Future estate divergence

Hi. How was your Xmas? I celebrated alone this year, and it was great, thanks. Thanks for asking. I invented two drinks on Xmas day. The first one is called a 'Champagne investment' - serve about a pint or so of cheap, dry, white sparkling wine (the cheaper, and the dryer, the better) in a stainless steel cocktail tumbler with ice, and depth-charge about 60 ml of Stone's Green Ginger Wine into it. The other one is called 'Champagne revolution', and it's for when you run out of Green Ginger Wine; use the same amount of tequila instead.

I've been having an awesome holiday. Xmas completely brings out my misanthropic side, so I've been avoiding ppl as much as possible. Instead of socialising, I've been working on my inner person - taking incredibly strong drugs and crashing early; rising with the birds; going to the gym a lot; drinking shitloads (white spirits, low-cal mixers) ; 'spring'-cleaning the entire flat (I even got the gardener in); trying to flog off my records and DVDs on internet auction sites to raise money for something; all that sort of grown-up crap. Four more weeks of this to go. Here's a picture of me looking fat and being suitably misanthropic.

A few people have privately commented that they think it's weird for me to be planning to get a tattoo that was designed by my ex-gf. To this I must respond simply that I don't. Actually, the main person whose opinion on whether or not this is weird I value is my future life-partner; since this is currently an abstract concept to me, the sum total of people whose opinion interests me equals two. More on this later. Maybe.

Things is looking up though.

I've also had two new mini-albums released in the last week; one (Syddo paragone) on the Belgian record label Audiobot, and the other (Nova bonalbo) on the Australian label Music Your Mind Will Love You. I can't be biffed ranting about them here, so just click on the cover images if you want to know more. I can't completely stop myself, though: here's an excerpt from the PR-sheet for the Audiobot disc:
"Imagine King Tubby at the controls of a New Zealand spaceship, throbbing and shifting into a bottomless pit of reverb upon meeting the Wordsound rockers in a malaria infected basement. Classify under : throbbing NZ claustrophobic dub sponge."

Oh, I'm gonna need a housemate soon. Keep your ear to the ground, would ya?

Tattoo me

Can I show off for a moment? Just wanted to share my awesome tattoo which I'm gonna get this summer. It was designed for me by The Jarman about 18 months ago, and I've fluffed around and procrastinated for far too long already. The second, lower image is an artist's (i.e. my) (extremely crude) representation of where and how it'll sit on my shoulder.

Since the weight of opinion in the responses to my pop-survey was for Roger's, and I had independently been advised the same, I shall be turning up there forthwith to get the ball rolling. The complete bugger of it all is, though, that there's something like a 4-week waitlist at the moment. You know that thing how when you make a decision about something and then you totally just have to do it right then and there. No? Maybe it's just ol' impetuous me. Well anyway, I hadn't counted on having to wait.

Yesterday was the staff Xmas party. About 200 of us convened at Newtown Workingmen's Bowling Club about lunchtime, and proceeded to get extremely pished in the extremely hot sun. There's hangovers aplenty in the office this morning, lemme tell you. What better time, I am thinking, to share with you my brand-new and seemingly surefire hangover prevention remedy. 'Tis the season and all that.

It's quite simple. Before you go out on a bender, put a litre of McCoy's cranberry juice in the fridge. When you get home, drink it. It's not all smoke and mirrors and magic potions.. apparently cranberry juice is a powerful diuretic, as well as being loaded with vitamins. Makes sense to me, anyway. It even works well on the morning after. Oh and for some reason, the stuff in the big glass bottles - Ocean Spray - doesn't work as well. It's much more acidic, to my gut anyway.

Gerry Rafferty's stem cells

One of the reasons I love shopping for booze at Rumbles, downtown in Waring Taylor Street, is that it affords me the opportunity to visit my favourite bit of the city, Maginnity Street (right). Without fail, every time I turn the corner from Ballance Street, I'm suddenly overwhelmed with delightfully faux sense of history, grandeur, depth and scale. Only here, utterly surrounded with 10+ floor buildings at close range, do I find myself forgetting for just a moment that we're basically a piss-ant little city built around a trinity of longish streets laid out in the shape of a Mercedes Benz logo. Only here do I get the hopeful feeling that - just possibly - there may suddenly have sprung up thirty city blocks in every direction.

It's not the architecture per se; the sequence on the right side of the street - the Wellesley Club, then the State (?) building, then the somewhat grandly named Petherick Tower - is nice, I guess, if a little disjointed*. It's more just the disorientation I experience when I suddenly cannot see any hills around me by which to navigate. It's a feeling I also experienced very strongly in Sydney, and have suddenly been overcome by at other odd moments like when walking down the main street of Onehunga, in Auckland.

So much deep thought, yesterday afternoon, as I wandered about in the bizarrely warm afternoon and dreamt of g'n'ts, and pondered on exactly how long it's been since I wrote anything of any worth on this blog. Busy-ness is only a partial excuse; I shall try harder, dear readers, do not be afeared.

If you're looking for promises, that's about as good as you're gonna get.

In other news, it appears that I'm not the only person who absolutely cannot stomach oaked Chardonnay. Oaked anything, actually, including Merlot, which I'm not absolutely sure is oaked, but if it is it will explain why I can't really drink it. I don't get headaches, apart from the understandable ones (1.5 bottles of any wine will do that to ya, innit), it just makes me retch, pretty much. I've started telling people I'm allergic to it; entertainingly enough, most take me at my word.

Shout outs to the other Welly-bloggers who turned out last Friday night for the hooley. It was good to meet y'all, although I almost feel bad that I was so tired after a big week that no typical Drinks-After-Work-type behaviours were indulged in. That's my excuse, anyway. I'm not sure what The Sifter's excuse for the state he got himself into later in the evening is, though.

*As I'm no expert I'll leave it up to someone like Tom to verify the identify of the middle building; he might also like to comment on the respective architecture of the three buildings. About the best I can do is suggest the approximate era of each - 1900s, 30s, and 50s.

Tattoo you

Any concensus on where's the best tattoo parlour in Wgtn, NZ?

Stumps T's are go!

I'm in the process of making a whole stack of Stumps t-shirts which are going to to be available in a wide variety of different shapes and sizes and very affordable. The shirts will essentially be one-offs - no two will be alike.

I've started uploading images of the shirts here; have a look and email me if there's one you want. Ultimately I'll have a much sexier web-interface set up for browsing and ordering the shirts; for now this'll have to do.

Shirts will be only approx NZ$15-20, with a shipping charge on top of that.

What you need to know:
- The colour and size of each shirt is given on the image. The measurements are approximate only - to the nearest 1cm/0.5in or so; the actual colour of the shirt may also be slightly different to that shown, due to the shitty light I'm photographing them in.
- Because no two shirt manufacturer's sizes are the same, I've measured each one in SPAN and DROP dimensions. See [0] demo.jpg for an example of how this works.
- The SPAN is the horizontal measurement across the shirt, basically the "bust" measurement from armpit-to-armpit.
- The DROP is the vertical measurement from the front of the neck to the bottom of the front of the shirt. In the case of 'V'-neck shirts, this is from the lowest point of the 'V'.
- All measurements are made initially in glorious metric; conversions to imperial (inches) are done here and at the mercy of javascript floating point math inaccuracies and the like.

And one for The Stumps....

MySpace.com page for The Stumps here.

Somewhat alarmingly, the url www.myspace.com/stumps AND www.myspace.com/thestumps were both already taken.

These MySpace pages are kinda neat; you can even include a wee blog-type thing where you can post info like a newsletter-type thing.

Sorry if I'm not making much sense. Hardly slept last night and I'm tired as a motherfucker.

I wish I could...

remember who I lent my DVD of the Twin Peaks pilot movie to. It's doing my head in... goddamn memory fails me every day lately, it would seem.

On a more positive note, I've set up a profile for Seht at myspace.com, including some tracks you can listen to while you're browsing.

More fun soon.. when I gotta time 'aiight.