Owing to a couple of major australian clothing and homewares shops having new-financial-year sales of great magnitude, and the generosity of Erins, and the general madness which ensues when huge sales and a genuine need for stuff combine with a vague fascination for a new thing… this sentence got much too long. The clothing thing: it is fixed. I have a couple of magnificent new pairs of pants and a whole bunch of new Van Heusen shirts of much niftiness.
Now all I need is to somehow get enough sleep, and I will actually look something like a professional when I’m at work! Wow!

We watched War of the Worlds a-la Spielberg and Cruise on Tuesday night. While it did a number of special effects rather well, it still managed to suck quite a lot. Cruise played his generic anti-hero, with no respect at all to the H.G.Wells story, and Spielberg made vague almost flippant references to it through the naming and arrangement of a few characters and narrative signposts, then leapt wholeheartedly into the worst part of the original story: the it-was-all-alright-in-the-end-because-of-bacteria,-three-cheers-for-science ending. Eugh! Blech!
The sound effects were particularly good in my opinion. The noises of the intial ‘landings’ and all the many sounds made by the tripods were just right. I have decided that I have a real thing for some specific sound-effects. Those of you with a similar propensity will recall the hair-raising noise made by the ghost-zapping backpacks in Ghostbusters when they were first powered up. There’s a similarity to the alien ships, and also to the noise of a really big capacitor charging up. Thorne likes…

Anyhoo. That’s all the even semi-interesting things I have to say for today. Double Trouble is getting steadily closer, but there still isn’t anything particularly newsworthy to report. Soon!