Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

Just as I was thinking of selling my NintendoDS, I had to pick up Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney and play it one more time. Four playing hours later, mucho excitemento. It's very Carmen Sandiego during investigation, even down to the sounds that the scrolling text makes as it narrates the story. Of course, it's got a few typical Japanese touches - mainly the wackiness of the characters and their facial expressions!

Even court trials are supreme battles for honour. In an American equivalent, their heads would probably smash together and explode like helmets in NFL telecast intros.

The main part of the game is trying to find contradictions in witness testimonies, either by "pressing" them into slipping up and screaming "Objection!" or presenting a piece of evidence that contradicts their statement. Anyway, good cheap fun. Probably for 10 year olds, but me no complain.

As I side note, I'm looking forward to Frankie's 21st tonight. We finally get to try the "Roxanne" game! If not, there's going to be an...

Objection!

Tonight's TV

The Australia vs Greece soccer friendly tonight sure has captured Melbourne's attention, but does everyone know it's not actually the World Cup yet? I hope the response is good, even if we lose 2-1 (which I'm expecting to)...

Unfortunately, if I'm watching the soccer, I'll miss out on Medium 3D. Such a gimmick! It could be the greatest TV gimmick since Lift soft drinks did that optical illusion thing during the Point Break premiere on Channel Ten. Now that was awesome. Keanu himself would, like, totally agree. He'd probably pay eleventy billion dollars to see it.

Lordy, Lordi, Lordi

Europe's grandeur pop spectacle, the Eurovision Song Contest, was surprisingly won on Sunday by Finnish metal band Lordi. The masked monsters' Hard Rock, Hallelujah proved quite a change from the folky pop standards, uptempo dancier efforts and the odd sombre ballad that Eurovision typically showcases. The general consensus is that it was a pretty weak showing, giving the bulk of votes to some more memorable, if not unconventional, contributions. I didn't see any real standout winners like usual. There wasn't even a supremely hot chick to attract votes on her assets alone either (although the Norwegian chick looked like Eliza Dushku, grrrowl).

Finland's rockin' victory was a voter rebellion against the formulaic pop songs - and a great show.

Lithuania's We Are The Winners was the wackiest entry, where six men in suits "soccer chanted" for the crowd to vote for them, because "We are the winners of Eurovision". Extra points for the guy with the glasses going into a Praise You style freak-out dance during the bridge.

There was quite a few styles of music on offer too, including a country track from Germany and an acappella song with semi-beatboxing from the Latvians. The use of metal must be a logical genre to explore in the Euro, following decent scoring (and sounding) performances from Norway's glam rock outfit Wig Wam last year and Turkey's ska band Athena a few years before that.

A Eurovision winner normally has a trick in the performance; Finland just turned it up with the wicked costumes, fireworks and some growling rock. Meanwhile, Russia had a chick emerge from the inside of a piano unexpectedly, Turkey formed a human star and the Armenian dancing girls used belts to try and straight jacket the guy throughout their good performance.

Las Ketchup, of The Ketchup Song fame, were crap for Spain, concentrating on spinning in chairs like in a hair salon more than singing in key. The Maltese guy's eyebrows didn't win favours with anyone, Moldova sounded dreadful, but France get the worst mark from me: once again choosing a ballad, in French, that sucked. Some creativity, or at least something different, might get them somewhere in the top half for once or at least entertain.

There could have been more interplay between the hosts, as often the most entertaining Eurovisions are when the host is comically trying to crack onto the hostess. That was left to the readers of the points, one who had a T-shirt saying "Maria, Marry Me" and the Dutch guy who tried to give his phone number to the Greek male host...who was less than pleased.

Still, Eurovision provided entertainment value as always - even if it tends to be entertainment first, mock the contestants and hosts second, music third.

Man's Best Friend

Dogs. What is it about them that people love so much? Do people find friends in the same vein as their canine companions?

It is ingrained in the genes of dogs to simply bark when unknown people walk past. I just don't know what they think it'll achieve. It annoyed the crap out of me in my pizza delivery days. Don't get me wrong, it's not always a bad thing to have an automatic doorbell to announce your entry (particularly with the sheer volume of faulty doorbells - pick up your game, doorbell manufacturers!), but I just can't envisage the usefulness of having a "Something's Going On" alarm, be it dog shaped or otherwise.

Would everyone like a friend that you can see every night at home that worships your attention or makes a nuisance that's often amusing? Is it the superiority over a lesser being, and the control of them, that is appealing? Could be. People like feeling big or important.

I've never had a dog, but some of them are pretty cool. I like the way you can train and teach them, like a furry robot. I think I just wanted to post a speculative sort of rant. Screw proof-reading: Mission accomplished.

Dogs will do anything to please; grass skirts may not always work, but the effort's there.

Crunchy Tuff Nuts

I love in-jokes and those little one liners people say that evolve into running gags. Just as well that my friends are so conducive to them too!

I was discussing the concept of in-jokes on ANZAC Day at the footy with Claire, because we got a packet of Crunchy Tuff Nuts free with the Footy Record. I'd never heard of these Tuff Nuts, but as it turns out, her friends had. So much so that at the tail end of a big night, they dare each other to go into servos and ask if they have Crunchy Tuff Nuts. The more you talk about it, the funnier it gets.

I really wanted to get a picture of a Tuff Nuts box. I even searched "Tuff Nuts" on Google Image Search, unsuccessfully, but at least the content wasn't ... explicit. Unless you count this guy, who either found it pretty damn funny or has superhuman testicular fortitude.

These days, we manage to create our own little catch phrases over a big night with ease. A few weeks back, everyone was in such good form with one-liners, I had to write them down. Photos are great, but if you can capture those magic quotables, you'll have a memory for ages. In the absence of owning a camera, I might start recording stuff onto my iRiver.

The General Lee

About a week and a half ago, the driver side handle of my car stopped opening properly. Seeing as it was still perfectly driveable, I decided to wait until my next service to get it fixed. Sure, it was a slight inconvenience entering through the passenger side (especially when I accidentally pushed the gear stick from P to R for a few moments!) but I managed to have some fun with it.

I love seeing people do "double takes" - the action where you see something, look away, then comprehend what you saw and go back for another look to confirm you're not crazy. I saw some guy do one out the front of Bi-lo one night last weekend. He was just having a smoke and noticed me getting in the passenger side door. One drag later I had moved to the driver's seat and I looked over at just the right moment to see his head snap back with a look of confusion on his face.

If only I'd tried jumping in through the window Dukes of Hazzard style. Yeee-haw!

Obscure music trivia question

Back in my pizza delivery days, I was a fan of Rosie Beaton's "Clever Request" on Triple J. They asked you to name a song that fulfilled their criteria, such as a song containing a dog bark or a reference to jaywalking, something like that. Call this effort a tribute to that. I stumbled into this bit of trivia while I was doing some downloading and listening in the past week and just had to share it with someone.

I've seen some interesting "top 5" or "top 10" lists; it seems to be a habit picked up by some reputable bloggers out there. I liked the Wireless Cranium discussion of Not Quite The Title Track, a list of "songs that mention the name of the album (or an approximation thereof) in the song, but go by another song name". I could add to that for ages, but my proposition is a little less common.

Three of the albums I've been listening to this week all happened to fit the criteria of this puzzle:

Motion City Soundtrack - I Am The Movie

Gomez - Bring It On

Beck - Midnite Vultures

If you want to try and think about it first, I'll write the answer in white below and you can highlight the text to view it. So, for zero dollars, what do these three albums have in common?
Answer: They're albums that don't contain the album's own title track.

Hint: If you want to try searching on the Internet for longer than 10 seconds, don't just type the album titles into google or you'll find out where I got it from!

The "PH Scale" 2.0

I haven't made many waves in regards to music recently (aside from updating my "Recently Played Albums" quite a bit!), so I thought I'd let you know how my organisation of albums is going.

Last time I identified that six categories had grown to 10 and needed better organising: this time I've got 13 plus Comedy, Compilations and Soundtracks. I'm still trying to follow that most people's music tastes can be bunched to adjacent groupings.

01 Dance

02 Electro

03 Pop

04 Easy

05 Light

06 Pop Rock

07 Rock Pop

08 Rock

09 Rock n Roll

10 Punk Rock

11 Heavy Rock

12 Prog

13 Metal

The breakthrough came thanks to iTunes. You see, iTunes' song info has separate sections for Genre and Grouping. Instead of focusing on genre, I tried to group similar artists (allowing easy pillaging of my collection) and not paying too much attention to the genre that it supposedly is. This ended up being my judgment of how heavy (or perhaps you could say "listenable") and matching it with albums I got from the same person (so Jiggy's might be 4.5, Will's about a 5.5, Brodie's roughly a 10.5).

I also realised that my favourite grouping, 07 Rock Pop, is right in the middle...making it PH Neutral. Woo for chemistry.

If you want heaps more detail of the sort of albums I've got, some program I found made my Albums directory into a JPEG. musicfolders.jpg (913 KB).
Note: it's so long, you'll want to view it in your browser and make sure it's zoomed to 100% (not scaled like it is by default in Firefox - hover over the tiny dots on the left side and click when the magnifying glass comes up)

I also pre-emptively apologise for applying the term Prog so liberally.

Categorising Your Personality ... By Chip Flavour

Job interviewers are known to ask stupid questions. One example, which I have been asked in an interview, is "What colour best describes your mood today?" These human resource types, often outsourced from the actual company, will claim to ask these sorts of questions to guage your personality. The real fact is that they'd like to know how much shit you're able to put up with, and how kind you'll be during the ordeal. I haven't started my rounds this year yet, but the subject came up in conversation yesterday night and it led to a possibly intruiging idea.

I'm not sure how it started, but we discussed the concept of finding a potato crisp flavour that is best able to describe your personality (or perhaps to draw a parallel between where you "fit in" in relation to your chip flavour's established position in society). There are the staples of chip flavours, your original/plains, chickens and salt & vinegars. Then you've got your trendier fad flavours courtesy of Red Rock Deli and the like.

No real conclusions were drawn, but the theory is out there. I'm not even sure why I posted this, but the urge did arrive precisely after I read about Uncyclopedia users classifying themselves by their "inner sock puppets".

All Quiet On The (Croydon) Western Front

Dare I say it, but it's become a little bit lonely here at the "Horganian Entertainment Complex and Gardens" (or whatever we called it when I hosted an Ultimate Poker Tour event). The Patmobile has been cooped up, as opposed to the more preferable "suped" up, as I haven't gone anywhere all day. Even if I did, it would just be to go to Eastland for the third time this week. Amy Burgess served me at JB both times and would probably think I'm stalking her if I was to show up again.

The two biggest features of recent days have been the uni workload and Radio Pat, as they co-exist peacefully. No UN troops required whatsoever. It seems most of my friends have other things to do: uni stuff, work or basketball training. My other good friend, beer, remains unpurchased at a location unfortunately not adjacent to the one I'm seated at. Shame that.

Yep, just a real old-fashioned Friday night, watching the footy on TV with the folks. My somewhat beloved Melbourne was playing, which was enough to keep my interest, and it turned out to be a pretty good tussle, concluding in a 6 point happy ending. Unlike those massage parlour 60 buck "happy endings"! Just kidding, chumps and chumpettes. They charge far more than that. Unless you define Happy as a 6-foot-5 Eastern European "woman".

I'll end this soliloquy here then, I think. Maybe all blogs are soliloquys anyway, but this one's particularly lonesome, as I'm the last one awake in the house.

Hockey: Conference Semifinal Predictions

What a wacky first round of NHL playoffs! The top four seeds in the Eastern Conference won, all predicted correctly by me, while the top four seeds in the Western Conference lost, only one result of which was correctly predicted by yours truly. A few may have predicted Dallas' choking, but the Oilers effort to knock out Detroit was unbelievable. Like off the chart. Like, I predicted a sweep against the Oilers. And that humble pie tastes great. In game six, the Oilers came from 2-0 down at the second break to win 4-3 in OT and the Edmonton home crowd cheered like they'd won the Cup. That's what the broadcast sounded like, that's for damn sure.

If you ask me, New Jersey is still on track for the Stanley Cup after sweeping the hapless Rangers and increasing their winning streak to 15 straight games. Carolina and Ottawa still have significant goaltending concerns and I'm just not sure what to expect from Buffalo's seemingly low profile but highly successful team. I'll take the Devils over the Hurricanes in five. I'll go for Buffalo over Ottawa in seven, as the Sabres don't seem to have a problem scoring and the Biron-Miller goaltending duo is far stronger than anything Ottawa can offer.

With the havoc in the West, anything could happen. I'll back in the Sharks for conference champions, as they're team I've been cheering for in these playoffs anyway. Thornton, Cheechoo, Marleau and Toskala are all doing well; I think San Jose should up-end Edmonton's fairytale run in five games. The Sharks have just got the depth and the firepower to get it done. The Mighty Ducks played well and fought hard to "douse" the Flames in seven games, so I'm going to back Anaheim to beat Colorado in six, even if J.S. Giguere is leaving Bryzgalov to "shut the door" at the moment.

My Life On Paper

I've been editing my resume in preparation for graduate position applications and I can't help feeling a bit self reflective looking back at my life, described on paper. It's not exactly looking in a mirror, but a resume does give you a decent portrayal of a person in the same way as appearance sometimes can.

Although I have been a bit lost in recent times underneath a pile of work, when I look back on past achievements, I've done alright for myself. Everything seems to add up nicely. When I look at the future, that's when things become more uncertain.

My technique for dealing with this sort of uncertainty is to play a game. This involves creating parallels between my current life status and that of a pro sports player. Considering the NFL draft has just taken place, that's the one I'm going with right now.

The premise of the game is that applying for a grad position is like trying to get drafted. There's teams (companies) that you'd love to play (work) for, but you might easily get picked up by a team who gets in early. Some can afford to pay you more, but you might have to adopt a different role to fit into their plans.

Hopefully, the scouts (recruiters) will think I came out of a well known college program (RMIT); my combine times (grades) stack up well against teammates (RMIT students) and opponents; I have experience as a starter (intern year) and I hope that I've got the right size and mobility to play the position they're looking for.

The interviews are still to come, but hey, that happens before the draft in the NFL too. At least I know that even if I don't get drafted early, there's still a good chance that I can make it in the big leagues.