The Gap Between The Pauses

Mikey fitted up by fixed footage Yes Zeitgeisters, I’m watching Big Brother 2006 – and if you don’t like it, you can sit out this blog entry. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. Just a quick recap – it’s day 37, the housemates have whittled the million bucks in prize money down to $490,000. Last night Michael was evicted. And for the last two nights it’s been a weird scene at Dreamworld between “Mikey” and Big Sister Gretel. Mikey doesn’t appear to be real good at sticking to a story. Last night he was talking over the top of Gretel to justify himself and eventually she appeared to get pissed off and just left him hanging. Mikey has seemed, well, quite the loose unit, despite the psychological profile from the usually reliable BB Psych, Carmel Hill. (This is all on the BB website to which I refuse to link). The thing that sent Mikey further over the edge tonight was the suggestion that he had kissed cowboy David, one of the two gay housemates. Mikey seemed to take this suggestion p...

Friends, Zeitgeisters, Like many another blogger, I regularly check me stats thanks to the good people at Site Meter. A few minutes ago I obsessively clicked through the various pie graphs to discover that this blog is overwhelmingly read by Australians at 49%, followed by the United States at 21% and the UK at 7%. So far, so expected. This is an Australian Blog written in English on the World Wide Web. (But seriously, New Zealanders, where are you? I’ve never done a single sheep gag in this blog. Promise.) The stats also record that Unknown Country is the fourth most frequent country of origin for people visiting this blog. I googled around for an answer and found Star Trek 6: The Undiscovered Country , but this seemed off-topic. Then I came across Whitley Strieber’s site Unknowncountry.com. Now Whitley has always creeped me out since he wrote accounts of his abduction by aliens. So I won’t link to him. Go do the Wikipedia, Google thing, if you want to know more about Mr Str...

Gorbs rip the crowd a new one at the Hellenic Club! Hey Zeitgeisters, As you know, my band Dancing with Gorbachev (DWG) has had some teething problems over the last three months, so I am pleased to announce that our new line-up is really starting to smoke. Just to introduce or possibly re-introduce them to you, Pedrag Babich : guitar, Zlatko Babich : rhythm Toma Draskovic : bass, vibes, theremin Vikram Suprotik : drums Mr Trivia : vocals, poetry Check out the photos taken by Toma’s mum, Jelena. They show us at a recent gig at the Hellenic Club, Northbridge, where we supported local band The Pencils . We’re still doing quite a few Nickelback, Live, Ash, Simple Plan and Pussycat Dolls covers, but we’re working hard on our originals. Our new opening song is a kick-ass rock ballad that Vikram wrote, very much in the style of Metallica’s Enter Sandman . It’s called Why Don’t People Get Me? In the middle of the night in the infommercial’s glow a question burns...

Zeitgeisters, it’s 2006 already and still no sign of the rich bounty we were promised by the science fiction movies and television of yesteryear. These fanciful magic lantern shows were of course inspired by the Golden Age of written science fiction (approx.1938-1950). Did we not envision this particular era we are suffering through now as an enlightened time of impossibly long travelators in clear plexiglass tubes? I was supposed to be able to step on a travelator here in Perth at 0855 and make my 0900 meeting in Beijing. Surely we all recall this? Did we not imagine that items such as the following would be commonplace: floating cars with batwing doors, food replicators, recessed lighting, wall-sized telescreens, invisible helpmate computers and funky androids that served us martinis on the terrace in our geodesic dome home? Did we not dream of a Utopian World Government that had ended famine, poverty and war, had our best interests at heart and was barely seen to govern a...

Lordi - The Unexpected Winners of Eurovision 2006 ADVISORY: Zeitgeisters, steer clear of this blog entry if the idea of a 4-hour televised European Song Contest leaves you unmoved. INTRODUCTION The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) is a televised song competition that has been aired every year since 1956. Participant countries are not necessarily “European” but have to be members of the European Broadcasting Union. Which is how countries like Egypt and Turkey can qualify. Audiences in thirty-eight countries can vote for the contestants in a television poll. That is a dry description of the event culled from the official website and the Wikipedia . If you’ve never witnessed the Eurovison Song Contest, it’s like a collision between The World Cup and an Australian rock eistedffod. Some people take it as seriously as the older Sanremo Music Festival (here if you read Italian) , however this is difficult to do if you don't enjoy middle-of-the-road pop. For the rest of us, the E...

Above: The Man, The Fat Man and the Grandfather of Shock Rock Hey Zeitgeisters, When I work late I will occasionally head home along Canning Highway and grab a burger from the drive-thru at Hungry Jack’s . For our international readers, Hungry Jack’s is the Australian version of Burger King. In fact we have both Burger King and Hungry Jack’s here in the Wide, Brown Land. It’s an odd situation; a little like Berlin before The Wall went up, when the city was divided into different zones of control (The American zone, the Russian zone etc.) Okay, it’s nothing like that at all. Believe it or not, there’s quite a good Wikipedia entry on Burger King which deals with the Hungry Jack’s controversy quite nicely. But I’m just warming up, folks. That’s merely a daub of mushroom sauce on the bacon wrapped patty that is this blog entry. It was two nights ago, the telecast of the Green/Mundine fight had just finished over at the Leopold Hotel on Canning Highway in Bicton. The multit...

A searing image representing Time (Kenji Phlange) Howdy Zeitgeisters, Time is a Construct. Try saying that to your Boss when you’re 35 minutes late for the weekly one-hour staff meeting. This sort of University-style postulation only goes over if you’re working in a Secret Government Research Facility trying to replicate "The Philadelphia Experiment”. And if you think, “Crappy 1980s sci-fi film starring Michael Pare and Nancy Allen” when you hear the term “The Philadelphia Experiment” then you need to click here . And remember the Wikipedia is NEVER WRONG. I have time only to blog these few following words: The Artline Pen thing, didn’t convince. Raspberry Beret remain unimpressed with my Pro-Team joggers. “At least they’re better than those old K-Mart shoes you used to have,” she said. Our good buddies at Kane & Kane are launching Stage 2 of The Project . If you’re bullish on aggregating content for your Me Brand, then maybe they have something to tell you. And check out Le...

Hello Zeitgeisters, If you’re an urban poseur like me, then you spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about, searching for and drinking coffee. You might even be a café habitué with your own dark corner of a local coffee house. Here in the glittering berg of Perth, Western Australia, we are blessed with some halfway decent caffeine and for that I believe we must thank the Post-World War 2 wave of European migration to Australia. See, sometimes the movement of entire populations owing to industrial-scale violence is good, because it improves the menu somewhere else in the world. Starbucks haven’t moved in here yet. Although my conspiracy theorist chums like to insist that they have, by telling me that Starbucks already own ‘Dome’ or ‘Gloria Jeans’ , but I am too damn lazy to research the truth of this statement. My point is this. Yesterday, I was at a seminar for work in the city. I was gabbing with some colleagues and in swift succession I did this: grabbed a ‘styr...

Hey Fashion-Geisters About two years ago I bought a pair of runners, joggers, sandshoes, plimsolls - what have you - from Spendless Shoes. The cognoscenti among you will recognise this as an excellent Australian business whose mission - cheap shoes for riffraff like myself - is not to be sneered at. I'm old school, see. Money spent on my shoes is money wasted. My friends would attest to this. "He's not stylish," they'd say. "We love him because he's quirky about old television shows and he knows that ALF comes from Melmac." The footwear is simply not part of the package. Anyhow, my partner (formerly Miss Pink, but she has expressed the desire to be known as.. ) Raspberry Beret hates my Pro-Team runners from Spendless (I believe they spell it "$pend-less") because I once did some house-painting for my father in them. So they became besmirched and bespattered with spots of white paint. Raspberry Beret has in the past regularly refer...

So Zeitgeisters, FOOTLOOSE was on the old Free To Air. At first, I decided to ignore it. If you don’t remember FOOTLOOSE or never saw it, the film was made in 1984 and stars Kevin Bacon as teenager Ren McCormack who moves from Chicago to a small town called Bomont where Rock and Roll Music is against the law! Why? I hear you ask. Because Rock is the Devil’s Music. And according to the screwy plot of FOOTLOOSE, five years before Ren’s arrival some kids from Bomont died in a drink-driving accident after they were out “enjoying” some of those devil rhythms. One of those kids was the son of Reverend Shaw Moore (John Lithgow) and the good Reverend dedicates himself to preaching against the deleterious effects of R-O-C-K. And no Rock means no dancing and that means no Senior Prom. It all sounds quite stupid. Which is why I almost didn’t watch the film again. However, some people did believe in bullshit like that back then, and continue to do so to this day. In fact, that banner ye...