Bea Arthur

The legendary comedienne and actress Bea Arthur has passed away at the age of 86.

Stealing our hearts as Maude in the 70s and acerbic Golden Girl Dorothy in the 80s, she will be sadly missed.

Let’s remember her with one of my favourites . . . a duet with Rock Hudson and a lovely ode to recreational drugs.

RIP Bea.

And Benn, 14 points for you.

What’s up with Joaquin?

River’s little brother has been behaving oddly recently. Check out his appearance last week on Letterman:

 

Rumour has it that it’s all part of a Spinal Tap-style mockumentary about Joaquin’s burgeoning hip-hop career.

It could well be. Casey Affleck has been following him around with a camera and if you check Dave’s Unabomber gag at the 3-minute mark, it definitely looks like Joaquin’s holding back a laugh.

If it is a joke, it’s damn funny.

If it’s not, then . . . well.

In Defence of Phelps

Your honours.

I’d like to draw your attention to the recent accusations and penalties meted out to one Mr. Michael Phelps, elite swimmer.

To wit: the recently-circulated picture apparently showing Mr. Phelps, if you’ll pardon the expression m’luds, sucking down a bong.

Item 1: A three-month ban from competitive swimming.

This will be nothing but counter-productive.

What Mr. Phelps needs is a greater training regimen. More hours in the pool. Less free time in which to toke on the chronic green.

Item 2: Cancellation of Mr. Phelps’ Kellogg sponsorship.

This is a foolish action on behalf of Kellogg.

The company is at risk of alienating an important part of its core market, namely: people with killer munchies and so wasted they’re unable to do anything more than pour milk into a bowl of cereal.

Estimates place this demographic at up to 16% of Kellogg’s fixed customer base.

We propose this alternative marketing strategy:

Item 3: The public reaction.

Now m’luds no-one is suggesting marijuana is a performance-enhancing drug.

In fact, despite its undeniable medicinal and anaesthetic properties weed has a certain reputation for being performance-reducing.

Being a cone monkey makes one shiftless and boring, prone to disjointed rambling and watching old episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation because they offer wondrous existential insight.

Yet Mr. Phelps’ clear natural ability has allowed him to overcome his devotion to Mary Jane to win 14 Olympic gold medals and to hold no less than 32 world records.

Surely these achievements in the face of a proclivity for busting down some blunt is worthy of nothing but our utmost respect.

Your honours, I rest my case.

Byron Bay

Last Sunday Kate, Eliza and I flew north for a week of R&R, and hopefully some cooling off, in Byron Bay. It seems odd to have to go to northern NSW to escape the heat, but there you are. Climate change and whatnot.

It had been raining up there for a week and our arrival heralded the first day of sunshine. The weather was just starting to get hot again. The ground was steaming and the air was humid.

We picked up our Prius from the airport and headed south in a cloud of smug.

It was a couple of hours before we could check into the house we'd rented, so we decided to take a quick detour to Nimbin to pick up some 'supplies'. You know, postcards and stuff. Unfortunately, the road was flooded (as it was in many places around there) so we went back into Byron, only to confront the mother of all traffic jams.

We thought the crawling traffic was because of the once-a-month market in the town, but after a few days we realised it's actually like that all the time. Once we made it into town we wandered around said market for a while, got our fill of hippiedom (and local sausages - very nice) then went to find our house.

The house was in Suffolk Park, a three minute walk from Tallow Beach and far enough away from the madness that is Byron Bay proper to afford us some peace and quiet. The owner insisted on giving us a long, comprehensive and mostly superfluous guided tour before asking for next-of-kin details, on the off chance that we were all to perish simultaneously in (for example) a car crash. And she actually used the word 'fireball'.

Debbie and Danielle were arriving on Monday afternoon, so once we got rid of the owner, we had the place to ourselves for the first night.

The next few days consisted of doing nothing but laying around the house reading, laying around the beach reading, and playing cards on the deck overlooking the oddly lush (well, for a Victorian, anyway) tropical garden.

This, um, activity was broken up by a spa visit on Monday for massages and sauna, and on Tuesday another attempt, this time successful, to get to Nimbin. While in Nimbin the heavens fairly opened for a storm the likes of which had not been seen for at least a week (apparently) and we were thinking we might be stranded there. But just as we were starting to think this might not actually be a bad thing, the rain stopped and we left. Oh well. Great town, though.

On Wednesday Kate and Eliza braved the very choppy surf of Tallow Beach while I sat on the sand reading and snoozing. Same again on Thursday, although this time the surf was even choppier. The dirty foam lining the sand was knee-deep and before long it started to rain. We didn't stay long that day.

We got up early on Friday to pack up and get out before the owner got there and subjected us to another half-hour spiel on some irritating minutiae. (We just made it as it turned out . . . we saw her sitting in her car outside as we drove off).

On the way out of Byron we stopped off at the famous Sharky's Tattoo to get some ink. I got a Möbius strip on my back (so sticking with the nerdy vibe), Kate got 'miel' ('Honey' in French) in white ink on her wrist and Eliza got her father's (my uncle's) initials on her back, in memory of his passing away one year ago yesterday.

Our flight out of Coolangatta was in the evening, so we had almost a whole day to kill in the north coast hinterland and the Gold Coast.

And kill it we did. We drove through the Tweed region, which was reasonably entertaining and pleasantly eccentric. For example, the Tweed town of Mooball has taken its branding potential to a somewhat ridiculous extreme, with just about every surface (including power poles and the occasional rock) painted in black and white cow spots.

We stopped in Murwillumbah, a pretty little town with a cinema that the tourist lady breathlessly told us (two or three times) was original art-deco and had, would you believe it, bean bags. Gosh.

We had lunch in the cutely-named Tumbulgum before driving through Coolangatta to Surfer's Paradise. I'd not been there since our 1988 family holiday and it doesn't seem to have changed a lot. The architecture is staunchly 1980's tack (there must have been a bylaw passed requiring this) and the whole place screams North American Tourism. The mini-golf course is even named Putt-Putt Golf. We stopped at the beach for two minutes to dip our feet, then got the hell out of there.

We ended up being a little early for the flight so Kate did what she does best, and sweet talked the check-in guy into getting us on an earlier one. It's just as well she did. All the flights were delayed by a few hours and the earlier flight ended up leaving at our original flight time, with our original flight leaving much later.

All in all, a great relaxing week. Now it's back to work. Sigh.

And here's some photos.

Before: Footy field on the the road to Nimbin when we arrived on Sunday afternoon.


After: the same footy field 48 hours later.


Soaking in the atmosphere in Nimbin.


Tropical garden at the house. Thankfully the water feature (the pipe and tub contraption on the left) wasn't working. I hate water features.


Your humble correspondent faces the mighty Tallow Beach surf . . .


. . . before having a snooze.


Kate's feet. This is the only photo of her she'd let me use.


Eliza and Debbie playing Chinese Checkers. I think I'm reading Famous magazine.


Eliza and I at Surfer's Paradise. We didn't stay long.


No photos of the tattoos at this stage. I'll post some in the next day or two.

Photos from Amsterdam

Very early morning arrival in Amsterdam Schipol airport.


Early morning in the streets of Amsterdam. The slight lean on the buildings is not an optical illusion and not due to the camera angle. Amsterdam is all built on marshy ground and as far as I can see, subject to imminent collapse into the mud.


Waiting outside the apartment for the agent. Ours is the one to the right of the red doors. Note all the bikes.


One of many canals. Pronounced "cay-nells" or alternatively (if they're not nearby) "far canals". That's hilarious after a few days in Amsterdam.


One of many windmills.


One of many coffeeshop visits. Note the name of the shop behind the window. You know you're in Amsterdam when.


Amsterdam tram. Pretty much the same as the Melbourne variety, but a little more reliable.


Building site near the Van Gogh museum. The crane is dropping part of the new building's foundation, which is a steel girder about 5 storeys high. This is what it takes to get buildings on a solid footing.

Amsterdam

Here we are in Amsterdam.

The trip was long, but pleasantly uneventful. Even the 1-hour layover in Singapore, which had the potential for a bit of Race-Around-the-World style airport dashing, was straightforward, mainly because we arrived from Melbourne half an hour early.

We got into Amsterdam at about 5.30am on Monday, breezed through Customs (which makes sense . . . who's going to smuggle anything into Amsterdam?) and caught a double-decker train into the city.

We weren't going to be able to check into our apartment until about midday. But that'll be ok, we thought. Surely a party town like Amsterdam never sleeps.

Actually, it does. Between about 4am and midday on Monday is when everyone seems to recover from the rest of the week. Nothing opens until midday. In the three days we've been here we've not seen the place as dead as it was when we first arrived.

Eventually we find our apartment, get in touch with the agent, and get them to let us in. Like most Amsterdam houses (and people), it's tall and thin. The staircase is about 80cm wide and goes up at an angle of 70 degrees. No point wasting space on things like staircases. This'll be tricky after a big night out, I thinks to myself.

(Side note: apparently it's a tax thing. Between 1200 and 1900 or thereabouts people were taxed on the width of their houses, so the standard house design is tall, deep and thin. You can tell the really rich areas cos it's where the houses are wide.)

Tuesday we decide to get a bit of culture (it can't all be red-light district, can it?) and go to the Van Gogh museum. Actually, it was only Sarah and Greg and I that went. We lost Kate and Shannon in some market along the way. I think deliberately on their part.

The Van Gogh museum was interesting, but clearly made up of the bits and pieces no-one else wants. None of the really famous painting are there, except for Irises and one of the Sunflowerses (but not the good one). It was all arranged in chronological order though, so you can see him getting madder and madder. Which was nice.

What amazed me was that he was only 37 when he topped himself. He looks about 70 in those self-portaits.

This morning we took a cruise around the canals. The cool thing about Amsterdam is that you're never more than a block away from a water view. The uncool thing is that it's also the sewer and serves as a reminder that it's all going to disappear under the ocean before the century's out. Still, we can enjoy it while it lasts.

Or maybe they can make the dykes bigger. Actually, now that I think about it, Amsterdam will probably be the one place to survive the rising oceans, given it's already below sea level.

That's about it for the moment. Sorry about the lack of photos. Unfortunately, I can't seem to upload from this particular net cafe. We've taken a bunch, though, so stay tuned.

Rewind: The Night Before

With all the excitement of seeing The Cure, I've neglected to talk about last Saturday night.

Saturday afternoon was spent over in Lara with Robb, continuing work on a video clip we're making for Tahoe (which, incidentally, is currently sitting at No. 7 on the Triple J Unearthed Roots chart).

It was quite the intensive afternoon, so I was a bit weary by the time I got home and prepared to go out.

It was Adam's 30th birthday, and Anna threw a surprise party for him at the Lincoln Hotel in Carlton. It's a great little pub, and the open fire and spicy food was welcome on a chilly winter night.

We met some very cool people from Adam's lab, and some of his friends all the way over from Sweden. Not sure if they only came for the party. Probably not, but if they did . . . awesome.

It may have been the four pints consumed in the space of two hours, or it may have been the strange Swedish chewing-tobacco that was being handed around, but at some point I started feeling a little unwell.

I suspect it was the tobacco . . . those crazy Swedes. And I wasn't the only victim of this strange Scandinavian concoction.

Admittedly, it may have been the combination. The upshot was that we ended up leaving a little earlier than expected.

Still, it was a great night. Happy birthday Adam, and welcome to the 30 club.

Greg, you're next.