Mildly diverting wee re-mix of the Dalek-Cyberman stand off – watch for a giggle…

What’s a Puggle, you ask, and well might you! I was as confused as you when my lovely friend Madeleine sent me an email entitled, simple, “Puggle”.

What is this “puggle”, I asked myself. Is it some sort of melange of a Harry Potter concept and a plush toy from the 80s? (who remembers Popples? I loved those things!) No, as I understand it, a Puggle is the collective noun for a group of baby platypus or echidna – a litter of kittens, a Puggle of baby platypus.

As it turns out, one such puggle was uncovered unwittingly by road workers not long ago, an though I feel terribly sorry for the darling puggle, getting turfed out of bed so unceremoniously, I challenge you to look at this photo and not go “aaawwwww”…

Many thanks to Maddy for this gorgeous photo.

You may have noticed a slight change to my blog recently.

It all started when my parents moved to Africa. My poor parents, accustomed as they were to high speed internet back home in Australia, are suffering under intermittent powercuts and dial up internet.

My mum has SO many photos to share with us, of baby elephants, house lizards, warthogs, and life in general in Kenya, but sending them as group emails has proved to be less than satisfactory. So I set her up with a blog all of her very own, hosted as a subdirectory right here on likethespider.com, check it out!

 She's pleased as punch, but me being the tinkerer that I am, I had to change the blog from the wordpress classic look (kinda boring if you ask me) to something with a little more va va voom. Her site is still a work in progress, but it did get me looking at all the new themes out there and I'm a bit excited at some of the ace designs which are coming out of the wordpress community.

Blogging has never been easier using wordpress, and I'm totally excited by it all.

When I happened upon the theme that you're viewing on now (or at least, the grey-blue theme at the time of writing), I was smitten by the double sidebar and the random photo capability. Every time you load the page, you get a wee trip down memory lane, through China, through two tours with Mark Saul and his band of merry men (and maiden!), and around Europe! I love it! Expect to see this site shift around a bit over the next few months, as I poke and prod my way through all the different functionality which is coming out of Wordpress.

One thing that amuses me is the sidebar item which will allow you to translate the page into different languages using a Google Translator.  I've used these translators before, they're not the most reliable of things (reading the French was a little like gobbledigook, but context is key) but hopefully it will help out my French and Chinese friends get an idea of what my life is about these days. 

If anyone has any suggestions about how I can improve things, do drop a comment in the box!

WARNING – THIS POST CONTAINS CASINO ROYALE SPOILERS

Finally, the Brosnan-Bond years are over

I went with the lovely ThursdayWeld and ErnieMay to watch Casino Royale today. Now, I’d love to go for an entire blog entry talking about how much I loved the scripting, the editing, the music, the story line, the way they finally catered to their female audience by showing a little more heart from our favorite Superhero-Spy.

I’d really love to talk about all that for a whole blog entry. Honestly, I would. But I can’t. And I’ll tell you why:

Daniel Craig has about the most perfect arse known to man.

His face has a profile which I’ve heard accurately described as that of an Easter Island Statue.

ThursdayWeld, ErnieMay and I all agree, despite the eyelids which make him look like he suffers from permanent hay-fever (always a little red around the edges), his eyes are the most perfect blue we’ve ever seen:

OK, so perhaps they gave him blue contact lenses throughout the movie, but I care not, because…

Did I mention his arse? Or his chest, or (omg) his arms?

The man is, quite simply, the most perfect-looking Bond I have EVER seen. Even the baddie mentioned it during a surprisingly amusing torture scene – Bond is tied naked (!) to a chair, and our baddie stalks around him, saying “so, you like to keep in shape, Mister Bond?” ThursdayWeld made a comment which had me laughing even as I was hiding my face from the inevitable torture to come – “He so wants to shag Bond!” Can’t say I particularly blame him…

You know it’s a good Bond flick when they manage to make Bond cool, even during what is obviously an utterly excruciating and humiliating torture. I mean, it wasn’t like he was staunchly NOT reacting to the torture – he was screaming his head off. We all had our hands over our faces during the torture scene, it was horrid, but all of a sudden Bond says something to make us laugh, and we see the hero even more through the screams of agony.

The script was written with simplicity in mind, despite the inevitable twists and turns which go with any Filme-Bond. And I appreciated the way the story was obviously put together to bring in the female audience – without giving anything more away, the shower scene (no, it’s not what you think, get your minds out of the gutter!) really softened that hard Bond shell.

There were very few fancy gadgets, which gave the whole thing a brilliantly raw feeling. And there were blissfully few car chase scenes – that tired old theme makes me yawn at every action movie made in the past 30 years. I really hate car chase scenes.

No, this movie was about the man, the girl, the baddie and the card game. It was about a Bond who’s just a little more dangerous and ragged around the edges (the movie is based on the original book by Ian Fleming, and purports to take place *before* any of the other Bonds), but who still manages to make us laugh or smile in more subtle ways.

And there was … *drum roll* NO PIERCE BROSNAN!!! Words can hardly describe how much I dislike that actor. I lamented when it was announced that Brosnan was taking up the mantle of Bond, I sneered at every Bond movie which came out during the Brosnan years (slimy man, always gives me the impression that he’s a closet child molester – ugh!).

And then when they announced Daniel Craig, I danced the dance of joy. Not just because I thought he was haaaarrrt (I didn’t even know who he was back then), but because anything after Brosnan has to be some sort of step up.

And oh my, is Craig ever a step up!

Go see Casino Royale, my friends. Don’t hesitate another day. You will be pleasantly surprised.

Maaan, I LOVED the movie Space Camp when I was a kid. I lost track of how many times I watched that movie. I totally wanted to BE Joaquin Phoenix’s character (though back then Joaquin was known as “Leaf”), cause it was about the coolest thing I could imagine, going into space as a member of a space shuttle crew. Like so many children of the 80s, I was kinda obsessed with space, which I think lead to my affection for Science Fiction. I always wanted to be an astronaut, but my maths was never good enough to consider applying. Oh, OK, I was always too lazy to work out how to apply. Yeesh, get off my back already!

Aaaaanyway. One of the people on my forum (by the name of maiii) works for NASA, involved in the shuttle mission control thingumie-doofah (that’s a technical term, I’ll have you know). He’s been keeping us all up to speed on all the latest Space Shuttle news, and took some happy snaps the other day of Discovery as it was being lifted onto its big rocket doovalackies (sorry, I should really stop using such technical language on you guys), ready for the upcoming launch to the International Space Station. Check it:

I love the way there’s the little slot in the wall to accommodate the tail. Kinda sweet.

Getting ready to lift it.

Lifting it a bit…

A bit more…

Now THAT’S what I call a crane!!

I totally recommend you go check out the other photos in the album, they’re just magnificent!

Go to Mick’s album

Thinking of buying a place? Look no further than Golden Valley, Arizona!

So my “sponsor” (as they prefer to be known) has sent me another link to talk about, for some realtor in Arizona. Kinda hard to talk about a dreadfully designed website, selling just a few products, but here I go.

Kingman Town & Country Realtor, in Mohave County, Arizona, seems to sell properties “of all sizes”, but the only property they have listed on their own domain is something that looks like something out of a roadside scene in From Dusk Till Dawn – check out the photo:

This realtor has possibly the worst website I’ve seen for a professional firm. Ever. Even the property management firm I worked for in Edinburgh had a better website, and their technical development was in about the Jurassic Age. This strikes me as a pity, cause you’d think that it’d actually be kinda fun to look – ranch properties in Arizona…

Oop, OK, so I found some more listings, just on another domain. Gawd, sometimes I wish that I was living in Arizona, just for house prices – there’s a 3 bedroom house there for around £25,000. You can’t even buy a GARAGE in Edinburgh for that amount!

I’ve been hankering after buying my own place for a while now. I feel like I’m at an age where it should be done, but my salary is certainly not at a point where it COULD be done, at least not in this town. Edinburgh property prices are through the roof, and it doesn’t help that the banks are willing to loan more and more, which pushes the prices higher and higher. Sometimes I think I’d move back to Melbourne just for a nice house all of my very own.

I so want a cat, and a garden. My very own small garden which I can make my own, and a cat to hide amongst the foliage. My bedroom has to do for now (practically every surface not at ground level is covered in potplants), though my flatmate won’t stand for a cat. This realtor and his cheap-by-Edinburgh-standards properties is making me want to move to Arizona…

*sigh*

From this week’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip

Harriet: I don’t even know what the sides ARE in the culture wars.

Matt: Well, your side hates my side because you think we think you’re stupid. And my side hates your side because we think you’re stupid. (said in jest… Many a true word spoken and all.)

A little distilled, losing a LOT of the essence, but that’s about the gist of it, as far as I’m concerned. I’m on Matt’s side, by the way.