Oh My God, Oh My God

Last night I witnessed a piece of music history.
With special thanks to Thom for bringing the concert to my attention, last night I saw Vanilla Ice. Live. In Perth.
And it was so, so bad that it was good.
First, let me clarify the reason why I paid to go see Vanilla Ice - tickets were $42. I've paid more to see Australian bands than $42 so I think to have the opportunity to say you saw "Ice, Ice Baby" performed live - well, I'm sure you understand.

The night started badly. We got there at about 8.30pm, thinking that being a Sunday, the show might run a little earlier. We were wrong.
As a result, we had to endure two painstaking hours of (and I'm not exaggerating) the worst DJs I had ever heard. Not only were the songs they were playing awful, but the mixing was so atrocious it hurt my ears. We set a cut-off time for 10.30pm - if Vanilla Ice wasn't on by then we were leaving. He came on at 10.40 - and I was soooo glad I waited that extra ten minutes.

This is what he looks like these days - gone are the college jackets and the wavy fringe.
These days, Vanilla Ice is hardcore.

The second he walked onstage I knew I was in for something bad. The set was Halloween-themed, and I have to say, watching Vanilla Ice sing about smoking marijuana was pretty fucking scary.

I won't say too much more other than to give you a few details about the show:

• He was onstage with a guy called DJ Dirty Chopstick.
• His drummer was called Clint Eastwood.
• He rapped in a gravelly, hardcore voice about, well, being hardcore.
• One of his songs contained the lyric "I get crazy like prozac."
• Another song contained the chorus "Oh My God, Oh My God."
• Another song contained the chorus "Do you wanna hit on my joint? Hell Yeah! Do you wanna hit on my bong? Hell Yeah!" (Repeat times four)
• He played Ice Ice Baby.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, made it all worth it.

I can now say I have seen Ice, Ice Baby performed live. Who would've thought?
Oh, and a special shout-out to the random couple I saw with my own eyes wearing - wait for it - matching white tracksuits.
Shudder.

"If it bleeds, we can kill it."

My uncle bought me a limited edition DVD of Predator for Christmas. I have a list of movies that I never got around to seeing, and Predator was pretty high on that list. Until last night.
And it did not fail to disappoint.

It was Arnie at his cigar-smoking, troop-leading, wisecracking best.
And I loved every minute of it.

Among the best of the quotes from the movie (and there were lots of them) were:

1) Texan cowboy soldier called - wait for it - Blain, in the middle of a gunfight. Token geek (who was obviously the communications specialist for the team of crack commandoes) says to him:
"You're bleeding man."
Blain's response: "I ain't got time to bleed."

Brilliant!!

Followed closely by Arnie's comment when he sees that the predator they have been hunting has been hit by one of their bullets:
"If it bleeds, we can kill it."

It was cheesy, it was funny, it was full of gratuitous violence - what more could you want?

I need a pear tree for that partridge. Stat!

It hit me today as I was walking through town.
It's Christmas time!
The carols, the decorations, the days off work.
I love it!!
For me, Christmas has changed a bit in the last 5 or 6 years.
Before moving out of home Christmas was always a family affair.
I used to obediently hand myself over to my parents in preparation for the family festivities - sweeping the patio, cleaning the barbecue, setting the table.
Once that was done I would endure a long hard day's worth of Dealing with Relatives 101.

These days, things are a little different. Since moving out of home I've discovered that Christmas is also a great time to catch up with friends. Everyone has their own family functions to attend, but the fact that there are a couple of public holidays means you can usually squeeze in a get-together with friends.

It also is a time for me to reflect on how lucky I am.
I try to do this as often as possible, regardless of the time of year.

I've got two wonderful parents who are, amazingly, still deeply in love after almost 30 years of marriage. That in itself is enough to make me realise how lucky I am. I've got a younger brother and sister who have both grown up to be fine young adults. I've got an extended family who, although they can be trying at times, are there for me if I need them. I have a wonderful group of friends and a fantastic young lady by the name of Bertie with whom I have copious amounts of fun.

But most of all, I live in Perth. I am lucky enough to not only live in a country in which I am free to do what I want and believe in what I want to believe - but I also have the means by which to do so.

Christmas is a time to reflect on all the good in your life.
Right now, I have a roof over my head, a car to get me places, clothes on my back, food in my fridge and a shitload of wonderful people in my life.

Merry Christmas to everyone who reads this and remember - no matter how bad you think you've got it, there actually is always someone worse off.

RIP Work Choices

The former Howard Government's outrageous industrial relations reforms have been abandoned by the party that put it into place.
It took a change of Government, but the bastards are finally listening.

Two important bits of news

Firstly, I discovered a new website today that is absolutely fantastic. Go here for a massive range of how-to videos on, well, anything.
I'll give you a few examples of videos that are on the website:
How to:

• kiss someone passionately
• avoid trapped arm whilst cuddling in bed
• adjust your digital camera's exposure
• get great abs through pilates
• fight a bear
• make traditional mince pies
• be the perfect girlfriend (??)

There is, quite literally, anything you want to find out about. There's also some handy office ones like what to do when you send a kamikaze email (you know the one, you accidentally sent it to the person you're bitching about - take note Observer).

And my second bit of news is that I received my first bit of post-John Howard literature today. It is quite exciting.

It's the Quarterly Essay, by Judith Brett, and it's called Exit Right: The Unravelling of John Howard.

How delicious.

And a very Merry Christmas to you too OR More reasons why my boss should retire.

There are some people out there for whom nothing is ever good enough.
My boss seems to be one of those people.
She waddled into work this morning after a council meeting last night and, when I asked her how she was, the response was:
"Tired."
Well, how's that for positive reinforcement...
She followed it up with:
"I think sometimes I get tired from thinking about all the work I have to do."

Oh, for god's sake.
We're all in the same frikkin' boat - and really, it's not as bad as you say it is.

She told me the other day that she had "never been more stressed in her entire life than she was right now."
Really. Wow. How's that working out for you?

And to top it all off, she vetoed a story one of my colleagues was going to do on homelessness in the local area.
Like anyone who makes a decision they haven't properly thought through, she gave a range of reasons that were completely disjointed and ill-informed.
Among them:

1) Homeless people are homeless because they choose to be.

2) Those that didn't choose to be are drug addicts or alcoholics anyway.

3) We don't have that big a homeless problem in Rockingham anyway.

4) I don't want you putting yourself at risk by approaching homeless people in the streeets - they're desperate.

5) If we do a story on a homeless person, even if they agree to have their name and photo in the paper, it's an invasion of their privacy.

At this point I turned around and said "That's the whole problem with homelessness. It's too often swept under the carpet. It needs to be given more exposure as a community issue."

She turned to me and said: "You don't know much."

I was shocked. I was speechless. I was fucking outraged.

THEN she followed that comment up by saying that because she was 64 and I wasn't, she knew much more than me about everything.

At that point I realised I wasn't going to win, regardless of what I said. It's a shame, but she is actually seeming more and more like she is starting to lose it lately.
The problem is, I just have to grit my teeth and bear it until she eventually decides to retire.

LOVE - The Beatles

A little over a year ago, Cirque du Soleil put on a Beatles tribute show. Of sorts.

The soundtrack to what was apparently an amazing performance was put together by veteran Beatles producer George Martin, along with his son Giles.

Now, I wouldn't necessarily call myself a Beatles fan - that is to say, I don't own any Beatles albums, but I respect them and enjoy quite a few of their songs because, well, they're the Beatles.

But this album is a masterpiece.

Put together over two years and comprising elements from 130 individual songs by the Beatles, this album brings the Beatles kicking and screaming into the 21st century - and then adds another layer or two.

One example of the fine production work that went into the album is Strawberry Fields Forever - track 13 on the album.

The song includes the orchestral section from Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the solo piano from In My Life, brass from Penny Lane, the cello and harpsicord arrangement from Piggies and the coda of Hello, Goodbye.

As I said before, I'm no Beatles afficionado, but this album is top notch.

The waves of sound are lush and three-dimensional, and you don't even have to close your eyes to imagine the Cirque du Soleil performers doing their thing.

As I thought about my rating for this review, I was in a bit of a quandry. Any reviewer will tell you their hesitation or, sometimes, flat out refusal to give perfect marks to a movie/book/album etc.

But I thought this one qualified.

Not only is it a collection of some of the 20th century's most seminal pop music, by none other than the Beatles, but it has also been taken to another level by Martin.

Five stars.

So today was one of those slow news days, right?

Anyone who has ever been a journalist knows there are slow news days and there are good/busy news days.
Sometimes there are slow news periods. Christmas is often one of them.
When you write for a Community Newspaper the scope of what you can write about is fairly limited to your local area.
However when you're writing for news.com.au, and you have national and international stories to cover, you'd think you wouldn't have to come up with a story like this.
Do you know what the best part is?
It took two journos to write it.

Grammar Terrorist Cell alert

Some time ago, I blogged about Big Brother drop out Brodie and the atrocious grammar on the shirt he was wearing.
Interestingly enough, another Big Brother drop out by the name of Bree seems to have started a relationship with this guy.
In an interview with one of the feature writers at our company, she was discussing Brodie when she said:
"You breed them good over here - Bodie is one of the funniest people I have met in my life."

I'm sorry, we breed them good???
You two were meant for each other.

Day Four - no cigarettes

Okay I know I've been blogging about this a fair bit lately but it's a fairly big effort for me.
I haven't had any real tests yet though - I stood with an old smoking buddy yesterday afternoon while he smoked and I chatted.
But tonight and tomorrow night will be the true tests - going to the pub with friends. The habitual "beer in one hand, cigarette in the other" will be the true test of my resolve.
But since I'm blogging about it and putting it all out there in the public sphere, I'm more obliged to stick to it.

Wow, what a random, disjointed little posting.

In other news, life is good, and Christmas is nearly upon us. Yay!

It's all the wrong way around

This is what Christmas should look like.

I took these pictures on my trip to Japan, which was almost exactly this time of year last year.

I saw snow for the first time, and I had a White Christmas. It was magical.

As the year draws to a close I find myself dreaming about Japan - and in particular the snow - once again.

I've decided that, after a lifetime of living in Australia, living in the southern hemisphere, that we've got it all wrong down here.

The movies are right - it is meant to snow at Christmas.

It's meant to be cold, you're meant to be able to go skiing on Christmas morning, you're meant to see the pure white covering over everything as you wake up in the morning.

Don't get me wrong, I love Australia and I know I'm living in one of the luckiest, most prosperous countries in the world... but wouldn't it be nice to have a white Christmas down here every now and then? :)

I'm not irritable, you're just pissing me off.

Quitting smoking, I have to say, is going better than expected. The first day or two was the worst, but now I'm on day three I actually feel like I can - and will - do this.

And I have to say, the realisation yesterday that I could actually do this was one of the most liberating feelings I'd had in a long time.


When you take a step like quitting smoking, telling people is probably one of the worst things you can do. I can count on one hand the number of people who responded positively without either laughing or not believing me when I told them (not including my blog readers who left very encouraging comments - thank you.)


At the same time, if you tell people you have to stick to it.


It doesn't make it easy, but what really gets me is when people assume I am going to be irritable or snappy.

It's a cop out.

Right now, I am not allowed to show any sign of irritability or frustration. If I do, it's "because I'm quitting."
As you may have guessed, the origin of this post was to bitch about my boss, who, after telling everyone how she's never been more stressed in her life than she is right now, grabs a major lead story from my area and writes it herself.
Not only that, but she cut and paste the press release and the reason she gave me for not passing it on to me was that "there's too much to do, we need the story and I thought you had enough to do already."
This was all after she rocked up to work 40 minutes late this morning. Nice.

Oh and to top it off, I lost my dog this morning. After waking up to find she had urinated on the couch, I growled at her and put her out the back. When I went to bring her inside, she saw me coming and freaked out, scrambling over a gate at least five times her height to run away.
She hasn't come back yet and my uncle and I have scoured the block looking for her. I'm concerned she won't at all.

BUT - and there is a but - I'm still not smoking. And that, in itself, is enough to make me incredibly happy. :)

An open letter to those nasty little cancer sticks

Dear Cigarettes,

We've known each other for quite some time. I first met you in a local pool around the age of 16. You tasted gross, I felt cool.
When I moved out of home I realised that I was old enough to smoke you without getting into trouble.
Since then, our relationship has been fairly involved. I've smoked heaps of you - from first thing in the morning with my cup of coffee, to 3am at the tail end of a huge night with close friends.

I've cursed you for making me cough like a 70-year-old woman.
I've loved you for being there with me on an evening when the weather is warm, the sun is setting and I am loving life.
I've hated you for how expensive you are.
I've loved you for helping me bond with other people who were also addicted to you.
I've hated you for making my breath and fingers smell, for turning me into an addict and for damaging my health.

So, as much fun as we've had, it's time to say goodbye.
God knows it's been fun - we've had a ball.
But now I'm too old for you. I enjoy life too much for it to be cruelly snatched away. For once, I am listening to all the pleas of those high-profile smokers who, after being diagnosed with a terminal illness, say they wish they had quit when they were younger.
I owe it to the people who love me, and I owe it to myself.

Goodbye Cigarettes.
You and I are over.
Don't ever call me again.

Sincerely,
David Johns.

Nothing new here...

I know we've all blogged about annoying PR people before, but I just got a phone call at 3.30pm on a Friday from one of them.
The conversation went something like this:

"Hi, can I speak to someone from editorial?"
"Speaking..."
"Oh hi, it's Sarah from PPR, I'm just chasing up a press release we sent you a few weeks ago about Christmas and I just wanted to see if you needed any more info at all?"
"Well, our editor sorts through the work emails so she would have seen it. I'm sure if she needed any more info she would have contacted you."
"Okay, thanks, bye!"

Seriously.
What PR person out there actually thinks if a press release arrived in a journo's mailbox and they needed more info they wouldn't call??
What are we going to do, just sit here and hope the pr company follows it up?
"Gee, I'd really like to get in touch with that person. Guess I'll just wait around for the PR person to call me."

Oh, and how's that for a clarification - a press release about Christmas.
I'm guessing roughly two-thirds of the releases that are coming in the mailbox now have something to do with Christmas. Not really narrowing it down very much, are we?

I'm sorry, what??

Apparently China has weighed into the proposed BHP Biliton/Rio Tinto takeover.
China's situation is an interesting one - on the one hand they are the last major bastion of communism in the world, yet at the same time they are riding a tidal wave of growth thanks to market forces.
China and Australia have recently had much closer ties, thanks to both of us 'booming'.
However this really irked me.
A senior mining company dude in China has called on the Australian Government to step in and stop the proposed takeover.
He said:
"I think the Australian government should take some anti-monopoly action to prevent the merger of BHP and Rio because this kind of behaviour will damage free competition."

Okay, let me get this straight. The world's last communist society is asking for a fair go in the name of free competition??
I know I've simplified it a bit but seriously, I just find that plain ridiculous.

Reasons why my boss should retire now

1. I got into trouble for being 20 minutes late this morning.
Never mind the fact that my boss is (literally) 20 mins late EVERY DAY.
But the thing is, she's always late for a good reason. Her good reasons are - she's either washing, cleaning, hanging the clothes out or walking. What. Ever.

2. I was told to "cut and paste" the press release for a major local news story destined for page 7 of this week's newspaper. "That's what I do," she said. Right, so that's how you get so many stories done each week - the PR people do them for you.

3. She used the term "cross-breeding" when referring to people of mixed Aboriginal and European heritage.

4. Everything's stessful - in fact, she made the comment the other day that she had never been more stressed in her life than she was at work right now. Riiight.....

A lesson in early 90s "hip-hop"

This is great. It's brilliant. It's so good, in fact, that I just had to share it with you.
Check out the uber-young Will Smith (or the Fresh Prince as he is known here) at his best.
It might take a few minutes to load, but it is well worth it, if only for a laugh.
Don't pretend you don't know the words.

How do ya like them apples, Mr Howard? Huh? Huh?

Pinched from news.com.au

Be vewwy, vewy quiet

I'm sitting in the sub-editors area at head office today because the temporary computer I use when I come up here on Mondays has been commandeered by someone else.
So I'm feeling particularly out of place, but at least I am sitting in such a position that I can see the Chief of Staff's screen at all times, and he can't see mine. Yay.