Be Warned

I feel an updating frenzy coming on!

Car, Part Two

Damn, still catching up with about three weekends ago!

I finally got around to cleaning Fuji the wonder car. It's only taken me seven years to get around to doing it properly... I took us both to one of those hand car wash places, the one's with the high pressure hoses, industrial vacuum cleaners etc. Damn, that place was weird - as well as the hose, there was a broom that produced suds.

I soaped Fuji all over then hose 'im down, only to discover there was more crud to be had from various corners of the car - you'd be amazed how many crannies there are on a car which can collect leaves, dirt, dead insects, etc. etc. etc. I'd been hosing for so long someone else was waiting to use the bay, so I thought this a good time to go do some more detailed scrubbin'. Scratched some of the weird black crud off the roof, and a few stickers which were worse for wear.

I went around the block and pulled back in, vacuumed every surface I could find, then went through another round of hosin'. There was crap in the panels next to the doors, crap under the bonnet, crap under the petrol flap thing! I hosed it all, and eventually grime stopped coming off Fuji, no more twigs where appearing from the groove along the edge of the roof. By this stage I was soaked myself - no greater love has a man for his car!

Anyway, from certain angles, if you ignore the odd dent and the stickers, Fuji looks almost new, it's freaky. Sure doesn't look 18 years old.

Because about four stickers had washed off, I thought I'd better replace them - with another twelve or so. I started running out of space on the back and the left rear, so I had to add about five of them to the right rear, where they get seen slightly less :-)

Probably time I posted some photos...

Here endith the uncharacteristic Car ramblin'.

Weird Al @ Hamer Hall

Damn, did I mention I sooooooooooooo behind in my bloggin'???

As mentioned, evildoom_bunny and, in another section, stillbeing, saw Weird Al Yankovic in the decidedly unrock venue of Hamer Hall in the Arts Centre. (Hamer Hall having been until recently the Concert Hall.) Any inclination we might have had to mosh would have been extremely constrained by all the friggin chairs!

I warned evildoom_bunny that it was likely to be a Den Of Nerds, but even I was surprised by just how damn nerdy the crowd was! Young nerds, old nerds, groups of nerds in Hawaiian shirts, groups of nerds who'd obviously dragged themselves away from an intensive roll-playing game, families of nerds with nerdlettes, and teenage nerds with their mothers there to keep an eye on them! Did I mention it was nerdy? evildoom_bunny often accuses me of being one, but damn, I was outclassed!

There was a support act, of sorts, an Aussie comedian lady who's name now escapes me. She wasn't bad, but would probably find that gig easier with some Star Wars material... There was supposed to be a 20 minute break before Weird Al, but twenty minutes passed, then thirty, then nearly an hour - something was obviously seriously screwy behind the scenes. We saw roadies and technicians crawling all over the place. Eventually, they made an announcement that things were broken, and to bear with 'em.

So we wandered out to get a drink - it'd got kinda festive by this stage. Then we wandered down the front to wave at stillbeing up in the balcony. I played with my Nerdphone, and someone randomly sent me a short porn film! Odd. I was inspired by this to turn on the Nerdphone's bluetooth. It found sixteen other phones in the area... Did I mention nerdy???

Eventually Al showed up, much to our relief, it was getting a bit dull. Apparently their media server had a rough passage on the journey down from Newcastle. Let this be a lesson to you folks - always back up your data.... :-)

The show as fantastic, the guy has obviously been doing this a long long time. He changed outfits almost every song - as did the whole band - and while they where off stage they played "Interviews" that Al had conducted on the large video screens. Basically, footage of air-headed celebrities was spliced with Weird Al asking questions which somehow fitted. Damn. That Averal Lavine shouldn't be allowed near a mic. Nor that Kevin Ferderline guy... Sounded like at least some of these were from a TV show called, predictably, "The Weird Al Show" that ran for one season back in the 1990's. Should try and lay my hands on it... It was also the source of the Prodigy parody I posted earlier...

Al knows his audience, and made sure he did his two Star Wars related numbers - "Yoda" and that one to the tune of American Pie about Episode One. Some particularly sad boisterous nerds behind us sang along to that one... He also did all his hits, "Fat", "Eat It", etc. There was also some very clever localisation in one song, he's singing about marrying his cousin and changes a line to "We could move to Tasmania where that kinda thing is tolerated." That caused some actual whooping!

Seemed like most of the crowd hadn't absorbed "Straight Outta Lynwood" the way we had - they seemed a bit perplexed by some of the new stuff. Although "You're Pitiful" went down well, especially the series of t-shirts Al had on to go with it. My particular favourite being "Tom Is My Only Friend."

The dude is a professional - they were on stage for a good two, two and half hours. We certainly got our $89(!) worth. I was also surprised that he played at least three songs I'd never heard (I'm one of those sad completist - when I'm into a band I want all of their stuff. If there's a single out there with an alternative version or a B-Side, I gotta have it!) At least one was obviously a new song, since it was about Britney Spears recent hair-cutting. And one of them he's never going to be able to release - suggesting that Gilligan from Gilligan's Island is in love with the skipper is not going to go down well :-)

Anyway, next time he's out here, go see him, I certainly will.

Fly Fly Plane Plane

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, I went to the Airshow down in Avalon when it was on a few weeks back. Odd behavior, I realise, for a committed lefty like myself. Going to watch a bunch of fighter jets scream around and strafing Geelong... I used to be into planes when I was a kid, and worked sorta in the industry for a while, till I got my current job... So I know a fair bit about 'em.

It was... Mildly interesting. There seemed to be a truck load of American planes there, but no interesting Airbuses or Russian planes. A great deal of them were actually flying around, which I guess is what you want in a plane. But... I dunno, maybe I'm getting too blase for my own good. I stood there watching mad pilots throwing their little planes all over the sky, and I was kinda thinking "whatever..." Once you've seen one plane tumbling about, you've pretty much seen them all...

Even the fighter jets, which are easily the loudest things on earth, were weirdly repetitive - they all did more or less the same set of manoeuvres - screaming along at high speed, barrel roles, loops... Blah blah blah. I mean, it's kinda impressive seeing a plane fly straight up into a cloud, but you've seen it once... it ain't going to be much different the next time around.

There was a big motherfucker of a transport plane that I was impressed by. It took off in about the length of Swanston Street, then heaved its 120 ton frame at an impressive angle into the sky. Watching this airplane equivalent of a Elephant bounce around the clouds was something else. After it landed they made it back up which was novel.

There was also a fly by of a B-52. Man, thats a big friggin plane as well. Wouldn't want a flock of them coming in at high altitude over my country.

And my conscience was getting the better of me towards the end - these jets would come screaming in at high speed, and I was thinking, if I was actually in, say, a Palestinian refugee camp and I heard that sound, I'd have every right to be scared shitless. This seems to go unmentioned as all these men are admiring flying Monaro's - they're killing machines. Get in low and fast, drop something explosive, get out again. Not to mention that an F-111 costs AU$160,000 an hour to fly...

There were some great old planes - as usual, I'm attracted to the old shit - an old Constellation airliner, for example. It did a brief bit of flying, but came back fairly quickly with one of its four engines switched off - them must have been pretty glad to get back on the ground, that thing is fifty years old if it's a day.

But in the end, I'm not really sure why I went. In some ways, planes are worse than cars - at least there a new models every year. If you're into cars, there's something newish regularly. Planes take decades to get off the ground (pardon the pun) and keep flying for decades after that, so there's not often anything new to see. And the "show" finished with some really naff mock ground attacks, conveniently placed explosives on the ground timed to go off then some little stunt plane passed by. Egad.

It also doesn't help when you've worked in the defence industry. I know for example that from a commander's point of view, each of these planes is just a symbol on a screen, going where it is told, shooting when instructed etc. etc. The Right Stuff my arse. Anyway, maybe it'd have been more fun if I taken someone whom I could name aeroplanes too. That's a neptune. That's a Hercules. Here we have a C-27. And over here a Learjet... This is a DC-3 etc. etc. etc.

I think I will stick to being a nerd nerd, rather than a plane nerd :-)