I sat my restricted driver licence test yesterday, at the grand old age of 28. The timing though not deliberate, seems apt.

Young guys in their cars statistically die more often between 16 and 25, and I’m past that. Rock stars die at 27, so  I’m free of that obstacle too. In more ways than age.

I was always convinced when younger I’d die in a car accident - my suspicion was it wouldn’t be whilst I was in a car, but cycling or jaywalking, but I figured with accident rates as they are for young guys, my rock star ambitions and the fact I grew up in a car-less family in a flat city, I’d be better off not getting behind the wheel too soon.

Still, there was never any conscious decision to wait this long - I began learning in 2003, with lessons from Rob - as a part of my post-freakout/Aropax, get in line phase - which never got beyond practise drives around Flagstaff. The theory was if we (I) hit anyone, the family would either be nice and rich enough to handle it, or evil and rich enough for us to be doing the universe a favour. Then again, getting to speed where injury was even a possibility was a problem, with my inept gear-changing skills.

I barely touched a steering wheel again till late last year, when Parker’s impending arrival, the realisation I had a real job, being past 27 and Tariqa’s … encouragement, got my motivation back up. 

I ran out of money a couple of times, and had to cancel what I thought would have been my last lesson - driving on busy motorways, lane changes and parallel parking - because Parker decided to arrive a few days earlier than we expected. That night was my first time driving by myself, which despite the disaster of getting completely lost, gave me the confidence I could actually make a car go forwards in the direction I wanted it to, etc.

Now, after spending a couple of months sometimes bussing, sometimes driving to work with the well-rehearsed (in my mind) ‘But officer, I’m 28 - I have a family - I’m not some 15-year-old hoon, I’m just trying to get to work,’ spiel ready to go, I have my restricted licence. The testing guy was a dick (’For the love of god, look out!’ when I was travelling 30km/h down an empty road towards a deserted pedestrian crossing), but gave me a pass, despite not saying a single nice thing about my driving skills from the time we met till the time we parted (where he took care to lock his door, but left the window wide open). 

I was driving home today in heavy lunchtime traffic, and realised, holy shit - I’m an Auckland commuter, in my own car, driving home from work to my family, listening to the Rolling Stones and Floyd on a Friday afternoon with the window down. 

In my defence there are no buses at 4.30am for my morning commute, and even if there were, I’m sure they’d still find a way to take 45 minutes to get to Eden Terrace. And I was listening to Bis and the Talking Heads, which are still cool. Aren’t they?

Mirrored from Radio Over Moscow.

… and they want their full-length interview taken down due to concerns over the recording of Muslim prayers. I’m not kidding - just got a call, the website I work for has been hosting a full-length interview with the band, as well as the cut version for TV, as we normally do.

It turns out half way through the interview, the band call a halt to proceedings, recorded in Morocco, as it’s prayer time for the local Muslim populace. But the camera and sound guys, whom I’m pretty sure were a local crew (don’t quote me on that), didn’t stop recording.

I’m sure it’s out of respect, ’cause they’re good dudes and all that, but I’m still gonna say U2: SCARED OF THE MUSLIMS for the googles.

Mirrored from Radio Over Moscow.

I think my taxi driver home tonight was drunk. He was driving with one hand, never once using his left hand - and he was driving an automatic, swerved all over the road - having trouble staying in lanes even when they were straight and almost hit cars parked on the side of the road - several times.

But I also think he was stoned, cause he did this all at a mere 40km/h, a full 30km/h slower than the average Auckland Co-op taxi driver.

On another note, I do wonder how this place will rent. I mean, it’s ‘close to all amenities’, but HAS NO FUCKING KITCHEN. Tariqa suggests perhaps we could live there and have pizza every night, and for $180 a week in rent, I’m sure we could.

I’m working on getting ‘Anti-Human Nous‘ onto the Nightline weather music - I just have to harass David Farrier the exact right amount, not too much, not too little.

Mirrored from Radio Over Moscow.

Back to work today, but I'm not sure how it will go. Had physio yesterday, seems that although a pinched nerve might be contributing to the problem in my right hand, it's also looking like a case of tendonitis and a lack of signals getting from my brain to my fingers.

When I hold my hands still, the fingers on my right hand shake a bit, because apparently they're lacking stability information from the brain, like the steadicam feature on a handicam.

The splint is beginning to cause its own problems - it can get quite uncomfortable, probably because it is designed more for thumb support than anything else.

The physio guy has prescribed me this odd routine of dipping my feet in and out of icy/hot buckets of water - something about reprogramming my nervous system or something.

Of all the times for something like this to come up, this is the worst! Christmas/New Years, which meant it was a week and a half from the time I saw the doctor before getting to physio, and if it gets any worse it will impact on my ability to do my job, and with babby due soon, that's not good.

Lucky I'm taking a break from guitar, huh? But if I can't use a computer much, the all-electro album isn't going to get far either. Grrr.

I'm only posting 'cause I feel I need at least one more 'TOP ALBUMS OF THE LAST X WEEKS' post before I can nerdily work out my top albums. I already had to come up with five for the 3 News list, they probably won't match my mathematically calculated top 20, but hey. 

Today is my last day of work till New Year's Eve. And it's only four hours of work, and five hours of party - unfortunately the party part comes first - we always seem to do things in a backward-ass way, haha.

Next week I'll be in Htown, hopefully getting some good vocal takes out of Rob. It is also to be hoped Tariqa doesn't go into labour while I'md down there. 

My wrist is all messed up since I mowed the lawn last week. Lesson? Don't mow the lawn. I'm going to the doctor tomorrow, hopefully he'll give me one of those wrist splint things and I can pretend it's a cybernetic weapon enhancement.


TOP TEN ALBUMS OF THE LAST THREE WEEKS!

1. Guns N' Roses - Chinese Democracy
2. Kanye West - 808s and Heartbreak
3. LadyHawke - LadyHawke
4. Bed Folds - Way To Normal
5. Kings of Leon - Only By The Night
6. The Killers - Day & Age
7. Over the Atlantic - Dimensions
8. Decortica - A New Aesthetic
9. Oasis - Dig Out Your Soul
10. Ryan Adams - Cardinology

 I've been totally neglecting this place, haven't I?

Um... work is as usual. Finished and informed everyone of the new Style Guide, but it seems everyone has pretty much ignored it going by what's appearing on the site when I'm not there.

It's too fucking hot to do anything.

I've had one driving lesson, and have another in half an hour or so.

We bought some drawers on the weekend, despite heading out to look at cots and strollers.

No progress on the recording front.

I've decided to try and watch all four previous seasons of Lost before the new one starts. It's perhaps the only show that requires revision before each season.

I've made about $4 from Google Adsense from fightingdantasy.blogspot.com to date. That's about 10c an entry. Bought a whole heap of the books I'm missing.

And woo hoo, Blur are back together. Finally.

Yah.

I suppose instead of posting silly pics and random bits it's about time I should actually make a classic LJ entry with what's actually happening in my life, etc etc. As boring as that is.

Well... after months of bitching, I finally did something about the taxi situation at work. Basically, up until recently, everyone in the news dept got company-paid taxis home if they were working late, and us in the online dept didn't, despit the fact on most nights we're the last ones to leave, usually between 12am and 1am, and at least two of us at any one time have 5am starts. I was at the company orientation day (seven months after starting!) on Wednesday last week, and the bigwigs were giving their 'online is the future and vitally important to the business' speeches. I didn't want to stick my hand up and make a scene during the presentation, but when one of them wandered over to our group during morning tea, with the encouragement of the other online people there I decided to speak up.

I simply asked her why, if we're so important and the future of the business, were we paid the least and not given carparks so are basically forced to walk home in the middle of the night...? And to my surprise, she said when the taxi system was rejigged a couple of months ago, we were meant to be included - funny, cause we all remember when the system was rejigged, and how we were first told we had taxis, then when we went to claim them we were told it was a mistake, and we didn't get them.

But now we do, and it's awesome - no more dodging drunks and oddballs in the middle of the night on the way home!

So that's pretty boring to anyone but us online people I suppose. I suppose I've also been a bit reluctant to write recently because we've had a few baby-related headaches, which is nothing any of you need to know about in any specific detail. We're pretty confident it's all worry and stress over nothing, but it's been a reminder having a baby certainly isn't the easiest thing in the world. It's the kind of thing that would never have been noticed before ultrasound was around, and the docs don't really know too much about, but reading about it on the net it seems the overriding vast majority of experiences end in completely normal babies, so yeah. Don't stress, cause we don't need anymore of that.

The house is slowly beginning to show signs of an impending mini-Dan though. Unfortunately, the cats seem to think the house is slowly beginning to show signs of cat domination, as you can see to the right.

tariqa  went and saw The Phantom of the Opera the other night, so you should tell her to post something about it.

TOP TEN ALBUMS OF THE LAST 3 WEEKS!

1. Chinese Democracy - Guns n' Roses (I never thought I'd be able to write that)
2. LadyHawke - LadyHawke
3. Friendly Fires - Friendly Fires
4. Dig Out Your Soul - Oasis
5. Only by the Night - Kings of Leon
6. Dear Science - TV On the Radio
7. Friendly Fires - Friendly Fires
8. 808s and Heartbreak - Kanye West
9. Electric Arguments - The Fireman
10. Day & Age - The Killers

Despite the ridiculous autotuning on the Kanye West album - even when he's rapping - there's something about it which makes it all work. I suppose it's the singular, consistent vision of the album, it kind of exists in its own world or something. Best track? 'Paranoid'. It's full-on electro-pop, but without sampling Daft Punk or anything. I tried the autotune on my own vocals for the new stuff, but as it's not as electro as Kanye's stuff, I couldn't really get it to fit in.

And Chinese Democracy? It's a good album, surprisingly enough. And perhaps even more surprisingly, it's not overly compressed and brick-walled like 99% of other hard rock albums nowadays. You can actually hear how brilliant the production is, and the songs ain't bad either - particularly 'Sorry', 'Better', and the Beatles-esque 'Catcher in the Rye'. And the guitar solo on 'Shackler's Revenge' is bizarro - I assume that's Buckethead's work.

 How can I convince a friend of mine not to make the same mistake I did by getting a job with an insurance company?!

We used to get loads of emails at work from disgruntled viewers who complained our coverage was biased towards National. Over the last couple of months, it's been all about how we're so obviously favouring Labour, even down to the red ties. Then yesterday, the emails reverted back to accusing us of not only favouring National, but are in 'lock step' with our 'American/National' backers. Hmmm.

Anyway, I haven't done this for a while: TOP TEN ALBUMS OF THE LAST MONTH!!! WOooOOoo.

1. Last Shadow Puppets - The Age of the Understatement
2. Primal Scream - Beautiful Future
3. My Morning Jacket - Evil Urges
4. Scars on Broadway - s/t
5. Portishead - Third
6. Weezer - Red Album
7. REM - Accelerate
8. Coldplay - Viva La Vida
9. Fleet Foxes - s/t
10. Motley Crue - Saints of Los Angeles

For the record, I don't really know who anyone at work is planning to vote for, and I'm not sure it's the kind of workplace/industry where it would be wise to ask. Except one woman who's outwardly announced she's voting for ACT, but I don't think it's because she has convictions, she says doesn't care about other people.

Today was one of them days where for the first few hours of the day I'm plodding through news, putting up whatever I can get my hands on in the absence of anything else, then for the next few hours I'm racing like a mad chicken dealing with two fires, a fatal car crash, a surprise drop in petrol prices, the crazed rants of a murderer, the pope, reports the Govt is considering universal student allowances (an issue I once went as far as getting arrested over) and Tony Veitch's resignation. Goddamn world, you could have spread this out over the week.

TOP 3 ALBUMS OF THE PAST FORTNIGHT!

1. My Morning Jacket - Evil Urges
2. Coldplay - Viva La Vida
3. Weezer - The Red Album

These past couple of weeks I've been listening to my 'classics/driving' playlist on random more than anything else, really. One morning at 4.25am as I left the house, the first song the iPod decided to play, at a loud volume (it was a quiet 4.25am after all, and the neighbours weren't fighting that night) was Master of Puppets. Now that's a way to wake up.

...but only if you're an animal in Simon & Garfunkel's unfortunately fictional At The Zoo. To be honest, they also make outlandish claims about the trustworthiness of monkeys and giraffes, insult the intelligence of elephants, paint orangutans as National Party supporters and Zebras as reactionaries (without specifying which side of the divide they sit on, if any), say antelopes wish to impose their religion on other creatures and hamsters are stoners, and all the while pigeons are plotting to overthrow the entire system, to which I say, really?

Pigeons?

Cause buses here suck. I can't even get one from here to work, 35 min walk away, or back. I'm noticing this more now that it's winter proper, and that the few of us in my dept don't get taxis home, like everyone else. The common reaction, after shock, is that once one of us gets mugged, we'll get taxis. It is only vaguely amusing that in reality, this apparently has already happened, and nothing changed.

Last night, in the pouring hail and gusting wind, there was a dude standing beneath this bridge - the one that spans this pic from north (up) to south (down). My way home, the only way I know home, is via the road that goes beneath it from the right of the pic to the left - and from the ground, in the rain and hail, figuring out alternative path in the witching hour on the fly isn't easy. And as huge as the north-south motorway it looks, there's only a small, one-across pathway for pedestrians beneath this thing. The road is blocked off by a fence about my neck height, presumably at the behest of council, looking either to reduce the number of pedestrian vs vehicle attacks (either way). Considering I've never heard of one happening ever, the fence in reality only serves as a trap for law-abiding people who work shifts.

It's almost like Indiana Jones crossing a ravine - The road is 10 metres across, but you get to use one... and fuck you if you need more.

I eventually found a way, but not before being frightened by a harmless old man on a bike and running through some mud in the top left of the map, then finding myself walking past creepy trees and seeing a strange man on the other, southern side of the road, running and stopping in a strange correlation to my own travels.

This analysis of what the Nats actually stand for is awesome. Props to Sexy Andy for the link. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only white, non-married male in NZ who isn't voting for reduced investment in education and tax breaks for people who make a lot of money but contribute nothing to society. Then again, those meant to be representing us don't always make it easy, and the alternative are often lunatics. Them's the problems with representative democracies...

The Herald hasn't given up on its retard stock photo story, but at least the vast majority of their readers, who can't usually be trusted for good judgment, have told them just how stupid they're acting. As probably the day's biggest politics story, somehow, we had to cover it but at least I tried to be a bit more neutral in my headline.

Yeah, our new site looks pretty, doesn't it? There were a few teething problems, completely normal I suppose but then again, not every website has to deal with a John Campbell on-air-plug sending thousands to it all at once!

Check this out. It's pretty much the coolest, oddest but most creative remix, ever.


Big Ideas (don't get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

Takes a while to get started, but pretty awesome.

I installed a cleaning/housework regime on the weekend, but have been terrible in sticking to it myself this week... must... do... dishes...

It seems the Child Poverty Action Group want the Working For Families package extended to cover beneficiaries. This sounds good in theory, as I've always agreed that not offering support to families, working or not, punishes the children more than it does the parents - it's not their fault they were born into a poor family, etc etc. But the problem is that Working For Families is a tax break - if you don't pay tax on earnings, you don't get a break - which is a problem for beneficiaries, isn't it?

Anyway. I suppose in principle I support their ultimate aim, but they've gone the complete backward-ass way about it, and at a particularly bad time. Funnily enough, National will benefit from this far-left idea, not Labour, who are damned if they agree, and damned if they don't.

I drove the 6pm/Campbell Live cutting tonight for the first time, pretty hectic, much more so than Nightline. The top stories file refused to upload properly though, it was there and playing off the FTP server just fine, but wouldn't appear on the website. We restarted the computer, and the FTP was showing two identically named wmv files, which I thought was unpossible, then suddenly they both vanished. IT said they'd no idea what was going on, then suddenly it all came right. Weird.

I'm gonna go read Time. This time tomorrow night, we're all expecting Hillary Clinton to have woken up from her dream and faced reality for the first time in months, so that should be exciting. If not, there'll be stories about how she hasn't for the millionth day in a row anyway...

On the way to work this morning (which is to say somewhere between 4.25am and 4.59am this morning) I saw two complete baguettes, fresh-looking, just lying in the gutter, 50 metres or so apart. I was a little bemused, till around the 15-minute mark when I came across a footpath chilly bin marked "FREE FRENCH BREAD - HELP YOURSELF" with myriad loaves, all undated and looking half frozen, and half stale.

Just after the chilly bin a man who looked just like a Tibetan monk, except wearing civilian clothes ('cause Tibetan monks aren't civilians?) ran right past me. A few minutes later I had to cross the road to avoid some vagrants. Well, they might just have been backpackers hanging outside a place with a sign saying 'HOSTEL', but I wasn't taking my chances.

I also came across a working Nokia cellphone, which I ditched upon realising it was the kind of brick I used to mock back when I owned a Sagem. That, and it was under a bridge, and so was probably some kind of trap.

My walks to work this early aren't usually this exciting! Except for yesterday when REM's Accelerate was exactly the same length as my walk. I'm not kidding - I'm Gonna DJ ended at the exact moment I hit the stairs and for the last time, knocked on the door to be let in. Yes, I finally got a swipe card, so now if I really wanted to, I could go to work at 5am. Oh wait...

Budget? Um, I'm not going to use it to buy cheese, but I have a few comments. Firstly, although the much touted 'average' worker earns $45k, the median worker - an almost infinitely better gauge of how the everyday person is going - earns about $35k, according to some five-minute-maths I've just done using a simplified income stats table, which I'm 99% sure mirrors reality. CEOs can earn millions, but no one can earn below zero, remember...

I'm bound to remember more and add it later, if not to this entry then to new ones...

Oh yeah. I'm totally excited about the new Indiana Jones movie. I've read a bazillion reviews, and once again, I think it's a case of "even the bad reviews make it sound good!" again... my trilogy DVD set was a casualty of the recent robbery, but the marathon last weekend has got me back going. one thing the reviews seem to agree on is that a) Harrison Ford is the best thing about the film, and b) Shia La Buffet is actually pretty good. I mean, he did a good job in Transformers, but it wasn't like he had to act at all in that, so it's hard to understand how he got the "new Indy" job (let's not beat around the bush) so quickly... but I bet many are happy it wasn't Hayden Christiansen.

In Anakin's defence, I've read some pieces recently that suggested he was supposed to be an angsty teenager the whole time, meaning Christiansen pulled the character off brilliantly, and shouldn't be mocked. To a degree I agree, except that Darth Vader would never have given a shit about sand, and that Lucas could have given him some better dialogue... like, dialogue people would actually speak. But then again, I still think the atmosphere wins out and I'm still totally organising an ultra-marathon, even if it takes a bring-your-own chair policy and extreme drunkenness to get through it all.

WEEKLY TOP TEN (FIVE) OF THE LAST FORTNIGHT!

1.  R.E.M - Accelerate
2. Portishead- Third
3. Supergrass - Diamond Hoo-Ha
4. Radiohead - The Bends
5. U2 - Zooropa

The photocopier at work is one of them machines that make a supersonic high-pitched 'eeeeeeeeeeee' sound that seems to annoy no one but me. I really don't know why my hearing has not deteriorated enough for this not to be a problem - I've barraged my eardrums since I was 14 with walkmans, iPods, gigs and practises, yet I can still hear monitors squealing and other electro-buzzes that 90% of one of my classes last year were blissfully unaware of. I don't know if I'm cursed or blessed!

So if anyone ever installs one of these horrible things in my vicinity I'll be destroying it quick smart.

In other news, or should I say otherworldly, Darth Vader's failed, drunken attack on a Jedi church has landed him a suspended sentence. I'm not kidding.

I've made some amusing mistakes at work this week, all part of the learning curve according to my manager. The best was perhaps when a popup menu came out of nowhere just as I was clicking into the article edit tool, and instead I'd somehow moved the national news stories to the top of the page.

It seems I'm not the only one who thinks Lisa Lewis' boobs are kinda freaky. Quite an amusing article, that one is.

Out of interest, I wanted to see if my last post about Larry Baldock being a cock comes up in a Google search for the guy, and sure enough, of 115,000 reported results, my post is already the 36th hit. Sweet. I'm sticking it to the man.

Check it out. Isn't that awesome? Not in a "yay, the dinosaurs are dead" kind of way, but in that spooky old-timey parallel kind of way? Dinosaurs were likely wiped out because of a process which we humans are deliberately feeding, 65 millions years on.

While reading up a bit more on the extinction, I came across this chart (which I'm shamelessly going to hotlink 'cause I think Wikipedia can handle my immense traffic):



Basically what it's showing is that over time, the general trend is for mass extinctions to be less and less severe because of increasing biodiversity. evolution. If this isn't a proof of evolution, I don't know what it is. Proof God is chilling out in his old age?

Wicked, this post gives me a chance to whip out my much-neglected 'science' tag.

It has been suggested to me that going to bed the second I get home from work, somewhere between 12am and 1am, isn't the best thing - evidenced by the length of time it takes me to get to sleep, despite my tiredness. So I think I'll post here each night, good enough a reason as any. Staying up and winding down in front of yet another LCD screen probably isn't ideal, but it's better than nothing. I'm too tired to read a magazine - probably because it isn't backlit!

I was thinking the other day, and hoping it would last, that despite everything that's gone down in the recent while, I'm probably the happiest I have ever been in my adult life, right now. Happy as in content, you know? Well, all my burning angst is under control anyway. Life isn't the easiest it's been, I'm not the richest I've been, I'm not exactly in the nicest house I've ever lived in, I haven't exactly got a band that's going anywhere (more on that at a later date, okay), but not much of it bothers me too much at the moment. I think it's because it has finally dawned on me over the last few months that Tariqa and I really are going to be together, forever. And for someone who can still hardly believe he's no longer meant to be a confused, afraid-of-never-getting-a-girl teenager, that's a huge weight off my shoulders!

Oh, and I don't hate my job, and it's not a job just anyone could do either, which pleases the grammar-nazi in me. Seriously, you should see some of the comments that come through onto the website. Holy shite.

Ryan Adams has started posting again... goodbye friends page... but it's awesome that he's been posting loads of Werewolph videos. Why is it that the best extreme death metal is made by an eccentric country singer? (I recommend not clicking on that link if there are children or grannies in the vicinity)

Ryan Adams has dyed his hair blonde.

Anyway, I've completed my first week at TV3 - how fast did the week go, goddamn!? I suppose that's what you get when you get a job you actually like and isn't the same thing over and over and over, and you know you're at pretty much the bottom and can only go up.

I got a small kick today to see a headline I wrote appear as the lead in news.google.co.nz's Sci/Tech section. I wasn't expecting it, and only wrote it an hour earlier, so to stumble across it randomly was pretty cool.

I have a huge list of things to do tomorrow - get a bike pump, fix bike, remove bike from Vulcan Lane, buy a jacket and a man bag, get receipts /quotes for stolen gear, drop off store key to Saturday staff, buy some blank CDs (optional), check mail, return library books, and maybe get a haircut. I'm not going to do things in that order, though cause that'd be inefficient.

I came across this article through Fark, and thought it'd make a good 'meme' of sorts. It's supposedly a list of 'obsolete' skills - how many do you still use?

Frustrating day. Firstly, the adjustments I needed to make to my bike (largely to make the front brakes work as well as the back) which I thought would take 5 minutes took an hour and a half - and even then it seems the brakes themselves just don't work properly, and it's nothing that can be adjusted into submission, at least it seems that way. They just don't centre themselves after use, so one of the things rubs against the tyre permanently - but if you loosen them, to get rid of that rubbing, they barely work. Grrr.

Then just as I made it into the central city, my front tyre went flat.

Then when I got to work, Mark said head office want to cut down the hours worked at the store overall, and sent through a laughable joke of a roster which would see him working ten hour days (opening and closing) with the other "full timer" coming in for four hours a day. It'd be the same on the weekends, except Sudnay would be sole charge - no opportunity for breaks, nothing. Hmmm.

Why? The usual reasons - declining sales, increase in the minimum wage. Funny, because when our sales doubled after two other stores on the street vanished, our wages didn't. And if they want us to sell more albums, reducing the number of people in the store isn't going to do it.

All on a "I'm not even supposed to be here today!" day!

Anyway... I saw some of the SAFE people on Queen St today, and thought I'd ask them if they'd heard about the China/Olymipcs/cats thing - the lady said yes, then barely paused before going into her asking-for-money spiel. Grrr. Enough cats at home already to feed... 

Graduation is on Friday. I didn't go to be degree grad day, couldn't afford it, so will this time.

Looks like an old friend from my band back in Htown is keen to jam on some new stuff with Marty, so Raid Over Moscow looks like it might actually happen... it's been too easy so far, haha, so we'll see.

Okay, so I stole that headline straight from fark.com, a site where the headlines are usually humorous in nature; it's a cruel irony I suppose this one is no joke. How many times do we have to tell people it's not about smacking, it's about stopping people who beat their children senseless using the "I'm the parent, I can do what I want" defence in court?

That's right, it doesn't really matter how many times we say it, because papers like the Herald are never going admit Labour did something right.

Grrr!

I've been proofing all week at Groove (look out for an article tangentially about MC Stormtroopa), was planning to spend this week working on demos for a potential new band Marty and I gonna try and form, but money is good too. I had a job interview at TV3 on Monday and was told I'd most likely be called back for a second interview, so that'd be awesome.

Anyway, this potential new band needs a name. We're hoping to find something along the lines of a cool 1980s computer game, and have whittled it down to two. One is better, and probably would suit the idea we have more, but is quite well-known and no doubt taken a million times over already - Paradroid. The other is cool, and would make a good Pitchfork/late-2000s-indie band name, but that's not the kind of band we're gonna be, but it's cool regardless - Raid Over Moscow. Any suggestions? The songs I have in mind are a mix of some of what we used to play in SAM/Slow Learner/Vetox, and mroe recent ones, obviously. Start with three of us, keep it loose and simple, then develop from there. Starting a band is the hardest part, and I don't want to start dealing with extra guitarists and keyboardists and triangulators till we've proved to ourselves the band is worth pursuing. I've no idea how good a bassist Marty is, but he's an okay guitarist so yeah. Grunge-pop for the win.

I'm going to re-kickoff my Fighting Fantasy blog, Fighting Dantasy (get it? lol). I'll start with pretty much the same two posts I did back when I tried it the first time (April or May last year) then get stuck in further this time, honest! It's empty at the time of writing though. Will get on it tonight perhaps. I'll consider switching to Joomla (anyone used it?) or Wordpress or something later on, if it's worthwhile, will stay at budget ol' blogspot till then.

So how about that cricket the other day? 300 deliveries apiece, seven hours of cricket, and both NZ and England manage to score a massive 340 runs. Insane. By far the highest scoring draw in ODI history, and if NZ had managed to score two off the last ball, instead of one, it would've been the third highest run chase of all time, and meant they 4 of the top 5 chases, while they currently only have a meager 3 :p


Top Albums of the Last Fortnight!

1. The Replacements - Tim
2. Liam Finn - I'll Be Lightning
3. Goldfrapp - Seventh Tree
4. Hot Chip - Made in the Dark
5. Ryan Adams - Easy Tiger
6. Radiohead - In Rainbows