Just when you think there’s no point…

Possible Pixies Reunion?

A report from MTV.com reveals that seminal US band “The Pixies” are set to reunite for a possible tour and album early next year. The news has not yet been confirmed by any member of the band, however in July, singer Frank Black revealed to XFM that the band had been jamming “but not for public consumption”.

Black was scheduled for some solo Australian shows in August this year, however cancelled due to “circumstances beyond his control”…

Most fans are taking the current rumours with a grain of salt until some more credible sources are revealed.

-source: mtv

Grain of salt be damned!

BOO-YA!!

Maybe πŸ™‚

Doctor WHOOOO!! Yeah! Doctor WHOOO!!!

Damn it’s good to see Doctor Who again!

As a result of recent budget cuts the ABC has been wildly scrambling through it’s archives for the last few months or so looking for things to take the place of dozens of suddenly axed shows. Someone obviously remembered that they had almost 30 years worth of Doctor Who episodes stored away, and now they’re screening them again (starting tonight), from scratch! Woo-hoo!

You see (and we’re plunging into the murky depths of my disreputable past here), long before I was into Stargate, I was a massive fan of the Doctor. It was my absolutely favourite TV show, and naturally enough all these years later I still have a soft spot for it (despite the often dodgy sets, premises and acting :). So the re-screening of the original episodes is fantastic.

The question that must (well, ok not really, but I’m going to ask it anyway, so there!) be asked at this point is of course who was my favourite Doctor? For my money it has to be Sylvester McCoy, Doctor number seven (I will spare everyone a long fannish monologue on why and just list the rest in descending order :). Probably Tom Baker is next, then Jon Pertwee, then William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, Peter Davison and Colin Baker (I haven’t seen much of Davison or Troughton’s episodes, thus explaining their low ranking, Colin Baker though was awful)* πŸ˜‰

Anyway I’m extremely happy to see it back on the screen, and am particularly looking forward to the debut of the Daleks (next week in The Dead Planet if my once encyclopedic knowledge of the series still serves) and – if they keep it running long enough – the Jon Pertwee era (I didn’t get to watch them first time round because my parents banned us from watching it when my brother got nightmares about the giant maggots in The Green Death).

So, yes, enough blathering about Doctor Who πŸ™‚

It occurred to me today that I haven’t got around to providing more detail on our data entry person who may or may not be Buster Stiggs of the Models and Swingers. Well, he is. He initially tried to fool us by himself Mark (the fact that that’s his real name is a poor excuse at best), but his email address and business card gave him away. So, yeah, I’ve spent the last week or so sitting next to the guy who co-wrote Counting the Beat (and until recently was making a nice little income from K-Mart adds). How weird is that? Well, at least I now have a better “brush with fame” story than “my cousin dated the sister of the girl who got thrown out of Bardot” πŸ™‚

Right, going now.

PS: Blonde?? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Swamp in the City

It’s been a while since I’ve done a decent update hasn’t it? I suppose I’d better set that right.

OK, I’ve had an insanely busy month. Not only was there the big-ass project at work, but my aunt from the UK was in town, my other aunts were heading off on a round the world trip, and Mars made it’s closest approach to Earth in a good 60,000 years or so. All of these factors made various and differing demands upon my time, meaning that I haven’t had more than a few minutes to myself, most of which were spent playing Civ III as a form of stress relief. But things have calmed down now (I hope) so I suppose I should write about what I’ve been up to in detail.

Let’s see. Well a few weeks back I took the folks out on our yearly excursion to the Witch’s Cauldron to celebrate Mum’s birthday and father’s day. I had the garlic prawns for my main course (naturally) but decided to try the pate for an entree. Frankly I think this was a big mistake.

When the pate arrived it was in the form of a foot high mountain, surrounded by about three-thousand triangles of toast. You could have served it as a main course and no one would have complained! I managed to finish most of it, but was hampered by the fact that it was ice cold. I don’t know, maybe that’s how pate is meant to be served, but it didn’t exactly make for pleasant eating. Overall I suspect that the pate is some kind of joke dish, and the kitchen staff have hidden cameras that they use to laugh at people who order it.

On the subject of gigantic servings I should mention that in recent months Rebecca, Dom and I have been out to La Porcetta in Morley twice. This is an Italian chain restaurant with fantastic food, but (from both of our experiences) rather dodgy service. For instance, the first time we sat around for at least 15 minutes before anyone turned up to take our orders. Then, once we’d finished our entree (a sun dried tomato pizza), one of the waitresses tried to settle our account and kick us out, at which juncture we had to point out that we hadn’t actually had our main courses yet. The second time round we were served a lot faster initially, but then had to wait twenty minutes for our deserts, which only turned up when we collared one of the serving staff and asked them what the heck was going on (my theory was that there was a serial killer hiding in the freezer room, killing the staff one by one as they went in to get our gelatos). But we did get one of them for free, which was nice.

So, the service may be a bit hit and miss, but the food is excellent. I had the mushroom gnocchi both times, and it was fantastic. The servings are huge too. I ordered the main course the first time round, and couldn’t finish it, so the second time ordered the entree serving, which I only just managed. The twenty minute gap was probably an advantage really, I might not have been able to get my desert down if I hadn’t had some extra digestion time.

Finally, in addition to the great food and gigantic servings, one of the waitresses is really cute* *g*. So I heartily recommend La Porcetta, so long as you don’t need to eat in a hurry or anything :)(Oh yeah, almost forgot. They don’t accept EFTPOS or Credit Cards for some reason, so bring cash. But they do serve ‘Dude Deserts’ πŸ˜‰

OK, so that’s covered dining out over the last two months or so. I could talk about Mars, but everything I tried to do associated with it ended in disaster, so I won’t. Instead I’ll talk about what I did yesterday.

I decided during the week that I could do with some new clothes, and that I needed a haircut. I was also wanting to buy some CDs, so I decided to make a major expedition over to the Galleria, and into the city. The most sensible way to go would be by bus, so I waded through the absolutely interminable Transperth website* and eventually managed to download a PDF of the appropriate timetable and plan my day accordingly. Everything pretty much went to plan, and by 11:00 I was getting off the bus in William Street in the city, with my ridiculously short new haircut (it does look ridiculous, but it looked equally ridiculous long, and this way I won’t have to get it cut again well into next year πŸ™‚

I was actually trying to track down a copy of Sibelius’s Kullervo, since I caught a documentary on him a few months ago, and I really liked what they played of it. I managed to find a copy (performed by the Stockholm Symphony Orchestra and National Male Choir of Estonia no less) at Wesley Classics, which was convenient. I then went over to JB’s Hi Fi intending to buy the New Pornographers’ Electric Version. I’m not quite sure what happened but I found myself back on the street fifteen minutes later clutching a copy of Spencer Tracey’s Ocean, b(if)tek’s Frequencies Will Move Together and a Stargate SG-1 DVD. I think they must be putting subliminals through the music down there or something πŸ˜‰

I then realised that I’d just missed the bus home, and the next one wasn’t due for an hour. So I went for a ramble along St George’s Terrace down to the Concert Hall, then down onto the foreshore and across the Esplanade. I was aiming for the Bus Station which I’d last visited about five years before while playing the role of psychopath stalker in one of my brother’s various film projects (The final scenes were shot at Jacob’s Ladder in King’s Park, resulting in the heroine shooting to death a very out of breath and sweaty villain πŸ˜‰

OK, here’s the thing about the Perth Bus Station. It’s a nightmare. I don’t know what they were thinking when they designed it, but imagine the departure lounge of an eastern European airport at three in the morning stuck on top of a World War Two submarine pen, and you’ve got some idea. The main concourse is a grimy hall filled with uncomfortable chairs (most leaking stuffing) and decorated with a variety of departure and arrival boards, about half of which will actually be functioning at any given time. A variety of small shopfronts poke out to the side, offering questionable magazines and even more questionable pies and sausages preserved pharaoh-like in a thin patina of grease. Staircases and escalators lead down to the various platforms – follow one down and you’ll find yourself in a strange subterranean world of pre-stressed concrete and orange fog lights. There are seats down there, but I strongly suspect they’re provided for the use of sewer dwelling mole-men who may occasionally stumble up through the storm drain system and like what they see enough to hang around.

As if all this isn’t bad enough, they’re currently constructing the Perth Convention Centre around the bus station, so add in all the noise, dust and inconvenience of a building site. For instance, access to the station is via three pedestrian walkways from the buildings opposite. Thanks to the construction work, only one of these is actually open (and you can’t tell which one until you’ve climbed the stairs up to them all). The only halfway pleasant area of the station, the roof garden, has now been fenced off and taken over by demountables and shipping containers – making my brother’s film a notable historical record of what the place originally looked like.

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The Roof Garden -Click to Enlarge

Anyway, so I spent a good fifteen minutes trying to find my way into the bus station. During my endeavors I did however make a fantastic discovery. Or fantastic at least for someone with as great an appreciation of decaying post-industrial landscapes as myself.

Directly opposite the bus station there’s a swamp. Right there, smack bang between the two blue glass skyscrapers that support the pedestrian walkways. It’s deep pit, obviously dug to provide the foundations for a new skyscraper – in fact there are stained blocks of concrete and rusted metal girders poking out all over the place suggesting construction actually began – but it seems to have been abandoned for years, and has been reclaimed by nature. A ruptured water pipe, still bubbling away in one corner has filled the bottom with water, and weeds, water plants and great banks of rushes have taken over. It’s amazing! A full on swamp right in the heart of the city!

Click to enlarge
Click to Enlarge
Click to enlarge
Click to Enlarge

I presume that it was the intended site of the old Westralia Place tower, which was launched in a blaze of glory about twelve years back, but never got built. I also presume that sooner or later someone will come along and redevelop the site, which personally I think would be a great shame. Secure any loose concrete, remove any dangerous waste, make sure the foundations of the surrounding buildings are secure, and let it be! Not only would it provide a haven for birds and other aquatic animals in the heart of the city, it would be a daily reminder of the fragility of human accomplishment and civilisation. Or something like that πŸ™‚

Anyway I eventually found my way into the station, and spent about fifteen minutes sitting in a darkened bus down in the subterranean realm of the Mole People before being delivered to the bus stop right outside the building. Excellent.

OK, I’m going to stop writing now. Got a rent inspection next Friday, so I’d better get theplace cleaned up.

Over and out.

Counting the Beat…

Man this is surreal. We need someone to do poorly paid data-entry for a big project, so we contacted an employment agency. They’ve sent us back the resume of a likely candidate, who we’re probably going to go with. And the candidate? Well I can’t say for certain (because I can’t remember the name on it) but it looks like Buster Stiggs. “Who?” you say? Buster Stiggs! Of seminal Australian/New Zealand eighties new wave acts The Models and The Swingers. Like, one of the guys responsible for Counting the Beat! And we’re hiring him for data entry!!

Hold my calls people, I’m in the Twilight Zone here!

Trogdor!!!

TROGDOR!!!!

I thought I’d better make an entry this morning, since Helen is getting annoyed at no-one updating, and Ryan is sending me emails asking me if I’m still alive. I would promise to make a longer entry tonight, but I need to make a shopping trip after work since I’m not only out of food, but even the basic elements of food (no salt, no margerine, no tomato sauce – it’s a wonder I haven’t starved!)

Anyway, in the meantime everyone sing along! Burninating the countryside! Burninating the peasants… πŸ™‚

Cattle-Urine Derived Amino Acids

Sic semper tyrannus! πŸ™‚

A while back now there was a movie out. It’s not a movie I actually saw, I just caught the adds for it, played incessantly during prime time. It was some kind of chick flick featuring an ensemble cast playing a mother and her daughters or a bunch of sisters or a group of childhood friends or an exclusively female cult or something all coming to terms with their complex lives and relations with each other. You know the kind of thing, it usually stars either Sandra Bullock or Michelle Pfieffer.

Anyway, a recurrent theme in this movie (to judge by the adds) was one or other of the cast talking on the telephone, getting annoyed with the person on the other end, then repeatedly and viciously smashing the earpiece against a convenient table or benchtop. BASH! BASH! BASH! BASH!

The reason I mention this is that I’ve had the kind of week where screaming down the phone then smashing it against the desk until it broke into tiny little pieces would be a wonderful stress reliever. Regardless of whether there was someone on the other end or not.

I won’t go into details, all I really want to do is go to sleep and not wake up for… two or three months would probably do it. But suffice to say I’ve been working on one of those projects that’s so insanely massive that no matter how much effort you put in it never seems to get any smaller. And to make matters even worse, it’s got a completely non-negotiable deadline swooping down on me – talons extended – like a harpy eagle, and I’m an overworked keyboard monkey on an exposed branch.

As if this isn’t enough the client keeps adding minor changes – that is to say changes that appear minor (like changing the background colour of a page, or moving a heading by a few pixels) but in fact require hours of re-working. They’re so fiendishly devised to require the maximum amount of effort for minimum effect that I’m starting to suspect he’s in league with some sort of diabolical cadre of evil web designers committed to my ultimate downfall. Thoughts like this seem perfectly rational when you’re working ten hour days and drinking way to much Red Bull (ie: any at all).

Things really came to a head when I arrived at the office this morning at 8:00am. Someone usually turns up to disable the alarm system at about 8:15, but not today! I had to sit around outside until 9:02 before one of the sluggards we rent a room from decided to turn up. And I’d already had a Red Bull, so my usual casual and relaxed demeanor was coming under severe attack from frenzied legions of caffeine, taurine and glucuranolactone molecules. Needless to say, I was not a happy web designer.

So, if you haven’t heard from me for a while, and don’t hear from me before mid October, I’m not dead. I’m just horribly horribly overworked and strung out on cattle-urine derived amino acids. What a world! What a world!….

PS: I’m sure many people will have seen these rather unfortunate URLs by now, but hey, who am I to refuse a ride on the latest pop-cultural bandwagon?

http://www.powergenitalia.com
http://www.gotahoe.com
http://www.classicalbums.co.uk
http://www.ringtoneshits.com
http://www.expertsexchange.com

Oh what a difference a hyphen could make! πŸ™‚

I can’t even walk down a Street!! FCOL!!

I had a pretty active day yesterday. Surprising isn’t it?

I went down to Freo. I had a vague idea of getting off the train at Fremantle station, having a bit of a wander around, then walking back to North Fremantle. You see I walked along the coast from North Fremantle to Cottesloe a few months back, and I quite like the idea of having walked the entire length from Fremantle up to Cottesloe. I also had vague plans of catching the train from North Fremantle to Cottesloe, getting off, and walking up to Swanbourne, then cutting inland to Claremont.

All of this of course was in aid of getting some exercise, so it’s highly ironic that I didn’t get any of it done at all and went to the new Maritime Museum instead πŸ™‚

First of all though I headed down to the Esplanande and Fishing Boat Harbour. My usual route from the train station down to the Esplanade is via Henry Street. However this posed something of a problem, since the Moores Building is on Henry Street, and the Moores building is currently being managed by Lyndah (you know, her). And if there was an exhibition on, there was a chance she might be there, supervising things. And if she was there then she might conceivably see me going past. And she might then step out to say hi. Which would of course be insanely awkward.

So, I decided the sensible thing to do would be walk down Mouat Street instead. Then I decided that that was ridiculous, and I would walk down Henry Street. Then I panicked and headed down Mouat Street anyway. Then I decided that I was being stupid, and cut down High Street onto Henry Street. I triumphantly scuttled past the Moores Building on the opposite side of the road, and dashed out onto the Esplanade in a cold sweat.

So, Me – one: Crippling neuroses – about two hundred and fifty *g*.

After so successfully stuffing up something as simple as walking down a street I needed a drink. So, I cut across the rail lines to Fishing Boat Harbour and bought an apple and cranberry juice. Then I wandered around the Bather’s Beach/Rouse Head precinct reading historical plaques and things. I thought about heading up to the Round House, but there’s nothing there I haven’t seen a hundred times before, so I headed over towards the new Maritime Museum to have another look at the HMAS Ovens, the big-ass submarine they have sitting outside.

Unfortunately this plan was stymied by the fact that they’ve fenced it off. So I wandered arund to the front of the museum, and up a set of stairs to a large balcony they’ve got overlooking the harbour. There’s some pretty nice views up there, so I took some photos, particularly of the RAN ship a bit down the docks in the hopes that someone would arrest me as a terrorist. No luck though, so I came down again.

Then I checked out the admission price for the museum. It was only $10, and since any plan to walk up to North Fremantle was looking increasingly shaky I decided what the heck and went in.

It’s not bad overall. A lot of ships hanging in the air (including Australia II, which is surprisingly small really) and a whole bunch of historic artifacts. Particularly interesting is the Whaling gallery and WWII gallery up on the top floor, which includes a window looking out onto the Ovens. I spent about an hour and a half wandering around before deciding I’d seen everything I wanted to see, and heading back to Fishing Boat Harbour for lunch.

I went to Kailis Brothers, because there was a queue at Cicerellos. They’ve made some major changes since the last time I was there (which isn’t surprising since I haven’t been there in a good ten years). Now when you order and pay they give you a little electronic pager, which lights up and beeps when your food is ready. I did consider running away with it, but then I wouldn’t have had anything to eat *g*. Instead I just spent my time glaring at a man who grabbed one of the two vinegar bottles (clearly marked “please do not remove”) and took it back to his table. Bastard!

Eventually my chips and crab sticks were ready (I presume they probably contained some crab *g*) so I grabbed a seat and dug in. Then, my hunger satisfied, I wandered back to the train station (down Mouat Street since I no longer had anything to prove πŸ˜‰ and came home, all thought of walking along the coast abandoned. Then I ironed some clothes for the week.

So, that was my Sunday. Apple and cranberry juice, domestic chores, maritime history, fish and chips and incipient paranoid psychosis. Not bad at all I think πŸ˜‰

PS: I happened to catch the clip for Watch Out Boys by Magic Dirt on Rage the other day, and have one question. Adalita, will you please marry me? *g*

Woolworths are Evil! :)

The Justin Timberlake poster I mean of course. In the scanner. Look, do you read this blog at all or what!?

So, yes I said I’d blog about something today, so I’d better follow through. For once πŸ™‚ So I’m going to blog about Woolworths in Subiaco, and how evil they are.

Why are they evil? Because they short changed me $6.00, that’s why!

On Tuesday evening I stopped into Woolworths to do a bit of grocery shopping, as is often my wont as there’s a 15 minute gap between my bus arriving and train departing. I purchased two 3 litre bottles of orange juice, some Don’s English ham (Is Don. Is Good.), a loaf of bread, a bag of jelly babies (which I didn’t intend to buy, they just lept into my basket), a set of coloured pencils (because I need to colour in some photocopied maps) and a pencil sharpener (for the pencils naturally). Grand total $23.26.

At the checkout (the first 12 items or less line to the right of the cigarette counter) I was served by a short brunette girl named (according to her badge anyway) Leah. She scanned and packed all my goods extremely effaciously, and I gave her one ten dollar note, and one twenty. She gave me 75c change.

Lets just run that over shall we? Ten dollars plus twenty dollars is thirty dollars, minus twenty three dollars and twenty five cents (rounded down from twenty six because the government won’t let us use one and two cent coins anymore because of the general copper shortage*) is six dollars and seventy five cents. So what the heck happened to my 6 dollars?!?!?

When Leah poured the change into my hand I thought it seemed a little light, but my inate social awkwardness provoked me to get away as soon as possible. So it wasn’t until I made it outside and double checked the docket that I realised there were three small gold coins missing from the pile. What a gyp!

I suppose I should have marched straight back in and demanded my money, but that would have taken time, and effort, and all sorts of messing around and demanding to speak to the manager and so forth, so I decided to chalk it up to karma and let it slide. Either that or shoplift $6.00 worth of items next time I’m in there *g*.

But if anyone would like to phone up the manager (P. Nahas – 9388 3199 local, 08 9388 3199 interstate, 61 8 9388 3199 international πŸ˜‰ and either abuse or bewilder him on my behalf, please feel free! πŸ™‚

So, what else can I blog about? Well, I found this page quite amusing. It’s a review of the game Blood Rayne by some Bulgarian guy. I stumbled across it tracking down some of my search engine rankings, zero points for spotting the similarity between his review and the Wyrmlog *g*.

(OK, it starts with the line “Mom made me a….pervert” but stick with it πŸ™‚

I was also amused by this. I mean who wouldn’t willingly race into battle backed up by the theme from Match of the Day? πŸ™‚

Ah, what else? Oh, the trains. Apparently some idiot decided to cross the tracks at West Leederville and (predictably) got totally cleaned up by an oncoming commuter train. Or at least that’s what I overheard on the 7:15 Fremantle service this morning. I don’t see any reason to doubt it, people are stupid.

That’ll do for now πŸ™‚

PS: Criminal Intent is back. Yey! (It’s the poor man’s CSI you know)

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