Words
"Look behind you - a three-headed monkey!"
Having been distracted by the abovementioned mutant simian, you probably won't have noticed eight months of no updates. Phew.
By an amazing coincidence Laura is eight months old - what are the chances of that? Obviously we've spent most of the time since the birth juggling parenthood, work, and our jet-setting lifestyles. From what I can recall it mostly involved nappies and lack of sleep.
This is probably an opportune moment to ramble on about what a wondrous life-changing experience fatherhood is, and how it opens your eyes to what you never knew you really wanted out of life - so I won't.
Baby!
Laura Alison Mary Vale was born at about 10pm on Sunday night. It was quite a difficult birth, but Micky and Laura are both fine, so all's well that ends well. Many thanks to our midwives and all the specialists at Wellington Hospital who helped it all happen. Hopefully they're both coming home tomorrow lunchtime.
The real credit, of course, goes to Micky who was fantastic, brave, strong, and an amazing pusher, according to the hospital staff. I've never been more proud of her, in love with her, or more delighted with something which came out of her body, than I was last night. And what a lovely little girl we have for all her hard work. Thanks love!
By the way, if anyone would like to visit, please give us a bit of time to settle down first, and let us know when you're planning to come so we can say yay or nea. You wouldn't want to turn up and have your head bitten off while being hit in the face with projectile vomit...
9 long months...
If you haven't seen the Tourism Australia Where the Bloody Hell Are You adverts, or indeed the excellent video parody by Downwind Media, then the above may not make as much sense as we would otherwise hope.
With any luck there'll be some proper baby related news, as opposed to this shiftless foot-tapping, quite soon. Until then.
Why living in New Zealand is probably better than where you live
There are lots of reasons - but here are a few. Please bear with the zeal of recently emigrated - after a while we'll probably settle down and start finding things to be annoyed about like proper folk.
1.
Fork-lift trucks are regularly advertised on prime-time television. And not only that, but said advert has a catchy jingle: "There ain't nothing like a Crown, for picking it up and putting it down." Admittedly those are the only lyrics, but it is sung in a barbershop stylee, complete with comically deep bass voice for the final d-o-wwwwww-nnn.2.
Being a relatively low-population country, some economies of scale don't make sense. This means that it's rare to have telephone answering outsourced to an overseas call-centre, and quite often you speak to people on the 'phone who you may have met in person in the bank or wherever. It would, sadly, be remiss of me not to point out that some telemarketing calls are being handled overseas, so we aren't completely devoid of the long-pause-and-click of the autodialler picking up...3.
Coffee is almost universally good - the only place I've come across where I couldn't get an espresso was on board the Fullers Waiheke ferry - and even Fullers have recently introduced proper coffee. As a side-benefit, different styles of coffee here have amusing names like "flat white" and "long black". Bill Bryson was so tickled by this phenomenon in Australia that he wrote a little spiel about it.
Baby needs a new box of bricks
So with a child on the way, a young man's thoughts turn idly to Lego®. In a collision of geekery of all kinds, I spent my evenings last week building a pretty detailed Lego version of the Mule (the yellow hovering beast of burden) from Serenity. I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. Now all I have to do is find all the bits of Lego which have been scattered around the house in order to spare myself the wrath of Micky.
P.S. It's a girl! I hope she likes Lego...
Tremble, Puny Earthmen!
Under guise of the futile Earth-ritual known as love-making, my genetic seed-parasite has been embedded in the body of a female from that pathetic world. Slowly, she will swell and distend as the zygote feeds within her, drawing vital nutrients from her living tissue. In time, the mature hybrid will burst forth in readiness to RULE THE EARTH!
The future of Mekonta, indeed the future of all Treens, is assured!
Smart, but not wise
I can't decide whether this poster is
- a. A brilliant piece of satire working on multiple levels, or
- b. depressing.
On the surface, it's a quick and easy appropriation of the Victoria University of Wellington's "It makes you think..." advertising campaign, using the existing ads as a framework for an anti-university message.
Fair enough.
At a deeper level, it could be clever demonstration of what will happen if every student receives five fewer textbooks next year. Alternatively, it's a genuine mistake, showing the desperate need for more copies of Fowler's Modern English Usage even before fees go up, and book numbers down...
So as to provide interesting and educational content to you, the reader, I tried to find some useful information about the background to the fee rise. All I could really come up with was this news story (which has a bare bottom in it) and this article, based on a leaked document and published in Salient, VUW's student magazine. The university had copies impounded at the printers and generally caused a lot more attention to be drawn to the issue than would otherwise have been the case. Oops.
The Doom That Came to Our Letterbox
New Zealand is not known for its large and fiercely venomous arthropods. At least, not compared to other parts of the world, where ever other trip to the toilet entails a grisly death at the fangs of one or other of these buggers.
OK, there are large Kiwi insects, and also poisonous Kiwi spiders.
But the beast that dwells in our letterbox is neither of these, and therefore scientifically harmless despite having eyes as big as dinner plates and fangs to match.
I think it's a female Nursery Web Spider of some description, which bites rarely, but when I venture into Shelob's Lair of a morning to collect the post, I like to take a big stick with me...
Realpolitik mit LEGO®
If you've ever come across an unfinished page on this site, you might have an inkling that I'm interested in Lego. Really embarrassingly interested in all things Lego. I even make my own things with it. For shame.
One of the appealling things about The Lego Company is their resistance to making sets with real-world weapons. OK, they have knights with swords, scurvy pirates, and gun-toting frontiersmen, but they still haven't made any tanks, jet fighters, atommick bombs or other up-to-the-minute implements of destruction. Bless them.
Of course, in these modern times, Homeland Security reasons that if little Johnny's building blocks aren't capable of fighting terrorism, they must be terrorism. Which means Lego's forbearance isn't going to win sales. So they've had to compromise. Enter Dino Attack.
Now little Johnny can proudly support our boys on the front line by spending his pocket money on
war bonds Lego Humvees and attack helicopters. That'll put the fear of god into those
filthy dinosaurs.
The Lego copywriters are clearly getting into the spirit of things. Take this quote from the description of set 7475, Fire Hammer vs. Mutant Lizards.
"Bring the hammer down on the dinos! Mutant dinosaurs have taken over a section of the city, but Viper and the fire hammer are ready to take it back! The Xenon Multi-Mode Launcher really shoots to bring down the monstrous creatures."
Back in Europe, however, Dino Attack doesn't exist. Instead, you can get Dino 2010.
At first glance, it looks pretty similar to Dino Attack, but instead of bristling with weapons, the vehicles have useful winches and dinosaur cages. And the copy is much less bombastic - it even suggests that it might be more about dinosaurs eating people than the other way around:
"Get the captured dino back to base! One escaped dinosaur has been captured and is ready for transport in the 4WD Dino Trapper. But other dinos have picked up the scent and are closing in! Will the dino hunter make it back to base with his catch? You decide!"
The real point of this long and winding tale is that Lego dinosaurs have arrived in New Zealand. Now, part of the reason we moved to NZ was to get away from Tony Blair and the UK's apparent desire to follow the US in everything it does. NZ is a much saner place - they don't even allow nuclear powered or armed American warships to visit here. At all. How amazing is that? So you can probably see I expected to see friendly educational Dino 2010 on the shelves at Toyworld.
Shock horror - we got Dino Attack. In the eyes of The Lego Company, NZ is geopolitically equivalent to the United States! Mind you, since the box text is in French as well as English, we must be in the same boat as the Canadians, and they always seemed like nice people. Personally, I blame Australia.
Of course, nothing is what it seems. Maybe Dino Attack is an attempt to relieve dinosaur population pressure via a humane cull? Perhaps the Lego hunters agonise about it when they get home, while the Lego trappers from Dino 2010 count their money and laugh: They've been out catching dinosaurs because their large eyes are excellent for Draize Testing, and they aren't as cute as fluffy bunny rabbits.
"Please mind the closing doors"
As mentioned here, I was quite keen on the idea of Densha De Go for the PSP. And now (many thanks to Cam, my erstwhile man in Japan) I have a copy. And it's really quite good.
It's impressive how much gameplay it's possible to get out of basically two buttons - slower and faster. OK, they go to some effort to disguise this, but really all you do is speed up and slow down. The tricky bit comes from the fact that a train is very very heavy, the timetables are very tight, and you have to stop within two metres of the end of the platform or the cute anime conductor girl will cry real tears.
You receive points for being on time, obeying speed limits and safety rules, ride comfort, and the all-important stopping in the right place. Much cursing has been heard when a flawless run is ruined at the last minute by jamming on the emergency brakes and seeing all the passengers fall over.
The game also makes good use of FMV for gameplay as opposed to cutscenes - to my mind, it would be a less appealing game if it didn't have the real life video. And for once a game completely on rails isn't going to upset any reviewers.
Oddly enough, about the nearest thing I can think of in gameplay terms (apart from other train simulators) is Lunar Lander - both games are built around tight time (or fuel) constraints, lots of inertia, and a very simple control system.
Despite the similarity, Lunar Lander loses out because you don't get to sound the horn as you go over level crossings. I think this is possibly because sound doesn't travel in space.
The verdict: "Mobile Train Simulator + Densha De GO! Tokyo Kyuukou Hen" gets four thumbs up from us, plus one more for having such an incredibly long name.
(Micky has been playing avidly as well, even though she's an actual real-life woman.)
"Battle state russet"
I was on my way to the solicitors this morning to sign our mortgage papers, and I got to the corner by the video shop and was shocked, nay amazed, to see a police cordon and all the cafe and shop staff hanging around in good humoured but obvious impatience.
It appeared that humble Kelburn was under threat of terrorist attack and a suspicious package had been reported - rumour had it that the police were planning to blow it up. I left and went down the back way through the Botanical Gardens, worrying as I went that the surly grey cat from the wine shop was nowhere to be seen - was he about to be blown to pussy heaven by a highly trained bomb disposal robot?
When I came back in the afternoon, everything was back to normal and the cheery ladies in the deli were expecting to be on the news, and wanting to take advantage for advertising reasons - their new slogan: "Our pies are The Bomb!".
The package in question was claimed by its absent-minded owner when they heard about the scare on the news. Still cost Kelburn shops an hour-and-a-half's trading though, and the cat was inside the whole time (probably having a nip of the hard stuff while he could.) Damn you, shadowy forces of global terror!
The above aside, I'm as shocked and appalled as anyone at the recent spate of bombings in London, and feared for friends there when I heard the news. Sadly, the aspect that most appalls me is how it forces stories like this one to the middle pages of the paper, if they get printed at all. Apparently suffering is only newsworthy if it's close to home, and preferably it shouldn't go on too long or it'll get boring.
Turned stones
If you have a website, you probably have a look at traffic logs and things every so often. I certainly do, because it allows me to find out just how utterly unimportant my web-ness is in the wider internet. Yay narcissism!
It also provides useful information, like the fact that 0.16% of visitor traffic in July has come from the Seychelles. That'll help me adjust my marketing strategies to maximise click-throughs. Or something.
Now the interesting bit: I know that this site is indexed by at least Google and MSN Search, but the stats show that not many people come here from search engines. So it's quite entertaining to look through the search phrases in the referers to see what that minority were looking for and whether there's a chance that they found it here...
The one that caught my eye today was a search for "pictures children playing".
The picture it found was naturally this one, which does indeed show children playing. I spent a while with Google trying to find out where my link appears in the results list, and clicked through 20-odd pages of search results with no joy. You'd have to really want to find a picture of children playing to go that far... oh. It appears my happy website has become a haven for sinister child-fanciers! (And I'll be branded too for doing all that searching...)
(It turned out that the search actually came from Yahoo, where that picture currently shows up on the second page of results. So it was probably a nice old lady wanting to illustrate the parish magazine after all. Phew.)
A handful of other fun things also came to light:
Yahoo seems to prefer indexing the print versions of these pages, but I'd prefer it to index the
nice normal versions since they're easier to navigate. I suspect a bit of fiddling with Apache mod-rewrite will fix this.
Searching for "pictures children playing" turned up an excellent rant by confused fundamentalists
about the dangers of Pokemon and Magic cards.
"What if they carry their favorite monsters like magical charms or fetishes in their pockets, trusting them to bring power in times of need?"
Oh for goodness' sake.
This one is good too. Environmentally-conscious kids are obviously pagan earth-worshippers.
Finally, someone searched for "something pleasing" and ended up here. How sweet. I hope they found it...
Symptoms include sneezing, swollen eyes, loss of arms...
We recently found out that Micky is allergic to tigers. We knew she suffered a bit when exposed to the household moggy and hypothesised that this might scale to the bigger cats, but we didn't have any experimental data. Until now, that is. It was all going fine at the time, but by the evening she looked like that bit in the latest Star Wars where Palpatine becomes (more) evil.
For my birthday, we went to the Zion Wildlife Gardens near Whangarei in Northland. About a 2 1/2-hour drive north of Auckland. They filmed a television series there called The Lion Man, about the big cats who live there and the people who look after them. The Lion Man himself is Craig Busch, who in typical Kiwi style trained as a motorcycle mechanic, went for his OE and came back with a real live lion. It happens all the time here, darling...
We saw lots of lovely cats and got to spend 20 minutes or so making friends with two hulking six-month-old Bengal tiger cubs called Indira and Kahli. It was utterly wonderful, and we discovered the following facts:
Tigers like chasing dangly things like balls of string, camera straps, and loose clothing.
Tiger fur is soft, but not as soft as that of house-cats. They are much more stylish though.
Tigers make a chuffing noise when happy, and a sort of grizzling sound when they're cross.
Having a tiger's mouth wrapped around your leg is unnerving at the time, but makes for a good story later.
Tigers aren't mad keen on being scratched behind the ears.
Tigers and garden furniture don't mix.
We also learnt some more traditional tiger facts, but I won't go into that now since I'll probably get it wrong, and anyway, the internet is full of better places to learn stuff than here.
Photo gallery from the trip to Zion
Even the drive up was exciting - I skidded the rental car going round a corner on a gravel road. I thought I was going at a fairly gentle pace, but the road thought differently. Pleasingly, all those years playing Gran Turismo paid off handsomely and I did exactly the right thing to control the car and get it going the right way again. Phew.
I hope to post a few more pictures from Zion later, and I realise there hasn't been much happening here recently. Hopefully I can get back in the habit...
"Freezing to death is a harsh mistress"
It's May, I can see my breath in front of my face inside the house, I'm about to turn 30, and there's no Christmas. Who'd have thought that the great festival of commercial excess is the only thing that makes the winter months worthwhile?
And now the sun's come out, so I can't even complain any more...
How many leagues was that again?
Having finally got over my month-long head cold we thought it was safe to go to the pictures. On offer: The Aviator, Constantine, House of Flying Daggers, and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Plus some other crap we didn't care about.
Obviously Micky didn't want to see anything with Hell Sequence Unit in the credits, and I hadn't had any coffee so the Aviator was out. We'd both been a bit underwhelmed by Hero recently, which was nice enough but didn't touch us in special ways. That just left Life Aquatic.
I hadn't heard anything about it at all until I saw a poster at a local indie cinema - this made me think it was a Disneyesque family underwater adventure film.
Which just goes to show how stupid I am. Wes Anderson directing Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Cate Blanchett, Angelica Huston, Willem Dafoe AND MORE! (OK, and Michael Gambon and some other excellent but less famous supporting cast types.) Luckily I'd watched the extremely funny trailer a while back and seen the light.
You might want to go and watch the trailer too: Life Aquatic trailer
Pretty good, huh? And it doesn't even have all the best bits, although the helmet antenna sequence is quite high in my estimation. Not really surprising that it's so good, since this is basically a Royal Tenenbaums take on the Jacques Cousteau story. And the Royal Tenenbaums is easily one of the best films of the last few years.
So why did we enjoy Life Aquatic so much, despite its retreading of much the same creative path as the previous movie? Partly it must be the premise: An aging semi-amateur marine documentarist (who hasn't made a good movie in ten years) returns to the sea to kill the Jaguar Shark which ate his best friend. With dynamite. Stacked up against estranged father fakes illness to make up with his family it's looking pretty good so far. Although there's a fairly strong strand of broken family brought back together by adversity in Life Aquatic too.
It has to be said that mostly it's the same things that worked in the Royal Tenenbaums working again. There's a really good ensemble cast, with even minor characters well developed (the rivalry between Willem Dafoe's perfect neurotic German and Zissou's maybe-son Owen Wilson is particularly fine.) The set designs are absolutely wonderful, with Zissou's house, equipment, ship, helicopter, telephones, and book collection all stuck between the late '60s and early '70s, and labelled in dymo tape. The telephones are especially worthy of a mention, with a speakerphone being approximated by an acoustic coupler attached to an aging loudspeaker which looks suspiciously bakelite-ey.
Likewise, the soundtrack is worthy of mention. Crista gave me a copy of the Royal Tenenbaums soundtrack a couple of Christmases ago, and I adore it. The Life Aquatic is accompanied about half the time by Portugese translations of David Bowie songs, sung by a Team Zissou member and accompanied on acoustic guitar. Shades of the bit in Master and Commander where Aubrey and Maturin's music in the cabin moves out through the windows and into the soundtrack. As if this weren't surreal enough, a few additional tracks are lifted from Inner Space, a real-life oceanographic documentary, and not Innerspace, that micro submarine movie from the '80s, as I had first supposed.
The so-called 'helmet song' by Mark Mothersbaugh is distressingly catchy casio music as well.
You can get quite a good feel for the style of the movie here: Life Aquatic website
Warning: A few minor plot spoilers might lurk in the next couple of paragraphs, waiting to bite the unwary.
Also serving well is the bookended narrative structure - there isn't the narration this time, but the film comes across as a fly on the wall documentary, and the presentation is in fact framed by screenings of two of Zissou's documentaries, appalling cuts and yellow title text proudly flaunted. The emotional tone of the film is similar but the ending is somehow lighter than the Royal Tenenbaums, despite having many the same sort of things happening. Perhaps it's the unending barrage of surrealism taking the sting out of the sadder events?
The reconciliation between Zissou and his arch rival, the 'only partly gay' and rather better funded Captain Hennessy (played by Jeff Goldblum doing his Jeff Goldblum thing) is a bit forced - it works well enough in the circumstances of the plot but I was enjoying the rivalry more. Likewise the end shot of the team running joyfully along feels unlikely, but it's fine as a credit sequence.
Phew. You're safe now. Come back.
Finally, and just to take the sheen off, the plot development isn't as coherent as it could be - Team Zissou plunges from one scrape to another without all that much to link them (although the links are usually there if you pay attention - there aren't really plot holes as such.) I didn't mind this because it suited the fragmentary style of the fake documentary. To me, they're just cuts. Other reviews seem to think it gets in the way, but they're probably overstating the point.
In summary, go and see this film. It's brilliant, I haven't sniggered so much in ages, although there were others in the cinema who didn't get it. Don't be like them, no one will respect you. And how can you pass on something with such wonderfully fake CGI marine life I don't know.
I'm off to buy a pair of speedos and a red woolly hat.
Wide View Hida, Pocket Type
I didn't know I wanted a Sony PSP until I read that Densha De Go, or Let's go by Train, the infamous Japanese train simulator, was being released for the platform. So you can play a train simulator on the train to work, if circular reference is your thing.
Reports from folks who've imported a copy are fairly positive.
Even so, I wasn't completely convinced until I saw the 3 part TV ad campaign. Utter perfection.
Incidentally, the titular Wide View Hida is a kind of Japanese EMU - it would be too hard to make things like that up.
Dumb birds
No, angry feminist mob, the other kind.
One of the best things about living here is we're surrounded by scads of wild birds, butterflies ad nauseam, and other living goodness despite being a lot closer to the city centre than we were in Sheffield.
Perhaps there are too many birds? I was happily working away and heard a loud thump against the window. Looking up to see if it was ejecta from the as-yet-undetected volcano my paranoia tells me we are living on top of, I saw a reasonably big bird in the process of bouncing off the glass and getting its balance back.
It flew away successfully, so presumably its window issues will be bred into the next generation. Evolution loves a survivor.
If only the cicadas of this world could be persuaded to off themselves in this fashion. I wouldn't mind wiping them off the windows, I really wouldn't.
Fixings
Added next and previous links to the galleries, and then fixed a little problem where they went wrong if a gallery had more than 9 images. Silly me.
More interestingly, I've also uploaded my favourite images from Holland, taken in Easter 2004. Strange to think that's nearly a year ago.
Cashbook for freelancers
I know a lot of the ex-Argonaut Sheffield folks are now freelancing for various people, as am I. Having become fed up with doing the accounts I spent a while sorting out a cashbook spreadsheet to make the whole business less annoying, and it seems to have worked. I did my January GST return today and it took considerably less time than it has before.
Paddy had a go with it and said it was "very very useful". If that's not a successful beta test I don't know what is.
Interested? Download it here.
Later on
Thanks to Micky for proof reading - I wouldn't have spotted the mis-spelling of Waiouru.
grrrrrrrrrrrrritted teeth...
Greetings from NZ
Hello! A thousand pardons to everyone we didn't manage to send Christmas cards to. We suck. A lot. Further apologies to anyone we did send cards to in case they didn't send cards to us and now feel guilty - don't.
Special apologies to Ellen who hasn't had a birthday or Christmas present yet, but don't worry, help is on the way.
In case you hadn't realised, Micky and I moved to New Zealand in June. Despite self-publishing on the internet being really easy and in many cases absolutely buckshee it's taken me until now to get the personal side of the website going. But now I have. Fear the blog.
OK, so I have to put something to put here in order to avoid having a blank page. But all the exciting stuff happened a couple of weeks ago - mainly earthquakes, if truth be told.
Why not have a look at the pictures instead? You'll be much happier, trust me.