Over

I give Israel 10 years, tops, of existance. Expanding settlements in the West Bank preclude a two state solution and while some may argue that there's already a system of apartheit in place, given current demographic trends, apartheit will be a numerical reality in about 10 years. Virulent nationalisim and extreme religious orthodoxy continute to drive West Bank settlement building at rates that are increasing by five percent per year. Stopping the building and negotiating a two state solution is the only hope Israel has for long term survival. I doubt that it will ever happen. I just wonder who will get to keep all the nuclear weapons.

Tough

It's hard being right all the time.

LONDON (AP) -- Bill Gates and other donors are giving more than $630 million to the international effort to eradicate polio, after the disease spiked and spread to seven countries that were previously polio-free......

Otaki

The gang went pseudo-camping at Otaki this weekend with some families from work. We were trying to go Friday night to Monday morning but some crazy rain Saturday night had us home by Sunday morning. We were at a campground about 100m from the beach. RC is getting pretty good at catching the waves on the boogie board, it will be learner surfboard time pretty soon. It was dog friendly, which is nice. Although I forgot the rain cover for the tent and had to go back home and get it Friday night, luckily it's only about an hour North.

Pix are here

This just in ...

People are stupid.

It's called "Herd Immunity" and people who don't vaccinate their kids deserve a good old fashioned Polio outbreak except, oops, it's not just the people who aren't immunized that will get sick, it's everyone. You have a social responsibility to vaccinate your kids. Welcome to the 21st century, these aren't your ancestor's Dark Ages.

Joe

So my friends Eric and Beth have family in San Diego. They usually go home every year around Christmas time. Get back to the states, see the family, eat some real mexican food, that kind of thing. Well, we're pretty busy right now, and Beth isn't working, so she took the kids and flew back to SoCal a couple weeks early to stay with family. Once we wrapped up some stuff at work, Eric flew back by himself. So, he's sitting on the plane, in business class, and he ends up talking to the guy sitting next to him, as you do, it's the Auckland to LA leg, you can't really ignore someone for 12 hours that you're sitting next to. Anyway, Eric asks the guy what he does for a living, and the conversation goes something like this.

Eric: What do you do for a living?
Person: Oh, I'm a singer in a rock and roll band.
Eric: That's awesome, what kind of music do you play?
Singer: Like Billy Joel.
Eric: That's cool. It's great that someone's keeping his music going since he retired.
Billy Joel: No, not like Billy Joel, I'm Billy Joel.

Ouch.

I love how Joel tried to play it off since Eric didn't know who he was. "I'm just a singer in a band". Of course Eric is the kind of person who always seems lucky, so when you hear a new Billy Joel song, and he's talking about the guy on the plane who doesn't know who he his, you'll know where the story comes from. The icing on the cake though, was this.

Eric: So, how do you like travelling with your dad?
Mrs. Joel: I'm his wife.

Twelve hours is a long time to sit next to someone on a airplane.

Happy Holidays

Merry Xmas, Happy new year. Blah, Blah. Hopefully everyone is well and having a good year end. Weta is closed for two weeks at the end of every year, so my poor widdle typing abused hands and my muddled brain are getting a rest. There are heaps of new pix up on flikr

STFU & GBTW's photostream

and Mrs. STFU put her xmas letter up in blog format.

Mrs. STFU's blog

Both of those are set to be relatively private. If you don't have permission and think you should, let me know and I'll see what I can do.

I'll see you all next year.

Surrender

Ok, I surrender. I give up trying to run a web server from the office. I signed up at flikr.com and I've started uploading the stuff from my gallery. It's here

My flikr photostream

but I've got the permissions set pretty strictly so I'll have to add you as a friend or family before you'll be able to see anything. Let me know your login.

Base

wingsuit base jumping from doubleA on Vimeo.

Help

So we're eating. W is spooning whatever it was we were having, some sticky, food type substance onto #4's plate. Sticky is the important concept here. It's not just dinner, it's sticky dinner. No, I don't remember what it was, doesn't matter, it was sticky, that's the important bit. Ok? We're all on the same page? Can we continue please? So Mrs. is shaking the spoon up and down a bit, since, not only is the dinner sticky, it's tenacious. It's clinging, nay, sticking to the spoon with great determination. It's late in the fourth quarter and the home team of food and various coefficients of static friction are looking unbeatable as W, gravity and inertia can't seem to get the offense together.

"#4 can you help me out, please?" says W, looking for a utensil to come off the bench and give the offense a lift.

#4 stops talking to #1, quicky asseses the situation, reaches out and grabs W's hand holding the spoon and starts shaking it up and down. Cal beats Stanford. Down Goes Frazier. Hilarity ensues.

Official

It's official, I signed new contract on Friday that will carry me through almost to the end of the show. I'm officially a 'CG Supervisor'. We're still waiting to hear back from immigration on the status of the application for residency, and having a contract extension should help. Residency will make it easier to get a home loan, and so on down the line. Hopefully the new deal will be the first domino. I'm still supposed to be in New Orleans in August. Maybe I'll take a couple days and hit the East Coast.

Action

If there's one thing I know, it's "people suck". Aside from that, another thing I know is movies.

Why Jason Statham is the planet’s purest action star


See E? It's not just me. You've got to work on your movie picking skills.

North: Part 1

So there ended up being five of us. The guy with the Indian couldn't get a warrant of fitness in time, since the bike had just arrived in the country (sounds just like last time, no?) but we picked up another rider. There was me on my 600rr, Duncan on a 1000rr, Grant on a late 80's Ducati 750-F1 and Reese on a late 90's Wide Glide Harley. And Shawn, who isn't 'allowed' to ride after he crashed the last time he went for a Sunday ride with Duncan and myself, but who didn't want to miss out on a weekend away, driving his 1990 300zx turbo. All the motorcycles met at a cafe on Oriental Parade around nine o'clock Saturday morning and headed out from there, up SR1 towards our first waypoint, Stratford, 314 klicks.


View Larger Map


Not only is SR1 straight and boring, it was a three day weekend, so the traffic was horrendous, until we got a couple of hours away from Wellington. But still, boooooooooring. Shawn had left a couple of hours before us, and we caught up to him just in time to stop in Whanganui for lunch. After lunch a by-god real Irish pub, I'm talking bagpipe music here, we gave Shawn another head start and continued North. Now that the traffic was thinning out, Shawn never had a chance. We overtook him almost immediately, and headed for Stratford. I think we got into Stratford around two o'clock. We waited for Shawn and got gassed up and headed up into the hills on The Forgotten World Highway to our final destination for the day, The Whangamomona Hotel.



View Larger Map

Again we gave Shawn a head start, figuring that we would catch him before we actually got to where we were going. And we did. Right here.


So, there we are, in the middle of nowhere. And believe me, I know the middle of nowhere when I see it, I used to live there. We're in the middle of nowhere, and all we have to get Shawn's car out of the ditch is four motorcycles. We're fucked. As fate would have it a very handy man in a van came by and helped us get the car out of the ditch.


After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, the Z was pulled from the ditch. The Z had, rather convincingly, lost is short, and intense, argument with the fence.

It ran, poorly. Luckily for Shawn, Grant, who had come along on the Ducati, is actually the handiest man in the known universe. We, and when I say we, I mean that I stood around taking pictures, had to rip quite a few parts of the front of the car that were rubbing on the front wheel when you tried to turn. You know the scene in "Armageddon" where the drilling guys are going over the rovers and pulling parts off and throwing them away? Yeah, like that. I was just impressed that Grant actually knew what the things he was pulling out from under the wheel well were.

So we kind of slowed it down and shepherded Shawn and the mortally wounded Z the rest of the way to Whangomomona. It's just as well, right after where Shawn crashed, that road turns into a real motherfucker. I managed to only have one crap my pants moment, after which I thanked my rapidly fading 40 year old reflexes and promised myself that I would invite every last engineer from Honda that worked on the 600rr over to my house for a beer, because that bike is a god damn miracle of modern technology. Every time I think I've found out how far I can push that thing, I find out I'm wrong. So The Forgotten World Highway is a very technical ride and I'm either not as good a rider as I thought, or Reese, who came on his Harley, is batshit crazy, as he had no trouble keeping up with the sportbikes. Hopefully it's a little of both, either way, I was in awe. One turn leads to another and before you know it. We're in Whangomomona. Look at the pretty machines! If you look very close at the rear tire of my 600, you can see how far towards the rim that brand new Pirelli is scrubbed out. Woo-hoo.



Day one ended with everyone in one piece. A big meal, some rugby on the telly and a couple glasses of Laphoraig later (I'm not sure when I turned into a scotch drinker) it was time to call it a day, we did have to go back out the way we came the next day. And we still had to figure out what to do about the Z. Stay tuned. Same Z time, same Z channel

Busy As

I'm responsible for some stuff that has to be done by the end of the year. Pretty busy, not much blogging.

Knife

Fun With Fireworks

As a denizen of SoCal, it's shocking to be able to run down to the Wherehouse (NZ version of Target) and by fireworks I spent $40 and had enough fireworks in my car to get 5 to 10 in Southern California. Fucking A. Guy Fawkes Day was Wednesday, but I had a basketball game at 9:00, so we lit some of the sparklers and spinners before I had to go play. I've got the rest saved up for New Year's Eve. Here's a couple pictures of the crew and their sparklers.






Not too bad for handheld.

Variation

Paul Gilbert is one of my favorite guitar players. This is a good example of why.

Right

I don't care what the polls say, ask John Kerry about polls. I'll believe that McCain won't win when I see it. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD AMERICA, DO THE RIGHT THING. I DON'T WANT TO BE BACK HERE LATER TONIGHT SAYING "I TOLD YOU SO".

The Unit

My very good friend Dave is the Effects Supervisor on The Unit. Chewie thinks it's boring.

Shhhh! Don't tell mom I'm on the couch!

Home Again

At home, well, I was home for thirty seconds and then I came to work. Am in one piece. No worries. More later.

Stupid Rain

Well, hitting the road with the bike tomorrow AM and of course its pissing down at the moment, got my fingers crossed for it to clear up tomorrow.