fatvegan

Just hanging out at Barkly Homestead for the day. There is do much military hardware being moved around. And when drivers coming through get tired they just leave their tanks in the parking lot and stop for a beer.

Libby's truly quite marvellous tea package arrived today with a litter of lovely letters. It filled my head with such cheersome fondness.

One sad thing has happened. Some might be tempted to call it a tragedy. You can't buy metho out these parts so we are on extremely strict fuel rations. So strict in fact that tea drinking can only be done when we have a fire. Which will sure be hard to do with these brutal tail winds. The winds are making our legs mighty glad and our tummies mighty sad.

I should have a little gush about how great Telstra has been out in the bush. The internet and phone reception are both incredible. I'm sitting under a bridge 80km from the nearest (tiny) town and there's reception. Quite amazing and great. And cheap these days.

It was my first movie in over six weeks and for that very anticipated. I was a book fan before it was cool and then somehow, somewhere along the way I got too cool for them. But that doesn't mean I don't have very fond memories and the first book really was pretty great. However, if you're too cool for the books then you're definitely too cool for them film. It's good but way daggy. Aimed at the mid-teens I'd guess and probably squarely at the boys.

The whole film was soaked in teen hormones to the point of silliness. But it was an amusing backdrop to some pretty quality Australian film violence. I was surprised to find out the budget was $20m because it looks more expensive than that to me, particularly the CGI.

I really enjoyed seeing the Blue Mountains looking so sexy. I don't tend to think of the area as very photogenic (although beautiful), but the film did a great job with the aerial shots. And also a great job hauling so much of the lighting and makeup gear from Home and Away all the way out there into the bush. Heavy stuff lighting gear. Good to see that even after weeks of fighting war from the bush without any sleep the whole cast still looked immaculate.

I thought the Ellie character was slightly absurd. It felt like a fair amount of character development in the books was about them not being beauty queens and underwear models. There wasn't a single point in the film where Ellie actually looked down to earth or practical. Although I know that beauty and usefulness aren't totally orthogonal.

Scenes like the Swinging Playground Seat of Lost Innocence just made me laugh out loud but they all added to the hammed up sense of drama.

Alice saw it too. Alice the 16 year-old boy gave it 11/10 and Alice gave it 5/10. Me the 16 year-old also gave it 11/10 and I gave it 7/10.

It has felt for a while like Gunns was teetering on the edge of
collapse or some big change. And it's finally happened.

I tried the famous iPhone alarm for the first time. It is as they say and quite excellent.

Although one downside is that you wake up so freaking refreshed that if you change your mind and want to go back to sleep you don't stand a chance.

I've been using Blogger for the last few weeks for our travel blog. Bouncing around inside it I am beginning to suspect that all development on Blogger stopped about 5 years ago. It really is a pretty miserable web app these days. Having spent a little too long pottering about with Posterous, the contrast is a bit embarrassing. If Blogger were released today, as it is today, I think it would have approximately zero users. It's still trading on the name it made back when all web apps sucked and it wasn't the only one.

Oh my gosh goodness golly. How could life get so perfect? I am applying for a job at the Mt Isa mine. On the typical salary I could buy about 30,000 of these cupcakes every year! What years they would be.

Quite delicious coffee. I declare that anyone who claims that Mt Isa
isn't thoroughly cosmopolitan is a foolheaded bumpkin.