Ballarat asks: who is DB Monday?

Each week upon our shiny radio show Len introduces the team - Len, Mick, Vin, and DB Monday.

Emails have been flooding in (none), the phone calls have been running hot (none) and this guy stopped me in the street and asked Who is DB Monday?

He is a man. A concept. A way of life. He is the very binding neutrinos that hold together the Show With No Name team, a man not unlike myself who chooses to eschew the microphone and speak with his hands.

DB Monday is no relation to DB Cooper, although his evil cousin, VB Sunday, has been known to lurk with intent around the Show With No Name Dim Sim Research Facility.

While dear old Roland Rock-hard-jelly gets the gig on 3BA on Saturday morning to flog his wares (and sometimes his whens), and gets the Courier's page 3 treatment when he gets his kit off and wraps his tadger in this nation's only flag to represent democracy, it's DB Monday who really keeps this town going. It's DB Monday who came up with Wrongfest.

You may or may not have heard of Wrongfest, one of the quality cultural icons on Ballarat's fairly empty calender of events. Wrongfest is as Wrongfest does - and here's a couple of pics from this year's event, where people were asked to dress up as their favourite Ballarat councillors. It was wrong. Very wrong.

But I digress. There's more to this town than teenagers trouser-banging themselves on Myspace. There's even a gay piano bar just opened on Camp Street! I walked in there and asked could I see the pianist and got the fright of my life. Maybe it was my pronunciation... but I digress.

Now that Bob Dylan has put together his own tribute to Ballarat radio's evergreen talent Kank Wolverang (see below) we can expect a new addition to the Sovereign Hill Music Festival - remember that? The Ballarat Council dropped a hundred thou or so on a festival which nobody came to. The Sovereign Hill staff were paid overtime so there was a crowd to watch James Reyne. Nobody could be paid enough to watch the Bullamakanka Hasbeen Bush band though.

DB Monday, take a bow. Having just recovered from the emotional rolldercoaster that was the Beijing Win Gold Or Die fest, it's great to have you on board.

Bob Dylan salutes Kank Wolverang

Its that time of year again when everyone looks to the voice of a generation, Kank Wolverang, that's WolverANG, to explain the tears and fears of a psychotic and psychiatric winter in a manner that befits a softly spoken git with nothing to say. "Tangled up in dudes", traditionally an untraditional Turkish work song. "If it aint turking it's just beef jerking" (Traditional Untraditional old Turkish saying) has finally landed. Born from Wolverangs tiresome work for charity whilst chronicling a lifetimes experience of crossing this wide brown sandy deposit we call Dudeton, population: me, or him, or her, or you? "Dudes" was originally born as an unguided way of passing the time between that horrible stretch that is Yass and just outside Yass and now through the grime sweat and sheer bloody hard graft, that and 20 minutes to write down the verses, it comes fully formed in a Brady Bunch environment that shows unreservedly that Alice doesn't live here anymore.