So we've got the All Blacks, the Tall Blacks, the Black Sticks, and now... the Black Cocks.

Current Film Festival shortlist stands at 24. As usual, way too many. Oh here, have an extensive Nicholas Ray retrospective! Oh look, the new Miyazaki film, and a 1953 movie written and designed by Dr Seuss! And while you're at it, watch a few documentaries on Townes Van Zandt, Daniel Johnston, Hank Williams, Emile Griffiths, and Deep Throat!

'It's all too much, for me to take...'

Kanye quotes Beck ('my teacher said I was a loser, I told her "why don't you kill me?"'), then Beck quotes the Kanye-produced Jay-Z ('fax machine anthem, get your damn hands up'). Coincidence? I think not.

My friend Lauren, whom I have known since I was six, had a baby a few weeks ago. Homeslice already has her own blog!

Rest in peace, Sonja.

Disparate accent similarities: Missouri and Scouse. See Chingy, 'I like the way you do that right thurr' cf. George Harrison, 'my love is thurr for you any time of day'.

Oh yeah. This.

I just watched Homegrown interviewing Dave Dobbyn on the release of his new album. I don't want you to read this bio, necessarily. But I do want you to look at the photos scrolling down the right hand side. I mean, obviously nature has never been kind to Dave Dobbyn, but has there ever been anyone this talented who is also so *aggressively* cheesy? There are *no* good photos! None! And if you've seen his videos you know that they're like a swift kick in the nuts - even for the 80s, they're appalling. He can take a good concept ('Loyal') and ruin it with a poodle mullet and a Cosby sweater. He can take a poor concept ('Magic What She Do') and make it exponentially worse with a checked suit and dreadful mugging. He's like a distilled eau de parfum of the new fragrance, Anti-Cool! Brent, who can approach Dave without the emotional baggage we Kiwis have, argues that Dobbyn's ratio of songwriting chops to dorkiness may be the most extreme he has ever seen anywhere. (And we're *Elvis Costello fans*.) He's someone who isn't embarrassed to write a song on the entire country's behalf, welcoming new immigrants (see the 'news' section of that site for a snippet of the insurance-ad-esque video and the lyrics). He's *earnest*. He *cares*. He wants to tell anti-immigration tossers like Winston Peters to piss off. And *damned* if I don't think that the song is, um, really lovely. That cheesy bugger keeps on winning me over. He has since 1983 when I was nine, so I don't know why I keep being surprised...

I'm not sure how I managed to forget to take our camera to Taupo. I completely failed to record our outings to the Rapids Jet, the Huka Falls, the Aratiatia Dam, or Benson, Jo's spaniel, gambolling through the shallows in Acacia Bay. Even if I had brought the camera, however, I don't think I could fully explain why 'you are in the gay van' is the most memorable sentence of Queen's Birthday Weekend 2005.

Jo and her family rule. Her parents even moved out of their Awesome-Nature-Porn-Views house on the lake and let the eleven of us take it over. I mean, who does that? (And I don't think I've ever had a blue lake, snow capped ranges and a giant unfurling koru directly outside my bedroom window before. Wow.)

Another crucial development: after seven long years of frustration and disappointment, stress and tragedy, I finally - finally! - triumphed over Juggernaut Brent in Trivial Pursuit. It's a weird feeling, like I'm an athlete who has broken a world record. What do I aim for now?

Yeah, so the new blog template I chose is reeeeeeeeeeeeeeal fuckin' girly. Your point?

(Actually my comments fields mysteriously disappeared a few days back, and I thought hey, the seven of you who read this need the option of full and free expression! Kick it, my friends. Kick it old school. Or something.)