I might have mentioned that my dad used to be in a steelband called "Trinidad Tripoli Steelband". They toured with Liberace for 4 years. Clips of Tripoli are now up on you tube. IN the clip below you'll see my dad playing the scratcher (this case two at once). At that stage my dad didn't play the steelpan himself. Check out the dance moves! MOre clips are on youtube, just type Trinidad Tripoli into the search thingy, my dad is in most but not all of the clips.

Yeah I'm very rusty. The vid is so out of sync it looks like I'm miming - I assure you all the muliple wrong notes are mine! Me playing Spanish Flea on youtube

Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets and then teams up with three complete strangers to kill again. - Marin County newspaper's TV listing for "The Wizard of Oz"

Well I spent a fair bit of time completely redoing my old website so that it isn't so embarrassing. I made a website in year 10, when I was 15, and consquently the humour and the layout is fairly embarrassing to me now. So I've replaced it (though I have kept the old one for posterity - I'm a sentimental bugger) with a website that puts all the creative stuff I've done into an organised format. It is still under construction but feel free to have a look. A lot of the stuff on there I have alr...

Last Friday I played steelpan for the PM's XI Cricket Match. The match was rained out, in fact it was a huge storm that killed a friend of a friend of our family. Below is the photo that appeared in the Canberra Times the next day. It's a crappy shot of me, but hey look what the poor photographer had to work with! The pan I'm playing is called a "Double Second" which is used to play chords, the green pan is a tenor pan which of course plays melody and the guy in the foreground (Marti...

I'm bored so I've decide to start the "Find the Hidden Satanic Message Challenge >8D" Every week (if this week works out)I will post a clue with a hidden satanic message. It may be decoded by any number of methods from week to week, just use your imagination. The message may be contained in the whole clue or just part of it, or it may even have multiple parts that have to be decoded differently and stitched together depending on how evil/creative I'm feeling from week to week. It is rat...

I was inspired to this after watching the 2nd season of Northern Exposure on DVD. There is a funny dream sequence where Dr Joel Fleishman is dreaming he's in the simply irresistible music video. One thing lead to another, my neurons started firing (read: misfiring)and this was the result... Don't you just love how the women look like they just don't want to be there. I guess they are thinking "shit this makeup is heavy, my face is getting tired." For comparison. Toblerone

Sometimes you get a really dumb idea and you just have to share it. This is a bizarre idea I got for a business one day, I'm pretty sure I was sober. The problem: The way I see it there must be heaps of rich people that are not happy with merely giving money to charity and heaps of unhappy needy people that don't strictly qualify to receive it, or need more than just money or have slipped through the cracks (Homeless people, struggling single mothers, overqualified unemployed academics ...

A few articles ago I invented the word remoticon: Remoticon (re-mo-ti-con): 1) A smiley that is entirely inscructible except to the person that uses it (for instance a non-standard smiley that you've never seen before making some face which you've never seen on a person and thus is completely meaningless) 2) A smiley that make no sense/is ambiguous in the context in which it is used. Smileys, as I understand it, started out as a way of saying "just kidding" so it would stop huge flam...

In George Orwell’s 1984 the Party forces everyone to speak the language “newspeak”. Basically it was a revised form of the English language with fewer words. It also had new words that reflected the policies of the Party such as the word badthink that referred to any ideas that disagreed the Party’s policies. The idea behind “newspeak” was that with fewer words to work with the proles (common people) would have less freedom of thought. In this article I propose a project to be taken part of...

'tis a work of art.... my sincerest apologies to Salvador Dali. Just to make this post a little less pointless here a link for a spoof of the Star Wars: Episode 3 trailer. Even if you don't like Stars Wars you'll probably find this funny. Link

Okay this is a series of articles I have been considering doing for a while now. Part of what I want to do with Keeping it Surreal , aside from write bizarre essays and point out how strange the universe is, is to point out how different life could be if we broke away from our unquestioned beliefs the staple diet of ‘normality’. For instance why do we alway use boring compliments like “You look gorgeous today ” why not say, “You’re looking quite bipedal today.” I’ve used it, it gets a laugh ...

Toblerone here, still keepin' it surreal for the unwashed masses. Today I bring you a random article to fill in your long dreary days until the next Understanding the Universe article. It isn't unusual for me to become fixated on a random topic for one or two weeks. For example once several years ago I decided to find out everything I could on Scandinavian Lemmings. Did you know that Lemmings don't really commit suicide? The myth stems from the fact that Lemmings experience a population ...