It is just as cool as I remembered it.  Lots of cool science, marvellous improvisation, awesome explosions, super evil baddies and an un-killable nemesis.  Of course, for the most part, everyone has the typical 80s clothing and hairstyles.  Yes, Mac does have a mullet in the later seasons, but in the first season he looks pretty good.  And his clothing is classic enough that it would still look good today (well maybe if he had better shoes).

So far, I’m up to season 4 and I’m loving every minute of it.

OK, technically it’s not the same series.  A different company has partnered with LucasArts to make a new game.  They say it isn’t the long-awaited MI5, but instead takes place after the (nonexistent) MI5.  Also, rather than being a monolithic game, it’s a series of 5 episodes.  They are released monthly, starting from August this year.  Two have been released to date, with 3 more to go.

The graphics are somewhat better than the last two, but the controls are a bit strange.  None of the 3D MI games ever quite sussed out how to control a 3D character effectively, and this one is no exception.  The strange drag-to-move interface is only a minor annoyance though – the same quirkiness and humour is still there, and that’s what makes MI so much fun.  It also seems rather easier than the previous MI games in that there is usually some logic to what you have to do in order to achieve a certain goal, although figuring out some of the details is still a bit tricky.  It’s definitely a good way to while away a few hours.

Tonight’s class seems a huge step up from the previous level.  The tutor spoke in Spanish almost the entire time, and there were lots of things that other students seemed to know that I’d never come across before (like words for animals and fabrics).  However, I’m not too badly off – there were a few others there who seemed to know even less than I do.

Tonight was mostly about reviewing the basics – greetings, numbers and letters, introductions and basic personal information, the verb ‘to be’ and conjugations for a few of the most common regular and irregular verbs.  At one point, we were going around the class describing our personalities and one guy says ‘Soy caliente’.  Caliente means hot in Spanish.  He was trying to say he’s hot-headed and impulsive but we laughed a bit because we thought he was saying that he’s hot (as in attractive).  Turns out that if you use caliente in that context, it actually means ‘I’m horny’.  The tutor was too embarrassed to translate it out loud but he wrote some of the letters on the board until we got the idea.

Then he was talking about how someone would refer to themselves as being hot, as in attractive, and made me rate the guy as to how attractive he was, asking if he was a 60 or an 85 and saying he wouldn’t move on with the class until I’d given him a rating.   I said cien (100) and everyone laughed and the guy made a great show of thanking me.  When it came my turn, I described myself as optimistic, and everyone laughed when the tutor said that my rating the guy 100 was an example of that.

We have to do a regular writing exercise to practice our sentence composition skills.  Currently we only know how to speak in present tense, so we have to keep a diary describing our daily activities in present tense only.  Here’s my first week’s exercise (I have no guarantee that this is in any way correct):

Yo vivo en un apartamento en el centro.  Me levanto a las siete y media todos los días.  Mi trabajo es muy cerca de mi apartamento.  Por la mañana enseño en la universidad.  Hay ochenta y ocho estudiantes in mi clase.  Por la tarde trabajo en mi computadora.  Por la noche, mis amigos y yo bebemos tequila.

My intended translation is this:

I live in an apartment in the city centre.  I get up at 7:30 every day. My work is very close to my apartment.  In the morning I teach in the university.  There are 88 students in my class.  In the afternoon, I work at my computer.  In the evening, my friends and I drink tequila.

My love of tequila is a running joke in the Spanish class, and the tutor makes frequent reference to it.  Another student is travelling to South America to meet girls, and so the tutor often makes reference to him being sad because he’s single and mentioning him finding a girlfriend.

1. Exam marking.  I spent most of the first part of November eyeballs deep in marking and grading.
2. Finishing my thesis.  The last part of November and the first two weeks of December were devoted to thesis work.  I wrote one third of my thesis in that two week period and submitted it to my supervisor on December 15th.  There are still one or two rounds of revision before I formally submit, but it’s essentially done.
3. Moving house.  As most of you would have gathered from Stephen’s blog post, I moved into a new apartment on December 16th.  It took a while to get everything sorted, with furniture to come from my brother’s place, some stuff from Waiheke and having to buy some new furniture.  
4. Christmas & New Year.  I spent a few days unplugged over on Waiheke for Christmas, and then got stuck into prepping for a series of New Year parties.
5. Playing games, reading books, watching TV and other normal time-wasters.  Having given up an awful lot of leisure activities in order to spend time on my thesis, now that it is over I have been indulging.  Been watching a Burn Notice marathon, reading books and playing GTA: Vice City Stories.

Sometime this week or next, my supervisor should be getting back to me with suggestions for rewriting and revising my thesis.  I will then have something to procrastinate and regular blog posts should resume.

The costumes were great, the dancing was good, and everyone had a fantastic ass. Seriously, both males and females had nice asses. I’m not really an ass person, but it was noticable. Clearly ballet dancing does something to your ass to make it look great.

I thought the fighting scenes could have used a little bit more realism, look a little bit more like fighting than dancing, but they were ok. The fake blood was nice and effective, especially when Romeo slits the other guy’s throat. Juliet could have used a little bit at the end though when she supposedly stabs herself and then you see her untouched white dress.

The death scenes early on were very long and drawn out, especially Mercutio’s. But then, this is Shakespeare I guess – people take pages and pages of dialog before they finally shut up and die.

The ’sex’ scene was pretty good – both of them dancing only in their underwear. My sister had a few critiques of Romeo’s choice of underwear design, but it wasn’t bad at all.

The corpse dancing scene was also great – where Romeo dances with Juliet while she’s unconscious after taking the sleeping potion. The way he is able to dance with her while her completely limp is very spectacular.

I think my opinion is slightly coloured by the fact that I saw Cinderella on Ice in the same theatre the week before. Compared to that, the ballet seems so incredibly slow. Romeo slowly lifts Juliet up and holds her still for a few seconds. Everyone gasps. But I’m thinking how in the same length of time Prince Charming lifted up Cinderella and spun her three times around the stage.

But basically, I did enjoy it. I don’t think it was exceptional value for money at $85, but I would be willing to go to another one. Just not very often.

Cinderella on Ice was performed by the Imperial Ice Stars, who are basically a bunch of mostly Russian ex Olympic and World Champion ice dancers or figure skaters. I happen to love watching ice dancing and skating, so despite some people seeming to think anything on ice is crap, I was really looking forward to it.

And it indeed was awesome. The costumes were great, the music was good and the skating was incredible. It really was amazing to see them doing such great lifts and turns on such a small stage, only a fraction of the size of a normal skating rink.

There were a few issues though. The handsome prince was extremely gay. He straightened up for a while during the middle of the performance, then gayed up again towards the end. There was also gay couple at the ball , which was quite cute. It probably didn’t help that we’d seen a clip on TV about it the night before in which they interviewed the male lead skater.

Breathless interviewer: You must really like skating with all these beautiful women?
Handsome Prince skater: I like skating.

Another interesting aspect was that we had quite a bit of trouble figuring out the story. We were too cheap to fork out $20 for a programme, but we figured we wouldn’t need it anyway. I remember the Cinderella story, and my sister reads the story about 20 times a day (she’s an early childhood teacher) so we thought we’d be OK. But neither of us remembered the bit where Cinderella is dancing in Swan Lake and takes over the lead role when the lead ballerina cannot dance. Nor did we remember the gypsy man and woman who appear throughout the performance in lieu of the fairy godmother. We were also quite unclear about some guy who appeared to be Cinderella’s father, but must have been a bit of an asshole to let his new wife treat his daughter the way she did. Still, we could figure out the gist of it.

The other funny part was the clearly only a small section of the audience had any clue about skating. They gasped and clapped at what looked (to most of us) fairly ordinary lifts or poses. Whereas the rest of us were blown away by fast spins that are probably technically very easy.

In summary, I enjoyed it very much, and am looking forward to the next ‘on ice’ event I can attend.

If you want a little peek at what we saw, here’s some YouTube:

Everything about it is brilliant – the acting is awesome, the characters are amazingly complex, the setting and costumes are great and the writing is just unbelievably good.

It tells the story of the Deadwood mining camp during the gold rush in the Black Hills of Dakota Territory in 1876. The three seasons that were filmed show the camp growing up, settling down (somewhat), establishing laws and battling big business in the form of a mining magnate who wants to take over the town.

One of the things it initially got publicity for was the amount of swearing. The producers have tried to be as historically accurate as possible with everything. However, one place where it breaks down is with the swearing. Back then, words like damn, darn, hell, christ, jesus and so on were the most appalling of profanity, with goddamn being the height of obscenity. Today they sound laughably mild. So in Deadwood, they swapped those words for modern words with similar impact.

Thus, the characters in Deadwood regularly say fuck, motherfucker, bastard, asshole, prick, cocksucker, bitch and cunt. The swearing is so pervasive that a site has actually gone to the trouble of calculating the number of fucks per minute: 1.56 fucks per minute across the whole three seasons. Here’s a sample of all the swearing from one episode:

How can you not like a program were the towns citizens are called hoopleheads and the favourite epithet is cocksucker?

My brother is in No. 6 Squadron (the helicoptor squadron) at the moment.  He works on the Navy’s Sea Sprite helicoptors, as well as the Air Force’s Iroquois & NH90s. 

Both the Sea Sprites and the Iroquois did displays that showcased their speed & manoeverability and the sheer skill of the pilots.

Most of the flying displays were of the fixed wing planes though, including a segment from the warbirds.  The military section included one of the six P3 Orions and one of the five Hercules.   The Hercs are awesome.  Unless you’ve seen it, you wouldn’t believe what a short distance of runway they require to take off and land.

One of my favourite planes is the Boeing 757 which did several low altitude and low speed flybys.

While obviously not quite so nimble as the Red Checkers or some of the other planes, it is amazing to watch the pilots throw it around the sky.  I always marvel that planes that size can fly at all, let alone how it can manage the angles & turns they were forcing on it.

Another highlight was the Royal Australian Air Force’s F-111 fighter jet.   My brother gave us all airplugs because it was fucking LOUD.  It was way too fast for me to get a photo.   It did a very spectacular dump and burn, dumping fuel and igniting it with its afterburners as it flew past.

If you want to see a dump & burn, this YouTube video shows an F-111 doing a dump and burn at the Amberley Air Show in Oz in 2004.

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream–and not make dreams your master,
If you can think–and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings–nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And–which is more–you’ll be a Man, my son!

By Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936).