Of Faraway Places…
Just making brief mention of two travel sites: Dan’s (SE Asia) and WaD’s (Europe).
Just making brief mention of two travel sites: Dan’s (SE Asia) and WaD’s (Europe).
(0)Issue 8 of The Backbench is now out. I go out on a limb this time and argue that McDonald’s is not evil.
At uni on a Saturday in the holidays doing Advanced Legal Research after a late night out yesterday… I’m dying here…
I really liked Spidey 2. Action was excellent, as was the CGI (if a little “stop-motion” at times). Lots of slow scenes teasing out the main comic themes such as the famous power/responsibility line and that infuriating romantic theme of “MJ can’t hook up with Spidey because it might hurt her”. Probably infuriating because I’ve been watching Smallville and seeing Superman in the exact same quandary, but for three long and painful seasons.
(0)The skiing was terrific. The consensus among the locals was that the snow hadn’t been this good, this early in the season for over a decade.
We were accommodated at Boloco Station, a large pastoral property almost an hour away from the slopes. Boloco was owned and operated by the grandparents of a mate from school a wonderfully hospitable, generous and amazingly healthy couple in their eighties. The property has been in their family for many generations, passed down by an unbroken line of first-born sons since Australia was settled by the Brits. The family tradition since then has been to name the eldest son Reuben, and with four living Reubens, it gets quite confusing at times which one people are referring to! For clarity they refer to each other as Ben, Reuben Snr, Reuben Jnr and little Ben.
When we got there, we heard reports that winds had caused the power station at Jindabyne to “fall over” the day before, so we were a little nervous about the conditions at Thredbo. The first morning there was extremely windy, but by lunchtime the wind had disappeared and conditions were excellent. There was a good coverage of snow, but slopes were pretty icy which is normal for Australia I suppose. Also developed a hatred for T-Bars after falling off not once, but three times. On the next day, all the lifts were in operation and we took Karels T-Bar to Australia’s highest lifted point. Shen had the bright idea of going down the black (and closed) Golf Course Bowl run, and we ended up going cross-country across the mountain side. Had a much better run with T-Bars this day, though. Looks like a good snow season ahead, especially if you’re thinking of going at the end of this month or later. Photos here.
SMH Article: A chick from Barker College posted up a few semi-revealing photos of herself in school uniform and got suspended. Her blog, cached by Google is here. Not surprising, given how disciplinarian some of these city private schools are.
“Barker boys wear skirts and high heels, tra la la la la, la la la la…” used to be a common chant at CAS sports carnivals in reference to how Barker’s upper grades are co-ed. I bet most CAS boys were now wishing they went to Barker instead. At least they don’t have any problems with Apple Chapels and Anacondas. {src: Lime Jelly}
Anyway, it’s not like it’s the first time something like this has happened.
Click (possibly nsfw)
Long day, but work finished much earlier than anticipated. It appears that some buses were still running this morning despite the strike. The plan was originally to walk up to Bondi Junction and catch a train into town from there. However, upon reaching Randwick, it seemed that some buses were still running. By a fluke, I arrived at work only ten minutes late after catching an express service.
I’m off to the snow until Sunday. Unfortunately, even while I’m down in Thredbo, I still have to mark exam papers during the evenings. At least it ends up paying for the trip.
Work has gone crazy… got back from it at about midnight and that was only because the systems had to shut down for the night. Lots of business to be done at financial year end, and of all the bloody days in year, the bus drivers decide to hold a fucking bus strike from 6-10am later today. On the busiest business day of the year. I have to walk to work. Not happy.
I can’t find the post right now, but a few years ago, I wrote about how it would be an excellent idea to have a service in the States that shipped goods internationally for you, so that you could order online from US merchants who only shipped domestically (eg, Amazon electrical goods) and they would forward it on to you internationally for a fee. Price Japan sort of does that for Japanese electronics. I just discovered that this site, Shop the States, does precisely that. The service charge is only US$5 per package, in addition to normal shipping costs. They can even repack several orders from different merchants into one box, for a small fee. Australian shipping rates are here. Excellent. There are a lot of electronics that are much cheaper in the States (or get released there months before getting released here) such as Muvo MP3 players, and now we have a way to get at them.
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