Category: Musical Snobbery

Faith in the Listening Public Restored!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best Hottest 100 result in years! 😀

Deranged Depressing Dreams

Well I mean I’ve got nothing against her music…

(It has been said that there is nothing more boring than hearing about other people’s dreams. You have been warned 🙂

You know it’s really stupid how much dreams can mess you up.

After getting home at 11:15 last night (a story I shall relate later in the week because right now I’m just far too tired) I had a dream where I was back at high school. I was back at high school, but I still had this blog (which is just plain silly because when I was in high school the web hadn’t even been invented).

Also back in high school – and in my year for some reason – was songstress Missy Higgins. Which is also just plain silly because she’s a good seven years younger than I am.

Anyway I was sitting in class mentally composing a rather superior blog entry on the subject of Missy Higgins – something along the lines of “I know Missy Higgins and you don’t, nya-nya-nyaaaa!” – when I woke up.

Now the point of this so far rather pointless story is that once I woke up properly and realised that I don’t actually know Missy Higgins I got all gloomy and depressed. Which is ridiculous because not knowing Missy Higgins has previously not been a problem for me. Nonetheless I remained gloomy and depressed all day, and remain slightly so even now.

So yeah, like I said it’s really stupid how much dreams can mess you up. Or at least mess me up 😀

Updates later in the week people!

If I danced, I’d dance like David Byrne

So it’s come to this then?

I try not to do the omg look at this its so kewll rofl!!! thing too much on this blog, because I figure if you’re reading it it’s because you want to hear what I’ve got to say (yes, dream on…). But this entry by the Tensor (someone who I don’t know but keep meaning to add a permenant link to because he always makes for good reading) is genuinely worth having a look at.

Not only are the eponymous dances truly bizzare (I particularly like David Byrne’s “Soothing the Earth”) but the music’s worth hearing too. The original (?) version of Mad World for instance sounds very strange if you’re used to the version from the Donnie Darko soundtrack. And True Faith is awesome! (well it’s New Order so it’d probably have to be wouldn’t it?)

So, um, yeah. Check it out. omg. rofl.

It Was Twenty (Five) Years Ago Today

I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round

People say I’m crazy, doing what I’m doing,
Well they give me all kinds of warnings, to save me from ruin,
When I say that I’m OK, they look at me kind of strange,
Surely you’re not happy now, you no longer play the game?

People say I’m lazy, dreaming my life away,
Well they give me all kinds of advice, designed to enlighten me,
When I tell them that I’m doing fine, watching shadows on the wall,
Don’t you miss the big time boy, you’re no longer on the ball?

I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round,
I really love to watch them roll,
No longer riding on the merry-go-round,
I just had to let it go,

People asking questions, lost in confusion,
Well I tell them there’s no problem, only solutions,
Well they shake their heads and they look at me, as if I’ve lost my mind,
I tell them there’s no hurry, I’m just sitting here doing time,

I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round,
I really love to watch them roll,
No longer riding on the merry-go-round,
I just had to let it go,
I just had to let it go,
I just had to let it go,

Hang up the Translation Habit

Well I finally managed to track down the lyrics to Laisse Tomber les Filles by Fabienne Del Sol. The trick of course was just to search merely for the song title, not for the song title plus ‘Fabienne Del Sol’ – as it turns out it’s a cover of a (seemingly) quite well known song. Or at least there seem to be dozens of recordings of it by various artists stretching back to the 50’s.

So now I have my lyrics, and can happily sing along whenever it comes on the radio. Or at least I could if I knew how to pronounce French. I’m quite sure that French spelling is fairly straightforward and logical but being poisoned with insane English spelling from birth my brain just refuses to see how Je dirai c’est bien fait pour toi, Je dirai ça t’apprendra could possibly come out as “Zher deela sev ya papal twa, Zher delyes satep onwa”. Actually, despite being no expert in French, I suspect Fabienne may be slurring her words a bit. Not that I care, it still sounds great.

One thing I was unable to track down however was an English translation. Or at least I could track down the lyrics of an English cover – but the author had clearly decided to just take the title of the song (“Drop the Girls”) and write some completely new words around that theme to fit the tune, resulting in a song called “Hang up the Chick Habit”. This is eminently sensible – translating lyrics from one language to another isn’t that hard, but trying to maintain meter, syllabylisation (is that even a word?), and rhyme is a nightmare – but it wasn’t what I was looking for.

So, for my own edification and amusement I decided to prepare my own translation (with the assistance of Babelfish). It doesn’t attempt to be singable – just to give an idea of what the song is actually about. So, without further ado I present Give up the Girls (which has to sound less dated than Hang up the Chick Habit at least…)

Give up the Girls

A hasty and somewhat dubious English translation of the French song Laisse Tomber les Filles

Give up the girls,
Give up the girls,
One day one is going to leave you,
Give up the girls,
Give up the girls,
One day you’ll be the one to cry,
Yes I cried, but not today,
No I won’t cry,
No I won’t cry,
I’ll say that you deserve it,
I’ll say that’ll teach you,
I’ll say that’ll teach you,

Give up the girls,
Give up the girls,
The ones you play cruel tricks on*This line could actually be “The ones that play cruel tricks on you“, but given the tone of the rest of the verse I decided to go with this lyric until someone tells me otherwise 🙂,
Give up the girls,
Give up the girls,
You will pay one of these days,
One does not play with impunity,
With an innocent heart,
With an innocent heart,
You will see what I mean,
Before very long,
Before very long,

The chance gives up,
That which does not know,
That to leave the wounded hearts*I can make neither head nor tail of these three lines, so leave them as Babelfish translated them in the hopes that readers smarter than me can make some sense out of them.,
You won’t have anyone,
To comfort you,
You will not have stolen it*Another line I’m confused about 🙂,

Give up the girls,
Give up the girls,
One day one is going to leave you,
Give up the girls,
Give up the girls,
One day you’ll be the one to cry,
To feel sorry for you there will be,
No one but yourself,
No one but yourself,
Then you will remember,
All that I told you,
All that I told you,

Then you will remember,
All that I told you,
All that I told you,

Then you will remember,
All that I told you,
All that I told you,

Parker (Posey) Doesn’t Love Me (no kidding?)

I’ve been appallingly slack haven’t I?

Over a week since my last entry, shocking. But to be fair I’ve been extremely busy. I could write about what I’ve been doing, but that’s too much work right now, so I’ll just write about a particularly weird dream I had last night – because that’s always fun, isn’t it? 🙂

OK, I was back in high school, about year nine which would make it 1990. Now I was me from 1990 physically, but I was me from 2004 mentally. So I knew all about the future. Cool hey?

Now the logical thing to do in that kind of situation is to go down to the local TAB and put some bets on – however being only 14 (and not being able to remember the outcome of any sporting events of the last fifteen years anyway) that wasn’t an option. So I decided to do the only sensible thing and start a band.

And not just any band, naturally it had to be a band made up of all my friends. I can’t remember exactly which friends were involved, and who did what, although I do have a vague impression of Justin on drums, and Fabian on piano. In any case I was (of course) the lead guitarist and vocalist. I can’t remember if we had a name either – but I like to imagine we called ourselves ‘Lord High Chamberlain and his Archbishops of Funk’ – because that would be a way cool name for a band (and I’d get to call myself ‘Lord High Chamberlain’ and talk in an affected British accent too :).

Anyway the thing that really made our band stand out was not that we were absolute crap – apparently travel backwards through time not only grants one incredible musical talent but allows one to bestow similar talents on anyone one wishes. No, what made us stand out was that (in order to assure our success) I decided that we’d only play hit songs from the future! Well, hit songs from the future and some Dire Straits. You know, just to be cool 🙂

Anyway, we were so good that I convinced the school to hire us for the social (instead of the usual lame DJ). Naturally this was to be our greatest triumph, so I spent a good deal of time selecting our playlist. I woke up before we actually got to play, but I do remember some of the set I prepared, and hence shall reveal it to the world.

I decided we’d better make a big impression up front. After all many of us were geeks and hence despised by the school community, many of whom wouldn’t have heard just how good we were. So for our first song I selected Are you gonna be my Girl? by Jet. The driving yet funky guitar riff would pull the audience right in – no one can resist a beat like that. To follow that up (after a quick “I am Lord High Chamberlain and these are the Archbishops of Funk!” just so everyone would be clear on just who we were) the obvious choice was Growing on Me by the Darkness. This should really get the place pumping and give me a chance to show of my suddenly remarkable vocal range.

Things got a bit hazy after that. I know that Hey-Ya by Outkast was definitely in there somewhere (even though it would require us to develop a chorus of jockeys). But the really weird one was Paco Doesn’t Love Me by the Spazzys.

Now, I quite like the Spazzys. Sure, they’re a complete rip off of the Ramones – but they’re a good rip off of the Ramones. What’s more they admit that they’re a rip off of the Ramones, and one of the few remaining Ramones (they keep dying of cancer so there aren’t that many left) is aware of them and likes them, so that’s OK. So there’s nothing weird about adding one of their songs to this imaginary playlist. But what is weird is that I wasn’t content to perform it as written (well, that would involve standing up in front of the entire school and singing about how I have a ‘killer crush’ on an ‘Italian fiend’, so maybe there was some kind of method in my madness) and instead rewrote it as Parker Doesn’t Love Me – an ode to alternative cinema’s Parker Posey.

No, I don’t get it either.

Sad to say I cannot remember any of the words of my rewrite – except that “I wanna see your band I wanna make you understand that I wanna hold your hand” became “I wanna hold your hand, wanna make you understand that I wanna be your man”, because I wasn’t sure if she was in a band or not – but it must have been something pretty damn special because when I woke up I was all excited about my new found skill in composition. For about a minute or so anyway, then I woke up properly and thought “WHA..!?” – you know, like you do in these situations.

So, there you go. My dream-self has a thing for Parker Posey, and the Spazzys. And for talking in an affected British accent while singing the songs of Justin Hawkins. All I can say is thank sanity I have to wake up properly in the mornings before going in to work 🙂

Got to feet?

It has come to my attention recently that after a long period of no lyrics being available at all for Shivaree’s song Scrub the net is suddenly flooded with them. I’d say this is good news, except for the fact that…

  1. They all seem to have been copied from one source,
  2. That source is somewhat dodgy.

I’d guess that someone put a lot of time and effort into transcribing the song. For the most part this has paid off, but there are one or two lines that are just blech. I mean “So small and sad you’re a skit“? What?! This cannot be allowed to stand.

So, here I present my version of the lyrics. Ones that make sense. Well, OK it’s Shivaree so it doesn’t make a huge amount of sense, but it makes a good deal more than the other versions floating ’round the net…

Scrub
by Shivaree

On the way coming up,
I’m quiet as a cup,
Be a girl anyway,
Close enough,

In your life,
Such a mess,
So small inside your skin1,
Got some time on the hand,
On the cast there’s no love,

No, only proof,
Of love this is the truth,
So I’ll drop my hand,
Think it’s you2,

You’re on the club,
Got two feet as they fall3,
Dropped on the bed4,
A spinning head love,

Now, keep the score5,
Like a baby tallies war6,
Adam should have just stepped on the snake7,

Naughty boys try to come,
But the best ones always go,
Say goodbye with a smile,
And they spoke there’s no love,

No, only proof,
Of love this is the truth,
So I’ll drop my hand,
Think it’s you2,

You’re on the club,
Got two feet as they fall3,
Dropped on the bed4,
A reeling f**king stone block,

Now, keep the score5,
Like a baby tallies war6,
Adam should have just stepped on the snake,

Adam should have just stepped on,
Adam should have just stepped,
Adam should have just stepped on the snake,

  1. This line may be “So small and sad you’re a skit” as suggested in the commonly posted lyrics (CPL), but I doubt it. It doesn’t fit the meter and it makes no freakin’ sense. I’m pretty confident “So small inside your skin” is the correct lyric.
  2. The CPL has “Look at you” for this line, but I’m not convinced. Neither am I totally convinced of my interpretation, but I think it’s closer than “Look at you”. (‘Pikachu’ is even closer but I’m not even going to think about that! 😉
  3. The CPL has “Got to feet” here which is just stupid. It would have to be “Got two feet”. Equally likely is “Got to feed”.
  4. This line could equally as well be “Trapped on the bed”, but I’ve left it as “Dropped” to tie in with “fall” from the previous line.
  5. The first word of this line is so muffled that it’s impossible to even take a stab at what it might be. “Now” is as good a guess as any.
  6. The CPL has “Like a baby tell his war”. The only explanation I can offer for this is that the transcriber is unfamilar with the verb “tallies”.
  7. This line is definitely correct, however I spent a long time thinking it was “Adam sure, I’ll just stand on the snake” which kind of puts a different spin on the whole song eh? 🙂

So, one more abuse of the musical arts corrected. Now if only I can smuggle a rifle into that Shannon Noll concert… 🙂

The Pornographers were ripped off!!!

I had a rather weird dream last night. It was an episode of a new sitcom about a bunch of people taking a university course together (actually I think it might have been the second or third season premiere, since there were some implications of some cast members having left and other new ones joining). It was kind of like that old Head of the Class show, you know the one that featured Billy Connolly for a while? Anyway the weird thing was it had an ensemble cast of characters from other sit-coms. The class was made up of Dr Frasier Crane from Frasier, Phoebe from Friends, Linda from Becker and… well Andy Dick (no matter what he’s in Andy Dick only ever plays one type of character and they’re all completely interchangeable, so we’ll just say Andy Dick). Lisa and Beth from Newsradio and Finch from Just Shoot Me might have been hanging around at the back, I can’t quite remember. In any case the teacher was the guy from According To Jim.

Not a lot happened really. Frasier acted like a pompous ass, Linda and Phoebe got into a prolonged and bewildering conversation about some inane subject, and Andy Dick made some stupid Andy-Dickesque comments about the teacher’s new PDA. Oh, and the teacher accidentally spilled the contents of his bag on the floor, and Frasier leapt from his seat and started picking them up in a blatant attempt at currying favour. But that’s about it. WIERD no? 🙂

I suppose all the Newsradio stuff had to do with a documentary on the archeology of Alexandria I watched before going to bed (one of the Archeologists looked surprisingly like Maura Tierney), and this week’s TV guide has a photo from the last episode of Friends which would account for Phoebe, but the rest is completely beyond me.

Anyway I had a pretty busy week socially (for me that is). On Tuesday night I went to the Sunset Cinemas at King’s Park with Ryan, Justin and Marika. They were playing that French bird film that everyone’s been raving about for the last years or so, so after work I caught the train down to Victoria Park and walked to Justin and Marika’s new place. As usual with Justin we were a bit delayed getting going (we had to make pizzas so as to have something to eat which took a while to cook) but we only missed the first ten minutes or so, so that was OK.

The Sunset Cinemas are held in the open air, you sit on the grass and watch the movie on a big screen held up by scaffolding. It was really good actually, the weather was perfect (although it got a little bit chilly by the end) and the film was amazing. Three bits in particular stuck in my mind, a gaggle of geese wandering around the Arizona desert (on their migration from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada, they didn’t just truck geese out to the desert for the shoot – or at least I hope they didn’t), some grebes running across a lake in Oregon (they looked like penguins speeded up five times, it was hilarious!) and a baby snowy owl waddling across the tundra looking like a disgruntled overweight hobbit with a backpack. The pizzas were great, Ryan bought a gigantic heaped platter of grapes (some of which we fed to the ducks while packing up, they couldn’t get enough of them!) and all in all it was a really fun night. I even got a pot plant as a belated Christmas present. It’s a succulent, which is great because it only needs to be watered about once a year which is about as often as I’d remember to 🙂

On Saturday night I headed down to the Red Orchid with Rebecca and Dom, just to catch up. We ended up sitting outside in the little courtyard at the back, which was great because it wasn’t as crowded as out the front, but didn’t have the appalling acoustics of indoors (in order to look cool and trendy the interior has a whole lot of bare concrete and girders, it echoes like crazy). As usual the food was excellent, although the service was a bit sloppy. We were asked for our orders twice, had to ask for a carafe of water twice, and the lemon lime and bitters I ordered with my meal failed to appear until I asked for it again. Oh, and we were offered desert and coffee menus three times, but by that point they may have been trying to get rid of us 🙂

The weird thing is that people kept coming out to sit at the table adjacent to us, then changing their minds and moving indoors. We figured we were doing something to drive them away, although we couldn’t quite figure out what.

So yeah, that was my week socially.

Today of course is the Australia Day/Invasion Day public holiday, depending on how you look at it. There’ll be the big firework display over the river tonight, but I’m not going. To get a decent seat you have to go in at about nine in the morning, and then spend the entire day sitting out in the sun surrounded by even increasing numbers of other bored people, all for fifteen minutes of fireworks choreographed to mindless top 40 tunes which you just know will feature Guy Sebastian. Then you’ve got the hassle of getting home through the thousands of other people all trying to get home. I can do without it frankly.

There was some kind of fireworks display last night as well, to judge by the noise. Either that or an artillery attack of some kind. It was probably over at Gloucester park or something, although I did entertain myself with the thought that the barges for tonight’s show might have caught on fire and the display was going off 24 hours early with no-one to watch it. Haven’t heard anything on the news though, sad to say 🙂

This being Australia Day means that yesterday was of course the Triple J Hottest 100 countdown. All in all it wasn’t too bad, although once again Powderfinger got way more placings than they actually deserve. The New Pornographers didn’t get in at all which annoyed the heck out of me, we could have taken out a few Powderfinger tracks to make room – no one would have missed them!

I would list the top ten here, but Triple J haven’t seen fit to put the results on the website yet. I can say that number one was Are You Gonna Be My Girl by Jet, and two was Hey Yah by Outkast. The Royskopp (which is not how you spell it I’m sure) remix of Coldplay’s Clocks was at about five, and… um I can’t quite remember the rest. A full update when Triple J does one I promise 🙂

As for the songs I voted for, a big chunk of them failed to get in alltogether. That’s what happens when you limit people to ten songs I guess, stupid policy that it is. Let’s see…

Biftek – Read To Me – Didn’t make it in!
Downsyde – El Questro – Didn’t make it in!
Eels – Dirty Girl – Didn’t make it in!
Electric Six – Gay Bar – Got in at about 26, which is good
Nofx – Franco Un-American – Made it in
Screamfeeder – Ice Patrol – Didn’t make it in
The Herd – 77% – Made it in
The New Pornographers – All For Swinging You Around – Didn’t make it in!
The New Pornographers – The Laws Have Changed – Didn’t make it in either!
The Waifs – Lighthouse – Got in at about 12, yey!!

Of the other four I would really have liked to vote for, they all made it in except for Spencer Tracy. They played the ‘Armageddon’ version of ‘Bomb the World’ I’m happy to report by the way, which is the far superior version of the song. A lot angrier than the normal one. Oh, and two songs I maybe would have voted for if I’d remembered them are Growing on Me by the Darkness, and Man of Constant Sorrows by the Soggy Bottom Boys. Now they rock!

Well that’s that for another year then *g*

Finally I should mention that Wyrmworld has undergone a major revision and re-arrangement. I’m aiming to reformat the entire site over the next few months, lord knows it needs it. Next on the horizon are the Tales of the Geek Underclass, I’ve got a design worked out, it’s just a case of finalising it and converting all the files. *sigh* so much work, so little time.

OK, I’m shutting up now 🙂

Songs, Songs and more Songs

I’ve had a rather rough week all told. First of all the ridiculous heat, then the huge problems upgrading my computer at work, then the lunatics who decided to move their party out into the carpark last night. You’ve got to love it when you’re woken from a very pleasant dream about Rose McGowan (not that kind of dream, get your mind out of the gutter!) at 1:00am by people shouting, laughing, smashing bottles and screaming just outside your bedroom window. Happily they decided to call it a night around 3:00, and I was able to get back to sleep, Ms McGowan however was nowhere to be seen. Oh well.

Anyway, computer problems.

Ever since I inadvertantly dragged the windows directory into the wrong place on the hard drive – and then panicked and reinstalled Windows 98 over the top – my work computer has been acting fairly erratically. Rather than erase everything and do a complete re-install (not smart since most of our sites are backed up on my machine) we decided to get a new hard drive, set that up as the master and install Windows on it, while keeping the old one as a slave. Good idea no?

No, not really. The installation process (which took the better part of two and half days) went something like this…

  1. Take off case and install new hard drive.
  2. Spend a good two hours trying to get the correct master/slave settings.
  3. Spend several more hours trying to match the office’s many copies of Windows 98 to the office’s many Windows 98 registration codes.
  4. Find a CD and code that will work together. Spend about two hours installing Windows 98.
  5. Spend a further half day re-installing all my software and configuring Windows.
  6. Realise I’ve installed Windows 98 First Edition when I need Second Edition to recognise the new 80 gig hard drive as an 80 gig hard drive instead of a 2 gig hard drive.
  7. Spend an hour searching through office for Second Edition CDs.
  8. Spend two hours trying to match Second Edition CDs to second edition registration codes.
  9. Find a CD and code that will work together. Spend an hour trying to get the installation to upgrade without crashing. Fail miserably.
  10. Despair.
  11. Convince Dale to buy a copy of Windows XP.
  12. Spend an hour trying to convince the Windows XP CD to recognise the correct hard drive. Eventually force it’s hand by taking out the wrong one.
  13. Spend two hours installing Windows XP. Spend a further two hours reinstalling all my software and settings. Again.
  14. Realise I don’t have enough memory to run Windows XP properly. Canabalize chips from other computers until I have enough.
  15. Go home.

So yeah, not the most productive week.

I’ve had a pretty productive weekend though. I’m not going to go into details just yet, but expect some big changes to Wyrmworld. And maybe to the Wyrmlog too if I can muster the energy 🙂

About the only other thing I’ve got to mention is that I did my patriotic duty today *g* and voted in the Triple J Hottest 100. For reasons best known to themselves the powers that be down at the J’s have decided that this year each person can only vote for ten songs, which was a bit of a problem for me personally since there were at least 131 songs listed that I would have voted for. But I eventually whittled the list down to the following ten tracks – my official ten favourite songs of 2003 (in no particular order)…

Biftek – Read To Me
Downsyde – El Questro
Eels – Dirty Girl
Electric Six – Gay Bar
Nofx – Franco Un-American
Screamfeeder – Ice Patrol
The Herd – 77%
The New Pornographers – All For Swinging You Around
The New Pornographers – The Laws Have Changed
The Waifs – Lighthouse

There were four other songs that almost made the cut, specifically…

Hilltop Hoods – The Nosebleed Section
Michael Franti/Spearhead – Bomb The World
Magic Dirt – Watch Out Boys
Spencer Tracy – Ocean

And I suppose I might as well list the rest of the 131 songs. You know, just for the sake of completeness 🙂 (the best of these are bolded).

1200 Techniques – Eye Of The Storm
A.R.E. Weapons – Hey World
Amiel – Love Song
Andromeda – Something White And Sigmund
Architecture In Helsinki – The Owls Go
Audioslave – Show Me How To Live
Beastie Boys – In A World Gone Mad
Ben Folds – There’s Always Someone Cooler Than You
Billy Bragg – The Price Of Oil
Bob Evans – Friday Come Five
Bob Evans – Turn
Chemical Brothers – The Golden Path
Chumbawamba – Jacob’s Ladder (Not In My Name)
Cody Chesnutt – The World Is Coming To My Party
Coldplay – Clocks
Curve – Want More, Need Less
Dallas Crane – Ladybird
Dallas Crane – No Through Road
Dan Kelly – Counter Meal Kim
Dan Kelly/The Alpha Males – Summer Wino
Dandy Warhols – I Am A Scientist
Dandy Warhols – We Used To Be Friends
Dandy Warhols – You Were The Last High
David Bridie – Hotel Radio
Dirty Lucy – Nothing Is Free
DJ Format – Ill Culinary Behaviour
Dropkick Murphys – The Outcast
Dsico – Smells Like Electro
Eels – Saturday Morning
Electric Six – Danger! High Voltage
Epicure – Armies Against Me
Freeland – We Want Your Soul
Frenzal Rhomb – Hippy Song
Frenzal Rhomb – Russell Crowe’s Band
Full Fathom Five – Built You A Gun
Futureshock – Pride’s Paranoia
Genshen – Nothing Quite Like This
Givegoods – We’re Here About The Budda’s
Gorgeous – Air Balloon
Gorgeous – Do Do Do Song
Grandaddy – Now It’s On
Hedrock Valley Beats – How Do You Feel?
Hot Hot Heat – Naked In The City Again
Idlewild – A Modern Way Of Letting Go
Jack Johnson – The Horizon Has Been Defeated
Jack Planck – Fit, Slender And Attractive
Jet – Are You Going To Be My Girl
Jewtown – Jewtown
Junkie XL/Peter Tosh – Don’t Wake Up Policeman
Klonhertz – Three Girl Rhumba
Ladytron – Evil
Layo And Bushwacka – Love Story
Lazy Susan – Sometimes
Le Tigre – Deceptacon
Legends Of Hip Hop – Fifth Element
Liam Lynch – Still Wasted From The Party Last Night
Liam Lynch – United States Of Whatever
Living End – One Said To The Other
Living End – Tabloid Magazine
Magic Dirt – Plastic Loveless Letter
Mark Ronson – I Suck
MC Honky – 3 Turntables & 2 Microphones
Mclusky – There Ain’t No Fool In Ferguson
Michael Andrews/Gary Jules – Mad World
Michael Franti/Spearhead – Everyone Deserves Music
Mint Royale – Show Me
Nick Holder – No More Dating DJ’s
Nina Simone – Sinnerman
Nofx – The Separation Of Church and Skate
Nokturnl – Woomera
Offcutts – Break It (Down James Brown)
Outkast – Hey Ya
Panjabi MC – Jogi
Panjabi MC – Mundian To Bach Ke
Placebo – Running Up That Hill
Radiohead – There There
Rancid – Red Hot Moon
Relaxed Muscle – Billy Jack
Sahara Hotnights – On Top Of Your World
Salmonella Dub – Slide
Screamfeeder – 1 2 3 4 5
Screamfeeder – I Don’t Know What To Do With Myself
Scribe – Not Many
Sir Veto – Underneath A Burning Sun
Sodastream – Blinky
Sonic Animation – (This Is Not) A Love Poem
Spearmint – Left Alone Among The Living
Starky – Girl Talk
The Bumblebeez – Pony Ride
The Casanovas – No Time For Love
The Cat Empire – The Chariot
The Fergusons – Sinner Is Red
The Fiery Furnaces – Don’t Dance Her Down
The Go! Team – Ladyflash
The Guild League – Jet Set…Go!
The Herd – Burn Down The Parliment
The Libertines – What A Waster
The Mountain Goats – See America Right
The Postal Service – Such Great Heights
The Postal Service – The District Sleeps Alone
The Raveonettes – Attack Of The Ghost Riders
The Raveonettes – That Great Love Sound
The Shins – Mine’s Not A High Horse
The Spazzys – Lets Get Spazzy
The Strokes – 12:51
The Thrills – Big Sur
The Weekend – 80’s Rockstar
Trash Palace – The Metric System
Turbonegro – F.T.W.
Two Up – Why Do I Try So Hard
Underworld – Dinosaur Adventure 3D
Vassy – Cover You In Kisses
White Stripes – Girl U Have No Faith In Medicine
White Stripes – In The Cold Cold Night
White Stripes – Seven Nation Army
Youth Group – Shadowland
Yunyu – A Prayer

Whew! That’s that over for another year. Oh, and my tip for the winning song? Either “Hey Ya” by Outkast or “Gay Bar” by Electric Six. I’d be very surprised is neither of them ended up in the top 10 anyway.

OK, I’m all typed out now, so I’ll shut up 🙂

Intransigent DNA Influenced Cute Woman of the Week: I happened to see some of a repeat of Undercover Angels yesterday. It’s an apalling show, but ex-Popstar Katie Underwood? Wowee! Actually she bears a slight resemblance to a certain someone else, which may have something to do with it 😉

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