Blues Brothers - 30 Year Anniversary in 2010

I've written about Breaking Away as an important movie in my life, inspiring a fascination with racing bicycles, Italy and la dolce vita.

That was 1979. Here comes 1980. Last year of high school, and The Blues Brothers hits our NZ screens.

A year ago I rented the original 1980 movie to watch with Noah (with handy ear covers ready for the obvious bits), and was pretty disappointed. Sound was so-so, the picture was grimy, and the story hinged on the high points of musical performance, plunging into dull periods of conversation and inaction.

I recall yawning and reminding myself that memories can play tricks on you.

We rented it again tonight.

And discovered to our joy that John Landis has managed to pull together an extended edition with remastered sound, new scenes and extended dialogue in various places. It's back to being a classic!

What a tragedy that the original cut, tested in a movie theatre in Los Angeles and declared by studio executives as "only going to attract a black audience", has been lost forever. They forced Landis to shorten the movie so it required no intermission.

With its 30th anniversary next year, it's time to celebrate what the Blues Brothers did to create an interest in the blues for people like me as far from Chicago as it is about possible to get on this planet. This must be the greatest B-movie ever made, with more superstar cameos than the V&A museum cameo collection.

And to file under 'subliminal influence', Ray's Music Exchange (with the subsequent 'Shake Your Tailfeather' dance spectacular) has always been my favourite scene - check out which guitar the kid is trying to steal when Ray shoots 2 well-placed warning shots into the wall from the other end of the shop!








That's pretty much how I would have looked if I hadn't been able to take my black stratocaster that fateful day in April! And why going into music shops can be such fun when there are people browsing the shelves around you who, despite not being Ray Charles, Steve Cropper or Donald Duck Dunn, could highly likely still light the place up in an instant.

“It's 106 miles to Chicago, we've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing sunglasses.”

“Hit it.”

Why I ride a motorcycle to work in Melbourne - a series.

Crazy old guy on cellphone at the top of his voice explaining to his Mum how he gets 100 minutes of talk time with the new phone he had to buy after the other one stopped working when he slept on the street in the rain at the weekend and he gets 150 texts per month for free as well and he's now just by City Road but going to St Kilda...

Wish his Mum would tell him to use his inside voice.

10 people tightly squeezed around me, all on iPhones and iPods trying to not hear crazy guy. MX newspaper with massive photo of Katy Perry's boobs falling out of her dress with headline "Has Katy got a bung eye?" based on a 2 line vox populi. 290,000 people in Melbourne read this crap every day?

Mouth "excuse me" with walking finger mime 15 times to headphone escapists just to squeeze past and get out at Albert Park. I'll take 40 degrees on the Gixxer in leather any day of the week thanks.

Favourite things - Herge illustration of Australia and NZ

Tintin was always a favourite character for me, although returning to them with Noah I have to say they are hard work to read out loud - they need the voices and accents I hear in my head but cannot reproduce. The pen and ink drawings are captivating enough on their own.

This illustration in 1959's Explorers on the Moon caught my eye - look which tiny part of the blue planet Herge has chosen to show.

Vintage Cycling Postcards - 1958 Corriere dello Sport

Corriere dello Sport was a main Italian sporting newspaper, and this card promotes the 1958 motorcycle and bicycle show. I've seen this card on eBay for up to 40 euros, I got it in the same batch as the Bartali and Coppi cards in 1994.

On the reverse it has a lovely stamp and postmark.

Vintage Cycling Postcards - Totosport 38th Giro D'Italia

This card is from the 1955 Giro, won by Fiorenzi Magni for the 3rd time. The card promotes Totosport, the Italian betting agency.

Cycling Vintage Postcards - Gino Bartali with Giordani Bike

Another in my postcard collection from that trip to the Giro d'Italia in the 1990s.

The rivalry between Gino Bartali and Fausto Coppi is well documented on Wikipedia, so I won't attempt to add to the existing catalog of observation and opinion on the subject. Gino was a legend in his own right, even without the rivalry that stopped a nation.

Personally blessed by 3 popes, and known as Gino the Pious, he died at the grand age of 85 in 2000 after open heart surgery .

Like all postcards, I struggle to guess if it's a fake or real. Finding it in an Italian flea-market in 1994 gives me some confidence it's not a digital print, as technology was not that great then. Nor had the internet made a global market for cycling memorabilia.

I found one the same recently on eBay in Italy for 15 euros that looks pretty similar, though the signature has some interesting variations and the picture has a pure black and white treatment where mine has a blue tone. You decide which is real!

International differences - getting a job in America

The startup I went to work for in the USA, now rolled up into a company called PreVisor, was in the serious business of selecting employees for Fortune 500 companies of all kinds.

The scale of the USA employment market is massive. Walmart for example, have over a million employees, turning over at an unbelievable rate (because the job sucks!), and over 12m job applicants a year. Most apply on-line, so how do you deal with that many resumes in your in-tray?

ePredix was a genius idea, providing an online, short psychological assessment which scored in real-time a view of the suitability of the person for the job. One key was that it was legally defensible, asking job-relevant questions that truly predicted the likelihood of success in a job.

This test was what we were competing with.

If you can't read the questions, click on the picture and it will open in a new window.

And think about what you'd be prepared to say to get a $6/hr job at a Rent-A-Center branch in Arkansas.

International differences - the philosophy of Click & Clack

If you have never listened to Car Talk, then you have not lived. It is probably the #1 syndicated show on radio in the USA, and listened to by a wide variety of people - many not interested in cars at all.

Starting out as a mechanical advice show on Public Service radio, it morphed through the personalities of the Magliozzi brothers into a sociological and philosophical series of pithy observations, through the lens of a mechanic. As vehicles became less and less fixable by the average American, the show became more and more about people.

Our neighbour in Minneapolis had been on Car Talk - she was famous! You have to have an interesting car problem, which you line up weeks or months in advance, then the show calls you live on air.

Their podcasts and books are priceless - check them out on iTunes. Make sure you get to the end, where they will make up a set of phoney credits for the show.

Here's one of my favourite moments of Tom and Ray's reflections on life in the USA (and its difference to life elsewhere), in their newspaper column from July 2003.

Don't get me started on Americans and guns.

International differences - another in the series

NZ Sports Culture.

Can you tell I've just been going through some old folders from our time in the USA? Hence all the posts in this series.

This cartoon was a complete surprise to me when I opened the Minneapolis paper one day. Made me homesick.

Priceless.

International, but not worldy. The true meaning of POOF

The stated aim of this blog was to reflect on the cultural differences that sometimes trip us up when crossing international borders - you think you know what is going on, but in reality it is something quite different.

I hung onto this email from 2003 as one of the prime examples. ePredix, whom I worked for in San Francisco and Minneapolis, were part-owned by a large, successful, global consulting form Personnel Decisions International.

As Australians and kiwis we had a bit of a chuckle at this faux pas, but my time since has given me cause to wonder about the blunders we all made in reverse!

Nice save Cindy Marsh.

The Psychology of Amplifiers

I do love XKCD.

Lonely Planet Band for Christmas

The band added Robbie William's Let Me Entertain You to the Espy set and went wild again celebrating the end of 2009 in style. Once again supported by Sparkle Motion, who performed a tight version of their Espy set and showed their musicianship.

Bunch of miscellaneous photos, as always biased towards Slabotomy's #5 guitarist.




Here's a taste of the skills of Mark Broadhead shooting bands and events.

Melbourne Weather Phenomenon (2 in a series)

As a child I was fascinated by the stories of UFOs in Erich von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods series of books. Well, there's my first sighting on the horizon of this photo, taken returning home from Thoughtworks' Quarterly Technology Briefing in Sydney.

Sadly, too many easy explanations I suppose. Gas balls escaping from a federal carbon trading policy perhaps...

Melbourne Weather Phenomenon (1 in a series)

Observed last week from our rooftop on a day of moist, Southerly winds driving up against the side of Melbourne's tallest tower block on a bright, sunny day.

I prefer to believe it is an outpouring of sonic energy and awesomeness from a searing 1997 Gibson SG being cranked up by the occupant of an upper-level apartment. He shall remain nameless in case the Department for the Environment get any complaints about contribution to global warming.

Pseud's Corner - Signspotting in Melbourne

If only we had some effing eggs we could make an effing omelette. Much amusement for 8 year old boys of all ages.