*** Note, the full 5 hour+ concert seems to have been pulled from YouTube just in the last hour.

I stumbled across this on YouTube this morning, the concert having taken place at Wembley in the last day or so. I don’t know much about Taylor Hawkins, but from the calibre of acts they could pull for this event, he was obviously a musical omnivore and well loved. It featured some pretty intriguing combinations (Josh Homme and Nile Rogers doing Let’s Dance, for example).

My initial thoughts: – Supergrass absolutely killed it. The best band at the event. – Justin Hawkins from the Darkness absolutely killed it. He was stunt vocalist for a few of the combinations and he was fantastic. People seem to be raving abut Sam Ryder singing Somebody to Love, but he wasn’t a patch on Hawkins. The Darkness in about 2004 was one of the greatest gigs I’ve seen. – Drummers begat drummers, as we know from the Starkey and Bonham lineages, and as Taylor’s kids reinforced. Wolfgang Van Halen is also no slouch on guitar. – While it was lovely to have Paul McCartney there, his voice seems to have devolved into a hoarse whisper. » Continue Reading.

For those who read my other post about the flooding in Brisbane, here is an appendix, not particularly related to events of the past few days.

I grew up in a street in Brisbane called Glenwood St, and my mother still lives in my childhood home. It’s a quite short street, a few hundred meters long with maybe 70 houses. If you look at it on Google Maps you’ll see it runs next to the river (thus the three floods in 50 years), and has a lovely park on the riverbank at the end of the street (currently underwater!). This is a beautiful area of old homes and tree-lined streets and I was very lucky to grow up there.

It’s quite rare these days that I walk through the neighbourhood, as I’m usually driving in to visit my mother. Bits of the street are relatively unchanged, yet slowly the old houses are being ripped out and replaced with modern monstrosities. This street was built just a little too late (WW2) to have the grand old Queenslander houses that fill the rest of the suburb, so it isn’t considered to have the same heritage value and blocks here are sought » Continue Reading.

As I’ve been working this morning, I’ve been listening to Sam Cooke to clear my head and counteract the sound of excavators building me a new driveway immediately outside my window. Once again, I have the repeated urge to reach through the speakers and swot the Jordanaire-style background singers and then fling a grenade into the orchestra pit. His voice and the songs still shine through, in spite of the light-entertainment adornments (although he could lose a few of the cha-cha-cha-style lounge numbers).

I can’t help thinking that, had he survived a couple of years later and be given a home at Atlantic and a producer like Jerry Wexler, he would have become the towering figure of 60s soul. Just before his death we get the mighty Bring it On Home and A Change is Gonna Come, both of which point forward to Otis and beyond.

A lot changed in those couple of years: soul music became funkier, tighter and grittier, and lost the cheesier hangovers from the 50s. He would have been unstoppable. In this alternate history, his earlier supper-club repertoire would be viewed the same way as Aretha’s Columbia recordings: a sugary aperitif before the spit-roasted » Continue Reading.

This morning, as is the case with most Sunday mornings, I was pootling around in my office reading a bit of this and listening to a bit of that when something struck me about several of the songs I had just heard: they all had lyrical punch lines at the end of the song:

Dear Dad by Chuck Berry, in which Chuck writes home to his Dad complaining about his crappy car, the punchline being that his Dad is Henry Ford (I’m guessing that when Dad sent him an Edsel in response, he stopped writing)

The Ocean by Led Zeppelin, in which it is revealed in the last line that the girl who has captured his heart is his 3-year old daughter.

Jiggery Pokery by the Duckworth Lewis Method (aka Pugwash and The Diving Comedy) where the rotter is revealed to be Shane Warne (although anyone with enough cricket knowledge to get the punchline would have figured it out well before).

What else is there? I actually couldn’t think of any others though I’m sure there are hundreds. The punchline can be comical or dramatic but it has to occur in the final line of the song (And yes I » Continue Reading.

I recently added a new rainwater tank on my property, and Ms Podicle and I are having serious disagreements about the fluid dynamics through said tanks. It hasn’t been an issue up to now due to the notable absence of anything resembling rain in South-East Queensland for much of the year until this week. I’ve had surprising difficulty finding a satisfactory answer on the net.

This is the setup: We have three tanks, A, B and C that are of equal size but at different heights, with A above B above C. We have a top tank A that collects water from the roof which then flows through a bottom outlet into the top of a significantly lower tank B until a float valve shuts off the inlet when tank B is full. The top of B is well below the bottom of A.

A, B and C are the same volume and size (22,000 litres, if anyone is interested) and all have overflows on their tops.

Tank B has an outlet halfway up (bottom half required for fire water) that is at the same height as the top of the lower tank C. This outlet flows into an » Continue Reading.

To dull the stress of my work, I’ve taken to spending one day each weekend slowly BBQing a chunk of meat (usually pulled pork), reading a book and sipping the odd G&T. It’s the middle of winter, but seeing as this is South-East Queensland and I live on the edge of a rainforest, that just means that I’m wearing long sleeves and that there are fewer snakes around than normal. The only brown leaves in sight are on the Japanese Maple that hangs above the BBQ, a victim of my over-exuberant lighting technique.

My musical accompaniment for the last month, besides the bellbirds, whip birds and parrots, has been a playlist of classic period Stevie Wonder, and I think that Stevie and I have made a deep connection this year. The connection is strained, however, whenever he breaks into the Muppet Show voice he uses in the back half of Living for the City, and a couple of others. He’s trying to sound hard and gritty, but the result is pure Fozzie Bear. It punctures his lyrical intent immediately.

So this got me thinking about other bits in great songs that make me cringe. I’ve documented before on this site » Continue Reading.

You know it’s been an interesting election when Prime Minister Scott Morrison, an evangelical Christian, called his victory last night a ‘miracle’, using the word in its literal sense. How Labor lost an unlosable election will fill the papers for months, but, just like Clinton vs Trump, you have to think that pretty much any other candidate would have romped home against a fragmented and unpopular government.

Shorten is a beige, uninspiring figure who would have trouble rallying the crowds in a bingo hall, let alone Federal Parliament, and every poll and survey in the last 12 months has indicated this. A mate of mine works in Parliament House and attended the Labor Party conference a couple of years ago where Shorten made his first speech as leader. He said the worried glances between attendees increased as the speech continued, and he suspects that many knew then that Labor was doomed at the next election. Labor put a set of challenge rules in place in 2013 to stop the revolving leadership door, and this made rolling him before the election almost impossible.

It’s going to be a long three years.

In fact, I’m the Chairman of the Bored. As my working and home life becomes busier I find myself listening to the same few podcasts and visiting the same few websites, favouring familiarity over novelty. I occasionally audition new ones of each, but inevitably boot them after a few samples. However a crisis is looming. I’m nearing the end of the hundreds of Adam and Joe podcasts on Podrot and I’m on my tenth trawl through the mighty Wikipedia List of Unusual Articles essentially sifting the fines at this point, so my bottomless well of diversions is now a puddle.

What do I like? For Podcasts, besides A&J (and obviously The Word), No such thing as a fish, bigmouth, chart music, so very wrong about games. I have previously listened to This American Life and its offshoots. What I want in podcasts is something with lots of regular content. I’ve got subscriptions to numerous interesting but irregular podcasts, but I need something with a back catalogue. I also tend to prefer UK to US content. I prefer content that is a dialogue between smart, witty people rather than a recited article.

For websites, I like interesting/peculiar history, science or music » Continue Reading.

You won’t find a more avid podcast listener than me. Commuting, mowing the yard, washing up, cooking, they’re all soundtracked by podcasts. Over the last decade I’ve subscribed to hundreds, ditching most after an exploratory listen but occasionally finding one that sticks and becomes part of my weekly fabric. I go on hiatus from some for a year or so and then become re-enthused when I rediscover them. So, in short, I love podcasts.

Recently, however, some trends have emerged that look to upset the podcart. Like a fungus, the trends have both spoiled some existing favourites as well as set up their own foul seed across podcast land. Let’s take a peek.

First off, L.A stand-up comics. Now, I don’t want to let my opinion of stand-up comics (i.e they’re not funny) cloud any facts about stand-up comics (i.e. they’re not funny), but at some point in the last year this seemingly vast population of droll, detached and deeply insecure people suddenly noticed podcasts, like a shopping mall full of zombies getting a whiff of brains. A trickle of of guest spots led to a torrent, then the inevitable proliferation of ‘quirky’, ironic podcasts that they could each guest » Continue Reading.