sammi needham : suckonnit

Monday before the cup day public holiday, we (at Sputnik) have been growing a tradition of an extra day off to extend the break to four days. This wekend has so far been fun filled and after doing a few chors around the house, i’m starting to get excited about having our first christmas in Footscray. After the whipper snipper broke upon it’s 2nd use, i haven’t been able to cut the lawn, so i bit the bullet and went and grabbed a cheap new electric edger and mower. GMC make cool / cheap gear that does the trick for an incredibly low price. My goal is to have nice lawn for christmas. At the moment it is a bit of a shambes, but hopefully i can change that now that i have the right tools.

Friday night we went to te international rules match at Telstra Dome with a couple of Irish folk and watch them get their asses hauled in a firey battle to regain the cup (or whatever it is you get when you win an international rules game).

Later that weekend it was time to off the cover of the bbq for the ceremonial 1st bbq of this years daylight savings. The first of many this summer, i am sure. I also upped some speaker brackets in the back yard and hung some old speaks on them that i have connected to the B channel on my amp. I spent a fair ammount of time this weekend lying in the hammock listening to them. It was blissful. I get a perfect reception on the laptop to my wireless inside too, so there’s not much reason to go inside anymore - except to get more beer, or meat.

So the iTunes store in australia has finally been launched. After over a year of whinging that there is nowhere to legitamately download songs in australia without using the horribly horrible bigpond feces music store that i could never get to work on my mac anyway.

Just like the Japan store, Sony is not on board, and that seems to have a bigger impact than i thought it would, but there are rumblings that a deal has been signed or is very close to being signed. I’m sure all the music in their catalogue is ready to go and just waiting in the wings for that pen on paper. I can’t imagine they’d be unprepared for such a deal.

Searching for a lot of artists gives less than mediocre results, for an Australian store launch, you’d think that an icon like John Farnham would have got a guernsey, but alas searching for him returns only limited results, and even those are for the Johnny Farnham of yesteryear.

However i would have thought that an artist such as Pearl Jam would be well represented, but alas, they don’t even rate a mention.

So there’s still a fair way to go, but i am very pleased it is finally here and i have already ramped up my involvement in music. I figured there wasn’t much point buying anymore discs until this thing launched as i was only going to digitise the music and lose the disc anyway. I’m quite happy paying $16.99 from iTunes.

For the record, my first purchase was the pre-release EP of Bernard Fanning’s Tea & Sympathy. It’s very good. My only hope is that the catalogue gets the attention it deserves and ITMS release dates don’t get too far behind.