back to school

Schools go back today in Melbourne after the summer hols, and there were warnings on the radio to stick to 40 kph in school zones. So on my way into work when I saw a group of school kids crossing the road, I ploughed into them regardless making sure that my speedo was displaying precisely 40 kph

who said that?

Over the past few weeks on Not The Real McCoy we have been asking Who Said That? - movie or song quotes for listeners to guess the answers for. We realised after last nights' show that no-one had correctly guessed who said this:

Come on and dance with me
Yeah, slow
Skip a beat and move with my body
Yeah, slow

Answer: the little-known Kylie Minogue.

water butt

This is a water butt. Found out at work this week that no-one knew what I was talking about when saying 'water butt'. Ho hum, and all our jokes on the show about it being 'good weather for butts' when it was raining had gone to waste.
Here is an article about water butts.

neighbours gaff

Catching the odd episode of Neighbours yesterday, saw Will (Sebastian) entering one of the hotels that he alledgedly owns in Melbourne, that was clearly the escalator-ed and waterfall-ed lobby of The Crown Casino Towers at Southbank. But mere moments later, they showed an interior shot boasting views over the botanical gardens and the arts centre. "Thats not possible from Crown!" we declared, shaking our fists at the tv screen. The scenic views were obviously shot from The Grand Hyatt , much further east. And on the show character Elle even said "I'll be at the expensive hotel in William Street". Neither of them are there.

Also saw on the Little Britain dvd extras that Lou & Andy's council flat scenes are filmed in a big country house in Bushey, an expensive suburb in North-West London. Cheeky.

rain

Melbourne gets 2 days of summer rain after months of drought. All those people doing rain dances must have worked. It was nice sitting outside on the verandah in the warmth watching the big fat droplets falling straight down - the garden looks greener already.

shannon noll

This one's specially for
Treacle the Pup. What I want to know is, would you bite those fingers Treacle?

food fads

january is definitely the month for food fads here at work. One of my colleagues is munching on celery sticks at donut time, our linux expert is only eating vegetables for 2 weeks, and the technical support guy is surviving purely on tinned tuna.

I give it a month before they're all back on the greasy spoon egg and bacon sangers, with kebab juice to drink.

hot in the city

Yesterdays soaring temperatures did not hit me until I left air-conditioned-work at 5:30, then stepped outside into the 39 degree smokey heat. I had heard the receptionist telling someone else how there were power-failures and that traffic was bad as traffic lights were out. I found this was the case in Williamstown Road, and when I got home Joe said we had no power. So no aircon, mustnt keep opening the fridge as everything will defrost, no tv, music, microwave or innernet.

We decided to make the room hotter by cooking sausages on the gas top, then headed for the beach with water bottles and boardshorts. Surprisingly a few (hundred) other people had the same idea. The beach and sea was jam packed full of huge people and even huge-er dogs, just waiting to run out of the water and skake all over you. A kind of personalised hyrdronic cooling system i suppose. Our beach is not a designated 'body beautiful' zone, so anyone can just come along and let it all hang out.

There was a family at the beach that had a boat, 5 kids, a newborn staffordshire bull terrier, and then later on we saw a newborn baby. We think the mother must have given birth while we were there. The kids seemed determined that the puppy would swim in the sea, and the poor mite kept being dropped in the sea and immediatly swimming back to shore and running away from the water, only to be yanked up by one of the bin-lids again.

When we got home, the power was back on and the fridge was beeping at us to say it was too warm. The beeping continued for about an hour until we worked out how to turn the beeping feature off.

Today there is talk of power bans , restricting the use of air conditioners to the ill, elderly or pregnant, with $10,000 fines if you are caught cooling down.

Water ban, electric bans, what next?

fame at last

Our house is in Belle Magazine this month. Havent seen it yet, have you?

Joe got a copy and just emailed me about it. He got back yesterday and we had a belated christmas. I made him stay awake nearly all day to beat the jet-lag. He tried to get me drunk on mini liquer chocolates.

Did you know: there are 800 species of birds in Australia, 50% unique to Aus.

bananas and ants

breaking news, bananas down to $4 a kilo in australia. whoho. for those overseas readers wondering what the fuss is about, 80 percent of Australia's banana crops were wiped out during Cyclone Larry last year, which caused banana prices to go up to $15/kilo at one stage. i prefer strawberries tho.

i woke up this morning to find ants all over the bedroom floor. in the hallway too. so i braved the 30 degree heat to buy ant-go-away-stuff (and the luring bananas), when i got back all the ants had gone! where are they? did they see me coming?

A Foreign Lyrics Show

I have been inspired by Craggles sending me a copy of the French dance track Fleur De Saison to do a Not The Real McCoy special show with songs containing foreign lyrics. Dunno whether I'll do it this week or next week, or whether the whole thing is a bad idea.... but I reckon I've got stuff in French, German (Rammstein, duh!), Spanish, Greek, Gaellic, heck even broken English.