As you can see from this Wikipedia list of countries in the Southern Hemisphere, any claim made of the largest or longest or anythingest "in the Southern Hemisphere" is pretty friggin' lame.

Ooo, I have the shortest hair of any late 20's males in my immediate vicinity.

I rule!

The Truth were one of my favourite Melbourne bands of the mid 90's along with The Sharp. Enough to build a fan page. Not enough to keep it up to date.

For reasons I cannot remember I googled them today and discovered something interesting.

I already knew that Nicky Bomba went on to form his band Bomba after The Truth broke up after their less than popular second album.

Recently I also learnt that The Truth's keyboard player is playing in Bomba.

What I didn't know was that The Truth's guitarist, Geoff Wells went on to become a session musician playing with Daryl Braithwaite, Tina Arena and finally John Farnham on his "I Can't Believe He's 50" tour, released on the "Live At The Regent Theatre" live album. The song "The Way" on John's "33 1/3" album is Geoff's.

He's still working with Daryl and is working on what sounds like a cover album with his band The Geoff Wells Experiment.

Most of this info was found on Geoff's mySpace page, proving that that most horrible of internet disasters has had at least one use.

Links:

• Geoff Wells's internet herpes page
• Wikipedia Nicky Bomba and Bomba
• Geoff Wells on the band page of a John Farnham fan page

The best thing to happen to music is digital.

That includes everything from CDs onwards.

I've just bought a record player (thanks to some xmas money) and I can clearly say that whatever you may think about analog vs. digital, one unavoidable fact remains...

You can scratch the "playing" surface of a CD and it doesn't matter. The actual "data" of a CD is protected by a significantly thick piece of clear plastic that only has to let light through to work. As long as you don't break the "paint" surface of a CD, it'll still contain the music.

A vinyl record on the other-hand only needs the lightest of light scuffs to lose it's "data". You can clean and buff and wash a vinyl all you like, but if it's scratched, it's effectively ruined.

Yes technically vinyl can map the various movements of soundwaves a little better due to it's analog nature. Yes digital music is lossy by it's very nature, having to convert a perfect sound wave into various "bits" will lose subtlety that can be mapped by vinyl.

But you can buy a $10 computer CD player and a 50 cent scuffed to crap second hand CD, clean and buff it's surface and get a perfect copy of that music just as if it was recorded yesterday.

Try that with a vinyl.

I have. You can't.

All the other arguments simply don't matter to me. I want to hear, and keep the music. Sure, you can get amazing quality out of equipment that costs more than a car, by treating your records with more care you'd take with a new born baby. That goes for anything.

So while I'm very happy I can hear my vinyls for the first time in ages, and happy to be able to buy cheap vinyl-only music, they're being digitally transferred and in digital format they will stay...

I will say one thing though.

When all the computers melt down, and all the power goes out, vinyl shows its one benefit over all other music formats.

You can conceivably play and amplify a vinyl record without power.