Before I get started, I have to admit that the Carlton footy club is having a good year so far - at least in comparison to the last five or so seasons, as well as in regards to the financial state and player pickups during the off season (Judd, anyone?).

Last night marked only the second match all season (granted we’re only 7 matches in) that I didn’t actually attend (in my defence it was in Perth), but it gave me a good opportunity to watch the match on TV and see the boy’s playing style from a different angle. Unfortunately I was out, so had to make do with the first half at Jake’s house while a party was raging in the same room, and then the final 15 minutes at the Queensbury pub while waiting for a tram. Alright, I may have engineered it so I’d just miss a tram, giving me no option but to go to the pub, but oh well.

Anyway it was, as most of our matches have been this year, a bit of a scrap. The first quarter was good, the second was bloody impressive (8.3 kicked to the Eagles’ 0.6) but the third quarter was woeful and we were lucky to regain some composure in the last quarter to take the match by an acceptable margin of 37 points. Our less than spectacular failings in the second half did get me thinking however, and this morning my suspicions were confirmed when I found the stats page on the AFL website, showing Carlton have indeed been terrible at sewing matches up. Of the 7 matches we’ve played this year, we’ve won 5 first quarters, 4 second quarters, 3 third quarters and only one final quarter - last night. The simple fact that we couldn’t finish against last year’s wooden spooners Richmond in round 1 is worrying enough, and we could quite easily have lost to Melbourne a couple of weeks ago if it weren’t for Melbourne’s own inability to finish games, but when you take into account that we have not yet played three of the top four (two of which are lossless), the shine from winning three of our last four matches kind of loses its gleam.

I suppose I should be focusing on the positives - its irrefutable that we are on the improve, and to win last night without Fevola kicking any goals in the second half was something of a positive. I just hope we can start to address our 3rd and 4th quarter fadeaways before we get really stung.

Pete

Well, maybe not a love song as such, but a bloody good little ditty that someone has lovingly whipped together for Charlie to sing to and about his #1 fan, Camilla.

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Pete

Well, I suppose it has been a while since my last big-ticket purchase. Financially I’m doing alright (at least as far as students can) and surely a laptop can be classed at least partly as a study-facilitator? Still, a laptop is a luxury for anyone, especially someone with a perfectly good, functioning, nay speced up PC at home. The shame builds when you take into account what brand of laptop I bought. Oh yes - you all know now, I bought a……. mac.

I think I started to have some regrets as soon as I walked out of campus computers on Friday having just shelled out $1800, but it has to be said that I did get $150 off simply for being a student, and I also qualify for $200 cashback because I bought an iPod nano (which cost less than the cashback - score - and is going straight to eBay anyway!) at the same time. Still, I now own a very wanky piece of hardware, and have little reason to actually own it.

Oh well, at least now I can sit in the law library and look like one of the cool kids… albeit while clearly giving away my true colours trying to write up sciencey stuffs.

For those at all interested, it’s the middle of the line macbook. White, Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz dualies, 2GB of RAM, and a 160GB harddrive. I’m pretty sure the graphics card is a simple integrated one, but then who games on a laptop? Give me a couple of weeks and I’ll get back to you as to whether or not it was a complete waste of money. At the very least it’ll provide a couple of weeks of fiddling with an OS I have no experience with.

Pete

In November last year I found myself with a little cash lying around, and having just finished another year of my studies ended up with a bit of time on my hands. After seeing an ad for a great deal at K-Mart, my little brother and I went in halves for a Wii, which has been a bit quiet of late (although Mario Kart comes out this week I believe) but has proven to be a great little joy. Anyway, one of the titles we really wanted to buy was the new Guitar Hero game, and after a bit of searching and price comparison I ended up in JB Hifi to buy the game. Trying to legitimise the purchase, and so as not to look like a overgrown child walking out with just a computer game, I decided to buy a CD while I was at it, and chose PNAU’s then recently-released self titled album.

Although I have to admit it took me a little while to open the packaging and listen to the CD (come on - I’d just bought a Wii), but once I did it quickly became one of my favourite albums of the last few years, and it seems that I’m not the only one. Anyway the band have not toured for yonks excepting the killer Boiler Room set that they put on during the Big Days Out around the country, so you may be able to understand my excitement on Friday when the boys played the sold-out Billboard nightclub into the wee hours.

- Photo by Will Reichelt, one of my favourite Flickr photographers.

The gig was exceptional. All the costumed characters except the key were there, those massive gym-ball sized balloons were tossed about for a few songs and the visuals in the form of a massive projector screen behind the stage were amazing. Just like the big day out visuals, its amazing how effective dancing cartoon characters and lyrics splattered for fractions of seconds can be. They didn’t play Shock To My System, which to be honest was a bit of a shock to mine, but the rest of the album was played and personal favourites “Lover”, “Embrace” and the first encore track “With you Forever” were highlights, and the crowd went insane for that-milk-ad-song “Baby” as well Hottest 100 track and show opener “Wild Strawberries”. The show ended at 1:15, which meant getting home was a bit of a hassle, and without earplugs I’m sure I ended up about 10 years older as far as my hearing is concerned, but all in all the show was awesome. If you get the chance to see PNAU in the next little while, seize it by the balls - even if you don’t like indie electro, you’ll love the stage presence of this great little threesome from Sydney.

So here’s a little taste of PNAU. “Embrace” is one of the mellower songs on the CD, but performed live it was a showstopper. Really, really special stuff - if only this was a live track….

Pete

Whilst I probably should have been studying for a looming mid-semester exam scheduled for this Friday, I watched the new animated film “Horton Hears a Who!” today. Being a kids movie it was guaranteed to be a hit with me, but even taking into account that particular bias it was very impressive. The CGI animation is stunning - to be expected given technological advancements since Toy Story hit cinemas twelve years ago, and the story is simple but profound in the same way as many of Seuss’s stories (or can you even classify them as fables?) are.

I have to admit that Horton Hears a Who is one of the Seuss books I never read or had read to me, and the story is perhaps not as topical as the Lorax would be given the current eco-awareness that is sweeping the globe, but is nonetheless thought provoking (especially to children) and enjoyable, although I can’t help but feel that creationists are going to seize the story and claim that the moral was ‘just because we can’t see God doesn’t mean he doesn’t exist’. I read somewhere that some anti-abortionist groups have used the tagline ‘a person’s a person no matter how small’ at various times over the last few decades, much to the chagrin of the Seuss estate.

Anyway for those of you like me harbouring a guilty pleasure for quirky and clever animated movies, or just want their inner child to shine for an hour and a half, go see the film - I really doubt anyone will leave feeling totally ripped off (apart from the relatively short runtime, which let’s face it is becoming the new norm).

Pete

I went to a trivia night last night, and for the first time experienced our entire table go intellectually AWOL at once. I think we held together and competed properly through the first of four rounds, but faced with probable defeat at that early stage we degraded into childish banter and idiotic answers. There were music questions (Next line of the Angel’s song ‘Am I ever gonna see your face again?…’ - although clearly the answer is a repeat of the question again we wrote the aussie version ‘NO WAY GET FUCKED FUCK OFF’ sprawled over the entire line), TV questions (what was Benny Hill’s actual name - clearly Adolf Hitler), and to everyone’s annoyance cheerleading based questions, which is understandable given that the fundraiser was for cheerleading, but considering our table was made up entirely of friends of the committee rather than actual cheerleaders, we had no help from anyone who would actually be of use, and scored about 3/10 for that section as a result.

Anyway I was hoping that the organisers had managed to include a booby prize, because we came a clear 10 or 15 points below anyone else (out of 40 by memory which is just astounding), but sadly that was not to be the case. It was still quite enjoyable and the heckling made it all worth while. Plus as an added bonus I got to see Webber finish 7th in Bahrain when I got home. A good night all round, even if we were blacklisted from any future events by that particular crowd.

Pete

This is something really quite special. Although American, and therefore not entirely applicable here in Australia, I stumbled over justia.com, a massive source of legal information including archived court procedures for various courts throughout the states. Of particular interest are the civil cases brought forward by Jonathan Lee Riches, a prisoner who is apparently trying to pass time in the slammer by clogging the court system that put him there.

Some of his claims include:

- Plaintiff Jonathan Lee Riches sued Defendants Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Maddox Jolie Pitt, Zahara Jolie Pitt, Shiloh Jolie Pitt, and Pax Jolie Pitt. Plaintiff alleged that Defendants Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie kidnapped Madeleine McCann in a major conspiracy plot to adopt her against her will, as part of a secret plot to take, kidnap and adopt a child from each of the 192 world wide countries. Plaintiff stated that he learned about the plot from his pen pal Billy Bob Thorton.

- Plaintiff sued Martha Stewart, KMART, Floyd Landis (the Tour de France cyclist) and E.T. the Extra Terrestrial. Supposedly the accused conspired to have Floyd Landis pedal his bike into the South Fork dam in Pennsylvania while E.T. uses his magical powers. The plaintiff further alleged that Landis has a state of the art Huffy bike that transforms into a flying missile, which will be used to breach the dam and have a flood of water rush into FCI Williamsburg (the plaintiff’s prison) and flush plaintiff into the Bermuda Triangle.

- Plaintiff sued Venus Williams, Serena Williams, Richard Williams, the U.S. Open and Poltergeist. Plaintiff alleged that defendants are reaching through the television set to grab him during the U.S. Open, defendants took Van Gogh paintings from him, he taught Venus how to play table tennis in county jail, Senator Larry Craig uses the FCI Williamsburg bathroom, and defendants want to learn identity theft from him.

- Plaintiff seeks $63 billion backed by gold and silver delivered via UPS from Michael Vick for allegedly stealing his two pit bulls and using them for dog fighting. Prisoner also alleges that Vick damaged the RFID chips in the plaintiff’s dog collars, sold plaintiff’s dogs on eBay and used the proceeds to purchase missiles from the Iran Government. Plaintiff also alleges that Michael Vick subjected him to microwave testing.

I think my favourite involves Riches supposedly catching a home run ball at a baseball game, but being punched by Justin Timberlake, who was sitting next to him, and then having the ball stolen by Jessica Biel.

I suppose prison means the bloke has all the time in the world to fuck with the courts, but considering each lodgement costs $350 to actually get heard by a judge, and he hasn’t paid a single one yet (of the hundreds of attempted filings) it does seem like a complete and total waste of time.

Oh well, at least it gave me a bit of a laugh, even if it is at the chagrin of the US court system…

Pete

I’ve been slightly amused by the three-way pissing contest the major football codes in this country have been having over the last couple of months. With soccer finally making headway with a working domestic competition, as well as the NRL celebrating 100 years of competition and my beloved AFL looking to make inroads throughout the rest of the country, the spats that the three respective heads have been having has been, well, amusing (I hesitate to use a stronger word considering how pathetic the whole thing is).

This morning I read on afl.com.au that Andrew Demetriou has formally registered the name ‘Western Sydney Football Club Ltd’, preparing for the entry of a second Sydney based team after the 2010 season. Football Federation Australia (soccer’s governing body) and the NRL have both also claimed an interest at setting up a team for their competitions in Sydney’s growing western suburbs, but this is the first legal ’shotgunning’ of a name, and basically blocks either of the other codes from the obviously desirable ‘football club’ name.

What the article fails to mention is the ownership of internet domain names relating to West Sydney. After a little bit of research, it turns out that the cheeky monkeys at the FFA registered the domains westernsydneyfc.com.au and westsydneyfc.com.au - the same format that most of the AFL clubs have for their websites (carltonfc.com.au, melbournefc.com.au, portadelaidefc.com.au etc) - although interestingly nothing appears on either site. Mysterious indeed.

It will be interesting to see if, now that the AFL has the legal name, the courts consider the FFC’s actions as domain squatting, or just tough titties for the AFL. Either way it should be semi-interesting for unconcerned and frankly rather bored Joe Blows like me, and just remember when this makes big news in months to come: you read it here first!

Pete

I went to the Laneway Festival in the middle of the city late last month, and although I have to admit that the single most lasting memory will undoubtedly be Issy, Lucy and I drinking beer and breezers in a derelict carpark in Chinatown during a break from the festival proper, the music itself was all pretty bloody good. Wally DeBacker’s (Gotye) set was the best I’ve seen of his - his new visuals are amazing, and I finally got to see Manchester Orchestra (even though I missed ‘Wolves at Night’). Hell, even the bloody Panics were alright, but the show stealers were undoubtedly The Presets, who played the last set on the main stage. It was the third time I’ve seen the Presets in as many years, and was easily the best, what with the excitement of their upcoming album ‘Apocalypso’ in a couple of weeks time, paired with the phenomenally popular single ‘My People’. The crowd was energetic and the boys played a killer set - mainly ‘Beams’ tracks with a few hints as to what is to come. Brilliant stuff - especially my favourite ‘Girl and The Sea’, and the perennial crowd pleaser ‘I Go Hard, I Go Home’ which the boys finished with.

Anyway one song they didn’t play, but which has been bandied about the radio a little bit in the last week or two was ‘This Boy’s In Love’ - the new single. It’s a more low key song - not as much a pumper as ‘My People’, and I have to admit I was uneasy about it when I first saw it on jTV a few weeks ago, but after hearing it a few more times I have to admit that it has warmed on me. I think it may have been the homo-erotic fighting-in-milk cutaways. Utterly bizarre, but then so is playing keyboards in a soot storm.

I think I’ll reserve complete judgement for a couple of weeks and see how the song fits with the rest of the album, but in any case here’s the new video for you to make up your own mind…

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Pete