As a duty to studenthood while one is sitting exams, procrastination must be running at full capacity. So for the last few days, along with my normal day-to-day procrastinatory efforts, I’ve bee reading about, sourcing and eventually downloading the first couple of episodes of the new Doctor Who spinoff, Torchwood. I’m admittedly a massive sceptic when it comes to spinoff series (infact I’m one of the only people I know who can’t stand Angel but loved Buffy – strangely enough especially when Angel was in it), so I was expecting instant rejection by my well developed spinoff protection glands, but funnily enough I kind of liked the quaint, Welsh take on Doctor-Who-without-the-doctor.

Torchwood seems to be set around Jack Harkness: the bisexual barrel of laughs yankydoodle who was instrumental in the closing episodes of the Chris Ecclestone season of DW, but was killed by a Dalek in a final display of courage at the climax of the series. As a plot twist at the very end of the episode, he was resurrected by Rose when she absorbed the TARDIS’ time vortex but was left behind when the new doctor and Rose buggered off without him. Although the character was promised a return in this year’s season, that never happened, however here Jack is, back with his own series.

Anyway you can read all about the actual series at wikipedia or Outpost Gallifrey, but basically Jack and his crew of misfits work for Torchwood 3 in Cardiff, above and beyond the police, the military and even the crown. However, they attract the attention of a young female copper who unknowingly witnesses a resurrection the team performs on a stab victim. This leads to fun times all round, and a new series is born.

Anyway if you can forget for just a moment that the series is simply a tacky afterthought to squeeze a bit more money out of a huge ratings and money maker for the BBC, the show isn’t all that bad. For those out there who have for forty years wanted nothing but a bit of hanky panky in the TARDIS – this series will deliver. It is clearly more adult oriented than Doctor Who which has forbidden even hintings of romantic entanglement until very recently. The first ‘fuck’ can be heard within 10 minutes of the curtain, and the second episode is built around a gaseous parasitic alien who transforms its host into a sex mad nympho. Regardless, I enjoyed the first two episodes (although the lack of The Doctor himself and the corniness that comes along with him was instantly missed from the first minute) and encourage anyone who is interested and able to COUGHdownloadCOUGH a copy of at least the first episode for themselves – you probably won’t be disappointed – especially if, like me, timewasting is the top of your agenda right now

Pete

Those that know me out there in cyberspace may disagree on many things about me, but I’ve worked hard over the last few years to ensure that one undisputed constant rings true throughout the universe – I am a lazy bastard. I am king of procrastinators, President of the United Federation of handing-shit-in-a-day-late and Supreme Overlord of making money the easy way. Just look at my few ‘jobs’ I’ve held down over the years – babysitting, guinea pig, volunteer teacher and PA to the BPC – with the exception of the teaching in Africa they all line my pockets quite nicely but require butt all in the effort department.

Anyway far from me to shake up anybody’s perceptions about the way the world works, I landed a job with 199BONGO last week where I get paid to answer SMS questions. Good employees can plough through 40 or 50 questions an hour, and at 60 cents a pop you can make $30 an hour, sitting on your arse sending messages to people. That is good money in anyone’s language, but when the (unpaid) training is constantly delayed with ‘sorry I can’t make it, come online tomorrow morning’ over an entire weekend, and then the first few shifts are scheduled right throughout uni exams, interupting study as well as general sanity BONGO starts to lose its gleam. Just. hang. in. there…

Pete

To steal Kel’s thunder just a touch, I (completely coincidentally I might add) landed the same job she did, a mere week later. Anyway the boss wanted to train me this morning, which meant without any notice I had to skip what can only be described as one of the most holy experiences known to man – eggy bread and booze. I was never going to actually attend the races at Caulfield that followed, but I was a sad little boy when told there was to be no eggy bread for me this morning. I fear I’ve put some noses out of joint too by not relaying information. Oh well.

While I’m at it I should mention that my tip won the cup today! Tawqeet was a 20:1 outsider and managed somehow to blitz the last 200m to win by half a length. It’s just a pity I didn’t bet on the race.

Anyhoo that is all beside the point. While I was shmaltzing around the house this afternoon I came across possibly the greatest thing that has ever been made by man. Ever.

It’s a 2 and a bit minute animation of album covers going at each other with guns, teeth, ninja skills, grenades… anything you can think of. Absolutely wonderful stuff. My two favourite bits are the Dead Kennedys logo beating the Van Halen logo to death with the forth leg of the Alice in Chains dog, and David Lee Roth (VH frontman) shrieking to the ASIA dragon ‘Hey man, leave that baby alone!’ Absolute gold, although you’ll need to watch it a few times to fully appreciate it all because it really does go along at breakneck speed. Oh and if anyone knows what the album is at 1:41 (Blonde girl lying on a pencil drawn car, directly before Michael Jackson) please let me know, it’s bugging me to hell.

Pete

I’m not the most artistic person in the world. Infact, considering i’m studying for a BSc and have basically shirked all artforms since school – be it performance based like music and drama or the more tedious and ‘arty’ visual arts – I could be considered a bit of a talentless waste of space. My handwriting is abysmal, any efforts at hand drawn diagrams or doodles usually end in the paper self-immolating, etc etc. Get the picture?

So, imagine my joy on Monday when I dreamt up my glorious return into the bosoms of artists worldwide. I had a witty, clever idea that with a little bit of work could be sent off to threadless where it would no doubt romp through the peer review process, be printed as a T-Shirt and over the next few years find its way onto thousands of chests around the world. The idea? The recently deemed ‘dwarf planet’ Pluto, anthropomorphised into the typical schoolyard uber-nerd being picked on by the 8 ‘true’ planets. Pluto would have giant glasses around its cratered and spherical head, pocket protectors and braces. It would be a revolution in tshirts.

Unfortunately I pretty much abandoned the idea five minutes later when I realised that although I had some proficiency with photoshop, even with days spent on the computer the best I’d do would probably be not much more than this:

Anyway, 48 hours on I received the new threadless newsletter outlining the last few weeks worth of new tshirt designs. Look what crept in – fucking plagiarism…. I SHOULD BE THAT DESIGNER! DAMN THIS TALENTLESS BODY!

Pete

In July 1969, when the Apollo 11 Lunar Vehicle landed on the moon and Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on its surface, what were his iconic and unforgettable first words after setting foot on the lunar surface?

a) That’s one giant leap for man, one small step for mankind.
b) That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
c) That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.
d) That’s one small fries for man, one giant combo for mankind.

Well although the answer may come as a shock to the many of you, if you didn’t answer c), you are an idiot and should be laughed out of town.

Alright, so maybe that is a little unfair, especially considering the question has actually been the centre of quite a controversy for some time with Armstrong himself even doubting whether he spoke the ‘a’. However, after an Australian study including digital examination of the original radio transmission and the assistance of speech pathologists and biomechanics finished at the end of last month, it has been concluded that Armstrong did indeed include the sementically vital ‘a’ in his speech, but rolled the words together too quickly, as well as the speech being further degraded by errors in the radio transmission.

Although this is all very interesting, I don’t know how reluctantly people will let go of the more non-sensical ‘small step for man’ version that is linguistically stupid but has been so ingrained in our culture over the last 37 years. I suppose we’ll just have to see next time the question pops up in Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’

Pete

Big Day Out tickets went on sale yesterday. Funnily enough it seems the mad buying frenzy for festival tickets that was evident with Falls, Meredith, Pyramid Rock, Homebake and Splendour extended to massive ticket sales for the BDO release, with Sydney selling out by midday (or at least the main allocation). Maybe, considering the interest that music festivals have generated this year Livid will come back from it’s 3 year hiatus for 2007.

Anyway I caved in and went for a wander to Greville Records, where I bought myself a couple of tickets, but now I am really starting to question whether I want to go or not afterall. The Big Day Out may attract the biggest names and have the most music of any single day festival in the country, but with 8 stages in a small area crammed with 50,000 people it becomes an absolute sensory overload. The lineup itself this year, even though it’s only in an early stage still doesn’t sound that fantastic either. Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to hack the $240 hole in my pocket and hope later announcements are….. better. I’ve always got Falls, the Muse sideshow and the Peppers in April to keep me from killing concert organisers.

Pete

The Falls Festival – in my mind the best music festival in the country as well as the best way imaginable to spend New Years Eve – sold out in record time this year, with all 15,000 tickets for Lorne spoken for within 3 hours of being released. I was one of the lucky few to land tickets, but now I’m somewhat conflicted. Half of my friends who were so pumped about going this year became unbelievably noncommital and just lazy around the time that tickets were released, ending up ticketless, and the other half decided that a roadtrip to the Tasmanian sister event would be a good idea, and are now locked into going to Marrion Bay, while the rest of us chumps are going to Lorne, some 300km and an ocean crossing away.

The reason I’m blogging about this conflict now is that today marks the release date for the 29th pre-event tickets. Last year, in an effort to cut down on queues forming on the morning of the 30th of December, the organisers announced that there would be a few sets played the night before the main event started, along with movies and dibs on which campsite you wanted for a paltry $20 extra. This year Michael Franti and Bassment Jaxx are the two ‘extra’ shows, which makes it pretty bloody tempting, but the price has risen to $55, and it means an extra 24 hours of not showering and using festival portaloos, which are world renowned as being the single most disgusting experience in the world.

So anyway, I need to decide on whether to do nothing and just pitch up on the 30th with the people I do know are going, to buy tickets to the 29th and get a great campsite while seeing Franti for a second time along with Bassment Jaxx, or just forget about Falls entirely and lob the tickets up on eBay where prices are approaching $500 for a couple of tickets (ticket price is $150 each), then spend NY somewhere else, sans Modest Mouse, Wolfmother and Eskimo Joe. I would have lots of moolah though….

Pete

This has been doing the rounds of blogs and the like recently but for posterity’s sake, as well as being a reason to blog I’ll dump it here too.

Linerider is one of those oh-so-simple little web tidbits that places you as designer of a simple toboggan track using only a pencil tool and a black white canvas. Usually, these sort of pseudo-games illicits one of three possible responses: one – a polite but brief chuckle at the cleverness of the program followed by immediate closure; two – amazement, followed by a brainstorming session about the wonderful things that could be done, then after 2 infuriating minutes of trying to get the first slope right, the program’s hasty closure shortly followed by the lobbing of your PC out a 4th story window (my actual response to linerider); or finally (and most worryingly) – something like this. Unbelievable

Pete

My old man came home this evening grinning from ear to ear. Granted, the last 7 days for him have been largely good news, with his company winning the tender for a large contract in Queensland, his twice-yearly cancer scans coming back fantastically (steady for 3 years now!) and his eldest son winning the sexiest bitch on field for a record 7th time. However, on Friday afternoon, that quickly came crashing down after a show that the Sydney office was staging for Telstra sprang a bit of a leak. Basically during the launch for Telstra’s NextG network a fire extinguisher blew and the conference room became a bit of a BigPond itself (click).

Considering Telstra is a big client and the fallout from the incident could be disastrous for Dad’s company, it would be understandable if he wasn’t feeling exactly full of himself at the moment, but I’ll be damned if he didn’t come home this evening pleased as punch. The reason? He received a phone call from crikey – a small independent media service based here in Melbourne, and they published an almost satirical article today that questions mockingly whether industrial sabotage was at work on Friday. It’s a shame really – if the mainstream media had caught wind of Haycom’s warehouse test results following Friday’s drenching at circular quay, there might be some interesting theories bouncing around.

Come to think of it, maybe I could become a touch more proactive about the whole situation…. I wonder if Naomi is interested.

Pete

This weekend I’ve been splendidly lazy. After big Thursday and Friday nights on the turps, I woke up on Saturday feeling somewhat worse for wear and pining to do sweet bugger all, all weekend. Thanks largely to the radio, it seems that my wish was granted.

Let me explain. Last year triple j celebrated 30 years of live recordings in Australia. At the centre of the celebrations was a weekend-long event named ‘The Impossible Music Festival’, in which listeners voted for the best shows from the j archives cut down to a bit under an hour each, and the cream of the crop was broadcast on the hour, every hour from 6pm Friday to 1am Monday morning. Due to the popularity of the one-off, the event was repeated this year, and as I type this, the Beastie Boys (recorded at the Big Day Out last year) have just finished the 3rd last of 55 performances.

Anyway it took me a long time to rise fully on Saturday, but in my half dead state I listened through recordings of The Kaiser Chiefs, Ben Folds and Nirvana before being torn out of my bedroom sometime around half twelve to be fully conscious for a 2000 Muse recording which I thought was rather good. Silverchair, Eskimo Joe and Bloc Party were a few of the other notable performances of Saturday, along with The Flaming Lips, Powderfinger, Jeff Buckley, AC/DC and (surpisingly) The Herd today.

All I can say is if BDO ’07 is as good as the virtual-festival played over the last two days, I’ll eat my hat AND do a merry jig. Promise.

Pete