Being a dedicated JJJ listener I didn’t listen to Fox FM back when I lived in Melbourne. But my girlfriend (now wife) did and on their morning show in 2006 they had a competition called Fan-Tastic! Essentially you sent in an email discussing what you were a rabid fan of and if you sounded interesting you would get a follow-up call. If that went well they would ring you one morning for a short interview about your obsession then ask you 3 questions on the subject. Each time you answered correctly and the money went up with the option to take the money at any time – the max you could win was $500.
Well at my girlfriends suggestion I did indeed email them discussing my love of The Transformers. I received the follow up call – not knowing that I was not on air I tried to be as amusing as possible. This got me on air the following week and… well, best you watch the video and listen for yourself what happened eh!
Did you enjoy this video? Would love to hear from you in the comments section below!
One of my favorite readers is Madds whom I have greatly enjoyed watching grow into a fully-fledged chicken-fancier. Once again we have an ‘Ask Trev’ question regarding chooks from her – this one regarding the molt:
Dear Farmer Trev,
Yep, me again seeking more chook advice please.
My girls are losing all their feathers!
At the start of winter!
They’re grumpy, sensitive and edgy, picking on each other, all off the lay.
The place is bedlam – feathers everywhere!
It has been suggested to me that they are having their first ‘molt’.
Is this a thing? Why are they so grumpy?
Why are hey molting in the cold weather?
What the hell do I do with all these feathers?
How long will it last? What can I do to help them?
Thanks Big Farmer Trev,
You noob chicken pal, Madsy.
Worry not sir – just a routine feather inspection.
Well Madds, I will answer your queries one by one:
It has been suggested to me that they are having their first ‘molt’. Is this a thing? Why are they so grumpy? The molt is most definitely ‘a thing’. In Australia chooks tend to molt most often in Autumn between March and May so them losing their feathers near the end of April puts them slap bang in the middle of that window. As for being grumpy, imagine someone nicking your nice warm coat as you were about to traipse off to work on a blustery cold day – you’d be a bit pissed too!
Why are they molting in the cold weather? So they can get rid of old feathers and start to grow thick luscious new ones to keep them warm when the really cold weather hits in 6 weeks. They wont lay eggs during this time as all the protein in their bodies will be geared towards new feather growth rather than egg production.
What the hell do I do with all these feathers? Sell them to a hippy tribal shop to make dream-catchers out of or perhaps stuff a pillow like my mother used to do with all the shed hair from her Shetland Sheepdog. Otherwise throw into the compost along with the rest of their straw bedding or simply in the buggers.
How long will it last? What can I do to help them? How long the molt lasts depends from chook to chook and breed to breed but usually goes for a few months. What you can do to help them is feed them protein-rich foods. It takes a helluva lot of protein to grow new feathers so they are going to need a lot right now. Of course don’t feed them an all-protein diet – they still need variety in their tucker.
The best ways to boost protein for your chooks is by feeding them the following:
*Scrambled egg: Eggs are a rich source of protein and they will chow down on scrambled eggs in jig time! Don’t give them raw eggs as that will encourage them to eat their own in the future.
*Starter Feed/Shell grit: As I mentioned in this article, starter feed is great for young chooks before you move them onto laying pellets. However starter feed/shell grit has more protein in it than laying pellets so it’s ok to move them back to it for a while.
*Some fish: Get a big can of tuna or sardines and pop that in for your chooks – they will go mad for it! Make sure it’s fish in spring water though, not oil or brine.
*Pumpkin Seeds: I’m loathe to mention this as we all know that pumpkins are a filthy disgusting vegetable that deserve eradication from the planet. But if you are one of those nutjobs that actually likes pumpkin and cooks it from time to time, scoop out the seeds and throw it to your chickens. This also has the benefit of making sure those seeds don’t go on to make new pumpkins – bastards of things!
A combination of the above should certainly help your chickens start regrowing their feathers in time for winter. But again, make sure it’s not all you give them. You don’t want them to have a nothing-but-protein diet as that won’t do them any good either. But their normal diet with some extra protein added should have them starting to get all feathery and happy again by the time winter hits. Hope this helps Madds my friend!
Got any other tips for Madds or other hobby farming questions? Would love to hear them in the comments section below!
At the start of 2016, my in-laws suggested that I start a blog in order to provide a creative outlet for the myriad of random thoughts that constantly run through this odd brain of mine, as well as it possibly being a new career. So one year ago in April of 2016 BigAngryTrev.com was born.
Happy birthday to me!
And here we are on the sites first anniversary! It’s been a lot of fun writing this and has proven quite educational. I’ve learned my audience is much more interested in Transformers than Hobby Farming, that spiders killing snakes (or at least skinks) makes for great news and that it’s often not what you write but where someone else shares it that determines the amount of views you get. Also that I must not be particularly photogenic as the most popular video I put up is the only one I am not pictured in. Over the course of the Blogs first year I’ve had over 10,000 views – a respectable number indeed. However well short of the 100,000 a month I would need to start making money out of it. So share away guys! Send in ‘Ask Trev‘ questions, subscribe for new stories, encourage your friends to follow the blog on Facebook and Twitter and keep reading, I need a new career badly! I really appreciate those who have followed me along this journey and hope I can keep informing and entertaining you all in the future.
Not too shabby so far
To celebrate the first year of BigAngryTrev.com I thought I’d list below what has proven the most popular posts in each section. Enjoy!
Thank you to all of you and if you have any suggestions on how I can improve the blog or something new you would like to see featured on here please give me a shout out!
As a young man, I thought it was a sign of strength of character to stick to your guns. That if you held an idea about something, you stuck to that idea and you didn’t let anyone mess with it. You fought them tooth and nail and showed them that you were right and they were wrong.
Only one danger to that – what if you are the one that is actually wrong?
This is a short story about how I held a strong perception about a certain group of people and it took one experience to show me that my opinion was total bollocks. And that group of people are hippies.
That’s right, hippies. And I figured I had them down pat. Long haired, pot smoking yahoos that never did a day of work in their lives. Smelly, filthy people putting more faith in a healing crystal than an aspirin and would lecture you about how you should eat nothing but lentils. Tree hugging nudies who deserved a good kick in their chakras.
I was 24 and living with a couple in Yarraville. Good friends who when they heard my first marriage was breaking up turned up with a moving truck and said “We are getting you out of here”. I’d been living with them for several months and was healing nicely from being used as an emotional punching bag for so long. With New Years coming up, they were going to Confest and wanted me to come along. Confest is best described as a hippy festival that takes place twice a year along a piece of river bank in the bush in southern NSW.
Did I wanna go? Hells no! If I went to the bush it was to do proper camping, catch some fish and maybe shoot a few rabbits. I wasn’t going to no damn hippy festival and see blokes walking about with their tackle out! I especially wasn’t going to go when they told me there was no meat allowed – bugger that!
But my friends wore me down and I ended up going along. I made ‘filthy hippy’ jokes the whole way to the point my mate Michael was asking me to give it a rest, and I had a big store of dried beef jerky (the proper stuff from a butcher at VIC Market, not that rubbery crap you get at a servo) hidden in my bag.
When we got there I was very non-plussed. Taking tickets on the gate were indeed two naked people, a man and woman in their late 40’s if I was any judge. As we parked and lugged our tents to find a spot, I was even less enthused when I saw the ‘workshops schedule board’ and saw there was actual tree hugging on it! As we walked past there was indeed people there embracing trees with their eyes closed. Oh gawd, I thought, I’m stuck here for a week with these friggin lunatics! This is gonna suck!
We found a spot and set our tents up, me grumbling to myself the whole time. I was an alpha-male stuck with a bunch of fruitloops in the middle of bloody nowhere. I figured since I was stuck, I might as well make the best of it and went for an explore.
Over the afternoon some things started to confuse me. There were naked people yes but plenty of clothed people too. You could smell pot coming from the odd tent but certainly not all. People were openly friendly without trying to convert me to crystal worship or lecturing me on the evils of a good steak. I was very taken aback when I stumbled across a cricket game in progress which I quickly joined and even managed to take a catch or two.
What was going on? Where was all the self-righteous condemnation for me not being one of them? Besides being perhaps a bit more openly friendly that is usual, these all seemed like normal people, that couldn’t be right!
Well guess what – it WAS right. It was right and I had been wrong. I had a brilliant time over the following week! People were really friendly, no one was in your face about anything, there were no people drunk out of their brains or off their heads on hard drugs. I had lots of great conversations with people who turned out to be very intelligent and well informed and seemed to have made their own minds up about issues rather than simply subscribing to some ‘hippy dogma’. Yes there was no meat allowed but I think people probably just pretended they couldn’t smell dried beef on my breath.
The Swan-Sarong Song
A few days in and I had had a go at a lot of interesting stuff I had not considered trying before. I wandered round in a sarong, very comfortable in the heat. Hell, on occasion I just disrobed and went for a walk in the nude which I found to be quite liberating! I went to a few workshops (though not the tree hugging one) and learned about yoga and crafts and all kinds of stuff. I learned to fire-twirl and developed a real taste for properly brewed chai tea. All these things I would never have tried if I had stuck to my guns, dismissing them out of hand and therefore never enjoyed experiencing. Come New Years night I danced hard into the wee hours of the morning, covered in sweat and body paint as a dozen guys smashed out a bestial rhythm on their bongo drums – it was primal and it was bloody fantastic!
“It’s 5am, do you know where your hippies are?”
I left Confest on the 2nd on Jan, my mind reeling from the previous weeks experience. I had been wrong all my life about hippies. Oh sure, there were plenty that did exist that fit my preconceptions but it turned out there were way more that didn’t. And they all seemed to be onto such a good thing, it was probably one of the most chilled out weeks of my life. Just a bunch of happy people being happy around other happy people and not bothering anyone else. Instead of continuing to condemn them I had actually learned from them. So if I was wrong about hippies, what else had I always believed that I could be wrong about?
I learned to examine my own opinions, looking for flaws in my own arguments. I learned just because you believe something strongly, whether that be about a group of people in general or because it’s the popular thing to believe or it’s what your parents taught you was right, it doesn’t make you correct. I’m not talking about abandoning your ideals, I’m talking about challenging yourself and making sure that if you believe something that you are right on the money, not simply believing it as that’s the comfortable thing to do. Of course it can work both ways, while some people hold irrational prejudices, don’t believe something just because it’s a politically correct thing to believe either. Find out the truth for yourself – good or bad.
This has served me well in all the years since. I’ve learned to admit when I’m wrong. I think it’s made me more intelligent, or at least better informed on issues as I’ve learned to examine something rather than letting someone else or popular opinion mold my own. A lot of the time popular myths are wrong, for instance I went to France a couple of times and the people there were quite polite. Besides one old street lady no one was overtly rude and it turned out the French weren’t a bunch of sex obsessed, cheese eating surrender monkeys. Back home I walked down the street one day in Broadmeadows and saw a big gang of Lebanese guys on the corner. I nearly crossed the road then thought “Hang on – the only times I’ve been punched in my life was by other ‘Aussies’”. So I continued walking and they couldn’t have cared less about me, let alone get violent or try to sell me drugs. Preconceptions smashed. I think the show A Current Affair might need to fact check things a bit more.
So challenge your own preconceptions, you might be surprised what you find out. And as for the long-haired fruitloops at Confest…
… I went back the following New Years and met a very pretty one. It’s now 14 years later and we are married, have 2 kids and organically grow all our own fruit, nuts and veg on our hobby farm in the countryside (they go well with meat). God bless the hippies!
Big Hippy Trev (my god I was fit back then!)
Got a similar story? Would love to read it in the comments section below!
*Please Note: I have subsequently been informed by Ms Emily Taylor that meat is indeed now allowed at Confest except in some of the communal kitchens – thanks for the update!
The LEGO franchise was always big. Now with a string of video games and DVD’s as well as being tied in to almost every popular franchise – from Marvel to Star Wars to even Ghostbusters – it is friggin huge!
A few years ago we all marveled at the first LEGO Movie. It was funny, interesting and had a lot of heart. One of the main characters in that movie was Batman. He was arrogant, even if highly skilled enough to warrant it, egocentric and obsessed with metal music and the colour black. The character has subsequently appeared in numerous tie-in DVD’s and has remained fairly faithful to this rendition of one of the most iconic super heroes of all time.
Now we have upon us the second of the Lego movies to hit the big screen and Batman has the starring role. So let’s take a look at The LEGO Batman Movie.
This movie is all about Batman’s personal emotional journey from the character we saw in the last movie to one that actually stands a chance of showing empathy and having a personal connection to others. We are treated at the start to a huge elaborate battle sequence between Batman and pretty much every villain that has ever shown up in the Batman Universe. Lead by Joker they are all here, from well known characters like Mr. Freeze and Catwoman to obscure characters such as Calendar Man and even Egghead (an egg themed villain from the campy 60’s show played by Vincent Price). Batman single handedly defeats every single villain, all whilst talking about how great he is, playing hardcore metal music and doing donuts in the Batmobile. It’s very adrenaline packed and there would be few male viewers who would not love to be in his blocky shoes.
At the climax of the fight, we get the stage set for the overriding theme of the movie. Joker appears to be genuinely hurt, even heartbroken, when Batman not only refutes that Joker is his arch enemy but states that Joker literally means nothing to him, no one does. After winning the fight, dropping by an orphanage to shoot miscellaneous Bat-merchandise at a bunch of orphans (and a young Dick Grayson whom returns shortly after) he goes home to an empty mansion, eating and watching movies by himself.
Things change pretty swiftly for Batman. Barbara Gordon becomes the new police commissioner and wants Batman to work with the police and within the constraints of the law. During her inauguration all the super villains show up and promptly turn themselves in, depriving Batman of anyone to fight in the future. It’s also at this time that Bruce Wayne unwittingly adopts Dick Grayson, agreeing to do by not even listening when the prospect is put to him and just blandly agreeing to whatever is said.
Deprived of his super villains to thwart Batman begins a downwards spiral and rejects Alfred’s suggestions to use this down time to make connections with people and focus on his personal life. Desperately needing something to do, Batman decides to send Joker to the Phantom Zone and has no compunctions about risking his new young wards life to do it.
This movie is really about Batman being a jerk and slowly learning not to be. Whilst the movie starts with him lapping up the attention we see showcased how he is unpopular with his fellow heroes (doesn’t even get invited to the Justice League party), disrespects Alfred, risks Robins life, refuses to work as a team with the police commissioner and constantly breaks the Jokers heart. We get a glimpse into why though, the death of his parents made a young Bruce refuse to let anyone else get close and his life became about his own ego and his obsession with being a vigilante.
So the fun yet predictable happens. Batman sends Joker to the Phantom Zone where he meets a ton of other evil characters from different franchises (including LOTR, Harry Potter, Jurassic Park and even Dr. Who), brings them back to Gotham and proceeds to destroy the city. This forces Batman to actually work as a team with Barbara, Dick and Alfred and by doing so let them into his life. The finale of Batman’s emotional journey is him finally admitting to Joker that he hates him and that Joker is the reason he works so hard as a crime fighter. With this emotional rift healed Joker helps Batman save the city and Gotham is safe once more.
Just wanted to know he was hated
Overall I would say this is very much a boys movie. Batman is a total jerk and a very blokey kind of jerk. There is constant violence and lots of humor – I found myself chuckling a few times which is pretty good for me. I took my 4 year old son and nothing was too graphic or smutty to faze him, though he was a tad restless in his seat by the end. I’d happily recommend this movie to any boys under the age of say 17, or grown up boys who just cant get enough of The Bat.
Seen the movie and have a different opinion? Would love to read it in the comments section below!
