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Welcome to the 21st Century. It’s a brave new world.

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Day three of Carnival, or day four, I don’t know, there have been blocos for a couple of days running into the weekend and they haven’t stopped. I spend the day chilling on Ipanema beach while a smallish float and Samba band crawls along the road. The sound is jacked up way too loud on the float and the speakers keep feeding back. This creates two bubbles of empty space in the party as no-one other than the deaf can stand to be right next the side speakers. Read more

Day 8: Las Vegas, Nevada

06/11/07

We begin another ‘long ass drive’ to Vegas to recuperate for a day after the past couple of days of insanity. I’d personally like to play Salt Lake, but the promoter still hasn’t been in touch. My throat is officially blown as well, I can barely speak above a whisper. It hurts to talk and swallow, something about the mountain air really did me in. I am medicating myself by swigging cough medicine that leaves me drowsy, and by eating honey on tortilla bread. The cough medicine tastes of nasty menthol but I have to do it otherwise I will be screwed in California. I feel like a hobo with a hipflask as I take infrequent sips of the stuff. As the defacto book keeper I am totting up the sums of the tour so far and it’s not looking good, the drive across the Mid-West has killed us financially. Hopefully we will make some of it up in California. Read more

Here’s the start of my write-up of my diaries from the Frightener USA tour, which happened on October/November of 2007 with Pulling Teeth. I’m taking this stuff straight from my diary, so if I say thanks and don’t put your name down, please don’t take offence, I just forgot to note it down afterwards. I am crap at remembering names at the best of times. Anyways, here goes: Read more

I took it easy on the Sunday, partly because I was shattered from wandering around so much the night before, but also because the real parties here kick off around eight or nine in the evening. Still, I left the house in between rain showers to grab some late lunch. The streets of Rio were eerily quiet save for diehard tourists who are wandering around in party gear at four in the afternoon trying to find some sort of party to attend. Read more

For anyone visiting Rio, Carnival is apparently a military operation masquerading as a party. Times, places, seat numbers, meeting points, rally points and so on and so forth. So with that in mind I woke up on day one of Carnival without the faintest hint of a plan. Apparently there is a pretty good samba parade in Ipanema, which is the hip beach area in the south zone of Rio. It also happens to be quite near to where I’m staying which is handy. The sun is shining, the day is glorious, and the streets are packed. Read more

And now, as they say, time for something completely different.

Juno (2008) - 3/10

At it’s heart, Juno is a teen pregnancy movie without teenagers and without pregnancy. We start off with Juno, our eponymous heroine, finding that she is pregnant, in between completely obvious ad-related namedrops for “Sunny D”. She has a witty exchange with the guy at the pharmacy and then affirms her pregnancy in the toilet cubicle. At a stroke, this opening scene destroys any and all sense of reality which the Coming-of-Age genre thrives on. Teen pregnancy scares do not involve witty dialogue, they do not involve un-fazed hip teenagers; anyone who has been through a pregnancy scare will tell you it involves denial, hysterics and an early grave for every hope and dream you may have had. Read more