Playlist by Emmjay

Ruby Tuesday – Melanie Safka  1971-2

Look What They’ve Done to My Song – Melanie Safka with Miley Cyrus (2015)

Ruby Tuesday – Coors and Ron Wood

Don’t Walk Away Renee – The Left Banke – 1966

Walk Away Renee – Billy Bragg – 1988

Don’t Walk Away Renee – The Left Banke – 2010

Because the Night – Patti Smith Band 1978

Because the Night – Patti Smith  2015

Story by Emmjay

Every New Year’s Eve, I ponder the enormously wasteful spectacle of the New Year’s Eve Fireworks display over Sydney Harbour. I think about how we are colluding in the sending of 6 tonnes worth of exploding air pollution over the magnificent Sydney Harbour Bridge and environs.

And I think about the huge cost of the fireworks that might otherwise pay for a bit of accommodation for Sydney’s homeless folk. Yes, yes, I get it – tourists will spend millions of their hard earned cash to crowd the foreshores to watch the same crap year after year after year. Fortunately this year, there’ll be some kind of allocation of paid perv spots, assiduously policed to make sure that the great unwashed and mostly tanked up masses play by the rules of Covid commerce.

But then… somebody has come up with the brilliant multi-functional use of skyrockets to send grandpa and grandma’s ashes into the inky near-blackness of a Sydney night sky – for distribution all over the Bridge and environs – and hopefully on the bonces of the nonces in attendance. Of course they wouldn’t do that, would they ? Sydney councils being what they are, I’m betting that an exceptionally low orbit arc for Nan and Pop might more likely end up over the municipal tip, or just outside the metro area. A shot into the hinterland, if you will.

The above photo is real ! Courtesy of the Marrickville Metro carpark. I put it down to somebody with a friend in the car sign-writing business watching too much Netflix.

For those of us insufficiently well-heeled to spit a bit of our ancestors into space, the final send-off might well be … light the blue touch paper, stand back and see off a rello … a few hundred feet up, up and away. Not with a whimper, but a bang – or a starburst or whatever. And heaven forbid if your Pop’s celestial vehicle is a fizzer.

The world we seem to be living in is bizarre beyond belief. You couldn’t make this shit up !

This year I am determined to not watch Jeremy Fernandez, Zan Rowe and Charlie Pickering pushing barrow-loads of faux mirth up a very steep hill, introducing B and C grade performers blasting it out in front of the Opera House. My resistance tank is empty. I just cannot face this again.

But in the spirit of camaraderie of the patrons and contributors to the Pig’s Arms, I wish you, one and all, a far less crappy 2022, a bucket of Pink Drink or Trotter’s Ale and immunity to whatever you need to be immune.

Stay tuned for our latest Pig-Tel development – Pig-Tel Bullshit Repellent.

Fond regards,

Emmjay.

Lockdown has provided a massive opportunity to romp through the best TV ever made. Once we exhausted Vera (The modern British version of Colombo), I slept through most of Midsummer Murders (REALLY ? Every week somebody gets knocked off in some bizarre ritual killing driven usually by greed and revenge). Surely if that happened in your borough, you’d move somewhere else.

Of course, there’s the many series of Death in Paradise. Same – but on a Caribbean Island. Shetland… what is it with islands and houses in isolated places that draws the murderers ?

And on SBS On Demand, for Pete’s (or was it Olaf’s) sake Sandhamn Murders on a Swedish Island where people go to bed in broad daylight. There’s more sex and a lot of drinking, teenage misadventure, infidelity, quite a lot of bicycle riding, running and scooting about in boats, more drinking, a lot of cop procedural but with that freelance nordic style casual dress and fine dining detective work.

There is a good looking boy cop played by a series of handsome nordic blokes, whose rather attractive – not too attractive but rather available female offsider would be a good sub at a pinch but the up close work is never consummated – leaving room for some tension with the female lead who starts out being a banking lawyer, and somehow morphs into a prosecutor who frequently finds herself running alternatively into the handsome detective and her ex-husband. There’s quite a lot of teenage girls being drugged and locked up in boats, and small lighthouse towers, quite a few mysterious drownings, amazing tans, lots of Volvos and BMWs and truly lovely seaside houses. Broken and repaired marriages. Traumatised children of divorced marriages, dodgy real estate deals and fraud. This is one island rich in motives, heads banged on rocks and bodies recovered from the sea in various stages of disrepair. Did I mention the drinking ? There are many bedside hospital scenes with people clinging to life and but for one or two, pulling through (Go for it Big and Hung !)

And everyone sounds like the Swedish chef in the Muppets.

But when it all boils down, Columbo is the real deal. The daddy sleuth of them all. Peter Falk won several golden globes / emmys and millions of fans.

Note Colombo started at the same time as Bluey – what contrasting styles !

ANd the late night send-up… revoiced Bargearse

Story by Emmjay

I was too young to be allowed to go to the 196x concert, but I was there in 1973!

Somewhat up he back – closer to Redfern than the Randwick Racecourse stage and with the aid of herbal chemistry, I have to admit I might have missed a bit of the Sydney concert. So many distractions…and so few big screens (none, really since it was way before they were invented).

Around the same time I went to Santana at the Horden Pavilion – although I can’t forget “Black Magic Woman”, I can and have forgotten everything else. Drats.

OK, sometimes the screaming is pretty annoying, but the first 15 minutes are classic Beatles Rock ‘n Roll. They really do rock it out !