Simon Rumble’s blog

Along the same theme as John Winston Howard's recent idiotic comments about marriage, the Village Voice has a hilarious comic.

Ahhh, just like home only cold. Just had a big storm with hail! Check the pics.

And they say Australia has dangerous animals. Watch out for the badgers. Sounds like a bad horror flick!

Mr Weaver said there was no need for people to start fearing an onslaught of badger attacks.

Oh no Mr Weaver, you won't be fooling me this time! Badgers, and all badger-like animals, should be shot on sight.

Holly found this great Spanish Powerpuff Girls pasta today. How cool!

Last Friday, Holly and I managed to make it along to a party on the Circle Line. For those who don't know London, the Circle Line is the tube line that loops around the centre of London, the party advantages of which I'll explain later.

Anyway, the premise of the party was for people to turn up in disguise, looking like ordinary commuters on their way home. The crew who organised it, Space Hijackers, have done it once before on a much smaller scale. Internet-speed communications meant that word on this one spread like wildfire and they estimate about 600 people turned up!

Holly and I were actually a bit miffed because we'd bought tickets to see Tipsy, a San Franciscan space-age pop band on DJ Spooky's Asphodel label. I'd booked these about a week before finding out about the Circle Line party and Tipsy were certainly on my "must see" band, particularly with Luke Vibert DJing.

So anyway, we go to the gig. It actually turned out to be a bit of a fizzer. They hadn't sold many tickets, evidently, and in the cavernous Queen Elizabeth Hall, the atmosphere was, shall we say, sparse. Anyway, after Tipsy's remarkably short set, we figured bugger it and headed across the bridge to Embankment tube station to see if we could find the party.

Now the Circle Line is pretty big and it would take about 45 minutes to make a full circuit, so our chances of catching the party were pretty slim. Regardless we thought we'd try. As we descended into the station, a train pulled in. We ran down to check it out and it wasn't the right one. However, the train that pulled in on the opposite platform actually was! Amazing. So we sprinted up and over to just make it onto the train. What's more, a couple of stops later we wandered further down the train and managed to find a bunch of our mates.

So we made it, and it was excellent. Here's some pictures and reports: http://www.spacehijackers.co.uk/html/projects/circle2/party.html, http://oskarlin.ath.cx/pictures/030314/ and http://community.webshots.com/album/66539919EpQbYH. Fantastic party with music blaring from a guitar amplifier and everyone dancing and singing along.

At Edgeware Road, the train stopped. Clearly the Underground thought this would be a good place to stop the train and get all the revellers off. This is where the choice of the Circle Line is brilliant. The problem with London Underground's plan is that if the train was stopped, every other train on the Circle Line, and the three other lines that share sections of it, would be heavily delayed while ours was taken out of service. So everyone ended going around until Barbican, when the party ended.

Great party and keep an eye out for the next one. I can see this becoming a real tradition!

We went to an English pub in Kennington to watch the match last night, Australia vs England. We were the only Aussies in the pub but it was a good natured crowd, considering we whupped their butts.

A 3-1 win is just inconceivable. The fact that the first two goals were scored against England's top team and it was England's completely new second-half team, testing out their up-and-coming talent, who scored against us just caps it. Amazing! Of course the England squad isn't helped by some its key players being well off top form. Michael Owen hasn't scored in months and Beckham seemed to just be holding back for some reason.

With more wins like this, Soccer Australia can look forward to becoming the third most popular football code in Australia. After the next World Cup with our virtual guaranteed qualification, it could set its sights on League.

So the big question is: has somebody burnt down the football and put the ashes into an urn?

And of course we'll need to get into this English tradition of writing ourselves a World Cup song. You know, like the "Playing for England" tune by New Order. Any Australian anthem would have to make some reference to wogball...

It's funny what you see going through your web server logs. Whenever you hit a web page, your browser sends the address of the site from which you linked, known as the referrer. This gives the web site owner some idea of who is linking to the site.

Looking through my server logs, I found someone had actually stuck one of my photos into a forum. It's a photo of Holly emerging from the Cu Chi Tunnels near Saigon.

What's really funny about this is that the forum thread is this: Is America Ready for Vietnam War Re-Enactments? Holly and I used to live with a guy who actually did exactly those sort of re-enactments, with all the right GI kit. Of course his re-enactments were in the not particularly authentic jungles of Surrey.

Anyway, due to the way the forum links to the photo, I can replace the image with something else. I was thinking a George Bush/Chimp comparison with "Vote Nader" or something. Anyone got anything cleverer?

Rupert's southern subs are getting their metaphors confused. Fires are supposedly laying "siege" to Sydney. Now we get Fires pound south-west Sydney, which conjures up all sorts of images.

Then again, what can you expect from subs who can't even capitalise South-West correctly?