Tag: Perth

For the Emperor! Supanova 2013

Headed over to the Supanova Con on Saturday with Ryan, Paula, Bek and Bek’s daughter who’s name I can never actually remember. It was a pretty good day overall. I didn’t get any autographs or photos – I’m always starstruck to the point of imbecility when meeting celebrities, so there’s really not much point, but I did enjoy the panels with Karl Urban, Alan Tudyk and (of all people) David Hasselhoff.

Yes, I went to see the Hoff. Mainly just so I could say that I saw the Hoff. I actually enjoyed his panel, mostly I suspect because I expected him to be a complete train wreck, and he wasn’t. He could in no way be said to be a humble man, but he had some interesting stories, and I was surprised to discover that he can actually sing pretty well – perhaps those Germans aren’t quite as crazy as we all thought.

Karl Urban was fun. He started off his talk by awarding Judge Dredd badges to audience members who could identify movie quotes. This didn’t go terribly well at first, until he clarified that they weren’t specifically quotes from his movies. After that he answered audience questions in a highly entertaining fashion, did a Batman voice, and threw in some good natured trash talk about the Wallabies 🙂

The final panel we went to was Alan Tudyk, who was a complete riot. The hall was completely packed out – standing room only – happily Paula and Bek had got a place in line while I was seeing the Hoff, so we got seats halfway up. Notable incidents included someone asking him to say his “leaf on the wind” quote – which he delivered as “I’m a leaf on the wind, watch me GHURK!” – a self admitted fangirl asking him if he were her and he were still him what he as her would ask him as him – which completely threw him in a most entertaining manner – and a story which he reckoned he’d never told before about how he found himself identifying with a Billy Joel song while working in a racist bar before he got in Juilliard (he knew it was a racist bar because he threw a customer out for saying abominably racist things, then got told off by management).

He also did some Karaoke at Deville’s earlier in the week. Awesome! 🙂

Apart from the guests we had a good look around the stalls. I had finally given in to the inevitable and dipped my toe into the waters of cosplay by wearing my Commissar hat (a few people even requested photographs!) and found an amazing replica chainsword for sale. Unfortunately it was priced at $215 which seemed a bit excessive for a piece of painted foam, so I had to leave it. Bek got a friend’s block mounted Star Wars poster signed by Carrie Fisher, and just about died of excitement at meeting her. We also did a lot of sitting around watching cosplayers.

It’s been a couple of years since I’ve been to Supanova, but I was quite surprised by the quantity of Adventure Time cosplayers. You couldn’t have throw a rock without hitting four or five Finns. A bit of aiming would have easily brained several Fionas and Princess Bubblegums. There were at least two Ice Kings doing the rounds, one Flame Princess and a Marceline and Marshall Lee with actual guitars. On the 40k front there were some generic guardsman and at least two other Commissars, but they had much better uniforms than me, so I stayed out of their way lest I be accused of Heresy ;D

All in all, an excellent day out!

Common Decency

Proof – if any were needed – that acting legally and acting decently are not necessarily the same thing.

When Clyde and Lesley Bevan were told the $6500 gold and diamond bracelet they had lost months ago had been found, they were delighted and grateful […] Their happiness turned into incredulity when the finder told them he now owned the jewellery […] He said he would give Mr and Mrs Bevan the bracelet but only if they made a claim under their insurance policy and gave him half the payout. […] The finder was a clergyman, the Rev. Terry McAuliffe, of St Paul’s Anglican Church in City Beach. — The West Australian, June 26th 2013

Proof also – if any were needed – that being a minister of religion is no guarantee of being a decent human being.

Sightings

I saw a UFO this morning.

At this point people are probably going “Oh god! Don’t tell me he believes in UFOs! He’s insane! I’m never reading this blog again!”. To which I say “Of course I believe in UFOs! I’ve seen a number of them over the years, I’d be mad to not believe in them!”

The point of course is that when you say “UFO” you probably mean “alien spaceship”, and when I say “UFO” I mean exactly what it says on the box – an Unidentified Flying Object.

Now I suppose it’s possible that any given UFO could be an alien spaceship, but – as a person with a decent grasp of both interstellar distances and physics – I wouldn’t be holding my breath. While I’m of the opinion that some UFOs may turn out to be anomalous – which is to say they are examples of a phenomena currently uncategorised by science – common sense dictates that the vast, vast majority of sightings are perfectly ordinary objects (such as aircraft, birds, stars, clouds, planets, meteors, etc.) seen from funny angles or under unusual conditions. I’m sure for instance that what I saw this morning was a plane either taking off from or circling to land at Perth Airport, which is only five or so kilometres from the site of my observation, Bayswater Railway Station.

What I saw at 8:33 this morning was a shining, slightly ovoid disc traveling from right to left across the east-north-eastern sky for between 30 seconds and a minute. It kept level at about four fingers above the treeline, and covered a distance of about four fingers before passing behind a cloud and vanishing. A mass of thin, whispy dark cloud was blowing across the sky from left to right, and the object was passing behind it, occasionally vanishing behind pillars of cloud – I was careful to note that the object was moving relative to the ground, not just to the cloud. Its level of brightness varied up and down, but remained constant for the last ten seconds of observation.

There were a large number of people on the platform at the time, but no-one else seemed to notice the object – or if they did they just assumed it was a plane. Which it almost certainly was. I considered taking a photo, but really couldn’t be bothered 🙂

So there we are. UFOs buzzing Bayswater. Tune in next week when I tell you about the thylacine I saw down by the river!

(Note: I have never actually seen a thylacine down by the river or indeed anywhere else :))

Urban Folklore

Here be dragons

This comic from Subnormality pretty much says it all.

They say maybe these are just good stories, as opposed to good facts. Just versions of old themes. But maybe those themes are old for a reason. Maybe there’s always been a city, and it’s always been kind of a drag at times, mundane and predictable, and as your comically brief window of existence ebbs away maybe it’s always kind of helped to pretend. To think about good stories as reality lumbers past, its cards all showing, its hills all flagged before you were born, its every expanse and signed and bathed in ceaseless light, nothing undiscovered.

That’s how I feel a lot of the time. I want there to be mysterious places, unsolved mysteries and strange phenomenon hiding just out of sight in the everyday landscape. I want there to be dragons, serpents and secrets just round the corner. And if there aren’t any, I’ll damn well make some up.

This was the impetus behind a project I came up with many years ago called The Secret History of Perth. It was to be a book full of completely made up rumours tied into the history of the city. Roman coins found during the construction of St Mary’s cathedral, strange cyclopean tunnels that put paid to attempts to build an underground railway system in the 1920s, Phoenician carvings in Bedfordale, a Japanese Midget Submarine in Melville Water and – oddly enough given the first panel of the comic – an illegal nightclub operating in the city’s storm drains in the 1970s.

As with many of my projects it never came to fruition. But there are actually a quite a few mysteries and urban myths around Perth without me making any up…

Platypuses – Platypuses are of course not native to Western Australia, but every now and then someone will claim to have spotted one in the streams up in the hills. Conventional wisdom is that they’ve just seen a native water rat, but rumours have persisted for years that at some indeterminate point in the past some indeterminate person released an indeterminate number of platypuses up there for indeterminate purposes.

Funnily enough, a few years back someone actually did the research and discovered that a breeding pair of platypuses were released into the hills back in the (I think) 1930s as part of some kind of deranged ecological ‘improvement’ scheme. One of them turned up dead a week or so later however, so it’s unlikely that they produced any offspring. As a result, the rumours now focus on some mysterious earlier release (possibly in the Victorian era) or subsequent, undocumented releases in the same program.

Japanese Sea Planes – During World War II rumours were rife that Japanese sea planes were using the dams up in the hills to pick up and drop off spies. Mysterious planes buzzing the hills at night were the black helicopters of the day. It’s almost certainly untrue, but it’s not completely outside the realms of possibility.

Secret Tunnels – It’s claimed by some that there are underground tunnels linking the Supreme Court building in the city to the Old Perth Mint. As the buildings are almost a kilometre apart this seems unlikely, but the rumours persist. Slightly more likely are stories of tunnels linking to the old Treasury Building across the road from the Court. There may also be a 1920s style public toilet entombed under the intersection just outside the Court – an underground toilet certainly existed there once, the question is whether it was demolished or simply sealed up when the authorities decided to close it.

The Boya Quarry – The old Boya Quarry up in the hills was supposed to be the site of all kinds of satanic rituals. These days it’s a rock climbing centre, but when I first visited it back in the 1990s it was full of junk and heavily gratified with pentagrams and the number 666. How much of that was down to genuine cult activity and how much to people who’d heard the rumours is open to debate.

The QV1 Building – Perth claims to be the most isolated large city in the world (it really depends on how you define ‘large city’). We have a population of 1.6 million and the nearest population centre with even 500,000 is a good 1,300 miles away. In the 1990s the QV1 skyscraper was constructed in the central city as a hub for telecommunications and internet firms and – so the rumours say – every communication link to the outside world was routed through it. Result? Blow up or otherwise disable QV1 and Perth would be completely cut off from the rest of the planet.

There’s another rumour about QV1, which is that its architecture is a tribute to Marilyn Monroe. The main north and south entrances resemble the skirt scene from The 7 Year Itch, and the building’s footprint seen from above resembles a pair of pouting lips.

Trilobites – Back in the 80s it was claimed that living, giant trilobites had been discovered in the city’s storm drains. It turned out to be a weird combination of rumour, hoax, and very hot summer with no other real news to report. An old tyre cut up to look like a giant bug was alleged to be involved.

So there it is. Perth has it’s own dragons.

CHOGM, Resin Skulls and Stephen Fry

An update

I think I promised a blog update this weekend didn’t I?

It’s kind of difficult to keep up with the blogging at the moment because the old black dog is nipping at my heels again – quite badly as a matter of fact. A lot of the time all I want to do is sleep. I’ve actually tested that out, to see if it makes things better, but it doesn’t really – I just wake up tired and fuzzy headed with my mouth feeling like the bottom of a lion cage, so it’s down to the tried and true methods of eating right, trying to get more exercise and doing my best to get out and be social, despite the fact that I’d rather be unconscious. No doubt I’ll pull out of it sooner or later, but in the meantime it’s not much fun.

In any case for those not in the know this was CHOGM week in Perth, when the heads of the Commonwealth nations descended on the city like a horde of Elder Gods, dragging hordes of vile servitors in their wake, and the Yog Sothoth of this abominable crew, Her Majesty the Queen (and her personal Nyarlathotep, Prince Phillip) also stopped in to say hi and attend a barbecue.

We’ve been preparing for this for months, and in the end it’s all been a bit of an anticlimax. Some roads were shut down, some exclusion zones were set up, some protesters waved placards and some civil liberties were casually abused in the name of security, and then it was all over. Some interesting things were done – the laws of Royal succession were altered to favour the first born child regardless of gender for instance – and some important things argued about and ultimately ignored (such as agreeing to give Commonwealth citizens a few basic human rights) and then it was all over. Ho Hum.

The big event for we peasants was the barbecue on the foreshore yesterday. It was the typical public event thing, everyone milling around for a few hours waiting for the Monarch and Royal Consort to put in an appearance, which they eventually did for a while before leaving without so much as eating a sausage (although Prince Phillip played with some barbecue tongs). On the plus side public transport was free across the entire city all day, which I took advantage of to catch up with Rebecca and Dom and the kids at Siennas in Mount Lawley for lunch. Strangely though, despite the free transport the railway was shut down between Perth Underground and Esplanade. If you asked they’d probably say they were concerned about someone trying to pull a V for Vendetta and blow up the Gleddon Building from below, but I suspect the real reason was that they’d either bailed up the city’s homeless in the tunnel to prevent the sight of them offending the Queen, or the Mole Men were holding their own CHOGM barbecue down there. Maybe both.

But anyway, it’s all over now and CHOGM ephemera is now selling for decent bucks on eBay.

I’ve been playing around with casting this weekend. I needed some large Adeptus Mechanicus symbols for some 40k terrain I’m sporadically working on, and a search of the net indicated that no one makes them anywhere and hence they’re quite hard to come across and rather expensive when you do. So I said, to hell with you, I’ll make my own people! Or rather my own AdMech symbols. I built a master out of plywood, plasticard and the general debris that a natural hoarder such as myself invariably accumulates, made a latex mould from it and have been merrily turning out cogwheels-with-skulls willy nilly all weekend. I’m almost tempted to make some extra ones and sell them on eBay, but I suspect Games Workshop’s lawyers would come down on me like the hammer of Sigmar and I’d never be heard from again. Oh well, I have what I came for 🙂

Last weekend of course it was QI Live at the Burswood theatre. I’d assembled a small group to attend consisting of myself, Katie, Justin and Marika. I met up with Justin and Marika at the Atrium buffet before the show which, despite the fact that it was stupidly expensive and they threw us out at 7:30 (they close for half an hour on Friday and Saturday evenings – no idea why but I suppose it’s not for the likes of me to criticise the behaviour of the wealthy) was fantastic. I was particularly fond of the beef and mushroom ragout, and the desert bar was absolutely sumptuous. We then met up with Katie outside the theatre before proceeding in to our seats.

Our seats were in the very back row of the ground floor and, surprisingly, turned out to be excellent. Sure, we were about as far from the stage as it was possible to get, but our view was completely unobstructed. We could also listen in to the chatter of the stage-management guys just across the aisle, which was most amusing when one of the guests’ microphones failed and they had to improvise a solution. We also heard the final scores a few second before everyone else, for what it was worth 🙂

The show was excellent. Entertaining and informative in equal measure. It was a bit shambolic, what with being the very first QI Live ever, but that was part of the fun. Stephen Fry regaled us with tales of his first visit to Perth (the phrase “eastern states or overseas” will never sound the same again) and Alan Davies hammed it up for the crowd, despite being seriously ill (or at least claiming that he was seriously ill, there was a lot of mention of ‘slurry’). The guests were Colin Lane, Denise Scott and some guy who I’ve never heard of, but who did a decent enough job despite being the victim of the aforementioned microphone failure.

If there was one problem it was that it did drag on a bit. The show didn’t finish until just before 11:00, and Justin even fell asleep in his sear despite the regular klaxon whenever Alan Davies tried to answer a question (he had been up since 4:00 though so it’s quite understandable). I imagine they’ll get the hang of balancing amusing blather with keeping things moving in future performances, but it was a small price to pay for the privilege of being there for the show’s first outing.

Once it was all over we dumped our plan of going somewhere for drinks (Justin was just about dead on his feet and I wasn’t far behind) and Katie and I wandered around what seemed like all of Burswood looking for a taxi before stumbling over one who’s driver was just as lost looking for the taxi rank as we were.

So, a good night was had by all, despite being informed that the first European to discover Australia recommended that it be named “New Zealand” 😉

Hmmm, that’s all I’ve got to say. There’s cleaning I have to do, and after that I’m tempted to see if that sleep thing might finally work 🙂

Postcards from the Edge

The past is a foreign country. They wear funny hats and eat all kinds’a weird crap there.

I give you Perth – 1954 style!

Pros – Decent public transport, lots of beautiful buildings, plentiful rain and a boundless sense of optimism.

Cons – Did you see a single non-Anglo-Saxon in that video? Because I sure didn’t…

I don’t think you know what that means…

You use that word a lot…

From WA Today

A mini-tornado has ripped through Canning Vale and heavy showers have caused dangerous flooding on the roads after a strong cold front passed through Perth this morning. A Canning Vale resident told ABC radio that the storm was “like the eye of a cyclone” as the tornado tore through.

Umm actually, no, it wasn’t.

Gossip

The seamy underbelly of the local web design scene…

Not naming any names here, but an apparently disgruntled employee (or possibly ex-employee – certainly an ex-employee once they figure out who it is) of a major local web design company has mailed copies of their entire client list to every other web design company in the city.

As we used to say in primary school – ooooo-ma!

Tunnel Dreams

Idiot dreaming of future rail lines.

If tomorrow the people of Perth arrived en-mass at my front door to appoint me absolute Monarch of the State, there would be a number of programs I would immediately initialise. For instance, the coversion of East Perth Power Station into a royal palace, the banning all imports from Texas (with the exception of Ms Kelly Clarkson) and the distribution of knighthoods and government allowances to people who don’t generally hack me off (a small and exclusive group).

But my major legacy to the state (apart from the continuation of the royal line – ideally with the assistance of Ms Kelly Clarkson) would be the expansion of the city’s public transport system via the construction of a number of underground rail lines. And they would go like this…

(Asterisks indicate interchanges with other lines)

The Northern Suburbs Line – Sorrento, Greenwood*, Ellersdale Avenue, Balcatta Road, Mirrabooka, Norranda, Morley, Broun Avenue, Bayswater*, King William Street, Ascot*, Blackrock Road, Belmont.

The City/Ariport Line – International Terminal, Domestic Terminal, Ascot*, Tranby, Burswood Island, WACA, Victoria Square, Perth Underground*, Cloisters*, Mill Point, Perth Zoo, Douglas Avenue, Ellam Street, Burswood Island (again).

The University Line – Glendalough*, Dog Swamp, Edith Cowan, Hyde Park, Russel Square, Cloisters*, Observatory, Nicolson Road, QE II, UWA North, UWA South, Applecross, Canning Bridge*, Goss Avenue, Curtin, Boundary Road, Hill View Terrace, Oats Street*.

There’s a fair potential for expansion there – for instance the University Line could be linked with the Northern Suburbs line with an expansion between Oats Street and Belmont. The other end of the University Line could be run out to Scarborough Beach, and a further expansion up to Sorrento could complete the loop. Norranda station is well placed for a branch line up to Whiteman Park and Ellenbrook. There’s also plenty of potential to expand into the southern suburbs – or at least there would be if they were anything more than a barren wasteland haunted by wind and ghosts 😉

I’ve obviously got it all figured out. On with the coronation! 😀

Close Bitnami banner
Bitnami