Rants

Where have all the big, glossy, chrome filled metal monsters of the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies gone? You know, the ones that immediately spring to mind when someone says “American Cars”. Southern California – to many people it means Disneyland and Universal Studios; to others it means freeways and traffic jams. Twenty seven million people…

No, let’s not. Please, just let it go I won’t be going to any of them, since I heard quite enough of old showtunes when growing up with my parents. Not only did they insist on dragging me along to things like High Society, Carmen Jones, South Pacific, Porgy and Bess etc. etc., and if that…

Forget the pound of flesh, how about an ounce of customer service? (attrib. William Shakespeare)                 Some journeys start off badly but get better. Others start off OK but get worse. This one is the latter! Once again Colin, my partner-in-crime at ARX, and I were heading off…

When I used to mix bands full time, and lived the strangely nomadic, semi-nocturnal life of the working sound engineer, casual acquaintances would often ask me, “What do you do for a living?” If I replied that I worked in the Live Sound industry and did the sound for bands, their reaction was usually one…

“Sugar Cane ate my brain, when I drove on the Bamboo Train…” (Apologies to Robbie Robertson from The Band for the misheard lyrics from his song ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’) After a couple of weeks holiday in Vietnam, my gf and I organised to go to Phnom Penh, in neighboring Cambodia, since…

‘Hanoi rocks, scooters roll, pedestrians just try to cross the road’ Regular readers of this column (who they, Dunk? Ed) may remember me writing a few years ago about how I’d never been to Vietnam, despite the offer of an all-expenses paid trip from the government back in the early 70s. As luck would have…

Coles face fines of $200 million In 2011 Coles supermarket chain merchandise director John Durkan had a brilliant idea. He approved a plan to hit on 200 suppliers and demand money. The way retail has worked for the past thousand years or so is that suppliers sell goods to retailers, who then mark up and…