You hear that, Mr Andersen?

Links & an Exciting Saturday

Sorry that it's been so long since my last entry -- in compensation, here's a bumper crop of pretty links. For a start -- you remember when Dick van Dyke's cheery chimney-sweep character did a series of chalk drawings on the footpath? Well, I suspect that this guy's drawings would beat the crap out of those fox hunters and pearly kings and queens.

Then there's a Flikr leech, if you can't be bothered randomly browsing Flickr; an interview with an expert witness in the recent "Intelligent Design" trial; and a picturebook called "Why Mommy is a Democrat".

And to round things off -- a NZ movie industry blog, which is obviously of some interest to me, and I thought might be interesting to some readers.

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Happy birthday to the lovely C.

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A few weekends ago I went up to Kapiti, to get some quality roleplaying done. However, there were a few hitches before I got up there.

I was going to go up on Friday evening... and then Saturday morning... and I finally got away Saturday lunchtime, leaving C at home to get on with her assignment. But I had only gotten to the Basin Reserve when I got a call from C, telling me that she'd gotten badly cut.

The traffic was pretty bad, and the whole way back I was worrying just how badly C had been hurt; thankfully, she'd only sliced open the top of her finger. (She'd been trying to open a bag with a knife, and it had slipped.) Nevertheless, it was pretty gruesome, and even though it had stopped bleeding we decided to go to the emergency room to get it looked at.

Getting to the hospital was yet another saga -- I ducked down a side street (Owen St) to avoid a bunch of traffic and lights, but took the corner into Mein St too tightly, and "sproing!", my hubcap came off. There was nowhere to park immediately, so I pulled into a driveway some distance down, leapt out, ran back, grabbed the (slightly bent) hubcap, ran to the car, banged the hubcap back on, and jumped back into the car... and pulled out to wait at the lights for ages. Dropping C at the front door was unproblematic, and finding a park for the car was straightforward... and then I slammed the driver's door, and the chrome detail fell off the passenger door. I grabbed it, stowed in the boot, and followed C in with books for both of us. (My experience when I was recovering from my broken leg suggested that a lot of waiting might be involved; indeed, when a doctor finally turned up, they apologised for making us wait a lot longer than we should have.)

Anyway, the finger was eventually pronounced fine (after two anesthetic injections that "might sting a bit", plus a tetanus shot), so we thought we might as well go and pick up C's cell phone from Karori. (We knew that's where it was, because one of her bosses had had a drink or two and sent me messages pretending to be C, before one of her other bosses had taken it off him and told him off. :) We drove off, and C mentioned that there was a bit of a funny smell; I said that we may as well get to Karori before we stopped and looked.

It was a watermelon.

More specifically, it was a watermelon that had looked fine when I put it in the back foot-well, but turned out to be completely rotten -- a small hole in the skin had let the gooey pink guts of the melon goop out all over the carpet, in a sea of stinky decomposing fruit. We removed as much as we could, and drove back to my house to clean up more... but even the next day, the car smelled like (as one friend commented) someone had taken a particularly stinky gym sock, eaten it, and then thrown it up again. This was the smell I drove up to Kapiti with that afternoon.

However, I'm really glad that I did go up -- not just because I got to see a bunch of people I don't hang out with enough, but because I got to try Primetime Adventures ("Play the greatest tv show that never was!"). I'll talk about that more next post.

Posted by svend at March 21, 2006 3:37 PM