The other day we ended up at the Yarch Hotel for tea – not a bad meal. Mrs CannibalRabbit had to go to the Yarck Adult Riding Club AGM there. Yarck is one of those places that seems to have nothing about it on the internet, it’s one of those places that most people pass through without even thinking about it. Yarck is on the road to the snow at Mt Buller, and Lake Eildon (Bonnie Doon). For us it’s on the way to the farm up at Strathbogie. It was nice to be able to get some photo’s on our brief stay, rather than just breezing through.
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November, 2007:
Where the Farck is Yarck?
Pixar in Melbourne
Mrs CannibalRabbit and myself recently managed a trip into the city a few weeks ago. It was a trip of contrasts; the purpose was a visit to the Human Body exhibition and to the Pixar exhibition. The human body was aside from the few plastinated bodies poorly organised for the number of people, with really shonky labelling of the part – the sort of thing you would expect from a country museum displaying agricultural implements from the 1970’s. There was a lot technical terminology with little or no allowance made for the lay-person – in other words the audience that they were charging $25 a go for! Don’t get me wrong, the Gunther von Hagens part was fantastic, but the general displays looked as though they had been lifted out of a uni anatomy lab.
Pixar on the other hand was fantastic, more people were there but they were flowing. There was no unexpected bunching-up, it was easy to keep moving and come back to the bits that you wanted to see more of or that people were grouped around. There was plenty of displays from everyone’s favourite movies – The Incredibles, Cars, Finding Nemo, and the Toy Story movies. There were various concept sketches though to final drafts, models, fur samples for the Monsters, and movies.
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“Lies, Damn Lies and . . . . “
I’m still tossing up the the continuation of this – Statistics or Politicians! Here in Australia we are in the grip of a Federal Election – there are eleven days of pre-election hell still to go through. And then there will be the post-election gloating . . . . .
Anyway I think that that just about sums up my feelings on that particular subject, on with the post. In a pre-campaign election campaign (that will take some explaining, but apparently it’s all tied-up in who gets to pay for the pollies gadding-around electioneering – before the “official” launch they can pay for travel and so-on out of their electorate fund, after that the party pays) where the two main parties are trying to out spend each other with their “me-too” policies, there hasn’t been too much to distinguish either party. So what happens? Well it seems that the reporters / media agencies need to go and stir-up something, this comes in the form of the “Who would you rather see in the nude?” survey.
Well it turns out that with this amazing piece of social research – 34% wanted to see Rudd in the Nudd, with 16% wanting Little Johnny (source Reuters [^]). What no-one seems to mention is, that by my calculations, an amazing 50% of the population would rather have the politicians with their clothes on! I’m just amazed about the half that would like to see one or the other with no clothes. It just goes to show that the adage that there are “Lies, damn lies and statistics” still holds, but the Politicians and Reporters who use them are just as bad!
Halloween
Just goes to show how up to date the CannibalRabbit is – here we are a week late. But this is cool a Waterford Crystal Halloween Tealight Pumpkin, a Jack-o’-lantern, that we saw while we were on the Factory tour. The bad news is we couldn’t buy them – otherwise you would have one Girgoyle!
It’s commonly believed that the modern Halloween festival is derived from the Gaelic festival of Samhain, so all in all Ireland was a good place to come across this. Although the Celtic tradition calls for a carved turnip, rather than the American pumpkin!
