Sunny Breaks

One of those things I don’t know if other people experience is very occasionally if I’m having a nap in a bright daytime environment and I start to dream then through the whole dream I’ll be stumbling around sheilding my eyes and feeling my way along. Occasionally I’ll lamely flail a bit, attempting to bat away the invisible light source.
It’s that flailing approach that I seem to have adopted to homework this year and it’s proving hard to change the attitude.
Anyway, if it all falls apart there’s a job niche I just noticed that’s open. I’ll become the union organiser for paper delivery people. The bosses call us ‘walkers’ but that’s rubbish, anyone can walk (except people who can’t walk). I prefer the term slotter. They probably don’t earn enough for me to skim a wage off but I don’t care, I’d be happy to do it for the power.
The thing is, if I say we’re going out on strike, then those papers ain’t gonna get delivered and nobody will find out that The Good Guys are having a fridge sale, and the whole society will come to a screeching halt. Besides, slotters get paid so little that the bosses will never find anyone else who’d scab for ‘em.
Sure it’ll be a bit of a challenge convincing all the various kinds of people that become slotters to join the union—grumpy old buggers, 10 y.o. kids who can’t concentrate for ten seconds and a myriad other unemployable freaks and half-bakes, but a routine of spending 95% of the week inside alone is preparation that’s second to none.

Once I met a guy who was organiser for a renegade sheep shearers union. He was very good with the talkin’, and had a rotund, silent offsider who did the drivin’. Arms crossed over chest sort.
I need to get me a fat guy.

Yesterday I realised that there isn’t one proper toy shop left in the middle of town here. Fortunately there’s a perfectly good one just up the road. I was looking around :- HotWheels cars have taken on a positively surreal quality
-neither they or Matchbox have any damn cars that correspond with those in reality anymore
-MicroMachines have this variety called ‘Phat’ cars, again surreal. In scale, you’re average street car would be about 30 feet wide. They have these little action sets, ‘dioramas’ if you like, which come with one car. It’s called ‘Phat Boyz City’ and the particular diorama I was looking at was of a hamburger restaurant (at least it wasn’t a product tie-in with McDs or BK).
Maybe it’s a vision of our fat future when, after eating ten hamburgers, we need a 30×30ft car to fit all that lard into.

That would be my n.american indian name if they were to give me one, because I seem to be doing an awful lot of that lately; walking eating a pizza. But who in their right mind could go past Monday Madness half-price night. $3.75 for a large pizza – that’s obscene. Pizza cutters have always been the mercenaries of the eats business. I didn’t need any ‘the pizza’ tvshow to work that out—I figured it out way back when Tower Pizza was at it’s height. It should’ve been called Dark Tower Pizza. Not in an ‘I’m whinging about this’ kind of way – but they were just evil. The last time I was near there there was dead leaves and scrap paper and wind-blown garbage around their door—the Tower now lies dormant, waiting for a new evil master.
And so Pizza Lovers of the monday madness was rather busy. Another of those things I wish I had the attitude for is to say a different name when the ask for a name—like blockhead or Potsy. It was very Happy Days there. I saw a guy wearing my 4WD slippers. A couple of weeks back there was an old Miss Marple-ish type sitting next to me waiting and via my mindblowingly brilliant peripheral vision I could see that she was doing something with a pen and paper and that her eyes were flicking up and down between the paper and _____? As I got up I managed one quick look at her paper and I think whe was sketching my profile – but frankly mr.squiggle could’ve done a better job.

Speaking of keyboard players, I was reading Monolake’s website and he mentions Jean-Michel Jarre as being an influence. That name was familiar – I pass by a couple of his CDs at the library every week but hadn’t picked them up on account of them looking skanky and old. I listened to a collected hits type thing. One sounded familiar – from Chariots of Fire or something like that, and I can tell that he was probably a bit of an influence on some of the earlier techno people like Speedy J. Synthesizer music is kind of like computers in films though—it doesn’t take long for it (them) to date.

I aren’t no graphical designer, but I could still really dig this Patron Saints of Graphic Design – what I saw a link Dabs from adland put up. Especially St.Concepta I could relate to.

This is an interesting spin on participatory music nights – NoWax where you bring along yourfave tracks on mp3 and have a little dj comp.

Here’s the latest wacky offering at NQR – ‘Thai Spray’—not only does it rhyme with fly spray, but the sweeping statement of the day is, “Nuffing good ever came out of a Spraycan” – except maybe spraypaint but only when it’s got lots of colours and is pretty, and I’m not around to inhale the toxic fumes. Fly spray, that stuff people put on baking trays, de-odourant with aluminium in, “air freshener”, WD40. I don’t need any of that junk.

Your dose of voyeurism can be got here, where there’s eight other people besides JM in Paris, who are doing the a-picture-a-day of themselves thing, including a pair of twins. By and large it appears to be a European phenomenon.

If that’s not enough, there’s this thing I saw (via brainal meltdown)—it’s an astonishingly large photo collection of nerds in their natural habitat. The element of similarity is that they all hold something against the side of their head, while individuality is expressed in what each chooses to hold there. – On the local front, some dudes from this group Paraquest Australia successfully took a photo of a ghost at Barwon Park, which is a big old-timey estate near Winchelsea. Winchelsea is about 25kms S-W of geelong (check the map. Barwon Park was where rabbits were first let loose in Australia. The photo was in one of the local rags, but hopefully the paradudes will stick it on their site. The ghost was a woman in period clothing, who apparently still lives upstairs in one of the rooms. Didn’t sound nasty-spooky though — it said her room is normally warmer than the rest of the house. Like someone just forgot to tell her she was dead. – Here’s a list of some of the other more well known haunted buildings in Victoria. happy easter hols! – A fairly decent old sort of collection of typefaces and something called Open Source Web Design which is shareable templates for dynamic sites. I saw both these links at del.icio.us. – The O’Reillys’ made a t-shirt that says, ‘I’m blogging this\’ on it. Good for them. Maybe I should too. – Last but not least, craneporn. Yet again the internet has shown me that I am not alone. I like cranes too!

I saw that link at axis of aevil, who I’ve been meaning to stick in the link-list. She’s in Finland, but is a native english-speaker so (sadly) no kinky sentence construction.

I really like the sound of the two words Cheetham Salt, and have done for a while now. There’s something about that combination of vowel and consonant sounds that floats my boat. The fact that it’s also a company is not much more than a coincidence. It’s all frames, but I like the ‘about salt-> origins of salt’ page. Pretty convenient for Cheetham that the planet began to cool when it did.

I like salt. Salt cops it pretty bad from The Man these days. Salt makes things taste good. I think it’s up to each of us to figure out what’s good or not to have, and how much of it. For years when I was a teeny-bopper and early-mid twentysomething I’d just be doing nothing much, kicking back sprawled across the couch or whatever. And even in this relaxed condition I’d be suddenly racked by excruciating spasms in the arch of my left foot. Sometimes I thought it was the devil trying to get in through there. The foot-muscles would cramp, curl up like foetals and I would be there thinking woe and why?

These days I just eat more salt and everything’s schmick.

This is not a paid announcement from cheetham salt, although I wouldn’t mind it if it was, but they’d have to pay me in dollars because that’s another thing about salt — while ‘The System’ doesn’t want you to eat any, and everyone could well eat a bit more, there’s definitely an upper limit. I don’t like the idea of being paid off in salt, then eating too much that my fingers rust up like the Tin Man’s and I can’t use them to type on with the keyboard for.

Finally, I’d like too have a swipe at large sections of the global population for running-on their words when referring to the wife of Henry the VIII, Anne Boleyn. All this time I thought her name was ‘Amberlin’. Nice as that sounds, it’s wrong. Why the hell aren’t they pronouncing it “Anne [one-one thousand] Boleyn”??? Or “Boll-een”? This is what happens when you rely on televison to get your history lessons.

This is no crime because telly is the loudest talker about such things, and these wayward re-dramatisations of the lives of historical figures are getting saucier and saucier. It won’t be long before there’s a movie made called ‘The Wives of Henry the VIII’ and all it is is hardcore prawnography with some period costumes thrown in.

Ug. now my stats counter thing isn’t working. I look at that thing all the time. I feel lost. Maybe it’s for the best.

Two things I saw at D/blog:

Noam ‘Chompers’ Chomsky has a weblog!

Also, this has to be one of the coolest sites I’ve seen ever — the official ninja webpage.

“My friend Mark said that he saw a ninja totally uppercut some kid just because the kid opened a window.” — I love it.

The other week at the op-shop I also got these unbelievably hideous shoes, but the were only four fiddy, so what are ya gonna do?

I was thinking of the future. Winter is coming. I’ll wear these as all-terrain slipppers around the backyard. I used to just wear loafers, and when I accidentally didn\’t see a snail or slug and stood on it, I’d think ‘sorry snail’.

But not any more. I don’t care what I stand on.

The extra rubber on the soles puts me in a higher, more commanding position. The old shoes left me feeling vulnerable. When somone stood beside me I couldn’t see over them and I was fearful of what might’ve been approaching from the other side. I know they use twice as much rubber as any other kind of shoe, but me and my family deserve it. Everybody else had them, so I decided that I needed them too.

In most situations of daily life I am left feeling powerless and impotent. But not when I’m wearing these babies. I stomp around like I own the joint.

That thing that got eaten yesterday – I was saying that the warehouses in my head are filling up with stuff from the institution and if there was any illusion of planning or effort that went into what went here, then it’ll probably drop off even more. I was thinking I had these essays to write, but then today I realised I have two weeks of solid procarastination to get though.

So I was roaming around the streets aimlessly at lunchtime and noticed a church op-shop open. They’re like those flowers that only open up on full moons — in that they aren’t open much. Sometimes they can have some good stuff. I found a book, The World’s Greatest Alien Abductions — impressive sounding, but I’m not that easily swayed. I did the flip-test, flip to a random page and read. I got the subheading, “The sexy spacenapper”. Sold!

Jump in the time-machine and let’s do some serious shoe-inspection. A big page of Slowdive tracks. If you like music where they play one chord, then change to another chord, then go back to the first, then back to the second — all buried under layer upon layer of effects-pedals (great because no one can tell when you hit a bum note). If you don’t mind a bit of distant, non-specific moaning in place of normal singing. Then this is the music for you!

Don’t mind it meself. Reminds me of being 16. – The Bureau of Extreme Ironing

– A Ukrainian biker woman rides through the Chernobyl area deadzone and takes a bunch of fascinating pictures — which I saw the link to at slashdot.

A thing about English indie-pop is actually part of my grand unified theory — being that the prevalence for long monotonous sounds (both vocal and instrumental) are due to ancient druidic influence on the anglo mindset.

Besides Slowdive, Ride were another good example. If you take an LP and switch it down to 16 RPMs you can get one note to last for up to a minute.

I went to the monster fete in south geelong today. It was okay, although I do take exception to this bourgeois ‘smashing shit’ trend that’s picked up.

A while back I saw a short news bit about some big cub-scout jambouree and one of the activities was throwing rocks at glass, ceramics and other breakables.

It was happening today too. People pay money, get given a few cricket balls and the opportunity to smash plates etc.

How to take out the back seats in a cadillac?

Dear cadillac owner,
I’m of the opinion that there’s no hard and fast rules on this matter. My advice is to employ some of that good old fashioned intuition that we’re all born with, reach down the crevasse in the cushioning to where the solid fixture is, grasp it and give it one sharp pull, followed by a series of longer yanking motions until the whole thing starts to come away.

And voila! DIY self-propelled rocket artillery: Get out of my dreams, Get into my Car. Get in the back seat baby.

It’s funny how the sentence component “... or I’ll kill you.” has slipped into workaday conversational english, eg. “Give me a piece of gum or I’ll kill you”.
I lost a unit guide, which is 8 or 10 photocopied pages with essay questions and rules in it re: one of the subjects I’m doing. I asked if there was anyway I could get a replacement. They printed me out one, and as the otherwise mild-mannered, middle-aged secretary/clerical type woman hands it over to me she says, “Don’t tell your friends about this or I’ll have to kill you”.

They’ve put OS X on the old G3 bule&whites out here — with Safari, so now I can see how rooted the web page looks in that.

An observation re: the Kids. They’re all wearing these bits of nylony material around their necks with keys or whatever attached. The nylon loop denotes “access all areas” because usually they’re used for various kinds of security passes, and in corporate settings, ways of ranking slaves. The connotation is ‘freedom’ or ‘exclusivity’. These loops are also conveniently wide enough to fit a logo or corporation name on.

This morning in two seperate instances I saw old women talking to dogs. The dogs had been leashed up to fixed objects outside shops by their owners, who weren’t the old women.

I had to make a special trip out to uni because their computers decided to unenrol me from a subject. I had to wait a half hour because the same computers had frozen up and wouldn’t access my file. Oh yeah, that’s one smooth operation they got out there.

I would really hoe into them properly, except for all I know this could be the standard nationwide. It’s a two-bit operation the whole way through, yet they insist on squeezing more money out of us each year. I think I’ve mentioned before that my studies are 75% off-campus. It’s not by choice — if I did want to attend lectures and tutes for these subjects I’m doing, I’d have to travel over 150kms one way, then nearly 100kms in the other direction every week. That’s nuts.

Listening to an RCA compilation of various black musics. Some of it’s really stand-out stuff, like ‘Sometimes I feel Like a Motherless Child’ – Paul Robeson. That vibratto thing that singers (usually opera) do with their voice makes me chunder, but in this gospel track it works well.

Also, there’s a Kid Koala live gig split into 4 bits for the grabbin’ here.

Slightly thoughtful piece about how clowns have to multitask to keep up, brought on by that clown convention. I saw a half-second shot on the news of a giant shoe stall.

omg these peaches are good. I ate ten last night.       omfg. Fruit trees in backyards are a gift.
I couple of years ago I was living in a rent house a few streets south of here. The owner sold it and we had to move out. The yuppie architect and his wife — the new owners, were eager to start fucking shit up and on the day we were moving they’d already come in and chopped down the apple and lemon trees. So they could install a pool and yuppy-car sized garage. They also chopped down a large, twenty year-old walnut tree that’d given us heaps of nuts the year before. The house wasn’t even for them – just a ‘do it up and flog it off’ job.
If I had my way, I’d chop their legs off just below the knee.

Reading the intro chapter to this personality text book I was reminded of how unbelievably dualistic whitey western society is. Off/on, toggle, switch, alternate – bridge pick up/neck pick up, one/zero, yes/no, good/bad, present/absent — all these binaries. A line with two ends can have specific stopping points in the middle, but they’re still part of the scale and they’ll always be stuck between the two end points.

But I’m not blaming capitalism, or rationalism or any of that. From what I can tell, dualistic thinking has been part of all that’s sprung from anglo thinking as far back as the druids.

What if the very first calculating machines and computers had been designed by crack zen monks? People who weren’t hedged in by the blip/blip …

I don’t know – I can’t imagine things like that, but I can imagine how nice it would be if my internet connection did not drag so often, and the MySql server i pay to use would stay connected.

What if, instead of the great leap being in electronic gadgets of communication, it’d been in telepathic ability. And over the last 40 years huge amount of time and effort had gone into understanding and learning how to manipulate interpersonal communication on that level.
Instead of holding a gizmo up to the side of the head, a person would get the message straight in their head. There would still be some laggards, like me, who hadn’t gotten on board most of these techniques, but they were there. People were continually letting a flow of communication between themselves and a person standing in front of them, be interrupted in preference for someone who was absent.

A whopping hop sideways into a parallel reality, which essentially is the same as this one because still no one’s listening to eachother.

It’d be convenient to have a professional, ridgey-didge astrologer on hand because lately I’ve noticed a bit of a jump in agro in both the external world and in me. I sent narky emails to both my ISP and web server host. They’re probably used to getting that kind of thing, but I’m not used to giving it. Also, something’s been bugging me today and I haven’t been able to lose it the way I normally do.

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Spent a day or so down at TheRanch. That little cat is runnin’ amok. What kind of cat gets on the roof and starts running around at night? A bad cat, that’s what I say. It’s a combination of bad parenting and a brush-stroke of evil running through its character.
Also, I think that the neo-nazi skinhead organisation (is it national front? I forget what they’re calling themselves — all I remember is that they’ve pinched the southern cross emblem. Bastards.) is unofficially setting up in Colac.

But it’s not all bad. Infact, when I look out the window here everything’s peachy, literally. There’s a peach tree out there that’s buckling under its own weight with fruit. According to Higgins they’re ready to eat now too. After years of being short-changed by Nature, it’s finally giving something back. Last summer I weeded and watered and all this other nonsense and got about two crappy mushy “black russian” tomatoes out of it. I don’t know who’s idea it was to make black tomatoes.

Small things that I’m liking: new season Royal Gala apples – yum. – products that come in re-usable glasses. – the word “cwazy”. There’s some rapper dude out here at the moment whose name is [something] Cwazy [something] — it’s great to hear, say, read and write. If I was boss of the world I would make everybody say cwazy instead of crazy.
Cwazy as a doamin name is already taken by an email service, but the Frencher spelling, “quasy” is available. – (Update -6pm) – add Eating Peaches to that list.. It’s like biting children.

This year at school the psychology subjects I’m doing are ‘Research Methods, the sequel’ (because I’m a saddo) and ‘Personality’. A component of the former is psychometrics, which, for the uninitiated, is those questionnaires, like, if you wanna be a travel agent and you go to the interview and you do a questionnaire that has on it,

58. I am excited by fire.
a)yes
b)no
c)maybe

And then based on what ju answer is if you become a travel agent.

Psychologists write them. A small set of steps that are part of the greater objective of completing my life-long ambition to construct one of those internet Quizilla “What ________ are you?” things. Mine will be, What piece of French 18th century furniture are you? Almost there — just got to do the 18 month TAFE Antique French furniture polishing and restoration course.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, this thing writes itself. It’s uncanny how these small themes will roll through for an entry or two, a day or two, or a whole week. I’ve noticed it happening for ages now. I have no bearing on it.

It’s evening, it’s warm and black outside—30 centigrade. A track from one of those ‘ultralounge’ type compilations came on and I punched ‘private dick’ into google. True, I knew the chances were great for getting something faggish back. But I didn’t expect it to be so funny.
Private dick.

At thought scraps I saw a link to this page of antique weirdness – a bunch of bawdy images. Hehe – ride a cockhorse to banbury cross.

I watched a doco on Unkie Joe Stalin (and yes I know he was terrible and killed a lot of people, but lets face it — these days at least, who isn’t doing that?) It focussed on the propaganda side which I’d not heard a lot about. Was looking for net stuff on the movies made under him, including The Oath and others I can’t remember the names of, but found little. Just this collection of mainly allied propaganda posters.

In that current, I saw this link to nazi propaganda posters at adland ages ago. Despite the evilness, some of them come across as kinda kooky.

I know it’d never happen because of the opposing viewpoints, but to me, this one’s begging to be resampled into a gay nightclub promotional poster.

So anyway, Stalin as a media construction was interesting. He changed his name to stalin which means ‘man of steel’ — I think I’d heard that before but forgot it. In a stranger than fiction situation, there was this guy, an actor, who’s one and only ever role was playing stalin in the movies. That’d be a weird life.

I came across this page of explanation of santa in parts of north and western europe, but I can’t vouch for its factuality. I actually think it’s a rather neat troll. Get this:
“Iceland is quite a big exception. They don’t have a Santa Claus. They have a mean witch family – mother, father and 13 sons – who live on the mountain. In the middle of December sons come one by one down from the mountain and steel from houses and scare people. Besides this Icelander have also a huge christmas cat who also lives on the mountain. If child doesn’t have new clothes in christmas eve this cat come and eat child.”
“The biggest competitor to Finnish Santa Claus is Greenland’s Santa. He has an office in Greenland but he actually lives in the North Pole but because there is so cold he doesn’t meet visitors there. And this is The Santa Claus who is very popular in North-America.”

Note to self: write up oulandish, preposterous page of “christmas in australia” in time for it to be properly indexed by search engines for christmas this year.

There’s some top-notch women’s cycling here on the weekend. Whereas all the other events I’ve seen in town have been on a short circuit around the eastern Gardens, this event has a 15km lap which goes over a lot of ‘burbs in town and includes the most killa hill in the area — the approach from Fyansford.
I’d already volunteered to help out with a do the heritage society are having before I knew about the cycling, so probably won’t get to take any happy-snaps of it.

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Handy Andy of North Geelong. He’s wearing a wire basket skirt. How about that.

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I finally got hold of a copy of this classy little poster the other day.

Ah golly, I was out having a coffee with good friend Obi wan kenobi this morning and ended up mentioning that i have this website, so consequently now feel that particular brand of self-conscousness that comes from the virtual bumping against the real. Been a while since i dealt with that.
It’s the kind of thing that can lead to self-censorship which I’ve seen a lot of webloggers bend to, which eventually leads to shutting down completely. The kind of thing that needs to be nipped in the bud straight away — which is what I’m attempting to do by mentioning all this now.

If I get the opportunity to argue against post-modernism again at school, I’ll take it. I didn’t last year, mainly because it took me 6 months to figure out what I thought about it all. But I’d disagree with the idea of multiple selves, I think the idea underplays the complexity of people — how we can have many, many facets. But when you really get to know someone you can see how they’re all linked.

At the same time, the one area where I could see the “for muliple selves” argument getting a go is with the online-self vs. the real life-self, because I know that in my case they can often be quite different. And infact I enjoy playing up to and mucking with character/identity in this online form.

Here’s what I would’ve writ yesterday if two things didn’t happen: first, the thingo I write in vanished right before my eyes, taking with it several paras of carefully worded, effulgent effluvia. Then the whole server goes down for half a day. But you don’t need to know this.

I’ve heard of people eatiing straight out of the pot — that’s something I can’t come at, but it appears I’m a sinkie (via DVZ). From the website:

“ Late one afternoon in 1991, Norm Hankoff was standing at his kitchen sink, scarfing down tuna salad, using extra-strength, corrugated potato chips as utensils.

Inexplicably, something compelled him to raise his eyes in mid-chew. There, just like in every comic book, above his head he saw a light bulb burning brightly. As he stood there puzzled, directly above the bulb appeared not the traditional word IDEA, but the letters SINKIE. At that instant, what he saw finally made sense. Hankoff, and millions of others around the world, had, for hundreds of years, been ”SINKIES“ without realizing it. ”

I’ve quite a thing for toast at lunch. Toast with promite or with hummus and mushroom — falls into this anomalous category where it’s gone too quickly to bother with a plate but too crumby to sprawl tummy-down on the carpet with, plateless. Other toast, like tomato, has more potential for catastrophe but if I’m not going to bother with a plate for the other kind of fucken toast then why would I with this?
^^^^^^^^^^

What are these old people singing?

A) The Cars, ‘Let the good times roll’
B) Roll over Beethoven
C) satanic summoning chants
D) The Cars, ‘Drive’

E) none of the above

^^^^^
Photos with semi-celebrities added to this entry back here.

I came across clean surface, based in melbourne, it has collections of grafitti and posters and stuff. Pretty neat but I wish there was a way to hide the comments since it seems that a site focussing on this subject matter attracts a high level of idiocy. Also sometimes it’s better to let the image speak for itself.

Senor Collis calls for photos of terse signs in the kitchens of public or private communal spaces. Definitely a widely existing phenomena and worthy of amassing. If memory serves me correctly, they got some doozies in the local (rotten) community radio station… something about how society breaks down when cups left unwashed… a former submarine officer runs the kitchen.

I’ve always wanted to do a collection or project on red shoes — where people send in a picture of their red shoes or them wearing their red shoes etc. It was about a year ago in communication with dr.crisp that she mentioned that she had a pair of red converse (as do I). For some reason it’d never occurred to me that other people also had them.
Red shoes are more special than other shoes. Because they’re red. Then there’s the whole folklore angle.

Another project that’d possibly go is fishnchips.com.au where someone travels around australia doing reviews of fish and chip shops. No good for me, for while I’m a great connoisseur of the chip, I don’t eat the fish.

Yes I was out at Not Quite Right supermarket again today and right now I’m drinking ‘Oatly’ organic oat drink. It’s ingredients are water, organic oats, organic rapeseed oil, sea salt. I think the reaon why it washed up at NQR is the plain old cause of it tastes terrible. It’s claim is that it’s the thing for people who are alergic to cow or soy milk — they’re they only people who are gonna choose it. It’s made in Sweden.

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Floating Disembodied Heads! — the iron chef ones are particularly handy because I read that despite it not having aired for all that long here, it’s finished up in Japan. So now you can grab those heads and write your own Iron Chef episodes. Well I will be anyway. I like it when that roving guy yells out “Scuzzah!” and interrupts.

Thanks to this post at d/blog I found out about this artist called charlie white and these fotoconstructions he does. There’s a bunch of links to the images at the above link. Like this. Very interesting.
(And then in the comments, more weirdness here – yikes.)

This chappy has a rather unusual angle to come at webloggen from – BDSM. Unusual in that it’s not trying to sell junk, get your email address or ram prawn at you — infact seems pretty thoughtful toward the nature of what he’s doing. Bit of an eye-opener for a simple country boy like me.

The Leonard Nimoy Should Eat More Salsa Foundation homepage.

One anonymous hopeful comes to the site here with the search request, “ocean’s eleven – is it possible?”.

Not. As the kids say, not. Another dose of revisionism I’m afraid.
1. At some point last year while reading Fiske semiotics of pop culture (maybe it was when I found there was a whole chapter on freudian analysis of The A Team, I thought ‘yeah I coulld do that. This is something ridiculous enough that I could apsire to continuing.’

The problem is the meat and potatoes of today is so called ‘reality’ or if you will, ‘event tv’. There’s a little man in the back of my head who wants me to try but I cannot cannot cannot stomach that shit. I recently read through a run down in AdNews of what ‘reality’ was bringing this year and they made is sound interesting, like the whole concept had evolved beyond the basic gladiatorial popularity elimination thang.

Since then I’ve been thumped with the commercials promoting the things and I’m always left wanting to make sick.
It’s making me feel old. The problem is I was a little kid when Knight Rider and The A Team were on, I liked those shows then so of course spending hours pulling them apart would sound like fun. They’re kitchy and inoffensive when compared to today’s fare.
But if I don’t like what’s being created today, when why should I in 20 years? From my point of view it’s just one endless stream of crap in both senses of – one episode to the next, and one series to the next. What discernable difference is there between ‘Big Brother 1’ and ‘Big Brother 3’? None. Whereas there was a qualitative difference between the first and last season of Miami Vice.
(The same scenario exists with pop music. Today’s offerings sound bare and souless … but I’ve spoken of this before.)

2. Lately I’ve seen a return trend of words or statements on t-shirts, and fuck me if it’s not horribly disappointing. Seen a kid with the nowhere-nothing-fuck mumble of, “I think you smell” in fairly small lettering, all on one line. In a shop I saw another with the word, “paradox” along with some scratchy shit — the intention being to make it look graffittious.
There have been many other equally pointless non-statements pass in front of me that I can’t recall.

A whole philosophy and way of living could be eeked out of the simple, almost zen-like three words on the t-shirts of 1983/84; “RELAX” and “CHOOSE LIFE”. These two say so much that there\’s nothing else for me to say apart from, they were on to a good thing with the all-caps.

3. Ten years ago an exgirlfriend tried to clue me into how good the band Hot Chocolate was. I only just got it figured last month. ‘Heaven’s in the back seat of my Cadillac’ is such a solid track. It’s got an understated heaviness about it and is one of about two songs in existence that’ll get me playing air-violin.
And they do a song about a UFO encounter. They deal with the issue of racism in ‘Brother Louie’. ‘Every 1’s a winner’ is also great, as is ‘Disco Queen’.