When I was trying to find the name of the song they use in Classic FM for a theme tune, I discovered a bug in iTunesRater – it only checks the title of the song, not anything else. So two songs with the same title played one after another won’t necessarily change the iTunesRater display. Of course, attempting to fix this has caused some other issues…
Yay! The days of having every post I posted with ecto automatically having the default category as well as those that I choose are numbered! An official bug report of the error (including the line of code where the bug occurs) has been put into the Word Press bug system (mosquito).
I bought a proper razor on the weekend. One of the ‘old school’ (I hate this term now, it’s been corrupted by the youth. Any type of Mobile Phone, no matter how old, is ‘old skool’) razors, a double-edged safety razor. No shaving rash. Closer shaves. Might have something to do with the cream I bought to, but it’s nice. Even makes me look forward to shaving. Almost. Well, consider this a plug for the Shaver Shop. Transform Yourself.
Seriously, the guy who served me was excellent. Didn’t try to sell me the most expensive razor or cream in the shop. I think he knows the value of patience, knows that if I am happy, I will come back, and buy stuff from him again.
John Williamson’s “masterful final act” (according to The Australian, but I didn’t know he’d stopped writing plays) Influence is currently playing at the Dunstan Theatre in Adelaide. Since we haven’t been to see anything since A Number, and Jaq won a raffle with a season ticket, we went to see it on Saturday night. John Waters is “Ziggi Blasco”, a conservative, hate-mongering talk radio host, along the lines of John Laws, Alan Jones and their ilk. His wife was a former ballet dancer – she was never really top of the heap but once performed the lead role of a production in London, but only because the two top dancers were both injured. Anyway, she is the most vile, vapid creature who is unable to believe that a) she isn’t going to make it big again, and b) other people have challenges in their lives that are much harder to live with. Things begin to get worse when Ziggi’s daughter from his first marriage, and his father, move into the Blasco mansion on the same day. Both have their own issues, which deepen as the story unfolds. This time of upheaval is made worse by the fact that Mrs. Blasco doesn’t seem to be able to find a good housekeeper (or, at least, one that will stick around), and hires a member of the “working poor”, a Turkish single mother of three, who has to travel hours every morning and night to and from work. The other characters are Ziggi’s sister Connie, a very left leaning psychologist, and Tony, the Blasco’s driver/butler/gardener. Most of the characters were believable, if somewhat stereotyped. I found John Waters a little hard to understand when he was “on air”, as his speech was somewhat unlike that of the “golden tonsils”, or most talk radio hosts whom he was based upon. But he was a perfect copy of Laws' style of radio, with even the obligatory “Now just wait a minute, I was having lunch with some of my friends who are pharmaceutical company executives the other day, and they are really nice fellas.” Zöe Carides was magnificent as Zehra, the housekeeper who doesn’t seem to be able to say the right thing, ever. “Better not to be that good looking. More time to spend on doing schoolwork.” Not quite what you want to say to a (clearly) jumpy Year 12 student, who has just complained about always being called a dog by the boys on the train. Zehra, and Ziggi’s father (I’m not sure that we ever heard his name) nearly brought me to tears as they showed the depth of character that made them real. My only hassle with Influence was the cheap laughs. Williamson took the easy track in a lot of situations – he didn’t have to work hard at all to get laughter from the audience. Which really annoyed me, because at other times, he clearly had put the effort into making stuff genuinely funny. Or, at least I, and a couple of others in the audience, thought so. By all means, if you get the chance, go and see Influence. Laugh if you must, but don’t let that stop you taking away the message I did: Australia is in trouble now. I’m not sure how we stop the slide to right-wing nationalism, (aptly hilighted by Blasco senior’s dilemma) but I hope we can.
Central Scorpions Touch Association Mens Open had their first training session yesterday. I am the coach. I’ve coached plenty of Womens and Girls touch, and the occasional boys team, but this is the first time I have coached a team of Real Men ™. It is kind of intimidating (and I probably need to stop worrying about stepping on feelings), but I’m quite looking forward to it.