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Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Saturday 14 June 2003 (Day View)

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14.06.2003 – Saturday 14 June – The Core

1:30am

• I am home. It is rather coldish outside. 11.4° according to the chaps on the BITS IRC channel.

Laugh and the world laughs with you

• There were two girls and a guy sitting in front of me in the train home, along with perhaps 15 or so other people in the carriage. The girls were from Griffith uni, the guy was an old friend who hadn’t seen them since school. They had been in town celebrating one of their birthdays. Everything was normal, people staring out the window making sure they don’t make eye contact with anyone else, and then the trio began laughing. Funnily enough, they were each laughing about something different. They laughed and laughed, and then one of them started with this noise – one of those noises only someone who is gasping for air and laughing uncontrollably can make. It was quite loud, and quite indescribable. Everyone in the carriage grinned, and one by one began to laugh. Some just laughed a little, trying to remain aloof; others slapped their thighs and laughed until they cried. We all laughed from Roma Street to Park Road, and then someone handed around some chocolate bars, the guards came, and a few people took some crazy photos. The atmosphere was broken, and people chatted and grinned for the rest of the journey.

The Core

• I caught a train into Silas’s station and walked up to his place. The kerosene heater was nice. I spent a half hour or so there, had a cup of tea and a chat, and headed back to the station to catch a train onto Roma Street, which I did. From there I caught a train to Indooroopilly, after asking the station-kiosk-with-darkly-tinted-windows man what time the last connecting train home would be, and walked up to the Indooroopilly Megaplex. Alas, Brisbane is such a small pokey city that everything shuts early, so I had to eat a dire very-few-veggies burger from Hungry Jacks. I guess I know why he’s hungry. I also made the usual mistake of buying a so-called “shake”, chemically strawberry. There were quite a few people at the cinema, with three thirty or longer queues waiting for seating. I sat in the second row from the front, having decided that sitting in the front row was not only stupid, but crazy, idiotic and unhealthy as well. The Core is yet another apocalyptic movie in the style of all those aliens, meteors, tidal waves, viruses, and large lizards from a few years back. In fact, I believe they’ve all read the same “Dramatically Destroying American Landmarks for Dummies” book, and are all members of the New York Suspenseful Movie Writers Association. Because they were going inside the earth, rather than out in space, they had to add a few little bits here and there, but most of the movie was the standard American hero footage that I’ve seen so many times before. Why can’t Hollywood make good movies? There’s so many books out there just crying out to be adapted to film, books that have both a plot and some cunning, and Hollywood continues to follow the same boring formulas used so many times before. Moviemaking has come to the stage now that realistic special effects are no longer amazing – they’re simply expected. I can see that reality is usually boring, but why can’t Hollywood manage to create a film that is both realistic and suspenseful, dramatic and exciting? Kiss of the Dragon remains my favourite action movie, as it has managed to do this. Having said all that, I quite enjoyed The Core; I needed an unashamedly crowd-pleaser movie like this.

2:30am

• The good chaps in #BITS have informed me it’s now 7.6°, centigrade of course. I dislike naming units after people – it merely complicates matters. Perhaps that’s why my fingers are cold. The weather today has been quite nice, clear and not too cold. I slept in, dozing and refusing to get out of bed until Silas phoned.

5:30am

• Oh dear. Bedtime. I’ve been making my journal site accessible. Adding hidden things that no one will see unless they’ve got CSS disabled or using a text-only browser or something similar.

Comment by azure – Sunday 15 June 2003, 3:14 AM

  mmm 7.6c, aka 280.76K. mmmm absolute zero.

Comment by io – Sunday 15 June 2003, 3:32 AM

  Temp at 03:30 - 7.4°C

Comment by io – Sunday 15 June 2003, 3:45 AM

  Temp at 03:30 - 8.0°C. I should sleep.

Comment by io – Sunday 15 June 2003, 3:46 AM

  oops, I think the first "03:30" was supposed to be a 03:00.

Comment by Ned – Sunday 15 June 2003, 3:58 AM

  Sleep is for the intelligent.