Category: Miscellaneous

Australian readers may be amused to hear that a local story from Cairns is making the email/blog rounds here in the USA (and, presumably, worldwide). I of course refer to this:

The story is here.

All I’m going to say is… well I don’t know quite what to say. I’ve strode through my share or Orb Weaver webs in my time but never seen something quite this shockingly large! Poor bird 🙁

Some of my all-time favourite songs by Australian bands (Nick Cave excluded):

“Reckless” by Australian Crawl
aka “The Boofhead Song”. Back when I was a shrimp, I recorded this one from the radio one time, perhaps accidentally, and used to fast forward past it all the time because I (and BS) hated it. Now I just love it to death, and believe it’s one of the all time classics of Australian music. I love the line about the Manly ferry. Every time I’ve ridden the ferry, I can just imagine someone sitting next to me writing the lyric.

“I Hear Motion” by The Models
A pop band during the 1980s, that had that distinct sound of Oz pop (more rock than british pop music). The Models actually had a tonne of fantastic songs, and their dark sound kept them on the periphery of other genres, such as goth or straight rock. This, their first big hit, is my current favourite. (Incidentally, the lead singer sounds incredibly like Nick Cave in this song)

“I Send A Message” by INXS
I saw INXS live once (free, at Spears Point Park) and hated them. Most of their later catalogue doesn’t do much for me, but that doesn’t detract in any way from the fact that The Swing is one of the finest crafted albums I own. So many great songs on that album! This is currently my favourite 🙂

“Street Cafe” by Icehouse
Ignore the song for a sec (if that’s possible) and check out that video. Holy Cow! This was 1982, and even Duran Duran hadn’t produced their video opus’s yet. Iva Davies was so ahead of his time in both music and video. He was a monster of Oz Rock back in the 1980s, and hopefully songs like this show you why.

“Say Goodbye” by Hunters & Collectors
God this video is awesome. Could they have possibly known, so many years ago, how nostalgic to an ex-pat this would eventually become. Look at the sky on the horizon. That’s 100% Australia! I used to know a girl who had such a crush on the lead singer of this band (Mark Seymour) and seeing him again here I understand why! This song has one of the most beautiful and powerful and evocative lyrics of any song I’ve ever heard, which is ironic since it was beloved by the sort of crowd one would hardly associate with poetic beauty. Read the comments on youtube and feel the passion! This song is a tour-de-force, a masterpiece. This song is one of the best songs ever written and I’ll love it until the day I die. And then I’ll play it in the Pure Land 🙂

“Down Under” by Men At Work
The song is almost a cliche these days (5.5 million youtube views!) but I still love it. Even though I always did, I believe this song has a special place in the hearts of Australian ex-pats, because it so skilfully summarizes the sorts of things about Australia the world seems to think 🙂

And of course, this one.

I’ve blogged it before and I’ll blog it again. That last entry is not just one of my favourite ever Australia songs, it’s one of my favourite songs period.

Sorry about all the Warcraft posts, but there has been a lot happening in the game recently!

Last weeks patch added so much and mixed everything around, almost entirely for the better. One big change was the way Paladin’s (one of the classes available in the game) work, and since JBF plays one this means a new experience for him. Today he and I faced King Gordok, the boss of the Dire Maul instance again. You may recall we faced him a few weeks back. So I logged the battle again and the new analysis is as follows:

Foosrazzle
Total time in combat: 12 seconds
Total damage done: 13484
Damage Per Second (DPS): 1124
Largest single attack: 2153 (Judgment of Command critical hit)

Momomo
Total time in combat: 12 second
Total damage done: 15307 (includes 2583 Water Elemental damage)
Damage Per Second (DPS): 1276
Largest single attack: 4398 (Frostbolt critical hit)

Bravo Foos! Bravo. The numbers don’t lie – the new Foos was almost 3 times more effective than the old, and this time I don’t even have any advice for JBF on how he could have improved (if at all). Momo, as you see, did quite a bit less total damage and therefore dps, due mostly to Foos’s effectiveness, and partially due to the removal of the frost spec’s “ghost hit” (one frostbolt was resisted…)

In other news I pugged some old-school raids today and it was absolute madness. I love screenshots of this sort of stuff, and here’s what it looks like when the tank pulls every single spider in the ZG spider room and the damage numbers are more than the game client seems able to display on the screen:

<Edge Of Madness! (geddit?)

It was truly some of the most fun WoW I’ve ever had, and it continues next week with MC and BWL 🙂