The view from my desk.

I've been working at the Ministry of Economic Development for the past two weeks. It's been pretty sweet. I work in the mail room and basically just pick up and drop off mail round to all the people all over the building. Everyone's really nice to me. They all tell me how much they totally loved my Mum (she used to work at MED) and it warms my heart.

Today, we had a lovely Christmas brunch. I drank a lot of champagne, but fortunately I managed to keep my composure which is no small achievement for me. Then I found out I could work there more after New Years. Then I got to leave early. It was hot and I was well fed and well drinked. All these factors contributed to me falling asleep on the train home listening to Bachelorette and it was good.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Strawberry.

I was going to post a blog about the job I've been doing for the past couple of weeks, but then another idea came up. At the moment I'm working at the Ministry of Economic Development, doing the mail run around the building. The Ministry of Economic Development has a Chief Executive. The Chief Executive has an Executive Assistant. Today, the Executive Assistant had some strawberries. The strawberries had a mutant. Below is a picture of a regular-sized strawberry and the mutant strawberry.
The EA (Jo is her name) said I could eat the mutant if I wanted to. But I just couldn't bring myself to eat it because I knew that if I ate it, it wouldn't exist anymore. So I said I'd just take a picture of it for my blog and she found that amusing.

Thanks to my sister Joanne for thinking of the name for this blog entry.

The (lack of) B-52s.

So a couple of weekends ago now, a friend, Chloe, rang me up to ask me if I'd like to go see the B-52s play that night on a wine estate, just outside of Martinborough. She and her two brothers, and a friend, had all bought tickets (approx. $100 each, I believe), but another friend of hers (a reporter) was going to be there covering the concert for the Wairarapa Times-Age. He was getting in for free and had a "plus 1" which I could get into the concert on. And then she said that the Proclaimers were going to be playing at the concert too. So, of course, I accepted the offer! Fun road trip + cool people + aging pop bands? sure!

Cut to a few hours later, and five of us were crammed into four car-seats during the hour-and-a-bit-ish drive to our motel at Lake Ferry (not far from Martinborough). There was much excitement in the car about the concert and we listened to some classic B-52s shit on the stereo, while debating whether we would "walk 10,000 miles just to be the man who fell down at your door", or whether we wouldn't.

We checked into our accom, where we met the reporter friend, and all six of us crammed into his five-seater car and headed off to the concert in the highest of spirits. It was 6:45pm, and the support act would be on by now. It was a beautiful clear and sunny day. Perfect for a big outdoor concert!!

Well, when we got to the estate and parked up it seemed like there wasn't really that many people hanging around the entrance to the property. Strange, but maybe there's more parking down the drive, we thought. As we wandered down the drive, towards the stage, we passed a few cars coming the other way. The people in the cars looked confusedly at us and we looked confusedly at them. What was going on??

Finally we rounded the final corner, and by this time, it seemed fairly obvious that there was no concert, and that there would be no B-52s that night. What we were hoping to see was the opening act on stage, mid-set, with a huge and happy crowd talking and laughing and celebrating all around in anticipation of the upcoming bands. What we actually saw when we rounded that final corner was this:
In case you've never seen this before, let me explain it to you. It's a picture of no one gathered around a stage where the B-52s, the Proclaimers and the other support band are all not playing. And if you squint your eyes you'll be able to make out a few people on stage, busy dismantling the stage.

After a bit of asking around (there were all the crew and support etc still milling around by the food tent), we found out that the show had been canceled due to high winds. High Winds?? It was still and sunny and warm!! But apparently there were high winds about an hour earlier when the bands were due to start, so they canned the whole thing and sent everyone home. The only entertainment still going was a drunken old dude playing drunken old Deep Purple covers on the red, strat-type guitar on his lap (to which he'd applied liberal amounts of flange and chorus).

We also found out that anyone who had paid for a ticket could get a full refund from the place they'd bought it from.

After thinking about the situation of the B52s and the Proclaimers canceling because of wind, I did some fairly simple mathematics, and proved the following:

The B-52s + The Proclaimers = NOT VERY FUCKING ROCK'N'ROLL

After eating some free cold hamburgers, we left. Fairly dejected, and fairly sober now. We decided that the best course of action was to try and get at least a partial refund on our accom. expenses, and high-tail it back to Wellington and get plastered in the safety of the city. Unfortunately, When we got back to our accom. the owners were nowhere to be found, so we cut our losses, and we buggered off.

The above is an accurate account of the time I went to see the B-52s and the Proclaimers. Lame-o. Sweet road-trip though.

Arrow.

Any day now...

Any day now I am expecting a call to say that my eldest sister, Carolyn (pictured on the right) has had her new baby girl. The due date is December the 8th (today!). Carolyn lives in Helensville (just north of Auckland) with her husband, Damon, and their son, Luca (in the middle of the photo drinking hot chocolate).

Below is a wee bonus photo. It's Marco with an emo wig on. Like, totally no one understands him.

Berneth? Kenadette?

I'm trying to work out one of those names like Bradgelina for my sister Bernadette and her fiancé Kenneth. Ken is from Ballyshannon, which is an amazing wee town in County Donegal, which is in the northwest of the Republic of Ireland. Ken met Bernie while he was living in New Zealand quite a number of years ago now. Shortly after, he moved back to Ireland. Shortly after, Bernie moved to Ireland, and they've been nerds about each-other ever since. They came back to New Zealand about a year ago and bought a house with a sweet as view of Wellington. They're getting married in March and I'm starting to wonder what I'm gonna wear to the wedding. Ken's whole family are coming over. I'm really excited because he has a really big raucous family and so do we. It's gonna be quite the occasion. Here are Bernie and Ken on the front porch of their new house.

Marco and Luca are cousins.

Marco (Left - 6 months old) and Luca (Right - nearly 3 years old) are cousins. They are also both my nephews. Marco lives in Wellington and Luca lives in Auckland so they don't see one another very often. They love each other, but they are still a bit unsure of each other. Luca is a sweet wee man and tries his hardest to be friends with Marco. Marco is still too young to really understand much, so all he can do is examine and analyse Luca. This makes Luca unsure, but he smiles anyway.


When Marco is lying on the floor I can't help but lying down next to him so I can tickle him, or kiss him on his chubby cheeks. Marco usually cycles through a whole collection of facial expressions, including: smiling, frowning, shocked, confused, annoyed etc. He's wearing his Pac-Man top. It has a matching bib too, but he's not wearing that.

The cute little Italian girl in this picture is Cecilia Martelli (my mother). It was probably taken around 1953-54, when she would have been about maybe two or three years of age. She passed away peacefully yesterday at our family home. I am currently putting together a photo-montage-thing for her funeral. I found some pretty awesome photos of her. I really like this one. She is standing outside the family house (on the farm), wearing a little dress that my Nanna Margherita (her mother) would have made for her. Nanna was as seamstress and made most of the family's clothes. "There wasn't a lot of money around in them days", Nanna said to me recently.

This picture of my Mum and her four younger siblings was probably taken around 1959. All clothes would have been tailored by my Nanna. I showed this picture to my Uncle Peter (pictured far right) recently. He laughed, and said something like "God, look at us! We look like refugees!"

A great-grandmother and great-grandson.

My Nanna Margherita holds my nephew Marco. She remarks at what a big boy he is! She tells him that he'll be a policeman when he's big and that he'll go around clobbering everyone.

"You'll go round clobbering everybody. That's what you'll be doing. Clobbering everybody", she says to him.

I can't figure out which one of them I find cutest.

Some nice quotes relating to weasels.

Hello. Lately I've been looking around for some quotes involving weasels. Here are some I've found:

"I have come up with a plan so cunning you could stick a tail on it and call it a weasel."- Blackadder (in Blackadder the Third)

"Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines." - John Benfield ( a very wise man.)

"Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what seperates us from the animals... except the weasel." - Matt Groening

"Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas... with the music at top volume and at least a pint of ether." - Hunter S. Thompson (from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)

As awesome as those quotes are, here's something more awesome:

What it means to be a fan of the Beatles.

Annie - The Movie

This is about the 1982 film. For any other Annie things, sod off.

Man, me and my friend Elizabeth were reminiscing about how we used to watch Annie all the time when we were both little. So, a couple of days later, we got together and watched it. It was the first time either of us had watched it in about 15-20 years and we were both freaking out a bit beforehand. When you have such great memories about a movie from your childhood, sometimes it's not a good idea to watch it as an adult. Like, often (as was the case for me with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie), you realise that it's just not that good a film and you feel like you've ruined the idealised memory you had of it. But Annie was just how I remembered it. Awesome.

I think I had a grin on my face through the whole film. Seriously, let me tell you about how I loved the characters:

Little orphan, Annie is really cute. I never realised this when I was little because I guess I was younger than Annie the last time I watched the film. I never realised how optimistic and positive and happy she was. Her best qualities are: a) her smile, b) her singing voice, and c) her ability to beat the living shit out of a gang of boys.

Miss Hannigan, who runs the orphanage and who is perpetually drunk (she brews her own gin in her bathtub), is even more entertaining now that I have experienced being drunk myself. I believe she would be an absolute riot to have as a guest at a wedding reception.

Oliver "Daddy" Warbucks (billionaire) shouts when he talks - like a deaf grandfather type guy, (except me and Liz reckon he's about 50 so he's still got a lot of energy and enthusiasm). He's the ultimate capitalism success story and hates liberals and commies. He owns an Autocopter and he's pretty good mates with the President. The character of Daddy Warbucks really went over my head as a child.

The music in the film is nothing short of genius. My favourites include: Maybe (which makes me well up a bit), Little Girls (sung by an inebriated Miss Hannigan), the heart-warming Dumb Dog/Sandy sequence, and, of course Lets Go To The Movies which is such a bloated epic that it can only exist in a broadway musical setting.

Topping it all though is It's a Hard-Knock Life, OMG what a freakin' sweet sequence. Not only is it the type of song that you can happily have on repeat in your head at work, but the choreography on display in the scene where the girls are singing it, while simultaneously doing advanced acrobatics and cleaning up the orphanage, blew my adult mind.

Other choreography of note is the scene I Think I'm Gonna Like It Here number, where Annie is overwhelmed after arriving at the Warbucks Mansion and finding that the entire staff are really bloody good at singing and dancing.

I don't know whether it'd be quite the same to watch Annie as an adult without having seen it as a kid, but I'd still recommend it. But to all those of you who haven't seen it since being a wee thing (Joanne, I'm looking in your direction), DO IT!

How to grow a Snow Man.

Growing a snowman is easy! It's good when you have no real friends and need some company. To be perfectly honest, a Snow Man provides little company, but it's better than being Nigel No-mates. Anyway, here's how you do it:

1. Choose a patch of ground where there are not likely to be any people or animals to interrupt the process. I chose my disgusting backyard. IMPORTANT: There needs to be a red bucket near the site otherwise this will not work!
2. Every night, before your bed time, repeat the following rhyme that I just made up:

Silly Billy, Peter Pan,
Jack be nimble, ripped and tanned.
I've got no friends to eat my flan,
Beam me down a real Snow Man!,
or Snow Woman.

Then, the next morning, you go outside into the shitty backyard and this is starting to happen:

3. Make sure you keep repeating the spell every night, otherwise all you'll end up with is a snow Foetus - (not half as fun, and a little creepy).
4. At this point, the Snow Being has reached adolescence. Soon, it will begin frothing out snowy spunk, not unlike human adolescence. One of these particles of spunk will develop into the head of the snowman. In fact, there is evidence of the seed of the head to the right of the photo.
5. Here's what I was describing in point four. I stress, keep saying the spell. You don't want the Snow Foetus to be stuck in adolescence forever.
6. The head is now attached to the body. This is one of the most special parts of the whole Snow Man creation. If you get a chance to witness this moment, bring popcorn.
7. Another violent discharge marks the point when the Snow Man is about to be born.
8. Finally, on day 8, the arms now erect, there is one more violent eruption, and the Snow Man springs to life!

It's easy. Now have a go yourself.

Museums, museums, and, astoundingly, more museums.

London likes it's museums. Big museums. And so do I cos I'm a nerd! So over the past few days I've been fortunate enough to have some time to start checking them out. And I say "start checking them out" cos I've only really looked at bits and pieces of the museums pictured below.

Rant alert, rant alert:
God, seriously, there are soooooooo many people at these museums who walk around with their digital video cameras and just seriously take footage of everything in the whole damn building. It's as if they're scoping he place out for a raid or something. But not me. I think the whole fun of going to a muesum is that you are actually there and you can see a ridiculously huge dinosaur skeleton right in front of you! As if it's gonna look as cool on your TV screen. To these people I say "Why not just hire Jurassic Park on DVD and be done with it?! You'd obviously enjoy it!" However, I did take a few photos of stuff that just made me go: "wowzer!". And I can justify each one - and I will. End of rant.

This is the ceiling of the middle area of the British Museum.

I thought I'd had enough for the day at the Science Museum when I entered a room with this thing in it. And I thought, hey, that looks like a really big version of the model of a NASA Apollo Command Module that my Dad used to show me when I was small. Turns out, it wasn't just a big version of that model, it was the actual Command Module from the Apollo 10 mission around the moon.

It was even all melty on the bottom from entering back into Earth's atmosphere!

The Natural History Museum was really big. See? It has to be big to fit all the cool stuff inside.

On the day I went to the Natural History Museum there was an Ice Sculpting Festival on outside.

This doesn't have anything to do with museums but I laughted to myself when I saw it. I have a soft spot for silly graffiti.

Greenwich - Not actually a green sandwich.

I went out to visit my friend Toby in Greenwich a few days ago and he offered to show me the local sights. Of course, I only had one thing on my mind - I'm in Greenwich, show me the Greenwich Mean Time related sight! Damn tourist.

So we wandered over to Greenwich Park (yes, there were squirrels), and up Greenwich Hill (I assume it's called that), to the Royal Observatory, Greenwich (Greenwich sounds quite self-obsessed at this point). This is where old white men with glasses concocted the idea of GMT a couple of hundred years ago I guess. It's also where the longitude is 0 degrees. The "Prime Meridian", it's called. So on one side of that line of longitude is the Eastern Hemisphere, and on the other is the Western Hemisphere. And the touristy part?

THEY HAVE THE LINE DRAWN ON THE GROUND! AND A LASER TO SHOW THE LINE TOO! hehe The perfect nerd-trap. See my sweet photos.

Toby and Myself. The view is out over Greenwich Park, looking towards the Canary Wharf business district (those tall buildings).

The Laser. To the left of the photo is the Eastern Hem. To the right of the photo, the Western.

This is how one ought to conduct one's self when in two hemispheres simultaneously. I considered pulling out the old Simpsons gag of "Now I'm in the West, now I'm in the East, now I'm in the West..." etc, but, in Greenwich, I don't think they tolerate that kind of crap.

This is Canary Wharf as it started to get dark. Look closely... can you see the green laser beam going across the photo?