I’m on the Central Coast now… at Watanobbi actually, which I remember some time ago was in the news because of the towns name.
Residents had unsuccessfully tried to get the name of the town changed after they found out that the town’s name wasn’t actually an Aboriginal word, but in fact may have been named after an early landowner commented on the shape of the surrounding terrain being rather “nobby”.
A beautiful story I think…
But land prices have reportedly remained rather static because of it… A small price to pay I say.
Anyway we’re at Nat’s sister’s place (a day earlier than expected) after spending a week in Forster but after enduring the rain for quite a few days we left early.
So there’s a few stories to tell, I made notes, so they will follow.
So I went to see Top Gear (UK) live at Acer arena on Saturday… You didn’t even know I had a ticket, did you huh? Well it was given to me for free(!!) and I was pretty pleased to be going.
But really it was a bit disappointing.. mmmm… maybe that’s not the right adjective, but when we were talking about it after the show we all decided it had some good bits and some really average bits. I guess I should’ve seen that coming though… I mean, it’s pretty difficult to turn an excellent TV show into a live production when most of the best bits of the TV show are a couple of guys driving really fast expensive cars from Paris to London, around race tracks, and turning cheap cars into space shuttles (remember that episode? Brilliant!). These are all the sort of things that don’t translate that well into a live production… But they did alright.
The most average aspect of the whole thing was that it was like one big car/product advertisement for the most part. Like TV ads but live…. I enjoyed Clarkson and Hammond. May wasn’t there so they replaced him with one of the guys from Top Gear AUS (the short dweeby one with a goatie) and I thought he might redeem TG AUS in a live interaction with TG UK but… I was wrong… Dweeb.
There seemed to be a lot of “Homo” jokes too… not particularly clever.
[As a side note can I point out the dualism of the word "Homo" in that sentence... Homo means "like, the same". So they made a lot of homo jokes (ie. gay jokes "same sex") and all the home jokes were the same... i think there's some irony in there.]
Overall… if it wasn’t free I think I would’ve been thinking that my $90 might’ve been better spent on a Top Gear UK DVD series, but it was still good to see them do their craft live. I’m grateful for that.
I’m playing guitar and singing at an outdoor wedding this afternoon, on the sand out at Boat Harbour. It’s going to be ridiculously hot out there. I’m at home in the (relative) cool, and I’m already sweating like the proverbial pig. I hope they like sweat patches.