The Constant Wombler

Snippets From America

2009-05-01T02:36:00.002-04:00

The Definition of Irony

One of the fascinating things about having lived in America for the last 3 years is the radical shift from "there is always more stuff" to "oh crap, the environment". When I first moved here the car ads were all "look at my big manly manly car that gets .5 miles to the gallon", now the ads are all "look at my big manly car that gets 1.5 miles to the gallon because of magic ingredient X". Or the ads that are all about how company that makes this car has managed to con the local government into declaring the grounds surrounding the manufacturing plant a nature reserve. Its an improvement, but not much. The key point of course being that, as usual, its all about the show and not the actual, you know, doing.

So there I am, coming off a flight from San Francisco and I land at JFK. I am walking through the endless miles of corridors and I come across what can only be called the Exxon Mobil Edifice of Irony. Its an entire section of the airport devoted to pointing out how wonderful and new energy Exxon Mobil is, how every day they are saving Americans all this energy and therefore the environment... as if that wasn't irony enough, how did they choose to impart this message? Recycled paper banners? Eco friendly water paints? Oh no, they used 40 plasma screens playing the same graphic presentation over and over again. 40 X 72 inch plasma screens all pointing out the Exxon Mobil is dedicated to conserving energy...

The less said about the current American Power = Clean Coal ads the better...

Things you will only see in New York...
The weather has turned very nice here, sort of the warning shots before the insane heat of August. The other day I wombled up to Central Park. Lovely day, sun was shining, not to hot. Managed to find a lovely spot under some cherry blossom trees to read a book for a few hours. There was even some young lads without their shirts on to provide some eye candy. On my way out of the park I noticed this young lady sitting under a tree with a dog on a leash. As I was walking close, in a supreme state of relaxation, I was trying to figure out what breed of dog... it wasn't until I got within 20 feet that I realised it was a rabbit. She was taking her rabbit for a walk... mind you, the size of this thing, frankly it had to have been a descendant of the killer rabbit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Standing on the shoulders of giants.

2008-02-16T20:20:00.007-05:00

For the last month or so I have been grappling with precisely what to say when I am asked by people how the project I am working on is going. I have struggled mightily with the English language to properly express what it is like - a veritable Captain Ahab facing the Great White Whale. Trust me - that is quite possibly the least pretentious sentence about to be carelessly flung in your direction. We all know that I can be a cantankerously wordy bastard at the best of times. Someone who is overly fond of using turgid, lengthy and frankly pointless sentences to meander around a point. When any sensible person would use a few carefully chosen sentences to cleave right to the heart of the matter at hand. (See what I mean?)

By way of perspective - at the outset I had thought of calling the project "The Sisyphus Initiative" - but frankly the name is on the wrong side of sissy and I have enough trouble being manly at the best of times. Besides - pushing rocks up hill is pretty much a routine part of life in modern society.

Then I thought of calling it the Don Quixote Project - you know, tilting at windmills and dreaming the impossible dream. Unfortunately our giants are rather less imaginary in nature.

So there I am cast adrift on a rhetorical sea of cheap literary metaphors with my life raft getting eaten away by the moment. When it struck me. A poem. A poem that perfectly summarises the mood, the mis en scene. Hey - stop rolling your eyes - I gave your fair warning at the beginning that this was going to get ugly on the language side.

So - given that the poem is out of copyright - I think - I lost track of the latest extension. Is copyright "authors death + infinity years" or just "authors death + when we can't make no more money off of a dead horse"?

Anyway, the poem:

The Charge of the Light Brigade
Alfred, Lord Tennyson

1.
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
"Forward, the Light Brigade!
"Charge for the guns!" he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

2.
"Forward, the Light Brigade!"
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Someone had blunder'd:
Their's not to make reply,
Their's not to reason why,
Their's but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

3.
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.

4.
Flash'd all their sabres bare,
Flash'd as they turn'd in air,
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
All the world wonder'd:
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right thro' the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reel'd from the sabre stroke
Shatter'd and sunder'd.
Then they rode back, but not
Not the six hundred.

5.
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro' the jaws of Death
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.

6.
When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wondered.
Honour the charge they made,
Honour the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred.

Obviously I am not riding a horse into battle - though I would wager that my colleague Karen would be overjoyed to storm the boardroom a-horseback with her sabre flashing! I face little danger other than a deep paper-cut, wounded ego and cirrhosis of the liver. But by George are there days when I limp back home feeling like the end of that poem - well - the bit before glory part anyways!

Adventures in Time

2008-02-10T01:13:00.001-05:00

No - its not a reference to the eternity that I am spending in New Hampshire. This is a story about clocks. Or rather, a clock. The Portsmouth IT office recently moved to a new location. In the room that we are using as a testing lab is a wall clock - frozen at 6.20.

Given that we are spending a lot of time in what is essentially a windowless room we figured we would whack in some new batteries to have some way of measuring just how long it was until we could all escape. Taking the clock down from the wall in order to ascertain just how many batteries it needed I was struck by something. On first inspection it looked like a perfectly ordinary clock. The sort of innocent, institutional, plastic clock that knows its place in the world and is happy to just tick away your hours of servitude. Naturally I was wrong - this clock turned out to be a relation of the devil himself. Sure, not a sibling hell bent on living up to his older brothers record - more of a second cousin thrice removed that chats nicely to the devil at a family gathering whilst Aunt Hilda gets into the Gin & Tonic.

The first sign was the fact that the back of the clock had a battery compartment (as expected) with a rather precise looking sticker inside the battery compartment. "Don't Place Battery Here". Not quite what you expect. Mind you, fair enough. I mean sure, it looks exactly like the place you pop the battery - right down to the handy etching of a battery - but okay, obviously the people who built it are the experts in the particular design features of this sort of $1.50 plastic wall clock.

Casting ones eyes around the rest of the clock I noticed two further items that should have given me pause for thought. The first was an 8 part instruction sticker as to how to reset the clock. The second was a two battery device that was attached to the bottom of the clock in what can only be described as a parasitical fashion - sort of like an electronic tick. (arf arf)

Reading through the instructions it became clear what this parasite was - an automatic, daylight savings time adjustment device. In order to reset the clock you had to do the following;

1. remove the batteries. For some reason the instructions were quite insistent on this point. Not sure why as I had rather assumed that removing the batteries was a key aspect of the exercise in the first place.

2. using the wheel turn the hands to the 12 O'Clock position.

3. select which particular US time zone you were in

4. reset the year

5. reset the date

6. reset the time - steps 3 through 5 taking place on the parasitical device that had a little digital screen and 4 buttons arranged in a singularly unhelpful, and desperately un-intuitive fashion.

7. insert the batteries - by now I was beginning to wonder when they would be required. Of course in all the confusion of reading instructions for what one had assumed to be a simple task I mixed the old and new batteries up. Bloody good job they were different brands.

8. re-hang the clock on the wall and spend the next 20 minutes watching it sweep through the seconds, minutes and hours at the pace of a slightly arthritic snail until it reached the time that you had hopefully intented to set it to.

This whole effort naturally lead me to ponder, and somewhat admire, the perverse genius capable of blending the features of an analogue and digital clock to such pointless effect. When you consider that people had to re-design the clock, come up with the parasite, re-tool production lines, come up with new marketing material (I imagine something along the lines of 'are you lazy to get off your arse and change the time twice a year? You deserve a clock like this one!'). Not to mention the fact that a clock that once upon a time required 1 battery now requires 3. "Wait!" I hear you cry, "3? You only mentioned 2!" Well, the observant amongst us will notice that I was using the digital parasite whilst the batteries were not in the clock - something I was able to do because it had its own separate watch battery. God only knows what happens in the event that it goes flat - probably the end of civilisation as we know it.

The point being a pretty significant chunk of time spent for what I had always imagined was a relatively simple task twice a year.

Not to mention I just spent 45 minutes writing this bloody entry.

And the best thing? All of this is for nought - last year Congress passed a bill that shifted the ruddy date anyways. So the damn thing won't work - and now you will have to get off your butt and spend 10 minutes wrestling with the stupid digital part to change the freaking time rather than just twisting the knob on the back.

As you can tell. Really not a lot going on up here and I have been in a hotel for way to long.

Waiting for Godot

2008-02-04T19:49:00.000-05:00

So, I have been in Portsmouth, New Hampshire since the 7th of Jan. We are facing delays in the ongoing development of the project that I am working on. Which means I am about to rack up a full month in the one hotel up here. It is a little disturbing when you realise that everyone in the hotel knows your name and who you work for. It is passing creepy when you realise that the car valet knows your name.

I don't have a car.

Or a drivers license.

And speaking of cars, be very careful just whose car you get in. Be particularly careful whose car you get in when it is snowing. Make damn sure that you get a crash helmet when you get in a massive 4WD truck driven by a woman who hasn't slept well in a couple of weeks and has an intense desire to blow off steam. Why I hear you ask? Well, because when it snows she promptly turns the empty car park into her own private donut track! It was the whooping like the good old fashioned farm girl that she is that particularly made the moment.

Whilst I do have to say I did experience a rather enjoyable frisson of a joie de vivre at this - I can't for the life of me imagine quite why Habib and his friends enjoy it so much down in the Rocks on a Saturday night.

With any luck, well actually, with a Herculean dose of luck - I will be able to leave New Hampshire at some point this month for the cool wonders of gloomy London and the excitement that is the West End. Apparently there is a new production of "The Importance of Being Earnest" starring Penelope Keith.

Something Just Ain't Right

2008-01-16T20:37:00.000-05:00

When you leave the large cities in America you come across a country side that is dotted with restaurants that you pretty much have to drive to. A lot of these can be chains such as TGI Friday and Arby's. Some of them are one off restaurants. Today I visited one for lunch that was a little "Not Right".

When you first walk into the place it seems fairly standard - most of these restaurants would probably seat say 100 - 200 people at a stretch. They generally have a bar as well as a separate dining area, with the dining area being made up of a combination of booths and free standing tables. And most of them do some kind of theme, be it sports memorabilia, cowboys, local colour etc. This particular place specialised in what can only be described as a "Animals wot we shot and mounted" theme. The hanging light fittings consisted of artfully arranged antlers. If there wasn't a dead animal head every 3 feet or so there was a fake, carved animal head. The whole effect was uncannily reminiscent of a 13th century Saxon hunting lodge - just with a lot more plastic table clothes.

Now I am quite fond of my place in the food chain and have no intrinsic objection to eating a good steak whilst surrounded by the cold, dead, staring eyes of beasts taken before their time from the animal kingdom. I even think that it is appropriate that the children eating a nice piece of venison are given a proper understanding of precisely what this means for Bambi on the wall over there.

However, I do draw the line at animatronic heads. Especially the animatronic head of ginormous black buffalo that every now and then speaks in a booming voice about how hungry he is and asks why he can't seem to feel his feet before mentioning the specials of the day. Not to mention the slightly creepy looking raccoon that pops out of a tree log and scans the room as if seeking sweet, sweet revenge before disappearing back into his log. And I don't even want to imagine what the talking deers head above the bar says.

Of course the most twisted thing is the fact that I will probably go back there again... although this time I am taking a rifle with me in case the raccoon tries to start anything.

Las Vegas Pt II - Stating the Obvious

2008-01-12T09:20:00.000-05:00

One of the nicknames for Las Vegas is "Disneyland for Adults" - so one is correct in thinking that there are a number of seriously strange things that you can get up to in this town. Perhaps one of the stranger things is a visit to the Liberace Museum. Now I am not entirely sure that I have ever actually listened to a Liberace recording, however my mother was a big fan and come hell or high water she was going. So, in for a penny, in for a pound.

The museum itself is about three miles away from 'the strip' - ie where the casinos are. I believe it is in what you would call a strip mall, decorated in a creme pseudo-adobe style with a whopping big grand piano above the door. Now, I understand that times were very different back then and that if you were gay you definitely wanted to keep it under wraps. If you were in the public eye you definitely wanted to vigorously defend any accusations. And the less said about a gay, public performer who happened to be a Roman Catholic the better. You may recall that Liberace actually took some publishers to court for libel - using thinly veiled language they accused him of frolicking with his lengthy string of pool boys. Nonetheless, never let it be said that I will allow dark and depressing period of history get in the way of making a joke. You see, I simply cannot fathom just why it is that the defence team didn’t just hold up pictures of the costumes the man wore followed by a perfunctory "The defence rests..." I mean, seriously - check this one out...

I think I am making a fair statement in saying that you would be hard pressed to find a more flamboyantly gay costume in the midst of the Sydney Mardis Gras!

The museum itself was actually quite interesting - I will admit I had no idea as to just how big Liberace was in his heyday. Not to mention how far his penchant for glitz and glamour went - the multiple luxury cars covered in rhinestones were somewhat of a revelation! Definitely not something the chaps from Top Gear would drive around in. If you click on the picture - and I would recommend doing so to experience the full visual spectacle of this ensemble - you will note the mirrored grand piano in the background.

So, if you find yourself in 'Vegas and you tire of the constant hustle and bustle I recommend a trip out to the Liberace museum. It will certainly open your eyes to something that your parents may very well have enjoyed listening to whilst sipping from a bottle of Cold Duck Sparkling Vino...

God Dang is it Cold

2007-12-06T22:10:00.000-05:00

Our main IT office is in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. On average I spend about a week a month up here. It is a nice little town that is right on the coast - as you can guess from the name - Portsmouth - it has always been a working port kinda town. A lot of ships captains lived up this way back when being a Merchant Captain meant you got to wear incredibly fancy coats and were forced to eat the occasional cabin boy when supplies ran low.

Of course, being New England it also snows up here. And we are not talking the paltry "you can sort of ski on it" snow that you get in the Australian ski fields. We are talking serious, "my god won't it just plain go the hell away" kinda snow. The average snowfall according to the Internet - which as we know never lies - is 16inches. Sure, that is not in line with the astounding 70+ inches in Colorado (or 6 feet). But c'mon - 18 inches on average is just shy of 2 feet of incredibly cold, picturesque white stuff!

Something I have learnt about places that get a lot of snow - local residents never appreciate it when you tell them with a shit-eating grin that you love it when it snows because as an Australian, if you can survive the various life threatening creatures doing their best to shred muscles, inject venom or beat the living bejesus out of you, the Aussie climate is bloody bewdy mate - snow is just such a novelty! I strongly recommend against following up by saying that as an apartment dweller in New York you don't have to shovel anything when the snow hits. I especially don't recommend saying that to a colleague that just spent 2 hours digging themselves out of their house with a Snow Blower. As an aside, a Snow Blower bears no resemblance to a leaf blower - oh no, it is a vastly different creature. Imagine a 4 foot tall lawnmower that has caterpillar tracks instead of wheels and a truly vicious combination of spinning blades in a wide mouth at the front of this infernal device. Actually - for those of us descended from farming stock, imagine a self-propelled-personal-harvesting-device and you are getting there. As far as I can tell, the basic mode of operation entails starting the device, staying as far away as you possibly can from the gnashing-bone-crunching-end and manhandling it down the driveway so it can eat large quantities of snow and blow it out a side chimney thingie - hence the "blower" name. Personally I would have called it the snow-eater/body-disposal-device. The point being that I am given to understand that this is a particularly cold and limb jarring process - the sort of process that has you envisaging excruciating dinners at the in-laws as a nice reprieve - and engenders a near homicidal rage towards any idiotic Aussie in the office proclaiming how he loves snow.

Oh, whilst I remember - god dang is it cold out there. I have caught myself giving serious thought to taking a little nip of vodka post breakfast in order to brave the cold between the hotel door and the nice heated car - which is an absolutely ginormous truck with the ever important heated car seats courtesy of the lovely Karen Collins who is kind enough to pick me up in the mornings! Btw - I challenge any of you to laugh at the idea of heated seats... I tells ya - in this environment they are an essential. I am sure that I have been millimetres away from hypothermia before they kick in!

So, all in all, I love the snow! But my lord am I keeping it to myself from now on!

You make HOW MUCH?

2007-11-25T12:32:00.000-05:00

You know those dodgy 1980's movies starring John Cusack and the never-ending fight of the underdogs versus the smarmy college sporting team? The movie where on a shoestring budget the underdogs come good and trounce the sneaky, dastardly and downright cheatin' big college team?

Well, whenever I was watching those movies I could never figure out why the big college team cared so much about winning. Sure team pride and all that, but really? That much?

And then in later years I never quite managed to figure out what the big deal was with getting a sports scholarship was. Sure - having the average cost of US$30k tuition for a 4 year degree paid is a big incentive. (source: Cnn Money Story) But I never quite managed to figure out why the college was offering such a deal on sports tuition - not to mention the reports of buying the college atheletes cars, helping them 'pass' their degrees and assorted shenanigans.

The cost in and of itself must be phenomenal when you consider the fact that, whilst you have 11 players on the field at any one point in time, the average college grid iron team has 125 players. Up to 85 of these players can be on a scholarship according to caps set in place by the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletics Association).

Why so many players? Rugby Union has 22 members in a team - with 15 of those on the pitch at any given point in time. Substitutions are supposed to be more of an injury thing - although that is changing with not a little bit of controversy - the usual rumblings of diluting the purity of the game played in heaven etc. I won't bore you with the details. In American Football you have much more of a play-by-play thing - with an offensive, neutral and defensive team. You set the play up, run it and then reform at the end of it all for another play. So you send in a different mix of 11 people per play depending upon which 'play' you are going to make. There is also a whole process of coordination - with coaches on the sidelines as well people at the top of the stadium watching a birds eye view and radioing down to the appropriate coach. And even (sacrilege) the coach being able to communicate by radio to the quarterback on the field.

So - where am I going with this? Well I found an article today that outlines just why colleges are willing to bear all the cost of this. According to (CNN: Money Story 2) the top 10 college teams raked in annual revenus ranging from US$25million to US$45million. Notre Dame earned US$9million from TV rights alone - and is 'worth' some US$101million. College football stadiums range in size from 60,000 to over 100,000 seat stadiums.

And there is the answer - sure professional football is big business as I always assumed it was - same deal in Australia. But what is different is that college football is also big business - not just a prestige thing for the college itself.

I promise that the next post will return to more geeky topics...

Just How Big is NY Again?

2007-11-22T18:58:00.000-05:00

So - the official stats first. According to Wikipedia the island of Manhattan is 21.6km long, 3.7km wide and has an area of 58.8km squared. Approximately 1.6million people live on Manhattan itself, a further 1.45million people commute to the island every day to come to work.

Why am I telling you this? Well, because where I live you don't actually feel that NY is huge. A lot of the streets are the same scale as the Sydney CBD - this is because the financial district follows the original layout of Manhattan when it was still New Amsterdam. You only hit the classic grid pattern when you get above 14th St. But every now and then I stumble across something that smacks you in the face and makes you realise how big this place is. "And what, pray tell, was the most recent event?" I hear you ask. This time it was the annual Inflate the Balloons for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. "But surely!", I hear you cry, "You mean the actual parade?" No. I left that one bloody well alone after risking life and limbs the night before.

You see, it all went down somewhat like this. I was supposed to be flying out today for a couple of weeks in the London office. Unfortunately the project I am working on is delayed and the trip was cancelled. So I did a bit of a web spank to find out about the parade - coz hey, its just so gosh darn American and has featured in like EVERY sitcom that ever made it to Australia. In doing so I find a Q&A page that as the very last point mentions that they inflate the balloons the night before and that if you want you can go up and see it happen between 76th & 80th streets. Well says I, that sounds like much more fun than standing for hours on end waiting for a parade to wander past. So I hop onto the subway like a good little boy, visions of whacky cartoon character balloons gradually inflating and breaking the surly bonds of gravity spinning around my naive little head. Me, casually strolling around, taking the odd picture and composing a nice little blog entry about same.

Oh how quickly I forgot the lesson of Halloween. Oh yes, what a foolish mistake. (A tale for another time).

You see, the thing is, NY is a big city just chock full of people. It has the highest population density in America - almost 67,000 per sq mile. During regular days NY copes admirably with this number of people. Sure traffic can be harsh - but I survived Bangkok traffic. A place where the unwary has to cope not only with insane tourists hurtling around on death machines called Tuk Tuks, but also the occasional local driving an elephant through town. And the subway can get a little packed during peak hour - but I have survived the London Underground during the height of summer.

But when a special event is on - all hell breaks loose. Because every man and his dog is heading towards said special event. No, not just every man and his dog, but every man, his dog, the cat, the cats' extended family visiting from Russia and one of those weird pets that only boys seem to find appealing - you know, the kind that has more than 4 legs and can only eat something exotic.

I should have realised something was up when I had to queue to get off the subway platform and up the stairs. Aha thought I - obviously this was a small choke point and all would be remedied once the street opened up. (I can do a wonderful combination of blind optimism and stupidity). Having achieved ground level I attempted to orient myself and quickly realised I was in mortal danger! A rather determined looking woman with a stroller the size of a small SUV was bearing down on me hell for leather. It would appear that she had finally achieved some momentum in moving through the crowd and woe betide anyone who got in her way. This wasn't an ordinary stroller - no sirree! This was one of those "Jeep" models with the huge wheels and the children sitting side-by-side rather than one behind the other - for maximum street sweeping effectiveness no doubt. I frantically looked around for salvation. I couldn't turn and dive back down the subway stairs for safety as people were pressing at my back. To the left of me was a sheer granite wall in the form of a 15 storey apartment building. To the right of me was the press of the crowd. With an avenue of escape eluding me - and wheeled death approaching ever faster - I started sizing up whether or not the lamp post was sturdy enough to take my weight, not to mention whether I thought I had it in me to scale something so vertical. Luckily salvation came when the starboard wheel of the stroller (I had started to think of it in nautical terms as from this distance the thing resembled an ocean liner) struck a protruding bit of the fence line and they careened off in a slightly different direction. With the port wheel whizzing by at what must have been eye level my mind found a sudden burst of clarity. Flinging myself behind the contraption I followed in their wake until I could get to a relatively quiet bit of the street. Sitting off to the sidelines - idly wondering whether I could run for a city council & outlaw side-by-side strollers - I attempted to gather my wits and figure out just what the bloody hell was going on.

You see - if there is one thing that the NYPD know, its crowd control. You only have to think about having something at street level that involves more than 4 people and WHAM! The place is flooded with police and metal fences about waist high. It is actually pretty impressive if I am honest. So, unlike muggins here, the NYPD knew that the place would be packed and had responded by fencing off anything that looked like a person might walk along it. The Avenues in NY run North/South and are the biggest roads, the streets rune East/West and are generally smaller. They were inflating the balloons in 5 of the streets between the avenues of Central Park West and Columbus. The NYPD had fenced off the sidewalks and basically were funnelling people into the worlds biggest rat maze. You walked about 800 metres up the left hand side of the avenue, crossed over, and then criss crossed the streets watching the balloons being inflated, before being spat out at the other end to menace innocent Australians popping out of the subway. No doubt having covered 8km of ground!

I had read the other day that there has been a 35% increase in children living on the island since 2000. Tonight I could believe it. Untold millions of the little tykes all over the place. Of course what the article had failed to mention was that the island had adapted. You see, you can't swing a cat in NY without hitting some kind of street stall selling something. Hordes of people set up a couple of planks of wood on top of milk crates and sell everything from NY themed hoodies to dodgy versions of DVD's for movies that you swear they only finished filming last week. At times like this they devote themselves to all things flashing, pointy and slightly dangerous for children. I turned the corner and spotted the entrance to this massive maze, a horde of people with what appeared to be a ratio of 76 children per adult - with all of the children waving pointy swords with coloured lights, flashing hair band thingies and what can only be described as a truly bizarre combination of a flashing spinning top encased in a clear plastic cover errr... thingie. Combine this with the never ending flash of cameras and it looked uncannily like a shiny, happy, disco version of the zombie apocalypse.

I managed to find a convenient mail box to shelter behind to watch said spectacle. Trying to decide whether I wanted to fling myself into the crush, I suddenly had a vision of reaching the half way mark surrounded by a rather truculent bunch of children armed to the teeth with flashing swords - a horde of children tired of walking and giving some thought towards harnessing any beast of burden that was handy aka the nearest convenient adult. Having read Lord of the Flies I decided that wandering into the midst of heavily armed children was too great a danger and beat a hasty retreat to the subway. Quite a tense journey I can assure you - what with one wary eye peeled for rogue strollers and the other for sugar hyped kids waving flashing swords around their head and intent on recreating an epic scene from Lord of the Rings!

The end result of the evening? A new found terror of strollers, a couple of blurry shots of the crowd and a glimpse of a balloon being inflated. Oh and a strong need for a stiff shot of whisky to steady my trembling nerves.

Las Vegas Pt I – Is Anything Real?

2007-08-15T23:10:00.000-04:00

My parents came over to the

for my 30^th birthday. As part of these spectacular celebrations I figured we may as well go down to Las Vegas. What could be more appropriate than celebrating the last gasp of your irresponsible 20’s in the town that has the motto “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”. It is a 5 hour flight from New York to Las Vegas – and unfortunately it was also an economy class flight all the way there. It has been some time since I have had to suffer through flying in the crappy end of an aircraft – let alone the fact that I have managed to score some flights on the company jet which makes even first class seem passé. The other thing about flying into Las Vegas is that you are coming in over the desert – lots of strong thermals and mountains to make for a real interesting turbulence factor. I can assure you that there were times on our approach to the runway that I was wondering whether the pilot was having flashbacks to his time in Vietnam and was throwing the aircraft around the sky to dodge incoming flak and surface-to-air missiles. But we got down onto the deck in one piece – any landing you can walk away from is a good one.

And yes – it is true – you can use pokies in the Las Vegas airport. I have uploaded one picture in particular for you. Yes, you are seeing correctly – a Star Wars slot machine. I suppose it makes as much sense as the good old Queen of the Nile back in Sydney. The really creepy one though was the Alien Slot Machine – one hopes that the jackpot wasn’t a facehugger launching at you.

Impressions of Las Vegas? First and foremost – nothing in Las Vegas is real. The casinos are expanding like the megacities in all those William Gibson novels – the majority of them are linked together through a series of tunnels and outbuildings. The Casinos themselves are usually based on a theme, some highlights being;

- Aladdin, a Middle East theme without the suicide bombers
- Paris, Paris without smelly student protestors & has a quarter size Eiffel Tower
- New York, NY without the steam pipe explosions
- Excalibur, an authentic King Arthur castle with 4,000 rooms, a moat & a fiberglass keep
- Luxor, a Glass Pyramid with a beam of light coming from the top that can be seen from space
- The Venetian, Venice without the stinky canal factor

As you can tell, subtlety is obviously the overarching motto of Las Vegas! One of the more surreal moments was actually at the Mandalay Bay hotel which has a ‘bit’ of a beach theme – 3 enormous wave pools. We went to what was one of the more impressive Aquariums I have ever seen – sitting 5 metres underwater looking at Sharks, Barracuda and all kinds of aquatic life whilst surrounded by a desert and being several hundred miles from the nearest ocean.

Needless to say that if you were an engineer in this town you would have a marvelous old time building the sort of things that used to be built by the more eccentric branch of the British Royal Family. Of course everything is made out of steel frames and what appears to be fiberglass or chipboard. This results in an insane urge to reach out and touch everything – I imagine that the closest you can get to this experience outside of Las Vegas is on a movie set in LA. You have this constant sense if you just peek around the next corner you will see the back of the building being held up by frames without an interior.

What supports this excess? Well consider the following stats for 2006,
- Number of visitors: 38,914,889
- Visitor Contribution: US$39,419,205,580
- Hotel Rooms: 132,605
- Government Gaming Revenue: US$10,643,206,000

So you can imagine that the great state of Nevada quite likes’ the gambling! They also like the boxing! In what was to become a bit of a recurrent theme for my parents visit, we just happened to pick a weekend in which a massive event was taking place. A boxing match. To give you an idea as to how big this event was – approx. 400 private jets had flown in for the weekend. So many that they were having trouble parking them all at the airport. Ringside seats that had originally sold for $10,000 were being sold by scalpers for $30,000.

On the next installment of Las Vegas – The Liberace Museum! (C’mon – we all know there was no way in hell that I was going to go ‘Vegas and not stop in at this place…)

Weird Stuff in NY: How Much of a Pervert Are You?

2007-08-12T21:19:00.000-04:00

Wandering around NY you come across all kinds of weird things - I fully intend these weird things to be a common feature of this blog. So today I wandered down the road to Battery Park and took a picture of a sculpture that is in the park. A sculpture that I think enables us all to gauge just how much of a 'prevert' (to quote Stanley Kubrick) we all are. What is the first thought that enters your mind when you see the image to your right?

If you were thinking of a different part of the human anatomy than 'eyeballs' you are a filthy pervert who shouldn't be allowed to look at art. I have been given to understand that they actually rotated the right errr... eyeball so that it was looking in a different direction than the left one in an attempt to minimise the number of children asking the awkward "Mummy - what are those?" questions. That or the artist comes from the deep south where that particular alignment of eyeballs is more common than we would like to think.

Where the hell do I live again?

2007-08-11T17:06:00.000-04:00

So - after 6 months of living like a nomad - albeit of the 5 star hotel kind - I finally landed for real in New York last December. After spending a month living uptown on 50th & 8th in a company apartment, I finally obtained the nirvana that is my own apartment. After 6 months I can assure you I was cartwheeling down the corridor. Well, actually, mentally I was cartwheeling down the corridor. Trust me - in my place you don't have that much space for such physical exertions!

So - I figured that I would try to give y'all and understanding as to where it is that I actually live. I am way downtown - in fact you can only go abou 500 metres further downtown. The picture above shows the southern tip of Manhattan. The blue arrow is the World Trade Centre site, the yellow arrow is my apartment building. I am on the 9th floor out of 28 - with just on 500 apartments in the entire building. It is pretty handy to the office - I have to walk all of 100 metres from the front door of my building to the front door of the office. We also have 24 hour doormen, a valet and dry cleaning service and a massive gym. Which disturbingly enough I am starting to use.

It is amazing how quicky I have adapted to the NY way of life - tiny, tiny apartment with the ability to have anything delivered within about 5 minutes. Within a 200 metre radius of my place there are 4 bottle shops that deliver. Not to mention directly opposite my apartment is a deli that is open 24hours a day just in case you need to duck out at 3 in the morning and get some more milk!

Over the next couple of weeks I hope to be fairly active on here - trying to get a feel for what you can put on this thing and how - but hopefully I can give regular updates of the plain weird stuff you get to see in this city. What kind of weird? The other day I got on a subway train and there was a guy in a 3 piece business suit (delightful shirt and tie combination by the way) holding a leather attache case in one hand and a kayak paddle in the other hand. And that is probably one of the less surreal things that I have seen in the last few months.

Work is its usual hectic mess - am spending about 1 week a month up in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. A delightful little seaside town - just not NY - and lets face it, if you do have to live in America NY is the place to be! You get to blend in with the rest of the weirdos...

What was that phrase - oh yeah - Let There Be Light... or something

2007-08-11T17:00:00.000-04:00

So - after a dedicated 6 year absence from the internet it would appear that I am being sucked into the world of blogs... as always - more to come...