chinese garden

A couple of bigger shots from the Chinese Garden of Friendship on Day Three of the Sydney Trip...

I actually got a magnetic bookmark from there which has almost the exact same shot of the pagoda on it too... and I like that you can see the carp under the water in the other shot.

I don't think I mentioned it at the time, but those carp were freakin insane! They'd swim around all sedate and lovely like you expect carp in a Chinese garden to do... then suddenly it was like they were staging a production of West Side Story, and there seemed to be little fish gangs and a lot of rushing backwards and forwards and swarming and swimming in big packs... and then they decided to start jumping out of the water for no apparent reason... very odd.

Current Mood:

movies: horton hears a who

"I meant what I said, and I said what I meant!
An elephant's faithful one hundred percent!"

Interestingly, even though that line appears in the movie version of Horton Hears a Who! it's actually from a different Horton story, one that I had a cassette tape of when I was a kid... Horton Hatches an Egg...

So I already had a built in soft spot for Horton before we saw the movie (plus he's an elephant, and I have a soft spot for elephants anyway).

I will by saying the same thing that I say just about every time we see the latest and greatest CG animation extravaganza... the textures and the rendering, from the ultra closeup shots right at the beginning, through to all the fur on all the Whos and a lot of the jungle animals, is all first rate. Yeah, there are a couple of "water issues" at the start, but since I know water is the hardest thing to do realistically, I can forgive that.

A case in point (of the good stuff) is the render they gave to Vlad the Vulture... his wings just look incredible when he's flinging them around like a cape when we first meet him... there's this oily black sheen to them that's just fantastic.

There's not a whole hell of a lot of story (but then, if you're turning what is essentially a picture book into an 88 minute movie, you're going to get that)... but what there is is quite sweet, and quite touching towards the end.

Both Jim Carrey and Steve Carell turn in quite good performances... perhaps somewhat understated... but that could just be that they had multiple takes to use and they chose some of the subtler ones, or it's just the use of the voice and not the visual that makes it feel that way.

Actually my favourite character had almost no lines at all... Jojo, son of the Mayor of Whoville... who's all grey and black and floppy haired and just all around EmoWho... the animators really do a great job of putting across his personality without any dialog.

There were a couple of really good moments (and a somewhat weird one at the end involving a song that just comes out of nowhere)... but I have to say that the traditional 2D animated "Japanimation Horton" section was pretty damn amusing... and the very brief use of original Suess style drawing in another one of Horton's daydreams was a nice touch.

It's a sweet movie, with a good message, but I don't think it's going to light the world on fire.

yani's rating: 2 Whoville Mayors out of 5

wet wet wet

Well I think Autumn is officially here now...

A couple of days ago we had the coldest night in three months only a week after having had the hottest March night on record...

And we haven't had rain in I don't know how many days (literally I don't know... I tried looking it up, but couldn't find it)... but after a few specks yesterday it came down with avengence this morning...

Yes, this morning... while I was on my walk!

I haven't been THAT wet on a walk since the Drowned Rat Incident back in April last year... I wasn't quite as wet this time... I mean my underwear stayed mostly dry this time... but I still got very, very wet!

And like last time the rain decided that it would be a good game to absolutely soak me to the skin when I was in the middle of a very open and exposed area... and then stop right around the time I managed to find shelter under the University Footbridge, leaving me to finish my walk in soaking wet clothes.

It was weird actually... I was standing there, pretty much in the dark (the end of Daylight Savings can just hurry up now) and soaking wet, under the Footbridge, and I could see rain against the street light back the way I'd come, but there didn't seem to be anything against the light in the direction I was heading... like the bridge was some mythical cut off point for the rain. Very weird, and also very annoying.

But unlike last time where I tried to wring the water out of my teeshirt as best I could while still wearing it, I decided that since it was dark, and mostly deserted (and I could see a long way in both directions), I would just take off my top and wring it out... which is actually a very out of character thing for me to have done, but in the end turned out to be the right one...

Luckily the wind didn't seem to be that cold, so I wasn't left shivering in a wet teeshirt (although most of me was pretty cold when I got home, I just didn't feel it). And now all my gear has been shut up in the bathroom with my oil heater to try and dry it out...

On the upside, I was showered, dressed and organised just after I got back (I didn't see the point in putting another set of clothes on after I'd taken off the wet ones, only to take those off to put on my actual clothes after my shower)...

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religious icons

Something with a religious vibe to round out the Easter holiday...

I actually went out this morning and did something of a "Hunt and Gather" photo safari... it started out because when we were on our way down to the Kite Fesitval on Saturday I was looking out of the car window as we were driving through a fairly industrialised area and happened to catch sight of something at the far end of a street as we whisked by... and in the two or three seconds that my eyes had to tell my brain what they'd seen, I knew it was a Benzobot (and a big one at that)... but then we were over the railway line and there was no way back around (actually there was, I just didn't know it at the time)...

Then, on the way back from Semaphore I saw what appeared to be a very cool Icon mural outside one of the churches on Port Road, so I figured I would head out and snap some photos while it was somewhat cloudy and the light was mostly soft... then as I was heading out, I decided I would go via one of the places I'd shot before which was on the way... then come back via the city and maybe snag a few bits and pieces there too.

So basically it felt like I was in and out of the car every few minutes.

There wasn't that much to see in the first street... but when I finally found it again, the Benzobot was very cool... possibly a commission piece, since it was the only piece of street art on the whole building... the Icon was less so... nice idea, but not great.

When I got into the city I did a bit of revisiting of previous sites, just to see if anything was different, although I did see a few new bits and pieces too... and I discovered this house with an amazing front garden, just chock full of, well, STUFF... sculptures and signs and hanging things and whatnot. I'm not sure I would want to live there... or even next door to it... but it was definitely worth a look.

And also in the "interestingly enough" column, even after the guy did all that whinging about Jules' "Phoenix Crane", he never did anything about getting rid of it, and it's still there... which was nice to see.

I stopped off in a couple of other places to reshoot some shots that hadn't come out all that well on previous occasions due to the harsh light (in between going around and around and around and around the same block far too many times because now you can't turn across King William Street because of the stupid tram *grrrr*)... and oddly enough, even though it's a public holiday, I seemed to keep coming across people in the backalleys (I actually saw a couple of guys on BMX bikes who were either tagging or doing stencils or possibly stickering... they kept circling the area while I was there, and then as I was driving away I saw one of them doing something to a wall)...

I also swung by the gold crash test dummies on poles in Hindmarsh Square... I'm sure it's "art"... but I have no idea what the hell it's all about (and I can't find anything about it on Google)... they sprung up just before the Fringe started, but they're still there, so they weren't just a Fringe thing obviously... and they're outside where the old RAA building was... and being crash test dummies, maybe it's significant... buggered if I know...

Then after trying to find the stuff that Benzo and Co did during the Fringe that I couldn't find previously (I even went as far as knocking on the closed door of the pub to ask the guy mopping the floor about it)... turns out they weren't permanent things, they'd been done on board and disappeared after the Fringe was over... buggery buggery bugger!

But at least I know now...

And yes, I realise that this little story has nothing at all to do with the photos at the top of this post, but I've had these shots for a while and Easter seemed to be the appropriate time to post them... and I'm sure I'll find more than a few chances to post the stuff from today later on.

Current Mood:

unconscious mutterings 268

Tumpty tumpty tay... Poor little rowing boys... all locked out of their shed in the chilly morning air wearing lycra suits and not much else... tumpty tumpty Unconscious Mutterings...

1. Money :: Talks


2. Unhappy :: Chappy


3. Joking :: Only


4. Chipmunk :: Chip and Dale


5. Date :: Movie


6. Slideshow :: Powerpoint


7. Chicago :: All That Jazz


8. Lifetime :: Once in a...


9. Skid row :: Little Shop of Horrors


10. Edward :: Scissorhands

Current Mood:

the exquisite sting of sunburn

I grew up as a child in the late 70's and early 80's in Australia... so I'm no stranger to the exquisite pink sting that is sunburn...

But I haven't been sunburnt over quite the amount of skin that I was yesterday for a long while... usually it's just my face or one arm or both arms... not my face and both my arms and the backs of my hands and my fingers and the back of my neck and the sides of my neck and even my lips I think...

And so it got me thinking about sunburn and my childhood and the strange and somewhat specific phenomenon that IS sunburn...

Like I said, as an Australian child, especially in the years before "Slip, Slop, Slap" came in, I'm no stranger to the concept... and I have more than a few childhood memories of warm Summer nights, after having spent the whole day at the beach, feeling like your whole body was on fire and dreading even the seemingly incredibly scratchy and heavy press of a light cotton sheet on hot, tight, pink skin (okay, that last bit sounds a bit filthy)...

Then there's the additional joy I had given that I have a mother who seems to have a particular thrill over peeling off the skin once it starts to flake and peel... and she's an evil wench, she really likes to peel it off in as big a piece as she can. She's the same with glue on fingers actually... I have no idea what that is all about... weird, freaky woman...

I know there's a whole bunch of science behind sunburn, and the fact you've probably cooked the top couple of layers of skin, but this is one of those cases where I'm far happier not knowing the exact whys and wherefores... but just the fact that your skin suddenly holds all this heat in it, and tightens up like a $3 facelift, and even the slightest kiss of either additional sunlight or water that's anything other than freezing cold will make it burn with the most exquisite pain imaginable.

And I also know I've used the word "exquisite" a lot during this post, but it was the one that sprang into my mind while I was in the shower this morning when the warm water was hitting the back of my left hand and the right side of my neck, the two most badly burned places on my body... it was that level of pain that is so sharp and bites so unexpectedly... but at the same time I didn't want to make it stop. But then that's probably just because my brain is wired all wrong when it comes to certain kinds of pain.

When it comes to pain from sunburn though, there have been two instances that are possibly the worst in my memory. I'm sure there were others that were more painful at the time, but these two stick in my mind possibly because they weren't "usual" cases. The first I think because it was just really, really odd, and the second because I wore that particular sunburn like a badge of honour...

Back when I lived in the house I grew up in, we had a big conifer tree in the front yard, right next to the front fence... and then, for some reason (maybe it had dropped a branch, maybe it was the wrong kind of tree, I honestly don't remember why), it was being cut down. So I sat on the front step in a pair of shorts (which tells you I must have been fairly young at the time) and watched them cut it down (the only thing I actually remember is that when they felled the main part it fell the wrong way and hit the gate and we had a huge dent in the top of the gate from then on). And that night, I had sunburn in the oddest of places... not, as you would have expected, on the tops of my legs... oh no... I was only sunburnt behind my knees! The only thing I can assume is that it was reflected sunlight from the step... but even that just seems really, really weird.

My badge of honour sunburn comes from my brief, but enjoyable, stint going down to the nude beach at Maslins with a former friend a few years back. And no, it wasn't where you would expect (everybody always assumes that certain parts of your anatomy will get burnt, but if you look at the skin on them, it's always much darker than the surrounding skin, so your chances of sunburn are much less likely)... and it wasn't even my butt if memory serves... but that section right at the top of the thigh. So for the next three or four days try to sit for any length of time while at the same time trying no to put any pressure on the sunburn... there wasn't a position known to man...

I've always wished I was one of those people (like my buddy J for example) who tan to a consistent, even, deep, golden brown in the Summer (or any time really)... but thanks to however many thousands of years of probable genetic inbreeding by my hardy English peasant stock ancestors (at least on Ma's side... although I would imagine that the ancestors on the paternal side disappear back to the Mother Country before too long too), I have basically three and a half skin colours... I have "Never Sees The Sun White", "Too Much Sun Pink", "Gradual Repeated Exposure Light Tan" and then the "half colour", which also happens to also be the slight bane of my existence on occasion, "Proper Golden Freckle".

The freckles were cute when I was little (and to be honest, on the right kind of guy, grown up facial freckles are still incredibly sexy)... but now they're just my skin's way of mocking me by producing little tiny blobs of tan in a sea of mediocre pink or beige.

For now, however, I remain pink and white...

Current Mood:

happy easter

Current Mood:

too much shopping and semaphore kites

I'm a dick! I'm a dick! I'm a dick! I'm a dick! I'm a dick! I'm a dick! I'm a dick! I'm a dick! I'm a dick! I'm a dick! I'm a dick!

But more on that later...

This morning was the first time in three weeks that I've actually been able to do a proper shop... first there was the pre-Sydney shop, so not much point getting too much stuff... then there was the post-Sydney shop where it was just too hot and too soon after Sydney for me to even think about what I might need, so I didn't end up getting much of anything... so today was a bumper, bumper shop...

My kitchen counter still looks like there's been some sort of supermarket explosion happen on it...

Then we kind of wandered around looking for bargains of an Easter Egg nature... and due to Ma being, well, Ma... we had to go to three different shops before we came back to the first shop we looked in (Target) and bought things there.

After we came back here and I'd unpacked everything and Ma had taken ten minutes to read like six pages of the paper (whereas I can usually read the whole thing in about that time), we hopping in the car and headed down to Semaphore...

The 11th Adelaide International Kite Festival was on down there... so, like last year, we had to go and have a look (actually I've had it in my Outlook diary and my phone calendar since after last year's trip).

It was a seemingly perfect day for it too... clear blue skies, not too hot (a total of 22°C according to the news earlier), the wind picked up not long after we arrived, and although they didn't get EVERYTHING into the air, there were a lot of the big floaty, flying things up (as proved by the small selection in the photo to the left), including some nipple showing mermaids, a couple of cute owl, various sea creatures, three cupids of various sizes and much to Ma's delight, a big pink and purple seahorse (sadly it never got that far off the ground because it was on the same line as the owls and the whole thing kept crashing, but it did look pretty good when it was up).

However, THIS is the point where the phrase "I'm a dick!" becomes relevant...

After all the photos I took on the last day we were in Sydney, I never recharged my camera battery. Yes, after the debacle on the third day, you would have thought that I would have learned my lesson... but, sadly, I didn't...

So as we were driving down the road towards the beach I suddenly realised I might be working on low battery and turned on my camera... yep, the little "one third of battery power left" icon was on. But that might not have been too bad... I did pretty much a whole day in Sydney before the battery finally conked out late in the afternoon... I could do this...

Errr.. not so much...

I managed 21 photos before the camera fell on it's ass... bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger...

It wasn't a complete disaster though, I just took charge of Ma's camera (at her insistence) and used it like I would have used mine... so I just have to get the photos from her on Tuesday. It does mean no Montage Monday though... at least not this week.

Other than that it was a pretty good day... we got down there at around 11:30 or so... we watched the kites for a while, I took photos, then we went and moved the car, came back, watched more kites and then went off and had some fish and chips for lunch (well, what else are you going to have beside the seaside?), then wandered a bit more before we went into the Kite Shop tent and I bought this cool little black "super sled" kite with a flame design and long red streamers (and interestingly, I seemed to be the only person on the whole beach who was flying one of that particular style... either officially in the Festival or out of it)... then we went back down onto the "public" end of the beach (ie not where all the official kite flyers were) and I flew it for ages. It was fun actually... although it's one of those things that once you get it up in the air, you don't really have to do very much to it.

Except that is, if you happened to have my kite. Somewhat like it's owner, my kite was equal parts suicidal and homicidal... it either wanted to keep crashing into the ground or else it looked like it was going to fall out of the sky and take the top of somebody's head off.

After she'd watched me for a while Ma decided she wanted a kite too, so she ended up getting this smaller kind that was actually shaped like a little bird, and we headed out onto one of the grassy areas to fly both of them. Poor Ma, she had all kinds of problems with her line snagging, and not being able to get it up in the air... although I think she was just being wussy about it... when I swapped kites with her briefly, I got hers up really easily and it was flying quite well until I gave it back to her (hehehe).

We hung out for ages just flying the kites and having fun... well, I was having fun because my kite was flying quite well and really high (if a little erratically from time to time), but poor Ma... her birdie kept doing spiral nosedives.

Anyway, I think it was about 4:30 or so by the time we'd had enough and we decided to leave... so we'd been there for about six hours...

Which would have been fine, had it not been for the fact that we only applied some sunscreen before we left my house, and hadn't taken any with us. Fortunately we were both wearing our hats... but my arms are all pink and slightly crispy... and so are the backs of my hands, oddly enough... which I think is a result of the kite flying... it's actually some really oddly orientated sunburn... weird.

Thank all appropriate deities for After Sun Gel... I'll be applying it all evening, and probably for large chunks of tomorrow too.

Current Mood:

photo friday: white bunnies

Bunnies!

In fact, they're white Sydney bunnies made of some unspecified material...

There were in this ginchy little chi chi la la store across the street from our hotel and they appeared the last morning. Sadly they were $45 for a set of three, because if they're actually just been $15 each I would have stuffed one in my suitcase somehow.

Actually a set of three would have been cool because somebody had set two of them up in an obscene pose (and it was just funny... bad and wrong, but funny)... I think it was the one laying down and the one sitting all the way up... you know, so they were doing it bunny-style.

I've had a slightly odd Good Friday... I'd been planning to make Toona Noodle Do, but I'd used up all my milk and grated cheese, so I had to go to the 7 Day Supermarket to grab some... which was fine... except when I got home I looked in the cupboard and discovered I didn't have any Cream of Celery soup... which is basically the glue that binds the whole thing together. So back to the supermarket I had to go... but it turned out they they didn't have any celery soup (I can't imagine it's a high demand item)... Cream of Chicken, Pumpkin, Mushroom and possibly some other random vegetable, but no celery. So I had a minor sulk in the supermarket (slightly tempered by the very tall and very obviously formerly private school gay guy who sasheyed past me while I was looking at soup) and ended up picking Cream of Mushroom...

Which I have to say, didn't work out that bad in the end... especially given what it looks like when you open the can... oh, and I need a new can opener... the one I have is a waste of time...

And then I had a conversation with a guy I've wanted to get groinal with for... oooh, about ten years... and it may just happen. I'm not counting chickens or crossing fingers, but the omens look promising...

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another deco thing

I lifted this one from Muzbot the other day... and interestingly enough after my comments about Art Deco last week, I came out with what I think is the most Deco sounding font...

I'm not sure how accurate some of the details are, but I do love the aesthetic!

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