Time To Get Homesick Again

  • December 13, 2011

In July 1990, I saw Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds at the Enmore Theatre in Newtown. Later that year (August 31 to be precise) I saw Depeche Mode on their first (and still only?) Australian tour. That was at the Hordern Pavilion.

The best was yet to come. May 12, 1992, I saw Nick Cave again at the Hordern. I went with a girl named Caraid, who I barely knew. I think she was smitten with me. I didn’t care – I was just there to see Nick Cave 🙂

Or maybe it was Sue, and I went to DM with Cara? I can hardly remember… it’s been 20 years!

Anyway that second Cave show was an amazing concert. I was seated to the side of the stage, fairly close, but unusually at an angle where we could see into these raised viewing boxes just above and behind the stage. The support act was The Beasts Of Bourbon, and I vividly recall seeing Nick himself in one of those viewing boxes dancing with a baby in his arms as Tex Perkins belted out an amazing cover of Bohemian Rhapsody. What a show!

I used to go and see all sorts of bands all the time in Newcastle. It was something I enjoyed and was used to. Even little amateur bands were fun to watch. The big ones that I idolized were magic, but of course they never (or rarely) came to Newcastle. I did see quite a few Australian bands though. I’m pretty pleased that – even if I may have not appreciated it at the time – I saw INXS once at a free Australia Day concert. I saw a few other bands I wasn’t really a fan of, such as They Might Be Giants and Einsturzende Neubauten (a one-off gig that occurred when Nick Cave was touring Australia in prhaps ’91). That last one I remember as being a bit scary…

Then in America it all stopped. I remember once thinking that here in the states you could just go and see any band whenever you wanted (which was novel since few international bands ever toured Australia in those days) but the opposite seemed to be true. Of course bands would play NYC here and there, but over the years I can count the number of concerts I considered attending on maybe one hand.

I’d like to see Rammstein one day. But I bet I never will 🙂

It’s More Fun To Compute

  • December 12, 2011

Another graduation gift I received is the TI Voyage 200 calculator. This is pretty much the Rolls Royce of calculators, and (I firmly believe) may be the best chip-based calculator ever made.

This shot shows it next to my iPad, which itself displays a life-sized image of the calculator. How meta!

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It’s a super device that can do almost anything you can imagine. A machine brain that makes me, a mere human, humble.

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Newer TI calculators are more like tablets, with colour screens and apps. This guy is old school, and although it can run apps (downloaded from the PC) via USB, the main function of the device is in a dedicated chip.

Did I mention the manual is 1080 pages in length? 🙂

Anyway I’m going to write a basic game for this one day. You can expect a blog entry if I succeed…

Going Berko

  • December 11, 2011

Today I shall tackle the long unanswered question of the origin of a particular piece of Australian slang.

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“Going berko” is the term. As in “Watch out, he just found out we broke the window and he’s going berko”. Irrationally angry. Crazy. Enraged. Demented even.

I’ve used this for years, and still do. Sometimes the cats go berko for instance. A few weeks ago KLS and I had a discussion about the term, which she’d never heard before me. A rudimentary online search shows that it is almost exclusively Australian, and slang.

The word ‘Berko’ exists with other uses of course, most notably as a name (of African origin) or an English village. The urban slang dictionary includes it with no origin. Where did it come from? Why is it just Australian?

I suspect, as you may have guessed from the above, that the term derives from David Berkowitz, the so-called ‘Son of Sam’. It makes sense in many ways, and is indeed what I assumed the origin has been most most of my life. But could this be true? Could this slang be as recent as 1977? Is it actually possible that Australian schoolyard slang could be derived from a NY serial killer and that the same slang doesn’t even exist in America?

I have no answers, and for once information seems very scant online. What do you think? Do you use the term? How long have you used it? Where do you think it came from?