The opportunity to sit down for an hour and listen to music is a luxury that simply unattainable for most parents, it certainly is for us. Luckily for me I have a friend with impeccable taste in music and the time to seek it out, however as he lives about five hours away it’s rare that I get the benefit of his insight. So it’s great that with very little nagging he’s agreed to start a music blog to help hopeless people like me hear new music and avoid the type of embarrassment that usually occurs at Hottest 100 time when you can’t identify a single song.

So make sure that you add his tumblr feed to your RSS reader.

He’s started off listing some of his top songs of the year, and there are some real gems there – go now and have a listen.

This isn’t just a case of dropping Beatles tracks into Rockband, it is so much more. The visuals are absolutely stunning, there are some nice tweaks to the gameplay, and it really sets a new benchmark for this style of game.

If you love The Beatles and you’re not a gamer, this game is seriously good enough to turn you into one.

I have rarely logged on to Face book over the past year, it’s only been to respond to messages or friend requests from some long forgotten school friend. On the rare occasions that I did log on, my time was almost entirely spent blocking new stupid applications that people thought I should be using. While I admit that I have in the past seriously discussed piracy as a great retirement plan, I have no desire to join online mafia clans, decide between vampirism or lycanism or even pick which side of the force I want to represent.

So with all that in mind, last week I decided to go one step further than ignoring facebook and I actually disabled my account. With that, I have left behind all of the people who I cajoled, coerced and conned into using Facebook back when it was the new big thing. They would undoubtedly all have started at some point, but thanks to my early adopter zeal it was me who gave them the nudge. Sorry guys, I was wrong. I think Facebook is shit.

After the initial buzz of reconnecting with all of my old ‘friends’ it became apparent that I didn’t really want to keep in touch with them, which was why I’d barely spoken to any of them since finishing high school fifteen years ago. As for the friends I do have, and want to keep in touch with, it didn’t take too long for me to realise that Facebook is a fairly shithouse way to do so. We all have mobiles, landlines, personal and work email addresses and more recently some of us even use twitter, all of which seem much better than logging onto a website that wants to bombard you with ads for crap, which has multiple, incompatible methods of communicating with each other and which changes its design and functionality on a whim.

I don’t think that Facebook will be the last thing that I dive head first into as an early adopter, only to become disillusioned and ditch later, but I’m glad that I’ve given it the flick properly, rather than letting it float along on the periphery.

Admittedly, having left the Facebook universe, I can no longer claim to be friends with Lawrence Sprinborg, random people from uni who I barely remember,  or some of the people who made high school a misery, but on reflection that’s probably a very good thing.

As the time for the event approached I began to fret. I don’t have a black skivvy, a beret or a goatee, and as a keynote speech isn’t the type of event you pull a laptop out at I couldn’t even rely on my Mac to give me an air of pretentiousness. I decided that I would simply have to make do with my god given aura of smugness and try to wing it.

As it turned out I needn’t have feared. Entering the auditorium at the SS&A Club I came across what looked like combined meeting of every Rotary and CWA branch in the region. Where were the luvvies, the indifferent hipsters and the struggling self published authors? It turns out they were all absent. I suspect that the grade A wankers probably attended today’s literary lunch with some award winning author who plebs like me have never heard of.

I quickly scanned the room for any hint of free booze, which sadly appeared to be non-existent, and then reset my sights on the bar, only to find it closed. What sort of an arts event has no booze? No wonder the pencil necks had left the keynote to the crochet and tweed set. Perturbed, I took my seat and waited for the arrival of the guest speaker.

First impression, Peter FitzSimons is a really, really big bloke. Second impression, he is a born story teller. Fitz was here to talk a bit about his career as an author and his newest book, Charles Kingsford Smith and those magnificent men. For an hour he shared stories about his life and career, from rugby in rural France, to interviewing veterans about their exploits at Tobruk and Kokoda, and of course some of his favourite bits from the new book.

I’m actually quite impressed that Write around the Murray organised an author of the stature of Peter FitzSimons to attend the festival. I’m even more impressed with FitzSimons performance tonight, it wouldn’t  have surprised me if, faced with a relatively small crowd, he had decided to just go through the motions, but it was the exact opposite. He was engaging and managed to drag the audience in to every one of his stories, and I’m sure I’m not the only one looking forward to reading his book.

1998 was the year that Miss Andrea took the reigns as station manager at 2UNE, making the move from 3RRR in Melbourne to our pokey little station in our pokey little town. One of the many wonderful things about Miss Andrea’s arrival was the fact that she knew people from record companies, which meant that we got to interview actual musicians. I can’t remember what kind of bribery was demanded, but I was given the task of interviewing the lead singer of TISM, Ron Hitler Barassi, not long after their album www.tism.wanker.com was released.

Although it was just a phone interview, Miss Andrea had completely psyched me out by telling tales of how hideously TISM usually treated interviewers. I prepared a long list of questions, reviewed them time and again, and hoped like hell that I could weave some of them into whatever random stream of thought that Ron decided to present.

The tape of that interview is one of the few things, t-shirts aside, that I still have from my years at uni and it’s been hiding at the bottom of a drawer for a few years now. Lee’s comment has prompted me to fish it out, convert it to an mp3 and share it with you. The content is not safe for work, Ron and I both refer to TISM’s body of work, and the audio quality of the first 30 seconds is pretty awful, but here it is in its unedited glory.

I miss radio.

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