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

I'm not alone in having a justified hatred for noisy animals at certain times of the day. Most birds,mating calls of frogs, in fact any shrill, irrhytmical mating calls, cicadas, dogs...do you see where this is going? During the days they're fine. Well, between the hours of 9am and 10pm on weekdays, 11am til 11pm on weekends. And that's being lenient and generous. If it were down to me, there'd be a unwelcome-noise curfew from 9pm onwards. Til 1pm the next day. And this noise curfew encompasses too many things. Way too many. Frogs - mating or otherwise, even just mating calls/sounds can be excused. They're a fact of life. Who am I to deny a frog a bit of a noisy prelude to spreading his seeds, or to impose on a cicada the humiliating fate of spending the lonely few hours before his scheduled death watching increasingly depraved insect porn (maybe culminating in interspecies  -  a spider mating with a fly, or a snuff movie like 2 stick insects mating then the fem...

Washing dirty dishes is a pretty tedious task, it causes arguments between couples, family disharmony about whose turn it is (to my younger sister who had an S in her name: if your name has an S in it then you only do washing up with an S in the days), friction among friends sharing a flat and one of them using 5 pans to cook bacon and egg, the point is escaping me....pretty much everyone would like to not do it. Pretty much everyone needs an excuse. This is a good excuse. A big, hairy, fuck-off spider in the corner of your kitchen. You can even see what looks like a black and white little face that looks like Papa Lazarou from The League of Gentlemen.  "Oh my....fuck me dead...what the fffffuuu..." was my reaction. Pretty colourful lanaguage looking back on it, but I was arse-clenchingly surprised. I'm not even that scared of spiders. But for those not used to seeing massive spiders (me included) this is probably one of the biggest, hairest, fuck-off spiders I have ...

There is probably a statistic available somewhere (in this situation though, I have just made it up...); maybe 1 out of every 12 people that has been to Thailand has had some sort of bad experience. I am one of that 8%. I have mixed feelings about Thailand. It's probably best, and more comprehensible if I categorise each bit of "culture". It's worth taking into account that we (Jo, Steph, Steve and Nick) visited Thailand during the peak of the peak season...Christmas and New Year. I have a lot of time for Thai people. As I mention in another post they are so friendly and helpful, and it lives up to the name of "the Land of Smiles". If you make eye contact with many Thai people, they would smile at you. I enjoyed this. But then this leads me to one of the major bad points. The tourists. The sheer amount of foriegners. I hate the word "tourist" too. It has such bad connotations to me. Everywhere we went there were just incredible volumes of foreign...

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 ...

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...