This picture taken inside Flinders Street Station yesterday reveals what we train users should have guessed all along…

That Connex is aligned with the Dark Side.

I might be losing weight since the weather got cold, what with freezing my arse off every morning. Welcome to winter.

Since my evil scheme to get us out of this cold house by the onset of winter hasn’t come off, yesterday I went and bought an extra heater, to prevent the family freezing to death.

It’s a twin for the smallish column oil heater I got last year. You know, shopping for appliances is so much easier when you know exactly what you want. Walk into shop, see product, tell salesman, hand over cash. Easy. If only all my shopping could be that simple.

A bunch of Year 12 boys from my old school on the train yesterday morning, jabbering away loudly like teenage boys do. “Yeah I got all sorts of weird shit with the co-efficients. Did you put c squared over x?” Then more talk of mathematical terms I couldn’t fathom. Ah, not the usual talk of movies, girls and annoying parents, then.

Stark contrast to the older young persons on the train on the way home, who seemed to be having more the kind of giggling Beavis and Butthead conversation.

I was watching something on TV early on Saturday night when an advert for Grease — The Musical came on. And I pondered to myself that Grease was a fine idea for a movie, but really, was there the need to ram it into the ground by endless adaptions into other formats, such as musicals? Aren’t there enough good ideas out there that the same ones don’t have to be repeated ad nauseaum? I have no intention of seeing Grease — The Musical. I’d rather spend my time and money exploring new and different ideas than the same ones over and over.

And, having come to this conclusion, then I went to see the Hitch Hiker’s Movie. Okay, so much for that idea.

Comparing the movie to earlier renditions is almost inevitable. While I haven’t heard the original radio series, I’ve certainly read the books and watched the TV series numerous times. I also had the LP records for quite some time, which I suspect combined the feel of the radio original with the pace of the TV show. I also played the computer game. My exposure to Hitch Hiker’s, and its influence over the years has been immense. (Towel Day, 2001 — coming up soon on 25th May 2005)

I tried not to be automatically critical of the new movie where it varied from the other versions. Face it, if it introduced nothing new, it would have been deadly dull. But I couldn’t help but spot where bits of dialogue skipped sentences, where they glossed-over some point, or varied it. And I found myself wondering if where they glossed-over something, would a virgin audience still understand it?

It’s important to remember that this was not done entirely without Douglas Adams’ influence, though his input dipped markedly when he died. There were a number of bows to the TV version — the original theme music, a cameo by the original Marvin, and Simon Jones (Arthur in the radio, record and TV versions) as the Magrathean answering machine. There’s even a Dish reference thrown in for good measure, and the League of Gentlemen contributing Vogon voices and Mr Prosser.

Overall, I must say, I enjoyed it. The special effects did everything the TV series ones tried and failed to do. And I think the overall feel of the previous versions was maintained in the movie.

PS. Don’t walk out when the credits start.

PPS. Our chaffeur found a parking spot right slap bang outside the door of the Sun Theatre, which made us all feel like VIPs as we walked out after the movie. The only thing missing was the red carpet.

Dear Blogger users,

I’m increasingly reading blogs through an aggregator. This is a software tool that grabs text from lots of different web pages and puts it in one place for me. It saves me time, and allows me to read more blogs in less time. More people are using them all the time.

To enable this, many blogs have site feeds, using technologies such as RSS and Atom, and provide a link somewhere that people can plug into their aggregator to read it that way. But most Blogger sites don’t have this turned on by default. If you use Blogger and haven’t already done it, make the time to switch it on — the instructions are here — it should only take a couple of minutes, and (if it’s what you want) it’ll make it easier for people to stay up to date with your blog.

I can see trouble brewing. They’re not saying so in the adverts yet, but Star Wars: Revenge Of The Sith has gained an M rating from the Office of Film and Literature Classification.

Unlike MA, this is not a legal restriction on kids under 15 seeing it, just a recommendation. But it may cause ripples in my house, where we have a well-established rule that G and PG-rated are okay, but anything higher is out. The kids understand and respect that, that they’ll have to wait until they’re older to see those programmes and films.

But this is Star Wars, dammit, the final chapter. I know Lucas said a while back that it was darker, but kids everywhere will be wanting to see it. Isaac in fact got invited to a screening with a bunch of friends, two days after the premiere. He’ll be 10 by then. Obviously I haven’t seen it yet, but knowing where the bar is for M-rated violence, I’m not sure I want him to see it. Some thought and discussion needs to go into this.

(By comparison, in the USA it’s got a PG-13 rating. The UK rating is 12A.)

What do other parents think about it?

If you were listening to the radio on Tuesday afternoon after the state budget was announced, you may have noticed that it wasn’t me doing the media for PTUA… I’ve bowed out as my real work is getting too busy to be able to do media effectively. Chris did the budget comment, and did a great job. (And yes, at least one outlet misspelt his name.)

Transport and environment groups aren’t happy with the budget on the transport front, principally because two-thirds of the new money for transport went into roads.

But Daniel, I hear you cry, that’s fair isn’t it? More than two-thirds of travel is by road, so roads should get the bulk of the money!

Not quite. The budget builds on Victoria as it is now — it takes today’s situation and pledges new money to build on today’s transport network.

Where should the money go? The principles of transport are pretty basic. It’s supply-led — people will use whatever’s there that’s most convenient for them. If you build roads, people will use them. If you provide usable public transport, people will use it.

So the money should go to the type of transport we want to encourage people to use. If we want to encourage more car travel, we give more money to roads. If we want to encourage more public transport use, we give more money to public transport.

For example, suppose you have a road that gets congested. And you have a parallel train service that gets overcrowded. You have a limited amount of money, and you can widen the road, or you can put more trains on. One or the other.

Which should you do? Widen the road so more people can drive, or put more trains on, so more people can catch them? For either, any fix may be temporary, as demand slowly grows and eventually again reaches the limits of supply. But one outcome is environmentally friendly, cheaper and safer for the participants. The other is the opposite.

The government says it wants to boost public transport use to 20% of motorised trips by 2020, about double what it is now. A fine goal.

But this is just rhetoric. If they really wanted to achieve it, they’d be doing something about public transport, would they? Until they provide usable services into every suburb — and in most cases upgrades to make PT usable are cheaper than the equivalent road projects — it’ll never happen.

I hadn’t noticed this before: you can now get a deerhunting game for the XBox. Obviously there have been 1st person shooter (FPS to those in the know) games for quite a while now, usually despatching alien monsters or WW2 German guards into the afterlife, but this is the first time I recall seeing a modern-day video game based on blowing away animals.

There have been various cruelty to animals games before, all the way back to Whack-a-mole and those arcade ducks, but video games are more realistic than ever before. Apparently this one actually features you hunting 9 different deer species, including exotic and rare deer. I wonder what PETA think of this? On the one hand maybe it’s better for the hunters to be killing pretend deer, but on the other hand, is it glorifying hunting, and encouraging more people to take it up?

I wonder, is it Game Over or do you at least lose points if you accidentally shoot another hunter? Do you have to avoid others’ bullets without shooting back? Can you opt for your character to wear a bright orange safety vest? What next… a fox hunt game perhaps?

I think I’ll stick to alien monsters.