The world adores matt hayward

It truly is the end of an era. This Friday, i’m afraid the XR suffers a fate worse than death. No, not the knackers yard, the auction house. She’ll go under the hammer to her next owner like a lamb to the slaughter. Bugger. The two year lease has ended and I will be carless.

To be completely honest, except for some initial troubles (because I believed a salesman when he told me ‘don’t worry about the 5000K service! It’s nothing!’) not a bloody thing has gone wrong. The power? Well do you really have to ask, it’s never dissapointed. The handling, for a standard family car near perfect. It’s chuckability… well lets just say it can always put a smile on your face. Torque? More than you could ever believe. Try taking off in fifth gear in your laser. Just a word of advice, that cloud of black smoke behind you is the clutch! Comfort? We’ll it wasn’t made for luxury, but the ride is sporty and it’s very well equipped without being soppy.

Well was it all perfect? The best love stories never are. New owner I give you one piece of advice. Don’t look in the driver’s side rear view mirror. Because you’ll see that none of the door panels line up. So instead of this great long, perfectly machined stripe of metal, you get a rough cut outline of panels crudely thrown together. This is not the panel fit of skilled craftsmen. IPod connector for the stereo? Dear sir, you must be joking! How’s the traction control? Well crude to say the least. It shuts down cylinders all the time and sounds terrible. God only knows what damage it does to the engine. Also, you can get pretty sideways before it kicks in.

And the size of the vehicle you ask? Well it’s just plain stupidly big. Not the big that you can fit handy stuff in. You know like drum kits, [presumably] prams, beds and stuff. Because the back door access is just plain stupid. It’s a very poor design. And for a car of its size, bloody useless. So you lug around this huge car, that’s actually bloody difficult to fit anything useful in. The economy. Just don’t ask. If it wasn’t leased, I would’ve been a bum with a big smile on my face begging for pennies for Optimax.

All in all however, it’s often the shortcomings that make something truly magical. This will no doubt be one of the best cars i’ve ever owned. For a car that you can thrash around like a real rock and roller in all weekend, then give to your girlfriend to drive to the shops, chances are she’s not going sizeways into a telephone pole. Try that in an old school muscle car of this ilk. It’s comfy on long drives, it puts importt cars back in their place and you can easily lease it and get it fixed. Most importantly, it has effortless power where you need it. In the middle of the rev range! So it could still sort a VE Commodore out if driven properly. And it doesn’t look overdone either.

I won’t miss parking it, but god I will miss this car. Long live the king. The mity XR6 Turbo.

Yes i’m aware of the tautology in the title. But are you aware how many small (well quite large small) cars look the same these days. I was looking at this story on autoblog today about a sporty Kia. Then I thought cool! Just like the V8 Hyundai, the Koreans are finally going for the heart with their wares, and not just the wallet. Well that is all good except for the fact, they should do it with a clean slate. Because this car looks cool, like a VW Golf, and the new Subaru Impreza, and the BMW 1 series, and the Mazda 3 …

Hell there’s nothing wrong with being derivative. Or for that matter doing something out of spite. But ALL small cars are starting to have the same silhouette. When the first Golf came out, it bore a resemblance to the Peugeot 307 (so did the Corolla).

This can only mean one thing. Small cars are going bloody gang busters all over the world and no one can shift enough product. So smaller players are trying to get their hustle on and bring out products quick smart to get some of that sweet, sweet market share. Mmmmm. Why waste R&D dollars when there’s such a good recipe already out there?

It’s bloody dissapointing, not only that when Kia put their best foot forward (finally) it looks like a 3 way between a Lexus, VW Golf and a Mazda 3. What really sucks is that the Subaru Impreza just looks like everyone else now. Except for its flat four boxer engine, it may as well be this Kia (pictured right).

That’s right Japan’s most individual brand, the Saab of the orient, has finally got a blue pinstripe suit and an office gig. Toyota has come in and now the bright spark is making coffee for the corporate types at Toyota. So I guess the other culprit is all these big corporate mergers. Now that there are only so few owners, all the cars are beginning to look the same. Because hey man, if they won’t buy you out, you can’t beat ‘em, so join em!

R.I.P. the individual unique hot hatch. Maybe Peugeot will save us yet with something as good as the GTi6 was in the nineties.

The problem with that big box with the silver screen in the living room is it doesn’t have a keyboard. It’s dumb. It can’t tell you the weather. It has no idea that there’s a far more useful box upstairs called, the computer. Seldom the domain of the female of the species, the computer connects to something called the internet and can access a plethora of movies, videos and christ knows what else! So if one fines what’s on the dumb silver screen uninteresting, chances are, they’re upstairs on the computer trying to find something interesting. And so the female of the species complains. Bugger. If only there were a way to combine the two . . .

Well bugger me dead, there is! It’s called a Phillips Streamium SLM5500. It provides a wifi link between your computer and your TV. So now anything on your PC can be watched the way it was intended. Rather than all cramped up on your desk in the study. And let me tell you, it’s bloody brilliant. It’s a box no bigger than a lunchbox with an aerial out the back. But the best thing is that the box blends in perfectly with the stupid silver screen. It doesn’t look like a computer at all! Nor does it make a stupid whirring noise.

To set it up, you plug it in, and after about 40 mins of setup (it’s fiddly, but it’s not that difficult. Not nerd difficult, but not iPod easy). There’s also some software you have to setup on your PC. It tells the streamer what directories you want to share out. From here on in, it’s driven by a very simple, quality remote control. All the menus on your TV screen are simple, clear and easily usable. No complex navigation.

At this point your probably asking, ‘does it have a hard drive?’. The simple answer is I don’t know! Does it run an operating system? Dunno. Frankly, it works and I don’t care. There are more complicated media gates out there. But I dare say there not as living room, or female friendly as this one. And besides, you don’t necessarily want to save everything to your media gate. I don’t. I’m quite happy to stream them. It’s a living room, not a laboratory.

Load time for movies is OK. It takes about 3 seconds to buffer the file you want to watch. And get this, I accidentally left it on for about 12 hours. I came home from work and it hadn’t stopped. It paused for about 20 seconds AFTER 12 HOURS OF CONTINUOUS PLAYBACK, and then just kept truckin’. No dramas at all. So far it hasn’t overheated, reset or shat itself in anyway. One thing is though, when you turn it on, it does take almost a minute to load and get on the network. But who cares, it looks good!

So there you have it, If you can find one they’re cheap, relatively simple and they make your TV useful again. My suggestion is bloody well buy one now. It easily plays files of your PC, there’s no FTP, no Linux, no shared drives and very little stuffing around. What more do you want?

Holy Crap this movie is out there. I mean after all, it’s meant to be based on one guy’s real life story and if ANYONE has lived this life, they deserve a Nobel Peace Prize!

If it sounds like some tame Weird Al Jankovic comedy thing, you’re way off. It’s a hip, period drama set in the mid 70s about a young effeminite boys painful childhood. His narcissistic mum is obsessed with becoming a famed poet. But let’s face it what poets are famous in their life time, let alone rich or admired? As his mum slips further into her psyhosis, her relationship with her alcholic husband detereorates. At a tender young age when a boy needs at least one strong role model, his family is falling apart.

They seek marriage counselling, with a psychiatrist. Which soon lapses into treatment of the mother. Eventually they divorce, but as the mum becomes junked up on the valium of the time, our main man is forced to move in with his mum’s pyschiatrist. His dad completely abandons him. He’s barely a teenager.

His pychiatrist pseudo parent lives in a psychedelic trash pile of a mansion that looked like The Greatful Dead partied there with the Manson Family. The only constant is total and utter dysfunction. The psychiatrist is a nearly retired mirror image of Freud, who’s tremendously caring, but verging on insane. He’s adopted three other patient’s kids, one of whom is played by Gwenyth Paltrow, range from the sublimely cool to the ridiculously neurotic.

Life only gets more twisted through the main character’s teens. He becomes gay, after starting a relationship with his skitzophrenic step-brother. Also finding out that his other siblings have equally been dumped by their parents. His mum becomes a lesbian and slips further into complete and utter insanity, till the point that she’s institutionalised.

Somehow, despite everything, both the main character lives through it all, and the movie has laugh out loud moments. Annette Benning put in a stellar performance as the insane mum. She starts out as the beautiful, hip 70s supermum that rapidly looses her mind, progressively becoming more disceveled as the movie goes on. For kitsch fans, you will love this movie, because the seventiesness is piled on in spades!

It is however a bizarre, at times frightening movie, not for the faint hearted. There’s genuine psycosis on display, suicide, rage and people being institutionalised against their will. At times it’s a harrowing reminder that for the mentally ill, you can be treated, but you never get well. You just stay a little more sane.

Four out of five stars :).