let's go

Well not the actual title of the song but right in the groove for a Friday night.

It still makes me smile...as do some of the comments.

Reaching even further back into the recesses of the memory, we get this. Holy moley, there are actually some memories not exterminated by the quantities of beer that used to accompany going to a barn where these blokes might be playing.

Good times....

sugar sugar

A taste of some hilarity to come.

Sorry about that pun there.

god only knows

so Mrs VVB is flicking through the TV channels and suddenly there's Tony Abbott and I hear him say "...like you, sir, we are one nation indivisible under God..."

At that stage I started ranting and Mrs VVB was obliged to, again, (a) warn me of the dangers of going on like that and (b) change the channel.

Umm...we're not, are we?

Also, I suspect in this case 'sir' is capitalised.

cheap wine

We went to see this concert here in rapidly warming Capricornia a few weeks ago.

It was exactly the same here in RARA land, with the possible exception that where we were standing, we could get a little cool breeze occasionally. Under the tent where the true rockers were, was probably a little warm.

The voice was awful to start with but gradually hit its straps.

Ian Moss was little short of supernatural: how he can keep going for two hours, with blistering (sorry about the cliche) solos every so often is just amazing.

The only real complaint was some of our fellow audience members who talked - and yelled, and argued, and had tedious in-depth personal discussions - most of the night. Second last song was Four Walls, performed with tenderness and restraint, and I could barely hear it as various groups around us continued the conversations/arguments/ diatribes they'd obviously started the previous weekend - or possibly previous decade.

Having to drive a fair way home, there was no wine, cheap or otherwise.

like a rolling stone

Well there's stuff in this story that I wouldn't have dreamt of. Margaret Trudeau? Ronnie Wood? Really?

Anyway out of the gazillions of words that have been written about the Stones, these are some more.

Time to get some old CDs out.

black is balck....is baclk....is black

Du de duddle duh... du du daaaa, du du duddle duh daaaaa... da dee duddle da du du daaaaaa ...... di duh da duh da daaaaoooooomph-a-oo

oooompha-a-ooooooompha- na naaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa etc...

For translation, go here.

Yep, that's what it is.

Also, have lost font options. Again. Buddddyyy blogggggerrrr.

No....they're back.

Is back.

rough boy

I caught up with an old school friend last weekend - hadn't seen him for over 40 years. We exchanged e-mail addresses and cemented the reunion online...so to speak.

Epically strange...still digesting some aspects. Anyway given all of that I figured it was relatively safe to give him the link to VVB: it's semi-anonymous but various folk, mainly from work, have the secret password.

He wrote back to say he'd spent a pleasant (yes, I know...) few hours trawling my back pages and passed some kind comments on what he had read. Yes, I know, redux.

Anyway I've done similarly tonight and was quite taken with how much I used to write before I either (a) started trying to be wry, or (b) just got lazy.

All of which is simply a prelude to something entirely different, namely this. I'm kind of a ZZ Top fan but I don't think I've ever seen a David Lynch film (he is a filmmaker isn't he, or an I mistaking him for someone else?). Not that it matters; it's a quite entrancing little article which is borne out by the entrancing little comments thread.

The ideal thing to post on a Friday night...sleep well.

and now this

Now with added link to article that I could not add after I'd posted without.

Well it let me add it, but not post again.

WTF is going on?

you don't get me i'm part of the union

A couple of things struck me as I read this article.

First, evidently it's OK to refer to the The Association of Professional Engineers, Scientists and Managers (APESMA) as a "union". Valuing consistency as I do, I expect the ABC to also use the "union" word when it next refers to the Australian Medical Association. I mean, they are both associations of professionals, are they not? Somehow, I don't like my chances.

Second, and for a moment disregarding who said what to whom but accepting that somewhere in the murky midst there is a skerrick of truth to the article that design responsibilities will be sent offshore at some indeterminate future point, where does that leave Australian industry policy?

For those who have more interesting things in which to dabble, I should point out that "industry policy" as she has been practised in these parts for some decades has been that low value-added ("metal bashing") has gone offshore while Australia retains the vital higher value, more knowledge-intensive work.

Hah. Do we train as many engineers as China and India, even on a per capita basis?

So, what's the new policy? Well, once wages and costs in the "developing" countries get high enough, they'll need to outsource their low value added manufacturing.

At that time I suspect Lee Kuan Yew's comment about "poor white trash of Asia" might start to look fairly applicable.