TV Turns You Into a Fat Bastard

Not to imply I was a particularly unfat bastard while I was actually filmed for television, or that I am one now, but I swear I don't normally look as fleshy and rotund as that. Especially those sideburns. So voluminous! They must weigh at least 5 kilos each.

Anyway, Cash Battle currently (for the next 3 nights) stars us, and it is weird. One thing that comes across looking at it is that I was (unconsciously) extremely self-conscious (was that the 'thumbs up' gesture? Did I just pump my fists?) and just plain aware that 'this was television, people!', because I don't seem to be acting in a particularly relaxed or natural fashion. Admittedly some of this is probably the fault of television itself, with it's tendency to go 'and now we need to film you falsely looking really excited, as if something good just happened to you, so we can use that footage when something good actually happens to you and you fail to be excited enough by it for television'. As they did, over and over, with swooping crane camera panning devices, even. Then there is them editing out huge chunks of the parts where we sat there deliberating about the answer to the question (you get a minute to answer in actuality), so it looks like we came quickly to the right decision, or what will probably move more embarrassing in the next couple of days, quickly to the wrong one. So there's a lot of umming and ahhing that might help to make us look more like real people that is missing. It's also surreal to actually be watching it after it was all over months ago. I feel they should pay us the money we won again as I watch it. The fact that I know how much we got, they gave it to us already, and I spent it all what seems like aeons ago, seems to make the fact that they got around to putting these events on TV (as if by afterthought) somehow irrelevant.

Still I reeeeeally don't look forward to watching the episode where we lose. Curse you, Rogers and Hammerstein.

Karen has absconded to New Plymouth to escape the crush of the unreasonable demands of our viewing public this week. This is a clever device, as New Plymouth barely even has a public. It does, however have the Wind Wand, which is cool after you get over the slightly irrational fear of: "It's bending it's bending it's BENDING, GOD it's STILL BENDING, IT CAN'T POSSIBLY BEND LIKE THAT, it's going to SNAP and LAND ON THE TOWN and WE'LL ALL BE KILLED!!!", and it has Puke Ariki (mini Te Papa, only all about the 'Naki. 'Tis good) and it has the 50 flavour Ice Cream parlour, which is very cool (of necessity, or else all the stock would melt). It's a pretty good town, I like it. It's certainly a lot more charming than its acronym spoonerism brother, Palmerston North (Worst. Hangover. Ever.), which last time we went there (on the way to the Big Day Out - the wrong way, looking for New Plymouth - P.N, N.P, all these North Island towns are the same, and all of them have a number of golf courses totally incommensurate with their population size) greeted us with such signs as Illuzzions Motel and D'Zine Furniture. I believe this was probably the result of some kind of local government policy designed to avoid cluttering Massey up with English students. Anyway, rest assured, after making use of Palmerston North's only public toilet, which is signposted from about as far away as Blenheim, we speedily quit the place, no doubt pre-empting a local cop wearing a pair of aviator sunglasses who would have pulled us over, done the "Look, your tail light's out! (smash)" bit and warned us "Folks 'round these parts don't care too much for your high falutin' correct English grammar and spelling, city boy. If I were you, I'd just keep on driving". Of course, if we'd stayed long enough for that, we would have almost certainly progressed rapidly into a situation where most of us were lying horribly slain somewhere, and the camera would be tracking Karen as she ran down the eerily lit but deserted main street, screaming as the club-footed, buck-toothed, malformed propietor of Illuzzions (possiblyTim's secret twin, the one his parents kept chained up in the basement and never mentioned) stalked after her, slavering between chainsaw revs: "I changed the 's' to two 'z's, you see! It makes it more clazzzzy! CLAZZZZY!!! HAHAHAHAHAAAAAA!!!" And no-one wanted that, or wants it now, which is why it's generally better to have Karen in N.P instead of P.N right now.

This is probably unfair. People I know from Palmerston North / people who have moved to Palmerston North (a surprisingly large group all up, actually) have in the past sometimes assured me that, as a place, it's not so bad. I think perhaps they should make use of this on the 'Welcome To...' sign that seems compulsory in New Zealand for any 'town' consisting of more than 3 buildings. 'Welcome To Palmerston North - It's Not That Bad' seems to me a fitting town slogan (and perhaps the opposite side could read: 'Goodbye from Palmerston North - Don't Think We Won't Sue You For Defamation').

Strangely vehement (I am biased of course. I refer you again to Worst. Hangover. Ever.) asides that slag off Palmerston North based on scant evidence and my grand total of probably under 2 full days total actually spent there, er, aside, the point again for those that may have lost it is that Karen's not here this week, and she's left me with a cat, a dollar, a few books and Half Life 2.

Lulu is at times quite the mad cat, but one with obvious concern for my welfare. She sleeps in the bed with me, and then I get up to feed her and go back to bed. This morning after I eventually rolled out of the bed for the second time and opened the bedroom door, I found that just outside it she had left me an offering of banana cake (from where she got it I don't know - the bench, I guess). She's seen me eating it I suppose, and perhaps figures I should be eating breakfast more regularly. Last night she spent a good half an hour attempting to swat, on the TV screen, the monsters - and only the monsters - from the X-Box game I was playing, like a totally ineffectual if well-intentioned feline bodyguard. Sadly, her throwing herself bodily at the television made it hard to see at times, and she may have caused more harm to my chances than good. However, if I can train her to show equal enthusiasm for having a go at controller buttons, I think the Covenant from Halo 2 are in serious trouble.

PC-wise, Half Life 2 is currently joined in a battle for my affections with World of Warcraft. When not working (which is often in the past two weeks) during the day or looking for jobs (another couple of hours or sometimes more most days) I am at home alone with Lulu and the actual chance to use Mike's computer, which I don't get pretty much any time he is home (he comes home from work, starts playing WoW, and stops when he goes to bed. The weekends are more or less the same, but without the going to work). And the agonising choice is of course what to play. I'm not all that far through Half Life 2 but already it's far and away the best shooter I've played. It makes Doom 3 look positively silly. The graphics are amazing, the story is cool, the atmosphere is fantastic, and whoever it was at Valve that thought of the gravity gun cannot possibly be being paid highly enough. It is doubleplus good.

World of Warcraft's fabulousness on the other hand, is well documented by many. Now that I have just got my character to level 40 there are is a whole bunch of things to do and places to see to add to the already bewildering range, and, importantly, I have just got hold of a headband that makes my avatar look like an NBA player. This is good. However, (I'm sure some would disagree with me) I find it hard to play in small spurts at a time. There's always the trouble of travelling, finding a group etc - although sometimes in certain situations, you can just jump right in, play for 30 mins or an hour and feel like you've really accomplished something, I don't find this the case too often. But the number of goals to work towards and neat things to see and so while doing so are legion.

So this is the choice with which I am constantly faced. Should I invest some serious time in going to see if I can find that object over there for that long-running chain quest I've got going on, or should I get in the dune-buggy with mounted rapid-fire electric death cannon and speed over the beach running over Starship Trooper style insects that are expressing interest in eating me? Should I go and try and get raw materials to make things to sell at auction to try and earn some of the money required so my WoW character can buy his mount? Is one of the options when buying a mount for your WoW character a dune-buggy with mounted rapid-fire electric death cannon? (Should I go outside and get some fresh air? Nah...)

I illustrate my dilemma by way of attempting to explain why I haven't blogged in over a month. I like writing at night, a time when I simply do not have computer access anymore (I'm only writing this because I've used the computer at Nic and Mel's house and at uni). When I do get computer access during the day and I'm not sending my C.V out to people with it or scanning SEEK, I tend to be distracted by either or both of these rather good games. There you have it. Complain all you like, but 95 percent of the time I can't blog when I want to, and when I do get time on a computer for recreational purposes I've been using to to either shoot things or fire spells at them. Sorry about that. But I am attempting to make up for it here a bit.

I'm still churning through the huge pile of books I bought when I first went to Borders. I just got through The First Men On the Moon and The Island of Dr Moreau by H.G Wells, and both are cool. As I think I've explained before, there are a few things that make this long-since outdated science fiction so fun to read. Firtsly there's not just what was accurately predicted, but what is completely wrong. Hell, the moon would be a lot more interesting if it did have snow and vegetation and an insectoid race living in a rigid hierarchy-based society in it's hollow core. The idea of Cavorite, which they use to get to the moon, is also brilliant (and sheds some light on volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) ; a substance that blocks gravity (which they thought of as a form of radiant energy at the time). The second thing is the absolute deadpan attitude of the (most often) Victorian gentlemen characters - the stiff upper lip in the face of unknown disaster and horrors. For example, when Cavorite first comes into existence, it is unattended and fixed to the ground, and suddenly all the air in a column above it extending to the stratosphere is totally unaffected by gravity - i.e weighs nothing - so it shoots off into space. So there is a bit of a vaccum there, and as we all know, nature abhors one of those, so the air around it (under considerable pressure of course from er, all the rest of the air, rushes into the gravity-free column. And shoots off into space. And so on (science wise, I'm not sure how much sense this makes, but we are dealing with a fictional gravity blocking substance here). And so there's considerable air movement going on, and the scientist's house is blown down, etc, until it stops (after the force of the air moving around, fortunately, smashes the restraints holding the Cavorite to the ground, and naturally enough it shoots off into space); the main characters, the scientist Cavor and his somewhat more sensible partner the narrator, pick themselves up of the ground and theorise about what the hell just happened, the narrator remarking:

'Good heavens! Why, it would have squirted all the atmosphere of the earth away! It would have robbed the world of air! I would have been the death of all mankind! That little lump of stuff!'

'Not exactly into space', said Cavor, 'but as bad - practically. It would have whipped the air off the world as one peels a banana, and flung it thousands of miles. It would have dropped back again, of course - but on an asphyxiated world! From our point of view very little better than if it never came back!'

When the narrator asks him what he intends to do now, the scientist replies that he is going to have a bath. This kind of casual attitude to 'oops, we almost destroyed the world, ah well, back to the drawing board' is neatly encapsulated a page or two later while the narrator is thinking about things in the following brilliantly deadpan passage:

And while he was having his bath I considered the entire question alone. It was clear that there were drawbacks to Mr Cavor's society I had not forseen. The absent-mindedness that had just escaped depopulating the terrestial globe might at any moment result in some other grave inconvenience.

What I love is the way in that the potential end of civilisation is sort of put on par with, say, not being able to find your best hat before going to take tea with the vicar. Later Cavor promises "If we can possibly avoid wrecking this little planet of ours, we will." Very considerate, really. Great stuff. Read War of the Worlds at least before the film comes out and probably arses it up totally.

Anyway, Karen and I recently went toddling off to Wellington, having purchased some tickets back when we were briefly financially solvent after Cash Battle gave us our winnings, which as I think I established earlier was in 1978. It looked like we were going to go up there and become beggars for 5 days or so, since although we had booked a couple of months ahead to get the cheap sale flights, (prudent) we had since spent all of our winnings and were back to being miserable part-time workers with barely enough money to keep us not just in the lifestyle to which we have been accustomed, or even in the life (full stop) to which we have become accustomed (who knew food and shelter cost money? I blames the government. [Imprudent.]) . Luckily this situation was resolved when Mum and Dad stepped in and bought our 2 (2? What the hell? There were 4 of us!) prize flights to Fiji off us (the fools, little do they know they expired in 1979). Briefly financially solvent again, we duely took our flights to Wellington, and succeeded in spending all our money again, largely on food. Thus follows the tales of this spending:

On arrival we located Andrew and James T's place (having first run randomly into James himself on Courtenay Place, keeping up my record of randomly running into people I know in the middle of cities away from home) . It was demonstrated to us that other cities have hills. Even though I lived in Wellington for a number of months, I had sort of forgotten. I think Christchurch does this to you. Anyway, we struggled up the long path to their flat, pausing only briefly to wonder if we had the right address because clearly the path was leading us to a derelict abandoned building. After a few more steps it became apparent that the derelict abandoned building was in fact Andrew and James' house, which is only abandoned at the bottom story, and only has a derelict exterior, and so is only half abandoned and half derelict, really. While we were there, we learned that everyone was moving out and the landlord was soon to begin the process of 'rennovating' it properly, which I might have assumed involved knocking the building down and erecting a new building. No need to aim too high to achieve an improvement- the new structure could be only 42 percent derelict perhaps, and maybe only 34 percent abandoned - but no, the rather incongruously nice and modern bathroom inside seemed to show that he was going to stick with the existing loosely organised pile of timbers. Actually, aside from the fact that it looked like it might fall off the hill at any second, it was a rather nice old house. We were installed in James' room while he went off to study for his girlfriend leaving the country exams, or something like that.

Braving the infinitely-more-confusing-than-that-of-Christchurch bus system, we trooped into town with Andrew. At lunchtime - hell, at any time - the streets of the Wellington CBD always seem to be absolutely chock-full of uniformly swankily dressed people. It is a town in which I sometimes feel I am lowering the tone. I almost expect a bouncer to be waiting for me as I try to get off the plane - "I'm sorry mate, you can't land here, not in those shoes". Anyway, two of the smartly dressed people were Pen and Kruse, and they led us to the Feathers pub, which had the best pub lunches in Wellington according to the pub itself, so they must have been telling the truth. I will go on record as saying I had a pretty good burger. We then wandered aimlessly while Karen looked in every clothes shop in the greater Wellington area.

6 to 8 weeks later, it was back to Newtown and soon the errant Mr. Tremewan had reappeared, and with he, Karen, Andrew and myself forming Voltron, we stormed the Newtown Sports Bar where in the guise of the quiz team Bat Mantaray Repellent, we emerged victorious, and made off with a 50 dollar bottle shop voucher. This we promptly spent and drank with the assistance of Pen and Kruse, who in the fashion of those no-good animals from the 'Little Red Hen' arrived late having been invited but having also done none of the hard question-answering work, and yet being only too happy to eat our bread (read: drink our gin). Being somewhat more generous of spirit than the self-righteous poultry in that tale however, Bat Mantaray Repellent was more than happy to share its winnings, ("Come round and drink gin", I think I said) and all got quietly tiddly. Huzzah.

Friday came and lo! so did the ugliest white cat in all Wellington. Despite his scabby nose and face, his limp, and his surgically removed ears (or lack of these ears), his plaintive miaowing and friendly manner bought him plenty of attention. Which is probably just what he wanted, and now we all have cat leprosy. That evil feline genius. A couple of days later we rescued a field mouse from this cat, so I suspect his outer appearance was all a ruse to lure small and large mammals alike into a false sense of security.

Wandering around town was the order of the day, diverting to locate Teena 'Bling!' Crocker and her sparkly bauble (she's going to have someone's eye out before long). Lunch followed at the giant food court under the BNZ building (which isn't any more. Now it's the 'Insert Corporate Brand I can't Remember' building - however, despite the new name, the nickname 'Darth Vader's Pencil Box' is still better). I had a souvlaki I deemed inferior to probably any souvlaki you would regularly eat in Christchurch. Take that, Wellington!

Teena went back to high-powered governmental focus groups after lunch and Andrew, Karen and I proceded to Te Papa, there to look at some drawings by some blokes (among others) named Raphael, Michaelangelo and Leonardo. For mutant turtles, they could draw pretty well - I would have thought they'd have spent all their spare time working on their ninjitsu, but obviously there was still time for art. These drawings were impressive for several reasons - one, obviously, because they were good to look at, but two, because they were all drawings, i.e mostly not finished artworks but preparatory sketches etc, it was likely that the artists in question sort of spat them out in an hour or two, and then threw them into a corner on top of a huge pile of hundreds of similar efforts - they were good without really trying. Damned talented people. In a couple of cases I guess because of this fact, these drawings had outlasted the paintings that followed them, (relatively unimportant sketches have a better chance of surviving wars, fires, and alien invasions I suppose), which was kind of cool. Then three, every so often you'd be looking at one of these things and you'd realise it was drawn on a piece of paper that was older than the Treaty of Waitangi by about 360 years - that it was in fact a 500 year old piece of paper. I'm not sure anyone will be keeping any pieces of paper I've written or drawn anything on carefully aside for 500 years. I certainly wonder at the awesome responsibility of being one of the people who puts these things in a frame (they seemed to be sort of suspended in there by some presumably special type of sticky tape) - whoops, I knocked over my coffee and there goes Leonardo Da Vinci's 500 year old study of a horse. Damn, that's older than our country and I destoyed it with a mocha latte. I suspect cups of coffee are not often spotted in the important back rooms of museums. (I'm sure Sarah and Heidi could confirm this.) Anyway, my personal favourite was this one of a chameleon done in 1612, they guess, by Ustad Mansur, "the leading animal painter at the Indian court of the Mughal emperor Jahangir." That's right, of all the animal painters at the court, he was the leading one. What you can't really see on the interweb version is that somehow the guy managed to pick out every really, really tiny scale of the chameleon with some kind of raised stippling technique. I guess that's why he was the court's number one animal painter. I can see the number two animal painter now:

"Curse that Mansur! I should be the number one animal painter in this court. But look at those scales! How does he do that? I must kill him. It is the only way. Then my animal paintings will achieve pre-eminence, and I shall be allowed access to the emperor's harem! From which I will then rescue my mother! Ahahahahahaaaaaa!"

Anyway, after trooping round Te Papa at large for a bit longer and taking in the 70s exhibition (it seems we should all be living in geodesic domes by now. Something has obviously gone wrong somewhere), Andrew swanned off to attend an orchestra concert with Teena, and Karen and I wandered around until we located the sushi train restaurant on Courtenay Place she wanted to try. I hadn't been to one of these before. In this particular one the conveyor belt filled with sushi items moved at quite a speed. It was quite a high pressure sort of dining environment, having to whip the plate with the thing you wanted to eat on it off with one deft movement before it sped past at approximately 80 kilometres an hour. Despite the speed, any given plate still took 45 seconds to get all the way round the table, so the other phenomenon that occurred was spotting something that you wanted to eat speeding just past you to your left, keeping your eye on it, waiting, waiting, waiting, willing none of the other diners to take it, finally getting ready to grab it, and then...the person sitting to your immediate right takes it, the bastard. I wonder if this type of restaurant produces more fist-fights than other establishments. I'm not a big fan of sushi anyway (what with its hideous tendency to contain fish, fish that isn't even cooked, the HORROR), so after eating a couple of wussy plates of vege sushi I ordered the teriyaki steak (good) and left Karen to eat strange orange fish egg things and raw things, and things that swim in the dark, and ecchhh. Never eat anything that can be splayed, or has a method of movement when alive that can be described as 'squirming' - these are good rules, I feel.

Following dinner we located a multiplex and went to Hostage, starring Bruce Willis. Things exploded. A Bruce Willis character took a pounding, yet again. Truly he is the pained action hero. I rated it not bad - I found the end was particularly satisfying in a righteous 'take that you evil masked bastards, you got up in Bruce Willis' face, and now you're all DEAD aren't you, you bitches!' way. We then went home in Mog's car driven by Teena after first finding Pen and Kruse. Karen went to bed and I went to find said Pen and Kruse again to go to some random party somewhere. The party consisted of about 5 English and Irish strangers and was out of alcohol and in general (as I was 100% sober) not very interesting, so after talking to Fran (person I knew living in Wellington) briefly, we sodded off.

As we walked back towards Pen and Kruse's house down Riddiford Street, a boy racer car, replete with stereo brand decals and blue neon underlighting etc. pulled up at the lights. I made some remark about how I could be on Colombo Street to Pen and Kruse. Kruse however went slightly further and gesticulated at the car with his beer bottle and suggested something about them being 'jerks'. Evidently they took this in because the car did a quick u-turn, parked, and 4 African guys jumped out it and came running across to Kruse to make polite inquiries about what he had been saying, and some kind of conversation followed. Pen and I stood down the road slightly, with Pen having had the remarkable prescience to call the police at this point already.

As she was describing how a fight was potentially about to break out, the fight (such as it was) broke out, when one of the guys from the car kicked with surpassing skill the beer bottle straight out of Kruse's hand, which then sailed in an impressively high backwards paraobla out into the road and smashed. Everyone sort of stood there for a second or two somewhat impressed by this feat (including the kicker himself I think) and then courageously the 4 of them attacked Kruse, while Pen kept up a running commentary down the phone ("They're punching him", she said). Before I had time to think about what I should be doing at this point, the attempted beating ceased after about 5 seconds, foiled largely I think by the fact that Kruse, stoically, neither punched back or fell down. Seeing this, his attackers elected to run away. Brilliantly, Kruse, who was at this point probably highly fuelled on adreneline, pursued the 4 of them out into the street, yelling pointed comments about their level of bravery at them as they jumped in their car. My next thought was that they might run him over, but they did another u-town and blasted off down the road at an illegal speed.

There followed some talking to the police. Kruse had a cut on his face which developed into an impressive black eye in the next couple of days. It seemed that when they approached, in attempting to justify his comments about boy racers being jerks (which, lets face it, don't need any justification at all. Boy racers are jerks. The end.) he had pointed out (again brilliantly, especially while drunk) that having blue lights on a car was illegal. Unsurprisingly, the boy racers didn't really seem to care about this, but somewhat more surprisingly, the lead boy racer had indicated that the purpose of the blue neon lights was in fact to alert bystanders to the prodigious size of his balls. Kruse I think correctly identified this as the point from which there was no backing down. The kicking and cheap shots followed shortly thereafter.

Glad am I that these hoons ran away, because had they have wanted to make a serious go of it, I suppose I would have been obliged to go and get myself beaten up as well (like most guys I suppose, I like to maintain this probable delusion that I might do OK in a fight, but it still would have been 4 versus 2); but as a couple of people were about looking on, a taxi slowed down to see what was up, and Pen was clearly on the phone to the police, it was definitely more of a 'we are dickheads' hit and run situation. And so now Kruse has additional arguments in his arsenal next time he wants to flag some boy racers down and tell them that they are jerks.

The next day saw Karen and I looking at the numerous second hand stores around Newtown after some yummy pizza at the nearby Mediterranean food warehouse (Christchurch equivalent: the Mediterranean food warehouse). Then having gathered a large posse together minus James C (back from Australia, tired) and James T (watching the Super 12 final, showed up briefly anyway) we went to dinner at the Chinese restaurant Pen and Kruse live directly on top of. Convenient. This was good (a theme of the Wellington food in general, minus that souvlaki). Then back upstairs to watch The Princess Bride, where I was able to point out to people following the work I did at Disability Services how Wesley's battle of wits with Vizzini is a classic example of game theory...I still contend that the coolest part of the film (that bit, and the preceding chase / fight) is over after the first third or so, making the rest of it a bit of an anti-climax; but it's still bloody good. Then home to Andrew's in a burst of hideous horizontal freezing sleet-rain. At least ours is vertical. And horizontal DOES make it worse. Take that again, Wellington!

On Sunday, we went to have yum-cha lunch at the Regent on Courtenay place. Our anticipation levels had been raised by James T's claims that 'Chinamen were lined up around the block' to eat at this particular establishment. Upon our arrival, we discovered that they weren't lined up around the block exactly, but that they were lined up out the door and down the stairs. My God. I have never seen a restaurant soooo busy. Soooo many people. A licence to print money, as James C. called it. Anyway, there followed much eating of various yum-cha dishes. The beauty of yum-cha, similar to sushi, is that the yummy mixes with the horribly fascinating, so if you're smart, you can eat the nice stuff, and watch amused but safe as your bolder friends attempt chicken's feet and various viscera-based dishes.

Following what was probably a good hour and a half or so of virtually non-stop eating we waddled out of the restaurant and headed to James and Teena's new apartment (same building and amenities as their old apartment, and yet a vast improvement) and played the riding around on trains board game (winner by a vast margin: James) until it was time to go and watch Episode III at the Embassy. The Embassy is vast and classy and does NOT, it should be noted by people in Palmerston North, spell its name as 'The Embazzzzy'. It takes you back to going to the movies in the central city when we still had old-school theatres there. The concept of a movie theatre that only shows one film at a time was odd but refreshingly throwback. It is also tres flash. Karen was particularly impressed by the bathroom. We went to a 6:00 on a Sunday session and the theatre was mostly full, too.

Episode III, for the second time, was - well, after reading many, MANY reviews of this film online, I have come to the conclusion that reviewing it is esentially pointless. Indeed, such is the size of the Star Wars phenomenon, the cultural weight of the whole thing, that professional criticism of it, positive or negative, is sort of rendered irrelevant. People will go (and have gone) in their millions, no matter what is said about the film. That said, the cognitive dissonance between reviews is amazing to behold. I mean, there are some polar opinions on this film. So, although the bulk of reviews I think can be put into the 'this film is good' category, my own carefully considered opinion on the film as recorded on the web is: either you like it, or you don't. I liked it considerably, although I was slightly disappointed by some aspects of it. I am glad to engage in a considerably more protracted discussion of the film in person should anyone want further clarification.

Monday we found Will, ate more food (at Fidel's, down Cuba mall - Wellington is endowed mightily with these C1 style trendy student lunch cafes) and trooped Wellington around taking photos of a toy weasel (naturally). Details to follow here shortly. Hell pizza and yelling at 'Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?' followed. Then back to Pen and Kruse's to catch the end of Star Wars Episode IV. Online verdict on that one: 5 stars. No correspondence entered into. If you disagree, you are simply wrong, but you are of course entitled to my opinion.

Tuesday we came home. The end.

There was more rambling to come here, but if I don't post this now, it's not going to get done, and events in real life have already overtaken the blogging. So damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead, and more to perhaps follow shortly. In any event I'll probably stick my Threesome play here shortly, because it didn't get selected (sob).

For now though I'm just going to stop.