Oh, School's Started

The very fact that i'm typing this shows that i'm still in the holiday mood. No way on this blessed earth can i survive if this was a normal Tuesday and i went online. I would probably be buried under a mountain, anyway, so would be pretty immobile to get anywhere near the computer.

But it isn't a normal Tuesday, coz the teachers are busy handing out marked test papers and corrections. So there isn' any homework - at least for this week.

I got streamyx. On the last day of the holidays. Anybody see the irony in getting broadband exactly before a time where i cannot use it? Hmm....

Well, besides that, the trainee teachers left before the holidays, so its back to the boring teachers that teach (and, in some cases, terrorise) us. Ms Judy even left a passing (snide) remark to remember her by. It was like this:

By the time i had finished the English paper, it was two minutes due to passing it all up. I sheafed through the stack of A4 paper and realised, with a horrible flash of panic, that there was no string to tie everything together. So, with less than 120 seconds left, i foded the top corner and scribbled: No string!!

The paper came back with "Only available in the SPM"

Some people.....

Bible camp....

Organising the teen end of things is crazy..., but so fulfilling. This time i was just overseeing the entire program, making sure no problems came up, and everbody was present. Which meant that indirectly i was responsible for anything that happened to the 98 kids there... But there was a great group of people supporting the program all the way - we even had Amanda back - so it would be really, really bad if it went wrong. Oh, and the games. I'm starting to get very good at managing kids during games ;-)

But boy was it hectic. As usual the (lovely) tired feet feeling is well embued in my feet, after running all around the NPC of the church, but it was running for God!!! And the games... well, Aaron and Jason did the job pretty well, though for some reason i had to take control of the mic, several times (hey, they wanted to play...)

And during the game Stuck In The Mud, we decided at the end to pit the leaders against the kids....all 98 of them!!! It was soooo cool! Only when i was on the ground that i realised that with all the leaders in the arena (including me) there was no one on the mic... So in the end i had to resort to pretty comical sign language. A 'three, two, one' followed by a whistle started the match. Then all the leaders linked hands and charged down at the kids.

The rest was pure screaming fun.

The holidays again

Just typing the title for this post reminds me of some daft quote i picked up somewhere (Time magazine might be the one) and it annoyingly juststicks to my mind.

He said (and this is actually very satarical, forgive me):

When you're young, its school, holidays, school, holidays, school, holidays......
And then when you grow up its work, work, work till you die.

It simplifies life in the twenty first century, yes, but it removes all the beautiful things that makes us who we are. Little rays of joy dotted here and there.

Anyway, i'm not having any success at tackling my homework, which is (ahem, ahem) roughly the size of Mount Kinabalu (not that bad right? At least not Everest ...) and its mainly because of my very short attention span. I just managed to finish the original Warcraft III campaign (Reign of chaos, that is - old fashion me) and Ghost Recon, and am itching to get out and run, cycle, swim, Judo...... anything

Pretty desperate here. Don't want to do Add Maths.

Fan based artwork, but good nevertheless. 

The Saga Is Complete

Or so says the blurp promoting the new star wars film. Face it, Star Wars mania is sweeping across the globe. Flipping through a business magazine, some tax specialist was lamenting the fact that Vader wasn't evil, just an unfortunate victim of circumstance. You know a movie's really made it when the people steorotyped as boring start discussing the film's perks and pitfalls.

Personally i found the third episode disapointing. The fight scenes were overdone, expecting audiences to enjoy watching Anakin killing, killing and, oh yeah, more killing. Count Dooku was eliminated very quickly in the film's opening moments, surprising, considering he sliced off Anakin's arm in the last episode, send Obi Wan flying with impressive Force firing, and distracted Yoda from carving him into popsicles. It was as if 'ol Lucas wanted to kill off all the remaining bad guys and wrap up the movies as fast as possible (hey, he is an 'uncommunicative' director. (whatever that is....)

Okay, so i'm not a loyal Star War's fan. But contrary to the majority of reviews (they said episode 1 and 2 to be lousy, episode 3 great) i found the opposite to be true. The very first Star Wars film was described by a certain film association as the best movie ever made, and many people still agree that Lucas never made anything as good as that one spectacle of beauty. but perhaps it wasn't all that great.

Perhaps it was the fact that Star Wars was part of the childhood of so many people growing up, and that sense of nostalgia blinded them to the true quality of the movies. Run a search online for the movie reviews, and most of them start with "When i was (insert number less than 20) i was greeted with splendid orange text scrolling up the screen and knew life would never be the same again ..." or something to that effect. And a lot of people hated episode 1 and 2, just because it was so different from the first three movies. The design, creatures, and architecture (no more freaky white ships that moved precariously though space) were new and they didn't like it. Why not cut Lucas some slack? He was pushing the boundaries of the Star Wars universe, why hate it?

And now the third episode contained traces of the old movie (notice that the ships progressively look more old-fashioned throughout the movie) and miraculously, BAM! good reviews start streaming in.

Then again i shouldn't be that cynical. The acting is generally good, the sondscape awesome, the special effects so good it had to come from the dark side, and the story one of the best ever told in cinematic history. Now, at least, we can wait for the next big thing to redefine moviemaking.