.. companions for a number of years, but it wasn’t till I got to the UK in the early ‘70s that I realised we were being short-changed in Australia – the range of chocolate bars was prodigious and Bounty bars and Amazin’ Raisin bars quickly became part of my daily diet round about the time…

Dick’s Toolbox cont. .. been blind-sided by A V Jennings. I realise that we are rather recently evolved creatures of imperfect knowledge, but I think that we should be able to do better in our beliefs than be extended versions of the followers of Joanna Southcott. This worthy lady passed away in 1814 after announcing…

Mike’s Pith & Wind cont. .. I’ve come to quite like my stinky asparagus pees actually, which probably tells me that I’ve been living on my own for too long. I’ve been skimming through my ‘WHY in West Germany’ journal (1983) to see if I can find any references to my German asparagus story. Boy!…

..the French. Who else would give this sensationalist and disturbing book two major awards – it would never have made it onto the short list of the anglospheric Man Booker – and have it leap into best seller status? Now while I am an unabashed Francophile, but I must confess that they do take intellectualism…

..bloke talking about an amazing band he’d seen in London. When he said they were called The Rolling Stones I was actually quite disappointed. I didn’t get the blues connotation and thought the name sounded like they were just another folk band – and you had to live through the folk boom of the early…

.. and the damn thing doesn’t understand the phrase ‘Just shut up, will you!’ People will drive of the road screaming that they can’t take any more of The Eagle’s Greatest Hits’. You can take and initiate phone calls and have your text messages read out to you. My Subaru which has a dashboard that…

.. because of my familiarity with the PC format. I shouldn’t have bothered. The Windows 8 platform in my Notebook bears little resemblance to my XP or Windows 7 equipped PCs and the hardware is relatively heavy and it’s onerous to lug around. I hate throwing still-functioning things away so I continue to lug it…

..he was as funny as another stand-up comedian he despised. I can see how that might be considered as fundamentally shallow, but if Seinfeld the stand-up comedian is actually Seinfeld the man’s complementary personality, you can see how it can become a very personal issue. Then there’s the (locally) celebrated example of The Vines’ singer,…

.. past the aged beef of the veldt. Whilst I follow in descending order of hope the All Blacks and the Wallabies at the end of the day I would rather see a good game and my team beaten than otherwise. So I don’t really think that New Zealand deserved to win the final of…

Anyway, the moment I shed a tear in Ricki and the Flash happened to be a line from Rick Springfield’s character (Greg) when he was putting the word on Meryl Streep’s character, (Ricki aka Linda) which, coincidentally is one of the lines featured in the trailer (that I fortunately didn’t see beforehand) so it must…

.. environment. I suppose that means they’ve dated. Beatles’ songs not only define an era, (‘60s and early ‘70s), but they are in turn defined by that era, as well as by their geographical and cultural location. As a schoolboy I can remember practising Beatles’ songs at Compton Tothill’s place and Compton’s father querying why…

.. deliver words of wisdom, affection and good humour. I don’t know the BM but the MoH, Una, will be sure to be formidably entertaining as she is, like Elizabeth, a lawyer. Elizabeth specialises in contract law, which may mean that the marriage Act will need to be rewritten, but Una usually appears for the…

..month stint bashing out covers in three states non-stop. Actually, it seems we couldn’t resist adding a few new songs of our own to the list of covers, written by myself and by former Ariel keyboardist Tony Slavich, because at some point we must’ve gone into a studio and recorded a bunch of them to…

..sign of Proust or a bottle of Pinot Noir, not a barbecued artichoke heart to be seen, just accents that could break glass at a hundred metres. I felt surrounded by stereotypes from the Bulletin and Billy Butlin holiday camps. But, with the exception of the on-going lack of Proust and the super strength strine…

..be registered, I imagine it’s not as easy to get away with it these days. Musicians are big on moonlighting. Well, with musos it’s not so much moonlighting as multi-tasking. I sometimes wonder what that does to the more sensitive audience members. I remember feeling quite disturbed when Ringo had to take some time off…

..when the relatively youthful and decidedly hip Sommelier appeared and, with gay abandon, she led the decision to place the nights drinking menu in his capable hands. And why not? It is not called a wine room for nothing. He knew the list intimately, having selected them personally, and given the criteria of an approximate…

..version, which is to music what the hydrogen bomb is to a fart. I can understand completely that to discover me sitting on a stool in the corner of a café with a guitar playing a bunch of never before heard songs can be a confronting or even annoying experience if not seen and heard…