Stuart McCullough

Woe is me. For, without really trying, I have angered the overlords of the Internet and they have determined that I must be punished. In fact, they I have decided to smote me. Truth is, I’ve not been smote by anyone for ages and I am out of practice. Clearly, they have decided to make an example of me. There’s little I can do other than rub ashes into my skin, start dressing in sackcloth and beg for forgiveness. Even then, I suspect it may be too late.
Continue reading “Damnation, Hellfire and the Internet”

Art-rock ensemble R.E.M. once opined, ‘That’s me in the corner.’ When it comes to attending live music events, not only am I invariably in the corner, but way up the back, wedged against a vending machine and stuck behind someone who’s much taller. Live music is a wonderful thing, but sometimes the idea of seeing a band live doesn’t quite match the actual experience. That’s because seeing a band is an exercise in faith. You go in the hope that it might be an exhilarating, life-changing experience. Mostly, though, it’s a really late night from which it takes you the rest of the week to recover.
Continue reading “Thanks for Everything, Matt Berninger”

When news broke that a giant, three-storey mango had gone missing, I’ll admit I feared the worst. Not since someone blew the backside off the Giant Pheasant outside Gumbuya Park had our nation faced so dark a day. Presumably when something of this magnitude occurs, the authorities activate some top-secret emergency plan and other national icons are immediately placed into high-security lockdown. For its own safety, Lang Lang’s Giant Earthworm would be cordoned off from the public. South Australia’s The Big Lobster would be ushered into its own underground reinforced concrete bunker. Adaminaby’s Big Trout would be placed into the witness protection program and forced to change its name to ‘Dennis’. Not that everything needs such high level security. Such measures are largely unnecessary for Tasmania’s The Big Potato. Nobody’s going to steal that thing. Nobody.
Continue reading “Monumental As Anything”

Clothes maketh the man. Or so claimed the inventor of the ‘Fido Dido’ t-shirt. (Believe me, they’re overdue for a comeback.) But what garments give they can just as easily take away, so the whole uneasy truth is that clothes can undo a person, regardless of gender, quicker than you can say ‘elasticized waist’. This, broadly, sums up my relationship with apparel. When I think of all the fashion statements I’ve made over the years, the vast majority of them are riddled with expletives. But it’s not my fault. You should have seen the things my father used to wear.
Continue reading “Trousers of Power”

It’s always been this way. Each generation declares their music to be better than the one that succeeds them. Growing up in the eighties, those of my parent’s era had a pretty powerful case to make – they had the Beatles, the Beach Boys and the Stones, whilst my teenage cohorts and I had to make do with Haircut 100 and the Thompson Twins. Granted, we had the Stones too, but it was during their far less successful pastel-suit wearing human-Muppet phase rather than, say, their living-in-the-south-of-France and jamming-with-Gram-Parsons stage. It hardly seemed fair.
Continue reading “The Indisputable Genius of Thomas Dolby”

It is not by accident that the term ‘blogging’ sounds like a human ablution. The results, it must be said, are often startling similar. Keeping a diary is one thing. Deciding to share your thoughts in a wholly unfettered, completely unfiltered manner is something best done in power-ballad form and not on the Internet where other people might actually read it. Frankly, if the excesses of blogging cannot be curbed, then it’s high time we considered abandoning the Internet altogether and made the move back to carrier pigeons and Telex machines.
Continue reading “Blogging: Sport of Dunces”

Secretly, I am ashamed. I watch others eat their meals with knives and forks and feel something of a pang; wishing that I, too, could accept the conventional approach to eating a meal. But it’s too late for me. Years of training mean that I must take the road less travelled and consume my meals, not at the table with a fistful of cutlery, but in the pantry and directly from the jar. For I choose to consume my ingredients not in combination but one at a time. For I am a tin eater, plain and simple.
Continue reading “True Tales of a Tin Eater”

Another year is now firmly upon us. Granted, it will take me at least another six weeks before I start denoting the date with a ‘14’ instead of a ‘13’, but I’ll eventually get used to it. It’s a strange habit, but as the old calendar is replaced by the new, people make rash declarations about the year ahead that range from the well meaning to the hopelessly misguided. It’s easy to dismiss them as the inevitable result of a celebration where sobriety is generally the first casualty. But in the spirit of turning over a new leaf, then turning it over again because I preferred it the way it was, I have decided to make some new year’s resolutions of my own.
Continue reading “The Evolution of the Resolution”

It’s obvious. Aliens from Planet Twerk descended to Earth and rendered me unconscious as part of the extra terrestrial ‘Schoolies’ prank and I have only now, nearly twelve months later, awoken from my state of alien stasis. I have no proof, of course. But even if I didn’t see them before the lights went out, I’ve long suspected that they’ve been watching my every move. That may sound far-fetched, but I dare you to come up with a more logical explanation. For other than the possibility that I’ve been in an alien-induced coma for the last twelve months, it can’t possibly be Christmas again. I’ve no idea where the year has gone.
Continue reading “Help! Aliens Stole My Christmas”

Once upon a time, there was paper. Using either a pen or pencil, it was customary to write on sheets of paper in order to communicate with others. This was before the computer made the art of handwriting almost wholly redundant. Back then, a tweet was something you wrote down, put in an envelope and mailed to another person. Several weeks later, you might receive a response to your written missive. Granted, it was painstakingly slow, but the world was a better place for it. It was an era when it was okay not to know what Lady Gaga had for breakfast and Shane Warne’s thoughts on almost everything remained his alone. It was, in other words, a paradise.
Continue reading “Everybody Wants to Ruler the World”