Saturday, May 14, 2005
We're going to the zoo zoo zoo...
Soundtrack: "Tilt" by the Lightning Seeds
Good evening this evening.
Selina and Stephanie took me to Melbourne Zoo yesterday. It was bloody great, penguins, seals, koalas, kangaroos, wombats, tigers, pygmy hippos, everything... Though you know how everybody always asks you, "If you could be any animal, what would you be?" I think I'd still be a fish.
My one concession to the way Australians speak is an overuse of the word "bloody." Otherwise, things have been going to plan and I'm getting a bit posh for my own good. When I was in the travel agent's the other day to book my flights to NZ, they asked me where I was from. I told them that I was from Wiltshire, which they seemed to think was very posh. I tried to tell them that the place is full of farmers.
Bytheway, Japanese stonegrilled food is the best stuff ever. Your steak comes out on a crazy-hot piece of granite, along with tofu and courgettes and mushrooms, and you have to cook it yourself. On the side are a salad, sushi and sashimi as well. Delicious. While we're on random little things, has anybody heard the Euroclub-style dance remix of Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse Of The Heart"? It must be one of the campest songs ever, alongside a theoretical Eroclub-style dance remix of Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive," and another of Shirley Bassey's, well, Shirley Bassey's anything.
Today, Andy drove the four of us out to Ballarat to go to Sovereign Hill, which is a recreated version of old Ballarat during the mid-19th Century gold rush. It was proper frontier - piles of horse shit lying around, handsome performing arts students running round in costume pretending to be miners. Even though it was meant to be a big tourist attraction, Sovereign Hill was much like present-day Ballarat, though: really rather quiet. "It's dead in the morgue, but it's deader in here..."
The organist at church tonight was awful, though the choir wasn't bad. Unfortunately, they didn't seem to take into consideration that none of the congregation had a clue how to sing their badly-picked hymns, so they all sang descant which didn't really help us because the organist was so bad. Last week, we went to a different church, and at least the music this week was many many many times better than that. I get quite annoyed about this, though. Hymns are meant to be communal, inclusive, so choirs shouldn't pick hymns that only they know how to sing. And they're so difficult to predict the tune of! All these idiot Christians who are wannabe songwriters - they just seem to pick random tunes and write nonsensical lyrics, and then they get published in hippy hymnbooks. If I ever end up being a regular church pianist/organist, I'm going to try and reinstate decent hymns like "Nearer My God To Thee," "Abide With Me," "Soul Of My Saviour" and "Dreadlock Holiday" by 10CC.
Good evening this evening.
Selina and Stephanie took me to Melbourne Zoo yesterday. It was bloody great, penguins, seals, koalas, kangaroos, wombats, tigers, pygmy hippos, everything... Though you know how everybody always asks you, "If you could be any animal, what would you be?" I think I'd still be a fish.
My one concession to the way Australians speak is an overuse of the word "bloody." Otherwise, things have been going to plan and I'm getting a bit posh for my own good. When I was in the travel agent's the other day to book my flights to NZ, they asked me where I was from. I told them that I was from Wiltshire, which they seemed to think was very posh. I tried to tell them that the place is full of farmers.
Bytheway, Japanese stonegrilled food is the best stuff ever. Your steak comes out on a crazy-hot piece of granite, along with tofu and courgettes and mushrooms, and you have to cook it yourself. On the side are a salad, sushi and sashimi as well. Delicious. While we're on random little things, has anybody heard the Euroclub-style dance remix of Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse Of The Heart"? It must be one of the campest songs ever, alongside a theoretical Eroclub-style dance remix of Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive," and another of Shirley Bassey's, well, Shirley Bassey's anything.
Today, Andy drove the four of us out to Ballarat to go to Sovereign Hill, which is a recreated version of old Ballarat during the mid-19th Century gold rush. It was proper frontier - piles of horse shit lying around, handsome performing arts students running round in costume pretending to be miners. Even though it was meant to be a big tourist attraction, Sovereign Hill was much like present-day Ballarat, though: really rather quiet. "It's dead in the morgue, but it's deader in here..."
The organist at church tonight was awful, though the choir wasn't bad. Unfortunately, they didn't seem to take into consideration that none of the congregation had a clue how to sing their badly-picked hymns, so they all sang descant which didn't really help us because the organist was so bad. Last week, we went to a different church, and at least the music this week was many many many times better than that. I get quite annoyed about this, though. Hymns are meant to be communal, inclusive, so choirs shouldn't pick hymns that only they know how to sing. And they're so difficult to predict the tune of! All these idiot Christians who are wannabe songwriters - they just seem to pick random tunes and write nonsensical lyrics, and then they get published in hippy hymnbooks. If I ever end up being a regular church pianist/organist, I'm going to try and reinstate decent hymns like "Nearer My God To Thee," "Abide With Me," "Soul Of My Saviour" and "Dreadlock Holiday" by 10CC.
