Tuesday, May 17, 2005
It's not a cult, it's a collective...
So sayeth Mr Daniel Wallace. More of that later.
Soundtrack: "All Maps Welcome" by Tom McRae. The flavour of the month until I get my hands on either the new Coral album or the new Coldplay album. "The Invisible Invasion" is due out in the UK on May 23rd, but I can't seem to find an Australian release date for it. "X & Y" I know for sure is June 6th, though. The more I listen to this album, the more aware I become of how mindblowingly good it is. Even more strongly recommended than before.
Good arvo this arvo.
Adelaide is warm and dry and the view from this house is bloody amazing, especially at night. It's a big house on the hill and you can see all of Adelaide, all the way down to the beach. Wonderfully, my Aunty Wendy hasn't given away the piano (apparently, she's pretty much given away everything else), so I had a good old play this morning. Unfortunately, it's not been looked after well - my cousin Elaine leaves the lid open, and because the atmosphere is so dry, the keys and the pedals have lost their action and it's quite difficult to get the thing to speak well. I suppose I'm spoilt because I'm used to Hugh my gorgeous Kemble, who sounds great and plays spectacularly because we know each other so well.
Now that I'm in a different town, I can do a bit of a retrospective analysis of Melbourne. The petrol's around 8-9 cents cheaper over there, for one. Not that that really makes much difference, because it's still nearly half the price of back home. Shocking. The other big differences are the landscape, and the pace of life. I looked at the land out of the window of the plane for the whole one-hour flight, and it does get much hillier as you approach Adelaide. [Weirdly, the fields are circular. They look like giant pie charts.] And if I thought things were slow in Melbourne, my God! Adelaide is even slower. There was a public holiday yesterday because of the Adelaide Cup. They have public holidays because of sporting events. We have sporting events because of public holidays.
So, I arrived in town on Sunday morning. My flight from Melbourne was delayed by an hour due to freak fog. The fog was good, but it's just not rain. I need rain, dammit! It's threatening to rain, but Antoinette said that it never rains when it's like this when she came to clean the house earlier today. Antoinette is Aunty Wendy's bestest buddy, and I spent Sunday at her house because Wendy and Uncle Peter were in Sydney on hippy cult business, and my cousin Elaine was away with her boyfriend Blake. I watched "War and Peace" (how could you get tired of three hours twenty minutes of Audrey Hepburn?), and I was really tempted to watch "Gone With The Wind" as well, but I settled on "Ned Kelly" instead in order to get a better idea of this place's cultural heritage. I still don't really understand why everybody thought that he was so great, though.
Yesterday morning, we picked up Peter from the airport. Wendy tried to convert me to the cult, Peter laid into my Catholicism. It's funny, other Catholics, like those evil sodding youth missionaries, make me lose faith. But outsiders, like the Falun Gong (the hippy cult) people only serve to strengthen everything that I believe in. Ever read "Join Me" by Danny Wallace? Inspired by his Swiss great uncle, he sort-of starts a cult by getting people to send him their passport photos, which he keeps in a shoebox, but then it all spirals out of control... You can see the results at www.join-me.com. But anyway, the tag line of the whole quest is: "It's not a cult, it's a collective." Except the Falun Gong people deny being a collective, so go figure.
After that, Wendy took me for a drive down to the beach. The beaches around Adelaide are really lovely - clean sand, blue waters, nice waterfronts. We had Thai for lunch, sadly with no penguin ice-creams, or else I would've ordered one and named him Toby Hester or something. In the evening, I went out for dinner with Elaine and Blake, who's one of those typically Australian boys. I expect he surfs. He pretty much lives here - he just came in to pick up his fireman training letters that he left behind.
We're going to see Cirque du Soleil tonight, which is all very exciting. But now, I'll just go and sit on the veranda and listen to the rest of this beautiful, beautiful album.
Soundtrack: "All Maps Welcome" by Tom McRae. The flavour of the month until I get my hands on either the new Coral album or the new Coldplay album. "The Invisible Invasion" is due out in the UK on May 23rd, but I can't seem to find an Australian release date for it. "X & Y" I know for sure is June 6th, though. The more I listen to this album, the more aware I become of how mindblowingly good it is. Even more strongly recommended than before.
Good arvo this arvo.
Adelaide is warm and dry and the view from this house is bloody amazing, especially at night. It's a big house on the hill and you can see all of Adelaide, all the way down to the beach. Wonderfully, my Aunty Wendy hasn't given away the piano (apparently, she's pretty much given away everything else), so I had a good old play this morning. Unfortunately, it's not been looked after well - my cousin Elaine leaves the lid open, and because the atmosphere is so dry, the keys and the pedals have lost their action and it's quite difficult to get the thing to speak well. I suppose I'm spoilt because I'm used to Hugh my gorgeous Kemble, who sounds great and plays spectacularly because we know each other so well.
Now that I'm in a different town, I can do a bit of a retrospective analysis of Melbourne. The petrol's around 8-9 cents cheaper over there, for one. Not that that really makes much difference, because it's still nearly half the price of back home. Shocking. The other big differences are the landscape, and the pace of life. I looked at the land out of the window of the plane for the whole one-hour flight, and it does get much hillier as you approach Adelaide. [Weirdly, the fields are circular. They look like giant pie charts.] And if I thought things were slow in Melbourne, my God! Adelaide is even slower. There was a public holiday yesterday because of the Adelaide Cup. They have public holidays because of sporting events. We have sporting events because of public holidays.
So, I arrived in town on Sunday morning. My flight from Melbourne was delayed by an hour due to freak fog. The fog was good, but it's just not rain. I need rain, dammit! It's threatening to rain, but Antoinette said that it never rains when it's like this when she came to clean the house earlier today. Antoinette is Aunty Wendy's bestest buddy, and I spent Sunday at her house because Wendy and Uncle Peter were in Sydney on hippy cult business, and my cousin Elaine was away with her boyfriend Blake. I watched "War and Peace" (how could you get tired of three hours twenty minutes of Audrey Hepburn?), and I was really tempted to watch "Gone With The Wind" as well, but I settled on "Ned Kelly" instead in order to get a better idea of this place's cultural heritage. I still don't really understand why everybody thought that he was so great, though.
Yesterday morning, we picked up Peter from the airport. Wendy tried to convert me to the cult, Peter laid into my Catholicism. It's funny, other Catholics, like those evil sodding youth missionaries, make me lose faith. But outsiders, like the Falun Gong (the hippy cult) people only serve to strengthen everything that I believe in. Ever read "Join Me" by Danny Wallace? Inspired by his Swiss great uncle, he sort-of starts a cult by getting people to send him their passport photos, which he keeps in a shoebox, but then it all spirals out of control... You can see the results at www.join-me.com. But anyway, the tag line of the whole quest is: "It's not a cult, it's a collective." Except the Falun Gong people deny being a collective, so go figure.
After that, Wendy took me for a drive down to the beach. The beaches around Adelaide are really lovely - clean sand, blue waters, nice waterfronts. We had Thai for lunch, sadly with no penguin ice-creams, or else I would've ordered one and named him Toby Hester or something. In the evening, I went out for dinner with Elaine and Blake, who's one of those typically Australian boys. I expect he surfs. He pretty much lives here - he just came in to pick up his fireman training letters that he left behind.
We're going to see Cirque du Soleil tonight, which is all very exciting. But now, I'll just go and sit on the veranda and listen to the rest of this beautiful, beautiful album.
Comments:
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Hey, nice one. good to know you're having an excellent time! The new coldplay thing doesn't seem to amazing, but I might buy it nevertheless. This religion thing is always a bit complicated it seems, and I get round it by diswoning any of them, and saying 'I'm a scientist' which is blatently not true, but may be some day. Have fun!
Alex
Alex
# posted by 
: 9:16 am
: 9:16 am
Science doesn't preclude religion, or vice versa, but don't really want to get into that now, already more involved than I should be in a Nestle boycott debate.
In other news, either I'm totally not getting it or the link doesn't work.....probly just too stupid tho.
In other news, either I'm totally not getting it or the link doesn't work.....probly just too stupid tho.
# posted by : 3:18 pm
: 3:18 pm
I think most people say that a boycott is only if there is consumer choice, ie if you're in a supermarket, but if you're at work or whatever and they only have a nestle coffee machine, other than bugging the management to change, you're not necessarily a totally hypocritical scumbag for getting your caffeine fix, so the Nestle room is probly ok, espesh as it's questionable as to whether the nestle corporation benefits from your using the room, so your not using the room wouldn't negatively impact on nestle so there's no real point in 'boycotting' the nestle room.
# posted by : 10:43 pm
: 10:43 pm
Spelling "bollocks" as "bollox"? That's just wrong.
Good to see that Alex and Miranda are getting in on the act.
That link probably was wrong. It's something similar, though. Maybe without the hyphen...
Good to see that Alex and Miranda are getting in on the act.
That link probably was wrong. It's something similar, though. Maybe without the hyphen...
www.joinme.com is an internet dating site.........so who else can tell that i'm really getting into this whole revision thing :)
also just wondering if you were still checking your emails steph, not urgent, but there's the possibility of organising stuff to do with my bassoon, don't necessarily want to do that on public fora/forums/whatever ( < mutter mutter > stupid english language < mutter mutter > stupid plurals < mutter mutter >)
also stupid html editor won't let me use < > the way i want......
also just wondering if you were still checking your emails steph, not urgent, but there's the possibility of organising stuff to do with my bassoon, don't necessarily want to do that on public fora/forums/whatever ( < mutter mutter > stupid english language < mutter mutter > stupid plurals < mutter mutter >)
also stupid html editor won't let me use < > the way i want......
# posted by : 9:48 am
: 9:48 am
Oh, jeez, patently just too stupid, as I only just realised that my name wasn't on my last post, well in case you didn't guess, anonymous just up there ^ is me. Sorry.
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# posted by : 3:35 pm
: 3:35 pm << Home
