People

As seen in the most recent edition of Katherine Times:

The Borja family wish to thank the emergency services of Pine Creek for assisting our son on the Stuart Highway on Friday December 16. Special thanks to the other drivers on the highway that stopped to lend their support. Their good spirits have helped to ensure our Christmas will be happy.

Wonder what that was about?

Tags: Classifieds, Newspaper, Katherine Times, Thanks.

It's well past two hours into Christmas already. Santa has come and gone. I should hurry to bed so I can get up and unwrap some presents.

Merry Christmas!

With JPB and I separated by a few thousand kilometres, there's not very much "gay" happening at the moment. I'm on the phone to Sydney pretty much every night and I did catch up with FagInTheBush but that's about it. Talking. Oh, and telling JPB that I love him and I miss him and JPB being worried about me when I told him about the blowout.

I set up my parent's audiovisual centre a couple of days ago and used Kylie's Showgirl dvd to test it out. Okay so this is not necessarily a "gay" thing but you can't deny that Red Blooded Woman is dripping wet with homo, none of the male dancers seem at all concerned about Kylie and instead would rather flex their muscles at each other. mmm... muscles... Oh, and there's that Pet Shop Boys collaboration with Kylie about some guy who's In Denial.

And on the news I saw Elton John and partner (sorry, dude, for not knowing your name) get "together". Not officially "married", to be sure, but at least recognised and with legal rights to... something... well anyway it was a bit of a shock to hear Tony Blair comment on it, saying that he proud that Britain is taking this step forward, allowing gay civil partnerships to occur. Good on you. Had you not sent troops to Iraq you'd be my favourite pollie.

Tags: Gay, News, Northern Territory, Civil Union, Gay Marriage, Elton John.

Update: Watching more news. Dad grunted disapprovingly and I chirped that it was a good thing. Elton John and partner are currently the face of gay marriage (even though they aren't really married). Lots of talk about the estimated combined annual income of all the poofs in Great Britain and I'm thinking "what's that got to do with love?" Maybe it's because Mr and Mr Elton John aren't really married, which is about love (apparently), they're just "unified civilly", which is more about tax. Oh well, baby steps...

I finally made it to Katherine last night (big ordeal, tell ya about it later...) It's always like going back in time, nothing much changes. Oh sure we might have different dogs but at least their names don't change. And while the furniture is as uncomfortable as ever, at least there's always a new television or hi-fi component in the living room (this time a huge widescreen CRT which runs rings around LCDs and especially Plasma).

I was digging through all my old stuff and came across a book that I kept a weekly top 10 favourite songs through 1990 (in 1991 it expanded to a top 20). I even had a point system whereby I could collate the year's top songs and even assigned gold and (multi) platinum status to long endurance tracks. Fifteen years ago the chart looked like this (don't laugh!):

15 December 1990
(9) 10. DNA ft Suzanne Vega - Tom's Diner
(6) 9. Dee-Lite - Groove is in the Heart
(8) 8. Kylie Minogue - Step Back in Time
(10) 7. Technotronic - Wave
(RE) 6. Jean Michel Jarre - Equinox
(4) 5. Vanilla Ice - Ice Ice Baby
(5) 4. Jean Michel Jarre - Industrial Revolution
(3) 3. Snap - Cult Of Snap
(1) 2. Technotronic - Megamix
(2) 1. Betty Boo - Doin' The Do

Let me explain: Jean Michel Jarre was only in the charts because some boy that I had a crush on started listening to it so, voila the Jarre-meister makes a mid-chart entry. Bad move. Apart from that, everyone thought that my taste in music sucked but I thought I was too cool.

Anyway, the year-end chart went a bit like this
G 10. MC Hammer - U Can't Touch This
G 9. Young MC - Bust A Move
G 8. Kylie Minogue - Better The Devil You Know
G 7. Starlight - Numero Uno
1P 6. Technotronic - Megamix
1P 5. Rococo - Megamix
2P 4. Madonna - Vogue
2P 3. Technotronic - Pump Up The Jam
2P 2. Technotronic - Get Up
4P 1. 49'ers - Touch Me

Sure, I had a thing for crappy girly Euro-housey stuff but, hey there's classic Kylie and Madonna in there! The rest of that chart went past 100 and also included alot of Paula Abdul, Grandmaster Chicken and DJ Duck's Check Out The Chicken and two different versions of Lambada.

Oi! Stop laughing! Things have gotten better: stay tuned for the Top 50 of 2005...

Tags: Music, Pop, House, Charts, Retro.

I'm not a particularly big fan of Madonna's music. I can't get passionate about the music she puts out there. I think her persona is far more fascinating for me and for a lot of people.

- Alison Goldfrapp

You make a few well-timed comments about Madonna and suddenly there's alot more interest about you than usual. In Goldfrapp's case, Madonna takes a few pointers from you ("Like It Or Not", a track off the latest album that I'm starting to like more...), you make a few comments and suddenly everyone's asking questions. Or, in my case, you devote some blog space talking about Madonna's new single and album and suddenly your hits counter is going ballistic or, more realistically, it splutters around the 50 per day mark and then goes all quiet again. Kylie doesn't have that kind of effect, even after talking about the televised snippets of her Showgirl concert. And now that the initial excitement about Madonna's new album has died down a bit I don't know if this desperate ditch for hits will attract that kind of attention again.

It's been on my mind for a while now: What do I have to do to get hits? As a gay blog there aren't nearly enough pictures of naked men and stories of exciting sexcapades to entice the pink readers but I just simply don't want to do that. In terms of pop culture I guess my taste lies in the no-man's-land between the overly maintstream and the downright geeky. And contemporary dance has never had a large audience, on stage or in blog space. Sure, I started this thing (almost twelve months ago now!) for my own interest but now that there is a bit of an audience out there, why not try to get MORE of an audience? Without losing the "essence of Jhuny"...

A few concise and well-timed references to things that would conceivably generate alot of hits?

I've got a couple of weeks in the middle of nowhere to have a think about it some more. In anycase, this site is due for a re-design anyway...

Tags: Goldfrapp, Madonna, Kylie Minogue, hits, pop, blog.

This morning, JPB gave me my birthday present. Guess what it is: It's small, but it's not a mini...

yep! One of these.

How exciting. Can you top that?

Mind you, I'm happy enough just waking up in the morning with him...

Tags: Birthday, present, iPod, nano.

More info: I couldn't get back to sleep this morning so I went downstairs to watch some TV. Went back up to JPB's room at about the time we normally wake up to find two small packages beside the bed. Opened the first box, initially saw a pile of chocolate love hearts, how sweet. Dug underneath and pulled it out.

Sat there. Stunned...

In the end, he just couldn't wait, he had to just get out of there. Two months early and with relatively little fuss. So what my sister dismissed as random abdominal pain turned out to be her cervix dilating. She was told she should have been screaming in agony. Between her waters breaking and the birth my sister and her husband decided to attend the Brolga Awards. What a nice way to celebrate her birthday weekend!

So unexpected was his early arrival his parents hadn't even picked out a name, though there is a name that they are considering (it reminds me of clay). At the moment he's still in hospital and will be there for about a month.

I can't wait to see him.

Tag: baby, birth, family, Brolga Awards

Oh my god has anyone seen Bangarra's tour schedule for 2006? I knew it was going to be a hard year next year but this is bloody ridiculous! On the plus side, we're in Darwin at the end of May, it'll be our second tour destination so the show will still be fresh. But by the time we get to, say, Lismore, I'm going to be a nervous wreck. And what about JPB??? Did anyone at Bangarra consider the consequences this tour will have on my relationship with JPB? Not to mention the two months we'll be spending in Melbourne trying to get the Gathering program together with the Australian Ballet. Or the month that we'll be overseas for the UK tour.

Six months away from Sydney...

In truth, it's not beyond asking, a schedule like this. 2004 was almost as full-on as well. But back then I wasn't leaving anyone behind. This is going to be a problem.

Meanwhile, even though we only have a few more performances left this year, rehearsals have been pretty good. We're re-mounting Rites using a very obscure archive video of a performance from 1999. I guess the best thing about it is that it's NEW (at least for me) after touring a show that we've done for over two-and-a-half years. It's also fast and has alot of movement, alot of which is already familiar, stylistically. Questions oft asked in a Bangarra rehearsal like "is the foot flexed?" are easily answered and taken on ("of course the foot is flexed!") How's that for progress? It's been three years and now I've learnt that feet are usually flexed by default.

and you're probably gonna wanna *knock-knee* as well...

Of course it's not always that simple. But at the very least it no longer seems all that foreign to me anymore.

Tags: Dance, Bangarra, tour, travel.

"Is there anything I need to attend to in the apartment?"

"No, everything looks alright."

"Great. Well can I please have someone fix the bedroom floor, the ceiling, the kitchen door and the bath tub? Oh and when will the fire detectors be installed?"

Thumbs up for Jhuny for keeping the place clean (if not exactly tidy!) Now he's back off to the other side of the city to be with his man...

Shock horror I've actually spent a couple of nights at my official place of residence. Sure, the Cross City Tunnel means that I'm only ten minutes from JPB but it still seems like a world away.

But at the very least it's not unbearably hot at night. I've had trouble dealing with the night time heat at JPB's place and, being in a Performance Week I simply had to spend a night in Glebe and I invited JPB to come over. Everything was going well but as we were preparing to go to bed, JPB spotted this furry eight-legged intruder.

I can normally deal with all sorts of bugs. I'm just not good with spiders. JPB screams at the sight of a fluttering moth so he wasn't going to be much help (actually, that's not very fair, he did manage to calmly talk me into doing it, I really needed the motivation). After about half an hour of planning and countless dry runs at trapping imaginary spiders I managed to catch it.

Phew! Don't know if JPB will ever visit again...

I may need to get myself one of these...

Tags: Spider, Huntsman Spider.