I'm doing a massive purge of crap that's I've been hauling from flat to flat for 10 years, and came across some old uni debating stuff, and it reminded me of my old friend Laura - the crazy American-Russian girl who was on my team at Joynt Scroll in 2002. I looked her up on Facebook - she's back in Arizona - and five minutes later, we're in touch. 

That's incredible, when you think about it. I haven't seen nor heard from her for almost five years, she's on the other side of the world and within five minutes I've not only located her, but we're exchanging 'hey, how you doin?' messages. 

Ten years ago that would have been impossible. Five years ago it would have been highly unlikely.

The internet is awesome.

 I'm cleaning up my computer (reorganising shit, finding out what I've actually accrued over the years, it's just like real tidying) and I came across this: an email sent to TVNZ by an inebriated James and I, back in early 2003. Having the internet on at home was still a novelty, and we were trashed.

----------------------------

Hi there

PLEEEEEEEAAAAASEEEEEEEEEEE

repeat the Young Ones!!!!! It's been something ridiculous like 3 years now since they last played on TV. that was a looooooong time ago. we believe the public is now willing and ready for a complete (both) series repeat of what is perhaps the third greatest comedy of all time (behind MONTY PYTHON and BACK OF THE Y of course :p ).

When I (dan duran) was in my early teens, watching the Young Ones was my only source of information on what it was to be a student in a flatting situation. Now, some might say that it was over the top and not meant to be realistic, but they would be wrong - i've lived in flats that we're the real-life equivalents of rik, mike, neil and vyvian's existence.

if the show cannot be shown for copyright and contractual reasons, PLEEEEAAAAAAAASEEEEE use the money that ISNT being spent on M2 to buy the rights for it - see if you can get a discount by claiming it is a Public Information Service. I learnt a lot from the exploits of the Young Ones crew, and would love to have a recap.

But seriously, there are 15 year olds out there who have never heard of Rik Mayall and Nigel Planer, who watch TV at random nighttime times who may come across this show and go "Woah!!!! what the f--k is this??!?!?!?" just like i did in my early teens and was forever hooked....

SO, in conclusion, PLEEEEEAAASSEEEEE return the Young Ones to our screens. Even if it is at 12.30AM on a tuesday night....

PLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASSSSSSSSSEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

------------

dan duran & Kerr Avon - Co-Presidents of the People's Organisation for the Liberation of the Young Ones (television show.

(the POLYO-TV)

P.s. we have beed drinking Lindauer wine and Moskva Vodka. I hope this does not devalue the quality of our argument.

Both pics courtesy of petrajane. First, here's Kent and I onstage - him looking all insane and awesome, me rocking out and fat...



Then myself (far left, believe it or not), my future bandmates Jed and Amy, and future Clinton-founder Emma out the back of an Eye-TV gig in early 1999. I can't believe how skinny I was - all I ate was pasta and ice cream, and look at me! Fuck!

 

I can't believe that's how skinny I used to be. Shiat. To get there again, or even close, I'd have to lose a quarter of my current weight. Is that even possible?

WEEKLY TOP FIVE!

1. I'll Be Lightning - Liam Finn
2. The Half Light Symphony - Battle Circus
3. Disasteradio - Visions
4. Radiohead - In Rainbows
5. Hot Chip - Made in the Dark

"Sexy sports presenter splits with ref" - the first sentence is enough! I know it's credited to the Sunday News in the small print, but they could at least not put it on the front page of the site if they want to be taken seriously now, huh?

So my week in Hamilton... On the first day, we popped into the Dewar court case in one of Htown's three adjacent courtrooms; it was the first day, and as I'd no idea what this Dewar guy looked like, I thought the guy being interrogated was Dewar. It wasn't, and was boring as fuck anyway, so I didn't really care when I found out it wasn't him.

On the second, we'd been in the Waikato Times office not even an hour and all the computers died. All us newbies panicked, while our tutor said things like, "how'd you have done this twenty years ago?".

A dumb question, cause (a) twenty years ago I was still learning how to tie my shoelaces, and (b) we've never been taught how exactly to go about things without computers. Use phone books? Okay, and what do we say when people tell us what we're asking is on the website? Write it longhand? Yeah, but will they mark it? Etc etc.

Anyway. I interviewed Pedro Carneiro on Wednesday morning, which was kinda cool. Part of me was hoping he barely spoke English so I could get everything down on paper without too much trouble. Turns out he's a fluent speaker, and I'd called him at 10pm (I was told it was 9pm in Portugal). Hmmm. Anyway, he was really cool, and going by his Youtube videos a much better classical marimba percussionist than any I've probably interviewed before.

So over the week I did a story on a high school surfing competition, a brief on APRA, the piece on Pedro, a preview of a play at the uni, and an article on a high school with a record label in Ngatea, which the Times decided to get a photo for - driving a photographer and I an hour each way to cover. I'm not sure which if any of these stories have been/will be published, being back in Aucks, but we'll see. The brief was included on the Ent page on Thursday, the play piece later this week I've been told. Fingers crossed for the rest.

Haha, Dave Letterman's getting ripped apart by someone from HR. He works one hour a day, high blood pressure, and has been with the company 14 years without a promotion. Hehe.

Anyway... the trip to Htown wasn't all work. Which doesn't mean the rest of the time was all fun. We stayed at the Ascot Lodge Motel; my room, and I suspect the others, had no internet, a shower whose five streams you couldn't position yourself in at once, and a Gideon Bible. Our tutor stayed across the road at the Kingsgate Hotel, which you can tell was awesome just by comparing the names.

My best attempt at entertainment alone involved hooking up my iPod to the TV, which for some reason only played the left channel, or playing mp3s off the laptop, which due to my lack of mp3s (AAC for the win) and desire to use the memory-limited laptop for getting thrashed at Civilization wasn't anything to rave about.

I went out one night and played pool with Rob and Jennah which was fun, and the night ended earlier than we wanted cause everything in Htown shuts early on a Tuesday; no bowling and video games for us.

On Wednesday we (the students) went out as a group to Barzurk, the gourmet pizza place. I think I was the only one who actually ordered a pizza. Anyway, it was an enlightening evening; it seems the young 'uns, predominantly those in the 3rd year of their degrees, want to forgo an honourable career in exchange for a money-grubbing career in PR, and the older ones, predominantly us in the grad dip course, intend to go into proper journalism. Strange, when you think at first it'd be the older ones who have degrees and go back to uni that'd be doing it for sanity and non-ideological reasons.

But you know, come the end of the course, we'll see what jobs are available...

Anyway, one particular student really ground my gears on the trip, but in that 'I find it amusing and a little frustrating while she gets completely riled up' kind of way. Cutting a long story short, she's a loud, incessant, rejects-anything-that-doesn't-sound-right to her kind of person, but not in that persuasive and admirable... sort of way. More in that intolerable, loud for the sake of it, inarguable... kind of way.

I remember last semester at the marae trip, after standing up for five minutes talking about how much Jesus meant to her, how angry and offended she looked after I spent my minute or so explaining why I was agnostic.

The most ridiculous part of the whole non-debate (at a pizza joint, for god's sake) was the moment she leaned past me and said directly to the girl to my left, a Christian who'd this far not disagreed with anything I'd said, "well we're not afraid to die, cause we know where we're going, eh?"

Quietly afterwards (and some even during), the others at the table (including she to my left) pretty much all agreed it was not a done deal Christianity was 100% correct, even if it was their faith.

I'm not sure if it counts for anything that she didn't stay with us for the entire trip, instead choosing to commute from Auckland to Hamilton every day, at her own expense, rather than spending three or four nights with us open-minded scum.

But the night was fun, regardless of how it comes across now. I do enjoy prodding and egging along people with bizarre opinions without giving too much of a shit myself where we end up. If I come out of it understanding another point of view a bit better that's great, if I disagree with their reasoning and they come out of it better understanding my point of view that's even better. If what they're proposing is blatantly absurd and they refuse to budge, the more ridiculous I can show their position to be without getting amped up myself, well that's a night well spent.

To counter-act her pro-Jesus bias and balance out the universe, as all good journalists are meant to do, I then thought I'd steal a bible. What could be worse than committing a supposed crime with the very word of God? As it turns out, most things are. One was left in the drawer in my room making it easy, but a quick glance at wikipedia suggests those who planted it wanted me to 'steal' it. Ah well. I'm sure when I'm done it'll make a good table leveller, projectile, fire, or something.

Court reporting lessons start tomorrow. Bed, I think.

Double Dragon, the board game.

WTF? I remember when I was at primary school, I made a Faery Tale Adventure "board game" out of cardboard and paper mache, it was (from memory) three meters long and had to be rolled up in order to carry. I'm also pretty sure it was only played once, in my backyard, with my brother. I must have been about 9 years old at the time.

Remembering that reminded me of another game I designed, which I admittedly have little memory of. I was off school for a couple of weeks with tonsillitis (this factoid places the story anywhere between 1986 and 1994, but I know it was when I had Savita Dheda as a teacher, so must've been 1989/90) and she said while I was off, I should design a game our class could play when I got back. She was a really cool teacher, at least to me, as she saw I perhaps wasn't just any ordinary ol' kid (for right or wrong, for good or for awesome) - even taking me out to Amiga computer conventions in the evenings, outside of school hours. Sounds dodgy in a 2007 context, but wasn't, trust me. She was cool. It was at those gatherings I first ever saw hacking software in operation...

Once she put me in an advanced maths class with a couple of others, where they tried teaching us trigonometry and Pythagoras - we were 9/10 years old!!! It would have been like teaching Tarzan how to write, or a 26 year old guy who still can't believe he has a cool girlfriend how to keep her happy.

Anyway... I designed this game, which I have no memory of, except the board was made of wood and had a spinner instead of dice - and apparently it was too complex for anyone to play.

I'm not sure what happened to it, but I know our family had a bin where things would regularly get burned, so yeah.

And for the record, I wrote about half of the Wikipedia entry I linked to earlier, and even use the names of the main characters as my youtube login. Mainly cause everything else I could think of was taken. And, for completion's sake is my song the game inspired.

The sequel sucked. Mostly cause it was released in 1997, and won't work on my 2004/5 computer. I'm talking about the game. I hope that's obvious.

I'm going to steer clear of continuing yesterday's train of thought, basically because I've been too busy to think about it since last night. We're at the business end of the semester all of a sudden, and I've spent all day today putting together not only parts of the design of our course newspaper (Te Waha Nui) but a couple of news stories, one of which has gone from being a "I need another story to fill my quota that might get published in our crappy AUT student mag" story to "back cover of an internationally distributed and award winning newspaper" story... pretty much all thanks to May Lee's awesome photo. It's great how far a story can go if you have the right picture, isn't it?

Then as I'm writing my second story of the day, on the inclusion of digital tracks in the NZ singles and album charts, the new My Chemical Romance video comes on. Somewhat predictably, it's Teenagers, but what I didn't expect was the excessive censoring, which left it sounding like a round of bingo in places (the progressively-leave-out-letters song Bingo, not the housie-gambling kind).

Seriously - is there a need to bleep out the word shirt?! Or any point in taking out the word murder, when the title of their 2005 DVD set is Life on the Murder Scene? And in an album detailing the thoughts of a dying cancer patient, is removing the word gun from a song three million or so people have already bought really going to solve anything?

But shirt?!?! WTF?

Kent's nearly finished the special effects on the Kitty Hawk Big Stick video, so that'll be up on our myspace and youtube fairly soon hopefully. You can watch the original cut here, if you haven't seen it already. The new version has flames and lasers and stuff, drawn frame by frame. It's seriously awesome.

Tariqa's written an entry on the Mercury Energy customer death story. I overheard some classmates talking about it this morning, berating the company for cutting off her power. Though I'm not normally one to defend large and profiteering corporations, I had to point out that if Mercury had been advised she needed the machine to live (notably, the Manukau chief medical officer doesn't believe she did), they'd have told her to make arrangements prior to cutting off the power, and that telling the contractor on site meant nothing, as he wouldn't have been a Mercury employee anyway.

As an ex-call centre employee for a large power company, I can tell you customers behind on their bill make up all sorts of fanciful stories (ie. lies) about why their power shouldn't be cut off - so even if someone did tell him, which I doubt, he probably would've dismissed it as yet another cry of 'wolf' without much hesitation.

Basically this sounds to me like a pretty tragic series of events where no one really is at fault; but watch the Herald awkwardly nail Mercury Energy to the cross over the next few days anyway.

One last thing - and one more reason to hate the Herald - not only does their new website not work properly in my Opera browser, but now they've begun spreading out their articles over several pages (probably in order to get more page hits, and therefore more advertising dollars). I fucking hate that. IT'S THE INTERNET, YOU FUCKING RETARDS. You have all the space in the world! You don't need to stop half way through a paragraph to continue on another page. My finger doesn't mind scrolling, but my eyes and brain hate waiting.

Even in this day and age of cellphones and the internet, sometimes news takes its time getting around. I discovered this morning my friend Emma, whom I've been unable to get in touch with the past six months, died in November of a drug overdose.

We didn't have any friends in common, so I didn't know till I looked this morning at her myspace page, of all things. Last night when I was re-doing up mine, I adjusted my front page friends to number 24 instead of 8 or however many I had, and included her. She's the kind of person who loved music, going to gigs and whatnot, and I was wondering why she hadn't come to any of the shows I texted her about, or reminded me her address so I could visit. Last year she moved just down the road from us, and a few times wandering past I'd texted her to see if she was home, cause I'd forgotten the house number.

At first the messages on her myspace seemed to suggest she'd gone overseas, you know, "away" - but as I scrolled down, back in time, they got stranger, the tone darker, till one left in November saying she had died.

We met in Hamilton in 2003, bonded over a love of guitars (she had five... FIVE!!!), Queens of the Stone Age and vodka, and were briefly something of an item till she decided to move to Auckland. I couldn't keep up with her anyway, she was insane - in that you never know what's going to happen next kind of way. Fun, but unsustainable, basically! She had, at the time anyway, the best CD collection I'd ever seen too, which impresses guys like me.

Anwyay. I think it must have been around October/November last time I saw Emma, as it doesn't seem like all that long ago to be honest. But the distance between her death and now makes finding this out more surreal than anything else.

She apparently died alone, with no one to help her. I don't know the circumstances and probably never will, but that sounds pretty fucking sad to me. Part of me thinks I'm glad we didn't have any friends in common, as it doesn't sound like they were good people to hang with, if this is what they were involved in. On the other hand, maybe there was no one to shake some sense into her, that perhaps heroin wasn't the best choice of drug. She always drank a lot, at least when I properly knew her, but last time we talked she said she didn't really drink anymore. I had no way of knowing what she'd replaced it with - I don't think I've ever known a heroin user. Not knowingly, anyway.

But as I said already, this is more surreal than anything else to me at the moment. It's not like we ever hung out deliberately at all since I moved up here, really. 

But as one of her closer friends said on her myspace, she'll be playing guitar with Johnny Cash now.

The new Manics album came out on Saturday, but I didn't get to listen to it till this morning as tariqa and I went to Hamilton for the weekend. Every time we go somewhere a fair distance in a car we inevitably have a fight, so once that was out of the way everything else went pretty well. hung out with Rob at his place, we had a couple of drinks and watched old "home movies" of us in our various bands and things. We came across this Big Elephants band practice (apparently that's the practice with a 'c') playing this song I have absolutely no recollection of, and it sounded awesome, like a long-lost Smashing Pumpkins track or something.

Anyway, crashed at mums, went to Chartwell with my little sister (who now sports blue-black hair, eyeliner and listens to Tool) where we all bought and devoured far too many lollies. And Hamilton being Hamilton, all three of us managed to run into people we knew.

Then we had a game of Monopoly, where I managed to build too many houses and rip off everyone for a victory. If only I was such an asshole in real life... and came home. I didn't get to listen to the new Manics album then either, cause of an awesome TV lineup of Simpsons, 'Earl, and Anchorman.

Sooo... I cranked it this morning at half past seven. It's definitely a step away from where they were heading on the underrated Lifeblood, which I suppose is a good decision in many ways - the reviews have been good, and the sales will probably overtake Lifeblood's pretty quickly. On first listen, the mashed up hard-limited production (that every album seems to have these days) doesn't do their re-discovered 'rock' sound any favours, but there's plenty going on in each of the songs I'm sure will shine through on a few more listens. In a lot of ways it sounds like a fuller, more eclectic follow-on from James' solo album. Lyrically, not so much, of course...

Anyway. Classtime.

Insane. These guys, the King Brothers, played at about three in the morn, two bands before us. The pics click open to larger versions - in which you'll notice they're playing in the crowd. I didn't get a decent shot of the drummer unfortunately, but while playing, they managed to move all their gear (including the drumkit) from the stage to the dancefloor. It was awesome.

Luckily we didn't have to follow them, but didn't get on stage till 4.30am. There were still plenty of people hanging around though, and we played pretty well... so hopefully some of them will rib their mates for going home early and tell them about us. If they got our name - Kent announced us as Slayer, and I as Queen...

At one point, my shoelace came undone, and I stuck my foot up on the foldback (not that they were working, but anyhoo) all AC/DC style. Kent saw it, and asked the audience if anyone would tie it up for me. Haha, yeah whatever, I thought, and we started the next song. Just then, a girl came up and tied up the laces, as we played. It was so awesome that when we left, I gave her my excess beer tickets. I felt like I owed her!

Speaking of giving out free beer, I ran into Calum, a guy I used to play in a couple of bands with around the turn of the millenium. He was our drummer, until he quit to move to Wellington to study classical piano. I've always maintained we're the only band in history to have broken up because their drummer left to study classical piano. Well, he tells me he still does a bit of piano, but is now studying pure mathematics, doing his honours.

So... I think I can now safely say we're the only band in history whose ex-drummer went on to do an honours in pure mathematics! Haha.

Monthly Top Ten Albums!

1. Nine Inch Nails - Year Zero
2. LCD Soundsystem - Sound Of Silver
3. Amy Racecar - Conclusions
4. Arcade Fire - Neon Bible
5. Silverchair - Young Modern
6. Good, the Bad and the Queen - s/t
7. Tenacious D - The Pick of Destiny
8. Trans Am - Sex Change
9. Decemberists - The Crane Wife
10. My Chemical Romance - The Black Parade

I've just been looking through seek.co.nz for a new job (yes, while at work - but that and me taking hour long lunch breaks are what my employer deserves at the moment), and came across some positions at MTV New Zealand. MTV NZ!!! It's back, finally. It would seem.

Just ran into my old mate Nate. He's going to the US with his girlfriend, i mean wife (that still seems weird) to live. I always planned when younger to go to England to live at some point, but it's looking less and less likely. Not to mention its less and less a thing I really care about.

I had this awesome dream the other night. It was short too, which is good, cause I suck at remembering dreams. So I'm on stage with an acoustic guitar, performing a gig with Rob, like the luna spark gig at the Circle Jerk. We see none other than Johnny Cash in the audience, near the back, and I say to Rob, 'hey, watch this.' I walk up to the mic, and impersonate the Man in Black himself, saying in a deep voice, 'Hi, I'm Johnny Cash.' I thought Johnny might get pissed off, but no. He cracked up laughing.

And that was that.