From this morning’s walk and talk around the park:
Slim Jim looked up and sure enough, he spotted the two really big drones that were constantly circling around the site, keeping an eye on it. They were massive, and not that high up, but he couldn’t hear them. What he could hear was the gnat-like buzz of the much smaller drones they were building and testing out here, the same model he’d been playing with at the pool party in the previous chapter.
I always liked this song by Sheryl Crow, but I really love this cover by Skeggs on Triple J.
No embedding, sorry.
We had some minor damage to the roof from the cyclone earlier this year, and I put a claim in to our insurers, who’ve been outstanding, including telling us there was a lot more damage from a previous storm up there that we weren't aware of. They said they’d repair that too, because apparently I made a previous claim out of that storm as well. That was nice of them. They could’ve just kept that to themselves.
I was on the mat at jujitsu last week, working out a technique with another black belt, learning how to flow from one move to the next. After only two or three minutes of getting into and out of position, up and down, I was puffed. Properly struggling for breath. It was both a bit of a shock and not surprising at all.
I do love me a good sandwich. The best ones stay with you in your memory for years afterwards. I had an amazing corned beef sanger in New York about 20 years ago that I still think about. I am forever searching for a decent Cubana sandwich in Brisbane, a Mexican toasty with pulled pork, ham, chorizo and sometimes even hotdog. Oh, and cheese, of course. You can't have a good sandwich let alone a toasty without cheese.
The entire TikTok book thing has passed me by. As a 60-year-old white male, I am officially banned from TikTok. So I've only ever experienced it at a distance. But I hear it's very important for selling books these days.
Last night, with a spare half-hour and my brain fried from a day of reading and writing, I decided to dive into the eleventy million streaming apps on my iPad. The first one I opened, Disney, served up M*A*S*H as an option, and for some reason, the "Captain Tuttle" episode immediately popped into my head.
I blew through 50,000 words on the first draft of the manuscript for World War 3.2 yesterday. That always feels like a significant milestone and I was pretty happy to see the numbers tick over.
This has been a big week for finding out about stuff I didn’t know. First it was the story of how Blade Runner the movie got the name and now this from Michael Ian Black’s Substack.
I stopped reading movie reviews before watching the film many years ago. Decades really. It was a film reviewer called Ana Maria Del’Oso (apologies for inevitably getting the spelling wrong, A.M.) wot done it to me. I'd been looking forward to watching Clint Eastwood's return to the Western with Unforgiven and naïvely picked up her review, which might have been in the Fairfax papers, or maybe some posh magazine.