Hey Guy, it's okay, she might not be about to die after all.

Oh, and you know how you were bemoaning the lack of a credible arbiter of celebrity plastic surgery since awfulpasticsurgery stinks so bad? Well, try goodplasticsurgery. It might be better.

In the video clip for Youth Group's song Baby Body, why has Patrick Matthews' face been blurred out?

Went to see The Impressionists exhibition at the national gallery today. It was pretty good, you know, Impressionist paintings from the Musee d'Orsay and all that. Some moments of leaping heart, some of detached consideration. You know, the usual art appreciation deal. Then I went to the symphony to see some Japanese drum power. It was cool. And strange. I've never seen funny outfits and rippling muscles on stage with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra before. Of course, if I had gone to see it when the orchestra played with Kiss or Meatloaf, I would have seen funny outfits. But I didn't go, and anyway, snigger snigger, no rippling muscles there. So this was definitely a first. Anyway, these drum dudes and ladies had what Kyan would call 'excellent core strength'. And there was a lot of intense poised banging things around and it was really cool. The encore was super fantastic, especially when the orchestra's percussion section started having a little party up the back, bopping around and clang clang clang and having a right old time. Oh, the percussion section. Love em. They're my peeps. Dunno why they're my peeps, as I am not myself a percussionist, but there you are. They're my favourite section. By the way, the main percussion dude and the new young percussion chick are sleeping together, right? I mean, not just sleeping together of course. What I meant to say is that they're together together, right? Like, he's mentoring her, but also they're an item, right? I'm only asking because having watched them all evening, that conclusion seems to stand up. I observed behaviour that I think points to their being in a relationship. For example, before the show started they were chatting on stage and she did that 'brush a bit of fluff off his jacket' thing. And then later, during the performance of the second piece - that Strauss one from 2001: A Space Odyssey - after she'd done a special bit of hitting on a special bit of equipment, he gave her a discreet thumbs up, in response to which she blushed and smiled into her chest. And then at the end of the performance he touched her shoulder in a 'well done I'm proud of you' sort of way before shaking hands with the other percussion man and applauding the timpanist. He seemed more chuffed than a simple mentor, is all I'm saying. And he has been smiling a lot more, too. Am I wrong? Whatever. A good time was had tonight by me and my orchestra percussion peeps.

Hmmm. Saw on the JB upcoming releases board that Bic Runga was due to release a new album at the beginning of August, but there's no mention of it on the net, and none at Sony's page. What gives?

Was watching Alias last night and saw an ad for Seven News  that went something like this: "the new wave of fear that's sweeping Melbourne... even sex-workers are afraid!". Hmmm. Firstly, shame on Seven for trying to cultivate an even more neurotic populace, but, um, why wouldn't sex-workers be afraid? It seems like an obviously dangerous industry, and I suspect that many sex-workers don't relish the risks their work entails. Bizarre.

On the topic of Alias, it was amusing when Ms Alias was scaling the walls of some random building (with a break-an-enter beanie on, and black camouflage) that she decided to still wear a bright crimson wig, and not to bother disturbing her hair by concealing it in the interests of, you know, camouflage. Why won't the CIA approach me so that I can juggle a student lifestyle with international intrigue?

Doing my usual street press reading at my 3CR shift today, and hell no but The Darkness have cancelled a tour which was going to bring them here around October. Noooooooo! Now we have to wait at least a few more months to see them again in the summer. Oh, Justin, you toy with me. But I love you. Also announced was the news that the producer of their next album will be Roy Thomas Baker. That name means nothing to me, but considering he's also produced albums for Queen, The Cars and Cheap Trick, I say it bodes incredibly well. Hee hee! Excitement building. Anyway, in other bad street press news, the Livid festival has been called off for this year too, which means, sob, no Livid side-shows! Oh my, but October is looking bleak. In better news, heaps heaps better in fact, The Libertines will be here very shortly. August 9th to be exact. No Pete in tow, but still, yay! Happy happy me!... Or so I thought, until I just went and tried to buy tickets from the Corner Hotel website and couldn't as there were no Libertines tickets for sale there. Oh no no no no no, I fear they have already sold out. Damnation!

Oh Franz Ferdinand, how I love thee. Such a fantastic gig tonight. Amazing amazing amazing. Ah, love em. So happy. So much compulsive dorko dancing and damn great tunes. Yay yay yay. So great.

Why have I not read Defamer yet, where I have stumbled across the somewhat predictable news that Lindsay Lohan has been spotted wearing the ubiquitous Kabbalah bracelet. This comes after her alleged breast augmentation, and proves once and for all that she has gone Hollywood - not that I know if she was anything else before. Can people (celebrities) please stop choosing their religion based on the fact that they want to be Madonna?

Some results from another personality test I took just now.

According to the test, my personality breaks down into these proportions...
Introverted (I) 58.33% Extroverted (E) 41.67%
Intuitive (N) 52.63% Sensing (S) 47.37%
Thinking (T) 50% Feeling (F) 50%
Perceiving (P) 55.17% Judging (J) 44.83%

My Myers Briggs Jung type is INFP, which means I'm a "Questor". High capacity for caring. Emotional face to the world. High sense of honor derived from internal values. 4.4% of total population. Ooh er.

Some graphics to clarify matters...

Enneagram Test Results Type 1 Perfectionism |||||||||| 33% Type 2 Helpfulness |||||||||||||| 60% Type 3 Image Awareness |||||||||||||||| 66% Type 4 Sensitivity |||||||||||||| 56% Type 5 Detachment |||||||||||||||| 66% Type 6 Anxiety |||||||||||||| 53% Type 7 Adventurousness |||||||||| 40% Type 8 Aggressiveness |||||||||||| 43% Type 9 Calmness |||||||||||||||| 70% Your Conscious-Surface type is 9w8 Your Unconscious-Overall type is 4w3

Take Free Enneagram Personality Test
personality tests by similarminds.com

Conscious self	Overall self

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personality tests by similarminds.com

I listened to my freshly purchased Boney M Super Hits album in the car on the way home from the symphony, and it's fantastic. Now I can't get Brown Girl in the Ring out of my head either. And I like it. Also got Courtney Love's album for a steal at JB for ten bucks. Score. I mean, respect. Oh, and the symphony orchestra was good tonight too. Ravel and Rachmaninov, you dig.

Just watched Touching The Void, that mountaineering movie about that legendary disastrous climb made by Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, and like, fuuuuuuck! Anyway, the film was really good and very well captured the horrendous experience, I think. Winced many many times. Yeeesh. And I liked the guys. I liked how they told their story. I liked how Simon didn't turn to God even in such dire straits. Also, I know it tortured him, but I really liked that Boney M song, Brown Girl in the Ring, that he got stuck in his head as he was going mental. I think I might go and see if I can buy a best of album, which will hopefully have Rasputin on it too. I'm also gonna buy Courtney Love's America's Sweetheart because, listening to it in Guy's car last night, I think he might be right. It's great. And I want to do my bit for Courtney at this late stage. I've never bought anything by her and I feel it necessary now to, er, make a stand. I feel like Rhett Butler going off to join the Confederate army when the war is all but lost. Um, yeah. Anyway, the other day at the film festival I saw Fallen Angel, that biopic about Gram Parsons. It was good, but I didn't feel like he'd become any less elusive. Emmylou Harris was cool, and that bassist guy from The Byrds/Flying Burrito Brothers, and Keith Richards, but it also seemed like Keith had done some damage which he wasn't really aware of. But he's Keith, so I love him. It's weird to see the survivors of drug-crazed debauchery looking so normal and middle-aged. Not Keith, of course, but some of the others. It was pretty funny in parts, and kind of a shambles. At the screening I went to there was also this really fantastic clay-mation short at the beginning. It was called Tree Officer and it was hilarious. So great and deadpan and cool. So try and get to the festival, okay people? You'll see many leather jackets and strange, out-of-place clumps of filmheads huddling outside multiplexes discussing movies. Outside multiplexes. During the day. It's all quite weird.

Life is grand innit? I'm seeing Franz Ferdinand tomorrow night, and I've bought tickets to see The Datsuns, Supergrass, and Muse in early September. Yay Melbourne, such a great town.

Alexander Downer is so lame. Australia's been threatened with 'pools of blood' and apparently it's the Philippines' fault. Way to be a foreign affairs wiz, dude. That's not completely ridiculous at all. My favourite part of this story, however, is this classic quote from Downer, our #1 go-between with the world, about the terrorist group making threats against us and Italy;

"This group isn't a group that we're familiar with but nevertheless, it's a threat, it's on the internet, we take it seriously".

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Gold.

Oh man, how embarrassing. Are we really going to do this now? Mark Latham says he inhaled and Tony Abbot says he didn't. Seriously, I just see that stuff and I am immediately cringing in embarrassment. We are so lame. And, just so journalists know, neither admission makes either man "just like Bill Clinton" any more than it makes them "just like Snoop Dogg".

Saw Fahrenheit 9/11 and thought it was very good, and completely depressing. Cried quite a bit, actually. I totally didn't get what was so funny when the audience was laughing. It was just upsetting. Crazy-making sadness. Sigh. Whenever I get a dose of marshalled facts like that, even if I already know them, I just go "whaa? how did they? why? huh? what the hell are you doing? how could you say that?" etc. It just, like, beggars belief that people can be so shitty and still command respect, power and trust. Seriously, those guys are bad news. I just can't get my head around it. Like, why did Bush want to be President anyway? I just look at him and he just seems so random. What motivated him to seek public office? It just makes no sense. What ethic of public service is he labouring under? What improving vision does he judge his decisions against? He just doesn't fit. And to think that maybe it all might have never happened, had the basic democratic principle of counting every vote cast been adhered to. Like, what were the Senate thinking, not supporting distressed congresspeople who objected about the election result? I'm looking at you, Kerry/Edwards/Kennedy/Biden et al. Hell, even Lieberman. Come on! Were you taking crazy pills or something? And the war, it just makes no sense whatsoever. Der. It's all just ugly and darkly darkly darkly absurd. Anyway, when I left the theatre I just felt full of, like, how maddening it is. The ignorance and stuff. When that woman yelled "Blame al-Qaeda", I was just done for. So yeah, verdict on the movie is that it's good. I guess I'm supposed to mention that there were some cheap shots blah blah blah, but as they weren't the substance of the movie I really can't be fucked. It did piss me off that people were creaming themselves at the prospect of even the slightest mild dig at Bush & co, but I generally hate the audiences I see movies with anyway, so what diff?

Just watched Dogville again, and I still don't get why you all hated it so much. I still really really like it. It's totally an excellent film.

I thought it was gonna be so shit, but I watched Along Came Polly and dudes, I laughed out loud a lot. Seriously, Philip Seymour Hoffman is hilarious! Two seconds after he first appears on screen, it's like, bam! You've cracked up big time. Comedy gold! Ah ha ha, and you gotta watch him play basketball. Prime. And Jennifer Aniston is also very good. And pretty. Seriously, her breasts are amazing. Anyway, so yeah, that movie was way better than I thought it would be. The ending still sucked BIG TIME, all forced and perfunctory with an off-puttingly smug Stiller, but that's what romantic comedies do, I guess. Curse them.

Also, The Hives on Letterman... AMAZING! People, that album is so great. You all have to get it. And they have to tour here. So goddamn great!

BTW, do NOT see The Stepford Wives. It was excruciating, and added further weight to my theory that Nicole is both cold and talentless. Glenn Close and Bette Midler, however, walked away unscathed. And what was country queen Faith Hill doing there? Did they cast her purely because she looks like a femme-bot?

Just got back from seeing Control Room, that documentary about Al-Jazeera during the war. It was really good. I have a headache and I'm tired so I'm just gonna give a brief overview of my impressions. The Al-Jazeera people are really smart and principled and really good journalists. Bombs are really really loud and monstrous. They are very violent when they impact. And finally, what Bush and Rumsfeld were saying in their public appearances during the war has never seemed more absurd and offensive than it did during this film. Like, your bombs aim at people and kill them, and you say, "oh, it's the victims' own fault for being there." Fuck you. At one point their shit talk was hilarious though, with Rummy railing against Al-Jazeera and how it's spreading lies and how the truth always comes out and the liars lose all credibility. Ha. The audience pissed themselves, a little too self-congratulatorily perhaps, but still, it was a funny scene. Guy's right when he says all you need is their own words to reveal the horror and bring them down.

Martha Stewart got five months!