If you don't laugh, you'll cry

The past week has been up around 40 degrees and its been hot. It'll still be hot for the next week, but dipping just below 30 on a few days. (The weather people are actually saying it'll be mostly below 30, but over the years I've been here, I've learned to add a couple of degrees to the forecast during summer).

Anyway, my wife and I are heading south for a couple of days down to the coast. Its only a couple of hours south, and I figured it'd just be a few degrees cooler. It isn't just going to be cooler, it'll be below 20 and raining most of the time.

This is not what I had envisioned, as I was looking forward to some swimming and hanging out by the beach. Instead it looks like we'll be stuck with being indoors and reading. Bummer.

Lovable rogue

This is something that confuses me a little bit, and I'm wondering if anyone quite knows why. On the surface, I would say that I would frown on criminal activities, particularly those which would seem to be quite black and white such as robbing a bank or any other brick & mortar institution. Yet there are films, that I admit I enjoy, where the protagonist(s) are career criminals yet myself and the viewers are intended to be drawn to them and to actually cheer for them as they engage in their escapades. Now I know that movies are all fiction, and we're not supposed to take it seriously, but remember that society always draws a line, and people generally don't tolerate certain things in movies, even with the argument of it being fiction. There are some things that we don't tolerate being portrayed in film, I know there are directors who have tried but I'm not even going to touch those extremes as that is something that people need to discuss face to face, rather than on a broad medium like blogs.

But moving away from the fringe cases, and back to mainstream; I find it weird that I enjoy some films where the premise is actually not a good thing. The films that come to mind are ones such as Inside Man (www.imdb.com/title/tt0454848), the Oceans series - I haven't watched the original - of Oceans 11 (www.imdb.com/title/tt0240772) Oceans 12 (www.imdb.com/title/tt0349903) and Oceans 13 (www.imdb.com/title/tt0496806), The Italian Job - again I haven't seen the original - (www.imdb.com/title/tt0317740), and I'm sure there's countless more examples. When I consider the context of the films, the primary characters may have their own set of "lines they won't cross" but they are still engaged in taking stuff that isn't theirs for the purpose of funding a free-wheeling, fun loving lifestyle that can come apart in an instant.

Now, because the dialog is witty, their banter is clever, the weather sunny, and the individuals attractive, we're then drawn to admiring and subliminally wanting what the characters have. Bizarre isn't it?

Maybe this is a guy thing, as perhaps women have a better perspective on how ridiculous these films are, but then does the propensity of romance films just work on a different set of triggers for the fairer gender?

Well I find myself thinking occasionally about The Fast & The Furious series for which I was amongst the mad few to buy the director edition DVDs for the first few movies, at least until reason caught me up. I love tinkering with cars, but the experience also taught me just how prohibitively expensive and time consuming the hobby is to engage with, not to mentioned generally futile. Ask any individual involved even in social racing clubs, and you'll start to observe the presence of corporate sponsorship in order to fund hobby. Then there's the rest of the lifestyle of Dom, Brian, et al...

At the end of the day, I'm thinking that entertainment is just providing the escapism of momentarily being in a world where we can be in our fantasy, however unrealistic or unacceptable that fantasy world may be. I'm wary of that the liberties taken by entertainment may shift my sense or morals, so I need to moderate how much of that I take in.

But I do enjoy George Clooney's charm, so I won't stay away from it completely.

Burn baby, burn!!

This weekend was a scorcher, and for an hour of sunday afternoon, I became increasing sweaty and gross as I shifted some surprisingly heavily furniture. This was compounded by not being really dressed for manual labour as I don't really think much about what the day potentially holds as I get ready to leave the house.

Anyway, at one point, hunched over a bed frame and trying to hold it steady while my father in-law worked on loosening some stubborn bolts, I was pondering the river of sweat down my face, a 40 degree day, and how this links to calorie consumption. Was I earning a gallon tub of ice cream for this afternoon of effort? Well a bit of a search across various fitness sites pretty much sunk that hope as sweating is all geared to moderating body temperature, not pushing calories out through the skin. So although it is true that heavy furniture around was better than slumping on the couch, it wasn't the pinnacle of Everest that I may have liked.

And this morning, some guys brought in 4 boxes of Krispy Kreme donuts to the office. Damn...

Get off my lawn!!!

I spent a short bit of time working in the USA, and one of the larger telecom companies there is Verizon. Verizon did a series of adverts which featured a character who was supposed to be a technician, walking around various locations, and repeating into the phone "can you hear me now?".

The idea was simple, but fairly clever, that as the character illustrated going to various locations where the typical American would not expect any cellphone coverage, Verizon would still be the most likely to provide reception. Verizon's main selling point was that they offered the best coverage across the USA, and just checking on opensignal.com, it seems they still do, more than 7 years on since I saw the ads.

The downside of the adverts is that they kind of got annoying quickly because the ad script was primarily that same person saying "can you hear me now?" over and over. Just search for that phrase on YouTube and you'll see for yourself.

And that brings me to what's eating me right now, and its the open plan office that I work in. Open plan is a concept that works with the idea that it fosters collaboration and a sense of equality across all staff. There is also the hope that people would goof off less as they are exposed to a larger number of colleagues who can see what they're doing. That of course doesn't guarantee anything as was seen by a worker at Macquarie Bank: http://www.smh.com.au/national/interest-in-assets-macquarie-worker-caught-ogling-pictures-of-miranda-kerr-live-on-tv-20100203-nbsi.html

In my workplace, I seem to have been more affected by people who either:

1. choose to shout at each other across a few desks rather than walk across
2. decide to talk loudly about the weekend, or recently about Taylor Swift, for 15min
3. have daily loud personal phone calls with family
4. have sinus trouble that results in constant regular sniffing, but never touch the box of tissues that are on their desk

Am I turning into one of those short-tempered grizzly old men who just don't tolerate anyone or anything?

*sigh* I need a nap.

Boom boom

Taylor Swift has a concert on tonight, just 500m from where I work. They're currently doing the preliminary soundchecks, but even though I'm on the far side of the office behind walls and double glazed glass, it sounds as if they are performing on the floor upstairs. I feel sorry for the people who live around the stadium, as they will not be enjoying their tv shows or going to bed early tonight.

Meow meow

Last friday, when talking to some of the guys at work about the weekend and stuff, I mentioned that I'd been teaching myself to juggle.

One of the other guys had taught himself a similar thing a number of years ago when he was still in uni. Apparently he used to moonlight as a bartender for a few years to supplement the costs of tertiary education. Anyway he was explaining the details of "flair bartending", and how he got into juggling with the intent of adding a bit more style and excitement to his work. The idea being that a better show for clients leads to a slight increase in tips, although he did say in the end that being gifted with looking cute trumped any skills a person could learn, hence some of the female bartenders always earned more tips without throwing bottles and glasses around.

In the process of explaining how he taught himself from a book on juggling, he mentioned about learning to juggle with different and odd shaped objects. I had been using a set of hackysacks, but it got me thinking that as I get better, I need to look progressing to beyond the training set of juggling balls.

On the weekend, I tried 3 kittens, and only dropped them a few times. Fortunately the little guys always land on their feet.

Cookie slime

Yesterday, my wife made some really tasty gluten free choc-chip cookies. But the way she shaped them instantly conjured images from a video game I used to play years ago; Dragon Quest.

Cookie

Slime

Maybe you needed to have spent over a hundred hours playing the game before you see it...