Back to the movies again!

Coming out of lockdown again, and getting back to the movies again, no danger of dangerous overcrowding in this cinema.

I was at Roseville, watching 'Eiffel'. It's a very watchable film. It's about Gustave Eiffel, his amazing tower, and his somewhat sad and sorry relationship with the love of his life (a woman, not a tower). That part might be all fiction. Not sure.

Re the tower, it was built for the 1889 Paris World's Fair, and a proposal had been submitted for a 200m tower, so as to beat the 169m Washington Monument. Eiffel decided to go for 300m instead, which is still a very respectable tower height to this day.

Bound for South Australia - 4: Broken Heel

Broken Hill's a mining town, but these days it's the legacy of films made in and around it that attract all the tourist attention. 

First there was Mad Max. Then the drag queens of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert have led to the creation of a Broken Heel Festival (postponed due to COVID this time). 

Top attraction is the very colourful Palace Hotel, featured prominently in the movie.

Back to the movies!

I went to the movies yesterday! Yes, they're still there, and sometimes they're open again. Here's the view from my seat at the Roseville Cinemas, where I watched 'The Personal History of David Copperfield'. They'd gone to great lengths to enforce Covid-appropriate physical distancing, but with the audience numbers as they were, I don't think there was much to worry about.

Parkes still dishing it up

It's still one of the things you've got to do if you're passing through Parkes. You've got to visit The Dish. If you time it right, you can even check out the visitor centre and learn lots.

We turned up a bit late in the afternoon. But even so there was a nice little garden to explore, with some interesting astronomically-themed artefacts and learning experiences. There's even a rather brilliant arrangement of two smaller dishes, which illustrate the magnifying powers of parabolas, and enable you to communicate by whisper with somebody stationed 100m away.

Officially the CSIRO Parkes radio telescope, The Dish is put to work on lots of cutting edge deep-space projects involving pulsars and gravity waves and the like.

It's best known though for its use during the Apollo 11 mission in 1969, when it received the TV broadcast to the world of most of the astronauts' moon walk.

And of course it starred in the 2000 movie, The Dish.

On the buses, Fiji style

Fiji's Viti Levu 'big island' has a big fleet of colourful and mainly comfortable buses, plying the routes between and within its main population centres. It wasn't difficult (or expensive) getting around.

Our day trip from Nadi to Suva and back went quite smoothly. It's about four hours each way along the Queen's Rd, and the buses were fine. Even the driving in Fiji is relaxed and sensible - there's none of the prolonged passenger terror you experience in India or Indonesia, say. (Maybe it's the kava, we thought.)

There was one thing that was decidedly wrong about our evening ride back though: the driver's choice of video to screen. In other places at other times I've been subjected to noisy kung fu, Bollywoods, silly slapstick comedies. You name it, somebody will make you watch it on a bus journey somewhere. This one though was totally new to me. It was a rather horrible ultra-violent junk prison 'drama'. I doubt there was much of a story line, just endless scenes of the prisoners, male and female, beating each other almost to a pulp. I was making a point of trying to look out the window, though it was soon too dark to see anything out there. Many of the other passengers were riveted to the screen however. Including small children. My companion, being a teacher, had to suppress her urge to march to the front and order the driver to take it off.

It was quite a revelation to encounter this unexpected facet of Fiji culture. They're generally so calm and gentle and friendly. Maybe it's all the rugby union they play, and the violence porn they watch, that keeps them so outwardly calm? As well as the kava.