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.
I haven’t really followed the Mushroom Lady murder trial—unless you count skimming the headlines, which were so everywhere-all-the-time that I felt I basically absorbed the whole story by osmosis. Like everyone else, I had an opinion. She done it. She so done it. And when the conviction finally came through, I’ll admit, it was satisfying, especially after what felt like a worrying delay for the jury to deliver the correct verdict.
I was having breakfast with a mate this morning who had just started watching Foundation on Apple TV, and I warned him that the first series was a bit ordinary but that he should stick with it because it got so much better in the later series.
I saw somebody post a warning yesterday about the trailer for Project Hail Mary, warning of a major spoiler. I think I know what it is, because I read the book. And be assured I’m not going to blow it here.