tomhoward

I love to think that it’s your shared love of Custard that’s kept you and your wife together all this time!

I too wrote for my campus newspaper - Monash Caulfield. I didn’t interview Custard (I did interview Snout, Earthmen and Atticus). But in some shoebox in storage are some Kodak instant camera prints of me and my uni mates with Dave and Matt when they played at our campus in 98. Such a wonderful time to be young.

Well, Triple Z is an independent/community station, not ABC!

I know that song/line well and remember mentions of Custard being “banned” by Triple Z in the band’s early days, but I can’t find any details. Do you know why they banned/smashed their music?

I suspect they had him in mind right from the start and even developed the character for him.

Custard/McCormack are Brisbane-based and Bluey has been produced from a Brisbane studio since the very beginning. The writers/producers would have known and liked his music and voice, and probably someone there already knew him personally. Bluey is shown on ABC in Australia and Custard has always had lots of airplay on ABC TV and radio stations.

For those not aware…

The voice actor for Bandit, Dave McCormack, was not previously known as an actor or voice artist, but he has been known in Australia since the early 90s as an indie rock band frontman.

The band he fronted, Custard, started getting airplay on Australia’s national youth radio station, Triple J, in about 1993, and they became a staple of the live music scene - especially uni student bars, live rock pubs and summer festivals - for all the 90s. They quit in 2000 but reformed in 2009 and are still recording albums and playing gigs.

They’re worth checking out [1] if you were into quirky 90s bands like Ween, Dino Jr, Flaming Lips, Ben Folds Five, etc. Full of grungy chords and riffs but mostly major key, happy/fun/funny compositions and lyrics. Very high energy and entertaining. Some nice slower jangly country ballads thrown in there too.

I think they’re the only band I ever stage-dived to, so I guess technically I’ve been “on stage with Bluey’s dad”.

Most music lovers in Australia now in their 40s knew of them, and I’m sure it was a factor in the casting to tap into the nostalgia of the people who are now parents of the kids Bluey is aimed at.

[1] It’s all on Spotify/Apple Music etc. Wisenheimer and Wahooti Fandango are their peak albums and Apartment, Lucky Star, Pack Yr Suitcase and Singlette are the songs that best convey their vibe.

They’ve cranked up the fees for renewals. New registrations of .com domains are €11 whereas renewals are €32. Some long-tail TLDs are much much more.

When you have as many domains (i.e. amazing future business opportunities!) as I do, that adds up to a lot.

So one by one I’m moving them all to Porkbun. Seems great so far.

I can imagine it doesn’t matter so much if you don’t have many domains.

I felt a lump in my throat as it came to mind while I drove around today with my 4yo son in the back, thinking about how to give him a “good life”.

Good on you for being willing to try improving.

HN doesn’t really distinguish between “punching down” and “punching up”, and prefers to avoid “punching” at all.

The guiding principle to keep top of mind is “intellectual curiosity”. There’s a place for an intellectually curious discussion about the history and present day meaning of the word “shibboleth”, and the way you commented brings that to a screeching halt. And even if someone else seems to be acting like a bit of a jerk in the comments, it doesn’t make it OK to do it too.

But as you say, you’ll try to do better which is great.

That’s not my argument at all. You’re responding to a straw man interpretation of what I wrote.

I’m saying that for a country like the US, the idea that brain-draining the best from the rest of the world will have unmitigated positive outcomes is false.

I’m just saying every perceived benefit has some kind of cost or perverse consequence, eventually. Please feel free to point to a specific example of a policy that has been successfully implemented that contradicts this principle.

Yes of course but when articles like this (and the general policy/assumption in the US) just blankly asserts that we can just “brain-drain” our way back to prosperity and dominance, there isn’t much nuanced consideration of the limits, caveats and tradeoffs inherent to that approach, which need much more than an HN comment or brief blog post to fully explore.