Well, the site is live. I hope nothing’s broken. Let me know what you think. I’ve got to do some more CSS cruftyness, but it’s presentable and working now. I’ve only really tested it on my Mac, so if it doesn’t work on your *nix or Windows machine, gentle reader, I do apologise. Let me know and I’ll fix it.

I’m always afraid to read Bill Dixon’s journal. I don’t read it often, but the last few times I read there, it was about bad things happening in his life. The previous entry would be fine, but the current one I click on would be about alcoholism or death or something. I’m worried it might be some quantum action from me reading that, going back over the weeks and years to set up events so that the entry I read is a bad one. So I don’t read him often. Sorry, Bill. I’m trying to make your life better.

But I just read today’s entry (I’d do a trackback thing, but I don’t know what it’s good for, or even if it’s a Good Thing™.) and good things are happening again. It’s his 2nd wedding anniversary. His wife’s too. He set up a website for his high school. Things are looking up.

High school. Hm.

Reading his words, we’ve had similar experiences in high school. I wasn’t much of a fan of my time there. It wasn’t fun, many of the people were dickheads, and I was very happy when I graduated. Come to think of it, high school might have spoiled my idea of education completely, since I don’t hold much value in formalised education at all now. Anyway, I am wondering about some of the people from there. I’m really only in touch with two of them: William and my high school girlfriend, Rachel (and her, only occasionally). I haven’t a clue what happened to anyone else from good ol’ David Thompson Secondary. I wonder if anyone else escaped to Australia?

What happened to all those people? I’m quite curious now. I’ve run some names through Google, but with some of them (Dave Green, for example), I just get the phone book. And no, he’s not the NTK guy. Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll put their names in this entry, and perhaps someone else also Googling them will see the names come up on this page, and will know where they are. Kind of a latent Googlism.

• Caitlyn Vernon. Yeah I had a crush on her. Looks like she’s doing something at the Falls Brook Centre now. This is not a surprise.
• Harold Feldberg. He was interesting. I’ve got to choose my words carefully here, because he fancied himself a bit of a Godfather at the school. He disappeared around year 10 or so. He lived a couple of blocks from where I did. I would see his mom driving around in this big ugly van thing they had. I think his dad had something to do with jewelry. Not much on Google there.
• David Green was paid CA$30,000 or so to attend a local university for a few years. If memory serves, he turned it down because he wanted to go somewhere else. Freak. We had a swordfight in year 12 English class.
• Michael-Don Borason and I kept in touch for a while after high school, but he stopped replying to my email. Was it something I said, Mike? He was valedictorian, and tradition states that he’s the one to organise the reunion, which is supposed to happen this year. I haven’t heard anything about it yet.
• I know I spelled Agnes Zilachowskia’s last name incorrectly, which will not help with my Google search idea. But I put here here for completeness, since she was dating Harold since forever. She acted like Madonna.
• Spencer Wood was comic relief during Physics class. He had amazing hair, I wanted hair like that. Where is he and his hair now?
• Manh-Ha Tran was a sarcastic bastard. I hope he’s still like that.
• In Googling for Manh-Ha, I found Julian Fong’s site This is cool. Looks like he works at Pixar, and uses Moveable Type for his blog. Hah! Once a geek… Looks like he’s still in touch with Manh Ha too.
• Bobbie Walkem was mentioned once before in these pages. She disappeared after year 9. Rumour had it she went to England to marry some guy. I’d love to find out what happened there, but good old Google comes up blank.
• Anne Funk was one year ahead of me. She was the perfect lady, with a wonderful mischievous streak. I got her to fake an orgasm on the school PA once. That was hilarous.
• Also one year ahead of me was Angela Witzke (or, wait, was it Andrea?). Might have spelled that last name wrong too. Damn. Whip-smart, funny, attractive and German. My parents would have been so pleased. Nothing happened though, cuz I was a loser.

There are probably more people that I’m forgetting. Maybe I’ll post another one of these. If you stumble across this thingo and knew me then from school, don’t be upset your name isn’t in here. I’m blocking much of that period of my life, I think.

I haven’t laughed this hard at a joke in a long time:

Person One: Ask me if I am an orange.
Person Two: Are you an orange?
Person One: No.

Just when you thought Google couldn’t get any more useful, efficient and cool, they come up with the Google Calculator:

• radius of the earth / c

Oddly enough, it doesn’t seem to know the mathematical meaning of the word “google”.

Remember Some Kind of Wonderful ? One of those fantastic John Hughes films that all of us of a certain age grew up with. Plot summary, really quickly: dumb boy chases stuck-up popular “pretty” girl, while more or less ignoring his platonic female friend, who realises she wants him bad. I remember spending most of the film yelling (in my head) at the dumb boy because anyone could see that he was chasing a stuck-up bitch, and his platonic friend, played by Mary Stuart Master-bate-son was a genuinely good person, and a hottie to boot! I think that movie had something to do with my attraction to slightly butch women (although Bobbie Walkem in year 8 and 9 probably had something to do with it as well. I wonder where she is now?).

Anyway. I bring this up now, in a piece about The Rage in Placid Lake because I spent most of this movie yelling (in my head) at poor sweet Placid to stop doing this stupid crap he’s doing and hook up with Rose Byrne. The basic premise here is simple: we’ve got this square peg who decides he’s had enough of trying to fit into round holes, and makes himself, well, round. He finds himself a round hole at a Sydney insurance company and sets about fitting in. There are some great fish-out-of-water moments when he tries to figure out how things work in this bizarre fairy-tale office, but the point here is that he’s trying to fit in. His self-centered parents are no help, and the above-mentioned platonic friend is going though a similar process, but in reverse, so she’s out of commission too.

All in all, a thoroughly enjoyable film, typical Aussie feel-good stuff. Ben Lee is cute as always, Rose Byrne (currently appearing in no less than 2 other films) is hot as always, the writing is sharp, funny and suitably satirical, and the direction keeps things moving quite well.

This is Ben Lee’s acting debut as well, and he plays an uncomfortable geeky person as if from experience. He skulks from scene to scene has if he’s wearing a hair shirt, and is only ever really comfortable-looking when he’s with Rose’s character. I can’t say how good an actor he is from just this one film, as he could be an uncomfortable geek in real life too. He was good to watch though, and I want to see him in more films.

Trivia #1: Ben Lee’s girlfriend, Claire Danes, cameos as a guest at a seminar Ben’s character attends. She tries, unsuccessfully, to pick him up.

Trivia #2: Nicholas Hammond, who plays Rose Byrne’s dad, was Spiderman on TV.

And so do I.

Here’s a fantastic article at The Register giving a kind of overview about what’s happening now, politically, at the BBC. I really like the BBC – their news site is very good, far better than most others on the net, and they’re sponsoring H2G2 , a motley group of people who are trying to write The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (Douglas Adams, RIP).

I should probably write more about this, but I’m going to be late for work.

I’m currently obsessed with finding a DVD copy of Peter Jackson’s Meet the Feebles somewhere here in Melbourne. The guy’s a Kiwi, so it’s got to be around here someplace. Unless he’s trying to disassociate himself with some of his earlier work, now that all he’s doing is filming orcs and goblins and shit. It’s the Muppet Show on crack. Fantastic stuff.

Three friends from the local congregation were asked “When you’re in your casket, and friends and congregation members are mourning over you, what would you like them to say?”

Artie said: “I would like them to say I was a wonderful husband, a fine spiritual leader, and a great family man.”

Eugene commented: “I would like them to say I was a wonderful teacher and servant of God who made a huge difference in people’s lives.”

Don said: “I’d like them to say, ‘Look, he’s moving!’”

There’s a fine line between “visionary” and “tacky”. Fifth Element and Dark City are two visionary films that come to mind now. While they were two completely different films, they both had a definite vision, and dealt with their subjects in a fantastic way.

Cypher was pitched as a visionary film. The director, Vincenzo Natali, had done one other film, Cube, which I rather enjoyed. The acting and dialogue wasn’t so great, but the film worked anyway, because Natali successfully made the movie about more than just the people and what they were saying – they were puppets in a bigger machine. After seeing it, I decided to keep an eye on this director, as he has potential.

So I walked into Cypher very curious to see what Natali has been up to lately. With a debut feature like Cube, the next one would either be fantastic or complete trash. Unfortunately, it was complete trash.

The acting was awful, don’t even talk to me about dialogue – and the big surprise payoff at the end? I’ll just say I saw it coming a mile away. While the basic idea was sound, the plot veered into tacky absurdity too many times to really take this film seriously at all. There was far too much techno-wizard gadgetry around – useless stuff that looks good on camera. It reminds me of when screenwriters first discovered the Internet and made a bunch of really crap “hacking” films with impossible computer stuff. This film would fit in really well with those, unfortunately. It’s as if Natali just turned on a computer for the first time in 20 years and thought “wow this is kinda cool”. I won’t even bother talking about the plot, because it really doesn’t matter.

Of the few good things I can say about this film, most are about Lucy Liu’s butt. The rest have to do mostly with some of the look-and-feel stuff. There was one shot, towards the beginning, that showed an arial shot of the neighbourhood our hero lives in. While it was obviously computer generated, it showed the monotony of suburban life better than the opening sequence of American Beauty could. The film was also lit really well, very dramatic. The use of colour was very well done as well. I think that’s why it reminded me a little of Dark City.

To sum up: Skip it, don’t even bother when drunk or off your head, because the plot is too complex and some of the scenes will give you vertigo.

I’ve been keeping tabs of what’s been happening back in BC, and the place is on fire. Check out this amazing satellite photo…