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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Been busy, so here’s a quick ‘n’ easy post.

1. The Specialist. This film is shit soup, but JW’s ‘bomb’ speech is his finest moment.
2. Virgin Suicides. From the ridiculous to the sublime. He can do understated.
3. Vampires. The opening scene is one of my favorites also.
4. Cop. I love 80’s cop movies set in LA, Colors being the other prime example.
5. Salvador. Yeah, this movie is typical Oliver Stone-bombastic, but imagine hanging out on set with Ollie and JW so close to Columbia.

Checking IMDB, I’ve added several films to my must see list. Like Cat’s Eye, the film made from three Stephen King short stories. JW is in Quitters, Inc, the company that makes Allan Carr look like a total pussy.
And now I really want to get to James Woods’ bit in Grand Theft Auto : San Andreas. Can’t wait.
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I loved this article. Gotta say, my own taste is getting less about what’s new as ‘What have I missed?’. And it’s pretty MOR for the most part. Eagles. Springsteen. Stones. Teenage Fanclub. Beach Boys. Cash. Especially Cash. I could never tell you who’s number one, nor do I care. The new NZ bands for the most part leave me cold. Fair play, but where was everyone when NZ Music was at its’ peak – the Dunedin sound, Auckland Punk, Bailter Space? But I digress.

So give up. Accept it. You screamed along to ‘Summer Of ’69’ at your work do like everyone else. Deep down, you know you drove just a little faster that time ‘Thunderstruck’ came on the radio. Embrace your roots, and stop trying to keep up. Because at the end of the day, you bloody know better than kids these days. /Fogey
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I’ve been bookmarking some cool (well, cool for me. Shut up.) pages lately, and been slack about blogging them, so I’m clearing them up. I know, you’ll just have to bear with me.

First up – Zombie mob. These hipsters terrorised downtown San Francisco, George A. Romero style one Saturday morning, just in time for Land of the Dead. Anyone wanna storm Aotea Square, The Viaduct, or a Destiny Church parade like this?
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Some of my fondest memories are within the M25. Like a picnic with me mates on Hampstead Heath one grey Saturday afternoon, Tequila Sunrises in the Adelaide’s garden bar in Swiss Cottage, drinking six bottles of cheap French red wine with Aidan then going to a party all night before waking up on the Piccadilly line on the opposite side of town, Sunday Cumberland Feasts with pints in The George in Clapham South. It’s an extremely long list. Reviewing it, they all involve alcohol. But I’ve moved on. Kind of.

So when Carly Kirkwood interrupted my Thursday night’s telly to tell me the Tube was under attack, I panicked. I’m awfully fond of my friends there, and London as a city. It turns my stomach what the tube passengers went through that day, and what it’s doing to the world’s greatest city, a microcosm of the world.
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If you’re lucky enough to live in Auckland, then you can go to one of the world’s great record shops. The slog up Queen St to Real Groovy is one of my favourite Auckland rituals. When I was growing up in Hamilton, no trip to the big smoke was complete without stocking up on vinyl in RG (“OH MY GOD they’ve got ALL The Pixies’ Eps! AND The Smiths! Shit-shit-shit.”).

Their website now offers one of the coolest services I can think of. Just get an account with them, enter all the names of the bands you like into the ‘Secondhand Music Faves’ section, and Viola! You can track the rare and wonderful second hand goods that your fellow RG patrons have cashed in on. And order them right from your desk.

Cool. But dangerous.

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