Sad news: Passing of Andreas Katsulas

Hi all,

This one is for the Sci-Fi geeks around. Andreas Katsulas, probably best known for playing the part of G'Kar in Babylon 5, but also for playing Frederick Sykes in The Fugitive remake in 1993, passed away on monday of lung cancer.

Wedderburn Today

heh. My dad's been talked into starting up a blog about his local town after he complained that "nothing ever happens there". He was told to make something happen and now has a blog. Have a look at Wedderburn Today for images of nothing ever happening in Wedderburn.

Film: Memoirs of a Geisha

Went and saw Memoirs of a Geisha the other night. Was not a bad film, actually. Zhang Zi Yi is always good, though she does seem to have a limited number of different characters that she can play. They all blend together to me. Ken Watanabe was the standout character for me, but he has such amazing presence on the screen. He was the one saving grace for me when he was in The Last Samurai, and he certainly added a great deal to this film.

Anyway, the most annoying thing about this film wasn't the film itself, it was the annoying little sh*ts sitting behind us when we saw it. I have never had to do this before, but halfway through the film I had to turn around and ask them (and I quote) "would you shut up?". I dunno. I must be getting too old if that kind of thing is annoying me.

Oh yeah... We're back...

Hi all,

Sorry for being a slack ass and not posting for 2 weeks.

Last couple of days in Korea consisted of searching for lots of nifty things to buy to take back home with us... Shopping can be such fun when you can't communicate with the person you want to buy something from. We were attempting to buy some bags from a Korean guy who knew less English than we did of Korean (and believe me when I say I know very little Korean). Thankfully, he had a friend who spoke English. 2 hours we sat in the store trying to get them to supply what we wanted at an acceptable price. All the while trying to getting them to give us the stock that wasn't run over by a steam train or shagged by a walrus. This was not what I had in mind for how to spend my time.

Oh, and in Jack's tradition of "It's the little things". Heres the Korean version:

• Koreans (especially kids) eat bugs. They are actually silkworm lavae or something like that. When we first arrived, we could smell it and thought "what is that smell?". We eventually got the courage up to try it - Its DISGUSTING. Apparently the kids love the stuff...
• Westerners put Chinese or Japanese characters onto T-shirts that they have no knowledge of what it means. Koreans (and I believe other Asians) put English words on their T-Shirts that they have no idea what it means. Unfortunately, it usually comes out to be gibberish.
• Some of you may be aware with South Koreas' fascination with computer games, treating the people who play it professionally like pop idols, etc. Watching the grand final of some Starcraft competition, some of the kids in the audience had keyboards for their "idols" to sign.
• Watching same show, some of the audience held up signs for their computer game playing idols. I assume they said something like "I love " and so on. But where as an Australian would hold these signs up high where everyone can see them, these Korean girls (yes, you heard me, girls idolising computer game players... Crazy) put them in front of their faces so that the camera won't show that it's them there.
• Think for a moment. It's -5 as a maximum temperature. You're a Korean girl deciding what to wear. What do you choose? Of course, it's obvious, you wear the shortest mini-skirt you have in your wardrobe! Bear as much flesh as possible, nevermind the possibility that you will cause damage to yourself by exposing that much bare flesh to rather cold weather.
  
  There was a news broadcast about this, as well. So they know it's stupid. Oh, and the kicker on this one was the news reporter - a male - got out the tape measure to measure how short the skirts were. I wouldn't have wanted to be him when he got home to his wife that night...

Anyway, this probably draws to a close my comments on our holiday... Back to ye olde grind. Yay!