weblog November 3rd, 2005
Sometimes, the name of a weblog post comes before you know what you’re going to write about. But this was easy. And if we want to keep on going, there’s heaps more Oz book titles to choose from.
We have a terror alert level, did you know/remember? I’d pretty much forgotten, though I vaguely recall some kind of fridge magnet doing the rounds at some point. Anyhow, it’s still at medium, despite our ultra-scary and important specific intelligence concerning a potential threat that Mr Howard kindly told us about yesterday. Now why is that? Probably an oversight I imagine.
Ah, it also turns out that our government has specifically told New Zealand that nothing is actually supposed to be happening soon, however. It must some kind of diversionary measure against the terrorists. Once you get them confused, they’re easier to catch.
Oh, we also didn’t tell our anti-terrorism infrastructure about it. That’ll really confuse those awful men. It’ll be like when you steal someone’s chocolate to get a rise out of them, but they don’t react amusingly and so you grudgingly give it back because you’re bored. I’m sure the bombs will be left, defused, outside Parliament House tomorrow.
So, there’s something bad happening, at some point, in the future, possibly. Very important, but only if you’re an Australian Senator or just an Australian pleb. Now, if group A could just remove group B’s social liberties quickly and neatly? Or, hey, we could just discuss these really important and potentially useful changes without cheap tricks and political sleight of hand. That’d be nice.
Posted by Tom Charman to australia, john howard, politics | 2 Comments »
weblog November 2nd, 2005
My travels are over and I’m back in a country where despite the many apocalyptic events happening throughout the world, a fast horse apparently deserves the first ten minutes of every news bulletin.
The remainder of my time in India went well. As promised, I rode off in to the desert on a camel and returned 24 hours later with a very sore arse. I visited a few more forts and palaces and now know far more than I ever needed to about Rajasthani history. I went to a number of very different cities — Jodhpur which was a nice place whose major claim to fame is that most of the buildings are painted blue, Udaipur which is a beautiful town on the edge of a lake and a good place to relax before I headed on to Ahmedabad, the most polluted city I have ever been to where my eyes were burning after 10 seconds outside and finally Mumbai.
Mumbai was a good place to finish. While still being very clearly Indian, it is India’s most westernised city with alcohol being far more accepted, people more often wearing western clothes and women actually speaking and being spoken to. It also bans rickshaws from most of the city meaning all the would-be rickshaw touts seem to have become drug dealers instead.
The absolute highlight of my time in India was the food which was amazing, particularly for a vegie like me. The restaurants class themselves as either ‘pure veg’, ‘veg’ or ‘non-veg’ and even non-veg tended to have loads of vegie food. It all tasted great, full of flavour and very fresh with my favourite dish being masala dosa — a pancake filled with spicy mashed potato. After such spicy, flavoursome food everything back here is tasting a bit bland.
But its not all bad. It’s great to look at the sky and see blue rather than haze. Driving down a three lane road with only three lanes of traffic moving down it is certainly novel and the sound of silence (rather than car horns) has never sounded so good. Anyway, must go — a newsflash on the highlights of Makybe Diva’s first day of retirement has just appeared on Ninemsn.
Posted by Andrew Coulthurst to india, travel | 7 Comments »
weblog October 27th, 2005
There’s lots of different ways to review TV. Over the years, we’ve had group reviews, we’ve had rants, we’ve had letters… It’s not usually hard to come up with something interesting when you’re watching something happen every week.
But when you’re watching old stuff, it’s harder to get an entire essay out. You’re watching it again, you’ve read stuff about it, it’s distractingly old… This is why people write episode guides the way they do. And that’s why now, some of the Grapefruit reviews of old TV will be in a different format to the usual. A more episode-guidey form.
Let me know what you think… We’ve almost made a separate Grapefruit episode guide in the past, but I think this is a better solution. It’s certainly easier.
Posted by Tom Charman to tv, website | 1 Comment »
weblog October 25th, 2005
Well, it’s about bloody time. Though we apparently don’t have any music from Sony BMG, the Australian iTunes Music Store is up and running — with tracks available for $1.69 and albums for (usually) $16.99. Bought me a Sarah Blasko track this morning and it was easy as pie (the greek letter pi! ahem, no, not really).
Ah, but is anything free, you ask? Well, they have a free single of the week (This week it’s ‘Shadowlands’ by Youth Group) and a nice collection of Australian Podcasts too.
So, er, yay. Hopefully we’ll get some TV at some point in the future…
Posted by Tom Charman to apple, music | 10 Comments »
weblog October 17th, 2005
Well, knock me over with a feather. I wasn’t expecting this.
An M-rated spin-off from Doctor Who set in the modern day, starring John Barrowman as Captain Jack. A kind of sci-fi crime show soap thing. Written by Russell T. Davies.
That comes to 27 episodes of Who-ish television per year. I just hope Davies doesn’t do too much writing on Torchwood. I don’t want him burning himself out too soon. When the Doctor starts sending people “straight to hell”, or twenty useless brats join the TARDIS crew, we’ll have our clue.
But, wow.
Posted by Tom Charman to Doctor Who, Torchwood, tv | 3 Comments »
weblog October 16th, 2005
This India place is pretty hectic. Appartently they have over a billion people here, and I think about half of them have asked me if I want to ride in their rickshaw. After about a week here I am slowly getting in to the Indian swing of things. My first few days were pretty bewildering — Delhi isn’t the easiest place in the world to find yourself in after the relative familarity of London. And after Delhi, Agra was equally challenging. The Taj Mahal is just as astonishing as everyone says it is but inevitably the more tourists there are, the more touts there are and the more aggresively they go about their touting. There I had one rickshaw driver following me around for two hours insisting I wanted to ride in his rickshaw. After that Jaipur has been pleasantly calm. It is still a big city — 2.5 million people (and a proper 2.5 mil city not a ‘somewhere between Melbourne and Adelaide 2.5 mil’) — with eight lanes of traffic trying to squeeze down a two lane road.
My more enjoyable time in Jaipur is in a large part due to Satendra, my new Indian friend and rickshaw driver who will actually take me where I want to go rather than where he will get the most commission. Yesterday he drove me round all the sites of Jaipur — most impressively the Amber Fort — about my fifth Indian Fort but by far the most impressive, nestled away on a hillside with hundreds of rooms to explore, many of which seemed like they hadn’t been found in a century or two, the Monkey valley where I made the serious faux-pas of hitting the bell in the Hindu temple with my head (they don’t plan for people over 5’10” here) which apparently meant the Hindu gods would curse me, and with 30 million of them that can’t be good, and some astronomical observatory built by one of the kings in which he felt the need to include a seven storey high sundial.
Anyway a couple of hours it is on to Jaisalmer, a desert city from where you can go even more deserty by heading on a camel safari out in to the middle of nowhere. If I survive expect another update from India in a week or so…
Posted by Andrew Coulthurst to india, travel | 4 Comments »
weblog October 13th, 2005
So, the new iPods are out. As the rumour sites had been alternately predicting and denying, they play videos. The American iTunes Music Store has an arrangement with both ABC and Disney to offer such shows as Lost and Desperate Housewives as 320×240 movies for US$2 each.
So do I get one? To replace the struggling battery on my current iPod would cost me $100; the 30GB iPod is now $403 for a student and the 60GB is $538. And you can get them in black. Hmmm. I was kind of hoping that the iPod would have a widescreen, that would just be a very tall display normally, and then be turned on its side to watch TV. But that would have made it kind of a long iPod. The new ones are quite small, thinner than they’ve ever been before.
The idea of watching my innumerable TV DVDs re-encoded for iPod use on the train is appealing, but having black bars on an already teeny screen seems a waste. I also have a certain reluctance to get the ‘first generation’ of iPods with video.
Meanwhile my lovely iMac was superceded — the new ones come with built in webcams, a remote control (and software to show large-type menu options when using it) and a few smaller additions/subtractions. I’m vaguely jealous, but I’m also aware that this moment of supecession must come to all technology. Imagine how my iPod feels.
So… to iPod or not to iPod?
Posted by Tom Charman to apple, imac, ipod, tv | 11 Comments »
weblog October 9th, 2005
Over the last week I have found myself walking around London laughing to myself at the ludicrous contradictions of the place. It is one of the most cosmopolitan places in the world but is at times still so very British. Its police have apparently have a shoot-to-kill policy but hardly any of them actually have guns (probably just as well). Its people would probably come second only to the Russians in a drinking competition (and at least they have the politeness to drink their bottles of vodka in the confines of their own home) yet all the pubs must shut by 11 (although this will finally change in a few months time). No one has gone to church in decades yet on a Sunday no shop is allowed to be open for more than six hours.
Whenever anyone asks me where I lived in the UK, I always say London. While this is technically correct, I lived in an outer suburb about as far from everything you would think of as London that you can get. It makes Brighton in Melbourne seem like a buzzing centre of excitement and entertainment, a bohemian, free-thinking metropolis. When we learnt leisure activities in French class, the teacher went round the class doing an oral exercise:
Teacher: Where do you live?
Student: (insert name of home suburb here)
Teacher: What is there to do in (home suburb)?
Student: (list of such activities)
When he came to me and I said Petts Wood, he burst out laughing and answered the second question himself: ‘Rien! Rien! Rien!’. After five minutes of him rolling around on floor laughing it was starting to become a little scary and we were all quite relieved when the bell rang. A few years later when I started learning German with the same teacher I thought it safer to answer Orpington, the very slightly less boring neighbouring suburb. I make a point of going back to visit Petts Wood each time I come to London just to make sure it is still as dead as ever. Somehow it is comforting to know that in this crazy, crazy world of ours, there is such a place even in one of the most vibrant, exciting, interesting cities there is.
Posted by Andrew Coulthurst to travel, united kingdom | 3 Comments »
weblog October 9th, 2005
As my time in London is rapidly drawing to a close, it is probably time I filed my New York review, so here it is:
New York is the world city. It is after all in the US which, as Copernicus proved, is the centre of the universe. It manages to cram a little piece of all the world’s societies on to one small island (and bar about four hours in not-very-Brooklyny bits of Brooklyn and 1.5 minutes on Staten Island, Manhattan is ‘all’ I saw). Despite the masses of tourists it is very much a worker’s city and, as my aunt pointed out to me, to truly understand its psyche you would really need to be working there. As I said in my previous message it has cleaned up a lot, almost to the point where it has maybe lost a little of what made it special. Regardless, it is still a great city — when you shove 15 million people from all around the world into a space the size of Melbourne you are bound to get something pretty special.
Pros: A little bit of every culture/society all mixed up, good CD shops, good live music, good bars, easy to follow if slightly unoriginal street names.
Cons: For me it lacked a certain je ne sais quoi.
Score: 7.5/10
(I asked Gisela also to give NY a score out of ten. She asked what the criteria were. I said whatever she wanted them to be. She said that was a fucking stupid idea — giving something a score based on an unknown criteria — and refused to do so. I pointed out that criteria was in fact the plural, criterion was the singular. She punched me. I am therefore forced to give what I think Gisela’s score based on the unknown criteria I believe she would select would be: 9.5/10.)
Posted by Andrew Coulthurst to travel, usa | 3 Comments »
weblog October 7th, 2005
Finally got part two of Season 5 of Angel the other day; my collection is complete. It’d be the first time I’d ever owned all the episodes of a TV series, if it wasn’t for that cheating Firefly with it’s all in one boxed set.
The DVD’s quite good — a better than average gag reel, a whole bunch of commentaries, including a Joss Whedon one, and four little documentaries. The one that looks at the series as a whole is particularly nice. I hate it when people making shows act as if their last few seasons were the only good ones, and these folk don’t. Which is nice.
Unfortunately the Joss Whedon (and Amy Acker and Alexis Denisof) commentary is for ‘A Hole in the World’ and as a result they’re all sad and quiet for about half the time. Ripped off! They do apologise sincerely. Alexis Denisof continues to sound exactly like Kermit the Frog. Anyhow, this purchase means that I might actually review the last two episodes. At some point. Maybe.
Posted by Tom Charman to Angel, joss whedon, tv | Comments Off on All Angel All The Time