.. follower I’ve also had to endure on occasions Listening to a raft of national anthems in a row, like at the Olympic Games for instance, is not that different to being an unwilling spectator at the Eurovision Song Contest. It’s not just Australia that needs to review its choice of song as a national…
.. communist plot. It was always so though never so pathetically blatant as now. In fact, if you took the events of the past month: the shooting down of the Air Malaysia aircraft, the events in Gaza, and the outbreak of the Ebola virus you might find good reason to be a tad depressed. But…
Mike’s Pith & Wind cont. ..winner taking home both tubes in triumph. There are endless examples of feeble synchronicity that we all experience daily – we just have to keep our senses alert to the possiblities. I’m not sure what it proves, but cumulatively it can have a pretty disconcerting effect, which might have something…
..on the street. Nevertheless, the lunch and the chat were great fun; the world’s problems with Intellectual Property and Copyright were discussed at length and the house pinot proved quite acceptable to boot, so I charged off back to the Casino car park full of bonhomie and anticipation. Perhaps I was cutting it a bit…
..Airport” as we started our descent in Whenupai, Auckland’s main airport until 1965. This inspired great confidence in the passengers, already frightened by the low altitude, turbulence, cloud and the single toilet. It was an age of muted optimism. Our father was a stock and station agent and would drive up from Eketahuna, redolent of…
..in our collective brain I had my subject. The first thing to do was listen to Ad Nauseam and see whether it had dated or indeed had retained any of the elements that made it funny – or shocking – in the first place. I’d heard the first in the series (Live) many decades ago…
..classed as actually employed. How one survives seven days on $13.50 is not explained. There are also many people who want to work – take many of those over 45 for example, who have given up seeking any job through not being able to take the endless frustration of hidden ageism denying them even an…
..driving-in-the-city impatience and exasperation. It’s a neat trick I jotted down the music that had become my soundtrack and I’ve just checked the dertails on the ABC Classic radio website. It was a guitar piece called Chamber Concerto by Shaun Rigney, whom I’ve not heard of before, played by one Antony Fielding*, whom I’ve not…
..a polished head emerging in a straight line from the type of neck generally owned by South African rugby hookers or Gestapo torturers. Those tight rolls of flesh extrude out of a too-tight collar and there is too much gold jewellery that once characterized used car salesmen or proto-Mafiosi. His legs look like Christmas hams…
..of two young ladies ( I am using the term ‘young’ loosely in the same way as you might describe the morals and ethics of the NSW Labor party) who rowed backwards below us for about an hour. The convention of rowing is that you face the blunt end (the stern) so that you can…
S P E C T R U M S P E C T R U M S P E C T R U M M I K E R U D D B I L L P U T T . C O MM M I K E R U D D B I L…
S P E C T R U M S P E C T R U M S P E C T R U M M I K E R U D D B I L L P U T T . C O MM M I K E R U D D B I L…
Anyway, there I am looking so 1972 with a big shirt collar and a porno moustache to boot, being seriously assertive while saying nothing of any substance. Once I’d got over the shock of seeing myself looking so fucking young, I was immediately reminded of a number of similar interviews I’ve seen on telly with…
..when I find myself there. The lights are very weak and the shadows and dark and endless. The switched are old, round and made of metal and sometimes they do nothing. There are doors down each side of the corridor. Often the doors are shut. Above some doors is a glass panel where occasionally the…
After a couple of minutes it became evident to me that the bloke at the machine was having some difficulties and I started to look around for the person that’s employed to lurk usefully around the ATMs for just such an emergency. That useful person wasn’t there, but it was then I realised that the…
.. Thom nowadays and they tend not to mix in my ever-decreasing circles. I first read about it in an audio magazine article written by the late, great Richard C Heyser of JPL one of the pioneers of in-depth loudspeaker laboratory analysis, and developer of Time Delay Spectrometry, who was using Catastrophe Theory to describe…
Manners certainly didn’t apply in these fraternal disputes. I suppose there had to be some release from perpetually polite behaviour – we were lads after all – but our constant bickering eventually led to our having to be separated and given our own bedrooms. Of course I got the better bedroom and Richard was consigned…
..with an annoyingly cheerful ‘Good morning’. Some time is spent contemplating what I would do with all the money I am totally convinced that I am going to win in the next lottery draw, a conviction which has gone totally unrewarded. Annoyingly I know that I have a better chance of being struck by a…
..discovered it was written by George Bernard Shaw – we’ll call him GBS from now on – and the star, (and executive producer), was none other than Christopher Plummer, widely pilloried for just being in The Sound of Music, but a perfect fit for the role of Caesar. The GBS version of the relationship between…