Halloween is coming, and I don’t care 🙂
Here in Australia, or Perth at least, no one makes a big fuss about All Hallow’s Eve. If you know someone who’s seriously into partying, they might take advantage of the night to throw a bash (with costumes naturally), but that’s about it. If you’re smart you might buy a few packets of lollies (that’s candy for Americans and other such dialectally divergent folk 🙂 just in case someone turns up trick or treating, but you’ll probably end up eating them yourself because it’s just not a tradition down here. Halloween is basically just another night.
The reason I’m thinking about this is that the net seems to be going Halloween ballistic. The email newsletters I subscribe to are suddenly packed to the gills with all sorts of Halloweeny content. The sites I visit are pushing all sorts of Halloween related deals and offers. There are special offers on costumes, pages and pages of ‘traditional’ pumpkin recipes, advice on how to throw the perfect Halloween party. There are even specially designed costumes for babies, a concept so deranged that I find it difficult to comprehend. I completely fail to see how any sane person could think that dressing their infant up as a pumpkin would be a good idea. Those Yankees are craaazeee!
Their online stores are good though, which is why I’ve just ordered some books from Amazon. As a geek with pretensions of linguistic grandure, I thought it was high time I actually learnt some Latin, so I’ve ordered a few textbooks. I mean I already know some Latin, you can’t be an intelligent English speaker and not pick up some large chunks of the language, but I’d like to formalise my knowledge. They were dispatched on Friday, and should be here within eleven days. Or so they say…
As regards my last foray into the world of online shopping however, I thought for a while there that I would have to go all grim and burn down the Sanity store in Hay Street. They did give me my promised refund. However it was a refund for $8.27. As the actual amount they charged me for not delivering my Shivaree CD was $30.33, this left me round about $22.06 in the lurch. I sent them off a rather terse email to this effect, and much to their credit they quickly refunded the rest of the money, but still. It makes me wonder if they’ve been short changing me in-store all these years as well.
But I’m not too annoyed, as I just managed to get my hands on a copy of the remarkably rare Corrupt and Immoral Transmissions promo CD the band put out some years back on eBay (that is I got my hands on it on eBay, the band didn’t release a CD exclusively on eBay, although that could be a neat promotional trick). I am yet to actually pay for it, as Paypal seems to be down for maintenance at the most inconvenient times, but I’ll get it done this afternoon. Then (after several weeks of waiting no doubt) I’ll finally be able to listen to the tracks Scrub and the band’s cover of My Boy Lollypop, which should be um….. interesting, given Ambrosia’s unique vocal talents.
Channel 9 broadcast Dinotopia as a mini-series this week, and I taped it. I finished watching it last night, although frankly I don’t know why. The effects were great. Yes, that’s what I’ll claim, I watched it for the effects. I certainly couldn’t have been watching it for the plot, script or acting, which were in various degrees predictable, clich
