warmish

Well, the papers this morning say it will be the hottest new year’s eve since records were first kept, but the temperature of 42+ has been revised a little, down to just high 30s. I still feel I should stay in the same spot and not do too much unnecessary moving around. Nevertheless we are going to go to the Old Bar tonight and see Panel and it might be an OK night. I dunno.

We spent the last couple of days at Heathcote I was writing a journal article and Mia was painting and Millie and Charlie just lay around indoors. Charlie was too freaked out by all the smells on the ground (she hasn’t been to the country before) to piss on it. How heritage-aware is that. Ultimately she could bear it no longer and found a small bush only about twice her height to get on top of and piss. While we were there she growled a lot too though, including when she saw a couple of kangaroos – a small and a person-height one – in the shelter of some trees just inside the boundary of the Heathcote property. This was yesterday. I have nightmare memories still of Millie and Silver racing off to catch kangaroos a few years ago so these dogs (Millie is the same dog of course) weren’t off their leads at all while we were at Heatchote. My father’s whippets have caught up to kangaroos a couple of times and got big gashes in their sides for their trouble.

We had two days without newspapers or television, it was great. When we got back last night we read the newspapers and watched two movies on DVD one was Rock School which was pretty good but I felt that the main guy’s motivation was difficult to divine. True, he had a big success at the Zappanale, but does this mean his methods were always correct? And how weird was it that in 2003 (when the film was made) he seemed to be equating ‘rock’ with ‘rock from 1966-1972’ and basically teaching the kids all the stuff. I mean the guy was probably younger than me, anyway, so it was obviously a retro interest in any case… but… you know. All that Zappa, Hendrix, Black Sabbath stuff. I am not saying that’s not rock, but it’s a very small part of the canon.

The other film we watched was 28 Days Later which is the one where the entire population of Britain is infected by a virus called rage (if I was a crapped out newspaper columnist I’d make some hilarious comment here about how they already are-ha-ha-ha) except for a few scant types who have to escape all the others. Very Day of the Triffids in its execution (especially the explanation as to how the main guy escapes the initial outbreak) but actually pretty effective at least until the second half when they end up in an army barracks and surprisingly for all the soldiers are if not as bad as the ‘infected’ people they are definitely a different kind of threat. The reason I say this is not effective is that it seems to set the story on too limited a course – a lot of British films, if I may say so, end up doing this – they start off on a broad sweep and end up plodding in the nitty gritty. Of course I can’t think of any examples, so maybe I’m wrong. However generally speaking I thought it was a pretty good film. Now I am getting too hot to type (I already wrote ‘a pretty god film’ then ‘a pretty goof film’) and might have to go and get under the house for a while.