After Grog Blog

SATURDAY SHUTDOWN

A closed thread where, at your weekend leisure, you cannot discuss anything you like.

TIME CRAPSULE

Pinks
Wanchors
Illeagles
Cows
Scray
Bumpkins
Paps
Aints
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PissnPooh
Bombrés
Tiggers
Mons
Brizroy
Blooz
Poys
Norf

WORLD CUPDATE VIII: GUNGA GALUNGA

When the Windian commentators say Lara, it sounds just like when Bill Murray says Lama.

Nearly as important was last nights' TDI win, which delivered a solid workout in preparation for our key match against traditional rival Dav Whatmore.

WORLD CUPDATE VII: TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY TONIGHT

TDI in Antigua: I wake up with Straya somewhere around 300, Flatty gets out, Paper Cut gets not out, the rain comes, I go back to sleep, the match is washed out, to be completed tomorrow.

Wonder how it will play out. Does one side have an advantage over the other? Straya must finish their last four overs, which is unlikely to be that easy momentum-wise. Then Windia bat fresh on a new day. The downside for them, like district cricket, is that the overnight rain might have juiced up the pitch.

Let's hope for a sweaty, spitting greentop.

By the way, you know what woke me up? A truck idling in the street, which made me get up to shut my bedroom door. The truck was still there chugging away at 6:30 when I got up proper. But it wasn't a truck. Jumping into the shower I realised the noise was actually the dishwasher stuck on rinse. Fuck! It's the middle of a drought, and here I am squirting gallons of water on clean plates for something like eight hours. But it wasn't the dishwasher, either. It was my turntable. Playing Siren last night, the arm had failed to retract at the end of side one causing the bloody thing to spend the whole night playing side one, track 5, Circular Paper Label.

JACK KNIFE

Drugs cost a lot of money, right? So how come whenever movie drug barons check their gear, it's out with the knife, slit the bag, test the powder on their tongue, then chuck the bag back down on the pile? They never reseal the packet. Don't felons run to sticky tape? If I was to delve into a sachet of smack, I'd be careful about how I opened it. I wouldn't just toss it down like a half-eaten pastie at the football.

"I wish this was Christian Slater's head."

Doubtless you're aware the screen-shot's from The Departed. You're probably less aware I'm no great fan of Martin Scorsese's work. Mean Streets: yeah, I'll pay it. Taxi Driver: gritty. Raging Bull: didn't like it. King Of Comedy: so TV people are pigs. Colour of Money: tripe. The Last Waltz: not without fast-forward. After Hours: slop. Cape Fear: not here. Goodfellas: Hit's & Memories. Gangs of New York: fiasco. The Aviator: snore. Age Of Innoce, well, you get the drift. Keeping all that in mind, it will come as no surprise that I'm no great fan of The Departed, either. Yes, it was ok. The cameras all pointed in the right direction. The soundtrack, actually, scratch that, the collection of rock songs needed for a CD issue contained all the right faces. (Not of itself a good thing. Where have all the great composers gone? Surely moviemakers only need to open the LA phonebook and ring the first Newman they see. Would that they could exhume the spirit of Carl Stalling.) The acting was competent, if schticky. The script not totally embarrassing. The twists almost not quite bleedin' obvious. The upshot is Marty has an Oscar for The Best Acheivement In Directing. Is it possible the Academy were channelling The Simpsons there? I'm not even sure if that's the award the rest of us call Best Director. While it's a matter of rote to bag the Academy in general and their consolation-prize-ism in particular, it's hard to believe even one of their knuckleheads thought The Departed was Scorsese's best film.

By a long way my favourite Scorsese film is Casino. Simply put, it's a good picture. His movie documentaries are gold, too. He knows heaps about film and is good at getting it across. But, as far as I'm concerned, his films aren't that great; they've rarely 'got me in'. He reminds me of Australian comedians. They know all about what's funny and can namecheck the very best in comedy gold, but they're far less capable of being funny themselves.

WORLD CUPDATE VI: THAT'S A BIGGY!

Saturday night and wasn't the Dick in verrry fine form:

Twelve days innn the makinnng. We've been full of sunshine and of showers. Of Dutch, of Scots, of South Africans and of Australians. And of a myriad of sixes. It's fair to say that we're ready for the big guns to fire at each other.

I'm beginning to like The Dick despite him being a dick. I guess it boils down to him having a wider variety of expressions than Bill Lawry. While Bill is all happening here with just salt and no pepper (too hot), The Dick applies a liberal pinch of all-spice. "Fetch that! Fetch! THAT!", was admittedly heard more than once; the aforementioned "That's a biggy!" was exclaimed with real zeal, despite it not actually being that biggy given Warner Park's lack of biggyness; and the pompous "Boucher the Bouyant!" is something only a Pom could try on and almost get away with.

(On reflection it occurs to me that they have to invent new ways to announce a six given how many are being hit.)

With Alec Stewart and Damien Fleming along for comedy relief - "There's got to be a first time for everything," said Flemmo. "Roger Bannister and the four minute mile, Jimi playing the guitar with his teeth." - the lower octane commentary was a refreshing change.

Then there was Bunny Cullinan relentlessly talking Sorth Efrica up and Australia down. "Ponting doesn't have a great track record under pressure," snarked Bunny, by way of yet another sly one. It drew a polite but sneery "Yeeaah. In what context?" from Fleming that had Bunny backpedalling furiously.

We won, too, but you knew that.

A poll then: On what would you prefer to land the ball?

a) a handkerchief
b) a saucer
c) a soup plate
d) a coin

WORLD CUPDATE V: MURDER THEY WROTE

A murder is announced: A Caribbean Mystery.

Whodunnit? MSM are speculating everyone diddit. What do they know. My money's on Loretta de Fay, a local hooker without a heart of gold not desperate to remove her child from poverty, and her colourful pimp, Augustine Alekine Andiston.

NOT OFF THE PRESSES

LEARNING CURVES

Bit of a shock this arvo. I sat down to do a post when it occurred to me I'd rather be developing class work. Things are right up the gonga when you prefer calculus, critical clearance angles and generator stability to blogging.

Nevermind, I'll get over it. In the meanwhile time how about a list of songs that I'm currently listening to that would be on mypod if I had one, which I don't and probably never will.

Rock Show - Wings

Magneto & Titanium Man - Wings

Ramble Tamble - Creedence

New Age - Velvet Underground

Can I have your autograph
he said
to the
fat blonde actress.

Essence - Gang of Four

The French Inhaler - Warren Zevon

White City Fighting - Pete Townshend

Street In The City - Pete Townshend

Life On Mars/Kooks - David Bowie

Georgia George - Mickey Jupp

Sentimental Fool - Roxy Music

Funky 4+1 - That's The Joint

However Much I Booze - The Who

Rock Medley - Roy Wood

Power In The Darkness - Tom Robinson Band

The Yayhoos - I Can Give You Everything

Swallowed By The Cracks - David & David

Violent Times - The Barracudas

Country Road - Toots & The Maytals

That crack yesterday about "music being shit" - A BIG STATEMENT, right, and a rare exaggeration that won't happen again until the next one.

MEMO FROM LEAPSTER

Via Currency Lad at Troppo comes this site dedicated to reviewing Rolling Stones albums. Can't agree "they’re quite brilliant", but some are alright.

Rather than review the site myself I sought the opinion of Sunburnt Country's foremost sensible Stones fan, Leaping Larry L, who writes:

Well I thought Dr Bong did a pretty good job with the 80s stuff, could not buy a clue on the post-Golden Era 70s stuff, and my feeling on the 68-72 golden era was that I've not got enough years left on the planet to waste any of them sitting down with a white-board, a CD player and people like this explaining why great music is great to them.

He's right about "Beggars Banquet", basically. No-one else rates "Ya-Yas" as highly as Germany's #1 funny-cigarette consumer does. It's the only official live album from their best period, has a few really good tracks, but is very stiff next to any other live stuff from the good period. "Let It Bleed" is over-rated as good as it is. He doesn't get "Exile". Just doesn't get it at all.

Can't understand the enthusiasm for the weak-kneed half-hearted 60s pop-tune stuff. Hardcore Stones fans go nuts for it, but I thought it was mostly written from hunger and recorded worse. I don't put this anywhere near their best music.

A lot of this rams right into perspective when you have a look at what other albums by other bands he rates highly. He considers "Animals" by Pink Floyd and a couple of albums by the hilarious German heavy metal band Accept to be among the greatest of all time.

At that point you know any opinion he did get right had to be a happy accident of the drug-cocktail the stinky old hippie happened to be on on the day in question. The punishment for that sort of alternative to having taste should be to listen to "Animals" the rest of his life.

Last week on the radio I heard a Rocks Off sting, which gave me a zing up the spine, but really, I haven't listened to a Stones album for the sake of it, in about 15 years.

For the record my first favourite Stones album was Ya-Yas in 1977, followed by Some Girls in 1978, Let It Bleed in 1979, Aftermath in 1980 and Exile from 1981 onwards. At various times I've played heaps of Sticky, Beggars, The Rolling Stones, Love You Live and It's Only Rock & Roll. But like I wrote above, I haven't listened to them out of choice for ages now. What's more, they were shit when I saw them in concert at the Lavertory.

That's not to say they weren't, at various stages, my favourite band. They were. I own every album up to Tattoo You including bootlegs and Decca 'get even' reissues and read all the books, bios and magazine articles. Somewhere around the mid eighties, though, their status as my enduring favourite band was overtaken by The Beatles, The Kinks and The Who.

If you think I've suddenly lost my grip or gone all fuddy in the duddy, don't blame me, blame the booze. Or rather, lack of it. Rock & roll music is shit when you don't drink.

WORLD CUPDATE IV: LITE SAID FRED?

Not bloody likely.

Blind Freddie

ANDREW Flintoff's binge drinking - which yesterday cost him any chance of again captaining England - almost led him to being disciplined before the Adelaide Ashes Test last summer.

Flintoff was lucky to escape sanction when he arrived for a training session at the Adelaide Oval leading into the second Test clearly suffering the consequences of a heavy night out.

England officials then decided any penalty would have divided the team at a crucial stage of the long tour.

MISSING COUSINS

Ben Cousins has been suspended indefinitely for missing a training session. No word yet on whether he missed it because he was face down in a puddle of his own piss.

First person to spot the phrase "litany of off-field _________ " wins a boat ride with Freddie Flintoff, a parcel of undisclosed shares in a drug company and a complementary panama hat.

BENDER

WORLD CUPDATE III: AFTER CLOG BLOG

Big news. We whipped Holland.

CRACK INFO

In bigger news, Holland has a player called Reekers, which is funny.

Well, not that funny, although Justin Langer may chuckle. The AGB deplores low humour and stereotypes. Two things I know you'll keep in mind when you're leaving your usual clever comments.

WORLD CUPDATE II: OPEN FIRE!

It's effigy time.

Green Day

Green Side 1 beats Green Side 2 on a green track leaving Green Side 2 feeling green and Green Side 1 drinking green beer to celebrate. Slainte.

Four things: one, if you were going to put a handful of magic beans on any one match in any cricket tournament, PuckyStan would feature prominently in your calculations; two, Ireland - "I.R.E.L.A.N.D Urrlund! Urlund!" to the chanting Blarney Army - couldn't have fielded any better, pulling in a swag of CCs; three, over No.30 was a laugh: W, 0, Wk, W, W, 0, 0, Wk, 1; and four, the last few runs of Urlund's chase seemed to take forever.

Ingladesh

In the day's lesser upset the Bangers mashed India by 5 wickets. Not much more to say than:

Indian fans celebrate the loss in traditional fashion.

ARE YOU MAD?

Here at school, there's a co-league with a strange habit.

Me (Reading the paper): "Morning."
She: "Hi. Are you reading the paper?"

Me (Making tea): "Morning."
She: "Hi. Are you making tea?"

Me: (Going to class): "Morning."
She: "Hi. Are you going to class?"

Doubtless she's just being chatty, but it's unsettling, all the same. On balance, I'd prefer she said something, anything, else.

WORLD CUPDATE 1: OCH!

Warning: The World Cupdates that follow from today may contain trace elements of dour analysis, sportsmanship, charitable internationalism and The Spirit of Cricket. For this I apologise. On the upside, they will also contain lashings of rampant barracking, shocking bias and one-sided invective.

Thank you.

Well then, the dross rehearsals are done with and World Cup 2007 is finally underway. One thing is certain: if I'm going to watch any of this Calypso Cavalcade, I'll have to get up well before I go to bed. What a perfectly uncivilized time to schedule a cricket tournament. If someone had thought to install modern electric candles at the Windian grounds us antipodeans could have watched most of most of the games. An oversight that may have been avoided had my suggestion to the ICC to have all international cricket outside Australia played in Sri Lanka - home just in time for dinner and cricket - not fallen on deaf ears.

The upshot is, there's not much to report about this morning's match this afternoon against Scotland in St Kitts because I only saw about 20 minutes of action.

We won.

Extras: The Dick was low-key in his beige open-necked ensemble; some bowlers were "tonked", others were mysteriously "tanked"; Flemmo was all over the "good areas"; a Scottish bowler "leaked", which is probably better than bled, but unsavoury nevertheless; Bunny Cullinan is not completely irritating; JIM MAXWELL! is; and various Windian commentators made various sensible and various not-so-sensible comments, some of which I did and/or didn't understand.

CHUCKY

How did I miss this? Well spotted, Rod.

LAND OF POD

Why remake good films when you can improve bad ones instead as Michael Caine observed just before cheerfully accepting a wad of cash to appear in a crappy remake of Get Carter.

Now apparently they've remade Invasion of the Body Snatchers again with the Nicole Kidman pod in the lead (Didn't she learn anything from the The Stepford Wives fiasco?) and a bloke who directed Inspector Rex eps at the helm.

Why not instead extend the franchise sideways like Body Snatchers: The Invasion Continues did?

(1993. Colour. Script: Raymond Cistheri and the inimitable Larry Cohen for screen story and Stuart "Re-Animator" Gordon, Denis Paoli and Nicholas St John for screenplay. Direction: Abel Ferrara. Cinematography: Bojan Bazelli. Score: Joe Delia.)

Body Snatchers was clearly packaged as a low budget, straight to video movie, probably just to exercise the screen option before it lapsed. But producer Robert H. Solo, whose credits range from Russell's The Devils to the 1978 Snatcher remake, assembled the likes of Larry Cohen, Stuart Gordon and Abe Ferrara (if you know whom none of them are, then I suggest you’re a pod person yourself) and probably told 'em "we've got fuck all budget but it's already in profit on video pre-sales so do whatever you like."

And what they did was come up with a film that excellently updated the creeping noir paranoia of the original. Among the clever twists are setting it on an army base where identically clad people unemotionally follow orders whether they have been podded or not and intelligently reworking the rules of the Body Snatcher universe.

Given the low budget, the special effects aren't too bad at all. But Larry, Stuart, Abe et al were all smart enough to realize the best special effect of all is great acting driven by great scripts.

Body Snatchers most powerful moments come from unexpected plot twists and great lines delivered by great actors. Like R. Lee Emery as the Base Commander who just can't wrap his head around what's going on, Forest Whitaker as the Army psychologist who does his head in when he realizes what is going on and Gabrielle Anwar, whose seductive full frontal nude scene takes place under circumstances that'd turn your trouser tent into a sleeping bag for a peanut.

And there's Meg Tilly's utterly chilling and precisely delivered speech that captures the spine of the movie, and which starts like this - "Where you gonna go, where you gonna run, where you gonna hide? Nowhere... 'cause there's no one like you left." – and then it gets even more spooky.

There are some bullshit happy ending explosions at the climax but it still has a suitable ambiguous conclusion. Look we're not talking a milestone in western cinema here but if you like a good creepy SF horror thiller that's much better than its cover art would suggest, do yourself a favour.

GrogFlog's verdict "We'll give 'em hell, Malone! We'll show 'em what the human race is really made of!" 7 out of 10 pods.

Coming soon: More "coming soons".

CARD SNARK

While I love the card game 500, I fookin' well hate it when someone goes misere. Dunno why, but it shits me up to the back teeth. And only animals go open misere.

That is all.

Wait a tick, no it isn't. I've been pretty much off the blog since Friday (long weekend here) so I haven't been able to answer any comments. Yes, I've popped in the odd one around the place, but an AGB comment is worth two comments anywhere else and as such requires greater deliberation. So, if I haven't answered your comment it's not because I'm burning you, it's because I've ... ohh, whatever.

Six hearts.

MY CONDEMNENTS TO THE CHEF

Has this ever happened to you?

Was out with The Green Man on Wednesday night when he asked the waitress for some English mustard. (No idea where he was going to put it given his plate was already asludge with gravy.) The waitress toodled off to the kitchen but came back empty-handed looking guilty "I'm sorry, if you want mustard it will cost you a dollar." I went "Yer kidding?" while Greeny went red in the face.

Condiments costing extra is wrong, right?

LEARNING THE GROPES

Anyone seen Notes on a Scandal? No, thought not. Here's Christopher Bantick in today's Herald Sun:

Still, besides the sex and power games, teachers are not portrayed favourably in the film.
Judi Dench is a friendless, repressed cynical lifer in a school system that has defeated her utterly.
Hippy-dippy, wispy Sheba fails to control herself or the children.
Meanwhile the staffroom is a menagerie of losers.
More than a few teachers will feel intensely uncomfortable in recognising themselves here.
Teaching, as portrayed by Notes on a Scandal, is mean spirited, exploitative and carnal. It is a repository for burnt out largely disillusioned and diminished people.
For many teachers the film may be hard to take, but then reality often is.

Is it? Sure, I'm a bit of a swine, but most of the rest of my colleagues are diminished, at worst. Some are almost OK.

MOD ONE OUT

One of these things I know nothing about:

1. Football
2. Cricket
3. Carbon offsets

NOSE JOB

WE INTERRUPT IRREGULAR PROGRAMMING

To bring you a late breaking fuck up.