The Invisible Man

This is the most fantastically vitriolic CD review I've ever seen.
It's funny, it's nasty and it gives a good kicking to a shit album (The Bloodhound Gang's Hefty Fine, if you can't be arsed clicking on the link).

If you think about it, having a brain like a sieve is a good thing.
After all, a sieve's job is to retain all the stuff you want and filter out the crap.

A nice start to the day. I got to open a fresh can of coffee, which means I got to stab my spoon through the foil seal at the top.
That, truly, is one of life's simple pleasures.

Or maybe I just like stabbing things.

So I watched Primer on the weekend. It's a low-budget film people that sone some high-faluting prize at Sundance and has the critics raving.
It's like Donnie Darko or Memento, they say.
They are wrong.
As it usually the case with a low-budget ($7000 according to some reports) film that gets a bit of buzz, everyone wants to jump onboard the Awesome Train and praise it.
But to praise it, they have to avoid one crucial detail - the story line is as confusing as shit. And not confusing in a Donnie Darko way, confusing in a bad-screenwriting kind of way.
The film, about two scientists who invent time-travel and use it to make money on stocks, gets harder and harder to follow.
It introduces several story threads that are never explained and never followed up on. By the end of the film those threads are dropped. It's as though the writer introduced them and then couldn't work out how to wrap it up. So he decided to drop them altogether and hope no-one would notice.
I noticed and it pissed me off.
Look, you can be as arty-farty as you want, you can use as many special effects as you want.
Just remember one thing - the story is paramount. If that's not strong, then nothing else matters.

Which more film-makers would remember that.

Here's something I hate about religion. We run a weekly column in the newspaper written by different local relgious leader each week.
The next writer, a reverend talks about the Gospel of Judas and whether or not it's true and proves the Bible wrong.
The reverend's argument boils down to the following "I believe in the Bible, therefore, the Gospel of Judas is crap".
Of course, being a man of God, he didn't use the word "crap" - I added that.
But it's this habit - common to almost all religions - of confusing belief with proof. You can believe in anything you want to, but you can't then use that belief to "prove" anything.
Belief exists in the margins beyond proof - it lives in places science cannot yet go. But just because you believe in God, the Bible or whatever, that belief can't be offered as proof it's all real.

And you certainly can't use it to, as the reverend I mentioned earlier did, claim that your belief is right while someone's else's wrong.
In the absence of proof, no belief can be right or wrong.

I just got a review copy of Big Momma's House 2 on DVD.
I know you're all so jealous, because Martin Lawrence is a comedy genius.


Yes, I'm kidding. I plan to fling it off a cliff in my lunch break.

It's Friday, it's a public holiday and I'm at work. So I thought I'd take a leaf out of the book of ironmaus and do a Friday Random 10.
That's where you take your iPod, set it to shuffle and note down the first 10 songs it throws up. There's no cheating allowed; if it plays Milli Vanilli, you can't skip it.

Okay, so here they are:
1. Every Breath You Take - Millencolin: Not bad, but I have better cover versions of this song.
2. Suicide Is Painless (Theme from MASH - Twopointeight: Two covers in a row. What are the odds?
3. Alone With You - The Sunnyboys: A classic pop tune from a great Australian band of the early 1980s.
4. Boxcar - Jawbreaker: They've been credited with inventing emo. But don't hold that against them, they're really good. Especially the awesome Dear You album.
5. Amberwood - Pollen: One of the bands I discovered when I was running my webzine Dragster.
6. Revelation - Rockafella: A dirty, rough, loose rocker from a local band.
7. Just Being With You - The Hard-Ons: One of the Australian trio's best songs. And probably the only love song with a reference to farting.
8. Wake Me Up Before You Go Go: Greenhouse: A cool ska-big band version of the Wham! hit. Can you tell I kind of like cover versions?
9. Wet Your Lips - Life, Sex & Death: A band who allegedly had a homeless person as a lead singer.
10. Cathy's Clown - You Am I: Not a cover version, rather a different song with the same name from an Australian band.

I'm glad it stopped at number 10 because number 11 was a Vengaboys tune from a mix disc xqjennaqx made for me. The other songs on that disc are cool (especially the Pizzacato Five number) But not the Vengaboys.

When record companies send you review CDs, they put a sticker on the back saying "Sample Product: Not For Sale".
It's a pointless action - second-hand CD stores are full of discs with this sticker.
It's also annoying. I reckon roughly 80 per cent of the CDs I receive have this sticker placed over the track listing, which make it damned hard to work out what songs are on the disc.
Just peel it off, you say? Can't do it. The stickers are designed to come apart in little pieces and leave behind a gooey residue.

I'm sure they do it on purpose.

This afternoon and tomorrow are looking damn scary. My boss has been in training all day yesterday and most of today, so we've had none of the weekend magazine to work on so far.
The magazine has to be finished by tomorrow afternoon, which means we'll have to subedit the whole thing in a day.
It's "head-down, bum-up" time.

It's long overdue ... yep, it's Speak Australian with Bear, where you'll learn more about my country than you ever thought possible. More, even, than if you ate at the Outback Steakhouse for a week.
The word for this lesson is "dick-pokers". This is a slang term for Speedos (Americans seem to call them "a Speedo" which is incorrect. Hey, the company was founded in Australia so we should know).
If you have any familiarity with Speedos, you'll work out pretty quickly why they're called "dick-pokers".
Other acceptable variations are "dick-stickers" or "budgie smugglers".

There you have it. Another great word to amuse and confuse your friends.

One hundred per cent geniune news story:

LONDON (Reuters) - British anti-terrorism detectives escorted a man from a plane after a taxi driver had earlier become suspicious when he started singing along to a track by punk band The Clash, police said on Wednesday.
Detectives halted the London-bound flight at Durham Tees Valley Airport and Harraj Mann, 24, was taken off.
The taxi driver had become worried on the way to the airport because Mann had been singing along to The Clash's 1979 anthem "London Calling," which features the lyrics "Now war is declared -- and battle come down" while other lines warn of a "meltdown expected".
Mann told newspapers the taxi had been fitted with a music system which allowed him to plug in his MP3 player and he had been playing The Clash, Procol Harum, Led Zeppelin and the Beatles to the driver.
"He didn't like Led Zeppelin or The Clash but I don't think there was any need to tell the police," Mann told the Daily Mirror.

Methinks a certain taxi driver needs to chill out a little.

You know what sucks?
Starting a three-day weekend tomorrow and waking up today with the flu coming on.

Fucking yeah.

What's bad about getting old: Thinking it's a good idea to have Rick Springfield's Jessie's Girl set as your ringtone. And not out of any sense of irony.
What's good about getting old: It's unlikely anyone else will be stupid enough to load that ringtone so I'll never confuse my phone ringing with someone else's.


Incidentally, Jessie's Girl could well be the only top 40 pop song in history to include the word "moot".

Well, it's finally happened. I'm over Lost.
After being a big fan last year, I watched the first few shows of the second series. But I've missed the last two episodes and I have to say I'm not concerned in the slightest.

That damn show just pushed me too far with its eternal padding out of storylines and, this season, essentially repeating an episode but adding a few new scenes.
Now I'm of the opinion that the writers know how the show will end but are trying to stretch things out as long as possible.

No wonder the ratings for the show are down this year compared to last. You can only test an audience's patience so much.

Even though it doesn't star Martin Lawrence When A Stranger Calls would have to be one of the stupidest films ever made.
It's based on the urban legend about the babysitter who gets crank calls and rings the police. They do a trace and discover (oh no!) the calls are coming from inside the house.
Problem #1: That means the audience knows the whole plot before they walk into the cinema.
Problem #2: The pay-off in the story is when the cop calls to say "he's inside the house". For that pay-off to work, the babysitter has to be in the house, unaware of the killer's presence. If she discovers him (or a body) she's not going to be hanging around to long.
So it doesn't take a genius to work out that nothing can happen until the call comes in. In the movie, the call doesn't come in for an hour. That means an hour of the babysitter walking down dimly lit corridors, investigating weird noises and the director trying to scare us, even though we already know nothing is going to happen.

My God, but scary movies have become crap lately. With the exception of gorefest Hostel of course.

Commander in Chief, the show that stars Geena Davis as a female President of the US, debuted here this week.
And, after seeing roughly five minutes, I fully understand why the US network bosses hacked it up into small pieces, burnt it and buried its ashes in a lead-lined coffin.
It's fucking awful. Or, more accurately, Geena Davis is fucking awful. Half the time her face looks like a sphincter sucking on a lemon. The other half it looks worse.
Acting wise, she couldn't be any hammier if she was a pig.

So, no, I won't be watching that show again.

Sometimes, having a penis really sucks. Take last night at footy training as an example. I was standing behind a team-mate who went to catch a kick over his head. Of course, he missed the ball and it ended up hitting me square in the goolies.
I went down like I'd been shot and spent the next few minutes writhing in pain. Then the next few minutes after that walking around trying to will the pain to go away.
So now, I have a bruise right in a certain sensitive area. Hooray for penises. Not.

So, after sending some sample chapters of a book I'd written to various publishers and getting "thanks but no" letters in return, I finally got one which didn't say that.
It's a tentative publication offer from a very small (ie run by one person) press where authors are expected to front up some cash to get the book printed.
But it's different to the self-publishing route because this way at least the book has a genuine publishing company's logo on it. And, as a journalist who has dealings in the book world, I know there's nothing viewed with more scorn than a self-published book.

I'm still waiting for a few other publishers to get back to me - once they say no, I reckon I might go ahead with that guy.

In disturbing news, crap actor Vincent Gallo is selling his sperm on his website, in the ..ahem ... merchandise section.
It's quite a bargain at $500,000 - double that if you want Gallo to knock you up the natural way.
If you have a dark complexion, he won't sell it to you but, if you're a blonde with blue eyes you get a discount.

So very charming.

Two reasons why I am an idiot.
1) Because I liked Tommy Tutone's 867-5309/Jenny I bought the album it came from, hoping there'd be something else good. Guess how wrong I was? Answer: Lots. I was an infinite amount of wrong.
2) I bought the album after that, for the same reason.