite songs from the last year, but as far as I’m concerned it came out in 2006, so I cut it to make room for some more recent tracks. But if they’d let us vote for 11 rather than just 10 songs, this would be a shoe in for number 11. (The eternal optimist that I am, I put my faith in the listening public and trusted that enough other people would vote for it. I was wrong but she did get in with two other songs so that’s OK 🙂

Reverend And The Makers – Heavyweight Champion Of The World – Great song about how pathetic life really is. A bit like the musical version of Fight Club (that is the book more than the movie).

The Shins – Turn On Me – As far as whiney folk rocks goes the Shins are pretty good. This was only just edged out of my main list by Phantom Limb, but it’s just as good – although all the oiled wrinkly flesh in the video clip tends to overpower the music (not in a good way!).

Soko – I’ll Kill Her (Number 9) – I can’t seem to find an official clip for this one, so the one I’ve chosen will have to do. As songs go, it’s pretty strange – the homicidal rantings of a dumped French stalker – but it’s so crazy I like it. This probably says far more about me that it does the song 🙂

White Stripes – You Don’t Know What Love Is – A good old fashioned rock and roll song from Meg and Jack, with a video clip shot in Iceland. Or maybe Finland? I forget to be honest, but somewhere cold and rocky anyway.

The Bumblebeez – Doctor Love (Number 93) – Fat (or maybe even “phat”) funky rap with a video clip full of fat (phat?) men with interesting tattoos.

Bloc Party – Flux (Number 48) – I head somewhere that this was originally written for Kylie Minogue, but can’t find any confirmation of it anywhere, so it’ll have to remain a supposition. In any case the chorus allegedly features the line “We were hoping for some romance”, but it sounds a lot more like “We were hoping for some Romans”, which is a much more entertaining lyric. Throw in a video clip featuring Cthulhoid monsters and a giant Cylon, and you’ve got great entertainment all round.

And so there we go. Hours (or at least minutes) of listening pleasure!

Of course we can’t sum up the year without mentioning the worst music as well. Not listening to commercial radio I no doubt missed the most aurally offensive stuff, but there was still a few songs that really put my teeth on edge (I’m not going to link to Youtube versions – why should everyone else suffer as well as me?)

If You Keep Losing Sleep – Silverchair (Number 30) – I think Daniel Johns had this really great idea for the beginning of a song, then couldn’t come up with anything to put after it. So he just kept on playing the intro over and over while singing things like “badaba-daba” and “Oo-oo-oo-oo!” over the top. I can’t think of any other way such a monstrosity as this could see the light of day. The video clip is just as bad – the basic idea seeming to be to shove as much weird stuff and special effects (smoke! electricity! blue mascara!) in as possible to try and distract from how awful the song is.

Foundations – Kate Nash (Number 101, which means it just missed out on the countdown, ha ha!) – Have you ever had the kind of friend who gets drunk, and then tells you all about their latest break up in excruciating detail while breathing beer fumes in your face and blocking the way to the bathroom? Well neither have I, but I don’t need one now because I’ve heard this song. It’s a drawn out, boring as hell story that no one wants to hear, yet Kate Nash seems driven to put it all to music – possibly because no one would listen otherwise. She’s got quite a nice voice and I’ll keep an ear out for anything else she records, but this track makes me want to gouge my eyes out with cocktail swizzlers.

So, in the end mighty Muse stole the crown from favourites Silverchair by a mere 13 votes. That’s 13 votes out of about 700,000 – or 1.7 thousandths of a percent! The result managed to totally gobsmack me three times, first when Silverchair came in second, second when they announced the 13 vote difference, and finally when they revealed the winner was Knights of Cydonia. I was literally walking around with my jaw hanging open in amazement.

Best Hottest 100 result in years! 😀

I’m An Authority! – Apparently

Hounded by the press…

So, I get home from work last night and find an email waiting for me from a journalist looking for information about Urban Exploration (I could name the journalist and say what organisation they work for, but I think it’d be a bit unfair to alert all the other journalists to what one particular journalist is doing until they’ve finished doing it – if you know what I mean).

As it turned out I couldn’t help much because (as I pretty much immediately deduced given the rather unfortunate incident in Sydney the other day) they were after information on draining, which is something I’ve never done and which isn’t very big here in Perth anyway because our sandy soils mean we don’t need the big drain networks they have in Sydney and Melbourne. But it’s nice to know that when it comes to Urban Exploration I’m the go to guy for the city’s press ;D

(Yeah, I’ll just keep telling myself that…)

Oh and Perth’s own Heath Ledger is dead. I’m not really bothered one way or the other to be honest.

…Later…

OK, this morning I said I wasn’t too fussed about Heath Ledger. Well that changed as soon as the over as that best ever argument for atheism, the Westboro Baptist Church, got involved.

You see, a few years back Heath starred in well known gay cowbow movie Brokeback Mountain. This – according to the Westboro pinheads – makes him some kind of “fag sympathiser”, who (because as they like to remind us all, “God hates fags”) is now burning in the flames of hell. Where he apparently belongs.

They also say they’re going to picket his funeral, which is something they really like doing. Just show them the funeral of a “fag” and they’ll turn up with a van full of hate-mongers and loudly remind everyone in the cemetery how much God hates the inhumee, and that they’re now burning in hell. Through the entire service (yes, these are nice people).

Thankfully I imagine Heath’s family will be bringing him back to Perth for burial, which means Fred Phelps and his crew of vile bigots should encounter some problems attending (“hate crimes” generally isn’t an acceptable reason for entering the country) but it still really boils my blood. I consider myself a pacifist, but I’d be extremely tempted to use some carefully calculated violence against the kind of creeps who harass mourning families at their loved ones’ funerals.

Neither am I the kind of person who takes it on themselves to judge others’ souls, but if there’s any kind of God, and any kind of afterlife, then Fred Phelps better try really hard for some remorse before he gets there.

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