Meticulously Murdering Music

I used to love Triple M. I listened to Doug Mulray in the morning, then Stuart Cranney, Ron E Sparx, Rob Duckworth, Nick Bennett, all the old school dudes, right through the day. The announcers had stuff to say that wasn't just spin for some sponsor and Mulray especially was a true star. It was a commercial rock station with some real character and they ruled the Sydney FM band for years without being topped. 2DAY didn't get a look in. When I was at uni, the film group I was with made a doco about the Ms and we spent the day at the studios at Bondi Junction interviewing the on air talent, including Mulray who was exceedingly generous with his time. I also got to talk to and meet Charlie Foxx, the program director who was a minor hero of mine from his on air days at 2SM (when that was rock station).

Later on, I went through a JJJ stage but I still had a soft spot for Triple M once in a while, even though it was rapidly becoming the joke of a station that it is today. Because while most other music stations have evolved in some way over the past 20 years, Triple M has not. Triple M still plays pretty much the same songs now as they did then. If you could travel back to 1989 and tune in to the Ms, it would be just like it is now, except without Nickelback and the inane presenters. If ever there was a radio station that needed a make-over, it is the once proud and great Triple M.

So enter Slash, a guy whom Triple M thinks hasn't recorded anything since 1990 but who suddenly has a Top 10 album and a sold out Aussie tour on his hands. In an amazing PR move, the Ms seize upon the top-hatted one and pay... er, ask him to re-record "their" ancient theme song -- which is actually a reworking of "Journey of a Fool", the intro track from Mike Batt's 1979 album Tarot Suite, although hardly anyone actually knows this. In this amusing story from the Daily Telegraph, Slash "blasts" contemporary rock like Nickleback as homogenised. While it's hard to argue with that, this is coming from a guy who was in Velvet Revolver and has Fergie from the Black Eyed fucking Peas do vocals on his new album. But the best part? "Slash agreed to re-record [the theme] for a station that has supported his career."

Triple M has indeed supported his career, by playing the same two Guns N Roses songs every day for the last two decades. The same way they support Alice Cooper by playing that one song he wrote or keep the spirit of Zeppelin alive by playing those three songs of theirs. In fact, there's nothing Triple M likes doing more than supporting rock dinosaurs, as long as it doesn't mean playing anything any of them have recorded since 1989, and as long as they don't have to play any more than three or four (at most) of their best known songs. And when it comes to bands that only released stuff after 1990, then they'd better be called Pearl Jam, Nickleback or Green Day if they even think they want airplay on the Ms. Unless a program director gets a hard-on for an obscure track like "Deep Water" by Deadstar and decides it needs to be played four times a day for six months straight, which happened a few years back for no apparent reason.

According to the article, "Craig Bruce, Austereo's head of content, said teaming with Slash was part of a "wish list" of ideas planned for the station's 30th anniversary". Fair enough. But if Bruce doesn't want the station's 30th anniversary to also be its last, he needs to completely rethink Triple M's content and bring it more into line with what listeners under the age of 45 want to hear.

Modern music must be destroyed.

I have a first-generation iPod Shuffle. It's not the coolest thing on the block, but it does the job. It holds about eight hours' worth of music, which is still pretty freaking amazing when you think that when I started listening to rock back in the 1980s, the most compact forms of portable music player were boom boxes the size of a small guitar amp. Compact discs had only just been invented, but no one had heard of them yet, and a DVD was some nasty form of sexually-transmitted disease. So younguns, don't snigger at me because I haven't gotten around to getting a Nano or something yet: when I was a kid that word didn't even have a meaning.

Now, as we all know, the great thing about iPods and MP3 players is that you don't have to flip the cassette over every half an hour or so, and they're less wear on the shoulders. For me, being able to listen to my favourite music for eight hours straight through a little white stick the size of my index finger is awesome. And when I get back to the first song, I can either switch it to shuffle and hear them all again in a different order, or plug it in to my computer and replace them all with other songs.

Watching Channel [V] on a Sunday is apparently rather like my iPod, except that when they get to the end of their three-hour playlist, they just repeat everything they've just played without even bothering to change the order. All they do is give it another title, like "Crucial Cuts" or "Top Downloads" as if it's a bunch of different songs, even though it actually isn't. Since arriving at work just before 7 this morning, I've heard the same polished, auto-tuned, electronic bullshit songs-about-nothing again and again, all day. In fact, it's so brain-frying that they just slipped a Nickleback song into the mix and I'm glad! I'm actually so happy just to see a dude playing a guitar that I don't even care that it's Chad Kroeger. In fact, this is probably half the reason Nickleback has sold so many records: after endless repeats of mindless Black Eyes Peas garbage, bad Michael Jackson rip-offs from Usher and that song from that chubby Irish dick who used to fuck Delta Goodrem which is so auto-tuned it sounds like Justin Beiber is singing it, people are so glad to hear something different they'll even listen to the worst rock band in history.

Wait! Muse just came on. Just in time to switch over to the footy.

Typical.

Star Trek: The Logic-Free Version

The other night I finally got around to seeing the Star Trek reboot, and found it to be decent enough; in fact I quite enjoyed it, until I started to think about the implausibility of the story. This sort of stuff isn't alien to JJ Abrams' films -- think Cloverfield, in which a sea-monster larger than a blue whale is somehow able to move around perfectly well on land. That's OK for a monster movie though -- this is Star Trek, a franchise that generally doesn't pay as much lip-service to the mechanics of science as this movie does.

Ignore all the references to the possibility of alternative universes in other parts of the franchise, or the way a comic book helped to explain stuff: I'm not that big a Trek fan to wade through The Next Generation and I haven't read a comic since I was 17. Besides which, as a film goer, I shouldn't need to read or see other media first to help me understand why enormous plotholes aren't really plotholes.

The thing is that this is a great movie, except for the fact that elements of the plot are so bat-shit crazy that if you think about them too much, any enjoyment of the film goes straight out the window. It's bad enough that Nero turns a planet into a black hole as revenge for something that hasn't even happened yet (instead of, say, simply warning everyone about what's going to happen in a century or so), but then Kirk turns Nero into one to stop him destroying the Earth. Then, in order to escape the black hole's gravitational pull, they eject part of its engine into it, causing an explosion that allows them to break free. Uh..? How would that work? A concussion wave... in space? Where there's no air to create one? Even if it did, the wave would have needed to exert enough force to accelerate the Enterprise to a super-light speed instantly.

You see where I'm going with this?

This leads me to ask: do the producers actually know anything about astronomy? The reason the red matter was developed was to turn a supernova that, in Spock's words "threatened the entire galaxy" into a black hole. Wha...? I don't know as much about astronomy as someone like Phil Plait, but even a gamma ray burst -- the most powerful kind of explosion in the universe -- wouldn't threaten an entire galaxy! A considerable part of it, sure, but not the whole thing. That's just dumb. Worse, stars don't just die overnight. It takes thousands of years for a star to degrade to supernova stage. Surely they would have noticed earlier?

OK. Let's forget about all that, and get to the part where the Nerada is attacking Vulcan. Fortunately for Nero, his ship is a mining vessel and just happens to be equipped with an enormous energy drill. It isn't apparent how even a spacecraft apparently the size of a medium-sized asteroid could produce the power necessary to drill through a whole planet, but at least early on Kirk says that it possesses "advanced technology", so that's an easy way to just make that problem go away. The issue is, if Vulcan was anything like Earth, as soon as he breached the crust, he'd be drilling through molten rock and magma, some of which would probably start spurting out in an enormous fountain thanks to the pressure release. Plus, it would be sort of like trying to drill through yoghurt.

But why does he even need to drill a hole? Red matter (apparently) creates a black hole by reacting with nuclear material. He could've basically just dropped the stuff anywhere on the planet. The tiny black hole it made would eat its way through to the core with the same result.

He could have wiped out the entire Federation in minutes!

So, after falling through a black hole 154 years into the past, Nero destroys Vulcan to teach Spock a lesson, because thats how you prevent your planet being destroyed in the future. Why he didn't just go to Romulus and warn everyone, I can't fathom. Probably because he's insane, which is why he then decides he's going to obliterate the entire Federation, starting with Earth. In reprisal for something that hasn't even happened yet and he has the power to prevent! I mean, he's got the red matter! Why doesn't he just go to the star, and do what Spock couldn't? Then, everyone would have lived happily ever after. Except Kirk's dad and that chick that got sucked out into space.

It's sort of like going back to the time before your wife was killed by a drunk driver, and wiping out the drunk's family in front of him instead of, I don't know, preventing him from getting behind the wheel somehow. I mean, if you have the ability to avert a tragedy, why not instead just allow it happen, and cause another one just for the hell of it! Satan would do it.

Anyway, after all that, let's say that the Spock from the future finally meets up with the Spock from the present, as happens after the climax. Basically, we're left with the impression that the young version of Spock goes on to live his life with the knowledge that in 129 years, he will suffer an epic fail that ultimately causes the destruction of his home planet, his mother and virtually his entire species -- 129 years in the past! Although, of course, knowing that the supernova was going to happen, they could get Spock Prime to develop the red matter 129 years early and stop it, preventing the events that set the entire plot in motion from ever happening. They would then all cease to exist, because their timeline would end abruptly at that point due to an impossibility paradox.

To Sydney Media - A Basic Geography Lesson

Dear Sydney Media Outlets,

The "Homebush" you continually refer to in your broadcasts when talking about the Sydney Showgrounds/Aquatic Centre/former Olympic site is not -- and has never been -- called Homebush. As you can see from this map, easily found with any modern Internet browser, Homebush is a completely different suburb. In fact, Homebush and the actual place often referred to as "Homebush" by Tim Bailey on Channel Ten weather, aren't even in the same council area. Homebush is in the Municipality of Strathfield, the other "Homebush" is in the Auburn Local Government Area.

Homebush

The former Olympic site, Bicentennial Park and the headquarters of the NSW Rural Fire Service -- a place that becomes newsworthy about two minutes after the beginning of summer -- are located in a suburb formerly known as Homebush Bay. Auburn Council long identified the confusion of adjacent suburbs with similar names, and the media's laziness when it came to reporting them, so it applied to the NSW Geographical Names Board to have it re-designated into three different suburbs. This occured on October 2, 2009, when Homebush Bay was broken up into Olympic Park and Wentworth Point. One street, Carter Street, where the RFS building is, reverted into the suburb of Lidcombe. So everytime you "report from Homebush" about the swimming, or the Easter Show crowds, or the Grand Final, or a bushfire emergency update, you are actually deceiving the public because you're not reporting from Homebush at all! It was never called Homebush and even if it was, it hasn't been for the last six months.

Not Homebush


I'm pretty sure the Melbourne media don't get Dandenong and Mt. Dandenong mixed up. Why this behaviour from the news rooms in Sydney? Are you stupid?

The dog's tale

Today's is a sad tale. It's the story of someone's former friend who no one seemed to want anymore. A friend who needed help, but none would come. That is, until I happened on the scene.

An old dog, lying beside the busy highway, broken and alone. No one stopped. In the pre-dawn gloom, the hollow in the embankment next to her was human-like. I circled the block, pulled to a stop. The old dog looked at me sadly. The hollow was just a hollow, and not, as I had first feared, an injured or dead human being.

I ushered the dog into my car. Her back legs no longer worked. I drove her to the nearby vet, but it wasn't yet 7am. I rang the office number and got a long and deeply involved recorded message about how to contact the on-call vet in an emergency. It was so long and deeply involved, with convoluted instructions about opening hours, various numbers, different clinics and the like, that I hung up before I got to the end. I put a call in to my regular vet, and he told me his nurse would be at the surgery about 8.

I drove home. The dog was silent, only her eyes showing me the pain she was in. I took her to my vet's surgery and the nurse helped her hobble inside.

Sometime later, they eased her pain forever.

She had a collar and a chip, but her owner could not be found. Who could have lost this lovely old dog? And how many people saw her there, struggling to move with a broken pelvis, alone and in pain beside the road, before I stopped to help? Who hit her in the first place, and left her to die?

You should be ashamed.

Can you survive a haunted house?

This doesn't get my goat. This is just something really, really cool.

When I was a kid, my favourite board game was Haunted House by Toltoys. Seriously, my brother and I must have played this hundreds of times. Hundreds! If you're too young to have played it or simply just unlucky, Haunted House was just the most awesome game in history. The idea was that you had to move your character through a haunted house. That was it.

If you think that's a pretty retarded idea for a game, you'd probably be right if it weren't for the fact that the board was a three-dimensional haunted house with awesome death traps everywhere! Every now and then you had to drop a full-on steel marble down the chimney and it could land anywhere, causing a huge broom to sweep you off your feet, move a secret wall panel that would flip you across the room, tip from a bucket on to your head, or cause ricketty floorboards to send you flying through the air. See that picture of the floorplan? There's only about 50 or 60 spots on it, but with all the death-traps going off about once a minute the game could take hours to play! Oh, and did I mention you could get turned into a mouse? It was simply the awesomest board game in the world.

I don't know what happened to my game of Haunted House. It probably just fell completely apart from being played too much. Where did I get the pictures for this entry then? Well, while I was idling away at work today, I stumbled on this site. It's a site dedicated completely to Haunted House! Honestly, this dude sell spare parts for a board game that came out in 1971!

Isn't the Internet wonderful?

Calling shenanigans on blame

Little Brody Oppelaar never really got to know his parents or siblings. He never learned how to ride a bike, or even speak. He never even learned to crawl. Because on Saturday night, at just three months old, he died when the car he and his parents were travelling in was struck by another car being driven by a reckless criminal who was deliberately and blatantly breaking the law. The criminal, a car thief named Justin Williams, who was still facing court related to an earlier crime, also died. His girlfriend, Skye Webbe, somehow survived and has been placed in an induced coma in Canberra Hospital. Her parents want the police to "pay for what has happened", because, obviously, it was the fault of the police that their daughter was in a stolen car being driven by an unlicensed driver. Who was also a car thief. Apparently, the entire tragedy was the fault of the police because they had the hide to start chasing an known offender driving a stolen car, instead of whatever else it is they should have been doing. Maybe drinking coffee and eating donuts like some real-life version of Clancy Wiggum.

Only a little less than two weeks ago, NSW State Parliament passed "Skye's Law", a legislation named after two-year old Skye Sassine who died on December 31 when her car was hit from behind by another being driven by bank robbers who were fleeing police. Skye's Law introduced a mandatory prison sentence for criminals who try to outrun police in car chases. Williams may have been aware that the new law meant he would go to gaol if he'd been caught, but as he was already facing court on similar charges it's unlikely he would have escaped prison time even if he'd managed to get away. Instead, he killed himself and three innocent people, one a small baby who never even learned his own name. And if some people are to be believed, it wasn't his fault. He was just trying to outrun the cops. If the cops hadn't been chasing him, he maybe wouldn't have been driving so fast nor run the red light. Naturally. Because guys driving stolen cars ALWAYS drive carefully and stop for red lights.

This was not the fault of the police. To quote Opposition Leader Barry O'Farrell, who supported the expedition of Skye's Law through Parliament, "there is no way that those police officers who now have to live with this, as others do for the rest of their lives, should be today sharing some of the blame for this terrible tragedy". He's right. This was not the fault of the police. We're already told by the media, time and time again, that cops don't do enough to prevent crime. Then, in this instance, when they are attempting to do just that, it's somehow their fault such a tragedy occurs. Of course.

Justin Williams was a reckless menace who cared about no one but himself. Through his own actions he will never harm another human being. Tragically for little Brody Oppelaar and his parents, this irresponsible moron wasn't stopped soon enough.