Misc

Holy fucking shit. It’s like a machine-run dystopia. The second and third shots, in particular, looks like something from the future scenes in T2 or the Matrix.

Apparently it’s something to do with coal mining.

I got my first motorcycle when I was, oh, 12. This means I’ve been riding or driving motor vehicles for 20 years now. In that time the roster has included an assortment of bikes, cars, tractors, and trucks and my only, uh, incidents have been (a) someone else’s fault, or (b) teenage male stupidity. The latter more or less finished at about 19.

When Jodi asked me to help them shift by piloting their borrowed van over their inhospitable new drive she had presumably divined that I was a farm boy in a previous life; while it’s been a while since I was running heavy machinery around Taranaki hill country, I allowed that I could give it lash.

It turned out that the laden van didn’t agree with the new drive. Reversing up (since, at that stage, they didn’t have access to the turning area at the end of the drive) generated Bad Smells from the clutch. After we unloaded, I suggested to Allyn that we might have to hump stuff up the drive from the street, unless the van’s owner wanted to tell us that bad smells and such were part of the normal operation of the van. At this point another helper suggested that perhaps I’d left the handbrake on.

Apparently the look on my face was quite… expressive.

You may have heard that Santa has a sleigh drawn by reindeer. Recent aquisitions in Christmas chocolates have exposed this as a fraud.

Rather, it emerges that Santa is pulled by rabbits: