No. Not really. I’m off to Melbourne and then Tasmania for a brief holiday.

To assorted peoples – Happy Christmas/Hanukah/Festivus then Happy New Year etc etc. I won’t be around until the New Year I guess – look for me on the 4th or 5th of January I think.

We’re going to be spending New Year in a tiny Tassie town – population less than 500 I think – it’s not Prague I know (unlike some lucky people – another year perhaps) but hopefully nice, quiet and fun. Apparently the local pub might stay open ‘a little later’. *lol*

P.S. To our cats – we’m coming back. We promise. Really. No don’t scratch the couch. *rip* Ah damn.

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Even I might buy this and I am totally the season grinch.

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Another epic to be filmed in Kiwi-land. This time it is the first book in C. S. Lewis’ Narnia series. It will be directed by Andrew Adamson (who also directed [u”>Shrek[/u”>). Filming starts in the middle of next year. Cool.

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The Eternal Appeal of Punctuation. I like punctuation.

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1. List your five favorite beverages.

Milk, bourbon, beer, tonic water, apple juice.

2. List your five favorite websites.

Nope. Too tricky. I check about thirty RSS feeds everyday – Slashdot, CNET, Wired, Metafilter, etc, etc.

3. List your five favorite snack foods.

Apples, cold roast chicken, fruit bread, melted cheese and mushroom toasted sandwiches, carrots.

4. List your five favorite board and/or card games.

Trivial Pursuit, poker, blackjack, Monopoly, patience.

5. List your five favorite computer and/or game system games.

Enjoy clever role-playing computer games – Fallout and it’s sequel, also like strategy stuff – Age of Empires and its ilk.

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This is very funny. Geek political humour.

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It takes no great skill to decode the world system today. A tiny percentage of the population is immensely wealthy, some are well off, a lot are just getting by, a lot more are suffering. We call it capitalism, but within it lies buried residual patterns of feudalism and older hierarchies, basic injustices framing the way we organise ourselves. Everybody lives in an imaginary relationship to this real situation; and that is our world. We walk with scales on our eyes, and only see what we think.

And all the while on a sidewalk over the abyss. There are islands of time when things seem stable. Nothing much happens but the rounds of the week. Later the islands break apart. When enough time has passed, no one now alive will still be here; everyone will be different. Then it will be the stories that link the generations, history, and DNA, long chains of the simplest bits – guanine, adenine, cytosine, thymine – love, hope, fear, selfishness – all recombining again and again, until a miracle happens
and the organism springs forth!

– Kim Stanley Robinson, [u”>Forty Signs of Rain[/u”>

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Oh. I want one. Pretty geek toy.

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The American military at its most bewildering. The operation to capture Saddam was named “Operation Red Dawn” with objectives of “Wolverine I” and “Wolverine II”. That started bells ringing for me. Bad 80s movie bells.

Anyone remember the crappy 80s movie – [u">Red Dawn[/u">? Patrick Swayze, Jennifer Grey? Evil Russians (with some Cubans I think) invading the US of A? That’s right. That one in which the resistance fighters called themselves the Wolverines after their high school football team. Brave young American high school students up against Spetnaz. *yeah* Very not believable.

Anyone sensing the irony at this point? Yep. That irony. “Red Dawn” is an operation conducted by the invading army of a huge nation to capture the former president of a much smaller invaded nation elements of whose population are currently fighting a guerilla war. Whereas the movie [u”>Red Dawn[/u”> is about a small group of guerilla fighters defending their nation against a huge and evil invading army. Is it just me or huh? Are they trying to make comparisons to the Iraqi resistance or are they just monumentally naive and confused?

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A whole site devoted to Lulu, the magnificant Louise Brooks.