I was fortunate to get out walking a fair bit this weekend - work was bringing me down in numerous ways, and all I could do was try to walk it off.

Usually an hour or two's enough to calm me down, but I found myself restless by the late afternoon and had to go for another.

I kept going on Sunday morning

and found a few back streets of Collingwood I hadn't been down, yet.

meanwhile, the keep clear set grows steadily larger.

The Ed Kuepper juggernaut continues with some live recordings now available (try the nice piano-laden version of By The Way on that myspace page). I found this out while reading an article on popular search terms that suggested:

More people search for Ed Kuepper than Chris Bailey in Australia, and more people for Chris Bailey in the UK.

and

Australia is leading the world for searches on "purple monkey dishwasher". I'm not making this stuff up.

...and while I'm going mad ordering things off people's myspace pages, I should also mention the new Stephen Cummings album Happiest Man Alive. Go get one. You know it'll be good.

The rest of those Brunswick walk photos are up, by the way.

Get yerself down to the Collingwood Gallery on 292 Smith St over the next 2 weeks to see some of my friends' work up on the wall as part of the Unsensored '08 exhibition. Check out this ice photography piece, for instance.

Finally, a morning where I could go for a wander. Time's been tight, lately. Brunswick's never too far away, and there always seems to be something to look at if you wander into enough side streets. Here's what I took with the cameraphone - there'll be more from the Canonet when I get the roll(s) of film developed.

[ more photos from today's wander around brunswick. ]

I can sorta remember Mr Tom ranting about the sameness of Meat Beat Manifesto albums back when Subliminal Sandwich came out, but in any case his latest rant has a spot-on description of how most MBM albums start off. It's all true. I bought Autoimmune, of course, though I'm still waiting for it to speak to me. MBM are one of my (many) guilty pleasures.

So there I was listening to a lovely Laura Cantrell song, wondering why I thought I'd heard the words somewhere before. Oh. Well, how about that?

I haven't had much free time to drag the DSLR around much lately - almost all my recent photos have been taken with my phone - I don't have enough room in one bag for everything (and if I did, I'd have a sore back!). Some kinda rangefindery film camera had been in my thoughts for a while, though maybe not at the price of, say, a Bessa R2 that tempted me from the window of a second hand shop.

Not long after I saw Bessa and thought better of it, Hamish showed me his Canonet, which he'd recommended previously as a cheap but good entry point into the land of rangefinders - a little ebaying later, and here's mine:

I'm a little late to the bandwagon (as usual). I guess I'm supposed to grow a beard now, and run down the street proclaiming that autofocus will be the death of us all...

...at least, once I get the hang of this thing (especially the scanning afterwards).

It wasn't until after I took this screenshot of my last.fm profile and put it on flickr that I realised today's the 7th of the 7th. I don't even pretend to know what this all means - fortunately I'm not superstitious (though my mother wasn't keen on me cutting my fingernails on Sundays when I was younger).

Severed Heads are no more. This 5-disc boxed set collects a bunch of their earlier work. I only became a full-on fan at the start of the 90's (thanks, again, to a little show on 3PBS-FM that played lots of interesting electronic music on Sunday evenings), but collected whatever I could since then. There's plenty of other good stuff still available, too.

It started with Cuisine - the CD shop at Monash Uni used to let you rent discs back then - I rented it, and ended up buying it. Bulkhead, a compilation of singles and 12" mixes (remember them?), soon followed. Before long I found a mailing list on the internet for like-minded souls...

Tom Ellard continues anon.