Category: Old and Uncategorised

It’s 3:15 in the afternoon, and after six and a half solid hours of reading I’ve just finished The Deathly Hallows. Now, call me a pathetic fanboy, but

wow

An absolutely perfect ending to the series 🙂

I’m not going to post any spoilers, there’ll be plenty of sites doing that already (the main reason I traipsed into the city and bought a copy at 7:30am despite having an appalling head cold was to avoid spoilers). I must raise a small note of protest however and complain that J.K. killed my favourite character! How dare she! How very dare she! 🙂

(That may seem like a spoiler, but since I don’t think anyone knows who my favourite character is, it’s not, see?)

OK, I’m going to go have a lie down now. This cold is killing me, and after hours of staring at paper my eyes have gone all funny.

PS: Oh, I got a free beanie baby owl along with the book because I pre-ordered. Bonus! 🙂

PPS: Oh, and said owl was handed to me by a really cute girl dressed as a Quiddich player (you wouldn’t think goggles could suit someone, but strangely they did…). Double bonus! 🙂

I was watching Time Team the other day (the one where they were trying to find a Roman villa and decided that Brunel had destroyed it by running a railway over the top) when they started talking about Neolithic burial practices – specifically the disarticulation (that’s dismembering to you and me 🙂 of dead bodies. You see for reasons unknown (but usually put into that too-hard basket of archeology known as “ritual” 😉 ancient peoples often disassembled the bodies of their dead relatives, putting the skulls and long bones of the arms and legs into barrows and such, and discarding the rest.

(Helen may want to correct/criticise that summary, she’s the archaeologist after all 🙂

Anyway a sudden rather entertaining thought entered my head. What if the Neolithic period was plagued by zombies!? 😀

Think about it – if you knew that poor, deceased Uncle Zog was likely to spring to life and start shambling around moaning “brains! brains!” (or the Neolithic equivalent thereof), chopping him to pieces would be downright respectful. And then you could take all the important, big bones and put them somewhere safe from the other zombies – like the local barrow for instance. Barrows (the West Kennet style ones with nice roomy passages at any rate) could even be the equivalent of civil defence shelters – when the zombies turn up, everyone runs for the barrow and drags a boulder over the door!

But wait, there’s more! What about all those ‘ritual’ sites deep in caves, where you find piles of human bones at the bottom of inaccessible shafts? Zombie prisons! Drop the zombies down the shaft, they can’t climb out, and eventually rot away! It all makes sense!

There has to be a book deal in this! ;D

Now of course it’s all a load of nonsense. I mean if you were worried about bodies rising up and attacking people then the last thing you’d do is expose them in open air mortuary sites, which is what the Neolithic people in Britain seem to have been doing. But it’s an entertaining thought.

On the subject of British undead however Triple J have been running a competition (which closes today as a matter of fact) titled “The J Odyssey”, which is where people can put forward a proposal for an “adventure of a lifetime”, and they’ll give the winner money and a camera to go off and do it. I’ve been idly wondering what kind of proposal I’d put in, were I inclined or eligible to enter (most of their contests are only open to 25 year olds or younger). The conclusion that I reached would be Hunting Vampires in the UK!

OK, that’s a bit of a dramatic way to put it (“Investigating Vampire Beliefs and Folklore” doesn’t quite have the same ring :). But it’s something I’d actually really enjoy. Traveling around the UK doing a series of 15 minute mini-documentaries about vampire cases, and the places and people involved.

Not that for a second I actually believe in vampires, but a lot of people through history have done, and some even continue to to this day – and I find that interesting. So it would follow that it might be interesting to go and talk to some of them.

I already know of the top of my head several people and places to look up. Highgate Cemetery for starters (although you need to be careful there, because if you even mention the word ‘vampire’ they throw you out the gates :). Robin Hood’s Grave at Kirklees would be a must, and I’d drop in to Whitby for the atmosphere. I’d try and get an interview with Lord Bishop (is he still calling himself “Lord Bishop”?) Sean Manchester, and if he wouldn’t talk maybe David Farrant. The current head of the British Dracula Society could be entertaining. A quick Google search could no doubt turn up plenty more, let alone a trawl through my extensive collection of books on the weird and paranormal.

So that’s what I’d do – if I had the opportunity, the money and an audience. But I doubt I’d even be able to get the time off work 🙂

You know over the last few years there’ve been a whole load of ‘best of’ albums released for classic artists. There was that Beatles one that seems to have started the whole trend, the Elvis one, possibly (if my mind isn’t tricking me) a Michael Jackson one, and recently they’ve put together a Clash one. This is all well and good, it allows lazy/cheap folk such as myself to get all the really good songs without having to shell out for every single album. But there’s one musical act that is sadly missing from the range, something that must be corrected as soon as possible! So, I humbly submit the following album design to the record companies, in the hopes that they’ll come to their senses…

OK, that’s that silliness out of the way 🙂

Well, it appears that 50 years after tearing up the network the Government is seriously considering re-introducing trams to Perth. I applaud this strongly. We seriously need to do something about the appalling lack of public transport away from the railway lines – let’s face it the bus network can’t cut it. Some dedicated tram lines would be the next best thing to a massive expansion of the rail network (and a whole lot cheaper). Hopefully they’ll decide to go ahead with it, although their first proposed line is from East Perth to Subiaco which seems a bit odd because you can already do that by train. But hey, it’ll be a start.

Funnily enough I spent a few hours last weekend playing around with routes for some extra rail lines (this is because I’m a massive nerd and I find such speculation entertaining :). I think we would be well served by a tram line running from the Perth rail station, up through Northbridge (passing by Russell Square), clipping the corner of Hyde Park, running up to Edith Cowan university, through Dianella Plaza and the Mirrabooka shopping centre, and ending up in Landsdale.

At the same time it would make sense to run a line from the Airport (both terminals), over the river at Redcliffe to Bayswater (with a connection to the railway near Bayswater station), across to the Morley Galleria, then west to Stirling rail station. I mean at the moment the only way to get into the city from the airport is by taxi, which is just plain crazy. The fact that such a line would also let me get the tram to the galleria from right outside my door is surely just a co-incidence :).

So, once again I prove myself to be least a week ahead of the best Government thinking 🙂

Not a huge lot else has been going on in my life. Went out to dinner with the family the Saturday before last, to Romany’s Italian restaurant in Northbridge. It was insanely noisy and I ended up stuck at the end of the table, so conversation wasn’t exactly an option. But it didn’t matter because the food was awesome. I had the tortellini which was served in a really rich cream cheese sauce. It almost put me to sleep (what with the hypoglycemia and all) but I’d happily eat it all again 🙂

I also went and saw the Transformers movie on Friday night with Ryan. Justin was meant to come along as well, but I totally forgot to phone him and let him know the session time we were going to, so he missed out 🙁 But he’s OK with it – or at least pretending to be OK with it – so that’s cool. The movie was actually a lot better that I expected, there’s some – if not great script writing and performances – very competent script writing and performances. The comedy aspects aren’t too jarring, and the plot is fairly comprehensible, which is a lot more than you can usually expect from these kinds of exercises. Some of the exposition was a bit clumsy (Optimus Prime explaining things to the other Autobots that they actually should have already known and so on) but overall it was an enjoyable way to spend a few hours.

(Oh, one criticism though, the combat sequences could have been massively improved by keeping the camera still for more than two seconds at a time. All those shots of rapidly moving metal look really cool, but it would have been nice to see who was actually winning the fights.)

Ummm, that’s pretty much all I’ve got to write about at the moment I think. I’ve got to do the washing up anyway, so I’d better get on with it I suppose.

Over and Out.

Well I’m going for the trilogy here, with another extremely geeky post concerning Games Workshop’s Lord of the Rings battle game. Thinking about various conversions got me thinking about the rules you’d need to use the converted models, and that got me thinking about one character in particular, Author Purple WyrmPosted on July 5, 2007August 12, 2010Categories Old and UncategorisedLeave a comment on Geekery III – This Time It’s Personal

Following on from yesterday’s excursion into Tolkien geekery I thought I’d sum up some other first age conversions I’m considering – assuming I’m ever rich enough to buy all the models 🙂

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