Christ! look at the time... the year's getting away already! And what have you done? What have I done? Well, I've done the first Blue Ring Records gig guide for 2011. Here is is:

Wednesday January 5 I reckon you could go to the Whitmore Hotel and watch the Shades of Blue band with Mike Barnes on the vocal cords.

Thursday January 6 Sweet Baby James and Rob Eyers will be in 2011 heaven at the Gilbert Street Hotel at dinner time - Yes!!! 7 pm till 10 pm. 

Friday, January 7, SWEET BABY JAMES & ROB EYERS, HALFWAY TO FORTH will be at the Wheatsheaf Hotel, Thebarton.

Also on Thursday January 6 the Cat's Pyjamas will be hosting a "walk-up" event at the Gaslight Tavern, West Hindmarsh from 9 pm. Bring your guitar or melodica but leave your harmonica at home, please.

Saturday night, January 8 who could not go to the Governor Hindmarsh Hotel to help the Fat Elvises celebrate Elvis's birthday in the way they know best - with offensive irreverence. As as special bonus - like a bacon double-cheeseburger - Chad Romero and the ... the.... Romanoffs or something will be snorting drugs in the blue room waiting for the Fat Boys to fuk off so they can fill the room with cream cheese. Book at somewhere - look it up at the Gov website - or buy tickets at the door.

Sunday January 9 it's the Steve Brown Band - just back for a highly successful OVERSEAS gig on Hindmarsh Island - performing at the Semaphore Workers Club from 5 am! Stevo, Davo, Denno, Jeffo and Pete-o will be grinding out the steamy blues that is Brownie's trademark. Don't be late, you'll miss soundcheck.

Looking ahead: Catch the Lonely Cosmonauts at the Old Queens Arms on 1January 14.

A salutary tale: Looking back over any fukup big or small you can see, with the clarity hindsight brings to the task, that the pathway to the shitpit was already in place from the moment the first step was taken.  It was already mapped out in the Cosmos, like a series of directions in a Tom Tom.  All my fukups have followed what – in retrospect – was  essentially a roadmap to failure. It’s a wonder Gregory’s hasn’t published the map book on fuckups. If they had, Cousin Perry would have got 2001 away to a better start. As it is, he is waiting for Aunty Phyllis to get out of hospital and write him out of her will.
Aunty Phyl has the personality of an inflamed boil in the armpit and is a as welcome anywhere as a dog turd on a picnic blanket, but in her part of the family she holds the purse strings and a lump of desirable property down the coast, hence Cousin Perry’s sycophantic attachment to the irritating crone .  She is ancient and unsteady on her pins, choosing a walking stack as a means of gaining stability and reaching out to other people – to jab and prod them to do her bidding. Her demands on Cousin Perry were escalating with her increasing instability and loss of fitness for the steady uphill ascent to their house from the shops. So, rather than actually assist the old hag, Perry – another of the family blessed with the inventor gene –came up with an apparently easy solution: he fitted a large suction cup to the end of Aunty’s walking stick.
What a boon it was! It kept her steady on her way down the hill, with a lanyard looped around her wrist to prevent its loss she was able to jab it onto upright surfaces to pull herself forward or to create a barrier so that others could not pass in front of her. She loved that upgraded stick; it allowed her to become her nagging, overbearing, over-opinionated bullying self once more. So, when retired Colonel Richard Tully scooted past on his Gopher – a mode of transport she despised – she let him have a volley of abuse.
“Use your legs,” she remonstrated. “War hero, my elbow! You’re just too lazy to walk; you’re a limp ‘Dick’… and your ‘friend’ Mrs Titswobble agrees with me… etc e, etc.” Until the Colonel uttered some remark under his breath and turned his Gopher to speed away.
“Come back and say that to my face, you coward,” snapped Aunty Phyllis and jabbed her walking stick at the Colonel’s departing head. His bald head.
The suction cup stuck firmly to the bald pate of the Colonel who, being aware he was under attack , gunned his Gopher and dragged the screaming old bag off her feet and two and a half kilometers back to the old people’s home. There wasn’t much left of Phyllis by the time the Colonel came to a stop at the hospice but, out of a sense of duty, the nurses gathered what they could, jammed it back together and tossed it on a hospital gurney. That she survived is a testament to the old witch’s desire for revenge; hence Cousin Perry’s trepidation.
But… looking at the event from this end, you could see the seamless progression from idea to fuckup that should have been obvious to Cousin Perry when he used his brain to avoid filial responsibility. It was plain as a road map; you could’ve read it in Gregory’s.