If you're going to see me in a group situation this month, don’t read this entry. Anything you read here will most likely be embellished socially later.

I have a Tayshaun Prince arm. By the time it gets to the wrist it's only skin and bone. From the right angle – which depressingly is from top down – it looks skeletal. The majority of bulk in my left forearm is scar tissue. My surgeon ordered X-rays to examine the metal button on my ulna that staples on the reattached tendon, but really he could have just run his fingers along my arm to check any detail of its skeleton.

I had my cast removed on Tuesday by a small saw that vibrates instead of spins. It was still pretty freaky having my arm hacked into for 15 minutes albeit stopping millimeters from skin. At one stage the nurse that was mining for biology put the saw down too quickly on the table and it took less than a second to hack a nice line into the plastic covering the leather. Not that another scar couldn't go amiss.

Now outside the cast my wrist feels like it's filled with concrete. Curling down or up cannot happen. Twisting the palm to face the floor or ceiling was equally stunted but in 36 hours I have gained a few degrees. I have to wait two months for my next check-up and I am not starting rehab until after that consultancy. I have a removable splint until then. November seems very very far away.
But this was all expected. After losing the cast my surgeon told me to rotate my wrist to face the roof and my lip curled more than my hand did, but he said "good". Same again when I managed two degrees of oscillation to try and face the floor.

I have all this extra sleeve on my left side. Itching it straight after felt like the best thing in the world! Actually, no, being able to hug properly again felt like the best thing in the world.
So much of this recovery is going to come down to patience, and I can do that. I still wonder how I even got injured to begin within. My bicep, tricep and bicep-brachia all atrophied and based on my experience with DOMS I figure in another five days I will be able to position my forearm without internal expletives.

I have scars everywhere, and skin rash all over my arm. I've scrubbed about three layers of dead skin away and still I find more. By all this I'm guessing I'm definitely not going to wake up mid-September 2008 and discover this was all a dream.

A flimsy social commentary on contemporary Hip Hop for your weekend.

Aceyalone

Aceyalone is a Californian emcee and he's the type of name you can bring up when someone tells you that all hip-hop is just blacks rapping about getting drunk and fucking. I mean, The Lonely Ones is a song about a rapper helping out a woman whose car breaks down that eventually leads to them hooking up. To a rhyming Neanderthal like, say, Flo Rida this is the makings of a profanity laced couplet. To Aceyalone it's a romantic tale deserving a whole doo wop beat that sells the classiness with little acoustic-guitar arpeggios. While so much hip-hop is pornographic this is practically Titanic.

Aceyalone - The Lonely Ones (from The Lonely Ones LP available now)

General Elektriks

Continuing with the funky rhythms, there is also a good deal of retro jazz dripping from the antique electronic keyboards in which Hervé Salters revels. He's finished production of his second full length Good City For Dreamers under the General Elektriks name for Bay Area label Quannum Projects. The Frenchman lets the label's hip hop beats influence the funky jazz, blues and swing that makes this a seriously smooth LP.

General Elektriks - Little Lady (from the Good City For Dreamers LP out now)

Flo Rida

There's as much subtly in Flo Rida's flow as there is in his beats, that is, absolutely none. It's refreshing. Jump is just muscular bass and blinging synths. It isn't meant to be anything analytical or artistic, it's about smoushing together last year's Get Low with Maneater and there's nothing wrong with that. This is a song for the drunk and parting, for cheerleaders to dance to during timeouts, for when you don't want to think. It's OK, you can have it both ways.

Flo Rida - Jump (from the R.O.O.T.S. LP available now)

Reminiscing

Talking Heads - Born Under Punches from 1980's Remain in Light LP
Bloodhound Gang - Fire Water Burn (acoustic version) from 1996's I Wish I was Queer EP
Arcade Fire - Wake Up live at Melbourne Big Day Out, 2008.

Morelike Eater Sunday.
Yeah that guy in the front row knows what I'm talking about.

The Paper Chase

The Paper Chase sound a little like if Fall Out Boy developed manic schizophrenia.. or got bitten by zombies... or both! Their speciality is heart-racing horror music stapled to panicked lyrics with the linguistic equivalent of teen horror movie clichés. It sounds like being tossed in drunk to a haunted house and dealing with alarming close rhythm sections and scary violin stabs and slasher sound effects.

The Paper Chase – We Know Where You Sleep (from 2006's Now You Are One of Us)

The Paper Chase – The Common Cold (from the forthcoming Someday This Could All Be Yours available May 5)

Andrew Bird

Andrew Bird is a lot more relaxing than The Paper Chase. He’s also a wordy warbler, and one of the world’s best whistler. Track titles like Anonanimal at least forewarn of the tongue twisting to come. 'Underneath the stalactites, the troglodytes lost their sight, oh.’ He sings with dreamy smoothness. ‘The seemingly innocuous plecostomus though posthumous they talk to us, they talk too much.' The words have no sharp edges, sing-songed about with charming casualness. Bird is a prolific composer and takes inspiration primarily from American and European folk, but he is also aroused by a long month’s worth of Discovery channel material, finding feeling in east-European circuses, Egyptian marketplaces and deep sea gardens. Everything he plays shares the same relaxed breeziness, fluttering about with simple complexity much like nature itself. All inspired by some fanciful whistle.

Andrew Bird - Anonanimal (from the Noble Beast LP out now)

Kanye West
I’m not even going to talk about auto-tune or Kanye’s ego here, just basketball. NBA playoffs start tomorrow and if you contain testosterone and get boners for montages the new official promo featuring Kanye's Amazing is for you. That said it is a little peculiar in places.. Suns cheerleader practicing for next season? Ray Allen diving to save a ball from going out of court, but not making it. That’s how you do wrists, Ray.

Kanye West - Amazing (from 2008’s 808’s and Heartbreak LP.)

http://bt.davka.info/ Basketball Torrents Basketball Torrents.

After fifteen minutes of microwaving I had lunch today and it was delicious. Stunning even. The meal and recipe aren't important here; it was my impeccable leftover reparation that deserves spotlighting. When it came time to eat the vegetables were lush in texture, soft enough to break apart with ease yet fibrous enough to indicate all their vitamins were still intact. The pasta hadn't been generously sauced but it remained al dente, firm to bite but soft to touch. The chicken, bacon, ham, onion and capsicum in the sauce each maintained their original, separate consistencies thanks to my slow-defrost, slow-bake reheat technique. A day ago I'd begun the ten hours defrost in the fridge, followed by 4.5 hours defrost at room temperature. My new, large Decor food storage then gave me the capacity to stir without risk of losing lunch over the sides. Six minutes on medium low, then five minutes on medium, interspaced with four minutes of thorough stirring gave me a scrumptious, evenly heated, moist pasta meal despite over a week passing from its original cooking. NASA have been in contact, observing my pleasure in tastiness from orbiting satellite. I will be moving to Houston to help coordinate the long-term feeding strategy for the first manned flight to Mars.

Normally WeatherZone will never put the chance of rain higher than 90%. Except for this Saturday. The extra 5% chance is because it's ANZAC Day. Honestly, if we had ANZAC Day monthly – apart from making the RSL super happy – we probably wouldn't have a drought in this country.
I love rain. Earlier this week when I saw that we were due to get the last four months total rainfall over a day and a half I excitedly went out to Harris Scarfe to buy a weatherproof jacket so that I could revel in the elements while still getting to work dry enough to rewrite variable names in some SQL Server stored procedures. I wore it to work today and... it didn't rain, but by the time I left and headed towards West Terrace it was dark and windy and the rain... well it didn't rain but it was very damp. And I felt good, maybe because of the first real rain in a long time, maybe because tomorrow was Casual Friday and therefore about 29% weekend.
So I charged down North Terrace with extra vigour while people I walked past seemed hesitant and scared and without weatherproof jackets. While I powered on by some of them huddled from the wind behind walls or braced themselves behind documents or satchels as they walked. It was then I realised that these people were only walking in the opposite direction to me, and part of my higher than normal speed was because of an epic tail wind.

Today I was going to post some MP3s that reminded me of different stages of rain. But I didn't. Although I could. Or I could just post Justin Timberlake's latest collab and an unplugged Big Country song. I dunno, do you care?

I was thinking about this as the last 10.3 seconds of an extremely close playoff game stretched to 15 minutes on One this evening. I've been watching a lot of NBA lately, mostly because it's the only kind of basketball that doesn't make me sad. Seeing my friends and old teams play it, or even the 36ers sometimes I just think how I wish I could be doing that too. But with NBA I could never do the things they do. Not with that attitude anyway.

Currently the NBA player I want to be is Rondo from the Boston Celtics because he has epic hand strength and can run the court and then lay the ball up without ever having the ball closer than arm length to his body. Also he shoots 3s and no one ever says to him "Rondo stop shooting fucking 3s and go in there for rebounds" to him.

If you could be an NBA player who would you be?