Merry Christmas One and All

Merry Christmas everyone. I hope your Christmas Day was full of joy, and free of injuries associated with giving the barbecue a nudge with lighter fluid, poorly executed fart lighting contests, or seeing if Auntie Doreen would get pissed off if you flick her arse with a teatowel.
I also hope your Boxing Day has been restful and you were able to destroy everyone in your path at Northlands when you went in to exchange all your gifts and get a pile of sick bargains with all your new gift cards.
Here's a clip I saw the other night. I don't think it was filmed here, but when I saw it I immediately got excited about Christmas Day in Reservoir.


With a Bullet

APRA AMCOS keep stats on which Australian postcodes have the most songwriters registered with them. Apparently back in 2003 Reservoir was sitting comfortably at number 29. Seems plausible, since it's a list of 30, and let's face it: you want to try, but you don't want to try too hard and look like a wanker do you? 

Somewhere in the last decade though, Reservoir ceased to make the "top" list of songwriters, and rejoined the "growing" list. I'm trying to work out why. It could be that the hard rock writers of Rezza realised that all the great songs have already been written by ACDC, and politely bowed out of the contest. Or it could be that all the blues writers began to question the plausibility of starting songs about Reservoir with "I woke up this morning....". Or perhaps the dance writers were imprisoned in a meth siege several years ago and have yet to be reported missing due to several hundred facebook friends who keep tagging them every Saturday night, creating the illusion that they are still around, but just very busy clubbing.

Personally though, I think it's just Reservoir's generosity of spirit that bumped us out of the top 30. When you've reached the top it's only right to wind things down and give someone else a go. Unless Geelong make the top 30 of course. It's fucking on if they make it.

Feeling Festive

Tonight I'm finally starting to feel the Christmas spirit, even though all the domestic light displays have been up  for precisely 20 days and the biker who manages the childrens' crossing on Plenty road has been wearing his Santa hat to work for a couple of weeks. Rezza has finally begun to cut sick tonight, busting out the "1986 With a Bullet" cd's, and discreetly testing their stockpiles of illegal fireworks in backyards and school playgrounds ahead of the Rezza New Year's Eve spectacular.
I'd like to give all my non-Reservoirian readers a hot tip that I only discovered last year when I stayed at home on NYE following an unexpected December 29-30 blowout: the fireworks in Rezza on New Year's Eve are by far superior to the ones in the city. You can position yourself pretty much anywhere in Reservoir between 11pm and 2am on New Year's Eve and the sky will be awash with a staggering and highly unpredictable display of pyrotechnics. The soundtrack is heaps better too. I've never felt so prepared to embark on a new year as I did in 2014, when "Thunderstruck" started belting from my neighbour's garage right on the stroke of midnight, just as all hell broke loose in the sky.

Let There Be Light

Last night I discovered that Geelong has an interactive domestic Christmas light map, to help you plan your itinerary when you decide to make a voyeuristic outing centred around the struggle between ostentatious yuletide displays and the carbon footprint. 



Obviously my first response was awe, but shortly thereafter I realised that if any region needs a domestic Christmas light map it's Reservoir. So I took a few moments and threw one together, based on my various investigations in the past. I hope this helps.