The small embarrassments of my life are no secret to the six or so people that read this site on a regular basis. Unfortunate and unlikely things happen to me on a daily basis, and I regard these humiliations with a kind of detached bemusement and tired resignation.

Only this week I wore my underpants backwards for an entire day, picking at my crack in tearful frustration and pain every few minutes, only to realize my mistake at showertime that night. Last weekend I spent an additional five minutes in the parking lot of Toys R Us stabbing the accelerator while an attendent waved his baton with furious impatience at my lack of forward motion, and the reason? I forgot to turn the fucking engine on, and was gliding forward centimeter by glacial centimeter in neutral.

I can't claim today's episode of personal crapness can compete on the same level as my 1km/h car accident, or the time I took out an entire Point of Sale promotional display of wine at the local bottle shop, or when I chased down a pack of teenage punks wearing little but my pajamas and a four-pack of Jim Beam cans.

I have important stuff to do, so there's no better time to vent some spleen and procrastinate.

Shit that shits me, #1 Yes, I'm looking at you Mt Erica bottleshop. You fuckers.

But let me backtrack just a little. I have some important job-applicationy stuff to do tonight. However, I am also tired and rundown and fucked-off beyond belief. In short, inspiration is lacking. In the circumstances, I figured the only sensible course of action was alcohol. So I strolled down to the Mt Erica pub with a sixpack on my mind and the suggestion of a jaunty spring returning to my step. That's until I saw they were charging $23 for a sixpack of Corona. That's right: $23. Twenty-three -- and that's dollars, not ringgits.

What. The. Fuck.

Does a complimentary blowjob come with that Corona? Is it brewed in diamond-encrusted silver chalices on a mountain in Mexico by 70 virgins? In addition to the booze itself, do I get to take home one of said virgins for an hour of vigorous mattress gymnastics?  And if not, why the fuck does that sixpack of Corona cost $23? You. Motherfuckers.

I was so fucking outraged I didn't buy the Corona. Instead, in high dudgeon, I purchased a sixpack of Heineken for a much more reasonable $21.90.

Fuck.

It was the winter of 1988. I’d never really noticed music because I was too busy chasing tadpoles in storm water drains and riding my bicycle over hill and dale. Sure, I knew about the Beatles and I had heard of Robert Palmer... I was always out Walking Like an Egyptian and doing the Locomotion. But I didn’t really care much for the art. All that was about to change... I was ten years old, and I had just moved halfway across the country. Cue my cultural awakening.

All of a sudden anyone who wasn’t bouncing around to the latest hit single from Bros was banging on about Poison or Def Leppard… "Every Rose Has Its Thorn", some were saying… "Pour Some Sugar On Me", others would reply… I got a taste, and it was just awesome. I became a big haired rock god almost overnight. My mullet-on-high-tease became the stuff of legend.

Being a lad of sound and discerning taste I quickly parted ways with Bret Michaels, and focused my attentions solely on the chaps from Sheffield and their unique brand of guitar perfectionism. No matter how uncool it became to adorn one’s bedroom walls with Def Leppard posters, I was always on the lookout for a new one. Every trip to Sydney was a chance to find new promotional images of the band. I would snap them up with my dinner money (and later beg for food).

Thousands of grief-stricken fans of popular group Naked Flame held a candlelight vigil outside the Melbourne headquarters of Sony BMG following an announcement by the band of its decision to split.

A statement issued by Sony BMG said the members of the group 'had weighed the decision carefully for many months and had decided to go their seperate ways due to ongoing internal tensions'.

Naked Flame, who sold more than 60,000,000 copies of its debut record Pyramid of Pain, still owes Sony BMG two more albums but reached an agreement to be released from its contract. It's believed the record company will assemble a Best-Of box-set comprised of highlights from the band's first two albums (tentatively titled This Is The Flame) and a live album from their wildly successful 1998 tour of Hungary (Hungary In Flames?).

It seemed like the thing to do. With the election, and everything. Barack Obama: the most talked about man on Planet Earth, multiracial gatecrasher, harbinger of change -- or maybe just a Trojan horse for the same-old, same-old? Whatever he is and whoever you are (jaded cynic, bile-filled rightwinger, clasped-hands worshipper, idealist, aspiring starfucker), everyone's fascinated by Obama. So, screw it, I thought, I'll join millions of others and read his book.

I don't wanna burst anyone's bubble, but frankly it was an elegantly phrased yawn. In retrospect, hardly surprising. After all, when Obama wrote The Audacity of Hope, he was a freshly minted senator. Clearly, he had aspirations for higher office. Which, of course, is why his books are of such interest, and of so little interest. Filled with so much ambition, invested with so much hope, and weighted down with so much scrutiny, he was never gonna write anything genuinely revelatory in his book.

If you're a misanthrope, or perhaps just a supercilious prick, the Coen Bros' latest venture is the film for you.

Burn after Reading is peopled -- without exception -- with characters who are stupid, narcissistic, venal, or selfish. If you could identify with, or invest in, a single one of them, well, you're doing better than I could. But that's the thing: as far as I can tell, you're not meant to identify with them. You're meant to laugh at them, at how fucking stupid they are, how selfish, how hapless and grasping.

But that gets old. Really quickly. Sure, there are some laughs, but there's a bitter aftertaste to the half-hearted chuckling. The whole exercise is too fucking mean-spirited, too full of caustic laughter, too lacking in compassion or empathy. Sure, sure: black comedy, you say. They're meant to be stupid, you say. Don't we get most of our laughs, you ask, poking fun at idiots? Solidarity via exclusion, and all that -- yeah? 

It’s eight years since the Drones first came howling across the Nullarbor in a squall of feedback. A lot’s changed since then. They’ve released three albums. Their second album won the Australian Music Prize, and their third was shortlisted. They’ve played hundreds of gigs home and abroad. And thousands have watched band frontman Gareth Liddiard pummel his way through sets, leaning into his mic as if into a gale, singing confessional songs thick with Australiana, blood, and the Drones’ own peculiarly askew vision.

This month the Drones released their fourth album, Havilah. It has a lot to live up to...

Each breath an act of valour.

The sun's blotted out, the trees are bare and burnt, and everything’s swathed in ashes. This is the setting of Cormac McCarthy's The Road – post-nuclear-war America, or at least what used to be America. What's left is a charnel house. Barren earth, ash-choked rivers, corpse-littered landscape.

The story starts several years after the apocalypse. Already everything’s slumped into horrific, gut-churning violence. Those unlucky enough to survive creep, starving, through a hellish landscape, hiding from the cannibals that stalk the countryside, and battling just to see the next day, and the next. Amid this panoply of horrors, the smallest act of endurance is the rawest act of bravery.

McCarthy’s protagonists are a father and his young son. (They’re never identified by name.) Cold and starving, they travel the road south, heading for the coast. They sleep huddled together beneath a tarpaulin or in derelict houses. They scavenge food wherever they can. The father coughs blood and clutches a pistol. Two bullets left.

'B-O-R-I-N-G. Boring.'

I should have trusted my instinctual hatred of Richard Gere and not allowed myself to rent this movie. He's managed to ruin every film he's ever been cast in with his slint-eyed, smarmy smugness, and Bee Season (a movie adapted from the novel by Myla Goldberg) is no exception.

However, even sans Gere, this movie would still suck arse. Another in a long line of American stories of upper middle-class family breakdown, Bee Season stands head and shoulders over its companions in the genre by trying so hard to be profoundly meaningful while delivering nothing more than a 'glorified informercial for Kabbalism', as one critic observed. Thanks in no small measure to Gere's paper-thin acting, the movie trails off from its reasonable opening premise of overly-ambitious, pushy parents isolating their children with their unrealistic expectations, into a vague, substanceless waiting room of implausibilities and unintentional religious comedy.