found here.
trailer for Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol …
June 29, 2011 — cate3221i think i might be looking forward to this.
pic of the day for mine
June 29, 2011 — cate3221
caption: “Eddie Blackwell (known as The Predator in the local surfing community) surfs through an enormous tunnel of water near Sydney, Australia, armed with a camera protected with a special waterproofing casing. Photographer Ray Collins takes pictures of himself and his friends surfing inside huge waves”
found at the UK’s Daily Telegraph.
went old school and took in a triple feature at the drive-in
June 29, 2011 — cate3221… have to say, for all the bogan-ness of the experience, at $24 for three first-release flicks, it was pretty good value for money. of course, toilet paper in the toilets would have been nice, but you can’t have everything.
not bad, not bad.
not as funny as the first, but there were still a few laugh out loud moments.
and frankly, any movie that has angelina jolie talking like a tigress, is all right by me.
at 91 minutes the pain, slight as it is, is over pretty quickly and the whole thing romps along well enough, if a little predictably. Po is adopted … who knew?
meanwhile dustin hoffman, jackie chan and lucy liu are criminally underused, while gary oldman as the evil peacock Shen gets a pretty decent chunk of the dialogue to break up the Jack Blackness of the whole thing.
look, the kids will love it.
at some point i’m sure i did read what Super 8 was about before tonight but i had completely forgotten by the time i was actually sitting in front of it.
so the whole train crash thing came as a surprise and was awesomely done.
i really enjoyed this film. not in a big, deep and meaningful way, but it’s a cross between Stand By Me, Cloverfield, ET and Close Encounters and it works as a better than average kids movie.
Elle Fanning is scary good, better than her sister Dakota, i think. and the kid playing the lead, Joel Courtney is similarly good.
big ups to riley griffiths who plays the stock-standard fat kid, a la Stand By Me’s Vern or Ben in It, and does it with a lot of comic chops. very good.
all in all, a JJ Abrams special with a lot of good points.
very good.
this franchise is actually getting better the more films there are.
i loved Wolverine and i think this one is as good, if not better.
excellent cast, which helps, of course, led by the lovely James McAvoy as Charles Xavier, the ubiquitous Kevin Bacon as Sebastian Shaw, the original bad boy mutant, Aussie girl Rose Byrne as Agent McTaggert and Michael Fassbender as Magneto.
Throw in a cameo from one of my favourites, Oliver Platt and it’s a top watch.
SFX spectacular, of course, and the storyline, woven in with the Cuban missile crisis, hangs together pretty well.
all in all, a good evening, in the privacy of my own car, where i could tweet, yell at the screen and watch the passing parade of bogans all while watching three pretty good flicks.
book: superbug by maryn mckenna
June 29, 2011 — cate3221
just finished reading this and it’s an absolute cracker. it will scare the crap out of you, however.
i’ve had my brush with golden staph … not MRSA, thankfully, but hard enough to get rid of. took me six months all up and sometimes i still wonder.
but MRSA is a whole ‘nother ball of wax. ms mckenna does a terrific job of explaining the intricacies of biochemistry, microbiology and a whole bunch of other ologies without being tedious. in fact, it was gripping and i read it pretty much straight through.
makes you never want to take antibiotics again. at the very least it makes you want to ask your GP why he’s prescribing you antibiotics for a viral infection like bronchitis (did you know only 10% of bronchitis cases are caused by bacterial infection?). happened to me so many times i can’t even begin to tell you.
i tell ya, scary stuff, and well told.
learn to love the different … my latest blog over at goldcoast.com.au
June 29, 2011 — cate3221you can read it here, or you can read it here.
THIS city has a lot to learn about tolerance, apparently.
Here at goldcoast.com.au we run polls every day about the issues that are in the news.
This week we ran one which didn’t get a lot attention but nonetheless struck a nerve with me. And, frankly, scared me.
On Wednesday we asked: ”Do you think the burka should be banned in Australia?”
There were 768 respondents.
A total of 670 of them, or 87.2%, said yes, the burka should be banned in this country.
Now, we don’t pretend to be Gallop, or Newspoll, but 768 is a fairly decent sample size, by any judge.
I don’t claim to be a saint on the issue of tolerance, not by any means.
A couple of weeks ago I was sitting on a rock at the end of the Seaway wall, minding my own business, as you do.
Next thing I hear is a harmonica, atrociously played, wafting from the other side of the lighthouse.
I turn around and there’s a bloke, lying on a rock, entertaining himself no end.
When he wasn’t rasping away tunelessly on the mouth organ, he was singing — equally badly — and waving his arms around in a sort of prone disco duck kind of way.
”Dude’s a loony,” I thought to myself, clearly low on my tolerance quotient for the day. I proceeded to Tweet the fact I was in the presence of insanity, along with a photo.
And then it occurred to me. Who was nuttier — the bloke singing a song on a rock happily, or the chick Tweeting on a rock?
Seriously, people, we need to learn about cherishing differences in those around us.
We’re a city that relies on tourists for our economic health.
Tourists … people who come from other places and are therefore likely to be different from us, culturally, politically, religiously, socially, linguistically.
If our attitude towards them is a reflection of the attitude of intolerance reflected in our poll about burkas, is it any wonder people aren’t coming to visit?
Reputations travel, just like tourists.
Remember how quickly word spread internationally when Pauline Hanson was spouting her drivel about Asians and Aborigines? Remember how quickly the condemnation from our neighbours came?
It’s time we started accepting some responsibility for the way we treat the people who come here and pour money into our city.
If we’re so terrified of the differences in people that we are willing to ban something as innocuous as a piece of headwear, then we’re in big, big trouble.
And yes, I know I’m talking to people who, if the polls are anything to go by, will more than likely think I’m talking drivel, but lighten up, Gold Coast and vive la difference!
