One of those ones / Glasto

It's a sit in the toilet sort of day. I properly can't be arsed. Dunno what it is, I haven't got a hangover, but I'm muchos underwhelmed with this whole work thing today. Still, that means I'm updating this thing, which makes a change.

Is anyone going to Glastonbury this year? The best they can do with the weather report is that 'it won't be as bad as last year' ?! Fook me, they'd have to cancel it if it was looking like it might be, no? Which raises an interesting question – when would it be? Personally it'd be when the Kaiser Chiefs were headlining and The Fratellis were on just before them. The Fratellis are playing here in August and there's a lot of chatter and excitement about said gigs. Yep, they still like their rock very uncomplicated here, mind you when I went to see them at Brixton Academy last year, at the start of a three night sell-out run (free tickets, the worst gig I'd seen in a very long time), the crowd there were going bananas an'all, so there y'are.

I'm much more into the new one from The Music. Took me a couple of listens, and I thought it was a bit straight ahead and electronic to begin with, which it is compared to the old stuff, but it's a grower and there's some cracking tunes on it. My favourite at the moment is 'The Price', which is an extra track on the digipak/special edition. I've only read recently about his drug and booze grief, and his stint in rehab, though with tunes called 'the spike' and 'drugs' it's not too subtle.
You know his problem of course? He's never done a propers days work in his life. A few weeks down ADL makes men of us all. Or stick him in an office for years and let him flirt with the ecstacy that it reading the Metro in the shitter.

Did anyone go to the Isle Of White festival? Apart from the obvious examples (Ian Brown), I thought the line up for that was a total shocker an'all. Are festivals trying to discourage people these days?

Heard the new Verve track? Pish. It's the soundtrack to buying a well designed yet reasonably priced Swedish coffee table.

How're the Euros going?

How's the football going? I'm reading about the results online, and I saw the Holland goals the other night, but apart from that, I've seen nowt. The games are on normal telly here, but they're slap bang in the middle of the night, where a late night or an early rise are no use. In a piece of scheduling genius that I can only put down to some dark commercial pact I'm unaware of, the highlights package on terrestial channel SBS is on at 5.30pm every night, surely the exact time when most normal people are right in the middle of their commute. The swines. It finishes at half six, which is normally when I walk through the door.
I could Sky+ it (Foxtel IQ it) if I had Sky+, but in a move that'll shock you, the fuckers are as bad out here as they are back home and we've been trying to get them to come and install it for weeks. They came wih the wrong stuff the first time, didn't tell us they were coming the second, and trying to book a third that suits all parties is... well, you know the drill.

The big sporting news here tonight is that Queensland pulled their socks up from the first best-of-three State Of Origin clash and murdered NSW in the second. All to play for in the decider on July 2nd.

MF31

Swan Dive

Went to my first AFL game on Sunday there, and saw the mighty Sydney Swans take a commanding lead in the first quarter against the Western Bulldogs (from Melbourne, as most of the Aussie rules teams are), only to fall apart and get hammered for the remaining three.
I'd been wanting to go for a while, as loads of people go on about it, but watching it on TV I thought it looked absolute pelt. But that's exactly what everyone tells you - it don't work on the telly, you've got to be able to see the whole pitch and get involved live to capture the full flavour. They were right, it is much better than say, watching rugby league live, where the little hand-offs and shimmies are easier to view on telly than they are from the thirtieth row of an 80,000 seater stadium (I went to see the opening game of the NRL at Homebush Olympic Stadium/The ANZ with Ste. It was the Rabbitohs Vs Roosters and wasn't much cop live). The Swans play most of there matches at the SCG, there was 29,000 there, and it's a bit like watching a weird mix of table football and ping pong played by 16-to-a-team giant nutters. Each quarter is half an hour long and with half time and breaks games last about two and a half to three hours. There's an Irish lad who plays for the Swans who used to be a Gaelic Football pro, and next year they're doing a cross code game, with the Swans playing Dublin at Aussie Rules in Dublin, then coming back to Sydney and playing them at Gaelic Football. Weird, but there's so many micks here it's not surprising. Go down Coogee at the weekend and all you see is pissed up, lobster-pink micks generating huge volts of static electricty in those nylon gaelic football tops. In a recent report the Coogee Bay Hotel was the second most violent pub in New South Wales (after a Hells Angels pub in in the middle of nowhere).

Read the match report here. I went with Luke, who's a Leicester fan. Quite fitting then that the Swans took a beasting and stood proud next to the Gills and the Foxes in failure.

Boris Johnson? Marvin Gaye?!

...What is going on? I leave and two minutes later all hell's breaking loose! Seriously, tell me none of you actually voted for the clown? Dave, I don't want to single you out, more just make sure that you definitely didn't? Maybe being so far away I missed the subtleties of the campaign, and rather than being a right-wing, retarded, mentally unhinged Eton Old Boy, Boris is actually a man of the people with his finger on the pulse. Big Ken's a bit of a crook an'all, and the congestion charge and the price of the tube's a joke, but still, who'd have thought for a minute that the 21st century's Screaming Lord Such would beat him? I'm spewing, it's like it's going back to the '80s when Essex boy cab drivers from Chingford used to love Maggie and all the wonderful things she'd done for the country. And he's going to be in charge for the Olympics eh? Christ.

Can one of you shed any light? What's the theories? I'm at a loss, and I guess it is because I'm way over here.

Moran

As far as famous people go there was Kevin Moran in the '80s, but in real life I don't think I ever met anyone else with the same surname. That's not the same here, as Australia's most famous crime family in recent years were the Morans (second ever only to the Kelly family of Ned fame, for a double barrelled coincidence). From the late '90s and up to a couple of years ago there were gangland wars in Melbourne with that family in the middle of it, seeing as they had a lot of the drug trade tied up, and Aussies still love their pills (and then some… there was loads of kids mushed at Interpol when I went to see them!). The biggest show by far on the box just now is called Underbelly, a drama with loads of old Neighbours bods in it about the Morans and the gangland murders. Because there's still trials happening from all the naughty business that went on then it's been banned in Victoria, but everyone else is lapping it up (and there's a roaring trade in pirate DVDs in Victoria). The Aussie word for a chav is Bogan, and Underbelly's been nicknamed the 'Bogan Sopranos'. Until now every time I made a booking or call centre phonecall I'd be going "Moran, m-o-r-a-n" but everyone knows the name now. Obviously at this point I’d like to say I also get treated with a new degree of respect and fear, but when you give off such an air of understated menace like I do there’s no where left to go…

DS31