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 🙂
