Swordfish. What a crap movie. Computer clichés galore, not to mention that scene where Halle Berry earned US$250,000 per breast. Did it add anything at all to the story? Hell no. Was it a ploy to get teenage boys into the cinema?
Looks like it to me.

Saturday Night Fever. Second in the weekend’s Travolta Festiva. Much better. Funny in places, dramatic and traumatic in others, groovy in most of it. And of course I giggled right through the opening sequence, remembering The Goodies.

It started with a funny noise. A funny noise, a kind of throbbing, and a little extra smoke. So I took the car in on Monday to get looked at, to find out why it was doing it. "Oil", they said - "lack of oil". Ah. Okay. Wish I’d checked the oil more regularly. Then they said "lack of oil caused by a valve problem". Oh. "Which will cost $430 to fix, because we’ll have to pull the car apart to get at it."

D’oh! All right Mr Mechanic, here’s my car, you do your work.

Then they said, "You know how we said it was a valve problem? Well it’s not just that. It’s the head gasket". The head gasket. Uh oh. I have very little idea what goes on under the bonnet of my car, and even less idea what the head gasket is or does. But this sounded bad. And expensive. "It’s going to have to be replaced", they said. "It’ll cost $950". Not because the head gasket is tremendously expensive, you understand, but because it’s deep down in the bowels of the engine. Argh!

D’oh! All right Mr Mechanic, I’ll make sure the credit card’s up for it, you do your work.

They rang back this afternoon. "We were wrong", they said. "Your head gasket is fine". Ah. Well, that sounds good, but why would they ring to tell me good news? Hell no. They hadn’t. "When we were pulling your engine apart, we found what caused the oil leak. It’s a big problem, you’d better come down and take a look."

I felt like I’d been asked by the doctor to come and visit a dying relative. I went down there. The guy ushered me into a darkened spot at the back of the workshop. There was my car, stripped down, bits everywhere. He showed me what they’d found. A crack in the cylinder shaft thingy. Pretty much irreparable.

D’oh! All right Mr Mechanic, what are my options? The main one is getting a reconditioned replacement engine. Yes, a whole engine. I asked what the ballpark cost would be. "About $3000".

THREE THOUSAND DOLLARS? I could almost buy a new second hand car for that! Three fucking grand? I DON’T REMEMBER THIS BEING IN THE FUCKING PLAN!!

The guy could see my disappointment. "There is an alternative", he said. "It sometimes works". $30 for a bottle of stuff which may seal the crack. May. No-brainer to try that, right? Uh uh. Not when you take into account the $1100 or so cost of the work to put it in, put the engine back together, let it run for a week, then pull the engine apart to flush the stuff out, then put it back in again. And all without any guarantee that it’ll work.

$1100 versus $3000. "It’s a lot if you weren’t thinking about upgrading your car". Yep. Never were truer words spoken. I hadn’t been thinking about upgrading. Well, not before today.

I do believe that my long standing belief about cars being a money pit has come true.

So, now I have some thinking time. To decide what I’m going to do next. You know, I’ve been thinking of buying a bicycle…

The moral of this story: check your oil regularly. Go do it now. Go on!

The landlady was predictably shocked at the $330 cost of the window repair last weekend. Well, that’s her fault - if she’d had it fixed when I told her it was cracked, it wouldn’t have been so expensive. Despite her original false claims that I had cracked it, I refused to pay, and she backed down and said she’d claim it from her insurance. After getting off the phone, I went and cracked out a Tom Petty CD and played "I Won’t Back Down" loudly.

My car has been making some funny noises, so I took it in to the car place today to get it looked at.

This involved driving in peak hour traffic along Glen Eira Road, which is not something I do very often. In fact the only times I do it is when I’m taking the car to get looked at. There are some nuts on the road at 8:15 in the morning, let me tell you. A few of them seem to think the bike lane is their personal overtaking lane.

The funny noises? Because there’s no oil in the engine. D’oh! No oil in the engine? Some valve has gone kaput, and replacement is going to shortly set me back about $400. Ouch. Damn cars, they’re a money pit.

Tinka’s New Dress - deep, multilayered,
thought-provoking. Wasn’t sure what to expect, but damn, this was brilliant.

After lunch I took a walk up to state Parliament House. A
blanket of flowers covers the steps, left there by people in memory of the Bali bombing. Judging from the notes, most had been left there by strangers, rather than relatives of victims. Above, blowing in the wind, the flags are still at half mast. People were lining up to sign a condolence book.

Then I walked up a block and found a bunch of blocked-off streets and abicycle lap race in progress. Cool stuff.

My dad told me about thebiography of Lillian Roxon, who was the author of the world’s first encyclopaedia of rock music. The biography which includes a bit about him, because he knew her. I considered buying it, but then I reada review on the SMH web site, which said it wasn’t the world’s best biography. Bearing in mind that it’s hardback only, and $36, I might wait and watch out for it in the discount bins! Still, she was obviously an interesting character - apparently Germaine Greer dedicated The Female Eunich to her.

I went down to Reader’s Feast, and it’s true… my dad is in the book. Most of page 78 is about him, editing a Queensland university newspaper, engaging in a spat with the Brisbane Courier-Mail, and introducing Roxon to one of the key players who would later give her a foothold in the world of journalism.

Cool.

I had problems with windows this week, both virtual (geeky) and actual (non-greeky).

On Tuesday I decided to install some firewall software. With the current Bugbear mayhem, and various other nasties out there, and given my computer frequently gets left on and connected to the Net, I thought it was probably prudent to have some kind of protection. I’ve usedZoneAlarm before with a reasonable amount of success, and installed it. It all worked fine. Except for the fact that neither my web browser or my web server (which I used for work.. you know, work, that activity which may not be your favourite way of passing the time, but which does bring in the bucks so you have the money to undertake other, more enjoyable activities) would function.

I wrestled with it for a while. Quite a while. I won’t go into the various methods of wrestling that I tried, suffice to say that none of them got me very far, and I ended up re-installing Windows on the computer. This wasn’t an entirely bad thing, as it gave me the chance to clear out a lot of the gunk that had accumulated. The computer certainly seems to run faster now. Just goes to show you, the best windows are clean windows.

On Sunday afternoon, a storm came over. Lots of wind, lots of rain. Good stuff, as long as you’re inside at the time. There’s a window in my place which has been cracked for years. It had little cracks when I moved in. Over time the cracks grew. I’d hassled my landlady about it, and she had stalled in getting it fixed, partly because she is of the opinion that it was broken after I moved in. I would love to dig out a condition report that proves it wasn’t, but I can’t find it.

Anyway, the storm passed over. And a little later, I happened to go into that room. Oh dear. Glass everywhere. Big scary shards of glass, little sharp deadly pointy smaller bits of glass. Glass on the curtains, glass on the bedside table, glass on the floor.

Unable to get hold of the landlady or any of her dodgy workmen, I let my fingers do the walking through the
Yellow Pages, and found a glazier who would come out and take a look. By this time it was getting dark and cold and wet again, but full credit to him, he spent about an hour and a half dangling from a ladder in these less than ideal conditions, getting the rest of the broken glass taken out, pulling apart the window frame, measuring and cutting new glass, and putting it together. It was a bit of an adventure for me too, as to expedite matters, I helped by handing him tools, holding the ladder so it didn’t blow over in the wind, and even holding onto him through the window while he dangled at angles which I’m sure theWorkCover authority would not be impressed at.

Anyway eventually it was all fixed. I paid him, and now face possibly a bigger battle: that of getting the money back off my landlady.

On the bright side, during the clean up I found $3!

PS. The events in Bali over the weekend have shocked everyone here. It seems now that, alas, Australia (and Indonesia) have their own September 11th.

I watched American Beauty last night. Well, that is, I watched some of it. I’d seen it before. Great movie. And Channel 9 were showing a remarkably enlightened attitude in their broadcast of it, leaving it in wide screen, and more importantly leaving all the swearing intact.

Just a shame the commercials made it go until almost midnight, and I bailed out after the first hour or so, having to do frivolous things like the dishes, ironing shirts, and sleep.