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So they interviewed this bloke on TV tonight about the fireworks and he said they were "awesome". Then they interviewed this other bloke and he said that they'd put on a free breakfast this morning after the fireworks the night before and the breakfast was "awesome". They showed a picture of the breakfast and it was sausages and eggs and stuff. So all in all I reckon that the description of it being awesome was pretty much spot on.

All this awe about. I'm lost for words.

You know, I skim through the excerpts on OzPolitics but I find myself opening fewer and fewer posts. The intro lines on some would put you right off - hey, no prejudices being jumped to around here, folks (as if...) - and for some all you need is the title.

The gloss appears to have worn off Kevin07 even amongst the true believers, some cling to hope, some detect a deeper strategic vision and it'll all be OK in the long run. Those who never believed are ramping up the snarking. There's academic and semi-academic analysis by the truckload, but somehow I feel that there's a bit more real life outside this new study in Villa VVB that needs to be attended to.

Actually it's not really a villa because it doesn't have a wall around it - that's what's missing. I'll get on to it one of these years.

So I predict a year or so of blogennui as the first Rudd Ministry continues to learn the ropes - and boy, do some of them need to - while we watch the international economy either get itself back into balance or continue to slowly unravel.

Of course so much depends on the US and while I'm not such a political tragic to expend acres of space on analysing the Presidential election (you'd swear we really were the 52nd state by the depths some local blogs get into) the fact remains that the scale and nature of the US's economic relationships with the rest of the world are key to our own economic health. That debt, man, all that debt. All those arcane financial instruments, who's got their hand on the levers? Who's looking at the screens?

Enough of the conspiracy, this is just a cheap stream-of-consciousness substitute way of saying that unless VVB finds something else interesting to write about (and I know I haven't finished all the car stories) we're going to sink into what I did on my holidays.

Except I haven't had any for a really long time and none on the horizon except the annual boys' weekend away at the Sydney Motor Show.

Look out.

horse house with no name

It must be the calming influences of those sea views, but the urge to whinge seems to have totally departed. I mean, you never got considered analysis around these parts so spiteful whingeing seemed just so...I dunno...adequate.

VVB-by-the-sea (I must come up with a shorter and more atmospheric name) at last entered the final bit of the 20th century today by acquiring a large, well large-ish, flat panel TV. It's great, I could almost watch for...minutes.

We did. We watched Riverfire. It was...oh, I dunno, how about awesome? Awesomeness seems to spring up around one nowadays.

We were particularly taken with the Victorian lady who was interviewed. She had come from Victoria to see the fireworks. It gets you wondering, really it does. Don't they have fireworks in Victoria? I mean, back in the gold rush the place was seething with Chinese people - Chinamen in fact. Surely some of them stayed on to become fireworks technicians?

Anyway it was awesome - well the first and last 2 minutes were, the middle 19 were extremely ho-hum. As one might have predicted.

And all the buildings with lights ablaze! What a wonderful night for the electricity generators. Just an awesome way to use some non-renewable resources.

Also, Channel 7's commentary was awesome.

Actually, no it wasn't. It was - like virtually everything else that 7 now does - tedious, amateurish, laden with cross-promotion and over-exposure of its stable of awesome stars and slightly forgettable.

As I may or may not have explained previously, VVB switched from 9 to 7 when Steve "Judas" Leibmann took John Howard's 30 pieces of silver and appeared on TV, all serious and businesslike, to warn us about all the terrorists in our midst who were hell-bent on destroying all the things we hold dear like freedom, democracy and liberty and all those things.

They weren't, of course, but it cruelled for me that carefully nurtured persona of Steve Liebmann as reassuring man of the news. And it pretty much paralleled the decline of 9 and rise of 7 although I suspect this is more correlation than causation. Except in our case, of course.

And then the nation got terrorism fever and we got Border Fucking Security whose popularity was hung on the perceptions of evil terrorists infiltrating our grfeat nation but in fact was more about dodgy visa-evaders, smugglers of exotic African diseases and general flim-flam men.

Anyway channel 7 has had several years of well deserved popularity and mega ratings - awesome ratings, in fact - which has inevitably ended with it believing its own popularity and that of David Koch, who has passed awesomeness into ubiquity. So ubiquitous in fact that I fully expect to see him in Bunnings on a Saturday.

So this has not been so much of a whinge - hmmm, well maybe just a little - as a reflection on how awesome everything is. In pursuit of which, here is a photo of a minor alteration to the horizon courtesy of the people who dig stuff up to sell. This is the bit that they don't.

Big, isn't it?

I hope you agree.


Anyway, back to names for the new Chateau VVB. Is it a bungalow? Could be. Is it a villa? Potentially, nearly everything is nowadays. Is it a ranch house? Hmm, probably not.

So we'll have to go with what sounds best. Villa VVB has a nice alliterative feel, we should go with that, yes?

i do like to be beside the seaside

It has no waves worthy of the name and it doesn't smell very salty, but it is the sea.

And this is what you see of it from VVB-by-the-sea.

I can't see us ever tiring of it.

australiana

I think I'll be glad to get back to regular blogging, eventually. The arrival our dedicated line got me all a little, er, thing.

It's also because things are starting to annoy me again. Having a whinge to no-one in particular seems, to me, to be one of the greatest benefits that blogs confer on their proprietors.

I got annoyed a few days ago about the usage of "pinkie" for little finger. And today I read in the paper that the government's otherwise admirable, if a little misguided, series of advertisements in which ladies wave their little fingers at blokes to admonish them for being speed fiends, is known as the "pinkie" advertisement. I should have have known it.

I'm not even sure that an advertisement should have a name, but as episodes of TV shows seem to have them, why not?

I think the ads are misguided, most genuine speed freaks would simply...well, drive on by, I suspect.

That'll also be other speed fiends, too, just to be clear.

I bought a doover in a shop yesterday. I can't quite remember what it was, hence a doover. But the packaging got me going, in a slightly understated way. It said that the doover was made by a "wholly owned Australian company."

I found this oddly reassuring. The last thing we need are little orphan companies, especially Australian companies, wandering around all alone because they have no owners. All incorporated entities need a mummy and daddy, for sure.

Now, whether the wording meant to imply that the company was Australian owned, is a whole other kettle of fish. I certainly hope that the wording was inadvertently poorly constructed, rather than - as I suspect - a deliberate attempt to mislead.

Anyway if you go into a K-mart and look at the rack of doovers you use to connect telephonic devices with other telephonic devices, you'll see what I mean.

We're big on made in Australia in VVB-by-the-sea (well, sort of). Offspring no 1 has the symbol tattooed on one shoulder blade. It's rather misleading advertising in its own right because, as anyone with a passing acquaintance with human biology and a calendar could figure out, while he was born here he certainly wasn't made here.

We rest our case.

Because it's tired.

i got rhythm

I also got connection. We got the box, we got the cables, we got the cables trailing from the hallway to the study, we got the old Pakistani rug over the cables so we don't trip over them, we got the intermodal gizmos, we have liftoff.

You can go to the post office before opening time and they will give you the stuff that is waiting for you. Who says the regions lack services? (CP, a comment is required on this, you can't read for free forever you know).

I was worried about the photos posted to date because they are on the old pooter, not flickr (because I once tried to set up a Picasa account, I think Picasa is like flickr, but having set the account up I failed to actually figure out how to use the flamin' thing) but the old pooter - well it's actually newer than this one - is coming soon.

How all these different hosting variations affect bandwidth usage is something else I've never been able to work out.

I like wheels and gears and ratchets and things you can see so you can figure out how they work. Bloody sad it is.

So Ms Pants will have to wait for a picture of VVB-by-the-sea. And even then she'll get a picture looking out, not in.

music from big pink

Actually, little pink. Sometime over the last decade, we stopped referring to our little fingers as...little fingers, and they became "pinkies". Little toes, I read at the weekend, are now pinkie toes.

What I want to know is why.

Similar to an ad on radio every morning as I drive to work, which says if you buy a bed from a local shop you will soon be pushing up "zees". All delivered in a perfectly standard Aussie accent.

Dog help us.

This exercise in tired reflexive anti-Americanism brought to you courtesy of VVB-by-the-sea which, because its inhabitants haven't really understood the consumer world since since the word "pinkie" was unknown in Australia, signed up for a new Tesltra broadband service at a Telstra shopfront, thus condemning us to getting our modem delivered by Australia Post who course expects us to come to the post office to collect it, which will be difficult given new workloads and so on. Because we didn't know you could go into a shop, a Harvey Norman for example which wishes to help you push up "zees", and buy a bloody modem and sign up for a bloody account and go home and get operational i-bloody-mmediately.

I wonder how we manage to get by at all, sometimes. We is out of touch, to be sure.

The next hurdle will be how to maintain access to Blogger and VVB after our e-mail address changes. I'm sure it's doable, but then I also once tried to get RSS feeds going.

That's another story.

I'd say watch this space but it'd be more realistic to suggest you go and watch grass grow.

oliver

We are in the house. The cat is settled.

I'm busier than a one-armed paperhanger.

Oliver Sudden blogging doesn't seem quite so...necessary.

I'm not sure whether this is a Good Thing or whether working an extra four hours a day is actually good for me.

the move

Is done. We are all in house, with cat.

I like looking at the sea and find myself on the balfalcony quite frequently doing just that. It's a longer hike to the shops than at Chateau VVB and it's a harder climb back up, so we won't be doing that as frequently as we useter.

Now I just have to organise my working life so I can enjoy more of VVB-by-the-sea.