Long boring retrospectives
Right from the very beginning, the companions in Doctor Who were our (the viewers’) representatives on the voyage. For me growing up, the archetype for this character was Sarah Jane Smith, played by Elisabeth Sladen. She was there just as I got into the show. The innumerable repeats of 70s episodes in Australia during the ... [More]
M was telling me about an ad from the 70s telling people to save petrol. I had absolutely no recollection of it, but sure enough, Mr Youtube had it… What a cracker! I couldn’t figure out why they made the cartoon people nude, but a comment suggested it was to grab people’s attention. Perhaps I ... [More]
My recollection is this clip used to pop up on the ABC when they had five minutes to fill. Nowadays they’d probably just run a bunch of promos and adverts for the ABC Shop. The song is actually called “Love Is All”, from The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast. I can’t make it along, ... [More]
The other day I retired one of my oldest web pages, an FAQ on Melbourne public transport. It started life (I think around 1993, before the Web was around) as a Usenet FAQ for the misc.transport.urban-transit group. In 1994 it was posted (with an incomplete attempt to convert it to HTML) on Railpage — where ... [More]
John Lennon died thirty years ago yesterday. He was as old then as I am now. It would have been the following day, thirty years ago today, when the news broke in Australia. I remember getting home from school and switching the television onto channel 9, probably to watch Skippy or The Curiosity Show. A ... [More]
Fifteen years ago today, Windows 95 was released. (Who’s feeling old now?) Many would remember the adverts, which hit TV screens around the world, to the tune of the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up”. It was arguably the first modern version of Windows (despite it still apparently having DOS under the hood), and arrived just ... [More]
Twenty years ago today, I posted my first online writing
Spotted in K-Mart: Lego Prince of Persia. So let me get this straight… this is the toy of the movie of the video game. I wonder if there’ll be (as there was with Star Wars and others) a Lego video game of it. That would be the game of the toy of the movie of ... [More]
Trivia for you: Back in prehistoric times, when most of you had never heard of the Internet and barely anybody used the Web, and way before Twitter and Facebook, I blogged the 1996 Federal election campaign. Several times a week I’d add something new, including a spoof leader debate transcript, a Hippy Party manifesto, Ron ... [More]
Some songs evoke a particular memory, of either a specific event or a period of my life. So it is with Paul Carrack’s version of Jackie DeShannon’s “When You Walk In The Room“, from 1987. I bought the 45 (rpm, single) of it, primarily because the (quite amusing) video clip included all of the cast ... [More]
Teaching kids to cross the road safely is a matter of laying out the basic rules, and continual practice. I’d thought over the years it might be easier if the Hector The Cat song was still run on TV, as the lyrics helps make it easy to remember what to do. Happily, thanks to YouTube, ... [More]
I’ve had few real idols; people of whom I could genuinely say “I want to be like them.” In my early-to-mid 20s, Ben Elton was one of them. Amazingly funny, both on stage and in his writing. I wanted to write stuff that was half as good as his books, but never quite managed to ... [More]
Here’s a list of all the places I’ve lived. Some of the info from my early years is a bit vague. I suppose I could ask my mum for more details, but I’m not sure it’s that critical. 1970: A flat somewhere in Sydney — for a short time after my birth 1971ish: A flat ... [More]
When I was younger I used to focus on a fairly narrow range of music, heavily influenced by what my peers had introduced me to. One day circa 1988 Raoul brought over a VHS tape of some band he liked called The Who. It was a compilation called Who’s Better Who’s Best. I remember I ... [More]
When I was a kid, my dad would take us to Camberwell Civic Centre every April or so, to see the huge model train exhibition they had there. We’d wander around for a couple of hours and I would dream that one day I’d have a really big, detailed train set. Early on I had ... [More]
On the 12th of August 1990, I sent out an email. It went to a handful of friends, under the name “Toxic Custard Workshop Files.” It was the first of many, initially made up of (allegedly) humorous writing, though these days it’s mostly the previous week’s blog posts. Tonight, 30th of June 2008, I’m sending ... [More]