Subiaco Lions

At our regular monday night gig in the Paddington Ale House (The Paddo) was host to a local footy team (thats aussie rules) who won at the weekend. This is a picture of their mascot. A stuffed lion. There was about 80 of them, all pretty hammered, watching a replay of the game they won on the tellys in the bar. At one stage a guy was ordering a drink, looked up at the telly to see himself score a ripper of a goal, and then casually paid for his drinks. Pretty surreal. The night itself was full of drunken lunacy, the picture below pretty much says it all 

Carlingford Weekend Away...

My sister went to Carlingford (about 90kms north of Dubland) at the weekend and returned to her car the following day to find it totally burned out! Of all the places, Carlingford?!?!? Terrible, also she was in the process of moving house so had a boot full of personel effects which were torched as well.
 

101 Beers Wall of Fame

Here is one of the boards where they put up your name on completion of the 101 beers. I made a good alphabetical start on it last night, got through all the A's and 2 more B's to go. The board shows the date of completion, your name and how long it took. The record is 23 mins, a co-operative effort by an entire aussie rules football team. As you can see, on the 2nd of July 2001 my mom completed the challenge in 42 days. Well done mom.

Monsterfruit

Look at the SIZE of this lemon. To be fair, the one on the left is slightly smaller than usual, but the one on the right is a mutant!!!! That is Martin in the background. He plucked it from his tree and brought it along to the party for the fish dishes. You could feed a family for a week with that!!! 

Golden Wedding Anniversary

We played at a 50th "suprise" wedding anniversary. The party was for friends of Janes folks, married 50 years. We set the place up with baloons and stuff. We played some of their favourite songs (foster & allen would you believe!!!) with the band, and then did about an hour of classical stuff.

Here is the cake we made. Janes friend has a special printer that uses food colouring and prints onto rice paper. Jane made the cake that morning.

I made them t-shirts, with that special iron-on paper. Works really well.

And here they are cutting the cake. 

More from the cinema

Here it is, the screen with curtains at the sides. Its pretty much done now. Still got to build a pelmet around the top and tidy up the power cable, but other than that our cinema is working away great! 

Gig Cam....

We played a wedding at a winery over the weekend and this was the view from my chair. A field of vines.

This is Andy, the cellist, taking a stoll in the orchard. I ate a freshly plucked orange at our break, twas mighty fresh!!!

Here is a view from a gallery above the wine store. Peel Estate Winery is the place, about an hour out of town and well worth the trip. 

Guess Who?

Here is a blast from the past.

Some clues:

Lives in Dublin
Likes cycling
Does all his own stunts
Answers to the usual address...

Dazed & confused

Another caption competition. This is a real one: What are the McCarthy cousins thinking/concentrating about?

Post answers as a reply to this entry. The first correct entry will win an entire batch (60 bottles) of homebrew when they arrive over here....... 

Porterhouse......

Ok. Lets do a caption competition. Add a comment/reply to this post, and the content of which being:

What was Finbarr thinking? 

Double & Chips

Mattie Kielys. An institution of cork cuisine. Manys the morning, noon and night I have spent in here. Ran by the two brothers; Mattie (the face man) and Martin (the muscle) this place makes the best burgers known to man. In his own words: "it keeps down whats down, and makes room for more" (referring to the amount of guinness consumed that day when i first commented on how good his burgers tasted. This was some time in 1997.). He is a fountain of knowledge and advice, and in line to be a saint! If anyone in cork is reading this ad will be passing by maylor street any time soon, tell matty I says hello from Oz! He'll remember me as the violin player from the maylor. 

Mothers Milk

Loooooooook at what I found in Perth! A bar that serves Murphy's!!! 

Good from afar but far from good

Here is a picture of a Lamborghini Countach and my Mazda 121 from last weekend. It looks really fancy but on closer inspection its not actually that good at all. Its a replica, complete with odd nuts and bolts and everything. Saying I could do better would be a lie, but given enough time and yellow sticky tape, I bet I could make my mazda look the part!
 

Hooning.....

These little feckers are absolutely everywhere. Automated speed cameras. Always in tactical places too, such as right at the bottom of a hill or aling a really open road at night time. YOu dont see anything and recieve a letter in the post the following week. They still haven't cought me though... 

Some of our fans

Here is Lunatic Mick. A legend of a man, hailing from down Jarrahdale way, he is never short of a wise word and always up for sweeping the ladies off their feet with his dancing.

Here is another 2 dudes who have been on to us to play a song in german for the last few weeks. They came in with the sheet music and the words last week...... 

Beer Club

We do a gig on mondays in a pub which has 101 different beers. If you drink all of them (not in 1 night, over a period of time) then they put your name up on the wall!! THe gountlet of beer has been thrown down. There is only 2 of us doing the gig, so with around 7 beers per gig, and not drinking every second week, it will take about 27 weeks to complete this mammoth task! 

Cinema update

Well, here is the latest screen update. I have it attached to the wall now, and its working away great. Next thing is a pelmet and curtains to conceal it all and some conduit to hide the power cable. I will keep y'all posted.... 

Happy Birthday Finn

1 week old the other day....
 

Periscope's, gigs, the viola and speeding.

Did a gig last night in the Fremantle Maritime Museum and I came accross this submarine parked out the back. Notice the torpedos carelessly strewn on the ground next to it. You wouldn't catch Sean Connery leaving his Red October sub parked so carelessly!

Also, this was my second viola gig of the year. (72 violin gigs and 2 viola gigs since I landed here) It has been quite a shock to the system playing the violin so much. 16 hours a week of regular gigs nowadays and thats not counting the classical stuff. Playing the viola last night was such a pleasure, wallowing in each individual note like it was an eternity (off beat waltz time crotchets of course) and as for the tone, INFINATLY better than the treble clef screeches of the violin. And the music for the viola, its so well written, even the simple quartet stuff, subtle yet vital to the chordal progression of any tune. It NEARLY made be want to go home and practice (practice is when you play your instrument but dont get paid, generally a bad habit to get in to). So there ya have it, I'm a born again viola player. I'll still masquerade around as a violin player as long as it pays, but at heart I am a viola player through and through. Not another viola gig for the rest of the year and all violin gigs every night till the first week of october. I'll have to work on that!

Just as an offshoot and a dialogue in the surreal and idle thoughts of an overgigged viola player, I was packing up after an irish band gig (a fairlly boozy one) the other night, and an annoying drunk guy came up to me, waffling about all sorts of stuff and generally telling me how to do my job, after about 5 minutes of not saying a word as he rambled, I actually phased out of the conversation (which is very unlike me) and calculated the dollar value of my violin and its relation/comparrison to the emotional and aesthetic satisfaction and the sheer poetic irony of whacking him over the head with it (which again is very unlike me). I even put the bow down, plugged out the pickup and started to hold the violin like a bat! I figured my pub gigging violin is worth about $400, but the fun of hitting him over the head was only about $49.95 max so I chose to solve the conversation diplomatically by pretending not to speak english and walked off. That has been my first case of gig-rage.

On another more normal note, the 2 penalty points I picked up for speeding over the mountains between gigs from Kerry to Cork a few years ago have expired this afternoon.

Omniremote

I forked out (19 bucks) and bought a universal remote program for my other PDA and am using it to control everything in the cinema room. No longer will we be juggling between 5 remotes, and in its time off, it will function as the rooms media player by running mp3's through the surround sound system and the occasional web surfing. Its also a clock. And an electronic tuner for the violin. The fun never ends!!!!