Yarr!

A hoi maties!
With talk like a pirate day long gone I’m already stewing with anticipation for next years talk like a pirate day event. To tide me over I have purchased a fantastic book dedicated to pirates aptly named “Pirateology”, not to be confused with Scientology of course, because that would just be lame.

This book has it all, descriptions of pirates, their weapons, it explains their obsession with treasures and various other random bits and pieces. On top of that (and really who could want more?) it’s got other little features like lengths of material that they used to make their flags, a guide to knotting and sections that you can peel back revealing other hidden pirate knowledge. The cover itself is also tré fancy, with a compass (it doesn’t actually work which sucks but the thought was there) attached to the outer layer of the cover with a fake leather binding. Very fancy stuff, the company in china that produced the book should be proud!

I can’t wait to get reading, I’ve already been busted twice at work going through it when I should be doing other stuff, like work for example. I should be a pirate expert in no time. Yarr!

Props to a flop

Did anyone happen to watch Australian idol last night and see that chick singing “Themata” by Karnivool? Sadly I only managed to catch the last 10 seconds or so where she completely massacred the final note, it was gut wrenching to watch and hear. However although she completely boned the song I give her props for helping to spread the word of the mighty force that is Karnivool.

In the space of maybe an hour or so Karnivool’s myspace had a huge number of hits and comments, mostly angry fans bagging her out, but hey it’s all publicity right? It would have taken a lot of courage to sing a song that not too many viewers of a show like Aus Idol would know so for that she has my complete respect. On the other hand however I just want to beat her with a stick for possibly giving the impression that Karnivool may actually sound that bad when in reality Kenny’s vocal talents are mind blowing.

From what I read in the myspace comments even the house band struggled with the song, the house band is suppose to consist of Australia best session musicians. To me this just further expresses how talented the “vool” truly are.

I was upset at the comments from both Marcia Heinz and Mark Holden calling them an obscure band based on the fact that they don’t know about them. They are possibly one of Australia’s biggest Rock/Metal acts going around. The fact the judges don’t know who Karnivool are signals the fact that they really don’t know much about the Australian music industry, surely you would have an idea of up and coming young bands/performers.

In summary props to Reigan (the girl who sang the song) for helping to spread the word of Karnivool, but in all honesty you should have chosen a song more suited to your voice because it wasn’t sung very well.

Visit Karnivools myspace at: http://myspace.com/karnivool

***On another note I finally updated my dream journal so go check it out and let me know what you think, the more encouragement I receive for this experiment the more likely I am to continue it***
(http://brodiesluciddreams.blogspot.com)

Movie Review: DOA: Dead Or Alive

As a gamer nerd I felt it was my duty to see this film, my brain ways saying “Don’t be a fool you know it’s going to blow” but my heart (and maybe my manhood) were telling me otherwise. I decided to follow my heart and go and see DOA: Dead Or Alive and although it was as lame and tacky I predicted, I did not leave the cinema disappointed.

After the first 10 minutes of the film or so where everyone in the cinema is “thinking why did I pay good money for this film?” I loosened up and decided just to enjoy a good laugh (and perve) at the films expense. I found it hard to tell if the movie was suppose to be making a mockery of itself and other similar fighting movies or trying to be serious, if it was intended to be a serious movie I feel sorry for both the director and the writer because it seems they have no clue.

The fight scenes were mostly terrible with very poor angles during the fights, however they managed to get great angles of the girls whenever possible. They didn’t even try to make it subtle, the just panned straight from one of the fighters asses up to their chest, held focus for a moment and moved on. While I’m not complaining about what the camera was focused on it did become rather annoying. Kudos to the film makers though for including a beach volleyball scene, between the female fighters it was great to see that they decided to include aspects of the DOA beach volleyball game even having Zack as the DJ.

I wouldn’t recommend seeing this film at the cinema unless you’re a big DOA fan but I would definitely rent a copy for viewing when it’s released to DVD as it is an entertaining film, just not the way the directors intended it to be. I give it a 5/10.

Crowd Control To Major Tom *Edited*

Last night Brad and I went to see Karnivool, Seven and Antistatic play at Ruby’s and it was a blast. For a full review visit Brads blog at http://www.theshithaus.com/ as this blog is more of a rant about the crown and “moshing” etiquette. All I will say on the gig is that Antistatic have won themselves a new fan (being me) and you should all check them out, Seven had their best performance I have possibly ever seen by them, I think I enjoyed them more than Karnivool, and well Karnivool just plain rocked!

Now back to crowd etiquette…
I was hardly impressed with crowd last night and it led me to thinking if there was such a thing as “moshing” etiquette anymore? Granted Karnivool has some heavier sounding songs but it’s still not really the kind of stuff you would “head bang” to. I hoping it was just the fact that these were Ruby’s Lounge idiots and Friday at the Hi Fi bar goes a little bit better.

Back in the day when there used to be some form of etiquette, people used to respect the fact that you were at the front and you had spent the time there sitting around and waiting. These days it seems that has disappeared, 80% of the gigs I’ve been to recently there are a group of assholes who throughout the entire gig just push at you and try to get their way to the front regardless of whether there is room or not. It’s just not cool people, show some respect.

Another question I’ve asked myself is what do you do when there are girls in the pit? Brad and I were discussing it afterwards, do you try and take it easy on them and not push them too much or just ignore the fact they are female and treat them the same way (I know that sounds sexist, but that’s not how I mean it). I think based on the events of last night I’m going to base my decision on a girl by girl basis. At the beginning of the gig their was this hella sweet, nice young girl next to me all pumped and excited about the gig and was obviously in the front just so she could get a better view. Once Karnivool got started you could see that it was all a little too much for her, and eventually she had to move. On my other side about half way through Karnivool’s performance some other girl had managed to push her way to the front and get in between Brad and I (not in the fun way either *wink*), and she was a pushy little cow (***EDIT: Met this girl tonight at the Karnivool gig at Hi Fi, made the effort to come home and apologise to me, ended up driving her home, nice girl***). Being the person I am, I never intentionally hurt girls, in fact I don’t like hurting anyone really, but hurting, hitting, pushing etc a girl is a HUGE no. So what should I do?

What are your thoughts on the subject of crowd etiquette at a gig?

Bongo

It’s the craze that’s sweeping the nation… well at least a craze that has kept myself and at least five or so other entertained in moments of complete randomness. What the hell am I talking about you ask? I’m talking about the service “Ask Bongo”.

BONGO is a mobile service where you text a question to “199 Bongo” and roughly 5 to 10 minutes later an answer to your question is given. From what I understand it was originally designed to help settle arguments in places like bars between mates such as “are zebras white with black stripes or white with black stripes” and general questions like that. But has since expanded into finding information on other people or about yourself, video games, movies, we have even asked where’s the best place to find free porn, basically any type of question you have simply ask Bongo.

How we came about using bongo was on the Saturday night just past we were at a friends place eating dinner when somehow we got into an argument about how to workout the square root of something, we were trying to figure out the actual equation on how to do it instead of the good old trusty calculator. Although we are all fairly intelligent people in a variety of different areas, math was hardly any of our strong points. So I did what I usually do when I have a maths problem to solve and that’s call one of my many friends who studied specialist maths and is actually good with that kind of stuff.

Thankyou to Robbie who answered our equation (what’s the square root of 1 million I think the question was. I know I know it’s an easy one, but like I said Math was not anyone’s cup of tea for who I was with) but he also used a calculator and couldn’t tell us how you would work it out manually. I heard about Bongo through another friend who has recently become addicted so we gave it a try. We messaged Bongo with our question and low and behold he had an answer for us.

We then started asking Bongo about ourselves, while the answers were fairly accurate it was obvious you’re not going to find out any big secrets about a person. I asked about myself and my reply was:

“Brodie Pruha tends to be always hanging around the ladies. He is always on his phone and will do anything to make a quick dollar. Loves dinning out”

For those who know me will probably agree that this is similar to who I am but could just be a lucky random guess. I kind of picture it like a horoscope. So I asked about myself again.

“Bongo has spoken of Brodie before, he tends to always try hard to pick up when out. He tends to always going out in the city. Loves Keeping Fit” – Note Bongos poor grammar.

Once again fairly general but pretty similar to how I act, I’d hardly say I go out of my way to try and pick up when I go out though. So far I’ve spent nearly $40 on the service on completely random crap like what Bongo thinks of my nose or to find out if Bert was a jerk all day. But it is very entertaining I recommend you try it at least once.

Check out Bongo at http://www.199bongo.com you wont be disappointed.

Children Children Children

I just had a random thought. After spending many hours browsing through Myspaces I’ve noticed one thing. In the edit profile section it asks if you have kids.

These are the options:
-I don’t want kids
-Someday
-Undecided
-Love Kids, But not for me
-Proud Parent
-No answer

What happens if you’re a parent but you’re not proud of it? Your child may be some deadbeat loser who you’ve disowned, but you don’t want to lie about have children.
I want a new option. “Yes I have children, but it was a mistake” or something along those lines.

There's Always One

Well once again I was at Croydon skate park last night working on my “skillz” with my mate Bert. All was going well for the 1st 10 minutes or so until some dude rocked up completely wasted (in Croydon? But it’s such a wonderful place! *sarcasm*) and looking to cause trouble. He immediately walks up to and introduces himself so I was thinking everything was cool until he wanted to ride Bert’s skateboard. Bert not knowing the guy really didn’t want to lend him the board, it also didn’t help that the dude looked dodgy as hell either.

After Bert denied him the board several times the guy still didn’t get the picture and wouldn’t quite hassling us, he kept getting in our way as we tried to skate. Eventually he started to get my upset that we wouldn’t let him use the board. His constant asking for the board then turned into threats against us. I wouldn’t have been so concerned being two on to one but there was a car load of his mates down in the car park, so we were a little worried. Obviously we wanted to avoid a fight altogether, but sometimes you can’t control that so Bert walked away and got on the phone to our mate Ben (big, tall scary looking, apparently really passive and useless in a fight, but we mainly wanted him for the intimidation factor) and asked him to come down.

After the phone call to Ben another guy came up to the skate park from the car, he also look quite wasted (I was liking the fact they were so smashed cause at least we would stand a chance if we had to fight). However this dude apart from being a complete dero was a pretty nice guy and also didn’t want any trouble. He came to try and get his mate back to the car. After the dude finally quit hounding Bert for the skate board he walked up to me and kept trying to pull at my beard. I carefully tried to push his hands away without trying to start anything. At this point Bert stood up holding his skateboard and the “nice guy” the turned telling Bert to “put the f**ing board down and stop trying to be intimidating”, at this point another one gets out from the car and I’m thinking we are royally screwed.

Once again both Bert and I said we really weren’t looking for any trouble. Bert put down his board and they finally gave up on us. Just as they started to walk off Ben finally arrived but the moment had passed, I felt kind of bad for wasting his time but it did get quite ugly for a moment.

The night before I rocked up to the skate park around 10pm for another skate and I met some random dude and his girlfriend they were nice enough so I introduced myself, we had a quick chat and I just kept on skating. I met Elyse and Bianca down there not long after who also came down for a skate. Eventually this dudes mates turned up, they were all nice enough people and we were all just there to skate and have a good time. There was one idiot though who, surprise, surprise was drunk and really wouldn’t leave us alone. He wasn’t threatening us or trying to start anything but just being a dick (kept hassling the girls, asking me stupid stuff). As we were leaving the guy starts yelling shit at us, I didn’t really hear what he was yelling but it wasn’t anything nice I’m quite sure of that. His mates told him to shut up and apologised so I knew everything was pretty cool and this guy was just being a dick.

This leads me to my point, why is there always one person who manages to ruin what should be a good time for everybody? 90% of the time there’s always one person who acts up in some way and really spoils the event. Why are people like this?