Categories
Clothes Working life

Runners for the commute

I can understand why some white-collar women wear runners on their commute given how uncomfortable and impractical some of the shoes they wear around the office look. I don’t understand why some men feel the same way though. It’s not like they wear platform shoes or high heels at work. (Unless their work is odder  ... [More]

Categories
Doctor Who dreams

The zombie dream

Jeremy, Isaac and I were being chased by kind of zombie-type things, that on-touch would change you from human into their kind. It was a bit like a cross between Shaun of the Dead and Rise of the Cybermen. Somehow I knew it was a dream, but we kept on running. Isaac nearly got caught,  ... [More]

Categories
Geek Video games

Are you keeping up with the Commodore?

Yesterday afternoon, reminiscing at ACMI’s Hits of the 80s video game exhibit — free at Melbourne’s Federation Square until May. While most of the games were running on Spectrum or C64 emulators, this copy of Way Of The Exploding Fist was running on a genuine machine. And just as it was back then, one of  ... [More]

Categories
Sport

The Village Green

We don’t have the Village Green anymore, but many Australian suburbs do have this: a local cricket oval. In summer the local cricket club will be in residence. About every fortnight there’ll be a game on. I’m not skilled enough to tell who are the locals and who are the visitors, but they frequently show  ... [More]

Categories
TV

TV stuff

The Daily Show has vanished off SBS again. It’s still on Foxtel’s Comedy Channel (9:30pm nightly). Damn. Given my inherent laziness (I don’t want to bother with torrents), do I have to shell out for Foxtel to be able to watch it? I really don’t want to do that, given the tiny amount of television  ... [More]

Categories
News and events TV

The MSM at work

Yesterday at Fed Square, the white stationwagons were a dead giveaway that the TV guys were around. Sure enough, across the road on Princes Bridge, Ted was fronting the cameras. I got my go a few minutes later. (It was one of those days, if you didn’t know.) In the pack I can see Alan  ... [More]

Categories
Net

Wikipedia

Wikipedia started a fundraising drive in December, and given the value I get out of it, I decided to contribute. Happily, I chose a day when all donations were being matched by some anonymous donor, which was a bonus. Imagine my surprise when a couple of weeks after Christmas, I got a Christmas card from  ... [More]

Categories
Culture Health

The permanence of tattoos

I know how much I’ve changed over the years. I’d like to think I’ve matured. My outlook on all sorts of things has altered. My lifestyle is radically different now from when I was 18 (if you think I’m a dag now, you should have seen me then), and has changed several times during that  ... [More]

Categories
Culture

Are actors rich?

I wonder how much money actors make? I don’t mean the megastars, I mean just your average medium-sized stars. Random example: Gareth Thomas. Played the title character in Blake’s 7, which must have occupied him for the three-and-a-bit years he was in it back in the late-70s, and made him famous. Since then IMDB lists  ... [More]

Categories
Retrospectives TV

Keeping the legend alive

I’ve mentioned before my exploits with video, a set of productions made predominantly when we were teenagers, with zero budget, on equipment borrowed from school. The very last production was an episode of the Professionals-inspired “STRIKE”, about a secret crime-fighting organisation. Made in 1993, by which point all of us were either at uni or  ... [More]

Categories
books Film Food'n'drink

Summer reviews

A big bunch of thumbs ups for all these, from the past couple of months. The First Casualty by Ben Elton — a mystery set close to a century ago, a bit like Julian Barnes’ Arthur and George, and also very reminiscent of Black Adder 4, but with a much more serious look at the  ... [More]

Categories
Home life Sport

Summer sports

Summer rolls on, with several hot days this week leaving us sweating. On Thursday night we had an evening session of street cricket, always good when it’s warm and the sun goes down late. It’s not exactly The Ashes, and some fielding slip-ups meant one tennis ball went down a drain. Oh well. If we’d  ... [More]