List

Flight to Auckland : $XXX
One Night Accomodations : $XXX
4th row tickets : $XXX

Crossing Counting Crows off The List Of Bands I Love And Never Got Around To Seeing Live? Fucking Priceless.

May 21st in Auckland. Counting Crows and some British Band, The What? The Where? ....... The Who! that's it, The Who. I suppose we'll stay and watch them as well, unless there's something better to do. Let's see, who's left on the list?

1. Pink Floyd
2. Huey Lewis and the News
3. Aerosmith
4. Brad Paisley
5. Indigo Girls
6. Van Halen w/ Roth
7. Maynard Ferguson (crap I think he's dead)
8. Boston (crap, more dead guys)
9. Smashmouth
10. Bryan Adams

Waves

Last week I bought a couple of kids size wetsuits for RC and RJ. Nothing fancy, got 'em used on trademe.co.nz, a fancier NZ version of craigslist. I wouldn't compare it to ebay, anyway. They've got spring suits, but the spring ones just don't cut it here. Since the suits came, all they want to do is hit the beach with the boogie boards. We went out Saturday for a while to break in the new suits. I was at work for half the day on Sunday, but I was home early enough so we went out to eat and got home at about 7:00pm. "Can we go, can we go, canwegocanwegocanwego?" So we threw the stuff in the truck and hit it until we lost the sun. Not as nice as the three to four footers on Saturday, but still some twos and a lot of threes.

Fast forward to Monday afternoon at work. I get a random email from one of the compositors with the subject "is this you?" well, actually, yes it was me. Turns out that he was down at the beach at the same time taking some pictures and he had taken a few of the boys and me boarding.

Before I get to the pictures I've got to give props to

Karim Sahai, Travel Photographer

whithout whom I could not bring you these amazing pictures

The Boys patiently waiting.

RC and I catching a wave.

RJ dropping in on a nice one.

They're going to be ready for learner surfboards pretty soon.

Steam

Wow


Awesome steampunk case mod

Review : Burn After Reading

I've been pretty remiss in doing movie reviews for the last copule months so I'm going back through some of the one's I've missed.

I was pretty hesitant seeing this after the fiasco of a movie that was the last Cohen brothers offering but hey everyone deserves a second chance right? Especially a second chance with a cast like this. Well they almost lost me with this one, I wanted to not like it. There's quite a few things going on, different plot lines, but the reality is, this is movie about how fucked up people are. Regardless of their station in life, or their circumstances. People are not only fucked up, but they bring it on themselves.

Now, however true that maybe, it's not exactly a recipe for a great movie. Frankly it makes for a stupendously grating movie, no matter how much humor you try to shoehorn into it, it's a movie about idiots. I found myself rather unsympathetic to, well, everyone in the movie. Except maybe for Malkovitch, but his ex CIA agent Osbourne Cox is pretty unlikable anyway. It's a whole movie of anti-heroes.

J.K. Simmons and David Rasche, however, were the saving grace of this movie as sort of the Deux ex Machina of the film, watching the idiocy unfold from afar. They don't have a lot of screen time, but, man, those two were the best part of the movie. Not only that, the way they look at the goings on, helps you look at it in a way that you can appreciate the humor in the situation. J.K. Simmons in particular is brilliant. If you missed it in the theatre, and judging from the box office, you probably did, you should still give this one a try at home.




Five out of Ten

Review: Slumdog Millionaire

I hadn't heard anything about this movie until it won a bunch of Golden Globe awards. I honestly didn't know even what it was about when we went to see it. As it turns out, it's a sometimes funny, sometimes gritty, always engaging story about a kid from the slums of Mumbai. Directory Danny boyle (Trainspotting) took a good story, and made it a great movie by simply telling it in an interesting way. To avoid spoilers for those of you who haven't seen it yet, I'll just say that it can't be more highly recommended. I give it






A) 2/10
B) 4/10
C) 6/10
D) 9/10

I'll go with D, nine out of ten, final answer.

Picinc

Ahh, the good old days. Crew Picnic at Pelenor Fields. Link goes to 3k original.



Can you find me?

Diablo Rojo

Holy crap. I'm never going back in the ocean ever again.

10 foot long squid with thousands of needle sharp teeth, that will fucking eat you. Not like, on accident, like, look Juan fell in the water and one squid distracted him while he was flanked by three more squid that don't care what he is as long as he's made of meat. Oops now he's dead. Just remember boys and girls, mother nature hates you and wants you to die, preferrably in as gruesome a manner as possible.

Seven pt 2

Less inspired rugby on Saturday. The US reverted to form and got destroyed by Argentina and South Africa, though their final result was still better than last year. We might have gone a bit hard on Friday so it was a little more laid back on the second day. England pulled off a shocker and stunned the Kiwis for the title at the end of fulltime. It seemed to put a bit of a damper on the crowd, although Courtenay was still packed untill three or four in the morning. Us oldtimers didn't even make it untill one.


Here's some pix.

Seven

The International Sevens Rugby League is in Wellington this weekend. Two days of seven a side rugby with seven minute halves. It's awesome. Some of us cut out of work early (at five, leaving work at five is early, *sigh*) last night. There was some fantastic rugby, The US went 2-0 in group play, which is unprecedented for the historically weak US side. Kenya came from behind to stun South Africa in an epic first round match, much to the delight of the local crowd who are not big fans of the Springboks. They like the Austrailians even less and took great pleasure in the beatdown the NZ side laid on the Austrailians. And it's really just a big party. I don't know why but it seems like there's a rule somewhere that says you have to dress up so just about everyone is in some kind of costume. Good times. Got a few pix from yesterday. I'll get some more today and get them up on flikr when I get a chance.

Fruity

I've been playing around with some digital music tools, mostly a software sequencer called, of all things, Fruity Loops. I'm totally hooked. This sounds pretty crappy because all I did was plop down the camcorder with my amp on one side and the computer with horrible sounding little game speakers on the other. I'm on the lookout for a used mixer so that I can balance everything out and feed it straight into the camera. I'm also waiting for a 5m optical interconnect so that I can feed the computer into the stereo for those times when it needs to be, shall we say, a bit louder? :)