Say Something...

This was taken on Lantau Island near the cable car leading up to the giant Buddha. I can't say there's an awful lot to see there since the entire cable car thing is a ploy by the MTR company to attract visitors. There's even a fake Chinese village at the end of the line dressed up like the old olden days where you can buy souvenirs presumably just like they used to hundreds of years ago.

I chose this photograph because I spent a good 30 minutes with my dad here waiting for the rest of my family to find a toilet. There's something about the elderly that requires some of them to report to a urinal every couple of hours, and when several of them congregate at once there is no escape.



Here we have two fine specimens of the ancient and noble order of the Starbuck, a mystic organisation devoted to serving you every possible combination of coffee imaginable, no matter how diabetes inducing or caffeine shake effecting it is.

Here's a nice night shot my sister took of the new fancy casino in Macau. It looks ridiculous during the day but at night it has a strange degree of fascination that attracts the eye. For a town driven completely by gambling, it really is a nice place to visit. I wasn't there long enough to find the seedy underbelly that runs the place but my inner Gamblor felt right at home.

Food in general is fairly cheap in these parts of the world, but being in a casino as part of a captive audience tends to inflate prices somewhat. The silver lining of sorts is that the prices becomes about the same as food would cost back home so you feel slightly not so bad about it... well self delusion was worth a shot.



I visited my old school with an old friend of mine from my old life. It was pure coincidence that we both happened to be visiting Hong Kong during the same week, let alone the same year. Not all of us former Hong Kongers have the chance to head back every year, and indeed not all of us have good reasons or desire to. Being back on old ground means a lot more when there's someone else to experience it with.

I took the next pic at the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront. It's a countdown clock letting you know how soon the looming 2009 East Asia Games are. Can't you just feel the excitement building up?




If you could win people at the fairground, I guess they would come in giant human sized enclosures like this. The clamp would really hurt though.

In Hong Kong, missing the train is no big deal. You simply wait 3 to 4 minutes for the next one. It's quick, reliable and most importantly nothing like the public transport system here. No bullshit about the tracks being too hot or there not being enough trains to service everyone, things just work there. Oh, and they have a smartcard system that doesn't take forever to implement.

Seeing this anti-drugs ad while on the train somehow made me think of that Jennifer Garner movie "Suddenly 30", but with a different set of numbers.

(Scene: young Chad, a surly teenager with a lust for sloth visits his grandfather in the nursing home and observes all the equipment keeping him alive.)

"Aww man! Look at all that neat stuff! I wish I could have a machine eat, breathe and extract my waste for me!"

(Chad then goes home to his closet and breaks out the jar of fairy dust that's been sitting on his doll house. Chad's a confused, lazy kind of sloth who will grow up to become the lead singer of Nickelback but of course he's skipping it all, thank Christ for that. He proceeds to sprinkle a liberal amount of fairy dust on himself.)

(Chad awakens 53 years later in the closet, only to stumble out and fall down the stairs and dislocating his hip in the process. He later finds out all his friends are dead and he can't afford all those nice things his grandfather had and has kidney failure from his days as a propagator of bad stoner rock music. On his way back to the house to gather the fairy dust to return him to his adolescent state, he is attacked by a mob of former PoWs who were tortured by the US government with the use of his music and the theme to Sesame Street, which he also somehow wrote before he was even conceived.)

Ok, so it starts out like a screwball comedy but ends up like a tragic drama. You might think that this is the worst script idea ever and that it'd never work but then they did make Hancock. I just need Will Smith to play Chad.


And this brings us to the end of this long winded journey, definitely worthy of the 100 post milestone. Thanks to everyone who even bothers visiting this site every now and then, I look forward to writing the next 100 posts.

Join me next time when I buy a new record!

Tumbling back through the archives as part of my ongoing procrastination quota for the day, I realised that it has been a year (and a day) since I first started this shambolic excuse for a blog. It feels great being the proud parent of an overly wordy, smart alecky, heavily backdated, net leeching blog with the vocabulary of almost 70 posts. Writing each post leads me to pour a bit of myself into each sentence, even if most of them are incoherently written or full of smut. 

Just a quick one for today. I don't normally outsource my brutish college brand of humour but this one really made me laugh. The day you see Say Something written with a Punjabi slant on current events is the day it's all over.

Of course you have to actually know the song for it to make any sense and the MS Office stylings are a bit cheap, but I love a good pie chart gag once in a while. This love is only exceeded by my affinity for Venn diagram jokes.


In other news, Brett Lee managed to snare the Allan Border Medal from the hands of the anti Indian Hayden and Ponting (hey, that wasn't written by me...!) in what my dad might describe as being a "disapponting" year for the two of them ("BOING"... that was definitely not me). In celebration, let us all sing the anthem I was performed many times in the past and will now share with you, the reader.

BRETT LEEEE!!!!
BRETT LEEEE!!!!
Brett Lee was a man
I mean, he was a bowlin' man
Or maybe he was just a bowler
But he was still BRETT LEE!
BRETT LEE!

Bowlinating the countryside
Bowlinating the peasants
Bowlinating all the peoples
In the thatched-roof COTTAGES! THATCHED-ROOF COTTAGES!

When the English line-up is in ruin
And bowlination makes them cry in their sleep
Only one guy will remain
My money's on

BRETT LEE!
BRETT LEE!

And the Brett Lee comes in the NIIIIIGHT!

Okay, so I didn't exactly make up a lot of the lyrics. The ones in red are the one I rarely have the memory to perform and so I have not really made anything up for them. Notice how nothing rhymes. The original was not much better, but it is Trogdor after all. Feel free to offer suggestions. The best one will win a prize of some non-description.

So really the song comes down to:

BRETT LEEEE!!!!
BRETT LEEEE!!!!

Bowlinating the countryside
Bowlinating the peasants
Bowlinating all the peoples

And the Brett Lee comes in the NIIIIIGHT!


I for one think it's better off this way.


PS: I was watching "Ice Princess" the other night for some reason. The family was watching that while I was squinting trying to watch Top Gear in the Picture-In-Picture. No dice. Apart from being a Disney production, I was surprised to see it starred The Key from Buffy being best friends with the cheerleader from Heroes whose mother happened to be Kim Cattrall. I sat there in amazement thinking this must have been the first role for Cattrall in a while where the plot didn't involve her trying to have sex with everyone/thing in sight. She was trying to screw Trachtenberg's character over at one point though, does that count?


PPS: I just finished reading the original "I Am Legend" after having to wait two months for it to show up at the library only to have the family dawdle about with it for the first two and a half weeks and forcing it upon me with four days to go before it was due back. It's quite popular right now for obvious reasons but I'm sure most people will be disappointed (or should I say disapponted, "kerching!") to find out the book is nothing like the movie. The movie manages to do a decent job of it, with many of the plots altered slightly to either suit modern times or for various other movie reasons. I would've liked to have seen a movie loyal to the original storyline, but I'm not too fussed I guess. Will Smith does own the role good though the ending was crapola.


Haha, fooled you into thinking this wouldn't take long! Now you've wasted five minutes you're never getting back*!

*Refunds of time will be honoured if possible upon presentation of coupon and depending on how you plan on wasting my time. No talk of how reality TV gets better and better each year please. I will throttle you myself.

The other night I had the horror of watching Four Corners (there was nothing else on and I like the left leaning bias) and witnessing the idiocy of a group of undecided swinging voters diddle doddle over who to throw their vote away to. For those who don't live in these parts, there is an election campaign between two parties whenever there is a slow news day: the Labour Party led by ear wax aficionado Kevin Rudd of the "New Left" and the incumbent Decepticons led by the evil Megatron, ahem... John Howard.

For about half an hour the reporters followed these people who would possibly have difficulty deciding between watching paint dry and subscribing to the Paint Watching Network on Foxtel (with a government rebate of course). The reporters took their voting intentions and opinions week by week as the campaign went on, and to no one's surprise the result was about break even. Some remained unimpressed by either side while others began to swing one way or another. The worst part of it all was watching some bogans on TV forming their opinions based on policies that did not exist anymore, in this case the private school hitlist as well as repeating the Liberal slogan of interest rate doom. I imagine it must be real hard to read a paper or two to try and look a little further than the propaganda (not that papers are completely free of it, but it's still better than just listening to campaign catchphrases).

With the weather here in Melbourne going out of whack every single day of the week, things really do get thrown into chaos. Crazy heatwaves followed by torrential downpours sounds like something out of an overproduced Jerry Bruckheimer film but the reality is not so far off. Luckily for us, this year being an election year we have a solution to the problem of these winds gone wild. Under a Rudd government, wind speed would be reduced by 40%, and rainfall would be increased to levels unseen since the 70s. Everyone knows rainfall has always been higher under Labour anyway, and now that Peter Garrett is on the scene he can perform some sort of rain dance to rob the heavens of that sweet sweet water.

While it may be pretty clear by now whom I intend to vote for this coming Saturday, I guess even if I thought otherwise there'd be no real point as I live in the safest Labour seat in Victoria, Batman. Did I also mention it has the coolest name? Up yours, Eden-Monaro. You can't really beat the electorate where Stately Wayne Manor is located. No one quite knows where the entrance to the Batcave is, but I'm sure there's a no go barrier painted in red and white to stop you in your tracks. Watch out for Martin Ferguson and think about why you've never seen him and Batman in the same room. Busy schedules for both involved or something more sinister? Ferguson has said that come each election someone managed to come along and draw a cowl and bat ears on his campaign poster in his office... an alert member of the public is obviously trying to tell us something here.

Hmm, one more Batman joke then. If Batman was caught street racing a bunch of teens after hours, would the Batmobile be impounded, confiscated, used as a crash test then returned to him in cuboid form as part of the anti hoon legislation? Alright, I'll level with you - I'm withholding my A-Grade material as part of the Writer's Guild strike. Even bloggers with heads filled to the brim with pickled molasses deserve residuals from online media. Even if I have to miss my favourite episodes of Letterman, it'll be worth it.

Oh, and one more thing... Costello would make an excellent Starscream. I can see him dumping Howard's body into deep space before proceeding to throw himself a kickarse coronation ceremony. That brings our obscure Transformers reference count to three... thank you, good night and may you throw away your vote wisely.

Some might say I lag behind the times when it comes to mindless entertainment, and that is something I refute in the extreme. Sure, I might have started watching crap like 24, Alias and Lost seasons after they debuted, but in my defence there's a lot of crap to watch out there and I can't possibly fit it all into my busy watching schedule.

And anyhow, if I were to sit on my arse all night watching TV where would I find the time to write to my loyal readers? If I wasn't around I'm not sure where you would have to turn for your occasional fix of amateurish idiocy. Someone has to be the bottom of the barrel, and I'm glad to be holding up the upper end of the blogosphere. No need to thank me, all in a day's work really.

In this instance, the other day I managed to hoist myself out of my home long enough to go and watch Transformers at IMAX with Kavi. Sure my laziness meant I had missed the premiere by a good four months, but that won't stop me walking the red carpet (which I had to bring from home). My only prior IMAX experience was some 3Dified presentation about animals in Africa, which was pretty cool though the lions didn't exactly jump out of the screen to devour the guy in the first row (that's what you get for buying cheap seats, death and a really sore neck), so I was expecting Optimus Prime to stand at a near 1:1 scale ratio on screen to deliver some big bad animated violence.

Unfortunately the screen, though big, was not as mind blowing as I had hoped. Sure Prime was gigantic but at the same time all the actors' faces got blown up as well. That meant we had to see Jon Voight's Secretary of Defence character being useless at a scale larger than usual, along with the work of Josh Duchamel when all that time I thought was Mark Walhberg. Now that I know he's not Mark I can like his character slightly more because I can't stand him. I'm not sure where he lost me, it was quite possible it was when he made that awful Planet of the Apes remake. Bad medicine.

The best part was when I saw the original Transformers movie not long afterwards. I'm not sure how I managed to go for so long without actually watching it. I just assumed I was out of the country for most of that time. It happened at a friend's place when I randomly started humming 'The Touch' by Stan Bush off the original soundtrack. Being the infectious tune it is, it wasn't long before everyone in the room was singing along to the three or four lines we collectively (and by that I mean just me) knew. Lucky he had it on his laptop and we watched away. I paid special attention when 'The Touch' came on... they picked the best moments to play it, when Prime makes his big entrance early on and the part near the end where the bad guys get blown to smithereens.

Why do I love that song so? For one reason, the song is a prime example of how rock music used to be in the 80s - big, loud and stadium filling on an epic scale. It takes everything that was bad about that style of music and turns it into something very listenable, if that's a real word. The other reason is that Richard from the soon to be axed 'Get This' (more on that in a later post) sparked my interest in that song with his god awful rendition which can be found here - click on the 'Wall Of Sound Clip'.

But for now, enjoy the awesomeness that is 'The Touch' by Stan Bush. And don't fast forward past the dumb kid acting alongside a man in a plastic Optimus Prime suit, he has the best line I've heard all day.



Until next time, live your day with a song in your heart. Preferably one that goes, "After all is said and done" in notes completely off key. That's how I sing it.

My blogging laziness has been fairly obvious as of late. I'm not sure why, but perhaps I just needed a break from sitting in front of the keyboard typing away when I already do that at work. On some days I can barely stand to sit in front of a computer for more than half an hour before I feel the need to be doing something else. Hopefully this is just a side effect of adjusting to my new job, which is going as well as I hoped it could be. Luck has brought me this far, now the rest is up to me I guess.

A couple of weeks ago I was randomly looking at crap and stumbled upon that awesome clip of Jackie Chan in all that gear from Street Fighter. I'm not completely sure where the inspiration to do such a scene came from, but it's definitely a classic the entire family can enjoy, providing they actually know what Street Fighter is (providing they're not referring to that awful flick with Jean-Claude Van Damme: the poor man's Schwarzenegger, the apprentice to the Stallones out there, but just enough class to outact Steven Seagal's ponytail). I'm not sure if the youths of today can appreciate the majesty of unleashing a 26 hit combo. Well anyway, enjoy the clip, even if it is horribly dubbed in English. I couldn't be arsed finding the Canto version, but oh well. Enjoy.



I can't help but wonder what led Chan into doing so many useless films later on in his career. Of course I am referring to the series of flicks he made in Hollywood. I'm sure collectors will remember the superb aspect ratio of The Tuxedo, or the fine camera work from Rush Hour 3. I haven't seen that one but I can sense the bottom of a barrel being scraped in the background. If only he could bring back the good old days of crazy martial arts stunts. He might be a bit too old for that though. All that jumping.

The most interesting part about this is when even Chan himself claimed the Rush Hour films were a load of junk. Personally I thought the first one was fairly entertaining and managed to be pretty funny (though it was released in 1998 so I assume my taste in movies and sophistication in humour was nowhere near what it is now... cue fart joke here please and supply your own sound effects). I've yet to see the third one so I might have to hold back on my usual harshness for now, but after seeing the second one it never really occurred to me I would be itching to see a third.

In the meantime join me as I take out my cultural outrage by watching and imitating the judges on Idol and rambling on senselessly in a fashion only Darryl Somers could. He may not make any sense at all but he sure knows how to pad a 47 minute program out to five hours, and you can't possibly get bored because he never seems to run out of stupid useless things to say. It's not my fault, you have to amuse yourself somehow when you're forced to watch tripe like that over dinner. Mmm, tripe....

Saw Spiderman 3 on Saturday (Or Spider-Man, as the posters state), and here's my big chance to become a cliche of an egocentric movie reviewer who hates everything about modern cinema. Well I wouldn't complain too much, especially when your job is basically watching movies every day of the week. Gotta love that popcorn.

I'm sure most people will know the storyline by now, but if you don't, the opening credits provide a nice little recap of the events of the past two installments. It goes on for quite a while, as there is quite a bit to cover. Unfortunately, the same is very true in regards to the film itself. It wasn't quite Lord of the Rings long, but it still managed to clock in at around two hours. That's not to say it was a complete waste of time. There is plenty of action throughout, and it certainly delivers when the time to kick arse arrives.

The battle between the two sides of Spidey's personality clash with the introduction of the symbiont Venom, who just manages to crash in meteor form in a park only metres away from where our hero is. This starts of a chain of coincidence after coincidence, and after a while you wonder when Peter is going to stumble upon the script for Spiderman 4 along with a big bag of cash. (You all know it's gonna happen, like it or not...)

The scene where Spiderman manages to expel Venom, where his arch rival photographer Eddie Brock (I obviously don't know/care enough about the subject matter, I had to IMDB the character's name) just happens to be praying downstairs for God to strike down Peter Parker with his Divine Wrath is just a bit too much for my liking. Sure, it moves the film along nicely, but at the cost of plausibility. And don't get me started on how Sandman, on the run from the cops, manages to hide in a conveniently parked truck full of sand which not only hides him, but makes him infinitely stronger. Curse that sandy truck!

I did kinda feel sorry for Kirsten Dunst in that the script writers gave her so little to do. The range of emotions required of her in this installment range from jealousy to irrationally annoying whinging, to the inevitable damsel in distress (geez, you think she'd be used to being in mortal danger by now, it happens in each freaking film), resulting in her being nothing more than a minor supporting act. It mustn't be too bad I suppose, considering she does get paid a lot to do such things.

However, it's not all doom and gloom for Spiderman. Most people who saw the film would have hated this, but I happened to love the emo dancing Peter Parker. It may be a pointless waste of five minutes that would normally be left on the cutting room floor, but the complete cheesiness of the entire thing made it the highlight for me. Why he is dressed in black with such an emo looking hairstyle is beyond me, I mean the symbiont is meant to amplify confidence among other things. Everyone knows the generalised image of emo culture is the downtrodden, bleakened outlook on society and life... OK, maybe that's a bit unfair, but if A Current Affair says it to be true, then who am I to argue?

All in all, the film managed to be satisfying, regardless of how long it was. You certainly can't complain when you get more cinema time for the price of admission, and there are definitely longer more tedious flicks out there that I could be avoiding. The action scenes are excellent, which goes without saying. The tag team battle is fun to watch, though it takes a hell of a while to get to that point. If I were to give my pretend professional film reviewer's rating out of 5, I would have to give it a solid 3.5/5.0... it's pretty good, but not really as deep as the previous two (If you want an in depth analysis, you're better off going elsewhere... you won't find the meaning of life reading this blog. If you do though, please let me know, it would be much appreciated). It would have been 3.0 stars, but the dancing pushes it up 0.5... hardly the sign of a professional reviewer...