| Simple things, simple minds |
[08 Nov 2009|07:23pm] |
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Someone in a passing car threw a firecracker in front of me while I was riding around town last night. I'll admit I flinched, but I hope those douchebags were watching me to get a reaction, because I didn't jump enough that they could have seen from their distance, I didn't swerve, I didn't yell, I didn't crash my bike. You get no reaction from me. I hope they thought it was money and time well spent.
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| Hey "Gorge"ous |
[03 Nov 2009|08:14pm] |
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My work put on tableloads of roast chicken and chips for the staff for Melbourne Cup lunch today. I think I must have eaten an entire chicken. Oh my god, I'm still full. It's definitely my favourite food.
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| Teef |
[27 Oct 2009|07:56pm] |
I had braces (the kind you get for your teeth) in high school. It was my parents' idea; I remember arguing that my teeth were the way nature intended and I didn't want to mess with that. It was probably a good thing to have done, though: my lower jaw was originally so receded that I couldn't push it forward far enough to have my front lower teeth line up with my front upper teeth, but thanks to rubber bands that were attached to my braces to painfully drag my jaw forward, they now kind of match up. And if the doctor was right, having my teeth moved into line around my jaw will have saved me a lot of agony later on. Cosmetically I guess it was worth it: I've had lots of people (okay, okay, three) comment on how straight my teeth are (they all assumed I must have had braces). Each time that happened I always thought it was weird, because I still think my teeth are kind of crooked, especially my right lateral incisor, which is creeping behind my central incisor.
When I had my braces off, I got a retainer (AKA a plate) to wear to hold my teeth in place; once I had finally mastered talking while wearing it without sounding like I had a mouthful of marbles, I was told I only had to wear it while sleeping. The plate had a little spring on it that was meant to push my lateral incisor out into place; as far as I can tell, it did squat all. Last time I went to the dentist must have been about four years ago, and it was probably four years since the time before that. It was very weird, but I'm sure it was weirder for him: he saw me so frequently as a young teenager and there I was back again as an (alleged) adult with a job and everything. Anyway, he said I should start wearing the retainer every second night and then gradually phase it out over time, although he said I would probably need to wear it at least once a week for the rest of my life. I didn't really phase it out much at all, despite what he said: doing something every second day is just too hard for me to remember, so I still wore it most nights, except when I forgot or was too drunk or didn't sleep at home.
Anyway, the point is this: yesterday I managed to shatter my retainer via a series of unfortunate events. Getting a new one would involve paying about $150 and require me to make an appointment to see the dentist, neither of which I am particularly motivated to do. So I guess its goodbye to the nighttime routine of the last god-knows-how-many years. Also, you will now probably be able to ring me while I'm asleep and I will answer without sounding like I have a mouthful of marbles. (I still won't make any sense, though, because I'll just have woken up. Why would you ring me while I'm asleep? Are you an idiot? Do you hate me?)
And if you notice my teeth becoming more crooked over the next few months, please don't mention it.
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| Also! |
[20 Oct 2009|09:51pm] |
Does anyone have a scally cap (that kinda Irish-style hat like Ben Furner from the Travelling Sacks used to always wear) that I can borrow this Saturday night? Or know anyone who might lend me theirs? I am going to a costume party and need/want one for my outfit.
This might be more useful if more than about two people still used LiveJournal.
UPDATE: I borrowed one from Country Alex, it was perfect.
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| Pssssh! |
[20 Oct 2009|08:49pm] |
Three punctures in two weeks! I really hope I have finished having my current run of bad luck with my bike.
UPDATE: Make that five punctures in two weeks. Fuck this shit.
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| "All the latest music fads all passed me by and left me cold" |
[14 Oct 2009|10:17pm] |
Frank Turner's album Love Ire & Song is pretty darn good. I'm more and more attracted to music with a folk-rock influence these days, especially if the musicians have a punk background. And Photosynthesis is one of the album highlights, with a great indictment of the live-to-work mentality that makes so many people compromise their dreams just because it's what everyone else does, but I do have one problem with it, and that's the lines "And if all you ever do with your life is photosynthesize, then you'll deserve every hour of your sleepless nights that you waste wondering when you're going to die". Fuck no, Frank! I would KILL to be able to photosynthesize! If all you ever do with your life is photosynthesize, you're living the fucking dream! You don't have to worry about eating, all you have to do is hang out in the sun! Sure, you could argue that Turner's using the word as a meaphor, but still: photosynthesis is amazing, and hopefully in the future they will splice a plant gene into me and I can stop wasting so much time preparing and digesting food to meet my energy needs.
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[11 Oct 2009|12:55pm] |
I cannot BELIEVE that I actually had to line up to get into the Cranker last night. I mean, it's the CRANKER! Lining up? Unheard of!
Fucken zombies... they should be hungry for brains, not beer.
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[01 Sep 2009|01:09am] |
You know what's rad? Being able to get to sleep easily.
You know what fucking sucks? The opposite.
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[27 Aug 2009|09:45pm] |
I really don't understand how spam email subject lines are generated.
I mean, "Shoot your gin into her vagina"? Seriously?
...
What a waste of gin.
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[03 Aug 2009|11:15pm] |
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Life is awesome! I had a great weekend.
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[30 Jul 2009|09:54pm] |
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One of the girls we have interviewed to be our new housemate has sent a couple of messages emphasising how keen she is to get the room, including the persuasive argument, "I have cute single friends".
This girl is now at the top of my list.
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[15 Jul 2009|08:33pm] |
On Thursday I spent nearly eight hours clothes shopping with Laura for a new outfit for me to wear on Saturday night, so I could go to a party at which I ended up spending approximately two hours total. Despite what the maths says, I still believe that this was a good use of my time. Mainly because it's nice to be hanging out with Laura again.
Also, I've realised Laura is the best person I've been shopping with for the following three reasons: (1) She doesn't hesitate to tell me it's a terrible idea when I'm tempted to try on something bad, (2) She kept volunteering to ask shop assistants questions when I was reluctant to, and (3) She was more than willing to put up with my chronic indecisiveness which has driven many people insane.
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[13 Jul 2009|11:04pm] |
Well, I needed that like I need a kick in the head.
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| I ain't no porcupine, take off your kid gloves |
[15 Jun 2009|07:43pm] |
Unsurprisingly, my dad and I have very different tastes in music. But some of my favourite albums are the ones that he used to play most often when I was growing up. Blood On The Tracks, for instance, would have to be in my top five records of all time. So I raid his CD collection occasionally, but I like to think I'm picking out the cream of the crop. So I'm happy to drive up there and say, "Hey dad, I'm taking your Elvis Costello best of", or "Can I borrow Revolver?", or "Can I have on loan your: Madness, Bruce Springsteen, Travelling Wilburys, Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel albums?" It's not like he has The Clash, XTC or The Jam to pick from, but I still don't worry that I'm lowering my musical credibility too much.
However, lately I've had songs from one of his favourite albums from the 80s running around in my head, and I'm sorry, but I couldn't do it: I just couldn't bring myself to confess that I wanted to listen to John Hiatt's MOR classic, Bring The Family. So I browsed through his collection on some other pretext and sneakily slipped it into my jacket pocket when he wasn't looking.
I looked through the liner notes when I got home, and I was surprised to find the other three musicians on the album were Nick Lowe (Elvis Costello producer), Ry Cooder (not my kind of thing, but a star guitarist in his own right) and Jim Keltner (session musician for a list of big names as long as my arm). This album's got quite the pedigree, I thought.
Of course, that still doesn't change the fact that it's 100% Dad Rock and I'm ashamed to be listening to it.
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| Mental assassin |
[12 Jun 2009|07:45pm] |
I read David Eddings' Belgariad and Mallorean fantasy series in uni, and really enjoyed them. The thing I remember most about them was Edding's sense of humour. I was introduced to the books by my friend Joseph, who has an ability to make absolutely anything hilarious when he retells it. Usually, he achieves this by gross exaggeration or outright lies. I remember him describing some sequence from one of the books that was so ridiculous I was convinced it was one of those outright lies, but then I reached that part of the book and discovered the scene was identical to the way Joseph had described it. And the books aren't comedies! They're serious, epic sagas that happen to have the odd bit of humour.
Anyway, point being: I can't remember when I last read an Eddings novel - it would have to be many years ago - but this Tuesday while at work I randomly remembered reading an introductory piece Eddings had written in one of his books where he alluded to being quite old, and I wondered if he was still alive. Thanks to the miracle of Wikipedia, I checked and found out that he had in fact died - exactly one week earlier! The moral? Watch out, authors I haven't thought of in years, or I'll think about you and retroactively kill you too! You're next, Capt W. E. Johns.
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| Woody Guthrie - the original posi-punk |
[09 Jun 2009|06:11pm] |
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"I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that." -Woody Guthrie, as quoted in the liner notes for the new Anti-Flag album The People Or The Gun and paraphrased in the lyrics of the song The Gre(A)t Depression.
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| Wherever you see a cop beatin' a guy... |
[02 Jun 2009|06:40pm] |
I was walking to my car on Saturday night, waiting to cross Grenfell St at the lights near the Cranker (where else?), when I saw an obviously fairly drunk girl on the other side of the road talking on her phone while stumbling west. The lights changed, I started crossing the road, then I heard someone yelling and looked up to see a man pinning the girl against the bonnet of a car. My first reaction was that this was the person she'd been on the phone with, someone she was in a relationship with, and it was domestic violence. I started heading towards them to see if intervention was required, but not particularly fast, because I'm not a good person. As I approached I noticed the guy was yelling in an accent that seemed European, something about "You do not... people on the street...", and I wondered if he was some sexually repressed Slavic dude taking his anger out on this girl because she'd propositioned him. There was another woman ahead of me, already on the other side of the street, and she headed over to the scene as well, after hesitating, which made me a bit more confident. I get there and the man has got the girl's arm twisted behind her back and is still pinning her against the bonnet, and I can make out what he's saying, which is "You do not assault an off-duty police officer", and my first thought is "Bullshit", and the woman steps forward and I thought she was going to intervene but instead she grabbed the girl as well and says "I'm a police officer too", which makes things complicated. So I just stand there watching, and the man is still yelling stuff, "You do not urinate in the street! You do not assault an off-duty police officer", and the story gets a little clearer as I can see they're all standing in a puddle of piss. Now I'm pretty sure the female cop pulls out some handcuffs and cuffs the girl, but the girl stops struggling and the man stops yelling so much, and I wish I could say it was because I was there as a witness but I think he just ran out of steam. And the girl says things like "Why are you doing this, I don't even know where I am", and "Can I please hold my handbag?" and "This is so embarrassing" and the cops tell her they're taking her over the street to the station. I justs stand there watching, still not knowing what I should do. Then these young kids walk by and ask the cops, "Hey, is that girl alright?" and the female cop says, "It's okay, we're police officers", and those kids hightail it out of there like they were running from the bogey man, and I still don't know what to do and I figure there is nothing I can do, so I walk to my car and drive home. Because I don't hate cops per se, I just hate jerks, and I wasn't in the mood to be sympathetic towards drunk bitches either, so I didn't care about anyone involved. You could have put a bullet in all three of their heads and I wouldn't have blamed you that night. But I thought about it later and thought that the cop's reaction was fairly out of proportion. I don't know for sure if the girl did "assault" him like he said (I wasn't watching at that point), but I know she sure didn't twist his arm behind his back and force him onto a car. I guess I should have said something, even just "Ease up". Actually, I should have asked them to show ID, considering they were both in plain clothes. And I bet the female cop would have told me to fuck off or mind my own business. And then I should have dialled triple 0 and said "Hi, there's two people assaulting a girl on Grenfell St claiming to be off-duty cops, but they won't show me any ID" and then I probably would have found out what the inside of a jail cell looks like.
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[19 May 2009|08:38pm] |
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Tom Gabel is a pretty attractive man. I don't mean that as in "OMG I love his music and therefore by a process of transference I find the man himself physically attractive" (I love Lily Allen's music, but I don't particularly fancy her), and I don't mean "wow he's a babe just because he's famous" (I think it's ridiculous that Paris Hilton can call herself hot without the world laughing in old squinty eye's face - it just goes to prove that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it). I also don't mean Tom is drop-dead gorgeous handsome in a movie star, Brad Pitt kind of way. I just like Tom's hair, and his face is pretty symmetrical, and he has a nice shaped head, and a nice smile. I could have chatted with him on Friday, but I didn't.
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| Fuuuuuuuuck |
[18 May 2009|09:43pm] |
I was just in a hurry to finish a comic page I'm inking, and put it over my halogen lamp so the last lot of ink would dry quicker and I could do the final details without smudging it. Then I got distracted by an email, and next thing I know my page is smoking and has a big fucking scorch mark in the middle of it.
Haste makes waste, bitches.
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