Optimus Primate

Another Sunday night, another blog, another movie on TV by the fire, although the quality of the film this week is considerably less crappy than Valentine from last week. It's Outbreak, which I have not seen before, and which seems to contain a ridiculous number of famous people, given the basic plot is a search for a cute little monkey. Find that monkey Dustin, Rene, Cuba, Morgan, Donald, Kevin! Find it I say! I think they should just given up on that killer disease sub-plot malarkey and made it into a zany family comedy, with franchise potential; Monkey Search 4: Monkeys in Mexico! I can see it now:

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: The trail is cold, again! But look - fresh banana skins. He WAS here!

RENE RUSSO: Yes, but not any more. We've just got to find him! In many ways, the affection we both share for Edwardo the Rhesus Monkey is the symbolic key to saving our shaky but still loving relationship.

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: Agreed. Kevin?

KEVIN SPACEY: You crazy kids and your monkeys. Don't worry, we'll find that monkey yet, even if this does prove our wackiest adventure to date! But we've only got 10 minutes to make the 2:15 to Tiajuana!

CUBA GOODING JR.: Hey gang, I just won 4 pogo sticks in an enchillada-eating contest with a moustachioed bean-farmer!

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: There's no time to lose!

Meanwhile, in a stereotypical Mexican bar some 5 miles down the road...

DONALD SUTHERLAND: Curses! Pedro says the wretched creature WAS here, but he hitched a ride on a balloon truck heading for Tiajuana 15 minutes ago! Freeman! Procure transport immediately! I must have that monkey!

MORGAN FREEMAN: And then we'll get the key, won't we Donald?

DONALD SUTHERLAND: Exactly! And once we have the key, recovering the gold should be a simple matter of completing the puzzle!

MORGAN FREEMAN: And then no-one will be able to stop us from buying out the orphanage, not even that meddling Dustin Hoffman and his pals! Ahahahahaaaaa!

J.T WALSH: I would add something, but I think probably only Ben actually knows who I am.

FREEMAN and SUTHERLAND: Shut up, Walsh.

You know, I think the word 'moustachioed' has been used in this blog a disproportionate number of times. Ooo, things look bad for Mr. Spacey. Once again a sluggish monkey location effort brings death. If I've seen it once I've seen it a thousand times.

It's all go round here Sparky, I can tell you. Too much on and too much bollocks like that up there to write to be piddling about with a trifling little thing like a thesis, even if that whole 'available time to write' period does seem to be approaching its business end rather rapidly. But with this cavalcade of social events going on in a never-ending parade of merry-making, who needs to do university work? (Aside from Tim, obviously. Oooo, cheap but fair, I'm sure the jibes will be repaid come around January) It seems to be all about the comings and goings. People that have been here now aren't, or won't be for much longer. Others that haven't been here now are, or soon will be. It's all highly confusing. Could we all just try and stay in the same place please, people? Or we could at least all wear some kind of locator beacon / satellite phone for use in emergencies - what if all the regular communication lines into Fez broke down (again with the interesting times. Damn you Tremewan) on the very day, say that I needed to get hold of James and ask him exactly how I was supposed to use a 'pasta bike'? What then? What say I feel like having somebody call me 'Benj' - where's Teena? She's in Canberra, goddamnit, which is of course no use to anyone, barring James C. and the Australian Public Service. Come next Saturday for instance, what will happen if I say something and then think "Hmm, that sentence could possibly be construed as some kind of innuendo, if only there was someone around to snicker and add some kind of dodgy related comment" - it'll all be for nothing, because Dan will be on the way to England, of all places, and we all know England's done nothing good for the world since (allegedly) inventing cricket... I mean what, we're going to have to download our OWN stuff off the internet from then on? It's asking a lot, really it is.

Luckily, Godzone's population is being kept hovering above the all important 4 million mark by a few arrivals. Emma turns out to be just like she was via MSN, only less of a blue and white Microsoft window with words in it, and more a sort of person, who has a higher probability of causing me actual physical injury. No problem though, I am always prepared to fall down and hurt myself slightly for the amusement of others, especially when drunk, as she will probably learn if she hangs around a bit (I suspect that in 'Nam, I would have lasted about 5 minutes, because the first time I took the heroin that Tour of Duty has implied was such an intregal part of everyone's Vietnam experience, I would have hurled myself into the nearest likely looking bush, which would of course have bamboo stakes concealed in it). Fi has also shown up of late, which I discovered today is excellent if for no other reason than that she turns out to be almost as bad at Grabble as I am, and because she is a fellow English major, I feel a lot better about my own incompetency. Also she can get things off high shelves for me, always a bonus. Two people definitely in the positive column then. Huzzah.

So with their replacements already lined up before their armchairs even got cold, it was only fitting to torture Teens while we still had the chance to with Denny's on Thursday, and gather all the people that know Dan so they could celebrate the fact that he was going to the opposite side of the planet on Friday. No, but seriously, you guys will be missed, until all those times you come back at like Labour Weekend or Christmas or whenever, and then next February, which is a month I now like to call 'Two Weddings, Nic's Bar Mitzvah, and Tim's Ordination as Bishop of Southland' will be looked forward to. Feel free to show up whenever, after all, New Zealand, we're at the bottom right of the Pacific, 15 minutes (in a rowboat) from anywhere. Just pop past.

Both nights as was fitting saw a good time had by all (I know that when we refer to a night at Denny's, a 'good time' means avoiding an internal rupture of some kind, but it was better even than that!) Picton on Friday was full of rockers. We rocked out, or might have done anyway, if Nic hadn't made his usual early evening putsch on the stereo, seized control, and ground the heel of his stormtrooper-issue jackboots into the face of anyone foolish enough to suggest any particular non-Nic approved CD. Claire made a valiant attempt, as Si pointed out, to become 'CD Eva Braun', but was I think eventually psychologically worn down by the sight of Nic crouched gargoyle-like in the eerie blue glow of the stereo with an intense look in his beady eyes, warning tresspassers away with guttural growling noises. Meanwhile, jars of alcohol were consumed, flowerpots took their medicine, and Sara attacked me with 'product', which made seemingly every woman at the party to pass some kind of comment on my hair, doubtless as the result of some kind of conspiracy on her part...in fact if we investigate the ownership of hair product labels at the top level, I'm sure we'd find 100 percent female owners, and a conspiracy that includes every woman in the Western world, all telling guys how great hair products are, and make them look really good, and all the while laughing on the inside and thinking of their stock options...mind you, down the road, seated around a long table in a dimly lit smokey room, the all-male owners of the peach-flavoured chapstick cartels are kicking back, reflecting upon what a great idea it was to add small traces of crack to their product...anyway, it was good to see nearly all the desired faces there having by and large a good time, and to see Picton coming into its own as a party venue, even if it does get cut down just as it is starting to blossom, akin perhaps to the cherry tree so heinously murdered by that infamous axe wielding maniac, George Washington (allegedly). Full credit too to those embroiled in work or writing their thesis (allegedly) for showing up. Truly alcohol abuse amongst young people was the winner on the day.

Morning two of this post now, and so much bollocks yet to write about. It never rains but it pours. Never mind, I'm sure I can cut down on some of the more flowery waffle - rather than write a protracted and angry story about it, imagine if you will me pouring a general torrent of abuse onto the anonymous bastard who made off with my rear bike wheel from in front of the UCSA last Tuesday evening, and that's one story right there. Try to use words and phrases that I might in your imagined scenario, such as 'contemptible' and 'clearly in need of a jolly good kicking'. Right, that's that out of the way.

Saturday then, Dan, Nic, Sara and I trouped off to eCosm, looked around and went 'who are all these people, apart from that one who's Michelle?' and sat very quietly and watched the rugby. Maybe my expectations were raised by the first two Tri-Nations ABs games, but unfortunately, rugby is a game I have decided that has a tendency to become boring, at the top level anyway, unless one team is playing significantly worse than the other. Not always the case of course by any means, and there have been lots of exciting close matches, especially between us in the Aussies in recent times, but I suspect last weekend's game could only truly appreciated by 50 year old men in checked shirts who get properly excited by an efficient defensive screen, and the true enthusiast's appreciation for accurate goal-kicking. Why oh why must we play rugby at night when it's too bloody cold and too bloody wet, OK so we have a TV audience, hurrah, nice one, but that audience merely gets to experience all the excitement of people repetitively dropping the ball, and large men being professionally good at stopping other large men from advancing more than 5 metres at a time. Now that's entertainment. If you ever hear the phrase 'good old-fashioned rugby' used, I can assure you it is code for 'was that game dull, or what?'. Anyway, having endured 80 minutes of what I'm sure many of my fellow survivors of Christchurch Boys' High School would have lapped up as 'real test match rugby' (yawn) we decided we were all tuckered out after the previous night's efforts, pansies that we are, and left just as other people we knew were arriving. Oh well, if we hadn't we might not ever have seen Transformers: The Movie, which would have been a minor tragedy. Orson Welles, Eric Idle and Leonard Nimoy, together at last. Seriously. Stick that in your Kevin Bacon game and smoke it. It was weird. More importantly, many cool Transformers, having survived years of mortal combat in the cartoon series, seemingly impervious to those pink lasers everybody was always shooting at each other, were killed off left, right and centre. Stalwart Autobot van heroes (OK, Ratchet was technically an ambulance, but that's a van, really) Ironside and Ratchet went out like punks in the first 5 minutes, what the hell is with that? I was seriously traumatised, especially when it looked like Jazz and even Bumblebee (gasp!) had been eaten by Orson Welles. The death rate was hard to keep up with, and pretty soon we were left with only the crappy 'next generation' Transformers that no-one much really bought, because they were crap (OK, so the triple changers were kind of nifty, but I mean, all this: I'm the evil Galvatron!, and rather than turning into some kind of cool looking actual gun like Megatron, I turn into um, this really scary looking cannon of the future thing, with these, um, really intimidating orange tripod bits! Cower puny human...ahhhhh, forget it. Meanwhile over in the Autobot camp, we have Roddimus Prime, car of the future, and Ultra Magnus, truck, er, of the future. Waaaaaank.) and the Dinobots, who are after all simply too cool to kill off. Megatron (as Galvatron) went against history entirely and just up and blew Starscream away, after years of Starscream being a whining bitch and making a coup attempt on the leadership of the Decepticons just about every episode, which Megatron always ignored, although he usually issued some dire warning about what would happen next time Starscream tried it - I guess Starscream finally used up his alotted 374 chances, or something. Fortunately, Bumblebee and Jazz later turned out to be alive, and all the Dinobots made it out OK in the end, otherwise the casualties amongst the old school would have been just about 100 percent. The DVD producers though, as if understanding the horror of 4 people (Dan, Nic, Tim and myself) who had all been small boys in the 80s at witnessing this carnage, were thoughtful enough to include in the extras a 'Mausoleum' section where you could go and check on exactly which of your beloved childhood toys had not been brutally blown to pieces, and 'View the death scene' of the ones that were. (Wheeljack! No! Whyyyyyyyyy!)

Phew, that's much longer than I intended to go on about Transformers. Damn, they were some cool toys though, obviously with some lasting appeal. When the little brother of a friend accidentally broke my Grimlock (so to speak) I was apoplectic. I felt like death was too good for him. I recall having at least one gleeful dream about the other Dinobots stamping him into paste in righteous vengeance. (Hopefully this is a healthy sign of being male child and a not symptomatic of some tendency towards psychosis.) I got the stegosaurus (Snarl? Slag? One of the two) by way of replacement, but pffft, he was not nearly as cool, I mean stegosaurus is a wussy herbivore after all, and certainly not as prestigous as the leader of the Dinobots. He smashed stuff with his tail though, so that was kinda neat. Yeah, smashing stuff.

Where was I?

Right, that was the weekend, more or less.

Tonight I went to read through the play I have got myself into so as to avoid my thesis a little bit more. This like last year is part of Threesome, the show with 3 original short plays written by Dramasoc people (these people are not necessarily students, strangely). I am again in the one written by by brother's friend and flatmate Corey, who has 3 years in a row now written plays that involve people hiding behind couches. The boy has a strange obsession. This one does not call for me to be a hidee however, rather I appear to be the suicidally depressed ship's doctor and all round sarcastic bastard. This should allow for a few laughs hopefully, although I'm not sure I'll get away with making most of my own lines up as I did last year. Never mind. Should be worth a giggle anyway, so everyone should come along to check it out around Septmber 10 when it's on. Excuses such as 'But I'm in Canberra / England / Fez / a coma / wearing a fez while in a coma in England brought on by the near-terminal boredom of spending so long in Canberra' will not be tolerated, unless you have a note from your mother.

Following that it was off with Emma to see Woodenhead at the film festival, a surreal kiwi flick made in Northland by someone with the unlikely name of Florian Habicht. It was weird. Good but weird. Did I mention it was weird? It was. As Emma said afterwards, it really screams 'film school', right down to the black and white, but is probably better than that sounds. No, honestly! I was entertained. Bemused, to be sure, but entertained. Then Le Cafe, then here, then blogging (blogger checks for HTML errors when you post now, that's nice), and the silliness of putting 'Sabre Dance' by Khacaturian on loop and listening to it 8 times in a row, because I couldn't be arsed going to get a CD, and because it was there.

And now it's 7:40am. Crikey. Lunch in 5 hours, apparently. To sleep, perchance to renew energy and replenish old cells. Aye, there's the rub.