This weekend marked Canberra’s biggest congregation of drunken uni students for the year. As enticing as that sounds I probably wouldn’t have gone, except for the seriously excellent line up they had this year.

Friday night’s draw card for me was Groove Armada, and they didn’t disappoint. They played most of the songs I’d hoped for, and from what I could see were doing most of it live, or at least there were lots of musicians on stage. Dj Dexter, of Avalanches fame, was also pretty cool.

Saturday arvo Jeremy and I went for a Boulder at the NL, and so I just caught the end of the Beautiful Girls. Then came Rocket Science, who are pretty underrated I think, they put on a great show.

The Von Bondies, or is it Van Bandies (thick accents), from somewhere stateside also put on a good show. The lead singer in particular had been taking his rock pills, and pulled off a particularly cool move where he followed a bout of screaming by dropping straight to the floor, while continuing to play his guitar. One for Chris to practice.

Some people were about intrigued by the choice of Something For Kate as the final act, but when they want to they can put on a really good rock show. They soldiered on through two power failures, something which Paul Dempsey later remarked was actually good because it gave him a chance to do an Electricity joke.

They played most of the old favs, plus a few newies, and everyone sung along. The organisers must have told them not to do an encore, because they crowd were definitely up for it, but the band never returned. Oh well, we were all dog tired anyway.

Last night the Cat Empire returned to ANU refectory. I saw them at the ANU earlier in the year, and a couple of times at Woodford, all of which were awesome gigs. Despite that, I was kind of prepared for them to be not as good this time, basically just ’cause the novelty’s warn off.

But it turns out they don’t need no stinken novelty, they were fully sick. Pretty much every song had a long drawn out bridge, which often evolved into a completely different song before coming back to the original melody. But they always kept the crowd going along with them.

After about 2 1/2 hours they finally let us stop dancing and we all stumbled to the pub to recover. Let’s hope we’ll see them at Woodford again this year, although I fear they might have become too popular.

On Friday it wasn’t Catherine’s birthday, but she had a party anyway!

We headed to the lovely Marinetti Restaurant. Well the food’s lovely, the service is perhaps “casual”!

Much was eaten and drunk, and many a bad photo taken. I apologise to those of you who I’ve snapped with mouth-fulls of food, or otherwise looking dodgy. Having said that, most of you only have yourselves to blame for putting on stupid faces!

Even if you’re pressed for time you simply must check out this photo.

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We can point out the truth as much as we like, and make slightly tastless jokes, but the truth is they got back in.

How totally frickin sucky.

Perhaps next election I’ll have to follow my cousin Rohan’s lead, and get off my butt and do more than running around pointlessly shouting “Vote Green!”. Maybe I can hand out how to vote cards that actually say “Vote Green!”, that’d be a start.

Headed to Point Perp again on the weekend. Drove down Friday night and got there reasonably quickly which was nice, needed some sleep.

Weather was awesome on Saturday and we managed to hit the cliff by about 8:30 which was quite impressive I thought. Some of the others had a minor incident with a Wombat late on Friday night and were a bit late getting in, they’re all OK though thankfully.

After 10 minutes searching for my damn contact lens after it blew out of my hand (a bit windy!), I jumped at the chance to second a 19 with Clancy. Actually to be fair Maurice seconded it, I thirded (?). Great climb, and a nice start to the day.

Later I managed a nice 16, although I think I was off route, and did Elspeth again just for the view.

After lunch Clancy decided he wanted to lead something next to Room With a View which was 21 and didn’t have much gear. I volunteered to second, just for the thrills. He breezed up it in the end, and I managed to second it after one “rest”, oh well.

Most people headed home on Saturday night, but not until after we went to Zac’s in Currarong for fish and chips. Nice. Me, Maurice, Truc and Derek camped again at Honey Moon bay. We went to bed early, both tired and depressed at events in Canberra.

Sunday we took it pretty easy, just lazing around on the beach until about noon. I tried to stay in the shade due to a slight mixup on Saturday with sunscreen (burnt!).

In the afternoon we headed to Thompson’s Point for a quick run around. Maurice and I both led Santa’s Little Helper (3* 15, very nice) and then mucked around on the Descent Gully side wall where there was a breeze (damn hot elsewhere).

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Last night I went and saw Stringmansassy play at Tilley’s. They were awesome, as usual, but it was extra lovely to see them at Tilley’s.

Kacey, the singer, is my 2nd cousin, or something like that, and it was great to see her again, and meet Aaron (the excellent guitarist).

They’ve still got some touring to do if you like a bit of folky jazzy, laid back sorta stuff. And if you’re lucky you might hear the worlds best version of “A Land Down Under”.

And they’ll be at Woodford this year too! Woot.

I went to the Pedal Power Ride to Work Breakfast this morning. It was in Veteran’s Park in the city, with free pancakes, juice and so on. It was a pretty good turn out, apparently 200 or so riders turned up during the hour it was on.

I was a bit overwhelmed by the amount of lycra people were wearing. Or rather the amount of people wearing lycra. It reinforced my view that only two groups of people ride to work in Canberra, poor-arse uni students, and sporty types.

I think it’s a pity so many people do go with the full lycra body-suit and all the gear, I think it probably puts “normal” folk off a bit. Riding around town is easy, you just need a bike and a helmet, no lycra, special shoes, glasses, wax etc. are needed.

On the way to work I noticed some strange markings on the grass at Regatta Point, an election message perhaps?

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Stumbled across this great piece by Douglas Adams (by way of Martin Pool’s blog), titled “How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet”.

Not only did he write some of the stupidist, funniest books ever, he was also a smart guy. The point that grabbed me most: