wherever I lay my hat

In parts chuffed, amazed and distressed by the revelation that at least one reader has Chateau VVB on an RSS feed (really! get a fucking television if you need entertainment, for crying out loud!), my private (until now) reflections about what to do with the Chateau were brought to a head today.

I have no Howard to hate and I suspect that the new government will take at least one term to learn its ropes. With a new government, I am always reminded of the old man's exclamation shortly after Hawke's ascension in 1983: "this is the best Liberal government we've ever had." He was prescient in that observation, at least.

Rudd and co. do not inspire in quite the same way, but we can always be amazed if they do better than expected. However, it's not the stuff of daily blogging, certainly not the superficial off-the-cuffisms so typical of so-called analysis here in the Chateau.

I said it would be about politics, economics (ha! let's ensure that dog never wakes up), cars and music. I've still got a few of the car stories to do and really, I must get a round tuit one of these days. But they are hardly the stuff of general interest so comprehensively displayed by all of VVB's 4 or 5 readers (sorry John!). And I'm going to run out of models soon, which will mean the end of the stories.

Music? I yam what I yam. But I know bugger all compared to others (yeah I know, it's not a competition). But I'm not sure I could contribute anything likely to start some interesting conversation: but then, neither has much I've written on anything else, as yet ;-)

Chateau VVB is not alone in its current state of self-examination, and even the ups and downs in Propensity to Blog (P2B) that we've experienced here in the Chateau over the past two years have indicated that blogging is very much an evolutionary activity at both individual and aggregated levels.

There's always the role of finding out interesting/useful/useless stuff and passing it on but again, even though it's not a competition, there are others who do this awfully well, for which you could read 'so much better.'

Although, the title of this post was brought to mind by this article. This British innovation (eh?) sounds just like the Countdown Australian live tour with a few additional restrictions on the performers. Incidentally, I picked up the linked review rather than the official website - which I assume exists somewhere - but this is a very nicely weighted, well written audience reflection well worth a read, along with the comments including one from Ross Wilson of Mondo Rock.

Reading the Guardian article, I was reminded of buying our one Rick Astley CD. We were living in Burma at the time so retail therapy was carried out in a very concentrated fashion during leave trips to Singapore. It was quite cathartic (hmm? maybe) to walk in to a store and walk out with 20 CDs at a time, but this was offset by having to ask the shop assistant what was 'hot' or 'new', as we had no way of knowing. And on one of these visits, in one of the these stores, on being asked this particular question, the assistant pointed to a Rick Astley CD and played a bit of it. "What a voice" I thought, along with "and it sounds so incongruous coming from such a dorky looking person."

So I bought it, took it back to Rangoon, played it once and put it away - a very unrewarding purchase. Whereas Belinda Carlisle got played over and over.

Well, there's a few minutes of your life you won't get back, and I won't go into how long it took me to type.

Back to the navel lint, there must be more to life than this.