Saturday, March 24, 2001
Croquet? Yes, the Club is back in business for 2001, with our first meeting last night. After which Je and I went out for a bit of a dance. All in all, it explains why I'm currently feeling like my head is stuffed with cotton wool. It was all good fun and the minutes will be up on the website as soon as I decipher everyone's writing.
PS: I danced in a cage. Rah!
1:44 PM - link to this -
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Thursday, March 22, 2001
Well, I just watched The Patriot. I think I might have enjoyed it more if I was American. Or at least less cynical.
Perish the thought. Both of them.
Starts out fairly mediocre with a nice little family warmth lilt that you know isn't going to last. Mel Gibson's good at that quirky sort of humour. And incidentally, have I mentioned that his voice is now in my top ten "Voices that make me swoon" list? Seriously, watch this movie with your eyes closed. Aaaaah...
Ahem. Where was I? Oh yeah. Then there's the predictable end to innocence. After the most stunning sequence of the movie - a blistering action scene - it settles into a standard (but amusing nonetheless) guerilla warfare stint. Then things get complicated. Never too much so, though. After all, we wouldn't want to confuse any of our happily patriotic audience by unwarranted complexity, would we?. Still, though, it manages a broad portrait of all sides, and it's really not too bad.
A broad swathe of jingoistic fervour runs straight up the middle of this movie, as you might expect. The only thing that stopped this being another Independence Day for me was the occasional brilliant character moments, brief flashes of stunning acting and writing. If there'd been more of them and less silly flag-waving, this would have been a much more enjoyable 2 and three-quarters hours of my life.
Oh, and the villain was delicious. Simply wonderful. He made the moments when the ever-edible Heath Ledger wasn't on screen bearable. He swaggered. He sneered. He ponced about being as evil and vicious as ever an English-accented Disney bad-guy ever was. (Can we say Jeremy Irons? I thought we could.)
In general, not a waste of celluloid.
PS: Yes, it was abso-flogging-lutely hilarious to watch a couple of Australia's favourite sons playing American patriots. Next, I'd like to see Russell Crowe play Abraham Lincoln. Or perhaps Hugh Jackman as Henry Kissinger. Whaddya think?
11:04 PM - link to this -
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Wednesday, March 21, 2001
A big cheerful wave to anyone from CANADA who happens to drop by. G'day and stuff. Specifically hello to Jeremy, if you come back again and happen to read this, and give that Aussie girl a big hug hello from me, y'hear? (I'm sure you know the one I mean, but if you don't, just hug every Aussie girl you know to make sure you get the right one. Aussie girls need hugs too.)
(And hey, Lizz, sorry about that. I mean, I'm sure everyone gets enough spam of their own without having to put up with mine as well. That's just a little bit bizarre.)
7:13 AM - link to this -
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Monday, March 19, 2001
Well, I guess that's it then, kiddies. Might as well pack up my blog and go home. (This lends so much credence to that quote: "If you build it, they will come.")
9:25 PM - link to this -
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Hah. Here's another entry guaranteed to get me even further banned on those safe-surf filter things (through which this delicious collection of college-student profanity and realism is apparently already unviewable). I may or may not have mentioned that Snake River Conspiracy is my new musical obsession, far eclipsing just about every obsession thus far with the power of my brief and impassioned Kittie flirtation, but holding on for the duration. Anyway, the following review of their single 'Vulcan' was not written by me. More's the pity. I wish I could write like that. It made me laugh so hard I fell off my chair. Literally. I'm going to have a bruise. So yeah, I thought I'd share it. It's pinched shamelessly off the Snake River Conspiracy main site, in their 'Press' section.
NME SINGLE OF THE WEEK
Snake River Conspiracy
Vulcan
(morpheus)
"FUCKKKKKKKKK!" That's how this stomping, swirling, clanging, roaring, superbly overproduced and frankly mental masterpiece of slickly ultra-discordant disco studio-punka starts and, just in case you've not quite grasped the track's subject matter, the lady singer screams "FUCKKKKKKKKKKK!" again and again and again very loudly and at regular intervals. Brilliant!
"FUCKKKKKKKKKKKK!" there she goes again. Imagine, if you will, Ginger from Garbage in a kick-boxing grudge match to the death with mock-cokernee Shouty Woman out of Republica. With Atari Teenage Riot's Alec Emprie as referee.
"FUCKKKKKKKKKKKK!" Shit, yes! This is what Indie Spice would sound like in a perfect world. Hell, this is what Bernard Butler would sound like if he wasn't just another scruffy, gurly-haired, po-faced, lemon-sucking muso bore with an overblown reputation and an artistically crippling Beatles fixation.
"FUCKKKKKKKKKKKK!" Thank you, God! You bastard! You make this poor boy sit through hour after hour of sub-listenable pseudo-'60's wank and cod-cerebral musoid anti-pop and E-fucked post-Ibiza nonger bollocks and then - just as he reaches the very pit of the trough of despond and starts to think that every single fucking single released this week is going to stink like a long-term homeless person's trainers marinated for a millennium in diseased dog shit - you slap him in the face with a slab of pop so shiny, so gratuitously aggressive and so 1999 and three-fucking-quarters that he involunarily ejaculates all over the computer screen with joy.
"FUCKKKKKKKKKKK!" It's Y2K Tourette's Pop and it beats the living shit out every single other record released this week and then dances naked around a bonfire of their burning corpses daubed in satanic runes and gibbering like a traumatised gibbon.
Like the woman says -"FUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKKKKKKKKKKK!"
4:36 PM - link to this -
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Been anally raped by a large web-based consortium? (Translation from Dee-lingo: Have you have a website on Tripod summarily deleted?) Well then, maybe this site will help you. Normally I'm not up for this protesting against the webpage providers, because usually they're quite within their rights and all that, and my apathy kicks in. But this Tripod deletion without prior warning (that's the killer right there) was just wrong. At the very least, warning notes of the violations should have been sent out. It would have just been polite.
8:05 AM - link to this -
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Sunday, March 18, 2001
I have previously commented a little on the larcenous tendencies of college students. But since she brought it up (I should have know you had a dodgy past, Shauny!), I thought I might explore the theme more fully.
Oh boy. Where to start?
Firstly, you have to understand something about my college, and I don't think this is limited to us. Our motto is: "Why not?" So, if someone was, for instance, to say: "Hey, let's steal a V-dub beetle and put it in the VC's parking place with a goat tethered to the steering wheel", the general response would be in the affirmative. The only problem would be finding a goat. And the solution to that, of course, would be to steal one.
Nothing is safe in Canberra. Especially around Scavenger Hunt time, when the real estate signs disappear like magic. Only things that are firmly cemented to bedrock survive. More about that later. This is about totally random acts of kleptomania. And a few carefully premeditated ones.
The first story I'd like to tell is my own induction into the world of sticky-fingeredness.
The target: a large cardboard cutout devil. I believe he was snapping his fingers, and probably holding a pitchfork. He was definitely advertising firelighters in Supabarn. He was cool.
The plan: beautiful in its simplicity. Grab a trolley. Place devil in bottom. Dump coats on top. Go through checkout, wheel trolly away to freedom!
The result: went off without a hitch, despite blatantly suspicious behaviour in the form of nervous whisperings and gigglings from the perpetrators. We got weird looks, but that was it. The devil is still on J1's door. (He scored it because he pushed the trolley.)
Second story was one by report only. But it's so good, it just has to get a mention here. This story was told by the more-Aussie-than-thou Pete over summer.
The target: It was a Buck's Night, right? A pub-crawl. And the best man gathers them together before they go into one place and says: "I want all of you to pinch something for a present for the bride and groom. The person who gets the best one gets a free beer at the next place."
The result: Well, Pete thought he did pretty well making off with the license act from behind the bouncer's head. Then he got back to the bus and found some of his mates waiting with a table. A large, round, wooden, solid table. Here's how it had gone. One of them had distracted the bouncer while the rest took the table out the back into the beer garden (empty at that time). They heaved it over the wall into the alley, ran around and picked it up. Smooth.
So many stories, so little time. Another one, this one centred around the delightful thing that is the Scav Hunt. Various items are procured - sexually suggestive road signs ('Slippery when wet' is a personal favourite) and park benches among them - but the year we stepped up to bat (our first year) one had never been accomplished.
The target: a concrete bollard. Scattered throughout the campus of the ANU like ossified giants' marbles, these round concrete balls mark off pedestrian zones and such. They're solid. They're cemented down. But J2 was sure he could manage it.
The plan: Midnight. A crowbar. Three burly guys. Some heaving. Getaway via rolling it back to college. Hard part would be finding somewhere to keep it where another team wouldn't pinch it.
The result: Ultimately unsuccessful. The boys went off on their mission with high spirits and a big metal stick. Not even a drive-by by ANU security could stop them long (though I really wish I'd been there to witness three guys trying to look nonchalant with a crowbar). But the bloody thing just wouldn't move, no matter how much they swore at it. Finally they gave up and went to Maccas instead.
Incidentally, as I look out my window I can see, in the back carpark of the college next door, one shopping trolley, one witch's hat and one 'Work in progress' road sign. Looks like last night was a good haul.
This has been quite long enough already, I think, so I'll stop about here. I won't go into Cb's weekend cruise of Canberra, looking for a 'Danger: weapons discharging' sign. Or the small collection of golf flags in his room, one of which was borrowed for the 3B limbo pole this year. Or the huge Coca-Cola sign that adorned Ry's room for most of last year.
And our planned paper-bagging of the red-light cameras on Northborne is another story altogether.
3:17 PM - link to this -
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