If you’re down with the podcasts and all that, or just have broadband, you’ll be interested to know Ricky Gervais of ‘The Office’ is doing a podcast on the Guardian’s website – with Stephen Merchant (co-writer of The Office) and another bloke. If you want to get clever, here’s the .xml feed.
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In June I started keeping a ‘film diary’ of all the movies I’ve seen – and between then and today, I’ve seen 37. Highlights / points of interest include:
– Ratio of cinema going / watching at home is 9 : 28
– Oldest film on the list: 2001 A Space Odyssey
– Newest: Serenity
– Biggest heap of shit: Faaaaaat Albert. The horror.
– Most disappointing: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
– Best to see at the cinema: Sin City and Batman Begins.
– Best re-watch: A three way tie between Colors, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Tremors
– Most likely to be a big, big all-time favourite of mine: Shaun of the Dead.

On the other side of my web empire is my latest effort at a rugby ‘cartoon’. You can see it at my flickr page or at thesilverfern.

No, I don’t know why NZers rarely see the massive potential for humor in our national game, either.
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I want one of these. I watched the making of Dawn Of The Dead last weekend – they had a lot of fun making that alright. I first saw it at about 14, in the prime of my horror watching / violence de-sensitising, and it still holds up pretty well today (except the pie fight?). I watched the remake with me mate that I watched the orginal with way back then – it’s become our little tradition. “You wanna watch a DVD Friday night?” “Yep, what do ya fancy?” “Something with heads coming off?” “Righto”.

You pick up loads of Peter Jackson’s influences watching Romero’s films – more in the Bad Taste era stuff obviously, but if you squint, you can make out a bit of Zombie in the Orcs I reckon.
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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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