Last week they cut down most of the trees around Subiaco railway station. I have no idea why they did such a thing but they've managed to transform what was quite a nice combination of greenery and modern architecture into a grey, lifeless concrete desert. Well done guys!
Well, the leak was right (although it was hardly a stretch) and Mumford and Sons have won the Triple J Hottest 100 for 2009. I can't say I'm jumping up and down with joy or anything, but it's a decent song, so good on them.
Three of my selected songs got in, specifically Blue Juice with Broken Leg at number 5, Lisa Mitchell's Coin Laundry at number 7 and John Butler's One Way Road at number 39. On the other hand - in a fine showing for the irony department - most of the songs I trimmed from my shortlist actually made it.
I've done my usual analysis of the results (expect some kind of exciting graph soon!) and the average score for the entire countdown this year was 2.77. This works out as between "An alright song but nothing special" and "I heartily endorse this tune or composition". The country breakdown is 36 for Australia, 29 for the UK, 23 for the United States, 4 for Canada, 3 for New Zealand (all of the courtesy of the Conchords), 2 each for Italy and France and 1 for Sweden, which is a nice spread.
OK, that's all I've got to say for now. My brain is fried after nine hours of serious radio listening (and cleaning, which I was doing during the serious radio listening).
Oh yes! It's also Australia Day! I really must get some of those inane car flags and a southern cross tattoo. Maybe I can even put a FOWF sticker on my vehicle! Hooray!!
*sigh*
I'm definitely coming late to the party but if you're any kind of Harry Potter fan you owe it to yourself to check out A Very Potter Musical - an incredibly silly, completely unauthorised musical "reinterpretation" of Harry Potter put together by students at the University of Michigan last year. I could go on and on about how great it is, but all I really need to say is that it features a tap-dancing Lord Voldemort. You hear me? A tap-dancing Lord Voldemort. What the hell are you waiting for? (And what the hell is a Hufflepuff?)
The downside is I now have a crush on Draco Malfoy. Before anyone gets out Scarf of Sexual Orientation I should point out that I have a crush strictly on the AVPM version of Draco Malfoy who is played by the very cute and downright hilarious Laura Lopez (I have no idea why was she continually rolling around the stage but it was extremely amusing).
Anyway, tomorrow's Australia Day (Boo! Hooray! Boo! Hooray! Call me when you're finished) so you can expect an entry on how crap the Hottest 100 turns out to be at least ;)
Yes yes, happy new year all, I've got better things to talk about than what I did on New Years Eve (bugger all really).
I'm using some of my time off work to get some more of my holiday snaps from the UK up on Flickr. One of said photos is of a pile of the Hungerford Bridge in London, festooned with the broken carcasses of skateboards.
I presumed at the time that there was some sadistic security guard who enjoyed confiscating boards off skaters who tried to ride them across the bridge, snapped them in half then threw them onto the pile. However on later reflection it became apparent to me that it was more likely that skaters from the nearby Queen Elizabeth Hall were deliberately depositing their broken boards on the pile as a sort of graveyard, and some quick Googling today suggested that this is in fact the case.
This is great. Why? Because it's a complete throwback to the old, pagan traditions of neolithic and bronze age England!
Further upstream at Battersea there's a stretch of river that's yielded vast (well, vast for archeology :) quantities of relics. Swords, shields, spearheads, that kind of things. The sheer concentration of them leaves no explanation apart from that they were deliberately thrown into the waters as some kind of sacrifice. I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that the urge to commit treasured personal possessions to the river that motivates today's skaters is fundamentally the same one that motivated the ancient Britons of Battersea.
Even more interestingly this site compares the Hungerford pile to a neolithic mortuary enclosure - a separated, sacred space in which the bodies of the deceased were left to break down to just bones (which were then collected and buried). The author points out that the bridge pier is "an unreachable island in the Thames" - small islands (neither being exactly land or water) meeting the requirements for all kinds of sacred spaces. Great stuff!
Seriously people, there is a thesis in this...
