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The brilliant Aussie hip hop outfit, the Hilltop Hoods are back with a new album State of the Art. While I’m not usually a fan of this genre at all, these guys win me over with brilliant construction. Their backing is varied and very closely linked to jazz and funk. The vocal timbre for their rapping is more light and bouncy, more rhythmic and humorous than the forward-pushing angry vocals typical to the genre.

Here’s some standouts:

Track 1 - The Return
This album builds from the opening notes. The introductory track commences with a suspense-laden motif that changes context immediately as a funky main guitar riff enters, becoming a fill support for the overall groove. At times the entire backing will drop out unexpectedly, and then return full swing in order to emphasise certain lyrics. Nicely mixed, there’s a little jazzy keys improvisation at times to fill out the complexity in the backing.

Typically Australian in lyrical content, we have humour mixed with politics - The System is broken/the cistern is broken/the shit is just floating. As I mentioned before the vocal style is rhythmic and bouncy, fitting with the funky backing.

Track 3 - Chase That Feeling
How can I resist a track that includes a syncopated violin ostinato? From the outset, a piano (ahem, keyboard) riff sets the scene for this to be a far more serious song than the others. There’s a sung chorus, incredibly well built up with orchestral backing which is inspiring to say the least. And I will take that feeling/Take that pain and replace that feeling comes out under the chorus, emphasising the point of the song.

Of all the tracks, this is worth the most attention. If you’re Australian and own a television, you might have already heard it, since it’s already been [abused] appropriated by Channel Ten for station advertising.

I find it hard to listen repetitively to this album. The vocals in hiphop always tend to get to me after a while. But for a once off listen every now and then this album is brilliantly thought out, funky and definitely worth playing at high volume.

Quote of the Day

...goes to Scumbag worker The Mole.

”It’s more useful than a cucumber in a women’s prison.”

Without Music!!!

Note to anybody moving a CD player with a carousel:

MAKE SURE THERE ARE NO CDs IN THE CAROUSEL WHEN YOU LAY THE THING ON IT’S SIDE

I went to open it up the other day and there was a sickening crunch. The tray stopped in its tracks, halfway out. I tipped it on the side and hit the button. No matter what way I moved the whole setup, there was no I was getting that to go anywhere with the press of a button. So I grabbed it and pulled.

CRUNCH

followed by

tink tink!

and now a tray all the way out with no discs in sight. More button pressing and the thing wouldn’t retract either. Time for surgery.

[Bear in mind that I had consumed most of a very cheap bottle of white wine in all its horror. Every step I describe here seemed like a good idea at the time.]

Safety first, I unplugged the whole setup and set to work busting into it with a screwdriver. Fifty screws and a sore wrist later, I popped the case off and found the three offending discs. They’d slipped over the back of the tray and jammed it.

Now is where I turn the thing on and hope that removing the blockage has magically fixed the operation of the tray. No dice. Bastardfuckingbastard. Dammit.I spot the gear that runs it in and out. I poke it gingerly, as if it might wake up and suddenly spring into normal operation. I poke it more roughly. I try to spin it, in order to remind it what it should be doing of it’s own accord. I try a bit more forcefully to spin it.

CLUNK

At this point I realise that I’ve probably stuffed it for life now.

Well stuff you, thinks Vic. I’ll beat you another way then. I’m drunk and I require music.

I plug my wireless router into the stereo games input. I normally have this setup and it works fine. Brilliant. I’ll use my computer to listen to the backlog on my hard drive and rip my CDs to it when I want to.

I fish out the trusty laptop, fire it up and hunt down iTunes.

”iTunes has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.”

Sorry for the inconvenience???. Sorry? Needs to close??? You didn’t even fire up in the first place, fuckwit. Not happy, Jan.

How to Clean Up Minor Grease & Oil Spills

Preparation time: 10 minutes, and two cigarettes.
Serves: At least six hours of continual work in various areas around a machine.

Ingredients:
2 cheap plastic buckets (1 without handle)
1 plastic bag
1 bag rags
1 scraper
1 pair incredibly cheap crappy leather gloves
1 pair degreasing gloves
1 sperm suit
degreaser

Method
1. While smoking first cigarette, prepare buckets. Insert plastic bag into bucket without handle and roll the edges under, so that the bag acts as a liner for the bucket. Put degreasing gloves and scraper in this prepared bucket. Pour degreaser into the other bucket with handle.

2. Finish cigarette, put on sperm suit and incredibly cheap crappy leather gloves. Stand, have conversation, and light second cigarette. Walk to machine.

3. Finish second cigarette and locate nearest spill within machine. Scrape excess spill with scraper and place bulk in lined bucket. Once excess is removed, take off incredibly cheap crappy leather gloves and replace with degreasing gloves.

4. Take one small rag, dunk it in degreaser and wring out the excess. Make sure this is done over the bucket so as to not make any more mess and conserve degreaser. Wipe over the spill area.
*Do not place used degreasing rag back in degreaser bucket. You can use this rag multiple times before it loses effectiveness on spills, at which point it should be discarded. A common mistake is to place the rag back into the degreaser and reuse it. This will only turn nice, clean degreaser into oily black slop.

5. Replace degreasing gloves with incredibly cheap leather gloves and dry area with clean, dry rag, leaving no streaks.

6. Take cigarette breaks as required.

7. Repeat degreasing/drying process if necessary, before moving on to find more spills.

IT’S NOT THAT HARD.

Quote of the Day

From a recent day out with Boz and EspressoHead…

Boz: You should join the Vulcan pick-up lines group. It’s awesome.

Vic’s ”YOU’LL LEARN” list

Chorizos go in Chimichangas. DUH
(at least they do in my version)

Measuring cups are required for measuring things.

There will come a time when you will, undoubtedly, require salami.

Every roast potato “fuck-I’ll-chuck-it-in-it-can’t-be-that-hard” experiment has been utter failure. Look up trustworthy advice and follow it.

Saucepan does not equal Frypan.
You don’t own a frypan.

The big fuckoff burner at the front of your stove won’t simmer. It knows only hard boil and flat out.

Five gladware containers is NEVER enough.
Buy two packets.
Or start eating chinese takeaway more.

White corn tortillas SUCK!!!
addition from Dot the EspressoHead:
so does instant coffee. Buy a plunger.

Reformation of The Groover

I have my own place now. For approximately the last year I’ve lived in a fairly reasonable situation in a granny flat titled Pixieland. I’m glad to get out of there, though. The name Pixie is a sour reminder of a sexual happiness I’ll never get to access again and living under a roof with that title constantly brought it home to me. It was like driving a car with a muffler leak. The carbon monoxide will make you feel tired but you won’t realise why. It’s my own fault that I have not taken this step earlier, completely.

Now I have a far larger place of my own. It’s eight in the morning and there’s sun spilling across my entire living area. The kitchen is filled with marble and stainless steel sexiness. I actually have a built-in closet that almost fits all my clothes. Once again I have a room to set up as a studio for music, editing and photography. Life is looking up.

On the list to aid in the reformation of the Groover of previous times:
- more bizarre kitchen adventures
- random road trips
- MAILBOXES!!!
- far more adventures in learning weird and wonderful things

Come along if you dare, but I’m going anyway.

Vic's Red Marker Pen

Ah, the local train station. An outpost on the edge of swampland and industrial area. It's about a two kilometre bike ride from home, downhill most of the way. At 4:11am there is nobody there. Except possibly me. It's a place to relax and have a quiet cigarette in the early hours before hitting the beginning of the work day. It's cold, dark and contemplative.



It's also home to some of the most idiotic graffiti tryhards.

Busted!

A text message from one of my bosses:

It is unaceptable to smoke in the trucks you should now better

Well, that's just teasing isn't it? Smoking in the truck is punishable by termination of employment. Knowing that I was treading a fine line of getting away with it or being jobless, I was forced to hold back on my reply...

Your spelling is unacceptable. You should know better.

The Death of Myrtle [Part III]

Where we left off...

I was on my way... but the fun wasn't over yet.

If you've missed the rest of the saga, you might want to go have a look at Part I and Part II before continuing here.

I'd done a walk to some local farms and scored some oil along the away. At one of the farms I walked into, there was nobody home. I was so damned frustrated at that point I rifled through their shed anyway. I figured if I found what I needed there I'd take it and leave whatever cash I had laying there for them in order to make some sort of attempt to apologise for breaking in and taking their oil. But no avail anyway.

Finally I got back on my way, with a mixture of lawnmower oil and a little of the right stuff slurping around in my stressed-out engine. I nursed this poor clapped-out beast of a car with shot brakes toward my destination. Sometime during the previous night (before passing out) I had organised for the kelsuperstarsinger and IcePick, the friends I was to meet up with, to start making their way toward me to meet up. I planned to leave Myrtle somewhere out of sight and mind until my fun, relaxing weekend with my friends was over and only then think about what to do with her.

Oh boy, Myrtle wasn't well. Not well at all. She rattled and clattered another hundred kilometres or so, getting worse and worse as she went. Myrtle and I got ourselves to the town that joins the wiggly little back route that I'd taken to one of the most well-used highways in the country - the Pacific Highway. Home of idiots in cars, trucks, caravans, and a hell of a lot more idiots. But I digress. The lead-up to getting on this nightmare highway consists of two roundabouts. They are hemmed in on either side by guard rails. There's traffic going every which way and everybody is in a hurry to get on the highway and out of there.

Myrtle got me through the first one, just. Something in her went clunk as I negotiated my way around. The second one was where she spoke for the last time. You're Fucked she said, as she died mid-roundabout and left me with enough forward momentum to get onto the verge on the other side of the exit. There she was, past the roundabout, but half off the road and nudged up against the guardrail on a section that nowhere to pull completely off. Great.

I was pissed. I couldn't even quietly dump her now. She was the equivalent of a big neon sign flashing ABANDONED on a very busy section of road.

Luckily kelsuperstarsinger and IcePick were only minutes away from catching up with me. We ripped everything off the car of any worth to me, including the plates. I was having a hell of a time trying to get everything out of the centre console, so IcePick sorted that one out for me. Giggling the whole time, he grabbed the entire console and ripped it out for me.

With that, I said goodbye to Myrtle. We drove off toward our concert, with the prospect of drinking wine in the sun and cheering on Ani Difranco being far more appealing than dwelling on the crime I had just committed and my new-found lack of transport.

Quote of the Day

.... goes to Erin the massage chicky at Chiropractic Plus, who attempted to put right the weirdness in my shoulder. It has caused massive pain for the past few days, after tweaking it the wrong way trying to be a mechanical hero.

"Your neck is ludicrous, just quietly."

Spam

Text message spamming has gone way too far when your federal government starts using it.

"It's tax time 2009. Lodge online using e-tax. It's free. Available from 1 July. Visit ato.gov.au. Please ignore if recently lodged. Australian Tax Office.

One of the best math jokes

Life is complex: it has both real and imaginary components.

Hit, or Not Hit

Do you already know the latest stats joke?
Probably...

Three statisticians go hunting. When they see a rabbit, the first one shoots, missing it on the left. The second one shoots and misses it on the right.
The third one shouts: "We've hit it!"

Okay. So there's a bit of a point to all this. I was at Scumbag Headquarters (aka The Yard) the other day, wasting time as is the norm when you're on shift in The Yard. The resident old fart mechanic turned turned around at one point not realising I was behind him. He made a point of saying sorry to me.

What for? says Vic.

Well, I almost touched your breast when I swung around there.

Oh. I don't see my tits as a sexual thing at all. There annoying lumps of fat I'd rather do without. The guys just don't seem to be able to comprehend that though. So I come back with:

You know what the difference between almost touching a breast and being a fucking mile away is, don't you?

No? He says.

And to that I replied: Absolutely none. Whether you're a mile away or an inch away you still haven't touched, so who gives a fuck?

The Scumbags find Pebbles

Pebbles?
No, not of the small stone variety.
Of the large, decaying variety.

For some reason one of our scumbag teams was sent out to pressure clean a machine part - the crowd rack, or "sticks", which is the bit that the bucket is attached to - on Pebbles. We spent an hour sitting around waiting at the workshop for directions because nobody was sure where the hell it actually was. Finally, somebody who had been around for a while recalled where Pebbles was stashed. As it turned out she was over in a nicely deserted and overgrown back corner of the mine.



See? There's her name right up there above the driver's cab.

Three scumbags, a beautiful day, and a bunch of stuff that had been dumped. How much better can it get?



Exactly as the writing on the track frame says. What now?

There's another old shovel sitting around at a mine we go to. A while back I asked around about it. What's it sitting around there for? Parts? Scrap? Turns out the thing has been there for years and isn't able to be butchered for parts. To scrap it will cost too much. So... it just sits there gathering rust and mud. I guess eventually it'll become part of a hill.

At least Pebbles gets to watch the grass grow where she lies.

Quote of the Day

The universe is full of magical things, patiently
waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

- Eden Phillpotts (1862-1960)

Getting Around With The Scumbags

Working for Scumbag Industries has some perks. We might have to be leaving the workshop at 4:30am to get to our prospective work sites, but once you get there you can end up having a pretty cruisey day.

Take this day, for example.

We arrived at 6:30am and snoozed at the gate of the mine for about an hour waiting for the guys on site to say it was okay to approach the machine. Then we get there and lo and behold... the thing still isn't ready. So you either snooze, talk shit, or take photos of the whole process.

Here we have a 4WD taking on a shovel (the shovel is that big sucker on the left).



And here we have a guy wondering how the hell he's meant to turn this thing off. Can't see him? Just on the left of the bucket there.



Half a pack of cigarettes later and we're finally allowed to go to work. Some of the guys you'll have to prod awake and watch them sleepily get ready. But hey, we're all getting paid for it. It's stuff like this that makes work worth going to.

Awww

Okay. I'm trying... Let me see...

How about: Ahem. Excuse me? Uh, I think you may have missed a letter in that statement? Or perhaps you would like to take the option of inserting an apostrophe on the end of "somethin" to at least make it look like you meant it?

The Death of Myrtle [Part II]

Where we left off...

Next morning I tried to start the beast and it had a bit of life in it. Holy shit! She's still kicking!

I'd had a night camped on the side of the road next to my car. It was shitty tent-pitching ground, so all I had was a swag with the canvas pulled up over my head to keep out the elements and anything else that might wish to intrude while I'm in drunken slumber.

Pretty early that night I'd managed to scare myself half to death when something plopped onto the canvas relatively close to my head. There was a bit of weight in it, and I lay there frozen trying to figure out what danger I had just encountered and how to deal with it. Since it had actually plopped onto my makeshift bed, I reasoned that it wasn't a snake. Good news there! So I psyched myself up to fling the canvas aside and found my assailant. Laying there, innocent and not threatening at all, was the empty beer bottle I had stashed next to the bed.

I woke at another point and realised the flaw in my plan to get a good night's sleep. When getting drunk, liquid consumed has to go somewhere. Ahhh. Nothing like squatting in the dark for a bush pee when you're completely unsure of your surroundings. After my earlier freakout experience, my overactive imagination was supplying me with images of myself pissing directly onto a snake and consequently having a snake bite me on the arse. Or worse.

When I emerged in the morning it was already light. The rest of the night had passed without incident and I had slept soundly until after eight. Fuck. What do I do now? I thought. So I tried the car just in case. And as we already know, she started. I checked the dipstick and it barely had anything on it after the litre I dropped into it. I went off in search of more.

There's got to be farms somewhere around here and where there's farms there's usually oil. A couple of kilometres, three unoccupied houses and one complete arsehat later, I came across a father-son combo who gave me four litres of lawnmower oil. I offered to pay but they wouldn't take it at all, which was sweet. Things were looking up! To top it off, I thumbed a lift almost immediately on the preety much deserted road that I'd been walking along.

The guy who gave me a lift had a travelling companion - a small dog who had his own little bowl set up on the passenger side floor. They were a great pair. The dog ran around and had an explore while old mate kindly waited with me at my car to see if it would still go.

She fired, and we waved our goodbyes. I was on my way... but the fun wasn't over yet.

The Death of Myrtle [Part I]

Finally, after months of legging it and fare evasion, I have a new car. It's burgundy. It's a station wagon. It's a Subaru with roof racks and a tow ball. Since I'm such a short-arse I can sleep in the back of it. AND the existing stereo is pretty damn good. I am in love with it's leather seats and sticking power windows.

I don't think I ever wrote about the demise of the last car. I'd just lost permanency in my job due to a stupid decision to douse an idiot with a cup of coffee. Said idoit was a relation of the boss, so I was lucky to be kept on as a casual. Anyways, I was driving this car around unregistered. The brakes were pretty shot - actually they were totally fucked to the point of grinding for ages after you atempted to use them - so I was using the gears to slow the car and babying it along. Since I'd gone from earning a grand a week to less than half that I had no chance of fucking the car off for a new one, so I was driving a bomb.

And it wasn't even registered in my name. I had no idea that I had to swap the rego over to my name when I bought it. I thought the dealer I bought it from would do that. Anyway, as things turned happened, that little oversight worked out well for me.

I was planning a night's stay a few hours drive away to meet up with friends kelsuperstarsinger and Icepick to take in the glorious And Difranco in concert. I'd been thinking about how the hell to get there a little more safely in my unregistered bomb. [Public transport? Pffft. Australia's a big place, and we don't have trains everywhere.] The plan came about that rather than taking the police-laden traffic haven of the highway straight up the coast, I would take in the longer, infinitely more scenic journey through the mountains on all the old back roads. In fact, stuff it, I might as well leave a day early and camp out on the way.

Shit happened that made me leave very late. I can't remember what exactly. I know I was near breaking point mentally with life and my job (or lack thereof) so I was operating on the flee instinct. I packed the car with my camping gear, gave it a bit of oil and set off into the dark.

The problem with taking a mountain route is that they tend to be pretty windy. I'd forget to use the engine to brake and instead use the stuffed brakes, producing a heart-wrenching grind that just seemed to get worse. The oil-light came on, which was no big drama because the beast has had a slow oil leak since I got her and it's perpetually coming on. Nothing open now out here, I thought. I'll put a bit more in tomorrow. So I kept on going, winding my way through the darkness with a spiralling head and a car with fucked brakes.

They got worse and worse, the brakes, or so I thought. And then it happened. I was on my way up one of the larger inclines when the engine seemed to chew itself to shreds. I stopped. No forward, no backward. No start what-so-fucking-ever. Dead in the middle of the road. In the middle of the night. With guard rails on one edge of the road and a cliff on the other. Shit.

All I could do was let it roll back down the hill until there was enough room on the side to pull over. I pooped the bonnet to check it out and my heart sank. There was oil everywhere. And my oil cap, sitting exactly where I'd left it when I took it off to top up the oil before leaving. Three hundred kilometres later and the fucking thing was still sitting there being a final reminder of my ineptitude.

I flagged down a passing car and they sold me a litre of oil for fifteen bucks. Rip-off bastards! But I obviously needed it. I put it in in the hope of reviving my poor dead vehicle but no dice. Luckily I was prepared to camp! I had the essentials for a decent night's sleep in any situation - a swag... and plenty of beer.

Next morning I tried to start the beast and it had a bit of life in it. Holy shit! She's still kicking!