The Triple J Hottest 100 was on the radio on Sunday. I forgot to listen to it because it's normally on the same day as the fireworks. As always, there is a lot of good music in the list, and it's pleasing to see seven of the top ten are Australian. Jet's Are You Gonna Be My Girl? was voted #1, which I think is well deserved. The White Stripes did well, with five tracks making it into the list (Seven Nation Army the most popular at #3).

And my favourite novelty song of the year, Frenzal Rhomb's Russell Crowe's Band, was number 26:

Don't get a million bucks for getting out of bed
Don't get a million fucks when I punch folks in the head
But even if we know we never get a billboard top 10 hit
At least we know Russell Crowe's band's a fuckin pile of shit.

Tennis

I played tennis on Sunday afternoon, and it felt a lot hotter than it was meant to be. We had a reasonable game, but the skill level seemed a bit lower than usual for some reason. I won the first set 6-1, Daz won the second 7-5.

Australia Day

We started with a barbeque lunch at a mate's place, and from there coordinated transport into South Perth at around 3:30pm. Traffic was heavy but tolerable, and having a guaranteed parking spot was brilliant.

We found an excellent spot this time, on a traffic island. Sitting on a traffic island is good because:

• People tend to walk around you rather than between you.
• People without chairs won't sit on the island because there's no grass.
• There's a gap of several metres in front of you due to the road.
• The palm trees provide shade all afternoon.

There weren't many radios around this year, probably due to Triple J broadcasting their Hottest 100 on Sunday instead. This was a bit confusing as we didn't realise what was going on when they stopped part-way through to play the national anthem.

This year was once again promoted as an alcohol-free event, but there were few signs from our vantage point that it was being enforced. For example, we watched as two police walked behind a man carrying a block of Emu Bitter, seemingly oblivious to the "crack-down".

There were two things that struck me as being particularly ingenious this year. Firstly, watermelon hats. We saw two men wearing watermelons on their heads, conveniently in the Australian colours of green and gold. It appeared that a fair bit of work had gone into carving them out. One of them was a full face mask as well. We assume it might have been a bit smelly inside. The other, and my personal favourite for this year, was a couch with the lot. We saw two guys wheeling this couch along around 5:30pm. It had been fully fitted out with built-in wheels, stereo, esky, license plate, and horn. Other interesting things.

This year was reportedly quite violent, but we didn't see anything from where we were.