You'll find me about 11,000 miles away.

There's been a bit of hiatus in blog posting recently, which has been mainly due to me breaking my loved camera. About time I got another one though. We had been through a lot - my FujiFinepix and me...including drunkenly leaning against a hotel counter and shattering the screen, so it looked like a freeze frame of travelling incredibly fast through space or a static version of the explosion of streams of light at the very start of the Futurama intro . That's what my camera screen looked like. When I got home after the MotoGP in Phillip Island, near Melbourne, I was immensely tired and wanted to sleep.  But before sleep, I wanted to put a wash on, have a quick sleep for an hour, get up and hang washing out. So in my tiredness I just took all my dirty clothes without checking the pockets or anything, heaped them all up in a big ball and dumped them in the washing machine. Put powder in, put it on a medium-hot water setting, then went to lie down. Before I did I pottered a

I had to put this picture somewhere. I even  found a site  where it could go... My house mate is convinced that the end of the world is dangerously close. Comet Elenin  is coming close to Earth (a mere 35 million miles) and there's quite a few strange "coincidences" happening at the moment. Maybe he's right. I took these pictures from the office window and few weeks ago. A nuclear explosion in the west of Sydney. Something is happening. Rupert Murdoch's free evening rag (masquerading as a newspaper) in Sydney (called MX) carries this section called "Overheard", where people write in with things they have overheard. This column is usually quite funny. One evening last week, after leaving the gym I was walking down to the train platform and on the stairs walking towards me were a well-dressed couple looking slightly dishevelled. The girl was searching in her handbag for something and then looked up and proclaimed in a loud hiss to

Chris and I have known each other for over 15 years. Actually calculating the years was a bit scary. Chris' company sent him over to Melbourne for work, so while he's in Australia it would be an injustice not to meet up! A short weekend break somewhere new is good, a short weekend break with lots of beer and food is even better. Meeting one of my really good friends, with beer, food and in a new place is awesome. Greeting each other with "awwright babe", "oi oi you schlaaaaga" or " where's the train to Catford mate? " aren't normal greetings. We're not normal people though, so it's alright. :) I arrived on Friday evening after the standard leaving-for-the-airport-a-bit-too-earlier-than-I-needed and so having to sit around waiting for my flight. To make things a bit worse, and presumably to make time go slower and make you spend more money in the airport shops (....mainly food and alcohol), I had no phone data coverage in the

A few weeks ago I went on an impromptu road trip, to a place south of Sydney called Jervis Bay. It's about 3 hours drive from Sydney and quite beautiful. It is a prime whale and dolphin spotting destination, and apparently between June and November is a great time to spot some of our special, plankton loving cousins! Terrorvision released an album immortalising whales and dolphins so they msut be pretty special. A few facts about whales and dolphins: They don't have gills or scales They need to come to the surface to breathe air They are warm-blooded Dolphins have sex for pleasure They have mammary glands They have eyelids They produce milk for their young A whale. Really...we saw its tail! A black and white picture of a beach. Jervis Bay Marine Park. This is where we saw some whales. Jervis Bay is home to HMAS Jervis Bay, part of the Royal Australian Navy. This is a picture of parachute jumpers over the ocean. Anot

Mysterious Bird Death Chronicles started as a photograph that I took on a beach of a headless bird (probably a pigeon). See the picture below. As we walked along this beach, called Cave Beach , there were quite a few dead birds lying in state on the sand or tangled in decaying marine fauna, in various stages of putrification. All with one thing in common. They were headless. Completely decapitated. No skull stripped to the bone. No keratin beaks. No head whatsoever. Nothing. It was probably even a clean disengagement the head. I didn't poke around the bird carcasses, but I assumed that this was the case. This struck me as being perturbedly interesting. Why would these birds have no head? Did something eat it? Does the entirety of their cranium totally disintegrate into the atmosphere? Is there some wild animal around here that only eats the heads of dead animals? Also extremely and morbidly intriguing was the thought of the paradox of why this beach was a mass ornithological

Time for this monthly update. I went to Jervis Bay this weekend which was pretty good. I'll write another blog post about it. The end of winter has finally come I think, and the return of warm/hot weather is coming. I can feel it. You can "smell summer" in the evenings. I attribute the "smell of summer" quote to my sister...although she was referring to freshly cut cucumber skins...and it was probably more than 15 years ago. Anyway, mmmm, the fresh smell of summer :) It's actually a bit scary how the months have gone so quickly and it is now August. This blog is over a year old now. I had no celebration as I forgot. I should have some sort of party soon. Maybe design a logo for this blog. I have previously written about The Mysterious Trumpet Player  (it is actually a trombone...) that practices his br ass instrument in increasingly ingenious and secluded places. A few days ago, a colleague and I were walking back from lunch and could hear

I can't really think of a subject that these things all relate to or have in common. This blog entry is more like just a brain-dump of strange, possibly blog-worthy things that have happened to me over the past week. One lunchtime last week, I was walking back to work from having lunch North Sydney with 2 of my colleagues. Sometimes we walk along a route that is next to a motorway back to work. It's only slightly quicker, but provides a bit more sunshine. It also takes us past 2 luxury car garages, which always have 6 digit price tag cars for sale. This particular day we had decided to walk back along this way and were rewarded for our choice. In the photo I've marked the trumpet player with a red arrow (you can slightly see him). He was hiding behind a corner and to protect his anonymity I took the picture partially obscuring him (my friend convinced me to not directly take a picture of his face. I wanted to take a full picture of him. He was dressed in a suit and a

One busy lunchtime a week or so ago I remembered that I was drastically running out of clothes hangers (the lack of hangers resulted in my bedroom being littered with discarded clothes. Coupled with the organised-chaos/messiness of my bedroom, the discarded clothes inadvertently giving the impression of sheer laziness. And when I came to wash some clothes I found that I had no where to hang some and that their new home was now on the floor or draped over the end of my bed). I had decided to call in on Aldi in North Sydney. For those that don't know Germany's richest man 's discount supermarket chain Aldi...  Aldi must sell hangers. I even asked a girl at work if Aldi sold hangers. She positively confirmed my suspicions and so North Sydney Aldi got a visit. We got there and it was packed. It was peak-lunch-time-rush-hour and full of suit clad shoppers wrestling slightly shop damaged boxes of $1 shower curtains and scented, rose shaped candles, so my friend and I set abo

A few weeks ago I went to my first AFL game. Sydney Swans vs Essendon at the ANZ Stadium. I went with my cousin who did an excellent job of explaining everything to me as the game progressed. There's quite a bit to take in. Like there's constant substitutions, on going throughout the game. They don't stop the play. There's certain rules about catches and kicks. The coaches and other training staff for each team sit in a gantry box, like the commentators and look down on the match and are in constant communication with a guy on the sidelines, who relays orders to the other players. There's extra players, who are not assigned to one particular team, and are running onto the field giving additional orders. There's maybe 5 of them. There's maybe 8 referees on the playing field - one for each half, four linesmen and 2 by the posts. Goals can be scored in a few different ways and yield different amounts of points. I had watched a bit of AFL on TV before and wha