..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…

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…

.. 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…

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…

..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…

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…

..and Uzbekistan lie to the north, Iran the west, Pakistan to the south and the People’s Republic of China to the east. If you didn’t live there it would have little to recommend it and a large percentage of the population has become refugees from decades of conflict – mostly fleeing into Pakistan. Currently a…

..(Maybe that accounts for my neighbours breaking into fits of sniggering whenever they see me). It turned out that I’d cracked my left foot a mighty whack on the side board, but there was nothing much else worth reporting. My foot was sore enough, but it was obviously not broken, so I counted myself lucky….

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…

..differentiates Melbourne from the rest of the world. Or maybe just Australia. It gives locals the joy of being the best in the world at a game that no one else plays or wants to play; in this it is like gridiron football writ very small. Rugby is at least played by more countries though…

..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…

Mike’s Pith & Wind cont. .. however, as it was the subject of constant headlines and discussed in hushed tones by disquieted mums over cups of tea and soggy white cucumber sandwiches from Beaths to Ballantynes. Strangely however, I don’t once remember lesbianism being mentioned, either in conversation or in the media, confined as it…

Dick’s Toolbox cont. ..real winner. I wandered into this musical genre through Stephen May, who learnt guitar from Gary Young. Stephen thought that as Mike is musically brilliant, some talent might have devolved to me – a supposition that would have pleased neither a geneticist nor a behavioural scientist. Mr May, apart from being a…

..delighted by him doubling his bets to cover his losses, as they profited by the eight billion dollars that he had lost. This increased the bonuses, the eventual sale of Porsches, floating gin palaces, excessive dinner, divorce settlements etc. of the very few people who tended to sit in front of trading screens for far…

..A Fate Worse Than Death, or simply provocative and silly like Mama, Did Jesus Wear Makeup?, but there’s no discernible trend as far as I know – apart from avoiding the bleeding obvious, of course. Perhaps perversely, (or of course perversely), while I’m quite comfortable playing certain songs for years at a time, I’m not…

.. but realised that he is a New Zealander so the sunburnt country will have to make do with Clive Palmer. Tentatively I might say that we have better gun laws but the similarities between the two countries are far greater than any differences. While we don’t have a George Bush in the closet we…

..(as represented on the For Pete’s Sake compilation CD that was produced to help raise funds for the second of Pete’s major Parkinson’s operations), Dragon, Thorpie, Russell Morris, John Farnham, Slim Dusty, Air Supply, Matt Finish, Australian Crawl, Mi-Sex, Pseudo Echo and Glenn Shorrock. No mention of any of my bands you’ll notice. Jamaican Farewell…

.. significant investment in both money and occupied space. If I was adding up – which in my darker moments I am – some might consider it a considerable investment. Which, in my darker moments, I do. I don’t know what some of these devices do – though there are a number that bear a…

Anyway, this particular setback to my innocence happened on a rainy day at the family farm (Mendip Hills) in North Canterbury, two or three hours north of the now blighted city of Christchurch. Mendip Hills was the jewel in the crown of the Rutherford family, our forebears on our mother’s side. Our grandfather, Norman Rutherford,…

.. into a rubbish skip or were used as weed suppressants somewhere on our little acre where I still occasionally turn up multi-coloured fragments. The silly thing was that whilst a number of paintings deserved their fate by being, in anybody’s opinion, a waste of paint and canvas, there were a number of paintings that…