Jock Cheese Alive & Well

For the many folk who have been coming here on the search "Jock Cheese", it is not Jock Cheese, the bass player of TISM, who died (despite what the Age and Beat magazine have to say), it is James Paull, the guitarist known as Tokin Blackman (but known to his friends as Jock) who has died of cancer at the age of 51.

http://www.smartartists.com.au/artists/jock.php

Seven Words You Can Probably Say On Television Any Time You Like, Part I

So here's the deal. I want you to type George Carlin's seven words you can't (OK, couldn't - this is 2008, and on Australian television you just need a warning before the show) say on television, one at a time, into the search box in iTunes (or another player if that will work). Post a list of what comes up, and post some of the more interesting tunes.

This will probably work better on punk rock blogs than any other kind, but country-and-western and metal should get a look in and who knows? There's some pretty explicit olde-tyme jazz and blues out there (and yes, I know what "jazz" means, but I would never say "Jazz me baby!").

Today's word: SHIT

Song	Artist	Album
The Ol' Shit	The Beasts Of Bourbon	Sour Mash
Shit Like That	Butthole Surfers	Weird Revolution
I Wanna Fuck The Shit Out Of You	G.G. Allin and ANTiSEEN	Murder Junkies
Tough Fuckin' Shit	GG Allin	You Give Love A Bad Name
Shitcanned Again	The Immortal Lee County Killers II	Love is a Charm of Powerful Trouble
The kids are all shite	Mikrofisch	Demo 2007
Boss Shitkicker	Moodists	Two Fisted Art
Degrassi Junior High	Pigshit	Box - a tv theme tribute
3D Sex Show	Shitdisco	Kingdom Of Fear
OK	ShitDisco	Kingdom Of Fear
Bullshit	This Is Serious Mum	De Rigueurmortis
The Horse, not the Horseshit	This Is Serious Mum	De Rigueurmortis
I Shit Me	This Is Serious Mum	Great Truckin' Songs of the Renaissance
It's Novel. It's Unique. It's Shithouse	This Is Serious Mum	Hot Dogma
TISM Are Shit	This Is Serious Mum	The White Albun
Don't Shit Where You Eat	Ween	Chocolate & Cheese
You're Full of Shit	X-X	1st 7"

TISM represent! This is not a bad selection of indie rock and punk if I may say so myself.

"I Wanna Fuck The Shit Out Of You" is about one thousandth as good as it should be, but "Tough Fuckin' Shit" is great and has a wonderfully incongruous surf guitar intro.

"OK" by Shitdisco is on permanent rotation in the "Aerobics" folder of my iRiver.

"You're Full of Shit" is a mystery song that sounds quite a bit like the Voidoids. I don't know where I got it, I don't know anything about the band, and I can't find them by searching (x-x is one of those unsearchable band names, like Fuck and The The) - little help here?

Ween are represented in other sections of this list. Today, they have some advice you really can't ignore.

OK, now it's your turn. And you know, tits shouldn't even be on the list!

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Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television

OK, here's the start of my meme. Watch and listen! Tomorrow you'll have homework.

A few quick bullet points

Hello. I haven't blogged lately because I've been having too much fun. I do have what I hope will be a tremendously exciting internet meme coming up very soon, but in the meantime, here are some squibs.

• Old School Unionism - In which an old school Fabian has Ms .45 punching the air and going "Fuck yeah!". It's about the continuing decline in union membership in Australia and the unions' frankly inadequate response, particularly in reference to young and casualised workers. I didn't know the stuff about recruiting shearers in the early days of Australian unionism, so this was a useful eye-opener.

• I've lost about 5kg since leaving uni in mid-2007, and have been utilising my workplace's small but SUBSIDISED gymnasium with inspiration by Stumptuous. Stumptuous provides a feminist view of health and weight training and is refreshingly free of faddism (if you don't count Krista's obsession with squatting). The recent Stumptuous Fitness Model competition was intended to reward women who have made improvements to their fitness in the face of difficulty, perhaps starting from a position of advanced age or obesity. Give it a shot, you're probably nearly as fat as I am anyway.
  

• Just in! Greg Wadley has recently had the opportunity to interview DC Root of ROOT! fame. It's a good interview - obviously done by email, giving both parties the chance to extemporise.

This is my terrible problem: if I sense everyone raving about a band, I'm out of there before you can say Thom Yorke. And I'll wait till about 5 years after they've had their day and disappeared off the face of the planet...and secretly love them! I must have rock-historian disease, or something. I have to enjoy everything retrospectively... I'm also still trying to catch up on artists I never knew during their day -- so last week I was listening to Dusty Springfield, Hunky Dory by Bowie, the Temptations. I had my experimental music phase a long time ago when I was hanging around black clad bookish girls in the vain hope that after a night of Jarry's Ubu trilogy performed by some avante garde troupe in a hell hole somewhere in Fitzroy we could cruise over to the Black Cat for a chinotto and light discussion about how becoming precedes being, and then maybe later she'd let me pop my Converses under her bed.

These days I prefer air guitaring at home to Thin Lizzy. I get about as much sex.

• NEW EYEZMAZE!!! Great idea, too - solve four separate mazes, you win when the family members are brought together. Not original as such, there are lots of games where you need to get multiple figures to the portal, but the fact that the mazes are in completely separate frames fucks up your shit just that little bit more.

Coming very soon - Rufus from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure...

Surviving the Coming Zombie Invasion

Kingdom of Loathing player Watts is hosting a competition in May - submit your zombie survival plan for three different situations (local, national and worldwide zombie infestation) and win great prizes! It's world-wide - if your entry wins, Watts will visit a website that delivers locally to your country and buy you the prize. The prizes are:

• Resident Evil 4, for whatever system suits you
  
• A copy of Max Brooks' World War Z or Zombie Survival Guide
  
• A t-shirt with the words "I had a great zombie plan but all I got was this Crappy T-Shirt" (probably handwritten in Sharpie by Watts himself)

The competition is intended to be aimed at Watts' fellow KoL/WoW players, and this post is aimed at the good folks who visit here from KoL (and occasionally JayIsGames). It seems a few of us have decided to give him a bit of free publicity - keep an eye on the competition page as he makes changes (or just collapses under all the extremely well-thought-out entries...).

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You Got Nothing I Want - Cold Chisel 101

Back in December '07, Bitterandrew from Armagideon Time posted a summary of an old issue of Hit Parader from November 1981, which rather intriguingly mentions Cold Chisel as "an Aussie rock outfit deemed 'likely' to follow in the footsteps of AC/DC and Air Supply". I asked if he'd actually heard any Chisels and he was curious, so I thought I'd remedy the total lack of Cold Chisel on The Hype Machine and try to explain it to our FTA partners.

How would you explain Chisels to an American? The first thing that jumps to mind is the "Freebird" joke. You know how this goes - you go and see some sensitive balladeer like Sufjan Stevens or Ryan Adams and, during a lull in the show, some wag in the audience yells "Freebird!". Well, in Australia, it's "Play some Chisels!".

An unsuspecting migrant trying to fill in Australia's immigration tests might wrongly think that Australia's national anthem is Advance Australia Fair. The correct answer is, of course, Khe Sanh, the poignant tale of a VietNam vet who returns to Australia only to fail to cope with civilian life. To adequately describe the significance of this Australian Marseillaise, I must turn to people far more competent than I:

an incredibly annoying song that is played at the end of every outer suburban Year 12 Social to a group of vomiting underage drinkers, and every function involving boorish Rock Spider Aussies making utter cocks of themselves abroad, and every footy trip/Grand Final barbeque/buck's night, or any other gathering popular with people who's main philosophy is 2-4-6-8-Bash-A-Gay-Til-He's-Straight...

During the 70s and 80s, Cold Chisel and their fans were despised by indie and alternative types, many of whom bore bruises inflicted by Chisels' more closely-related fans, and it was not until about the middle of this decade that Cold Chisel enjoyed a certain amount of rehabilitation (although songwriter Don Walker has always been held in high esteem by your male white Hornby wannabe's, and rightly so).

In general, Cold Chisel's most popular songs are straight-down-the-line rock, with some sentimental ballads slowing the pace a little. What saves Chisels from being utter shit is the quality of the songwriting. Mostly handled by Don Walker - but all members of the band contributed songs - the songs enable you to see the characters and step into their lives. I don't write this lightly - when you listen to Ita, you can see the stoner share-house full of bogans watching quality TV like Beauty and the Beast. You can relate to the guy who foolishly told his girlfriend they should take a break from their relationship, only for her to up stumps and get married to someone else. I absolutely guarantee you're hankering to rip the headset off, tell the customer to go fuck themselves and head off to Bow River, whatever that may be for you. I mean, for me Bow River is the East Brunswick Club (I have small dreams). The point is that just because I'm a middle-class* softcock doesn't mean I can't see myself in a Chisels song. Here's a great little explanation of the appeal of the Ian Moss-penned Bow River.

*For widely varying definitions of middle class - the reason this post is four months overdue is that I got a job as a real live pubic servant in February, and my life has been a whirlwind of business cases and benchmarking and probity, but not the good kind of probity.

You Must Know:

Khe Sanh
Just what it says on the box. If you don't know any other Chisels songs, this is the one you need to know.

My Turn To Cry
"When I told you just have a good time I think you took me all wrong - next thing you're engaged and a kid is coming along." Remember Barnsey next time you're thinking of suggesting to your partner that you should consider a trial separation.

Choir Girl
Possibly the world's only Top 40 hit about abortion.

No Sense
No Sense is unusual in two regards - firstly, it's stylistically quite distinct from Cold Chisel's typical output, and secondly, it was written by singer Jimmy Barnes, whose career both in Cold Chisel and as a solo artist has not suggested that spiky, post-punk screeds are really his thing.

Bow River
Like a more mainstream version of Take This Job And Shove It.

You Got Nothing I Want
Chisels' response to not breaking the American market.

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Matador Intended Play sampler 2008

I'm not the kind of person who buys everything on a label - I'd like to think people are over that by now - and samplers are often, erm, samply, in the one-song-is-awesome-the-rest-are-pants sense. But I downloaded Matador's annual sampler for 2008 (warning: that's a 70Mb zip file) in a flurried frenzy of downloading in preparation for Cherryrock08, and there's quite a range of decent stuff on it. My picks - Mission of Burma's That's How I Escaped My Certain Fate, The Cave Singers' Helen, Jay Reatard's Always Wanting More and Matmos' Polychords.

There's a reason I'm a public servant and not a record reviewer, you know.

The New Pornographers - All The Things That Go To Make Heaven And Earth (live)

The Cave Singers - Helen

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Hark! A Vagrant, eh?

Please to be noticing in the Not Music column to the right, a link to comic website Hark! A Vagrant! It's Canadian! It's Catholic! It's hilarious! (fails to think of synonym for 'very funny' beginning with a hard-c sound, can't be arsed looking one up)

Click on Tesla to read about more famous historical figures. Margaret Trudeau, Geoffrey Chaucer, Henry VIII and Marcel Duchamp provide fun for the whole family. Well, possibly not Margaret Trudeau.




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Casual Gameplay Game Design Competition #5

They're at it again in a seemingly endless series. Jayisgames' new Game Design competition gives you eight weeks to design a Flash game with the theme "Upgrade". There are great new prizes but also new entry requirements, so be sure to read the entry form carefully. Good luck!