Drop the bass..

Merciless self promotion time:

Earlybirds on sale from Monday 11 May ONLY from Marvel Menswear 143 Ponsonby Rd and Strangely Normal 19 O’Connell St CBD.
Then available from Real Groovy, Conch Records or buy online from iTicket

It took massive amounts of juggling, and a few international airfares and work to get this happening but Tom & I think we've done it. Gonna be a night.....

Yeah, this is the job that ate my brain.....

Simon Jenkins and the world's slow collision with common sense.....

When the current scare is over and the bill tallied, surely there should be an inquiry into this fiasco. Otherwise Voltaire was right. We should take out a virologist from time to time and shoot him, to encourage the others. And ­perhaps an editor too.

[From CIF | The Guardian

There's Klingons on the starboard bow, starboard bow, starboard bow

Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable'

And though this world, with devils filled, should threaten to undo us / We will not fear, for God hath willed His truth to triumph through us

Why am I really not surprised

New video evidence has surfaced showing that US military forces in Afghanistan have been instructed by the military's top chaplain in the country to "hunt people for Jesus" as they spread Christianity to the overwhelmingly Muslim population. Soldiers also have imported bibles translated into Pashto and Dari, the two dominant languages of Afghanistan. What's more, the center of this evangelical operation is at the huge US base at Bagram, one of the main sites used by the US military to torture and indefinitely detain prisoners.

In a video obtained by Al Jazeera and broadcast Monday, Lieutenant-Colonel Gary Hensley, the chief of the US military chaplains in Afghanistan, is seen telling soldiers that as followers of Jesus Christ, they all have a responsibility "to be witnesses for him."

[From Jeremy Scahill: US Soldiers in Afghanistan Told to "Hunt People for Jesus... So We Get Them into the Kingdom" (Video)]

I might send a few Imams into Iowa and Georgia to try and sort those non believers out and see how that works out.....

I know so many people who think they can do it alone / They isolate their heads and stay in their saftey zones

• The man who took my car battery last night said, in Indonesian, that the battery will be ready in the morning and that I should bring the car in to have it fitted. It took a couple of slow explanations (it may have been my fractured Indonesian of course) to point out that the 20km to his benkel might prove too far to push the hulking beast. A friend on Facebook said something about it all being very zen.
  This morning, as if to underline that, he turned up with a brand new top of the range battery to replace the older one we’d bought a year or so ago...free of charge. It wasn’t inside the warranty period but it seemed they thought it was the right thing to do, and at their cost. How often does that happen?
• I’d forgotten that teenagers sleep so much. Did I? I guess I did. But I’m thinking that Isabella has my night-owl genes as she sleeps half to day, only to rise around noon to stagger to the computer to communicate (rarely with us for an hour or two unless it’s in snarls, it improves after food is administered). Myself, I think I used to crawl out and place headphones on at that stage, while mum pointed angrily at the festering pile that was my bedroom.
• And thinking of Facebook and such things, I used to get annoyed at the snipes at Facebook from those who just don’t approve. Last night a good friend, over dinner, made a series of remarks ranging from the dangerous to kids (so is riding a bike if you don’t have few simple enforced rules) to the standard wasting of time nonsense. I’m fairly even tempered and held it in, but that I like chatting and passing some time with friends and, yes, mere acquaintances, without having to a) drink large quantities of alcohol or coffee, or b) get on an aircraft really is my business, so please, get over it.
• And now I’m relentlessly told by the spoilsports that twitter is a) destroying the English language and b) yes again, wasting my time (please worry about your own time, and I’ll worry about mine), with critics relentlessly asking who wants to know when someone is heading down to the shop or about to do the ironing. Well, to be honest, I don’t, but I’m intellectually curious enough to have a couple of hundred people hunting out links and bit and pieces that I may or may nor be interested in, which, if you manage the stream smartly (and use an app that sits outside the browser, so as not to distract..I’m liking Tweetie now) is what you get…along with the trivial of course, but it’s my trivial and I’ll do what I like with it.
  
  Hell, I dunno about you but I like communicating with people and large parts of my day to day has always been rather inane, as I suspect most people’s is. And yes, several times a day I’m sent a link to something that might even make me laugh…sorry if that offends….sour off. Witness the always grumpy and out of time Australian newspaper miss the point completely and in the process get all misty eyed and nostalgic about a TV show that was on thirty odd years back, which rather says it all. Mate, you stick to your struggle to find readers to tell us how good it was in the good old days, and I’ll interact.
• The madness continues…..Indonesia, in it’s usual perplexingly irrational way, has tightened up the importation of alcohol to a frankly insane level. The argument from the lads in Jakarta is that there was so much untaxed stuff being smuggled in that something had to be done, so the license to import booze was all given to one company (just, funnily enough, coincidently like every other state defined monopoly, owned by one of the good old boys) in Jakarta, and the duty was raised to amongst the highest in the world. How to kill the higher spending end of the tourist market…..while Malaysia and Thailand are pulling in tens of millions of tourists a year, Indonesia, even with Bali as it’s jewel, staggers towards 5 or 6 million.
  
  The end result, aside from bottles of AUD$7 Australian and Chilean paint stripper retailing for US$50 each is that we, in the past two weeks, have been to a Belgian Beer Bar that has no Belgian beers, and a Japanese restaurant that had no bloody Sake. Oh, and the smugglers, with the help of the rather inevitable little customs lubrication, are back at it with a very thirsty market. I’m rather over it and would do just about anything for a well stocked wine shop (or restaurant) at reasonable prices. Or a bloody Stella Artois….
• 
• We’re moving…or rather have been forced out. The folks around us, the locals, have decided to build right to the boundary..three of the four, a selection of gruesome concrete block monstrosities, all completely illegal of course but that’s neither here nor there in the gilded isle where the law will happily bend as far as your wallet will open. Oh, and for good measure a bunch of young guys have, joy, opened a motorcycle repair business...the sort where they take the mufflers off and rev loudly to show the watching young girls just how well appended they are, out the front. The serenity and peace of Bali…it’s time to move to Seminyak..at least I can stagger off to a beachfront bar to hide from it all. Once you step outside the tourist myths the concrete block and badly tuned motorbike are as close as you get to the real Bali.
• I think I need a holiday

To the happy home / With trees and flowers and chirping birds

We the people: