the inner curmudgeon

Ex-Punters Club

I’ve updated my Fitzroy flickr project. Seems like my earlier confidence in the power of suprglu was not well founded - it takes forever to update.

Went clothes shopping on the weekend only to discover that I’ve been voted out of the fat bastard stores. Somewhere along the way I’ve dropped two whole pant sizes. In the change room I found that half the reason I’ve been stuck on my current belt notch is because there is so much gather in my current pants.

9 Garfield Street

In case you hadn’t guessed from my previous post, I’m starting a bit of a photographic wander down memory lane. I was going to post the photos on flickr and post the commentary here, or on both, but I think I’ll just do it all on flickr and post updates here.

suprglu will hold it all together anyway.

Napier Hotel

About 20 years ago some friends dragged me to the Napier Hotel one Saturday night to see a band called the Feral Women. I was highly skeptical. I think it took all of 30 seconds before I was hooked. They were magic: Annie on guitar, Kjirsten Robb on drums, Rosie Beaumont and someone whose name escapes me at the moment on vocals.

We made a regular thing of it: every Saturday, off to see the Feral Women and when they had finished, we’d walk down to the Prince Patrick and catch Running Joak. I don’t know how long it all lasted, but eventually Annie left to focus on another project. The Ferals got another guitarist, but it just was not the same. My friends drifted away, but I kept going to the Napier to see other bands and expanded my circuit to include other Fitzroy venues - mainly the Punters Club.

Running Joak split up and various members formed the Rococo Pops and started playing at the Napier. I was pretty much part of the furniture by that stage and soon got to know the band pretty well. When they needed a roadie one New Year’s Eve they asked me. I started lugging for them regularly and they taught me how to mix, starting me off on a year moonlight career in sound engineering.

I am now officially a member of the blogosphere. I can tell because I’m starting to attract comment spam. Yay me!

I’m starting work on a website for some friends of mine who are opening up a pub/restaurant. For several years Frank & Melissa have been operating the Farmers Arms in Daylesford - very successfully too. Last year they sold the business and are about to open the Royal George Hotel in Kyneton. There’s just a placeholder page there at the moment, but I expect we’ll have something more useful up in a week or so.

For the past couple of years I’ve been playing for the Tramway Hotel’s 3rd division team in the Melbourne Metropolitan Pool League. We finished the summer season on top of the ladder and played the Dan O’Connell team in the first round semi-final last night. Unfortunately we lost, but we get second bite at the grand final cherry next week when we play one of The Cue’s teams.

Satirical cartoons have a long and venerable history in public discourse. However, many political cartoons simply express bigotry, ignorance and plain old fear. The pieces at the centre of the recent Danish Cartoon nonsense are a case in point. The illustration (at right) accompanying an opionion piece in Saturday’s Age is another. It depicts a handshake - one hand representing the West, the other clearly intended to represent the Middle East. The fingers of one of the hands are actually nuclear missiles representing the massive stockpiles of WMDs that the Middle East has trained on the haplessly nuclear-free West.

Flogging the Simian has some astute observations on the Danish cartoon furore. There’s nothing I can add to what Soj has already said except to say that Karl Marx had no idea - these days it seems that religion is the rohypnol of the masses.