the corner office

This is turning out to be another fabulously rainy weekend. I went into gym this morning - I'm growing quite enamoured of the Roodepoort Virgin Active - a lot quieter than the others around us. Spent the afternoon getting some work done, then R & I went into Rosebank for dinner with AT who's up in Joburg on business. Always a hoot meeting up with him. P&L didn't join us on account of today being their 10th anniversary (of going out). After dinner, we popped into Exclusive Books which as usual has bugger all of interest to me.

I expected the same from CD Wherehouse, but actually came out with a few new CDs. First, shock bloody horror, they had a copy of the Oneida/Liars 'Atheists, Reconsider' compilation. Oneida cover a few Liars songs, and Liars return the favour. Fine album. I cleaned out the last two Meteors albums CDW had: 'Psycho Down' and 'Psychobilly', the last of which is released on "I Used To F*** People Like You In Prison" Records. I can imagine a new warning label being legislated by the Decency Police: "Parental Advisory. Explicit Record Company". Yeah. Also picked up the 25th anniversary edition of Deep Purple's 'Fireball'.

It kind of grates: I have almost all the Deep Purple albums up to Who Do We Think We Are. Now they've all been re-released, remastered and dollied up with unreleased and alternative tracks, new liner notes, the lot. Many bands end up doing this. Now, if you're a completist, it's pretty much a given you're going to shell out just to get those extra bonus tracks. And once you've done that you're going to consider getting the boxed bloody sets with even more unreleased material. Considering how the record companies would like to limit what we're entitled to do with the CDs we cough up for, I think the reasonable flipside is that one should be able to trade in older versions of albums when they re-release 'em with new stuff. (Update: the 25th anniversary of Fireball was 1996, which tells you how long ago I built up my Deep Purple collection. So perhaps I'm just talking nonsense. It took me 8 years to notice the new edition. Then again, now that I know the other albums also have extra goodies, I want 'em all)

On another note, as we were driving home, we got a message from P, saying that her and L are now engaged. Congratulations!