Just so you know, Real Groovy is having the best sale at the moment. Here’s the results of my lunchtime stroll (21 degrees today in Auckland BTW).

fIREHOSE – Mr Machinery Operator. A very underrated band from the SST label (eg Husker Du, Sonic Youth, Black Flag, etc etc), I got into these guys after hearing them on an old skateboard video. They feature Mike Watt, who’s probably the best bass player in this kind of band around. Damage: $4

Primal Scream – Screamadelica. With songs produced by Andy Weatherall and The Orb, this is seminal stuff. While I’ll always think of Bobby Gillespie as the one armed drummer from The Jesus and Mary Chain, this will do nicely, been meaning to get it for ages. Damage: $15

Grant Lee Buffalo – Fuzzy. This guy’s got the best voice. See also his cover of ‘We’ve only just begun’ from that Carpenters covers album. Damage: $10

Ride – Carnival of Light. Alright, it’s no Nowhere (I frantically searched through the racks for that one – no dice). Hey, it was $4. Damage: $4

Big Red Letter Day – Buffalo Tom. Hint: the best BT songs aren’t by main singer and guitarist Tom Janovitz, but the quieter, more country-ish ones by bassist Chris Colbourn. Try ‘I’m Not There’ from Let Me Come Over. Damage: $6

Get in there.
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I bought my iPod (plain vanilla – 20gig, 4G) a few months ago, and frankly, I don’t know how I lived without it. Its just fitted right in to the way I do stuff, and now I’m going to become the 1,000,000,000th person on the internet to say OH MY GOD IT TOTALLY TOTALLY RULES. The three best things are:
– Being able to shuffle my 2850 songs (so far) in the car is amazing, stuff you haven’t heard for ages, but loved 10 years ago pops up right after your new favorite song. It’s like having a radio station you programmed yourself, but you’re still not sure what’s coming next.
– Setting up your own playlist of songs to jam along to on the gat is something else – YOU! LIVE AT WEMBLEY! AND YOU CAN JUST PAUSE AND GO TO THE LOO!
– With an iTrip you can take over stereos everywhere from Taxis to yer mate’s place. Highly recommended.

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I fairly refuse to watch TV1’s ‘news’ or ‘current affairs’ (Susan Wood?!? I’d rather watch a wheelie bin for half an hour weeknights) because it’s a load of patronising braindead shit. Still, I’m really happy to see the back of the ‘Mummy of the nation’. Sure, we all loved her and John Hawkesby on ‘Top Half’ in the olden days, but is $800,000 justifiable for reading an autocue? On TV News that’s so abysmal?

Take those promos with Jude in a meeting with the ‘news team’ – I’d love to have been at the filming, just to see them rolling their eyes at JB for four hours (“I’m off to get a story, where are you off to, Jude?” “Make up”). She’s a NEWSREADER, not a Journo. Fair play, she only negociated the biggest pay packet she could, but her bloated salary is symptomatic of the general malaise TVNZ are going through under Fraser and Ralston (go back to the politics reporting like you used to on Nightline, Bill!). They’ve just lost it.

TV3 were all over it last night, pulling out such Jude quotes from the promos like ‘it’s a shocker, a real shocker’. Now they’re really making TVNZ piss blood – it’s great payback for all those years of being caned and having their talent pinched. TVNZ’s problem is their slavish apeing of American news networks, where presenters are the stars instead of the stories. If I want my intelligence insulted, I’ll wait ’til my weekly pub quiz, thanks.

To quote Nathan Rarere – “I love the Olympics – it gives me a chance to use the ‘one’ button on my remote”.
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This is genius. God bless the internet for bringing us stuff like this. (Link is a ten MB quicktime movie, pinched from waxy.
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I see The Warehouse has a new logo (on the left). I really liked the old one (on the right), because it looked like a last minute job by a twelve year old. I can just see it – the day before Stephen opened the first Warehouse he thought “Shit! We need a logo! Here, little Davey, you’re good at art and all that, why don’t you come up with something?”. And little Davey went off and got his pencil, ruler, rubber (er, eraser), and Letraset and went to it. It’s got all the elements – the painstaking angles, the ‘almost out of room!’ bits on the ‘R’ and ‘W’, and best of all, the shadow. You can almost hear the cries of pain from Parnell design studios.

Letraset books were IT in our school. If you had one, you were easily the most popular kid in class, with offers of K-bars, Rashuns and Big Bens for a loan of it. You could spend hours looking at all the fonts and figuring our which ones would be easiest to trace. And then you’d use bubble writing anyway. Bit different to firing up Photoshop or what have you.

So it’s a shame The Warehouse’s logo has changed, it used to give me warm fuzzies looking at such a throwback logo all over the country in this day and age. I’m heartened that their new one still has an inherent kind of, well, shit-ness to it. Some things never change.
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What is up with this guy? ‘KR’ is one of my most loathed people in the world, and now he’s chipping in on fighting terrorism? I’m going to write my own ‘motivational’ business book one of these days and make squillions off it too. It can’t be that hard if fucktards like this can do it, now can it?
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