werribee etc

 What’s more irritating than this? Please let me know.

Anyway, I can wait a little while for Vodafone, and I admit, Vodafone is not a good friend to me but I am not a good friend to it, either. I consistently get its name wrong, and in fact often think my ‘service provider’ is actually Motorola.

 

I was actually coming online to tell you about my few hours in Werribee, going to the Victorian Government Library Service. I decided that the prospect of driving for an hour and a half (there and back) was too depressing so instead I would bike-train-bike it. Citymapper, which is my general app of choice for figuring out how to get places on public transport, could have told me a few things – ie there is a bus service between Werribee station and Hopppers Crossing which deposits ya at the top, more or less, of Sneydes Road (what a name for a road) but Citymapper thought I should walk to and from the station (37 minutes; with the bus it would have been about 15, max). In fairness to Citymapper the bus is quite infrequent so maybe I was asking at (or about) the wrong time of day. ‘Maps on my phone’ (I don’t actually know who provides that) was also not as helpful as it could have been. When it came to working out the best route from Werribee station to the VGLS it suggested I go north from the station, along the north side of the railway line, and cross when Tarneit Road crosses it (record scratch sound here please) that road does not have a capacity for pedestrians or cyclists. So you have to go around so much further to cross the railway line you get closer to Hoppers Crossing station than to Werribee station. (This is an interesting narrative isn’t it, you’re welcome).

This last picture is the VGLS building

 

Sneydes Road is actually a pretty interesting road, but I didn’t really need to be riding a bike in 25 degree heat and while it wasn’t painful, a slightly lower temperature would have been better (this by the way is always my policy). You go past a lot of odd buildings/facilities, some of them I suspect no longer operating but hard to tell. I don’t know when I’ll be there again so maybe I should have spent a bit more time poking around but I needed to get home. It’s amazing to reflect that it’s only an hour on public transport from the centre of Melbourne to the corner of Sneydes Road and Princes Highway. 

 

I don’t have anything more to say right now except have you seen The Other Guys, a film with Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg? It’s actually pretty funny, mainly because of the hardboiled dialogue they deliver to each other and then commend each other on the metaphors used. It really has an all-star cast which confused me for a while because I thought wow, Michael Keaton is really taking a back seat here (for instance) but then I realised the film was from 2010 (not, like 2017 or 18 as I had thought) and he was pretty down on his luck then, careerwise. He was soon to resurge. It’s not important. 

dreaming is free

I dreamt that... shit. I dreamt a long and involved dream that ended with an old lady winning Just a Minute on the basis that she knew a dolphin was a fish, and getting to kiss Nicholas Parsons on the cheek (by the way the new series of Just a Minute which I believe is the 53rd is on the BBC website now, though this week's isn't the best episode ever). I also dreamt that someone got Roger Dean to design something but not in his trademark style, more in the style of a woodcut. But now I can't remember what.

Maybe I didn't dream this at all. Because what I did dream is writing all of my dream down, and thinking 'gee, there's a lot to this dream, it's filling pages and pages and it's all really interesting'. Then I woke up and was majorly pissed because I hadn't written it down at all. I dreamt I was writing it in green biro, incidentally, which should have alerted me to the unrealisticness of the scenario.

What is not free is watching bad DVDs. Last night I drained the dregs out of the local Blockbuster and got Casino Royale, Semi Pro and the most recent Almodovar film. Semi-Pro was the nightly so we had to watch that, and because I am sick for the 53rd time this year (yes, the exact same amount as there have been seasons of Just a Minute), I insisted on Casino Royale first, you know, because sick people like childish things. It was OK. I would like to have had scientobabble explanation of what Bond puts on his face to make it heal so fast, but looking for any special logic isn't going to bring you much joy in that kind of a film is it. Semi Pro is yet another Will Ferrell sports biopic parody. If I had ever seen one of the originals of this genre, if it is a genre which I assume it is, then these might make more sense to me, but why should the makers of these films care about that - after all, I have no particular knowledge of the genre being parodied, yet I have seen all the Ferrell parodies (I think). The only downside to the onslaught of these films is that by the time I came to Semi Pro I wasn't sure if I'd seen it before or not. (Actually there only seem to be three of these films. I thought there were about six.) Anyway, it's, you know, OK, I didn't laugh. I was quite impressed by the 70s disco parody, artistically.

The only time I was moved to comment on the Bond film was the reckless vandalism of an old hand-caned chair. But I did think about it more later. One thing I thought about was the bit where they demolish an old Venetian building in the course of battling over a silver suitcase containing $120 million. I am sure that sometime soon the external shots in that scene are going to look really fake, you know, people in 2020 will be saying 'Despite the truly awful oughties special effects...' but because they're probably still world's best practice and I have never seen a Venetian building collapse I am not entirely sure why they look fake. Perhaps one way around this in the future will be to eliminate the static, impartial camera shot, which looks like a special effects set-up. What do you think my friend?