Month: February 2005

Why Don’t You…

…skip celebrating Valentine’s Day (which Saint Valentine has very little do to with love) and wait until tomorrow and celebrate Lupercalia, the “annual Roman festival held on February 15 to honour Faunus, god of fertility and forests.”

The religious ceremonies were directed by the Luperci, the “brothers of the wolf”, priests of Faunus, dressed only in a goatskin. During Lupercalia, a dog and two male goats were sacrificed. Two youths were anointed with the blood, which was wiped off with wool soaked in milk, after which they were expected to smile. They afterwards ran round the Palatine Hill with thongs cut from the sacrificed goats in their hands. These were called Februa. Girls would line up on their route to receive lashes from these whips. This was supposed to ensure fertility.

Kid Koala & P-Love

Rozie and I went down to the Clare on Broadway last night to catch Kid Koala and P-Love for the Cyclic Defrost Issue 10 launch since we were too stingy to go and check out the “Short Attention Span Theatre” at the Gaelic Club last Thursday. The Clare isn’t a big place and it got packed out pretty quickly. By the end of the night it was stinking hot. They completed rocked the joint by dropping, cutting, scratching and juggling stacks of great breaks, hip hop, rock and some 80’s funk. I remember hearing Digital Underground’s “Humpty Dance” (who are coming out to play at the Sydney Luna Park soon), “The Power” by Snap, “7 Nation Army” by The White Stripes (like who doesn’t play that these days ;-)) and “Supersonic” by JJ Fad. There was stacks of other great tracks which I can’t remember right now, but it was a great night out. Glad we made the effort to get down there.

FM Towns

Thought I’d dump out this post since it was sitting in saved state for so long. I’ll add some more info to it later.

Fujitsu FM-Towns IIThe Fujitsu FM Towns was one of those funky Japanese game systems from the late 80’s/early 90’s which I used to drool over in PC Mags like the NEC PC Engine. Unlike the PC Engine which atleast made it to the States and the UK, the Fujitsu FM Towns never seems to have made it outside of Japan. It was pretty ahead of its time, having alot the things that the MPC1 and MPC2 standards aspired to at the time, like a CD-ROM, game controllers, high color video card (which had a color palette of 16.7 million colours) and sound cards. This were all pretty awesome stuff to be having in a 386 at the time!

Another interesting thing about it was the different variations on this machine. First up there was the FM Towns, then after that there was the updated FM Towns II. Somewhere along the line came the FM Towns Marty. Searching around I’ve also come across the FM Towns II UR, which appears to be the same as the FM Towns II EX and the FM Towns HR-20. These three models sport the updated 486. There also appears to be a FM Towns 20F, but it seems to be another name for the FM Towns II.

And here some more interesting FM Towns links: