Howard Photoshop challenge

Howard on dry dam bed

George Michaelson has thrown down the gauntlet for aspiring Photoshop/GIMP manglers with this photo taken from the Smage.

Anomalous has already responded with this great Mad Max III one.

A lone warrior searching for his destiny...a tribe
of lost children waiting for a hero... in a world battling to survive,
they face a woman determined to rule.

We want more!

The Chaser recording

We went to see the recording of this week's Chaser. Now it's time for me to ruin all the jokes for you. Just kidding.

Was quite fun, though they kept us waiting around in the lobby for an hour, which isn't polite. Interesting to see how they recorded two different intros in order to comment (or not) on a story that should happen tomorrow but might not happen.

Quite a fun, free night out if you're footloose on a Tuesday night. The "WOE Tickets" link on their site becomes available when there are (free) tickets. Also they seem to announce them on their RSS feed.

What are they smoking at Channel Ten?

Was just watching a Simpsons episode from earlier in the week and caught a promo Channel Ten ran for Lost in Translation. The promo started with "One of the funniest movies in recent years". WTF? It's hardly a comedy, and any comedic elements are vastly overshadowed by the other themes of this excellent film. Yeesh. Did they even watch the film?

SMH shows some tact

Sydney Morning Herald shows Tsunami story
with Monster rides teaser for story about big wave surfing

The Herald has shown its tact with this teaser about "Big wave surfing" alongside the story "Tsunami: 'move to higher ground'".

Chutzpah is...

I figure the word "chutzpah", as mentioned in Mediawatch last night, probably isn't the most familiar term to Australian gentiles. It's a fantastic word so I thought I'd start a series of examples. Feel free to send in your examples. BTW, it's always been pronounced "hoos-pah" or "hoots-pah" by my Jewish friends, rather than how you'd expect from the spelling.

Chutzpah is... honking your horn at the kid riding across the pedestrian crossing on his BMX, while driving an SUV with two kids in the back and talking on a hand-help mobile phone. (Spotted this morning on Erskineville Road.)

Green lightning?

Last night there was a huge storm in Sydney. Given how hot it was all weekend, that's not terribly surprising. Was a pretty cool storm, going from about 23:00 until well after midnight, as it kept swirling around. We'd be just dropping off to sleep when another crack of thunder would shake the house.

Anyway, we're sitting out the front watching the cool lightning displahy when both Holly and I spotted a very bright, green glow to the North-West. It was green lightning, but perhaps behind clouds.

Searching online, I've found other references to green lightning, but nothing explaining what causes it. Then again, it seems the causes of ordinary lightning are, amazingly, still open for debate, let along exotic types of lightning.

So anyone know anything about green lightning?

As classified "Pornography/Sex,Entertainment" by the Australian government

Apparently my blog is blocked on a federal government department's network as "Category: Pornography/Sex,Entertainment (Global)".

Besides the mis-categorization, it just goes to show the futility of filtering web sites based on the URL or domain. Kristy read my blog via some kind of aggregation, probably one of the planet aggregators on which my blog appears. Handily side-stepping the classification.

Kristy is being coy about which government department, probably for good reason, but I'd love to put "As classified Pornography/Sex,Entertainment by the Department of..." on my site.

Rimming sugar?

Browsing through the homewares store at the bottom of the building I work in, I spotted a product like this.

Not the kind of thing I'd normally associate with "homewares" but I guess whatever makes it taste better eh?