Read

A special tester came by school to give #4 a special reading test. W heard from her teacher that the tester was floored when he discovered that she was not only reading at a thirteen to fifteen year old level, but also had the same level of reading comprehension.

Fish

I went diving last weekend. Usually we just go somewhere around Island Bay, which is the suburb of Wellington that faces South across the Cook Straight. Last Saturday we decided to go diving out past Red Rocks, which is the area further West past Island Bay along the South end of the North Island. We're talking four wheel drive access only. Cory, Colin and I met up at Cory's house Saturday around 1. Now, Eric, Cory and I actually all have four wheel drive vehicles, but none of them are really meant for off road use except for maybe Eric's Range Rover and where we were going, it wasn't going to cut it, because we were taking these





Now, we were meeting Eric and Dana out at Red Rocks so Colin and Cory took Cory's buggy and I was riding Cory's 400 cc Suzuki quad bike. We packed everything up on the buggy and headed out.










I might have mentioned that Red Rocks is four wheel vehicles only. There's all kinds of signage to that effect because, well, some people just don't listen. The signs are there becuase to get out to where everything interesting is, you have to get through "Devil's Gate". It's kind of hard to explain, let's just say that I wouldn't drive my Land Cruiser through there unless it wasn't my primary vehicle. It's kind of like this





Here's me trying to get through. You can see I have half my body in front of the handlebars, trying reaaaaaaally hard not to wreck Cory's quad getting it over the gate. It is quite steep




Now obviously I didn't take any of these pictures. Colin came along for the ride and the view and the photography, he doesn't do the diving thing. These are all some preliminary selects from the pictures he took that day. When he gets them up on Flickr, I'll get a link up here so that you all can have a look. I did bring a camera , they're just still on the camera. So here's the rest of the pix Colin e-mailed me, I'll post mine as soon as I get around to it.


Our spot



Me getting my suit on



Cory and I changing



Eric and Dana show up



Cory getting ready to go in




Cool pic



Red Rocks is purdy





I will say this, in the middle of Winter, in Wellington, the ocean is fucking cold. My suit keeps me pretty warm but the bare skin on your face feels like it's on fire for the first five minutes you're in the water. Eric and Dana were scuba diving for lobster and Cory and I were snorkeling for fish. It was a pretty nice day. There was only some moderate wind, but the currents were downright dangerous. I stopped for a second to reload my speargun, and when I looked up I was half way out to sea and it was not easy swimming back against the current. Eric and Dana got a couple lobsters and Cory got three fish. I didn't get any fish, the current was too strong for a rookie like me, but I got the biggest Paua I've ever seen in my life. I found an even bigger one, but my knife was going to break before that sucker was going to come off his rock. So I caught a couple steaks at the Supermarket, grabbed the STFU&GBTW gang and everyone who went out, plus wives and kids and some other people went over to Eric's house for some fresh seafood on the grill.

On tap for this weekend. Work!

"Boys" of Summer

Rangers vs Mets got rained out at Shea. I guess some of the Rangers got bored. Ian Kinsler, Milton Bradley, Josh Hamilton, Michael Young and Josh Rupe got in some extracirricular activity.

E-Mail

So AM and HM and I were in the car a couple of days ago and I was asking A about a letter that she had gotten from a friend at home. It turned out that she had sent a letter first and her friend had returned the favor. So we're on the subject of letters, and I don't remember the exact context, but H came up with these words of wisdom.

"It was a letter. It's just like e-mail, except that you have to put the address on there".

HHmmm, old we are getting. Too late to change, it is.

Smoke

Apparently, fumar no es bueno. Supposedly these are some new anti-smoking warnings from on the pack of smokes in Brazil. Yikes.

Universal

Universal sadness that is.

"It is with great sadness that I must inform you that yesterdays
fire destroyed nearly 100% of the archive prints kept here on the
lot. Due to this we will be unable to honor any film bookings of
prints that were set to ship from here. Over the next few weeks and
months we will be able to try and piece together what material we
do have and if any prints exist elsewhere. For the time being
please check your rental confirmations and look under shipping
instructions. If the print was set to ship from the studio then you
date is now canceled. If the shipping instructions say ship from
Deluxe then those dates are still good."

There was a fire at Universal studios, and from what I gather it directly affected their film storage and archival warehouse. Many Universal titles will never be seen in 35mm publicly again.

The Lake Show

If there was a god, do you know how I would know that he hates me? Because every time I leave the fucking country, the Lakers win the NBA Championship. 2000 through 2002? Kobe and Shaq terrorize the NBA for three straight years, have no competition in winning three straight. Where am I, in New Zealand. I'm in Los Angeles for the last five years. I support my team. I bought season tickets one year for crying out loud. Nada, zip, zilch, zero, bupkus. I'm back in New Zealand, the Lakers are back in the NBA finals. Which, they will win, since I can't go to any of the games. If god wanted to really twist the knife the Indians will also win the World Series while I'm here. Actually, he should know better. If the Tribe makes it to the Series. I will see ONE game in person. I'm not sure how. Hopefully instead of having to actually sell one of the children to go, one of them can just not go to college, we'll have to see.

So here's one of my all time favorite NBA memories. 1993. The much hated Bulls had just beaten the Cavs, again, and were playing the Knicks in the conference finals. It was tuesday night so we were at the Euclid Tavern drinking beer and eating wings and rooting for the Knicks, who happened to be Anyone But The Bulls. It was a close game and the Bulls had made a run to pull within three with less than a minute to go. When John Starks, all heart and no size brings the ball up the court ....





and absolutely fucking posterizes Michael Jordan and Horace Grant. Forget The Garden, everyone in the Euc went stnad-up, scream and yell, high fiving apeshit crazy. I mean, Starks is, like, 6'3" on a good day. The Bulls were the powerhouse new kids on the block. That one play was a microcosm, that one moment was epic, it was David beating Goliath kind of stuff. When you have nothing invested, you root for the underdog and Starks was the little guy putting the underdog team on his back and winning.

The Knicks won that game but unfortunately lost the series, but it can't take away from one of the great moments in NBA playoff history.

The Big O

No, not that one, you perverts. I guess it looks like Obama has it all wrapped up. It's a good thing, I think. I think Clinton probably would've beaten the little crazy guy, but not like Obama is going to crush him. I don't think that the RNC can coordinate enough cheating to overcome the ass whooping that Obama is going to lay on McCain. It's kind of a shame, that we won't get to have a woman president. A lot of the other civilized places have already had a woman president, or prime minister. Germany, Israel, The UK, India, New Zealand. But, and it's a big one, just being a woman is not enough reason to vote for someone, especially someone like Clinton who's triangulated herself so far to the right she might as well run as McCain's VP. She represents everything that everyone who's going to vote for Obama is tired of. The same old. Corporate money is just as dirty when it's given to a democrat as it is when it's given to a republican. Hillary Clinton represents politics and that is a dirty word these days boys and girls. Why'd she lose?

This is why

Who knows, maybe Obama is going to be more of the same, but I don't think so. I must admit that since I voted with my passport I haven't paid nearly as much attention to the US political scene as I did when I was living in LA, but it seems like good things are at least trying to happen. Dems that voted for the war better take a lesson from Clinton's loss, they better be watching their backs. I have noticed however that McClellan is looking to roll over on his former employers at the White House and you should be seeing him in front of a Congressional committee before too long. Unless he has an "accident". I might have to keep an eye on that particular story.

Review: Untraceable

This was another one of those "well, everything else that's out looks like it sucks" movie. Not a whole lot to say. Diane Lane is an ass kicking FBI agent who, well, kicks some ass. It's actually pretty gory in a 'Saw' kind of way, although it a lot less 'torture-porn' than Saw, or Hostel or any other movies in that vein. When the best thing you can say about a movie is "it didn't suck" then I guess that there's not much to say. This one scores a bullseye on the fiftieth percentile for




Three Stars

O Rly?

“I would call my attorney general in and review every single executive order issued by George Bush and overturn those laws or executive decisions that I feel violate the constitution,” said Obama.

Fucking A.

Review: Indiana Jones

I'm not going to beat around the bush here. It's, like, two o'clock in the morning and I'm writing this while utterly failing to sleep so I'm just going to give you the pros and cons.

Pros: Karen Allen is in it. I'm not sure why this made such a difference to me. Perhaps it brought the whole story around full circle.

Cons: Everything else. The story was awful. The direction was awful. The acting was awful. The visual effects were barely competent. There was too much action for the run time so the pacing was rushed. There was no chemistry between Ford and Allen. The villians were barely one dimensional. Every time they went for campy it came off as just corny. There were at least three, three action sequences that could have been replaced with, oh, I don't know, an actual story. For fuck's sake. Twenty years? Twenty years we waited with these jerkoffs stroking themselves off with "well it has to be the right movie" and "we all have to agree". Are you fucking kidding me? I have never in my life left a movie theatre with a stronger feeling that the people involved really couldn't care less if I was entertained or not, as long as I bought a ticket. Are Lucas and Speilberg really that desperate for cash? Jesus Christ, I would've just sent them twenty bucks and we could've all saved ourselves a lot of trouble.


Two horribly dissapointing stars

Update

My friend S is out of ICU and has been up on his feet walking around the floor at the hospital a couple of times. He's feeling well enough that he wants to know whats happening with the Stanley Cup finals (he's Canadian, eh). Hopefully he'll be home at some point next week. We've lost one of our own though. The motorcycle is getting sold "until the kids are older" he says.

Down

So, SD, DSW and I went for a motorcyle ride on Sunday morning. Up towards The Hutt, out across towards the ocean, brunch and back again. It's a great ride and doesn't take too long. I'm on my 600rr, D is on a 1000rr and S is on a Buell lighting 1200. So we thrash our way out and back and get off the SR1 in Wellington to take Oriental Parade from town to the Eastern Suburbs where we all live. This is usually where D and I leave everyone else behind. I'm used to lane splitting from LA and D is from London. Neither of us are scared by traffic but not everyone is as fearless so we usually end up spread out over the last few minutes. On this particular day, I also had to get home to take the boys back into town to the bolwling lanes for a birthday party. I got home, got my gear off, grabbed the boys and off we went. I had just been out so I knew the traffic was bad so I decided to go back out Oriental Parade to town. It's not nearly as short, but if traffic is backed up through the Mt. Vic tunnel, it can be just as fast. I got about halfway down Oriental Parade and, hey look. there's a crashed motorcycle. I always try to stop to help another motorcyclist out if I can so I started looking for a place to pull over, which is when I noticed the cop, which is right before I thought to my self ... "holy fuck, that's S's motorcycle". Stopped and talked to the cop to find out that he'd been taken to the hospital. Called W who called S's wife with the bad news.

Long story short. He's out of surgery, still in ICU. All the limbs are moving but he's got several impact/deceleration injuries including 7 broken ribs, fractured T5-T7 and a lung contusion. He'll have some titanium rods in his spine for 6-18 months. He doesn't remember what happened. "For fuck's sake, I was taking it easy" he said. He's a competent rider and he really was taking it easier than everyone else. D and I went back later to the crash site after we left the ER, and we couldn't for the life of us figure out what happened. I'm convinced that it was a total freak accident. I don't think that he could've been going more than 30 or 35 kph. I got run over by a car going faster than that and I got up and walked away. We all wear the gear ... just a total freak accident.

So ... you can pray, if that kind of thing does it for you, or at the very least think some good thoughts for S and his family.

Shipment

Many thanks to the HumanTeam, who were kind enough to receive and ship a bunch of stuff to us. Including a blu-ray player, that also just happens to be a PS3 which is still just about the best blu-ray player you can get, a battery charger for our pocket cam that we haven't been able to take pictures with for four months because we lost the battery charger, which, I guarantee, I will find any day now that I actually bought a replacement and a 802.11n PCMCIA card for my powerbook which is letting me post this from in bed, as opposed to the powerbook's built in AirPort that seems to have a range of about five feet if you're lucky enough to have line-of-sight from the laptop to the wireless router and, of all things, some women's deodorant that, from what I understand, you can't get in New Zealand. Yes you can get women's deodorant in New Zealand, you can't get that particular brand in New Zealand. Of course HumanTeam was not satisfied with labeling the PS3 as a "used computer game" to try and deter customs from opening the package and charging me sales tax on the stuff I was importing. They marked the deodorant as "tampons". Brilliant!

Time

I don't know how often people visit this blog, but when I post about stuff, I try to set the post time on the day that it happens, which means that occasionally new posts will pop up between posts that you might have already read. It really does happen only very occasionally, like that Iron Man review right down there under the moron from Texas that can't spell official.

Hair

So, RJ, got a haircut. The only problem was the lady who cut his hair must have been a total moron. He said he wanted to keep it long, below the collar. It's ... uhh ... not. It's really short. Not that it's a bad haircut or anything, he looks pretty good, added a couple years. It's just not the haircut that he wanted. He's pretty gutted. I told him at least he doesn't have to get it cut again for another eighteen months.

It's official

This guy's a dumbass. What do you expect from Texas?





Don't get me wrong, as someone who's been an immigrant elsewhere I'm really for immigration reform in the US. It's completely broken and absurd. I think it's the one 'wedge issue' that is actually a real problem, but most likely not for the same reasons that the mouth-breathing trailer-dwelling proletariat might think. It's a race to the bottom economically. It doesn't get fixed because it's all about cheap labor. Most things are.

Review: Iron Man

I like the comic book movies, even when I don't know, or don't follow the comic. I know that I'm going to get a lot of the things that I like to see in movies. Action, Good vs Evil, action, flawed heroes, action. This movie does not disappoint. Now I never followed the Iron Man comic. Xmen was always more my speed in the Marvel universe so when I first started seeing the trailers for this movie, I must say that I was not impressed. Guy in a suit? Flies around? Hello, that movie was called The Rocketeer and it came out like 46 years ago. I figured that it would get a pass. A funny thing happened. As it got closer and closer to the release date of the movie, the trailers got better and better and better. Before you know it I was pretty interested in at least giving it a shot. So Sunday rolled around and we put it to a vote and everyone seemed interested in seeing it. So off the STFU&GBTW clan goes to the Island Bay Cinema, a nifty little boutique/cafe movie theater in, of all places, Island Bay. The ratings were M (PG-13 for you Yanks) for "mild violence", W and I were hoping that we weren't taking everyone to some blood soaked gore fest masquerading as a friendly comic book movie.

We need not have worried, there's some "horrors of war" in the opening sequence, but it's played pretty subtly. Our hero is also a serial womanizer and that's played very low key as well. None of that, however, really has anything to do with how much ass this movie kicked and I'm here to tell you my friends, it was a considerable amount. "Why?" you ask because you're lame and haven't seen it yet. "Why is it so good?". Well, I will tell you. Was it beacuse of the awesome plot? No. The plot was typical comic book movie good but not great. Was it because of the fantastic visual effects. Yes they were fantastic, but no. Was it Jon Farveau's brilliant direction? NO. I will tell you why. I will tell you in three little words. This movie was awesome because of Robert ... Downey ... Jr. He was just flat out awesome. He made the movie great. If you don't see this movie, then you hate America. The kids all loved it. You must see this movie.

PS. I don't mean to nit pick, but I'm from SoCal so I'm afraid I must. When a billionaire industrialist super-genius gets home from spending three months in a cave in Af-fucking-ghanistan and says that he wants two things, first an American cheeseburger and second, a press conference does he get out of the limo at the press conference with a BK bag in one hand and a Whopper in the other? No! Fucking product placement. Fucking In-And-Out. IN-AND-OUT god damnit. He would go to fucking In-And-Out a get a double double. BK my ass. Minature fusion reactors in his chest, that I can believe, but no In-And-Out? it strains credibility and completely blew my suspension of disbelief, but still, I gotta give it ...



Five Ass Kicking Stars

Single

Things like this are the reason it's probably best that I didn't make any money until after I got married.

DVD projector

Quiz

Can you get 100%? I bet you can't. I missed one. I should be fired.

Fake or Photo