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!
____
A domain name going begging – turbogenerator.net.

Well this is the neoplasticism mutation/rip-off look. gawdbless those little neoplakky heads — mondrian et al. More about that later.
Ug, it’s amazing how planning and constructing things behind the curtain can go exceedingly smoothly then as soon as I move it all to the front all these strange glitches show up and make the night trying.
The QuikComment thing to the right = it puts the comment for the most recent entry. It’s got no ‘link’ field – but there’s one in the normal ‘comments’ link with each entry.
I went over to nucleus and this is the last I’m ever going to change weblog systems and may I be run over by a bus if I do. Funnily enough, after months of silence there an announcement about Pivot progress yesterday.

Eeek! Eeeek! I heard on the radio this morning that there’s some kind of Ninja Tune gig in St. Kilda on Friday night. Amon Tobin will be playing at it but I don’t think I’ll be able to go – I’ve no people south of the river and i would turn into a pumpkin even before midnight because of public transport. Ah well.

I went and saw ze career person today and managed to bump into the head communication studies dude too which was good. I’ve got a much clearer idea of where I’m going, and am pretty much certain that I’d be doing honours in comms instead of psychology. Phew! listen to your little man.

“Far and away the single most popular crime ‘yellow-back’ was The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, a novel originally published in Melbourne, Australia, by the author, Fergus Hume (1859-1932), at his own expense. There is, in fact, probably no more unlikely success story in the history of crime fiction publishing than this tale of a brutal crime in which the identity of the killer is actually given away in the preface! Hume had been born in England, but emigrated with his family to New Zealand and then moved to Australia to practise as a lawyer. In an attempt to augment his income, he asked a local bookseller what kind of book sold best. Hume wrote later, ‘He replied that the detective sales of Emile Gaboriau had a large sale; and as, at this time, I had never heard of this author, I bought all his works and determined to write a book of the same class containing a mystery, a murder, and a description of the low life of Melbourne.’”

“Unable to find a publisher for The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, Hume decided to publish the book himself and just about covered his costs on the first printing. One purchaser of the book, however, was an Englishman who evidently had an eye for a commercial prospect. He promptly bought the rights from the author, set up the Hansom Cab Publishing Company in London, and launched the book onto the nation’s railway bookstalls. With its simple yellow cover and an illustration of a hansom cab, it rapidly sold 350,000 copies, a figure which was doubled when the story was reprinted in America. By the end of the century, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab had been translated into 12 foriegn languages.”

“Hume, who was still in Australia while all this was happening, scraped together enough money for a fare to England and arrived in London to find his name on everyone’s lips. It should have made him wealthy, but having sold the copyright he was not entitled to a penny. Disappointed but not downhearted, Hume settled in Essex and in the years that followed tried desperately to repeat his success, writing over 100 more crime novels — including Madame Midas (1888), For the Defense (1898) and the optomistically entitled The Mystery of a Motor Cab (1908) — but none achieved anything like the popularity of the first book. Today, in most histories of crime fiction, Hume is dismissed as a hack whose books are unreadable and whose most famous story was ‘tedious from start to finish’. Yet it outsold the works of Poe, Collins and even Conan Doyle for years, and more copies were bought in its ‘yellow-back’ format than any other title. Furthermore, the original Melbourne edition has the distinction today of being one of the rarest books in the world – only two copies are known to exist.”

: I lifted this out of The Classic Era of Crime Fiction by Peter Haining, published by the good folks at Chicago Review Press. It’s a large hardback book with heaps of pictures of book covers and goes through to about 1960. Very nice.