Thursday, July 17, 2008

squidward!

This is beyond awesome:

Giant squid dissection - LIVE from Melbourne.

Monday, July 14, 2008

a blog post?!

So yeah I'm shite at the updates. That's not news.

I'm back from Florida. Been a couple of weeks actually. Some fun and/or memorable things:

- hired the biggest car we could find - Lincoln Navigator: roughly the size of Madagascar with just enough interior space for 6 people and a shoe. Nicknamed the reTARDIS.
- when at the airport collecting one of the last to arrive decided to look up gun ranges on the free computers provided. Then, for a laugh, looked up flight training schools and mosques. Left very quickly after that.
- Florida beaches in midsummer consist entirely of geriatrics and jail-bait. And large hairy men (though to be fair, we were in that category too).
- TV stations in the sunshine state are obsessed with the weather - every 8-10 minutes there was a weather update. It's strange only because the weather NEVER CHANGED. There's a lot of copy/paste done in meteorology there.
- coffee in the US is RUBBISH.
- the American version of rye bread is roughly what we in the Antipodes call white bread. I didn't have white bread whilst there but I imagine it's made of tissue paper, cotton candy and smoke.
- there's high fructose corn syrup in nearly everything. Don't read ingredients lists on food when you're there or you may starve to death.
- cheese is either more orange than the most flamboyant carrot or paler than an anaemic emo.
- don't fly United. Their planes SUCK.

There's more (obviously). I'll post it as it comes to mind.

Now I'm back in Sydney where World Youth Day is underway (it takes a week). And also where it has become illegal to annoy Catholics. Frankly I'd thought it was the other way around: the Catholics are annoying the rest of us. There are so many of them in town the rattling of rosary beads is deafening.

The mobs of penguins roaming the streets are just surreal - I keep expecting one of them to be Robbie Coltrane. It was amusing to see a superfluity* of them duck into the Abercrombie Pub - just for a single creme de menthe of course...

So, in the anti-Catholic spirit (though not, of course, anti-catholic):

The belief that a cosmic Jewish zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree...
Yeah, makes perfect sense.


Oh, and to George Pell:



* the actual collective noun. Who knew?