Crack your cheeks, indeed.
11/07/2002

Have I mentioned that the weather hates me? I must have.

Now, Auckland is one of those cities where the weather genuinely is a valid topic of conversation. "Shitty weather, eh?" "What do you think the weather is going to be like today/tomorrow/for the next fifteen fucking minutes?" Like they say, if you don't like the weather: wait a bit.

My presence seems to take some of the unpredictability out of things though: if it looks like it might rain, and I step outside, it will. Despite being unpredictably patchy all week, it has nevertheless rained at 12:30 every day - this being the time I go out to buy lunch. It hailed briefly on Monday, but not so briefly that I didn't have to walk back to work from Burger King right through the middle of it. (What? Fast food makes for a cheap and convenient working lunch, so up ya.)

This isn't just bad luck, mind - this is personal. I well remember the time I was on my way out to work a few years ago in a light drizzle. In the time it took me to get out of my car at the top of the driveway, check the mailbox and get back in the car, it rained hard enough to soak me completely, then stopped as soon as I was back in the dry. There could be no doubt - this was the weather saying to me "I know who you are sonny Jim, and I'm going to fuck with you 'cause I can."

Those of you old enough and local enough will remember when Cyclone Bola touched down some time in the late 80s - our newly installed conservatory sprung half a dozen leaks, parts of Auckland were covered in a layer of hail that looked like snow, and the papers were full of pictures of kids tobogganing in their own back yards.

That was the day I forgot to take my umbrella to school.

For the next five years of high school and six years of University I was never again without one. People mocked me (well, questioned me) for walking around with a collapsible umbrella sticking out of my backpack in the middle of summer, but who was laughing when it rained, hmm!? Which it invariably did, this being Auckland.

I noticed, however, that the other week when I was in Wellington - a city known for its blusterous climate also, that things were mysteriously clement. Could it be that it's just Auckland weather that has it in for me? Was Wellington opening me with open arms, or merely lulling me into a false sense of security for next time...

Today I saw a rabbit. It was white.
08/07/2002

Seems everyone's got a livejournal these days. And when I say "everyone", I mean "some people but not everyone, me being one of the people who don't". I don't have one because:

• I already have this place. With a readership in low single figures, fixed space limit and dubious bandwidth - sorry, what was my point?
• I don't like doing the Dear Diary thing (like this and this and this and this and, hell, this - godammit, where was that point?!)
• My life is not that interesting (ah, there it is).

I'm lucky if I can find something to write about once a week, and half the time it's stuff I'm making up off the top of my head with no bearing on my current circumstances. I live a quiet, comfortable, pedestrian existence which suits me just fine, but doesn't make for interesting reading. If I had a "creative" outlet in a format that made me feel obliged to put something in it every day, all that would happen would be me writing at work, first thing in the morning before I'm awake/caffeinated enough to face up to the responsibilities of my vocation and get something fucking done. And first thing in the morning, the only thing of note in my life is that my head hurts because I'm fucking tired, which tends to make me emotional and disjointed.

It'd just be me sitting at my desk at 9:30AM, talking about how I'm listening to Nickelback's "This is How You Remind Me" and weeping openly into my hot chocolate with marshmallows from the cafe downstairs, or going on about how the end sequence of Final Fantasy X was kind of a downer, but not as moving as VIII's, which very nearly brought a tear to my eye when you found out that Laguna and Raine got married before he left and then she died, and... look it's now 10:27 and still I'm at it. Could you stand that five days out of seven? Exactly, so those other folks are welcome to it. If they can keep me entertained with the minutiae of their respective existences, all the better. And then I can write piss-taking comments and get locked out of their columns and form ever-lasting personal feuds and oh the fun we'll have.

The Hominid Issue
28/06/2002

I'm still asked from time to time to clarify my stance on the Hominid Issue. My views can be expressed simply as:

• Monkeys are funny.
• Apes are evil.

Note, however, that this does not mean that monkeys can be only funny and that apes can be nothing more than evil. It is fully possible for apes to be funny (but still evil) - see the Playstation classic Ape Escape for example. Similarly, examples of evil monkeys (who are, of course, funny as well) are many and varied - the evil monkey that lives in Chris' closet in The Family Guy springs instantly to mind, or Mojo Jojo, the evil monkey from The Powerpuff Girls.

Thank you for your time; I hope this makes things clearer for you.

P.S. I have no firm opinion on pre-hominids, e.g. lemurs.

More Excuses
19/06/2002

Been a bit sick (inner ear infection), going on holiday to sunny Taupo and Wellington. (Well, more likely rainy and shitty Taupo and Wellington, but a break's a break.)

Just to keep you going until I'm back and in the mood for writing:

Some time in the last couple of days: "watch and download Japanese sex Action" - at least it's honest. But why "action"? As opposed to passive, inert sex?

Tuesday 18 June:

"comedy monkey giraffe" - now you're talkin'! That this phrase should be identified with my humble site, well it brings a tear to my eye...

"wizard of oz porn" - won't find that at my site, but good luck to you.

Dear Diary,
10/06/2002

Am becoming increasingly convinced of the existence of some sort of evil conspiracy. It's all a game to them, finding out the most disturbing combination of words that can be used to find my site. They seek to taint me with their deviance, leaving me feeling dirty, like I must be some sort of bad, bad, bad bad man.

Thursday, June 6 - "film rape sex download movie violence sites story" OK, now you're just taking the piss.

Friday, June 7 - "conman murderer" - what the fuck does that even mean? A murderer of conmen? A conman who is a murderer? And when the fuck have I used the words "conman" and "murderer"? Oh, right.

And more and more people are looking to download Annabel Chong. Yeh dirty, dirty, dirty...

By "monkey-cake", I meant your ass.
04/06/2002

I bought Final Fantasy VII just before my exams started - this was, perhaps, a bad idea.

Buying Final Fantasy VIII just before "starting work on" my dissertation the next year was almost certainly one.

By the time Final Fantasy IX came out I was out of Uni and in paid employment, which was fine, but meant I only had my evenings free.

Final Fantasy X came at the start of a long weekend (Queen's Birthday for you foreign types) - I can play the bastard until the blood vessels in my eyes burst! That's more or less a good thing.

The Final Fantasy series are truly the finest experience available to the Playstation-owning population, with only one downside. This week I will be removing with an ice pick the primary reproductive organs of:

The next person who says "Final Fantasy Ten? That doesn't sound very 'final'..."

Also, anyone who says "I thought Yoda should've just, like, stood there, and used the force to swing his lightsaber around." You fools - Yoda is the kung fu master! You obviously don't watch enough kung fu movies, and that makes you a bad person.

In other news, watched Futurama last night, which contained what could well be the funniest line ever (the title for this post). The only conceivable way that sentence could be more hilarious would be if it was "monkey pie" - pie being the funniest of all baked goods, as we all know.

Dear Diary,
27/05/2002

Monday, May 27 - Checked my Hitometer logs again. This week, it seems someone found my site by searching for "horror/sci-fi porn rape". Am currently sitting on bed, huddled in duvet with shotgun pointed tremblingly at computer screen. Wasn't actually aware that I'd ever used the word "rape" here. Oh no - there it is. Good old manga.

Wednesday, May 29 - This time it's "fuckin from the back". Am developing the feeling that this makes me a bad person in some way. Not sure what's more offensive in that last one, the content or the grammar.

The Season of my Discontent. No, the other one.
21/05/2002

It was quite sunny yesterday - where's my fucking winter? Sure it's still May, but it should be colder than this. I've got a brand new woollen coat and I need as many excuses to wear it as I can get, damn it!

Given that sleep (or lack thereof) defines most of my existence, it's no surprise that it's heavily involved in how I chart the seasons. The start of summer is marked for me by the first night on which the noise of a fan is less likely to keep me awake than the heat if I turn it off. Similarly, winter begins on the first day when it's the cold keeping me in bed in the morning, over and above the general desire not to get out of bed in the morning. Hasn't happened yet.

It's this damn El Niņo - how can a single Mexican wrestler cause so much meteorological havoc? I say he must be stopped, and I'm willing to take him on any time any place in a No Holds Barred, Falls Count Anywhere Hardcore Grudge Match of the Century. And now I'm thinking of wrestling, which, ever since the WWF lost its court case with the World Wildlife Fund and became WWE, makes me think of dancing squirrels. Bugger.

The Demon Drink.
13/05/2002

An interesting topic for investigation here: why I don't drink. I'm no puritan - it's not a matter of "drinking's bad mm-kay", my reasons are a little more involved. And numerous:

It's bad for you. But then so is all the sugar and caffeine and red meat and no vegetables I eat, so not really a huge consideration.

I don't like the taste. I just plain don't, and this is probably the biggest reason why I don't drink. Alcohol tastes icky - even your sickly sweet lolly water alco-pops still have that slight bitterness behind them - I'd rather have a Fanta. I dutifully try alcoholic drinks and concoctions as they are offered to me, and without fail say "nup - does nothing for me". (Or sometimes "Gnnk! Accchh! Splthtt! Tastes like burning!" Fucking absinthe.)

Loss of control. I pride myself on being in control of myself at all times, and wouldn't voluntarily give that up. A bit of a deeper psychological reason, this - I'm really uncomfortable with the idea of taking something that changes the way you think and act. No, not uncomfortable, I just don't get it - why would a person want to do that to themselves? So that they can feel less responsible for themselves? Well that's a load of crap right there - who chose to drink in the first place?

I'm stubborn. I decided I wasn't going to drink, and suddenly everybody wants to know why not? What's wrong with me? Come on, surely you'll have to start drinking some time - if only for social reasons. And that was just my parents. (You think I'm joking, don't you?) It's stuff like that that tends to make me dig my heels in.

Drinking's for grownups. I dunno, it's like at the time I decided alcohol wasn't for me, I was still pretty young, and there was a bit of a feeling that drinking was what adults did. Or rather should do. Obviously lots of teenagers drink, but they all act like fuckwits. Which brings me to...

It makes you act like a fuckwit. No offence to anyone reading this, but when you're pissed you act like a prize twat. I don't care if you're someone I know or someone I've never met, but if you're reading this let me take the opportunity to say to you personally that, when inebriated, you are a fucking cretin. Some more than others, obviously, but I'm yet to see anyone get smarter by drinking. More articulate maybe, but only to begin with.

And so, having insulted my entire readership, I wrap up. You can keep offering me new drinks to try if you want, but I'll keep trying them, saying "no thanks", and laughing at your hangover/ memory lapses the next morning.

Incredible Film Fest - Part Four.
05/05/2002

Well this is no fun. The last couple of films I saw at the festival were from the "good films from countries that we don't normally get stuff from" section, rather than the "funny old shit" section. Which means they were good, but a lot harder to make fun of. Ah well...

Joint Security Area - A political thriller from Korea, first up. This film centres on the border between North and South (almost literally), and concerns an incident where a soldier crossed/was kidnapped from North to South and killed while escaping from/assassinated some soldiers on The Other Side. It's the job of a Swiss/Korean inspector from the Neutral Nations Security Commission to find out what really went on.

Let's get one thing straight: this was a bloody good film, with a very anti-war "everyone's the same as everyone else" message in the end. But that's not very funny, so instead I'll tell you about my cousin Jamie. Jamie's teaching English in Korea at the moment, and has visited the set used in this movie to stand in for the real border crossing between North and South Korea. He got one of his mates to tape him running across the border while his friends yelled "don't do it Jamie, you'll never make it!!" etc. That wacky bastard. He got drafted into another film as an extra, you know - some sci-fi thriller set in a future where Japan has taken over Korea or something. One to look for in festivals to come, perhaps.

The Experiment - Or, to give it its German title, Das Experiment. Those Germans, eh? This one was based on a book which was based on the famous experiment conducted by Stanford University a few decades ago, where they got a bunch of subjects to be prisoners and another bunch to be guards and sat back to see how they would act when given defined roles. It had to be called off after less than a week, once the guards got too sadistic and started beating up on the prisoners when they thought the scientists running the experiment weren't watching.

The film follows the events of the real experiment fairly closely, but then goes a bit further, having the guards basically take over the experiment, imprison the scientists and generally go psycho. It's told from the perspective of an ex-journalist who plans to sell the story of his participation for some big money (which is apparently what one of the actual subjects did). To make for a more interesting write-up he becomes the troublemaker of the group (there's always one), which only serves to make things worse with the guards. A genuinely tense psychological thriller, with a nice edge-of-the seat ending. If you see it around at a video library, rent it (since last year's Anatomie came out here, I figure this one has a chance, too).

In case you're interested in the original experiment, there's bunch of info to be found on this site. Fascinating reading, if you have some time to spare.

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And that's it for this year's Incredibile Film Festival. Back to exercising independent thought instead of churning out "reviews" to fill space. Hurrah!

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