Since we don’t live by politix alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!
Life, Culture and Politics from BrisVegas
Larvatus Prodeo is an Australian group blog which discusses politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
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First maybe 2nd
Ummmmm hot day in Adelaide. farmers market–new stall there selling mutton & hogget instead of the ever-present lamb. Will get a small mutton roast next sunday.
Went to the little Uraidla market as well, got some tough, perennial groundcovers and some “naked lady” belladonna bulbs for planting in a month or three.
Quite quiet and lazy Sunday really.
Just playing with my new Acer Aspire mini-laptop, and its ace! Less than $400 and its excellently portsble for work trips. Really needed something smaller than the laptop, which has become a bit of a family desktop anyway. Uses Linux which so far seems vastly superior and faster than Windows, Great for blogging on the couch!
JV, that little Uraidla market is lovely.
LE, I too spent half the day with a new gadget, but in my case it was the new high-efficiency washing machine acquired after the faithful Hoover top-loader finally gave up the ghost. Spent the day stuffing around with hot water and Epsom salts trying to eliminate ‘streaking and spotting’ from insufficiently dissolved detergent. For a person who wears a lot of black and is already behind the 8-ball in the cat hair stakes, this is not good.
I want my old Hoover back.
Yes I hate it when new stuff doesn’t immediately work 100%, straight out of the box, Pav.
Sudden rush of adrenalin as an acrid smell of burning scrub assailed the very worn sinuses. Then the siren and a speeding CFA truck heading leeward. Yep, a camper had failed to take the precaution of properly extinguishing an over night campfire.
Luckily the boys hit the problem hard and fast and it was brought under control and in fact totally put out within minutes.
Who needs terrorists?
And then along came The Trial of Tony Blair on ABC . Now that’s relaxation!
settling in for a Speerfest over on SBS
While the Trial of Tony Blair was bitingly witty I found thought that there was a bit much left wing wish fulfillment to be all that entertaining.
Lefty E: if you need help with Linuxy stuff, let me know.
ObLazySunday: Saturday morning ride – the city to Hurstbridge station via Epping the Humevale Hill and Kinglake. Why lazy Sunday? No writeup yet
Just slung out the last guest from the husband’s birthday do and am now engaged in bunging crayfish in bins for the Chinese to fang.
Absolutely perfect day in Cape Jaffa. Just an ever-so-gentle sea breeze. (Called in the Guinness Book of records.)
Took dogs for a canter along the beach in the afternoon. Halfwit Hound found heaps of seaweed and was very pleased with himself. Whiptster careered around and was mainly inscrutable.
Watched a very stoned man fall into the vegetation above the shoreline about a million times.
Forgot to record the Trial of Tony Blair, so am pissed off with self.
Apart from that a brilliant summer day.
Drove up the M5 to pay a visit to the NSW Art Gallery and take in the Monet exhibit. A fortnight ago I’d driven down to Canberra to see an Edgar Degas exhibit. I think I enjoyed Degas more; I certainly enjoyed the experience of walking around looking at art more in Canberra, there wasn’t anywhere near the crowding there. The pieces are made to be viewed from four or five metres back and there were too many people at Monet to do that.
Long time lurker, first time commenting.
Spent the day watching the cricket, had a BBQ dinner and later, perhaps nerdily, fiddled with Ubuntu. Yes #3, Linux is better than windows.
Saw Slumdog Millionaire, went to the beach, had the parents over for brunch, went to sister-in-law’s for lunch, now listening to my wife and her friends organise a holiday.
Oh, and fiddled with my (Windows only) home network. Getting a domain running at home is easier with Server 2003 than with Samba – but it is more vulnerable. The firewall ended up looking like the proverbial Swiss cheese.
LE, I got myself an Aspire before Christmas on a day when I was about to send the old Dell laptop through the nearest closed window. Yes, they’re pretty [adjective] good, although mine runs Windows XP.
Have spent most of the weekend playing with the machine that’ll soon replace the laptop, the television, and the VHS: an Apple iMac — ex-display stock from the computer place three streets away — with a monitor that’s nearly 3′ in size. It’s a little bit of a culture-shock to one who’s been tapping away into Microsoftish PCs since the days when DOS-5 was the most common operating system, but great fun!
Now to get back to typing the letter I was typing a few minutes ago…
I went to the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival on Cockatoo Island. Closest thing to a perfect festival that I’ve been to.
Thanks Rob – and Sam, yeah, I cant believe how much faster Linux is. And no need for viral-proofing too!
gilmae – I had much the same experience a fortnight ago. Although quite a crowd was viewing the Degas at the ANG, the rabble at the AGNSW made the Monet very unpleasant. I’ve never seen so many people equate physical proximity to artworks with an appreciation of their contents. IMO material for the next Condemn thread…
Apart from commenting on LP spent most of Saturday reading Marc Egnal’s A Mighty Empire: The Origins of the American Revolution and taking notes from it. A difficult but absorbing book on factional politics in colonial and Revolutionary America. Dipped in The Eighteenth Century in Indian History, but couldn’t get into it. Watched The Bill, then French thriller on SBS.
Sunday, as above. Dipped into Ambrose Serle’s American Journal. fascinating. John Hunter, later governor of NSW, gets a couple of mentions. Watched Children’s Crusade on SBS, then Trial of Tony Blair. (JWH was so inconsequential, apparently, he didn’t get a mention.) Watched Speer and Hitler. Did this.
Wow, still up reading Cryptonomicron. Like Anathem a big, weighty book. enjoying it a lot.
Went to the Big Day Out at the Gold Coast. Finally got to see Neil Young live and he slayed me. Finished with ‘Rocking in the Free World’, then encoring with ‘A Day in the Life’. Never thought I’d hear that song played live (well), and would never have guessed it would be Neil Young doing it.
Virtually every other band I saw was good too (including Kate Bradley again, Mark, and if there’s a Best of Died Pretty out there I need to buy it NOW!), the bonehead element was markedly down on previous years, almost nil obnoxious morons… damn good day really.
I had a shockingly slovenly weekend which has culminated in my being unable to sleep, probably from a build-up of potential energy that was never expended. I shall now have to have a suitably industrious Monday to make up for it, which, ironically, I will not feel like doing come Monday morning, due to my lack of sleep! Curse you, foul logic of doom!
Lefty E,
Two of my computers never need virus-proofing: I don’t think anyone’s targeting DOS-6 or Windows 3.11 anymore.
terangeree,
Just make sure you check the boot sectors of those 3 1/2 inch disks. You could get Stoned…
Wow! Windows for Workgroups. Those were the days. I hope you’re running Drivespace in DOS 6. Would hate to run out of room on that, what, 80 meg hard drive?
Andrew,
Why do you think I’m still using the 5.25″ disks, huh?
Went Frockblogging in Bendigo with Bwca, G-G and Lady Livia, JahTeh, Another Outspoken Female, Laura, Antikva and Feminoz. Four hours of peace in the car with nothing but me, the radio and sweeping vistas of Australia Felix. Then several in Bendigo with nothing but adult conversation. And frocks and short films with Audrey Hepburn. Brilliant!!
I also bumped into some of my favourite rels in the show who also live in the Goldfields area and who I don’t see nearly enough.
Home for dinner, not cooked by me. Did NO house work stuff whatsoever.
hmmm…img tags don’t seem to work
Let’s see, did the washing on Sunday, went for a walk from home to the other side of East Brisbane on Saturday, read several journal articles about Queensland politics after that, had dinner at the Lemon Grass Thai restaurant on Sunday night, put the finishing touches on an article for the SEARCH Foundation discussion bulleting, went for a walk along Stanley Street on Sunday, and on the way back suddenly had an attack of nausea, bloating and an intense desire to vomit just as I was walking past the Liberal Party HQ – really! Then returned home to watch the cricket, after which I had dinner at the Sur Taj Indian restaurant.
I spent Sunday fiddling around on Ubuntu with MySQL and Python, trying to learn how to set things up to wean my wife away from MS Access. Long way to go yet.
Ah, 3.1. The joy I used to derive from arranging the program categories, so.
I went to work yesterday, it was quite pleasant down on the southern Fleurieu. Then when I got home I mooched around on the net looking at high resolution images of masterpieces from the Museo del Prado collection…courtesy of google earth..slow to load, but really good stuff.
http://www.museodelprado.es/en/paginas-sueltas/obras-maestras/
Had a morning digging up crappy old paving with my shoulder and back in screaming pain from cricket prac in the nets Saturday.
Then got stuck into mixing my new(-er) band’s demos of some new material we recorded just before Xmas.
It sounded way better than we thunk it would, so now considering making it a 5-track EP. Here’s to accidental competence!
I was in Bendigo with Helen looking at the beatuful beautiful dresses – lovely afternoon.
Awoke wanting to be at the Briz Lifeline Book sale (but car currently sick). Read on-line papers (seems to take less time each day). Loaded LP’s latest on Windshuttle and decided to dust off my best LL buy EVAH! (50 cents)
(Note: All punctuation of poems, inc. titles, is [sic]}
Ern Malley, “COLLOQUY WITH JOHN KEATS”, in Angry Penguins: 1944 Autumn Number to Commemorate the Australian Poet Ern Malley, p. 29
Altho I have to admit “EM’s” effort is more credible than another poem, in the edition’s U.S.A. section; the quoted lines apposite (sort of) to my initial Sunday activity:
Vincent Ferrini, “FIRST FURROWING”, Ibid. p. 89.
The real genius of a good hoax is to imitate the sense, feeling, tone, intention and mindset of the original.
Onya, Katherine Wilson! You aced it, and quinella’d for the Green & Gold (we do excel at more than sport) Bloody bewdy!
PS: Yes, the zine is original, and came interleaved with newspaper/ zine clippings.