There’s a goddamn dead whale in between the two beaches nearest to me.
A whale carcass has forced the closure of two busy swimming and surfing spots after washing up between Coogee and Maroubra beaches in Sydney – but there are no plans to remove it.
The whale’s heavily decomposed body was found on Thursday morning at Lurline Bay, a rocky cove surrounded by cliffs in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.
It’s believed to be a juvenile humpback.
Local council said nearby Coogee and Maroubra beaches would be closed until further notice to protect oceangoers as whale carcasses have been known to attract sharks.
“We have cordoned off the area to leave this creature in peace and safe from the attention of people,” Randwick Council mayor, Dr Clare Willington, told reporters.
The council has also contacted Surf Life Saving about introducing extra drone patrols, but Willington said it was a precaution as there had not yet been reports of an increase in shark activity.
Willington said there were no plans to remove the whale and that staff were working with Gamay Rangers about a culturally and environmentally sensitive approach to take.
“This is a natural occurrence and in time nature will deal with the carcass,” Willington said.
In other words, presumably not this way:
I actually did see a live whale out here once when I was quite young, not sure exactly when but it was mid-to-late 80s… Dad had got word from someone that there was a whale at Malabar, so off we went to see it; not much to see, mostly just the tail fin breaching, but still, I saw a whale, which I haven’t seen since. I know whales come down the east coast in the latter part of the year, but this is only the second one I’ve heard of coming to my particular area…
There’s been quite a few notable passings in the last couple of days, not just Jim Bakker (cunt) but also Jeffrey Archer (cunt), Dennis Hastert (cunt), and Richard Morecroft (not a cunt, he was cool), and now one of old Hollywood’s last big figures, Eva Marie Saint, has shuffled off her own mortal coil at the pretty reasonable age of 102. I was amazed that her first TV role was in NINETEEN FORTY SEVEN—an adaptation of A Christmas Carol that, per IMDB, also starred John Carradine as Scrooge and David Carradine (only about eight years old or so) as the young Scrooge—and her last acting role appears to have been a podcast (a scripted comedy/drama series) just five years ago. What industry changes she must’ve seen over all those decades.
Venom singer/bassist Conrad Lant, better known as Cronos, has died at the age of 63.
His band confirmed his death in a statement today (Tuesday, October 1). No cause of death has been given. […]
Born in London in 1963, Lant moved to Newcastle aged eight, where he joined Venom in 1978, during the burgeoning New Wave Of British Heavy Metal. Inspired by the rough, DIY nature of punk rock, the trio – completed by guitarist Jeffrey ‘Mantas’ Dunn and drummer Tony ‘Abaddon’ Bray – brought a raw fury to the UK heavy metal scene, first heard on 1981’s controversial yet ultimately seminal debut album, Welcome To Hell, which UK music magazine Sounds hailed as “possibly the heaviest record ever allowed in the shops for public consumption.”
“I loved Motorhead,” Cronos said in 2019, “they were a huge inspiration, but I wanted to have the Black Sabbath satanic thing too, and Alice Cooper’s theatricality, and punk’s aggression. I wanted us to be evil.”
Recorded in six days, Venom’s second record, Black Metal, was released in November 1982, and received a five star review in Sounds from future Classic Rock editor Geoff Barton. The album’s title track became the band’s signature song, influencing the namesake extreme metal genre, featuring such bands as Mayhem, Emperor and Darkthrone.
A marvellously Neanderthal racket they did make, and still teenagers when they started making it. May he enjoy all the Newcastle Brown Ale in Hell that he can handle.
I literally burst out “OH JESUS FUCK!” twice while watching this. Aamon says it took him four days to make this, and I must say those four days were far more productive and worthwhile than any four day period I’ve lived through recently.
I must say, though so much else is falling apart around us, the particular falling apart of right-wing media of late has been kind of pleasing to watch. Most recently we’ve had the quite peculiar spectacle of Alex Jones challenging Tim Pool to a boxing match, and we’ve also had Ben Shapiro turning on Tucker Carlson, and the whole bullshit with Candace Owens has been unto itself for a while now. It’s been great watching these shitheads carry on almost like leftists.
But Benji Bear versus Malsh Walsh is an interesting new wrinkle, cos the latter is still part of the former’s Daily Wire setup; this isn’t rival organisations going at each other, this is some internecine shit. Per the video by Rashad Crenshaw, Malsh went on the socials raving about postpartum depression not being a thing and Shapiro hit back on his own show basically saying “actually it IS a thing and fuck anyone who says otherwise”. And, you know, this is kind of inherently funny coming from Ben after the “wet-ass p-word” debacle, from a man who apparently believes that a woman getting wet Down There is actually a bad thing, but at the same time this is, frankly, Ben Shapiro acknowledging women do suffer from something Malsh Walsh refuses to believe in because Wammen, Am I Right?, and let’s acknowledge that’s good.
Walsh, of course, is possibly the most revolting specimen to still be publishing under Shapiro’s banner, and one of the most hate-filled on the right in general; there’s another… interesting video hereby Youtuber Mickey Atkins in which she covers Malsh going after her specifically while looking at a broader rant about people going “no contact” with their parents, because, obviously, how DARE people set boundaries and so forth, and the mental health industry hasn’t developed anything new in over a century except make families break up, and HEY I’m Malsh Walsh and not a licensed professional but I don’t really believe most so-called “abuse” actually is that, and you might be pissy at your folks when you were a child and yeah they had flaws but as an adult you should realise how good they were, not cut them off, etc. The latter point was particularly striking; it felt like a pre-emptive threat to his own numerous children to forgive his own failures as a parent, which I suspect are many and varied, saying “I might be a misogynistic racist cunt but you WILL love me, and I will send you to HELL before I ever send you to therapy, which I could do with even more than you probably will”…
Whither Walsh, therefore? Cos I can’t see him taking this reproach from Shapiro lightly… someone reckons in the comments he’ll go full Nick Fuentes, but Crenshaw in the video says Matty actually can’t afford to go independent cos those numerous children I mentioned aren’t going to feed themselves just yet. I feel, though, like the relationship is tenuous enough that he’s going to go too far right even for Shapiro… Walsh is already an overt racist about black people but a carefully quiet antisemite, and I suspect that sooner rather than later he’ll come out as a loud and explicit one. I can even imagine how it’ll happen: Walsh will add to his filmography with a new “documentary” called Am I Jewish?, and Shapiro will be down with it cos he has, you know, form in answering that question negativelyabout Jews he dislikes, but then at the end of the film Walsh will declare him the “wrong” sort of Jew for some reason and Ben will be all “FFFFFUUUUUUU GOY BASTARD” and that’ll be that…
In memoriam Australian music’s other great Dutch import(Harry Vanda being the first, obviously), aged only 79. I say “only” cos I was talking about his passing with Joe, my housemate, and Joe said he’d thought he’d have been older. And though 79 is a good innings, I knew what he meant Johnny Young was just… always there, wasn’t he? He was a TV show host in Perth by 1965 when he was just 18. Young Talent Time was there for nearly two decades after that. He was a fixture of the industry. One of those fixtures.. And now he’s… one of those former fixtures of the sort we probably won’t ever see again.
Speaking of fixtures, here’s another one:
The legendary Brian Henderson introducing Russell Morris doing “The Oom-mow-mamow-mow Song“, Australia’s finest (if belated) contribution to the psychedelic music scene, and probably also Johnny Young’s finest contribution to music. Apparently he actually wrote this thing with Ronnie Burns in mind, and frankly I can’t imagine that working; instead, Molly Meldrum heard Young himself playing it, demanded he give it to Russell Morris (one of Molly’s clients at the time), and then overproduced it into immortality. And let’s not forget John’s own big hit as a performer, one of those fantastic short sharp pop hits in which the mid-60s abounded:
So NPR in the US does this thing called the Tiny Desk Concerts, where they get musicians to perform in, well, the limited space behind a tiny desk at the NPR music department. It’s not quite an MTV Unplugged situation as such, but there is a similar sort of scaled back and stripped down aspect to it.
And 18 years after it started, whoever books these miniature gigs had the inspired idea to have Napalm Death do one.
The idea was glorious and so is the execution, and the highlight comes near the end where we see the NPR staff present getting a mosh going. They’re into it. I particularly enjoyed the opening coarse language warning, cos it’s not like most of the lyrics are decipherable as such anyway. And yes, the band play “You Suffer”. It’s beautiful (seriously, the precision timing required to pull that off really is something I didn’t fully appreciate until I saw them do it).
Oooh. I think THAT’s a bit nasty. I mean, Christian rock isn’t exactly the most original and brilliant art, indeed almost nothing made in the name of Christian culture is…
…and Seth Andrews has a whole video on that theme, about how Christian media essentially takes its ideas from secular popular culture to try and keep pace with the latter. It’s kind of a form of exploitation in some respects. Which is not to say that it’s necessarily all bad and irredeemable, is it? Even if we concede almost all of it probably is, surely there’s got to be some exception that proves the rule. And I do believe that one of Australia’s more perplexing international success stories provides one…
Michael Tait might have irrevocably ruined things for the band with his misbehaving, but they did produce this song which may have kind of inspired this somewhat regrettable film series in which the band makes guest appearances as themselves, but which is nonetheless something of a banger. I actually encountered it in parodic form, it should be said, courtesy of God Awful Movies, whose review of the second GND film from ten years ago featured a stellar rewrite of the song by Eli Bosnick… it took me years to actually hear the original, but when I did it not only gave me a new appreciation of just how good the GAM parody was, but also how good the original had been too.
I mean, I’ve no use for the theology behind it and even less for its evangelising purpose (and it’s obviously failed to work on me in that regard), but the song slaps. It obviously gave GAM something solid to build their parody upon. Artistically speaking, Christian media may be stuck in the past somewhat and almost all of it may well be irredeemable shit, but actual people made this thing in a way I don’t think AI would have done. And as counterintuitive as Christian black metal sounds on paper and surely is in practice, I’ve actually liked what I’ve heard by Antestor:
I mean, fucking HELLHAMMER drummed for this lot at one point. So there’s something of value out there, maybe not much but some exists. I suspect that’s a lot more than we’ll ever say about AI art…
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