The Continuing Adventures Of Your Own Personal Jesus

I used to own two aviaries full of budgies, lovebirds and other assorted parrot type birds back in the 1980s and I loved it. In fact I miss my budgies no end, they’d sing and they’d be a constant source of amusement for me, especially as they’d puzzle out certain members of my family with relative ease. As soon as my interest in the birds became serious I began to hunt down books – the best amongst them being Ernest Harts brilliant – and still useful – tome on budgies. Seek it out if you can. I was given my copy by the next door neighbour and I’ve still go it. But one book I wanted to find and never did, until yesterday, was Stroud’s Digest On The Diseases Of Birds. First published in 1943 it soon became a much sought after book, if only because it was, and still is, considered to be one of the best books of it’s type. Meticulously researched, well written and lavishly illustrated, some of the treatments have since been improved upon, but the book is still worth finding because...

Wither Ricky now? Who knows, and frankly who cares. Is the guy fit enough to continue doing his job? Possibly. He could argue that he was merely getting his standard 10% off the top by visiting the girl and allegedly having sex. But then who do we believe? He says he didn’t do it; she has video footage which is, well, to put it bluntly, fairly damning. He says the footage was faked, maybe it is, but I’m not so sure. Why do we care? For the same reason people slow down to check out accidents and fights – because it’s tragic and it’s happening to someone else. That’s the only reason. It’s like watching a bad movie like The Keep – you only watch it for the film score by Tangerine Dream. Otherwise why bother? I’m not entirely sure where my sympathies lie in all of this mess. They certainly don’t lie with Nixon. Let’s assume for a minute that he did, to quote Neil Patrick Harris, got his fuck on (and I’m not saying he did, I wasn’t there) and got stuck into The Girl. She’s ...

I hate being let down. It happens all too frequently these days, and each time it does happen I generally get annoyed, if not upset and downright pissed off. The one thing that can always drive me to the latter is poor service that I’m then expected to politely pay for. Sadly that’s what happened last night. The night started off well enough as we attended a birthday party for the Bear’s nephew, but then it went downhill from there. The restaurant that we gathered at is a famous and long standing one, in North Adelaide. I’ll call it Spanish Fly, but trust me, you all know it. I’ve been there several times and each time I’ve been treated well. Indeed, on one occasion, I went and got happily smashed because the barkeep was intent on trying out new Mexican cocktails upon me and my lady friend, gratis. Now that was an evening to remember, indeed some of that night is permanently shut off for me, but I recall waking up the next day with a lot of sore bits, so fun was had somewhere...

To use a popular expression more commonly associated with Ice Hockey; I went to the fights last night and a game of soccer broke out (and if you think that joke is old and tired, then have you seen Ben Elton lately?  Hey, Ben, 1986 called - it wants it's joke back mate).  It was a balmy night, cooler than it has been for a while, so we decided to wander down to Adelaide Oval and catch the Adelaide United vs Melbourne Victory game.  We were fairly pumped for it, with the only thing to spoil our evening before we wandered in was the absence of Victory captain, and all around thug sniper, Kevin "Bastard' Muscat.  A dirtier player you may never want to find, although he is the darling of the Victory fans, and going on their behaviour last night, well, I'm not surprised that they laud him as some kind of a footballing God.  Still we did get some cheap, early chuckles in as we spied a Weslo man who looked suspiciously like Ivan Milat, so we were watching him with keen...

It was a party night; it wasn’t the end of school though. A Monday night, and it was the first time. I’ve been told for years that I should be on stage, sprouting shit at people and trying to make them laugh, so with that in my ears I found myself entered into a local comedy competition. Come the night, cometh the man. I wandered up, wound up and found out that I had one of the worst slots possible – second to last. That’s not the best time to go on; you really want to be on either straight up, or in the second bracket. By the time I went on most people were drunk, sleepy or both but mainly they just wanted to get the fuck out of dodge as fast as possible. In fact the room, which had been packed to overflowing for the first two sets, was a little less full by the time I went on. Before getting up there the people closest to me were advising me: no dick jokes. No fart jokes. No wog jokes. They’re all in bad taste and wouldn’t go over that well. And certainly not Hitler joke...

And then came Merlin. And the Merlin was fat. And the Merlin was grey. And furry. With long, sharp claws and fangs. For Merlin was, and indeed still is, a cat. Work that out. Personal Jesus's last party The joys of entertainment in downtown Adelaide are few and far between. Now that isn’t the fault of anyone in particular, indeed we have to compete with, of all places, Perth for major entertainment. Why is this? Because concert promoters believe that we can’t draw a decent crowd. That’s despite the fact that the last time U2 and Robbie Williams were here they squeezed as much as 60,000+ people into each show, and Pink did a series of seemingly never ending shows. But that’s what passes for entertainment. Gone are the days when the likes of David Bowie insist on doing a show in every major capital city. It could be worse though, we could all be living in Hobart. Despite this we’ve managed to have some great riots over the years. Those who were there still talk w...