Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3

Looky looky, my blog has moved! (But don't worry - it's still great value...)

Hallo 2007! (Can I have an iPhone now?)

Hond in de Goot!

Warming up - and getting ready for Europe!

"Johnny we're coming after your job mate. You want our job, we want you."

New gigs, new snow, and new experiences in my new city home.

Minus ten FTW! And Sander Van Doorn, of course.

Martha Stewart is on parole and in my bedroom!

Armin 1, Froboy 0

Inflatable furniture. No, really. Inflatable furniture. *cough*

Fingers and toes...

Black Olives Redux

Running up that hill

Didja notice?

Black Coffee and Olives - and a New Mix for Download.

Welcome to the solar system - now with 11% less planet!

It's true, Pluto's been turfed out. 

Nah, not the dog.  The planet.

Well, I mean, it's still there, one would assume, but it's been demoted from its status as a planet.  I guess you could say it was fired?  Well not exactly, it's now a "dwarf planet".  Which would be ok, except that there weren't any dwarf planets in the solar system before, so it's like they created a special class just for it - like a short bus for planets, I guess.

BT was excellent.  The godfather of melodic prog certainly still has it - and wasn't afraid to show it.  I daresay it was the first laptop-based show I've seen that I was impressed by.  Using a number of outputs into the mixer, some proper outboard hardware, and a very large helping of sincere enthusiasm, yeah, he nailed it.

Tony Hawk is in town this weekend.  Hoping to head down Sunday to catch some skateboarding action.  I have a lot of respect for Tony Hawk.  He's on my list of 'people I'd like to interview', as I think he'd be very interesting.  He certainly appears to be pretty switched on.  Not only is he immensely talented, but he has a keen business sense (he's just re-inked a licensing deal with Activision that carries him through till 2015!), and was instrumental in buliding what was once a very underground street activity into a serious multinational sport.  Heck he can even string a sentence together (his autobiography hit 18th on the New York Times' best-seller list!). 

The underground dance music scene could use a Tony Hawk-type figure to bring it some legitimacy, I think.  Oakenfold tried it, but, well...  heh we'll leave that kettle of fish for a bit longer, I think.

Seems there's all sorts of paranoia in the air this past week. 

You've probably heard about the Indian businessmen flying from Amsterdam to India a few days ago that got their flight turned around and a night in the slammer for swapping seats and a few jokes?  What about this one, on a US Airways domestic flight yesterday where a passenger freaked out and had to be restrained (come on - it's Fox News, it has to be true).  Or an American flight from Manchester to Chicago, that diverted and its passengers searched after some in-flight freaky-deaky?  Last week it was a bomb threat on a barf bag that got the fighter jets a-scramblin'.  Not to mention the woman that decided to urinate on the floor mid-flight, which of course set the global panic-o-meter to stun once more, the flight that diverted because there was a scary name on the manifest, or the two scary-looking guys that got turfed from their flight just for, well, looking scary.  Some other dude decided to bring some dynamite with him on his flight, which was a bit alarming.  To say nothing of the guy that tried to pass his penis pump off as a bomb.  Talk about diversions.

Now, for sure terrorism is scary.  Check out one of the dudes arrested in the UK for planning to blow up his iPod with his Lucozade:

Nope, not the 'gonna bust a cap in yo ass for cutting my tie' guy on the left, or his wife in the middle.  No, it's the dude on the right I'm most concerned with, for good reason.  Here's a mug shot taken from a recent arrest, before he let his hair grow out.

Look familiar?  Here he is in colour, with a certain "special friend".

Very interesting.  Need more evidence?  Consider this placard, prominently displayed at a pro-Bin Laden rally not too long ago.

Look carefully.  Truth is stranger than fiction.

Poor Grace.  Seems I'm not the only one to run into issues with Australian immigration.  For reasons too convoluted (and silly) to go in to here, it seems Grace has had her application for an electronic tourist visa declined until immigration 'has some words with her'.  Never mind that she's a Canadian citizen, studied in Australia for a year, and followed the instructions of her visa to the T. 

Gas is under a litre here in Calgary now.  Coffee is, too.  94 cents a litre!  For the coffee that is, at 7-11 if you bring your own cup.  Gas is 99 cents a litre whether you bring your own cup or not.  Good thing, too...  Fro and I got 400kms out of a 50L tank of petrol coming back through the back roads of Banff last weekend!  (Might have had something to do with having set the cruise control at 160km/h.)

Dan - the guy who caught Sasha in the booth in Ibiza, and who's getting married in December - asked me about the meaning of the lyrics in my last promo mix, Tales from the Departure Lounge.  You were on the right track, Dan.  It does indeed tell a story, and if you listen to the lyrics in each vocal track from the first to the last, it is a recap of a recent relationship of sorts.  Good spotting.

Speaking of picking up trash, check this out.  Who knew a winning $1M lottery ticket only paid $40K a year?  Geez, you can make that telemarketing for an insurance company.  Hardly the stuff of millionaires.

I've always enjoyed mixes that tell a story and have some continuity across the songs so that the mix, taken as a whole, flows lyrically.  It took me a while to get my head around how to best use vocal tracks in my mixes, too.  I recall receiving, in addition to some very good advice (thank you marsh, mangler, ben, jules, jem and jezza!) some decidedly bad advice that unfortunately stuck with me during my early days as a DJ in Australia - the idea that it was somehow verboten to put two vocal tracks back to back in a set.  Mind you in fairness, this advice was doled out by the same mental giant that told me - in complete seriousness - that 'keymixing makes you lazy and forget your phrasings', so shame on me for even listening to the dude such in the first place. 

Attitude may be a choice - but then again so's finishing high school, now, innit?

Speaking of mixing in key, I'll be putting a new mix up for download this weekend for those of you with iPods.  It's a three-hour mix, recorded live off vinyl (and a couple CDs) at my birthday party in late May - mixed in key, and you know what that means - boring and flat!  *cough*   I'll pop the link up in a blog post once it's been uploaded to the server and I've finished the tracklisting, but it'll only be up a little while so grab it while you can.

Pretty excited about a couple print opportunities that have opened up for my writing, too.  Danny Howells is through town in a few weeks, and I'm writing up a feature for Calgary's street press for it.  Oh yeah, and Hernan Cattaneo's in town week after next, too.  This Calgary place ain't so bad!

Ok, enough for now. 

"beetie beetie beetie!"

...at least that's what I think Twiki said on Buck Rogers.  We've been over this already, haven't we?

Just a quick one as I'm heading out the door to see BT - aka Brian Transeau, one of the coolest music producers on the planet, who's playing here in Calgary on a rainy Wednesday night.  Calgary gets some pretty good acts through town.  Hernan Cattaneo's thru in two weeks' time, too.

The weekend blast out to Vancouver and back was amazing fun.  I've said enough about the car, so I'll talk about the roads instead.

Look carefully - that's all one road.  Ahh, yeah!

The weather was superb.  We drove along the US/Canada border, through the winery region and what seemed to be a desert in BC's interior, rather than go through Jasper, and were well rewarded with some very fun, well-maintained, hang-on-to-your-hat, the-rev-limiter-kicks-in-at-9600RPM driving.  1200kms out, 1050kms back.

Caught up with Grace, my flatmate from when I lived in Carlton.  Here she is with Fro, in the middle of giving us a tour of the campus of the University of British Columbia.  Twas a great day - once I worked through my hangover, of course.  Whoops.

After dinner, it was a nice dinner overlooking the beach - and a very nice sunset. 

Oh yeah.  We saw a really big truck.  Holy truck!

Andy Moor feature is written and should be up soon.  Andy who, you say?  Andy Moor.  If you live in Melbourne and you like music - any music - you should go see Andy Moor.  Complete info here.

...and hey, speaking of Melbourne's dance music community, what's this?  It looks like Melbourne's finally getting something approaching a world-class club again.  Very nice.

What?  Vinyl's dead?  Yes, It Is?  No, It's Not?  (FAO BB, 12 months is up, the VW, she still be standing.)

Next feature coming up is the ever-clever, politically astute John Askew.  Should be up by the end of the week.

Aiight, out to catch BT.

It's a weird, weird world...

"I was not pleased that Hamas has refused to announce its desire to destroy Israel."— US President George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., May 4, 2006

Indeed.

Anyone who visted me when I lived in Kew in Melbourne's inner-eastern suburbs will note that my house was pretty much on the Eastern Freeway (bb = blind bender?), but it would seem they've managed to do one better in the proximity sweepstakes today.  In one of those 'this doesn't happen very often' sort of moments, it appears there's been a pretty major traffic foul-up on that same freeway, as a result of a house that's actually on the road.  Which is, you know, unusual.

Paul Oakenfold's a busy guy these days, spending his weekdays in his studio in Ibiza finishing off his soundtrack work for the upcoming Danny DeVito film "Nobel Son", and his weekends touring with Madonna - he's the first support act to tour with her since 1985, in fact.  (He says hi, Charlee.)  The tour has been garnering some unwanted attention from religious types, too.  It seems that the crucifixion act that's part of the show has been offending people, most noteably at last weekend's show in Rome. This weekend it's Germany, and the German authorities will apparently be paying pretty close attention to how things unfold.  As Germans do, I suppose.

But back to Australia for a moment.  Here's something.  Now first, I should point out for the benefit of our non-Australian readers that Liberal in Australia means a member of the Liberal party, which is decidedly un-liberal in its ideology, and startlingly right-wing in nature, which is why you'll hear phrases like 'small L liberal' or 'big L liberal' bandied about by political scientists in Australia, should you take a moment to listen to them.  So yes, everyone's favourite Liberal (that's a big L, yo), Jeff Kennett, is doing his best to bury reports that his son was picked up by police in St Kilda over the weekend outside a nightclub with a tablet of ecstacy in his pocket. 

Big L indeed, Jeff.  Right on the forehead.  Anyone know what venue it was?

Speaking of politicians' progeny finding themselves amazingly unimprisoned after their drug arrests, does anyone else remember Jeb Bush's daughter getting picked up for having a rock of crack cocaine in her shoe while in rehab?

And hey, speaking of evolution, here's a howler.  Unlike people in, well, pretty much every other developed nation in the world, it seems that less than half of all Americans recently polled had faith in evolution.  Even weirder, the percentage of Americans unsure of their stand on evolution has tripled from 7% to 21% in the past ten years.  I have to ask: is our children learning?

Nice to see a few big-L Liberals were willing to cross the floor of the Senate, standing up to John Howard's plan to further shift Australia's immigration policies away from the rest of humanity's.  If you're not familiar with the proposed legislation, here's a primer.  In a nutshell, Howard wanted to pass a law that would mean any refugees landing on Australian shores would be automatically taken back out of Australia to a remote Pacific island concentration camp for 'processing'.  Or, as any rational observer with a calendar and a conscience might call it, indefinite imprisonment without a trial.  Advance Australia where?

Moving into the international sphere, we find that the US has learned a trick from Australia in terms of disposing of unwanted guests.  That's right, taking a lead from John Howard's decision to send refugees off to remote Pacific island concentr- sorry, detention centres they're called - for 'processing' until they die of old age - or, in some cases, go crazy after five years of imprisonment without charges being laid - the US government has started to auction off its unwanted Guantanamo guests to the lowest bidder.  In this case, it's Albania - the country fictionally invaded in Wag the Dog - that's managed to pick up the booby prize, with the US sending some Chinese nationals who were imprisoned at Gitmo off to Albania, rather than processing them as refugees in accordance with international law.  From the article:

Their transfer to Albania meant exchanging a military prison camp on the south-eastern tip of Cuba for a bleak and unpromising future in one of Europe's poorest countries where no one speaks their language.

One of the men, Abu Bakker Qassim, said in an interview: "I would rather be in a society where I can be with my countrymen, but here is better than Guantanamo."

Keep on rocking in the free world.  Or something.

Now on to the craziness at Heathrow.  Seems all heck's breaking loose - and a few cellos, too.  Isn't the whole point of terrorism to paralyse our society?  Now I'm no social scientist, but here's a bit of cold, hard math.  Lets say those terrorists pulled it off - the whole Lucozade/iPod bomb thing, with all nine of those planes blowing up.  Now, going with our worst-case scenario, lets make them all packed-to-the-rafters Boeing 747-400s.  So we have 498 passengers, 3 crew in the cockpit, and two dozen air hostesses in each.  And, well, lets just say that they all blow up.  That's 4725 dead folks, and there's nothing funny about 4725 people dying. In fact, we should do whatever it takes, no matter what it does to our economy, our culture, our way of life, or our stuff - to ensure no lives are lost.  Because just letting people die would be wrong, right?

After all, 4725 people is a fair few people indeed.  It takes a nearly a month for that many people to die in automobile crashes in the United States.  Or about eight hours for that many people to die globally from tobacco-related illnesses.

Lets look at it another way.  AIDS is serious business, as one of business' most serious individuals took pains to point out yesterday.  (Obligatory counterpoint from The Onion.)  Now, we could radically reduce AIDS transmission and mortality rates by throwing some money at the problem (and throwing out some pretty seriously outdated ideological views).  We could give drug companies - who need money to fund research - money to subsidise drug treatment for those who cannot afford it - ie the vast majority of those infected globally.  Remember those Luco-pod 747s we had blowing up over the North Atlantic?  If AIDS killed by crashing planes instead of smashing immune systems, we'd see a fair few of those loaded 747s smashing into the North Atlantic and killing everyone on board.  Like, uh, sixteen a day.

And yet the vast majority of us motor through our daily lives safe in the knowledge that the numbers are still on our side - which, I'll concede, they are. 

My point?

We as a society have put a price on life.  Not saying its right or wrong, just saying we've done it.  We - and I mean you, me, all of us - have made the decision to keep our money for our own use, rather than use it to save lives.  We've already chosen an economic balance between life and death.  Before our entire international travel system grinds to a halt (read to the bottom for a chuckle), our economy buckles, and we give up what precious few rights to privacy we still have in the name of fighting this 'global war on terror', lets not forget that the world is a dangerous place, and that without risk there can be no reward.  I may still wear my seatbelt (Mo, I'm talking to you) but I took the training wheels off my tricycle a long time ago.

Still reading?  Nice one.

If you've ever seen me write, you'll know I'm left handed.  Now, I've always had a sneaking suspicion lefties were pretty cool dudes, but here's something I found interesting - it seems lefties don't just get more than our share of the gigs, girls and giggles in this world - we also get paid disproportionately well, too.

Besides, being a part of any club that includes Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Benjamin Franklin, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, Fidel Castro, Benjamin Netanyahu, Henry Ford, David Rockefeller, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, David Letterman, Jay Leno, Matt Groening, Marshall McLuhan, Mark Twain, H.G. Wells, David Byrne, Glen Campbell, Kurt Cobain, Phil Collins, Billy Corgan, Glenn Frey, Noel Gallagher, Judy Garland, Jimi Hendrix, Paul McCartney, George Micheal, Robert Plant, Cole Porter, Paul Simon, M.C. Escher, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Dan Aykroyd, Tim Allen, Matthew Broderick, George Burns, Charlie Chaplin, Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon, Robert DeNiro, Richard Dreyfuss, W.C. Fields, Peter Fonda, Whoopie Goldberg, Mark Hamill, Jim Henson, Angelina Jolie, Shirley MacLaine, Steve McQueen, Marilyn Monroe, Sarah Jessica Parker, Richard Pryor, Robert Redford, Keanu Reeves, Julia Roberts, Mickey Rourke, Christian Slater, Bruce Willis, Oprah Winfrey, Pelé -Edson Arantes do Nascimento, Mark Spitz, Bruce Jenner, Oscar de la Hoya, Ayrton Senna, and Valentino Rossi...  is just fine with me.

Yeah...  especially Valentino Rossi. 

Viva la southpaw, Doc!

More news as it happens.  This weekend it's another VTEC-powered blast through the mountains, as Andrew and I complete the final leg of the Trans-Canada, driving out to Vancouver to see my one-time flatmate and long-time friend (and Zeljko's sleepier half) Grace. Up through Jasper, camping in the mountains, then into Vancouver for Friday night.

A Summary of my writing for ITM