Earth Hour – You’re Doing It Wrong

Over the last few years you’ve probably come across Earth Hour – a global event whereby we turn our lights off for one hour.  Simple – every person just flicks a switch – and effective – it’s a lot of switches.  A lot of cities are also putting on events to coincide and further increase environmental awareness.

Sadly, not everybody gets it.  Our local event is being put on by Willoughby Council and it seems doomed from the start.  First, it would appear they’ve done a mail drop to everyone in the area – one envelope, one letter and one flyer per person adds up to a lot of trees. What’s worse, however, is that the flyer is mostly black.  I don’t mean printed on black paper, I mean a lot of solid black ink printed onto white paper.  Even the best ink cartridges aren’t designed to print constantly in solid black, so I imagine this process generated  a lot of environmentally unfriendly waste.

I showed the flyer to E-Steve, the IT guy in charge of printer supplies at work, and his instant scowled reaction was “WHO DID THIS?!  THIS WOULD COST $20 PER COPY!!!”  Just a small taste of the reaction I would get if I ever printed something so silly!

I hope you’ve all got your candles ready for 8:30 tonight!

No To Watching The Watchmen

If you want to read in detail about the literary depth of Alan Moore’s Watchmen graphic novel, or want to hear about it’s troubled transition to film, then this is not the place for you.  The internets are filled with millions of words on these topics.  This post is just a brief brain dump of my thoughts having seen the movie last night.

• Watchmen is a great comic that I like very much.
• Watchmen is a terrible movie that I struggled through.
• Ignoring anything that I had read, I went in excited – but left disappointed.
• I really didn’t miss those bits of the comic that were omitted, such as the comic in a comic.
• The faithful recreation of panel to frame is impressive, but it just doesn’t work.
• Some of the casting is great, the rest is just a waste.
• At 2 hours and 40 minutes it was sooooo looonnnggg.
• I see what they were trying to do with the soundtrack, situating the film in the 80s, but it was quite horrendous and incredibly jarring.
• The film just didn’t work.
• Which is a shame.

Fruitfail

Amanda posted recently about how I am prone to impulse buying when it comes to fruit.  Well, as with all experiments sometimes things go a little awry.  Let’s just say that the key word in “prickly pear” is not “pear”.

I had read about them coming from cacti and that you need to remove spikes – but I assumed they’d be big and obvious.  There were no such spikes, so I figured they were already prepped. I really should have read more closely.  Wikipedia refers to “small spines” that can be “easily lodged in the skin“.  Even The Jungle Book’s Baloo in The Bare Necessities sings that:

Now when you pick a pawpaw
Or a prickly pear
And you prick a raw paw
Next time beware
Don’t pick the prickly pear by the paw
When you pick a pear
Try to use the claw

I clearly should have known better.  Instead I spent the evening with numerous invisible spikes sticking in my fingers. To make matters worse … the fruit is nothing to shout about. (blog?  yes.  shout? no.)  It’s a fun dark purple but the taste is like a nearly tasteless melon.  And the seeds … I’ve never seen the fun in pomegranates, packed with many many seeds that you have to spit out, and this is worse as the seeds are even more fiddly.

Between the spikes, the seeds and the total lack of taste- this is a fruit that clearly does not want to be eaten. I’m very happy to oblige.

The Saddest Airport Terminal In The World

I think enough time has passed that we can share this with you without launching into an expletive filled diatribe.  You know how much we love airports and particularly LAX (sarcasm coming through loud and clear I hope).  Well on our recent return journey the timings on our flights meant we were actually looking forward to getting there – it would be the first chance we had to eat since breakfast (12+ hours), and they have some decent Mexican food in a few of the terminals.

Or so we thought.

Do to the desire to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on refurbishments, our terminal was pretty much dead.  After walking the entire length we had two options – toffees, or this:

That was it.  A sad cheap ass hot dog and an over priced watered down martini (note this post is not tagged ‘Food and Drink’).  No Mexican tastiness, no VIP lounge to escape the hoi polloi – not even a Burger King for our troubles.  Needless to say, we were disappointed.  Also needless to say that our love affair with (and by that I mean extreme loathing for) LAX continues.

I wonder if we can get a flight though San Francisco next time … ?

What A Flightmare

You could say it’s an example of the butterfly effect – Air Tahiti have canceled a portion of our flight to the States (the flight from Papeete to Los Angeles) and substituted a different one – just an hour and half later.  It would seem a minor delay, but it effects our arrival at home by some 14 hours.

It has taken the travel agent 5 days to sort this out, and as you can imagine, there are a lot of very full flights during the Christmas period.  This left us with 2 options: 14 hours in LAX followed by 6 hours in O’Hare, or a night in a Chicago with the exact same arrival time at home (14 hours after we were originally supposed to be there).  Windy city here we come!  If anyone needs us, we’ll be at the Sofitel.