I have laryngitis and tonsillitis, which means my throat is swollen up to twice its normal size and I can’t talk. Which is no doubt why the world chose today to throw all these outrage-inspiring stories at me. I’ve been engaging in furiously angry typing all day.

First the mouth-breathing religious freaks. The Westboro Baptists – the “god hates fags” idiots, more a collection of extremist political bigots than a church, or in the words of my mate Heisty, “a tight-knit family of wilfully delusional, hateful, abusive lunatics” – are planning to picket the public memorial service being held for Ronnie James Dio. Mrs J summed it up quite nicely on Facebook:

Personally, I welcome the dumb fucks to try it. A handful of delusional god botherers in the midst of a bunch of metal heads trying to farewell an idol? Yeah, good luck!

This kind of thing makes me so mad that I’m having trouble putting it into words. Meanwhile the tributes to Dio continue to roll in. Metal As Fuck has put together a number of tributes that the MAF community posted on Twitter and Facebook, as well as some that were emailed in, and they truly go to show what a universally loved individual he was.

Then, it’s been revealed that Australia has fallen even further into a nanny state by adding an “are you carrying porn” question to customs arrivals cards. If you say “yes” they can then search your laptop, camera, and drives to confiscate anything considered “illegal” and issue fines or worse.

What disturbs me most about this is that it’s already been shown that the guidelines for what the Australian Classification Board thinks is “ok” and “not ok” seems a bit fickle. For example, there was a big outcry a couple of months ago when women with small breasts were deemed “out”, and the government’s stance on female ejaculation is that it’s urine and therefore under a blanket ban, no matter what medical research has to say on the matter.

More to the point, I don’t intend to hand my laptop over for rifling through by customs officials. TrueCrypt to the rescue!

A few years ago, Glenn Danzig said in an interview that he was too old to be touring – that he was ok with flying in for one off shows, but spending weeks in the back of a bus was no longer attractive. I can’t for the life of me find a reference online, but I swear I read it. Subsequently I moved heaven and earth to get to Sydney to see the Evil Elvis live in 2006, in what I assumed would be my one and only chance.

A few years on, it seems memories of the horror of the touring lifestyle has faded cos he’s back on the road – with performances at the Sweden Rock Festival and Finland’s Sauna Open Air, then nine dates in the US, all in June, to support upcoming album Deth Red Sabaoth.

According to Blabbermouth’s “exclusive” report, the band plans to tour “extensively” in support of the new album.

Do I like the sound of “extensively”? Hells yes.  Please, please, please include Australia!

This was uploaded from my phone using Shozu. Prepaid 3G internet has been an absolute godsend this year.

This is an old video (2001) but wow.

YouTube – TOP SECRET 2009 – Ronnie James Dio talks about UFO sighting

via Blabbermouth.

Angry Anderson is joining the list of rockers and other celebs in politics, standing for the Warringah Council elections in New South Wales.

Apparently he has quite a bit of competition and doesn’t expect to make it in. But depending on the bogan population of that area, I’d say he’d have a pretty good chance – hell, I’d vote for him.

Unlike Peter Garrett, I think Angry would be a force to be reckoned with in politics. And yes, that tiny white figure on stage in the photo above is the man himself, at the Bon Scott Celebration Concert (the second one, I believe).

I’m nowhere near as interesting as he is, but he did tag me with a request to hear the “Why Goatlady” story, so here it is… minus the seven other things.

It’s simple really. I like goats. When I was younger, my family lived on 5 acres in a semi-rural area and we inherited a lovely milking goat named Megan-Morgan from some neighbours. Although originally named Morgan, these previous owners hadn’t thought that was an appropriate name for a nanny. The problem was she responded to both names, so they both stuck.

Here’s a photo of Megan with her twin kids, Butch and Cassidy (that’s one of my horses, Smelly Melly, in the background):

To get our poor nanny goat “serviced”, we took her in the back of a Mitsubishi starwagon to an Angora stud. On the way we got dinner at a McDonalds drive-through. Much predictable hilarity ensued.

I had to deliver one of the kids (nope, no idea which was which, but it was the one born second) because Megan was so exhausted after the first one she gave up halfway through pushing it out, and it’s little head was buried in the sand where it lay. I had to pull the little bugger out and break open the birth sac and pull some muck out of it’s mouth so it could breathe. I was all by myself at the time and pretty impressed with myself for managing with almost no animal husbandry experience. I still remember feeling its little heart beating frantically through its ribcage, all covered in slimy warm amniotic fluid.

The kids were cross-bred Angoras, and as they were both males they were unfortunately completely useless for anything except eating. To make things worse, because we didn’t bud their horns in time, they grew huge honking antlers which they mostly used to terrorize each other with. But because they were such pets and we were most definitely not farmers, we could never bring ourselves to give them over to the slaughterhouse. Eventually a somewhat crazy friend took them down to her farm as pets.

Being the lactose-intolerant member of the family, it was my responsibility to milk Megan-Morgan each night and while I’m sure my mum took on the duty many more times than she would have liked, I think I was pretty good at making sure I was home for that job each day (I also had to feed my horses) – not bad for a 14, 15 and 16 year old who had friends with cars!

We constantly had more milk than we could use, which meant the dog drank big bowls of it, all our friends and neighbours drank it, the freezer was full of it, and every now and then we’d try to make stuff out of it. Mum bought some culture once to make cheese, but accidentally used one that was designed for creating desserts… needless to say no one really wanted to try the pink feta! My brother and a family friend who lived with us at the time actually thought they were drinking cows milk… not knowing mum used to fill up the plastic bottles in the fridge each morning.

Eventually we moved back to the suburbs and Megan-Morgan went to live with some other lovely people on a farm.

Years later, knowing my nostalgia for our capricious friends, an ex-boyfriend brought me another dairy goat for a Christmas present. He came down from Pinjarra in the car with Kai, as this goat was called – sitting on her haunches in the back seat of our old LTD, with her front legs on either side of the centre console, looking with some concern out of the front window (especially when going down hills).

The problem was, we lived in Mt Lawley at the time (a quite nice inner-city suburb for those not familiar with Perth). Although the garden was large and Kai spent most of her days on a long tether rope under a large shady tree with the garage for shelter – quite appropriate lodgings for a goat and a much nicer home the dairy farm she’d come from – the council disagreed. According to various archaic bylaws, in order to house a goat you needed a structure of particular dimensions (smaller than the area she had), with a concrete floor sloping at a particular angle toward a drain to catch waste. Which sounded stinky and unpleasant, and the last thing I would wish on any living creature.

After 12 months I gave up arguing with them and we gave her to a friend’s dad, who put her on his farm in Baldivis. He wanted to keep the property but his wife wanted to sell it, so he was thrilled when Kai – being a somewhat stroppy goat to start with, and having much less interaction with humans since living on this on this largely unoccupied farm – started chasing and headbutting potential purchasers who came to inspect the property.

So essentially, my nickname is Goatlady because, given enough space and without suitable sensible influences, I would quite happily become the Crazy Goat Lady of <insert location here>.

Gary has tagged me with the eight random things meme. I wasn’t going to bother participating but what better way to get back into a posting routine on this blog than with something completely random? The answer is, of course, eight things that are completely random. So here we go.

1. Chocolate Crackles for grownups

Ben let on that he eats Coco Pops for breakfast. I didn’t think that anyone over the age of six did that. I am of the opinion that the only thing Coco Pops are good for is making chocolate crackles.

Of course, after I convinced Dave to buy a packet in order to revisit the childhood delight that is chocolate crackles, we realised that they are in fact made with Rice Bubbles and cocoa. Not to be dissuaded, Dave made some anyway, with our coco pops and dark chocolate. They were delicious. Next time I will make them with liqueur as well: alcoholic chocolate crackles for grownups. Mmmmm.

2. Dopod838 Pro: ultimate geek phone

About two weeks after getting mobile broadband enabled on my phone, a cute little Nokia 6800, I got sick of trying to reply to emails with a numeric keypad and started investigating geekier phones. A lot of people seem to be lusting after the Nokia N95 but I really, really wanted a QWERTY keyboard, which at the moment (on the 3 network) limits me to the Dopod838Pro or the Palm Treo, both Windows Mobile phones.

After playing with the keyboards, I decided I didn’t think much of the Palm, leaving me with the Dopod838Pro. I was a bit hesitant to get a Windows Mobile device – not because I don’t like Windows Mobile, but because I really like using Google Maps, GMail and Twitteresce on my mobile, all J2ME applications, and I didn’t think they would run on Windows Mobile. As it turns out they do, although not perfectly – Windows Mobile 6 which will be released soon apparently has a better J2ME midlet manager.

So anyway I now have the geekiest phone in the universe. And I’m loving it.

3. Live Music

I’ve been lucky enough to see a lot of live shows this year. In fact, the list is quite ridiculously long, and there’s more to come. I have a ton of photos and videos that I haven’t uploaded yet, and I haven’t blogged about most of them, but there’s a heap of my reviews on Metal Underground and FasterLouder:

• Hellyeah at Metropolis Fremantle
• Beasts of Bourbon at Metropolis Fremantle
• Darkest Hour at the Rosemount Hotel
• Nile and Decapitated at Club Capitol
• Obituary at Club Capitol
• Slayer at Robinson Pavilion
• God Forbid at the Amplifier
• Suicidal Tendencies, Hatebreed, Terror, The Bronx and Deftones at the Soundwave Festival, Robinson Pavilion

Bands I’ve also seen but haven’t actually reviewed include Guns n Roses and Lamb of God. I missed Stone Sour because we were in Sydney for Nine Inch Nails, which has been postponed until September. And coming up I have Alice Cooper, Dinosaur Jr, Heaven and Hell (Black Sabbath with Ronnie James Dio) with Down, The Cure, Bob Dylan, Napalm Death, Marilyn Manson, and the Black Crusade (Machine Head, Arch Enemy and Trivium). Hot tour rumors are Velvet Revolver, possibly with Alice in Chains.

Whew! and it’s only July. Compare this to last year, when there were maybe 5 international metal shows for the entire year.

4. Transformers

As you’ve no doubt heard, the movie that Dave had been excited about ever since it was announced four years ago finally came out. Scott Barnes saw it while he was in Perth for Barcamp and said it was a religious experience. I don’t know if I would go that far but it was definitely very, very cool. Dave has quite a few new Transformer toys now, including the Optimus Prime voice changing helmet. Boys will be boys.

5. Barcamp

Speaking of Barcamp Perth, it went really, really well. Myles did an awesome job of organising and big thanks are due to all the sponsors as well. My presentation was on Geek Ergonomics and some kind soul kept excellent notes on the official wiki. There was a video but hopefully it will never see the light of day

6. WA Web Awards

They’re on again for 2007. This is the third year AWIA have run the WA Web Awards and this time, we are really, really ramping things up – the committee has dropped down to three committed (or is that “should be committed”) people who can make decisions quickly and the awesome talents of Rebecca and Jan from Red Horizon, our event managers. There are more sponsors, more entries, a bigger awards presentation night at the Duxton Hotel and essentially, everything about it is going to be HUGE.

7. Garden

We still don’t have one. However, my friend Coral is helping us to plan and organise the ultimate low-maintenance native water-conserving garden, and it will be awesome.

8. Pirates

I am totally obsessed with pirates, and not just because Johnny Depp is cute. Also because Verbal Deception are awesome. Pirate metal, yarrr. Check it out.

Seriously, my new computer’s name is Jollyroger.

Seeing as my “spider in the mailbox” was such a hit with readers of this blog, here’s another Madeley arachnid – I found this one in the laundry.

Dave took him over the road to the bush. Hopefully he a) won’t come back and b) doesn’t have any relatives in our house!

I don’t know if these are poisonous – from what I’ve read, most scorpions aren’t, particularly those in the southern parts of Australia.

Click the photo to go through to Flickr – the large version is much scarier! Dave took this one.

And not so anonymous, it would seem. Web “Perthonality” Miles Burke has a site – WrongWrite – showcasing snapshots of bad spelling, grammar and incorrect punctuation on signs. I submitted a picture of a display stand that had been bugging me in the local video library for a long time – check it out, it’s hard to believe that a) someone employed to design a sign like that would think an apostrophe should actually go there; b) that it managed to get all the way to the printers without anyone saying “ummm… about that apostrophe…”; and c) no one works at the store who cares enough to colour in, cover up or otherwise disguise the offending puntuative imprint (yes, I’m making words up).

So, stuff happened in the past month. We went to the Soundwave festival, then to see God Forbid, then to see Helmet although I haven’t written that one up yet. Just yesterday I booked tickets, flights, and accommodation to see Nine Inch Nails in Syndey next month, but we’ll miss Stone Sour (playing in Perth the same night). There’s probably other stuff too…

Today we went for a walk down down the Kingsley end of Yellagonga. I took some photos. Here are some of them.

See ya at next month’s wrap-up