Sunny Breaks

Feeling a bit heat-addled — here at HQ it’s 29&#176 C (or approx. 83&#176 F) and 50% humidity. That doesn’t sound too bad but it didn’t get much lower all last night.

I got a little weather gaugey thing for christmas — which for the most part was nice. Over three days I only felt the intense desire to kill Evil Brother once. Which is, like, some kind of record for me.

My frayvrite present is a calendar with pictures from the olden days from parts local — deans marsh and bambra which, from here, are towards the Otway forests.

Click on ‘more yes please!’ for some minor gurglings about the Return of the King movie.’, ‘It’s been strange how this thing has stretched itself out over two full years. Two years ago myself and former girlfriend were prepping for a driving hol. through S.A. — that feels like ancient history, but the style of the Lord of the Rings movies hasn’t changed a smidgeon.

And that’s fine by me — now at least. After the firts one i remember thinking why the hell couldn’t they put some jokes in there. But it’s just not the jokey kind of thing, and it’s core is firmly based in the celtic mythology style where men are masculine, women feminie, evil things are black and there ain’t no such thing as “afirmative action”.

I wished I hadn’t watched the ‘the making of’ rubbish from the Two Towers dvd. I ended up thinking things like “I wonder if shoots from all three movies were arranged with any chronology or if the whole thing was dictated by construction of sets, weather, actors’ timetables …?

I wasn’t able to lose myself in it, and ended up a little envious of the kids sitting to my right, who clearly were able to. (Actually they were also a bit annoying because they kept talking and yelling out excitedly.)

Again, with things that really mattered, Jackson really hit the nail on the head with how things should look visually – like Minas Tirith – looked very impressive and close enough to how I envisioned it that the filmic visual happily melded (and overtook) how I saw it.

A small thing that occurred afterward was the almost complete absence of yankee actors from the main line up. The end result was a new style of ‘international accent’.

All up the trilogy is a pretty damn major achievement for Jackson and all involved.

Last night I bumped into Damon Albarn from blur at a petrol station.

‘Oh hey my sister’s a really big fan of yours’ i say but he’s got this expression on his face like he’s really unimpressed.

I try again, ‘I got “There’s no other way” on 45 [making a small circular motion with one finger] back in ‘90’. I’m not completely sure what year it was.

The same expression.

I follow after him a little, and realise that I’m trying to cheer him up, and say something like, ‘people shouldn’t expect you to produce something major every year’.

But I think they did actually relase an album this year — I don’t know — I don’t keep up with that pop shite anymore. nemore.

Some links to prime cuts at this excitement machine entry. Particularly the little North Korean kid, Mo Kin, playing the xylophone is out of this world. Definitely worth the 3.3Mb d/load to see.

Well sure I think the chrissy-card thing can be odd, but I did make and send some. I got some printing credits from camerahaus when I bought the kamera and used them to get fotos printed and glued them on cardboard which promptly warped.
So merry christmas to people who sent me a card but not a return address. I lost the email addresses of everyone I know about a month ago.

From all of us here at Spouting. to all of you out there reading Spouting, I hope your christmas is as gay as this picture:<%image(20031222-adam.jpg|313|455|adam)%>

I was at the op-shop acquiring some christmaspresent materials and came across this book, ‘Bible Firsts’ from the tiny-tots library. Sorry if this offends any christians out there. I’m just looking at it from the perspective of it —the book— as an artefact.
See this is what people who came after the fall (basically everyone) is missing out on. If I was to get nekkid and walk up behind a lion and put my hand on its back, let me tell ya it wouldn’t be a pretty scene. Thanks very bloody much adam and eve.
Interestingly, adam isn’t mentioned at all when it comes to “the first Wrong Deed”. That’s 1953 for you. I hope to bring some more of its illustrations to the site here in the future.

I also picked up a super-special copy of Mad Magazine from 1997. I haven’t looked at Mad for donkeys, and it was rather enlightening, because I used to get it all the time when I was a wee lad. It was like putting another small bit of the jigsaw in place because I can see that i got a fair amount of my social conscience from it, weird as it sounds.

From Diversionz, this X-treme shopping article is a corker. Bring on the insanity and chaos.

I was just having a look at the photo gallery page of the brisbane storm chasers‘ site.
I normally walk when I’m heading into the middle of town, but a couple of times lately I’ve been riding the a.o.g.g. kruzor. I went in to OfficeWerks to get something and was using the bike lock, locking it to a power-pole. It’s one of those wire coily locks and I didn’t keep ahold of one end while I stretched the other end around the pole. It was gripping around a wheel, but obviously not enough because it let go and whipped around the pole, smacking someone\‘s Honda right in the headlight. Thankfully it must\‘ve been made of some supa-tuff plastic because it didn’t leave a mark even. Lucky.’, ‘The ‘more’ link generally deters mother.
I’m making t-shirts for the famblee. The problem with trying something new in conjunction with the making of presents is that there’s a fair chance things will screw up or look a bit wonky.
However, making stuff brings with it the weight of the “it’s the thought that counts” statement and only a fool attempts to argue against that one.
I’m experimenting on me first. First boo-boo — how was I supposed to know it’d come out back-to-front?? And the second is that some paper got stuck on it.
At least I didn’t start a fire.

Erm, there’s a space invaders game in the bloodyvolvodriver website. Go RearView -> 70s -> classic game.

They stretch it a bit by claiming that safety was an integral part of the whole plan in the early periods — safety in the 1930s amounted to ‘now with added brakes’.

My final thought to the whole camapign is that there’s no such thing as the blody volvo driver anymore. Bad drivers have spread across many brands due to the general level of safetey in design increasing. For all intents and purposes your ‘there’s more to like about a kia’ is just as safe as a volvo, what with air-bags n’ such. When you’re out on the highway and in that short moment before coming down with a case of acute semi-trailer poisoning, it doesn’t really matter what you’re in. Despite what the TAC would like us to think.
Volvo’s heyday was the mid-late 70s when the bloodyvolvodriver was establishing and growing. The car had a distinct shape, safety was an issue and they had a genuine jump on the rest in the area.

While I’m talking ads, the Telstra bigpond broadband ads bug me. I mean the one that had ned kelly and others jumping up out of the ocean. Briefly a tv commercial – but seems to be more prevalent as a billboard.
A layer or two down, what the ad says is that web sites on Ned kelly (and other australian things relevant to a kid doing homework) are located on web-servers overseas. Why is this? Because Telstra is like the fat kid in the little wader pool and it’s keeping the water level (prices) high — and so running a web-server here stays an uncompetitve proposition.

Ah, I’m unusually tired today … thus the ridiculous analogies.

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Thanks Snackulator!

How I’m getting my kicks today: Riding bike to shops and walking around shops with stak-hat still on.

Plans for the future: Building a house out of the little plastic clippy things on bread and the circular prickly things on milk bottle lids — held together with plastic coated wire tie-snips.

Jennifer chose a rug, $96.99 for something. “I wonder if it’s pure wool?” Glenn chose boardshorts $8.99 and backpack $9.99 for his son. “I don’t want to over-indulge the children, they grow up thinking life is full of Santa Clauses.”

“Dear yak, I heard a hideous story in the school yard that Santa weren’t real.
Is Santa Claus real?”

- “Dear Natashlie, life is full of Santa Clauses.”

In a very weird house a cat spewed and it had hair in it. It was very yucky spew. So the man went to clean it up. “Oh Milly”, he mumbled. And while he was cleaning the spew, he got it on himself. He started to grow hair. So he quickly went to go and have a shower. Meanwhile, at the zoo, there was a missing ape. Then on their beeper, the zoo-keepers saw the hairy man and they thought it was the ape. They got a cage and took him to the zoo.

Once upon a time there was a boy named Mike. He was bad. He put mouse poo in the bottle. His dad went to wash his hair and his hair fell off. He ate cheese. Then he grew more hair. It was beautiful.

Paper Rock Scissors Championships which I saw a link of at the highly industrious Diversionz — infact you’d be doing yourself a favour by cutting out the middleman and just visiting him instead of here.
The complexity of the P.R.S. results defeat me, so I can’t say exactly what won, paper rock or scissors but I have a hunch it was rock.

If I ever end up in a situation where I’ve made my own people then you can bet your socks that when it comes to this part of the year and cards are sent here and there through the mail — — each person within the sox clan will be signing their own name in each of those cards.
Every year I’m perplexed by the combination of effort and half-heartedness involved in this wacky little traditon or bouncing cardboard through the national mail service.

Then there’s the actual cards. Mass produced little things with pictures of snow on them. At this point I’d like to inform the international readers that during the last two days it’s been 37degrees Celcius Plus! here.
Sandra is sitting at the kitchen table sweating her arse off, writing, “Dear Gemima and Scotty, hope you and the kids are well, happy crismas, luv Sandra, Billy and Bobby-Jo” on a card with snow on it and probably jesus too and nobody’s been to church since forever.

Giving elephants paint brushes — another fucking triumph in human wisdom.
Some advice to you, dear reader, don’t accept the gift of a painting done by any mammal that can’t write its own name.

And another thing – you kids out there: Shopping trolleys are for putting groceries in – not lairising about with.

For once in ages I really lucked out with the CDs I borrowed from the Library: the soundtrack to Blue Velvet and the Pink Floyd album – The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.

The first – is scored by Angelo Badalamenti who is rapidly going from ‘who?’ to ‘muchly respected’ in my book. He did the soundtrack to Twin Peaks also and I’m finding that he’s something of an influence on Amon Tobin too.
Pink Floyd is reminding me of my teenage hoodlum days, which is fun. Lucifer Sam and Interstellar Overdrive are killa riffs and the bike song is good because I like bikes.

Although I wish they could make a frikkin’ stak-hat that’d keep the sun off my face.

Santa through the ages is mildly interesting. I like this one where he’s riding a goat, holding a jumbo bowl of noodles and with a bird’s nest on his head — dude must be respected.

It just ended tonight but I’ve really liked watching this doco series ‘Martin Scorsese: My Voyage to Italy‘ that’s been on SBS. In an odd way, the way he goes about talking about the films reminds me of that art-lovin’ nun, sister Wendy. It’s nice to hear someone talking in the “appreciation” style rather than the fast-fiction “3 and a half Stars (out of 5)” critic/consumer way.
A doco series/movie worth checking out if it comes around again. 4 stars!

Last week I got me a paper round delivering one of the local free community papers. I doesn’t pay a lot but i don’t care too much about that at the moment. I use an old-school pram to delver them in. The suspension on it is insanely great.
I don’t understand those yuppy 3-wheeled pusher things. You’d think they’d have learnt from one hundred years of automotive lessons that: 3 points of contact = tends to fall over, four points = better.
Actually, I’ve seen lumpin with the 3-wheelers now, and I bet the yupppies are bitter about that. They are waiting for something new to purchase and set themselves apart with.

I deliver to the local drag of shops. I walk up and down there all the time but i never realised there were so many shops, so much junk. All this home decoration stuff … I don’t know .. it’s just not the kind of thing I’d buy in a million years.
I was a little concerned that all there people would turn their nose up and not take the paper, but they were all quite obliging, and in 95% of cases, cheery about it.

A few nights ago I had a dream where Madonna gave me a sheet of paper that had answers to exam questions on it, which isn’t much help considering the exams were over a month a go.
Golly Christmas is creeping up really sleazy-like.
I applied for an editing job today too. I hadn’t looked at or adjusted a resume in years. I really dislike the whole resume thing. The kind of thing where I’m tempted to push it way out — like writing it in screenplay format, or putting it on video.
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I had a little go of the SUSE 9.0 live evaluation. It’s like one of those Linux on a CD dealies. Despite having mentioned the whole ‘linux on a CD’ approach before, this was the first time I’d tried a version of it. And of course, because the whole thing is running out of the CD drive, it’s a bit slower than normal.
But there were these minute but impressive differences between Suse and every other version of every other distro I’ve tried (including SuSE 7.0) — refinements in the installation that could mean the difference between the new user throwing a lamp-stand through the front of the monitor, and not throwing it. A lampstand.

- it picked which port the modem was located at. Never happened before, I’ve always had to set it manually. As I said, a small thing but it’s progress. – the soundcard worked straight up. Even with this version of Mandrake I’m using now I had to flick the master volume off and on once for it to work. – Getting really confident, I plugged the camera into its USB cord, turned it on and started the camera app. ( I forget which one it uses right now — Kfoto(?))
It recognised what model the camera was and uploaded the picture without any trouble. That’s very impressive.

The full version still seems kind of exxy, but then – that extra money is going to pay the nerds whe worked on refining the hardware detection capabilities to that level beyond where the money-free versions are at.
Also, for people who have fat and unlimited bandwidth options available, 9.0 it available for free install-via-ftp.

In 2007 Echinecea will be eaten out of existence the same way the brontosaurus was.

Everyone can see how the wheels turns, but the trick is figuring out the length of one full revolution — is MC Hammer ‘can’t touch this’ cool yet???

I walked past a private retirement home up the gentrified end of the nearby main drag — old men sat in the shade of the verandah with light blankets wrapped around their legs. One of them was playing a harmonica open-handed style — bob dylan style.

There’s no other time of year as distinctive as summer. Everything vibrates and eminates. There’s been this metamorphosis happening in me over the last 6 years and now I’m a sensory junky. Giving up smoking and regaining smell and taste was like dotting the is and crossing the ts.
The smell pines give off remind me of two years ago and 15 years ago. I smell other tree smells that I can’t pin down, but which remind me of the start of grade six and maybe grade two. Summer and a new year often meant starting at a new school in a new place with new smells.

There aren’t anywhere near as many cicadas around here as there are further north, but I love it when they get going and turn the volume up to eleven and drown out the traffic noise.

If there was a halfway decent video store in this town I’d go grab Devil’s Playground for a look, but as it stands I can’t even get hold of eraserhead.

Speaking of David Lynch, there was this a couple of days ago. They’re definitely on the right track. I read of a similar thing somewhere in the Amazon there’s this healer guy who can somehow reach right into people and rip tumas straight out without needing conventional surgery. There was a hall where adepts would meditate in shifts so there was always a certain level of ‘vibe’ flowing around the place.

Asparagus pee-pee
in the still night,
a dragon gently exhales

Golly what a day – quarter to four am is the second earliest time I’ve got up all this year. Watching the sun come up in clear sky while on the train was pretty spesh, since the land is flat-as around Little River.

The end of year OB was stacks fun. Congratulations to the Breakfasters for another year, I don’t know how they get up so early.

That’s Clare Bowditch with the axe, and then standing below the RRR sign, Fi B², Angus Samson and Tony Wilson sitting, and Tom Elliott and Phlip Shelton in the background.

Milkman.

I decided I’m going to go to the breakfaster’s end-of-year Outside Broadcast tomorrow morning — it’s at Cookie which apparently is near Mind Games on Swanston St. It would be cool to see other webbaloggers there.

The other day I came across a long trail of cool music and other stuff, starting with the International Mind Control Corporation — which is all things related to dave Thrussel, like Snog, Soma, Black Lung. Snog had a new album out and I didn’t even know about it.
Seze Devres must be a friend of theirs and does some interesting visual art.
Sharing the same website as Snog are End and Mehmet irdel. Both have wonderfully abrasive and unmelodic songs available for the grabbin’ and Mehmet has a link to dev/null who makes the same kind of sounds, and has a long link-list of kindered spirits, including atom heart a.k.a Senor Coconut.
Hymen, a German recording label is involved in it all somehow too, and they have a page of neat wallpapers for jor desktop.

(Phew! I’m having a few system-changeover hiccups. They were battling royale for the highly prized index.php spot. Working again now.)

In other news that’s already happened this morning, ‘Ken Alright! I won the Jack Planck ‘To hell with you, I’ll make my own people’ CD off the RRR breakfasters. I was on the air and I answered questions and I hadn’t even had a coffee yet.
STD callers like me don’t have a chance in hell usually but when the breakfasters say that callers have to go on the air they lines clear out very quickly.
Pretty cool. In the month or so since the album got released here the track ‘Milkman’ got the most airplay and I like that as soon as I heard it, but there’s almost no mention of Planck on the net, and definitely none of the music for schnaffling. So it was a good one to win.

Satan called me up on the telephone this afternoon, except I was on the internet so he left a message — actually two messages two minutes apart. If I lived in The HouseHold of the Future I would be able to somehow share these messages with you — apart from saying it was breathing, but not what I’d call heavy, then something whispered but completely unintelligible.

A brief description of neoplasticism. I’m a big fan of the primaries, I like wearing them.
I’ll get around to what I think are the differences between north american and european styles in weblog appearance, but right here I’ll say that to me ‘clean design’ equals boring. If someone says a page looks too cramped then they should get out of the rat-race maybe — maybe that’s the cause of the cramped feeling. Generally I think most people can fit a lot more info on their page than they’re currently fitting.

But for once I’m giving it all a bit more space. Afterall, this is the “summer edition” – even more light weight than usual. We’ve wheeled in the reserves and the weekend guy.
Don’t be surprised if this design disappears quickly because I’m tempted to start thinking it’s boring.

Project Censored have relased their book for the year gone. Forget your mark lathams forget your howard deans – that stuff is australian idol in grey suits. Have a gander at these these 25 stories, they’re what politics is. And it could well be that it’s not that these bits of news were actively suppressed by TheMan but instead, to the average person this stuff is really really bad news. It’s just not fun becoming actively conscious of the fact that the US military is the largest environmental polluter on earth, it generates 750,000 tons of toxic waste material annually, more than the five largest chemical companies in the U.S. combined.

But one out of the 25 was good news – #23 Argentina Crisis Sparks Cooperative Growth. It’s heartening to hear of genuine democracy alive somewhere on the planet — the kind where people go out to meetings after work and engage in discussion about what is to be done. It’s more work but more rewarding than the “Ring or SMS your vote Now!” bullshit we currently have.

Chuck your Natasha Atlas tape in the deck and press play because we’re taking a journey back in time to the lands of the mysterious ancient Egyptians …

The ancient Egyptian of North Geelong that is. The Sphinx Hotel – featuring ‘deNile dance club’ for over 25s. Hey! I’m over 25s, but it’s never a good sign when they have to state ‘no denim’.
I mean, what are people supposed to wear, their tracksuits?

Speaking of tracksuits I should mention the few good vids out of a selection of several forgetables that I’ve seen recently. The Royal Tenenbaums was quite clever – a lot of detail in it.
The Man Who Wasn’t There must be one of the Coen brothers’ earlier efforts because i hadn’t heard of it before. Playing a quiet character really suited Thornton.
And I’ve been watching Twin Peaks again. Now that’s the kind of thing DVDs would be really handy for. Damn it’s good – the characters, the writing and the aura that the setting gives off.

I was reading an article out of the latest Nexus about strange things in siberia and then twisting around to look at it on the world map and golly it’s a big place. It’s always been a big place. I remember in grade five having those exercise books that had a little political-sort map of the world on the back divided in six or so colours. Australia was either green or yellow and at the top right across most of it was the pink-red of USSR – most of which was/is siberia.
There’s a pretty okay map here — okay for the internet at least.
Imagine reshuffling things and putting all of that land across the space of the pacific and moving all the ocean up into that spot – there’d be another 4 billion people on the planet.

Let’s Go: Novosibirsk! – Now there’s a town that can have a little chuckle at itself. I like that.
And there’s a whole bunch more fotos here – a few of them circa 1965.

Interesting page on the Akademgorodok – (soviet push to get science happening in the sticks) – with plenty more pics from the ’60s.

Novo state uni – now in Enklissh!
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A domain name going begging – turbogenerator.net.