Another wet day

And too wet to work, sometimes construction sux and I'd rather be out doing the maintenance work, at least the income is more regular. So looks like I'll get a chance to fix the gate... which in this pic looks as it should. With Meathead eyeing the gate up or more particularly the nice fresh juicy grass on the other side.

When I turned away...........

At least he did it while I was around so he didn't get to do a bolt up the road which is a favorite pasttime. I think he enjoys this because he gets to force me into doing exercise to bring him home. Unlike dogs, horses don't do the guilty look. He just had that - "Well the bloody thing should have been open. My function in life is to eat grass, the gate was stopping me from fulfilling that function, ergo the gate had to go!" - look on his face. No guilt at all.

The moral is Fence post vs 1 tonne of Horse = No Contest.

Looks like a hot wire on top of the gate is in order.

Big Boys Toys Department

It must be a sign of the encroaching of some new "Discovered-in-this-latest-Doctoral-thesis" age based syndrome that arrives past the half century where men go out and get the toys they couldn't have, but really wanted, in their teens. I haven't quite decided what mine will be yet.. a big V Twin Cruiser, (Not a Harley I hasten to add, I had one of those bloody things for a month or so in my dim dark past and they don't appear to have got any better. Nope something reliable, that doesn't leak oil and goes first kick everytime.) or maybe Beemer R80GS, always liked those. Or maybe a 66 Droptop Mustang, or a Gullwing Merc. At the fancful end of things Jeremy Clarkson got himself an EE Lightning fighter jet and stuck it on his front lawn. Not really my cup of tea, but a jet black Hughes 500G sitting on my front lawn, a working one of course, would definitely be cool. I suppose we all have those or similar little desires and guys like Tim Wallis and his P54 go out and get those sort of things.

However you can take things a little too far.... Like about 114 metres too far! which is just what Scottish Hearts Soccer club owner Vladimir Romanov has done. Obviously not one to be put off by minor logistical problems associated with a toy that weighs in at paltry 5000 tonnes, he bought a Julliett class Nuclear Sub!

I bet he didn't ask his wife first. You can imagine him arriving home from work:

"Hi, honey, I'm Hoooome... You won't believe the bargain I scored today and don't worry, the guy who's delivering it promised he wouldn't leave any marks on the lawn

The best Kiwi Breasts

It's official Angela Bloomfield has the best Kiwi Breasts... as voted by 1500 WOMEN! Now I'm sorry, but you can't use women to make such a huge aesthetic judgement. Some things are best left to us blokes.

God designed us this way. Your average bloke studies the phenomonon with a fervour that is bordering on obsessive. Women have to have expensive television campaigns to convince them to do what any redblooded bloke would do at the drop of a hat... or bra.. or wet t-shirt.

Incidentally, I just happen to agree with their findings, look at the picture who wouldn't agree...

Of course Niki Watson would get the nod for the most expensive and there would have be an award for "Best Face-Plunge Cleavage"... Kerry Woodham hands down.

TV addictions

I confess I'm also addicted to some TV programmes. What is surprising about this is that I'm starting to like some American TV. West Wing, I like that, fast paced dialogue and the characters are static only when necessary.

Having been in a bit of TV (Herc, Xena, Shorty St, City life, Street Legal and so on. The sort of stuff that just about every journeyman actor in NZ has done.) I know how directors and especially sound trogs hate dialogue delivered on the move. It's a bitch, the Boom Operator has to be right on his game and given that in a TV crew, the Boom Operator is often at or near the bottom of the food chain the chances are slim especially in NZ where we tend to be generalists rather than specialists.

On top of that you see the way they dodge through passage ways , corridors and doorways and in and out of offices all while the dialogue is going on. That means Carrycam or the Cameraman strapped into harness so he can carry a damped camera mount. This raises all sorts of other issues. Cameraman has to have his eye in the viewfinder while going backwards at the same pace as the actors are walking. Film cameras have notoriously shallow depth of field and so Cameraman has to maintain the exact distance between actor and lense. Behind him is Asst Cameraman rolling up cable while steering No1 backwards through the maze all the while avoiding the Boom operator also going backwards. If the head sound dude is a nice guy, then boom-guy's mike is plugged to a wireless transmitter at his waist, if not then he's rolling up cable as well.

It's all a recipe for chaos but if you can pull it off, which the West Wing crew seem to do week after week, it makes for great pacey drama. It's production values and it can't be beat as long as it's got good writing to go with it. Awesome. And disturbingly the Americans seem to be getting it right a lot.

As well as West Wing, add 24 and Huff. It makes making decisions about what to watch bloody hard. Friday night at 8:30 especially.

Mind you as soon as it seems the Americans seem to be catching up, Aunty Beeb or ITV or whoever in pommy land comes up with something like Rome. Ha! Cool.

Addictive personalities

I'm definitely an addictive personality type. Computer games were designed for Addictive personalities. Now I'm not a gamer so I don't have the hard core gaming plant. I have a machine that runs Win2k (The best product that MS ever stuck their sticker on) on a 1gig processor and 512 megs of ram with an old 64 meg Nvidia card. So I'm not your counterstrike/Quake3/Castle Wolfenstein type.... At least I didn't think so until a couple of years ago my son gave me a copy of Dungeon Seige. The result was disturbing.

I have a good mate who is a gamer, RPG's and all that and I used to chuckle into my beir-sticks when he would disappear offline for weeks on end after finding a new game. (With Jagged Alliance II it turned into months IIRC) Anyhoo suffice to say I laugh no more. The first taste of Dungeon Seige saw me disappearing to my Pooter room for hours on end and I swore that would never happen again.

Unfortunately, I discovered the expansion pack to DS and as you can tell from my recent blogging frequency, the addictive personality reared it's ugly head. I'm not sure what's more disappointing, the fact that I weakened or the fact that Game expansion packs are obviously like movie sequels, second time round sux.

Of course this has been made possible by the weather. The wettest July on record has translated into an equally soggy August. Everything is wet, you can't dig because there's nothing but mud underneath. You daren't wheelspin because the wheels will break through to the mud and the truck and trailer will start acting like Torvill and Dean on a very bad hair day.

Consequently I have done bugger all for weeks while Doddery and the maintenance boys are up to their eyeballs... in mud... what else?..... And what am I doing: Killing monsters and demons and saving the virtual world of course. Well up until a day or two ago that is... Then I packaged the game up and sent it to my son, Ha! revenge is sweet! ;).

Yesterday it was getting metal onto a track up to an airstrip so that the fertiliser trucks could get to the bin where the Topdressing planes load up. A truck and trailer got stuck up there requiring the bringing in of a 25 tonne Dozer to drag him out. An exercise which will cost the Cocky over a grand. As opposed to a couple of hundred bucks for a bit of maintenance.

Spreading metal on farm tracks is not for the fainthearted or inexperienced. The tracks are generally narrow, rough and usually slippery in this weather. My mate in another truck was spreading on an uphill section of the track, without warning, the load shifted to the back of the truck in a big lump facilitating what can only be described as a wheelie. Not particularly unusual on this sort of job, but the wrong actions at this point can have bad consequences. Slam on the brakes for instance at the wrong moment, or putting foot on clutch, can result in broken front axles as the front of twenty tonnes of truck come slamming down from two and a half metres up. Best move is just ease the throttle off and as the metal pours out the back; the front will gently drop back to the ground. Of course the truck is still travelling straight ahead at this point so you just have to hope that there are no corners in your immediate future. My mate was a relative newbie and this was the first time he'd had the front of the truck grasping at the sky but he handled it well... even if he did look a little bleached in the face afterwards.

The only real downside was that I didn't have a camera!

Bugger!