Dear Massive
I have been issued a challenge. This afternoon I was sitting at my desk here in Melbourne and a disc I had made of 70's music was on the office cd player. As it played one of my colleagues, an ex-pat Englishman, was rattling off who the artists were, as though it were a trivia quiz and finally a song came on he said he hadn't heard.

It was Go All The Way by The Raspberries. I explained who it was and that they were Americans and he said "Oh I knew they weren't British, you'd never be able to stump me with a British act." I of course said I could and a challenge was issued and rules were set. The songs have to be from 1972 or thereabouts, and prior to 1990 when he came to Australia.

The only restriction I have is I need to have the songs already in my itunes. Unfortunately I don't have the 30,000+ songs divided by nationality so it's not as easy as I thought it would be.

Big acts like Bowie, Queen, Sex Pistols, The Clash etc are obviously useless for this so they need to be on the obscure side but I figure if they are successful enough to have penetrated my collection here in Australia then they should be amply famous in the UK.

The sort of songs I am looking for and have already selected...
Just One More Night -Yellow Dog
The Way That You Do It-Pussyfoot
Underpass-John Foxx
Hit the Ground-The Darling Buds
Ever So Lonely-Monsoon

There is nothing riding on this except if I fail to stump him I may receive a fearful scoffing.

Any suggestions at all will be used (I can make as many discs as I want) as long as I know it and can pounce instantly with an "Aha! It's #####!"

I've already ben through the recent songs from the last 20 years blog and got a couple of songs from there.
Thank you

I've uploaded a dozen or so things to youtube, nothing important or amazing, just stuff that interested me. They've had a whopping 1200 or so views between them.

The site has a video manager where if you click the right buttons you can see the demographics of people who have watched your clips.

I gave it a try and was struck by the similarity between my demographics and my imagined demographics of Word Magazine. While it's not surprising that people similar to me have similar interests but it tickled me none the less.

There was a thread here a while back on unusual words in songs, that is words that don't appear often (or at all) in other songs. My suggestion was "plebian" from Cry Me A River.

The US quiz show Jeopardy had a question on that very subject recently and I thought I'd pass it along.

The subject was US Number 1's

I have to reword the question slightly (due to the format of the show) but it amounted to this...

What 1962 novelty song was the only No. 1 hit to have the word "electrodes" in the lyrics?

You have 30 seconds to answer.

I said something recently that would have taken aback a concussed Basil Fawlty.
I went to Thailand and I played a round at the magnificent, but treacherous, Black Mountain Golf Club in Hua Hin where I was teamed with a German couple who spoke perfect English.
After one particularly difficult hole we were comparing scores and I confessed to scoring a 10. This amused the gentleman of the pair no end and he was very gently ribbing me (he himself had scored a 9) and I blurted out, “That bunker had walls like Colditz!”
He didn’t react but the next few holes were played in silence, mostly as I was too ashamed to open my mouth.
My question is this; does anyone else care to confess to saying something as insensitive as that? I can’t be the only oaf on the board! In my defence I defy anyone to mention the word “bunker” to a German and not have images of Berlin 1945 flash through their mind.
At least I bit my tongue when he wished me good luck as I was about to tee off over a lake, I thought “The last time a German said that to an Anglo-Saxon was in The Great Escape and that didn’t end well either.”
This photo is of the bunker in question. It took me four strokes to get out and I then three-putted the green. The bunkers were so deep my caddie, a tiny thing named Get, had to physically help me out of one.

Just wanted to draw attention to a moment that may have passed you by.

During Game 6 of the recently completed Baseball World Series the commentators were talking about previous Game 6's and one they mentioned was from 1991 which ended with a great call by late broadcaster Jack Buck who with one sentence was able to set up the next day's Game 7.

Twenty years later almost to the day Jack's son Joe was calling the game and thanks to a fellow named David Freese he was given reason to knowingly quote his dad verbatim at the games conclusion.

The fact it happened in the Buck families hometown of St Louis at a stadium that has a monument of the father just added to it. I never particularly liked Joe Buck but I loved his dad and I loved this call.

A while back there was a thread where you could ask questions that were bugging you in the hope it would jog the memory of someone on this blog who could help out by providing the answer.

The title of a particular film has been driving me nuts for thirty years or more. It's probably the first film I ever saw and I remember it very vividly (I think) and I would love to see it again but have no idea what it might be called. I saw it on TV so can't even guess when it was made, the closest I can estimate is it probably came out prior to 1970.

The climax as I remember it... (spoiler alert!)

There are two mountain climbers, one young and cocky, the other older and cautious. They are climbing a mountain and as they approach the peak they are faced with a valley criss-crossed with ice-bridges and there is no other way across. Only the older one can tell which bridge is strong enough to hold their weight.

He picks the right one, they reach the peak. Coming down again they come to the same spot. Having conquered the mountain the now over-confident young one rushes ahead to an ice bridge and begins to cross. The older one warns him that it's not the right bridge. The young one ignores him and plummets to his death. The end.

My question is this, what frigging film is this?

The only other clue I have is it might have been produced by Paramount as I seem to remember the last shot was of the mountain that dissolved into a logo of a mountain which whould make it Paramount. However I may have misremembered that.

Thank you for reading this far and God bless you if you can help!

Would they have to pay him for this?
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/more-news/david-bowies-ziggy-stardust-i...

or so said one of the golf commentators at a tournament in Munich and his co-commentator said "He was a lot more lively before he got hit by lightning"

There is no point to this blog I just heard that gem a few moments ago and felt that I needed to share it before I forgot. It tickled me anyway.

I went to my mother's funeral yesterday. After not being sick a day in her eighty years she started coughing a few weeks ago so we called an ambulance and they took her to hospital and she never came out.

I wanted to post a tribute to her but I realised I'd already done it. On this blog on the 20th April 2010 Johan asked "Who is the greatest cricketer you have had the pleasure of watching in your lifetime?" and this was my response. I gave it the header of "Mother Knows Best"

"My fondest childhood memory involving sport is the time my mum dragged me along to the MCG. She had asked me if I'd like to go to the cricket and see Gary Sobers bat. I recall saying, "He's 139 not out. How many do you think he's going to make?"

He ended up making 254 in a knock later described by Don Bradman as "the best inning ever played in Australia."

Once he passed 200 it was as though he decided to put on a show, not only for the huge crowd but (apparently) also for his opposition. It was like watching a magician perform tricks he'd only just invented.

My strongest recollection of the day (apart from the reaction of the crowd) is how the ball would rebound all the way back to the pitch from the concrete gutters that formed the boundary. As young as I was I knew I was seeing something incredible."

I also wanted to post this sentiment I found among the comments while watching the youtube clip for Alone Again Naturally. Someone called Skynyrdtim wrote...

"You don't know what real lonliness is until your parents die. Trust me, treasure your parents while they are alive. You will miss them every day after they're gone and you'll never fill the void they leave with their passing."

http://youtu.be/D_P-v1BVQn8

I have a friend that has a fascination for bio-pics, however loosely they stick to the facts.

She actually hates fiction, says it's a "waste of time." I've given her all the obvious ones like Goodfellas but I've run out of ideas so I need recommendations. By the way, war movies are out!

She has a particular penchant for musical bio-pics, loved La Bamba, Ray, Walk The Line, De-Lovely, Coal Miner's Daughter, Nowhere Boy, Backbeat, Amadeus, Immortal Beloved so any like those I'd particularly like to hear about.

No, I don't understand it either.

Just wondering if anyone else has seen this, I did a search and the name Dewey Cox appears in only two threads. It's surprising to me as readers of magazines like Word would appear to be a prime audience.

I had zero expectations which undoubtedly helped but I thought it excellent.

If you've not seen it, it's a pastiche of musical bio-pics (primarily Walk the Line) and Dewey's journey takes us from the 50's through the protest era, past disco to the present day.

It's very crude but my only real complaint is they cast Jack Black as Paul McCartney! If he didn't identify himself by name you'd never guess who he was supposd to be.

This clip is from the mid-60s and Dewey is enduring a press conference.

P.S The wrong son died

This was posted on Youtube on 3rd of January 2011 and has had almost 10,000,000 hits already. In case you missed it here is a homeless dude with a a fantastic radio voice. I beleive he's already got a job out of it.

Just read through the Opening Lines thread and that made me think about closing lines. Cinema has dozens of great examples but music not so many. I can only think of two.

I once watched a sporting contest in a crowded pub and it was hideously one-sided and right near the end of it everyone else but me had obviously lost interest.

Someone asked me why I was bothering as the result was a foregone conclusion. As my least favourite team of anything in the world were the ones on the recieving end I answered by paraphrasing the closing line of Masters of War, I said "I'm gonna stand over their grave until I'm sure that they're dead."

I've heard people quote Hotel California a few times, "You can check out anytime you like but you can never leave."

Are there any others?

Perhaps a psychologist could tell me why I think that.

With utterly crucial help from the Massive on another thread I recently went on a cd buying spree in Tokyo and thought I'd report back on how I went.

If you still collect cds then you should go there if you can, the stores are so amazing I think you are actually doing yourself a dis-service by not visiting.

The problem for a first timer is the stores are near impossible to find. There are some shopfronts but they're mostly hidden away on the 4th or 5th floor of an office building with no indication (if you can't read Japanese)as to what lies upstairs. Sometimes the challenge isn't finding the building but convincing yourself there is a record shop inside.

You walk around these bizarre, cramped streets with only a map three inches by two inches as a guide to find yourself in front of a Citibank branch or a hotel. You take a deep breathe, go inside, find the elevator and hope.

Once inside though, you'll find racks and racks of cds, bootlegs sitting right next to legit releases. The stores are so comprehensive that a friend gave me a list of nine titles, all as good as unobtainable to him and I was able to purchase eight of them.

The racks are all arranged alphabetically. They are sorted according to first name so Frank Zappa is towards the front but poor old Yngwie Malmsteen is way up the back. So if you do go you need to make yourself a wish list and sort it according to "Bob" not "Dylan".

The city itself is amazing, it was love at first sight for me. Catching the trains is a breeze, all I did was purchase the cheapest ticket (130 yen) and top it up at the adjustment machine at the other end.

I will put in the comments maps and things I have discovered on the net as well as some photos I took myself. This is a view of Shinjuku at dusk taken from the overpass there.