delta 5 and helmi

When I was away recently (as I said, more about this soon) I picked up another copy of the Delta 5 album See the Whirl', yes, a naff title as anyone would point out and made even naffer by that apostrophe at the end, but I always liked the band. TBH the album is only a partial success, it makes no sense though - it should be a thorough success after however many (3? 4?) amazing singles. 

Why another copy? Well, I have long had a copy, but it has a big scratch on it, I can't remember where now, the last song on one of the sides. I found it a bit disheartening. This new copy is a Dutch pressing which is nice and so it's on the actual Charisma label, rather than the Pre label.* My Pre copy has a postcard in it (also naff) but my Charisma copy is actually playable and sounds good.

I saw a bit of writing by the late drummer Kelvin who seems to blame the big budget for the album's lack of spontaneity. Actually I suspect it might actually be the sequencing that is the problem, or at least, there is a weird disjunct between the tracks, it all seems so sparse. Maybe Delta 5 just weren't an albums band.

Meanwhile something very bizarre has happened here as Helmi, who has spent the last five or more years cowering under my bed, has suddenly decided it is time to emerge and be present. Not only is she now consistently in the living room out in the open not hiding from anyone, she has even ventured outside, the first time she has voluntarily done such a thing ever as far as I know (obviously there were quite a few years when I didn't know her at all). I can't imagine what would lead to such a change. 

*Pre was Charisma's new wave sub-label, like Mushroom had White and Virgin had DinDisc. I guess these labels did some market research and realised that the consumers of 'alternative' music liked to think that the records they were buying were on some kind of niche, perhaps independent, label, like it made the slightest difference. 

plastic bag

These shopping bags, which before 2019 we would actually get FREE every time we shopped, so you could have three or four of them in your hands when you left the shops and you would not have to pay ANYTHING, are now a rare sight and I found one in my plastic bag collection (a stash of bags used for getting rid of stuff) yesterday. I had a moment's vacillation: could this be rare? Now or sometime? Should I just destroy it? Yeah, I don't know. It's rarer now because it's been filled with junk and thrown in the bin. 
 

karkarook park

 

Perry and I like to go for walks in new places, particularly where there are clumps of plants or bushes that smell good, or grass where you can run round and round. Karkarook Park has both of these things in great quantity.

I have an embarrassing confession to make which leads to a quandary/philosophical question. I am not going to say where it came from but I was carrying a small bag of dog shit with me when we saw a corn can, that is, a can which had once contained corn, by the water (I actually initially assumed that someone had literally sat on the bank of the lake and ate corn out of a can but now I come to think of it - more likely they had emptied the can earlier and put something else in it, like bait, if corn itself isn't bait. There are a lot of people fishing at the lake - you'll note the sign above suggests it as an activity - but you can take the advice of that sign, or of the other signs all around saying the lake has blue-green algae in it and you shouldn't swim in it or fish in it). Anyway I didn't like the idea of a corn can being by the water so I picked it up* and put the dog shit bag in the can and we kept walking. There are signs all round saying, well saying by implication, that there are no bins/no rubbish pick up in the park, you have to leave with your rubbish. So I took the can all the way back to the car and when we go there realised it was empty i.e. I had inadvertantly dropped the dog shit out of the can. 

Now I didn't mean to do it, so I don't feel guilty per se, except I know someone will see that bag of dogshit somewhere and say or at least think 'what the fuck is wrong with people', at least, that's what I do every time I see a bag of dogshit lying around somewhere - it's almost worse than just ordinary unbagged dog shit. Although the bags in question claim to be biodegradable (or the manufacturers claim that for them). No-one's claiming that for a corn can. So, out of the two things, is it better to retrieve a corn can than bag some dog shit and remove it, ie should I have just stuck to my knitting?** 

'I'm implicated! Woof'

*Just to fully neutralise this act I would like to add the information that I knew that I had an alcohol-based hand sanitising towelette in the car, acquired during recent air travel. 

** I pay dogshit tax - I pick up more dog shit than my colleague above produces. Not as much as I should because it's really nasty to pick up some other dog's cold old dogshit but it's what Jesus would do. Dogshit is bad for the environment and Jesus loved the environment. 

21 years of blogging

I've been travelling (more about that in a few weeks) and I noticed my habitual compulsion to diarise to the degree that, when embarking on a walk of some sort (which I have been doing a lot) I frame it with intro pictures and a narrative. I saw some suck write something somewhere, probably a suck meme, about how you should live in the moment instead of always trying to record it, but geez, for me recording it is part of being in the moment. 

When I look back on the early posts, which I don't do often, I certainly seem to be in amongst it - in amongst something. Or quite a few things. Lots of going out to see bands, lots of going out to walk dogs. I guess like a lot of people of my general age, covid killed (basically, essentially) my band seeing, though I will still very occasionally. Maybe covid killed that great time of bands in Melbourne but that's hard to be objective about. 

I think also back then I was proselytising for things I liked, and framing it in a sort of good humoured cajoling way that could as easily be irritating for the reader as anything else, maybe more easily irritating. I still have that aspect to me, that I can't believe people can't get as excited as I am about various things, arguably even things that everyone else has long moved on from, like, I don't know, Neil Sedaka that week I really liked early 70s Neil Sedaka. I can't imagine how I got to be like this. 

'Those nice things you said and thought about me for a brief few days seven or eight years ago made it all worthwhile - sorry but now I have to die - NS'

the end of the mentalist (spoiler)

Yellow John in Swanston St recently
 

OMG the final episode of The Mentalist is just like a... put it this way, in fifty years some geek will say 'That last episode was obviously written by AI' and a geekier geek will say, 'But AI didn't really start until around 2022. So that was just human laziness.' So Patrick and Teresa are going to get married but there is a bit of kerfuffle amongst their FBI colleagues about whether they should be told that the serial killer Patrick thought he blew up in the basement with the old gas+in+the+room+with+chewing+gum+on+the+lightbulb+and+the+bulb+heats+up+and+cracks+and+there's+an+explosion trick (very MacGuyver/Burn Notice) is actually still wandering around like a burned zombie unchallenged by all who see them however grotesque he looks, with a strong impulse to kill presumably Patrick and everyone he cares about. Well, somehow, he gets to the wedding but then the FBI all know he's there and even Teresa has a gun on him, alongside 15 others. I mean it's ridiculously lame (to be fair, I don't quite understand how the FBI knew where he would be, so maybe there's something really cunning in there that I blanked on). 

A-a-a-anyway I'll miss The Mentalist but I'll forget it soon enough. 

the final season of the mentalist

 

So the final season of The Mentalist is a curate's egg. Once Patrick kills his bête noir Red John in a Hitchcockesque park on a Hitchcockesque day the show loses its entire backbone and flails around on the beach. Actually, it's not terrible, and the bit you'd think was really problematic - that Patrick and Teresa become a couple - works. You can see Robin Tunney really embrace a new side of Teresa (new to us) and she and Simon Baker really have a chemistry, I have to say. You could almost imagine the two of them having a show of their own, I mean, not The Mentalist. 

But clearly it was time to finish up the production and as I write I am watching the second-last ever episode. 

The show's producers concocted some kind of weirdo serial killer thing to ramp up the thrills to get us to a finale that approximates some of the same kind of feels we had during the Red John years. It feels weird that Patrick is not a lone wolf anymore, though. 

not very interesting imo, me in the US forty years ago (and a bit)

This is me in Olympia (top) and San Francisco (middle and bottom). It was actually April 1986. I flew into SF just before my 21st birthday, and took a train I think (must have) up to Olympia, or near enough. Yeah, I know, there are train tracks in the Olympia picture but they were just for goods trains. I was kind of captivated by the train line in the road. I don't know why those state buildings (in the middle) were at all interesting to me. Supermarkets kind of thrilled me, with their crazy products (orange cheese etc). I seem apparently happy to just stand in front of things disengagedly. 

I was on my way to Thatcher's Britain which sucked a big turd but at least I saw The Smiths and, er, Stump or whatever. And I got to endure the Chernobyl cloud and be somewhat arguably possibly exposed to mad cow disease.