My First Scrabble Win

My First Scrabble Win, originally uploaded by glennpeters.

Look what I won at last Sunday's Dandenong Scrabble tournament!

And I won $10.00!!!

Out of the hundreds of games played throughout the day, my word FRITTED was the biggest scoring at 115 points.

I came fourth in my division and shot up over 130 places in the Australian rankings to be the 569th best scrabs player in the country.

You can check out my entire scrabble career statistics here.

Watch Him Building In There. As Seen On TV!

Wow.

Big mate and nifty sculpter, Nick Jones is going to be interviewed by Michael Veitch on the ABC's Sunday Arts this Sunday.

Longtime readers of this site would be familiar with Nick's old book sculptures. I wrote about him here and here. Big US pop culture blog, Neatorama also talked him up.

Here's the nice little blurb from the Sunday Arts website.

Nicholas Jones often reads the books he's working on but generally he reads them differently - working from back to front. As he folds, cuts, glues and sews them into exquisite sculptures and installations.

Exquisite.

What Would David Byrne Do?

Out of everybody I know and have met, I was the last to get a mobile phone. It was only a few weeks ago I gave in to my disdain for the greedy little things. There were so many reasons not to have one. Coltan wars in the DRC, the blood curdling reason, and the scene I saw today, a nine year old outside the library texting God knows who, another.

For so long it was honorable not to be mobile, in touch and available. Not to be texting or texted and rarely even contactable on a landline. Email and phoneboxes were enough for me.

But things have changed. Not many friends were answering calls from unknown numbers from phoneboxes. It was starting to give me the da-dits. On a recent Saturday night I made fruitless calls from four phoneboxes in the Fitzroy area. I felt like a bigger mug than I usually give myself credit for.

So I've got one now and what have I done? What has it done to me? Seduced me to the point of jumping way way over to the world of crazy Glenn by recording my own ringtone, holding the phone up to my stereo, blaring Big Star's On The Street.

What made me do this? Who knows, but a few days ago in his journal, David Byrne came very close to working it out...

"On the train I can heart the faint cacophony of many distant cell phone rings. Snippets of Mozart and hip-hop, old school rings and pop song fragments — all emanating out of miniscule phone speakers. All tinkling away, here and there. All are incredibly poor reproductions of other music — these are “signs” for other music. Music not meant to be actually listened to as music, but to remind you of and refer to other, more real, music. They are audio road signs that proclaim “I am a Mozart person” or “I can’t even be bothered to select a ring tone”. A modern symphony of music that is not music but asks that you remember music."

Indeed.

The Best Herald Sun Headline In Years

The Best Herald Sun Headline In Years, originally uploaded by glennpeters.

Pure subediting genius.

Love Is All At The Butterfly Ball

Best music video ever.

Back in the olden days ABC would play this ludicriously uplifting video to open their daily broadcast. And what a way to start the day!

The song is from Roger Glover from Deep Purple's (don't let that put you off, it's a doozy!), 1974 concept album The Butterfly Ball. Funny metal twerp, Ronnie James Dio sings.

Thanks to Boing Boing and 43 Folders for the video link.

Is That Paul Keating? It Is, You Know.

Tonight at scrabble club I'm getting my arse slapped by one of the world's best players, Andrew Fisher and what happens?

Paul Keating walks into the pub.

There's bugger all going on in the pub. Not many people there. Only us scrabblers, Paul Keating and a few of his suited mates.

They were drinking jugs of beer.

I was a shaking mess and couldn't concentrate on my game. The score? Andrew 527. Me 267.

Paul Keating.

Yes, Paul Keating.

What a strange night.

Photo from The Age.

A Sobering Thought From A Hot Rod Enthusiast

"Everything you love, everything meaningful with depth and history, all passionate authentic experiences will be appropriated, mishandled, watered down, cheapened, repackaged, marketed and sold to the people you hate."

From the brilliant custom car blog, Mister Jalopy's Hooptyrides.

New York Looks Like Such An Exciting City!

One Of NY's Thousands Of Taxi Cabs, originally uploaded by glennpeters.

Check out the photos from my recent quick trip to New York.

Hellava town!

We're Doing Five Blades

"Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the fucking vanguard of shaving in this country. The Gillette Mach3 was the razor to own. Then the other guy came out with a three-blade razor. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with a little thing called the Mach3Turbo. That's three blades and an aloe strip. For moisture. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened—the bastards went to four blades. Now we're standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling three blades and a strip. Moisture or no, suddenly we're the chumps. Well, fuck it. We're going to five blades."

By James M. Kilts CEO and President, The Gillette Company "as told" to The Onion.

The Nightwatchman Poll #1

Who's your favorite Beaconsfield mine survivor? Brant or Todd?

Click the comments bit and tell us all about it.

I'm On MySpace If You Like That Sort Of Thing

I've never liked the idea of MySpace. Apart from its godawful design, the whole idea of bragging of your 1853 "friends" is peurile and stupid. But I'm told nobody will come to read The Nightwatchman if I don't have a page there.

I'm not having too much trouble getting readers but hey, here's my MySpace page. Now you can be my friend!!

Question. Does having The Posies' Jon Auer and My Morning Jacket as friends make me almost as famous?

And if you become one of my "friends" does that allow you to refer to Jon Auer as a "friend of a friend."

Vale Grant McLennan

Grant W McLennan of my alltime favorite Australian band, The Go-Betweens, died in his sleep last night.

Horrible, horrible news.

Writers' Block Is Rubbish

In the past month I've been doing this high falutin' advertising thingy called AWARD School. In its 12 weeks you have to come up with brilliant ideas for 12 different advertising briefs. Sounds easy-ish but boy oh boy, I'm here to tells ya, it's bloody hard.

The first couple of weeks were a breeze but now I'm tired and stuck. Luckily, so is everyone else I've spoken to who's doing the course.

So I'm looking through my emails and found this bit of advice I once gave to a friend who was struggling with writers' block. First I'll take my own advice and then share it with all of youse.

Here's a few things. Go for a long walk. Write in a cafe. Even if it's breakfast time, mix yourself an obscure cocktail. Move all your gear to a different room. Turn off the computer or at least disconnect the internets. If you usually write on computer, try using a notepad. Better than that, write on an A3 layout pad. Read a different newspaper.

43 Folders is an excellent site about stuff like writers block, cool stationery and time management.

For me, I'm usually a lazy bastard. The writing usually flows, opening the word processor thingy is the hardest bit.

Now, back to work.

Stella!

Found this nifty little voucher on the brillo adblog, Advertising For Peanuts.