The Chronicles Of…

I found this website last night: punk christmas.com, and downloaded a whole bunch of the mp3’s for free!

I’m loving punk Christmas carols!

It’s been a pretty good weekend, although busy…

Friday night was our youth groups (The MOB) end of year pool party and they hired out the Water slides at the local pool for an hour which was top fun. Then we had a bit of a feed before a few formalities followed by some time dedicated to perfecting our bombs, before being told not to…

Saturday, was only yesterday but I already forget what I did. I think it started with a bunch of shopping then home for some lunch and a wee nap, a bit over an hour and half I think, before heading off to the Carol’s by Crackerlight put on by our church. It was a good night and we got heaps as publicity from one of the local radio stations as they held a competition to see who would light the fireworks.

Then today was the novelty of church in the morning as our service isn’t on tonight and they had a couple of invitation type services this morning. Tonight we’ll be having a bunch of people over for take away, watching Hamish & Andy and heading up to the church for the Christmas lights display.

Apparently this cost $300 to make and the dude has been offered $30M from Hollywood to do what he wants! I can’t imagine that the $300 included software or editing/shooting time, but still very impressive!

I was reading Tom’s blog and noticed his mention of James Gandolfini as a character in ‘Where the Wild Things Are’.

Now I can’t possibly think of Mr Gandolfini as anyone other than Tony Soprano. He was that character, and that character was him. I’ve seen him in a few other films, playing other roles, but I’ll never be able to see him as anyone else. Blame that on scripts/ acting talent/ production/ whatever, the character in the show was made real for me.

There are other actors out there who have made characters their own, and can never really move on. I think of most of the cast of ‘The Bill’ for example, who will probably never move on and get a different role.

But what about in other areas of life, beyond TV or film – are there characters in books that you’ve read, and imagined to look a certain way, that could just never be different, no matter how they were portrayed in a film? Or a definitive version of a song, whether it’s by the original composer or a particulalry inspired cover version. Jeff Buckley’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah comes to mind. No matter how many times I hear someone play that song, the version that I’ll always be comparing it to will be the one I heard on ‘Grace’, that starts with a sigh and ends with an amazingly sustained falsetto note.

Or your nanna’s sausage rolls, or your first kiss with ‘that person’, or whatever… what are some of the things that have set the benchmarks in your life?

Some fairly amusing types in the UK have decided that they’re sick of X-Factor/Idol type records being number 1 in the charts over Christmas each year, so have started a campaign to make Rage Against the Machine’s song “Killing in the name” number 1 instead.

RAGE

I’ve seen it on Twitter a fair bit, with quite a few famous types promoting it. I hope it works, I can’t stand all that bubble gum plastic music marketing crossover stuff.

(Even if I see the irony in a whole lot of people all chanting about “not doing what they tell me” at the same time…)

On another music related note, if you’re interested in hearing some great new tunes, you can go to this website:

BLALOCK

This guy puts together a monthly ‘mix tape’ of new music by indie bands, and lets you download the MP3s from his site. A lot of the bands see it as free advertising and are quite keen to get themselves onto his ‘compilations’ each month. It’s apparently very good for your indie cred.

So I’m putting together our quarterly newsletter/paper for our church (it’s called the Chronicle and you can see past versions here), and I need to put some light hearted stuff on the back page. My idea was that I could put some Christianese terms on the back like the ABC702 Dags Dictionary… but I need a little help…

One term particular to Christians at All Saints Petersham is

• Bazzism (adj.) – Those phrases or mannerisms common to the rector of All Saints Petersham: Antony Barraclough, aka. Bazz. Eg. “How hard could it be?“, “In whom do you believe?” (preceding the saying of a creed), “You’re fired.“

This is really the only idea I have at this stage, but I’m sure the creative minds that stop by thechroniclesof from time to time are much more witty and inventive…

I go to print on Thursday, so get creative people!

This won’t be breaking news to some, but I just don’t get politics… it so hard to keep up with and I don’t know who is charge of what and all the different levels, and distinctions between governments, councils, local members, state, federal blah blah blah…

I’m not sure exactly how it all came about but there’s a new leader of the Liberal party I believe, and that had something to doing with our climate change. A bunch of people voted, although I’m not sure who, and some guy won by 1 vote.

Now, unfortunately I’m not playing dumb… I just don’t retain this stuff too easily and have never been able to…

I can’t remember who used to be the leader of that party, and I can’t even remember now who the new leader is.

Now I hear other things like that because of what happened there may be an election… but what’s the point, they just voted for a new guy, shouldn’t we give him a chance before voting him out.

I also hear the phrase double disillusion, it all a bloody illusion to me, let alone a double one!!

Maybe I’m again showing my stupidity here but up until recently I could never remember if ALP stands for Australian Labour Party or Australian Liberal Party. But then someone pointed out that one of the parties just shortens their name, so now I think is it The Libs or The Labs, and surely it’s not The Labs, therefore ALP must stand for Australian Labour Party.

You should know that I’m also not writing Politics off, I understand how important the whole thing is to running a country, but for the average (or below average) person it just seems to be a little overwhelming…

Chris Waghorn

Political Correspondent

Dubbo

• You’re that guy… who doesn’t use toothpaste.
• You’re that guy… who parks their car on church property 24/7 so that people who actually come to church can’t get a parking spot.
• You’re that guy… who pays lots of money to get good tickets at a concert and then watches it through a 2″ LCD screen on the back of your camera.
• You’re that guy… who has a pony tail and where’s a big bloody cricket hat and a backpack and loves to have a whinge at people who actually enjoy being at the front of a concert.

We’ve been missing toothpaste in our house for about a week now… and before you recoil in disgust at our dental hygiene, we have still been brushing our teeth… just without the paste…
A dentist once told me that toothpaste does nothing for your teeth except make the experience more pleasant, ie. the brushing bit is what matters.
But thank God for toothpaste because brushing your teeth without is foul! Like brushing your teeth with partly digested food that’s been left out to ferment for 12 hours.
I’m buying more toothpaste today.