Friday, April 13 2007, 17:00

Beth, Blue Mountains, and buttocks

It's been ages since I last blogged - time to catch up! It really doesn't seem that long ago that I was standing in arrivals at the airport again, waiting for Beth to strut down the ramp with her minimal baggage behind her; I was there with John, Mikey, Phil, and Wayne, and somewhat self-consciously holding one end of a long banner inscribed with a message of welcome in rainbow print; when Beth showed her face, Wayne actually screamed. Loudly. Obviously Beth was delighted, but I could have died.

It all seems to have passed by so swiftly - a barbecue one night, drinks another, lunch in the week, dinner at our place another night, and then the Easter weekend, Beth's last, was upon us. A fierce session of beers the night before ensured that my 8am alarm call for Beth on Good Friday was greeted with a most unladylike grumble, but she managed a certain perkiness when John and I met her at Central Station a little later for our daytrip to Katoomba in the Blue Mountains. This must have been only momentary, because I got a good photo of her on the two hour journey which, let's be honest, isn't her at her best. I'm strictly forbidden to post it on my site, but I may bow to popular pressure if enough of you shout loud enough ;)

Katoomba was freezing, so we hurried to the Carrington Hotel to warm up in the lounge and tuck into a cheese selection and some warming meals, while trying to ignore the infant crawling on the back of our sofa. Not wanting to waste the day, we had a quick drink with Mikey when he arrived, then ventured out to explore Katoomba High Street. On a cold day in the rain, there's not much to see - mostly shops full of old junk and new; in fact, it was like someone had filtered through the combined crap of a hundred car-boot sales, rejected anything remotely interesting or useful, and assembled the leftovers in no particular order in each shop John cheerfully dragged us into while Beth and I rolled our eyes at each other. After that, we dashed out for the briefest of glimpses out from Echo Point before high-tailing it back to the warm train and finally home.

On Saturday, we met Beth and Mikey at Lyric Theatre to see the musical stage show of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. I'm not the biggest fan of the film, but I really enjoyed the show - it was well adapted for the stage, featuring a very shiny Priscilla bus complete with glittery rooftop stiletto. Beth managed to anticipate the mullet-sporting lady from Broken Hill in Act One when she exposed her thong and buttocks to the people behind us before the show even started! How we laughed. John even got this wonderful picture :)

And it was all over on Sunday when John and I took Beth to the airport to see her off. How quickly a week and a bit can pass! Hopefully Beth went home with a few more great memories of Aus, not to mention my old laptop and a small dent in her finger where I squished it in her suitcase, trying to be helpful. Those are the things that make you smile, eh? :)

Tuesday, April 17 2007, 23:43

Between the Hot Gates and a hard place

"I want to be a Spartan when I grow up", said Shane.

When I saw the trailer for 300, I got just the tiniest bit excited. When Michael and I plodded through Herodotus' rather dry account of the Persian War with Mr Rhodes in our Ancient Greek class when we were 17, these weren't the images that were going through my mind. Actually, just being able to link the participles with the soldiers, and the spears with the genitives and the Persians, and remember that Spartans and Lacedaemonians and Laconians were actually all the same people (pretty much), and where was Thermopylae and where are Phocians from...?! It's no wonder I didn't really have a solid idea about what actually came to pass at the end of my A Level...

Anyway, Shane, John, John, and I went to the IMAX to watch the film last Friday, so we could watch the carnage on a grand scale! Very exciting! Actually we discovered within the first five minutes that, although it is monumentally stupendous watching films on a screen that's so big you have to turn your head to catch all of the action, normal films actually appear to be far too close to your face, and I think we were all slightly in danger of going cross-eyed before the film had truly begun. The film is an adaptation of a graphic novel, and it was clearly a very stylised production, dreamlike in quality, with unreal shades and shadows. The battle scenes seemed a frenetic mass of movement at one moment, but slowed into almost freeze-frame from blow to blow at times. It was all very effective.

I surprised myself with how much of the original story I remembered, and the differences in the film. There must be a lot of people out there who are wondering if this bears any resemblance to historical fact, and I think it seems to be a pretty glammed-up version of what is known. Of course, I don't remember reading in Herodotus that Xerxes was a tall, effeminate, gravelly-voiced gentleman laden with a chav's ransom of bling... For a bit more dramatic effect, no-one mentions that Leonidas' 300 Spartans led an army of 7000 Greeks from other cities, or that the Athenian navy were doing their bit elsewhere... But the little details, like shoving the Persian envoys down the well and the brutally militaristic society of Sparta, and their laconic humour, are spot on. Unfortunately, that's about the best thing you could say about the dialogue, whose nadir was unquestionably the rash of oratory at the end. All this babble about free citizens of Greece was a bit rich coming from a civilisation that consisted of about 90% serfs... Still, I shouldn't complain too much about Spartan customs, all that warlike training left them quite buff :)

Anyway, I digress. As Bryan said, the film was preposterous but very enjoyable, not least because those poor Spartans hardly had a stitch to cover themselves and had to make do with tiny leather... er... jockstraps and red capes and... um... oil. ;)

Wednesday, April 18 2007, 9:39

"Bad" people

It doesn't surprise me in the least that George Bush is still all for every American's right to bear arms, even after Cho Seung-Hui gunned down 31 students and staff in Virginia yesterday, but, "According to a Gallup poll, Americans are more likely to blame the way the perpetrators are raised, or popular culture, for cases of multiple killings than the ready access to guns" (SMH). John McCain, one of the Republican presidential candidates, said yesterday, "We have to look at what happened here, but it doesn't change my views on the second amendment except to make sure that these kinds of weapons don't fall into the hands of bad people."

I was just reading today that Cho's classmates were disturbed by the macabre and violent content of his plays and creative writing. He'd been referred to the university counselling service. There may have been a slight hint at his maybe being a "bad" person. But that wouldn't have mattered anyway - in Virginia, where the massacre took place, you can just stroll into a shop and buy a gun - you don't need a licence, and you don't need to register it. There's no check to see if you're unhinged or disturbed or even just a little hormonal on the day you buy it, let alone "bad". The only rules are that you can only buy one firearm a month, and you need a permit to carry a concealed weapon. Less than foolproof?

Of course, if Cho had only had a knife, I'm sure he would still have killed his ex-girlfriend, but I'm sure he could have been wrestled to the ground before he managed to stab 30 more people to death. But I'm not sure why I'm ranting to you, the converted. I've never met a single person in my life who thought that guns shouldn't be controlled.

Monday, April 30 2007, 17:58

A walk in the sunshine

I think last week might have been the first time I've ever enjoyed a public holiday in the middle of the week. In the UK, holidays are stuck to the end or beginning of a weekend, but Australia celebrated ANZAC Day last week on Wednesday. If any of us thought it was in slightly bad taste or disrespectful to go to a dance party themed combat on such a day of remembrance, we didn't show it... So my day off in the middle of the week was written off, but at least there were only two more working days until the weekend!

This weekend in comparison has been much more relaxing. John and I picked up some pictures for the home on Saturday and went to the cinema in the evening. Sunday was a bit more challenging - we took a train down to Cronulla in the morning. This is a fifty minute journey, not stopping at every station - a bit like going from London Paddington to Reading, but the similarities stop there: the return fare was a trifling $6.20! That London - Reading journey costs £13, not £2.60! Well, no matter what horrible things Sydneysiders say about their rail system, they clearly have much to be grateful for...

From Cronulla, we took a ferry to Bundeena, a little town on the tip of the Royal National Park. It's amazing that after such a short journey from the thick of it, you can be looking out over miles and miles of woods and Pacific rocky coastline. April pulled out all the stops and gave us a warm and sunny day as we took the 26km Coastal Path south along the cliffs, and we strolled at a leisurely pace, stopping to enjoy some of the clifftop views, or for a snackette along the way. We were hoping to make it as far as the beach, Big Marley, but we had to settle for seeing it from up high. We'd drunk almost all our drink (oops), and were getting a bit bored of walking, and still had an hour and a half of retracing our steps with the sun in our faces to go. By the time we got back to Bundeena, we were more than a little footsore, and more than deleriously happy to fall into the boat and be whisked back to Sydney in the shade!

Photos from our Royal National Park walk