— पांच हजार तीन सौ बहत्तर —
Okay! It took six days to get it done, but my five travelogue emails from our trip to Australia have
finally been formatted and added to this blog, in backdated posts.
This would be the easiest way to navigate them: just go first to the post about our first destination, "
Queensland 2023: Brisbane, Gold Coast." Read and/or scroll through that, and at the bottom of the post will be a link to the next post in the series, and they can all be clicked through that way.
But, just for shits and giggles, I will also provide all five direct links here:
Queensland 2023: Brisbane, Gold Coast
Kangaroo Island 2023
Adelaide 2023
Sydney 2023
Sydney World Pride 2023
Just a quick reminder and side note on Sydney: we went there twice, three nights each on two successive weekends—but, my two travelogues both combined photos, captions and details from both weekends into one post. They are only separated by theme: one on regular, non-World Pride related things we did; one focused on all the World Pride stuff.
That said, if you are more interested in seeing all the photos (1,549 of them in all for the entire two and a half weeks, or 17 days, of travel), then you can start
here for the collection of all photo albums on my Flickr account.
Or, again, here are separate links for specific album collections by location:
Brisbane, Queensland (Sunday-Friday, February 19-24)
Gold Coast, Queensland (day trip by train from Brisbane, Wednesday, February 22)
Kangaroo Island, South Australia (Monday-Wednesday, February 27 - March 1)
Adelaide, South Australia (Wednesday-Saturday, March 1-4)
Sydney, New South Wales (Friday-Monday, February 24-27; Saturday-Tuesday, March 4-7)
Or in the case of Sydney, you can view those photo albums with World Pride separated out:
Sydney, New South Wales (Friday-Monday, February 24-27; Saturday-Tuesday, March 4-7)
Sydney World Pride (Saturday, February 25 & Sunday-Monday, March 5-6)
Or!—and it took me until I had nearly today's entire post written before I realized this—you can just
click here to be taken to my "Australia 2023: Greatest Hits" photo album, which distills the entire 17-day trip down to 125 of the best shots out of all of them. I created that album for the purpose of showing our neighbor friend Alexia, who looked after the cats while we were gone, a slide show overview of the trip on our TV on Saturday night.
Or! If you're
really ambitious and you want to just click through every single photo in chronological order, without dealing with them being separated by photo albums—and this would be the only way to do that—then click
click here to start, and then just click the left-arrow button, basically indefinitely (or, until you've run through all 1,549 photos from these travels). Quick heads up on this approach, though: once you hit the 256 photos I took at the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Parade, you'll need to click through a pretty healthy number of photos of men dressed in not much more than briefs or jockstraps. Some of them also have things like headdresses or wings on! So they aren't all
just half-naked. 😊 That said, one-and-a-half-thousand photos is a lot, so navigating by location through separated photo albums might be more manageable anyway.
I have plenty of work left to do on the photos, particularly tagging them. All the city locations are tagged, some of the other more specific, local locations are tagged too, things like that. I still haven't tagged all the photos with Shobhit in them or all the photos with me in them, for example. I have now transferred all the captions from the travelogues onto the corresponding photos on Flickr, but that only means around 115 or so of the photos have captions; that leaves about 93% of the photos without captions.
— पांच हजार तीन सौ बहत्तर —
Shobhit and I spent a
lot of time over the past week just catching up on TV that we fell behind on while in Australia: two episodes of
The Last of Us (with a third, the season finale, to watch after the Oscars last night); three episodes of
Poker Face; three episodes of
Last Week Tonight with John Olive (and we still haven't watched the one that aired just last night); two episodes of
Abbott Elementary.
As if that weren't enough, Shobhit was interested in checking out the new Hulu series
History of the World Part II, but yesterday morning decided we should watch
History of the World Part I instead. He fell asleep in a couple of parts, found a lot of it boring—and frankly, he wasn't wrong. That movie was genuinely hilarious in the context of its release year, 1981, but what we have gotten used to in terms of pacing has changed radically since then. Also, as is the case with nearly all Mel Brooks films, a
lot of the humor has aged poorly. I still found the "first homosexual marriage" gag funny, although that one plays fine in a modern context basically by accident—the humor almost certainly came from a homophobic place in 1981. And then, there are multiple, blithe uses of the word "faggot" during the Rome sequence.
It's fascinating how much respect Mel Brooks still has as a comedian today, in spite of how much of what he released between thirty and fifty years ago would never work today. No one has tried to "cancel" him, nor am I aware of any admission of wrong-mindedness to the humor in a lot of his early films. People still regard
Blazing Saddles as a classic work of comedy in cinema, and I don't get it. Even when I watched it for the first time twenty years ago, I had a really hard time getting past the constant use of the N-word in that movie.
And yet, this
History of the World Part II show is stacked with stars in its casting, with a truly diverse cast of characters, all seemingly tripping over themselves to be in a project with Mel Brooks's name on it. We watched just the first episode, and it was . . . fine. Some gags work, some don't, really. The comic tone is roughly the same as most Mel Brooks projects have been for decades, which is interesting to experience. It just doesn't really have the same kind of problematic humor as those old movies did, but the humor remains spotty in terms of what really works.
— पांच हजार तीन सौ बहत्तर —
— पांच हजार तीन सौ बहत्तर —
All that said, this past weekend itself, I spent a pretty large amount of time socializing. I'd have gotten my backdated posts on this blog (both the travelogues and the daily Twitter digests) updated a whole lot sooner if not for those two things: the socializing; and most especially, the catching up on TV episodes we got behind on. Being away for one week is enough of a challenge on that front, but for 17 days? Forget it!
Don't even get me started on my podcasts. I have multiple podcasts I usually listen to every single day. While we were traveling, the single podcast I managed to stay up to date on was
WTF with Marc Maron, as I only had time for podcasts while getting ready in the mornings and that was all I was able to listen to. In the week since we've gotten back, I've had to be selective about which podcasts I even went back to catch up on missed episodes, focusing mostly on those covering the Oscars, which aired last night. I'm also trying to catch up on the episode recap podcasts for shows I watch, particularly for
The Last of Us.
I had initially invited Alexia over to view a slideshow from our trip to Australia, on Friday evening. But, then she texted me that she'd had a very long week and was very tired and needed a rain check. I said okay.
So, the first socializing I did over the weekend was with Laney: our March Happy Hour, which wasn't during the actual Happy Hour at the location we met at, one of our favorites, La Cocina Oaxaqueña. I had my perennial favorite, actually my favorite dish at any Mexican restaurant,
quesadillas fritas (that photo is from 2015; it seems to be the only time I've taken a photo of the actual dish). It's basically deep fried quesadillas with delicious sauces swirled over them.
I guess I should back up just slightly, because I also went to a Town Hall at Seattle First Baptist Church on Harvard & Seneca, I think the first one I have ever attended: we were there to see all three of our state representatives in District 43:
Senator Jamie Pedersen;
Representative Nicole Macri; and
Representative Frank Chopp. I found the meeting a lot more engaging, informative and compelling than I expected, and even learned about certain things I found genuinely exciting—such as the "
Covenant Home Ownership Account," an attempt to make up for a history of racist "restrictive housing covenants" right here in Seattle, which prevented people of color from purchasing homes in most neighborhoods. There was a flyer about this passed around, and I understood immediately that this was basically a form of reparations, but noted that nowhere was that word actually used. Because conservatives get ridiculously triggered by certain keywords that should really just be innocuous ("socialist," for instance). I am fully on board with this sort of program, of course.
Anyway, Shobhit went largely to introduce himself to the representatives, or in the end their aides, in the hopes of getting his agenda passed on to them as a candidate for Seattle City Council. I think he's a bit further behind than he realized in the idea of running in this race; he only discovered on Friday that there were already
nine known candidates running, not including him, and that kind of depressed him for a bit. He still hasn't given up, though, and right now is trying to convince as many people as they can to assign their
Democracy Vouchers to him.
A young-ish Black man sat in the pew next to us, asking first if he could join us there, which of course we said yes. We chatted with him for a bit, only to discover the next day that he is
also running for the District 3 Council seat. He did not tell us in person that he was a candidate, which is kind of funny because I made a facetious comment about how those of us in our pew "skewed younger" than most of the attendees at the meeting. He chucked and agreed, but I'm realizing now that, just like Shobhit, he probably would not have come were he not actually running.
I should start going to these things whether someone I know is running or not though. As I said, I found it informative. But, I also had plans with Laney at 2:00, and this meeting was at 1:00, so I had to leave to walk about 10 minutes down to La Cocina Oaxaqueña to meet her. She actually drove up from Renton, parked at Volunteer Park, and walked from there, miscalculating how long it would take her, and I could have waited another ten minutes at least to leave. Oh well.
We hung out a bit longer than I anticipated, for a Happy Hour where we go to an actual restaurant (sitting outside, of course; it was dry, thankfully, but once the clouds covered the sun it did get a bit chilly), probably two and a half to three hours. Shobhit came by after the Town Hall was done, and even ordered himself some chips and salsa. Laney had three beers and I had three House Margaritas, and when it wasn't technically Happy Hour those were ten bucks each, so it got a little pricy. But, I wanted to keep pace with Laney and her beers, and they make good margaritas. And of course the company was the best part. We talked a lot about both Australia and the novel
Ministry for the Future, which she is reading at my recommendation, is really enjoying, and is 68% of the way through according to her digital reader.
In any case, Shobhit coming by for just a few minutes secured himself a point on the next Social Review—not that he won't be way ahead of everyone else by default anyway, as he always is but will be especially so this time around thanks to the trip to Australia, for which he gets 17 points for 17 straight days traveling together.
He did leave a while before Laney and I did, though, and I walked her back to her van at Volunteer Park, telling her I was always happy to maximize my time with her. She then gave me a ride back to the condo.
— पांच हजार तीन सौ बहत्तर —
I had also texted Alexia Saturday morning, to see if she wanted to do the slide show that night instead, since I happened to have the evening free. Her response kind of cracked me up:
Yes!!! I need a reason to shower and act human. So, at 6:30, she did come over, and using my iPad and mirroring it to the TV screen via the Apple TV box, I took her through
125 shots that I assembled into one photo album solely for this purpose. In fact, now that I think about it, that might be the best place to go for a comparatively brief overview of the entire trip to Australia, distilled to 125 shots instead of 1,549. I should go back and edit the top section of this post and add a note about that!
A good majority of those photos were repeats of shots in the email travelogues Alexia had already read through, but there was still something to be said for the ability to discuss them as we went along, plus now my photos were projected onto our huge TV screen rather than merely viewed on her much smaller laptop screen.
— पांच हजार तीन सौ बहत्तर —
And that finally brings us to yesterday, and the Oscars, while we wound up watching along with Gabriel and Lea the same way we had last year (even though last year I was with Barbara in Louisville): texting along during the telecast, and then connecting on FaceTime during the vast majority of the commercials. I have to say, I rather like this system, as it makes the time fly by and we never have to actually pay any attention to the commercials.
Before we went to Australia, Gabriel kind of surprised me when he called and suggested maybe we could actually come over to watch with them in person at their house. I loved this idea, and until Saturday night I thought it might actually happen. I called him to confirm, but he didn't answer; I had to let it go to voicemail when he called back as Alexia was over at the time.
In his voicemail, he noted that both he and Lea were not feeling well—they've taken many covid tests; it doesn't appear to be that—plus he was really busy with work and needed to meet his brother yesterday, all sorts of things. He just didn't think it was a good idea for us to come over after all. Not only that, but Sean from Action Movie Night on Wednesday sent out an email on Friday that he had tested positive for covid. Oh, great.
I told Gabriel that when I called him back after Alexia left, and he was like, "Oh we wouldn't have let you in anyway!" I have no idea how serious he was about that; perhaps, even probably he was. I tested both Shobhit and myself on Saturday and we were negative, and I absolutely would have tested again Sunday if Gabriel were still open to us coming over, but he probably wouldn't have been. In the end, it was their own issues that precluded us getting together anyway.
Our compromise approach worked well anyway, and on the upside, we didn’t have to drive an hour home afterward, nor did Shobhit have to refill the gas tank as initially expected (at least, not yet). So, we actually didn't go anywhere at all yesterday. We watched a movie and TV and I finished up the travelogues on this blog, and then we watched the Oscars. Shobhit only put his pants back on because of the amount of time spent on FaceTime during the Oscars.
As for the Oscars, I did not even realize this until hearing it on one of my podcasts at work this morning:
Everything Everywhere All at Once made history in more ways than I even realized. Michelle Yeoh is only the second woman of color ever to win Best Actress (which is nuts), and the movie won seven of the Oscars for which it was nominated. But, apparently it's the first film
in history to win for all the categories that it did win: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Editing, Best Screenplay, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress (Jamie Lee Curtis's first win!) and Best Supporting Actor. Probably the sole reason it did not become the first movie to win the "Big 5" (Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Screenplay) since
Silence of the Lambs is because there just wasn't a male part significant enough in the film to qualify for Best Actor. (This in spite of the fact that Ke Huy Kwan played Yeoh's husband—but, the movie is still very much Yeoh's movie.)
The telecast was kind of an odd experience, albeit a good and fun one, in that a lot of it was very exciting, many firsts, but they were all also eminently predictable. It would have been great to get one or two wins that were shocking or unexpected, but no such luck. That said, even though I really thought Cate Blanchett's performance in
Tár was the best of the year, it's relevant that she already has two Oscars, and I was really rooting for Yeoh anyway.
— पांच हजार तीन सौ बहत्तर —
[posted 12:30 pm]
