Tag: Townsville

A Panda walked into a bar…

It strikes me that it’s been a while since I actually wrote anything substantial (ie of substance) on this blog. I’m not sure that this trend will be broken in this post – but I am trying to think of something serious and important to write about.

You may notice, if you’re bored enough to go to Tim’s blog (and bored enough to read it when you get there), that he’s posted some form of response to my diatribe on hippies the other day. You may also notice in the comments on that there’s a comment there from a guy who looks like he’s stepped off the set of a Star Wars movie. That is Scooter. For the benefit of my Brisbane readers – he’s related to the Poysers. For the benefit of my blog readers – he’s related to MIP. For the benefit of people who have no idea what I’m talking about – MIP is a Poyser, and Scooter is a cousin of said family. Anyway – Scooter also now has a blog.

On Thursday night at 12am I got on a 68 foot boat to go fishing. I was accompanying I Fish – Channel Ten’s very popular fishing show. In short… I caught one fish, and didn’t get sea sick, so the trip was considered a success. I also didn’t manage to catch any sleep. I can’t take a photo of the sleep I didn’t catch, but I will be able to upload a picture of my fish sometime next week. When I got home from fishing I smelled like I’d been fishing, and I was very tired. When I say home, I mean when I got back to work. I had an afternoon appointment with a marketing salesperson from the Financial Review. She gave me an umbrella. It is yellow and white. It was almost worth going to work for. Have you noticed that when you write short sentences it immeadietly sounds more childlike? Or maybe I’m using less erudite words. I am still tired.

Last night I went to my first Youth Surge event. Somehow I always managed to be busy when Youth Surges were on in Brisbane. I’m happy to report that it wasn’t bad. It was in fact good. We had a youth group leaders training session this morning which was also good. I’ve been doing some thinking about how youth groups work over the last few weeks – and when I’m in a less tired state I’ll share my thoughts on youth group via my blog.

Tim and I dined at Sizzler this afternoon and I’d like to make a point about the importance of grammar, and particularly punctuation, based on my experiences. I ordered the special of the day – rib eye and prawn skewers. I was looking forward to my nice juicy steak with a side of prawns… It turns out I should have looked more closely at the sign, because I was shocked when the waitress delivered my sizzling prawn skewers with some meat coloured vegetables on the skewer and no juicy steak on the plate. I think they should have more clearly deliniated words on the menu board. Only the Grammar Nazi, and Scooter, would have picked up on that subtle distinction. It’s like that old joke about the panda who walked into a bar.

Have you ever noticed that when you write lol it looks like a man with his arms in the air? I’m not going to write much on what I think about people who write “lol” when they’re not actually laughing out loud. I should point out that with inverted commas it looks like the little man has just moved his arms there. So now I’d like to present you with a series of excercises based on the lol man.

_o_
| |

( \o/ )
( || )

“lol”
_/ \_

( \o/ )
( /\ )
_o_
‘ || ‘

I guess by series I meant one star jump. You have no idea how much time I wasted figuring that out. There’s a whole range of artwork out there created using letters – it’s called ASCII art – very, very, nerdy stuff.

June 3, 2006

Why does it always rain on me… literally not figuratively

So when I told Donna I was moving to Townsville she said “ha… get used to never seeing rain ever again.” Well Donna, you were wrong, so na na na nana na. Our stock editorial (the writing we have on file to use for ads and send to journalists and stuff) boasts that Townsville has 320 days of sunshine per year. I’m starting to wonder if the North Queensland year is slightly longer than the standard 365.25 days. I’ve now been in Townsville 67 days. By my calculations (read estimates) it’s rained on all but five of those days. That means that at this point the standard Townsville year runs for 382 days assuming there is no more rain. What a phenomena. We should call the weather bureau, or the department of astronomy (if they don’t exist they should), or the people who make all the calendars in the world (if there’s not a centralised company there should be, not that I’m pro-monopolies but sometimes they just make things easier).

Which brings me to today’s political discussion. On Sunday after church I was talking to a couple of people about the introduction of VSU and the government’s increasing desire to introduce a user pays culture. The underlying theory can be summarised (today I’ll try to actually summarise – ie be succinct) as the belief that people shouldn’t be forced to pay for services they don’t use – and should be able to control who they get those services from. It’s the rationale behind the sale of Telstra, the proposed privatisation of Ergon and the introduction of privately funded roads with toll systems introduced to pay them. All very interesting stuff if you like economics. For the rest of us there’s apparently a worrying spin-off if VSU sucks all the life out of on campus culture. One of the people I was talking to is quite involved with theatre stuff at JCU, she was talking about a petition signed by members of Australia’s cultural alumni – former graduates of leading institutions who have gone on to taste success as Australia’s artsy ambassadors – successful actors and musicians who claim that their success can be directly attributed to the funding they received from student unions on campus. Well I have a message for Heath Ledger, Mel Gibson, Cate Blanchett and co… I want my money back. Nicole Kidman can keep hers as compensation for having to share her adopted children with a freak. But the rest of you living in your multi million dollar penthouses in America – please send me a cheque for $1210 – that’s how much I outlayed in guild fees while I was “studying” at QUT. It’s a small price to pay. I’d hate to think I spent all that money funding the future multi million dollar Australian exports. It hardly seems fair to me.

I posted a comment on Andrew the Opera Singer’s blog (as opposed to Andrew the guy who works for the weather channel) promising a link. I’m a man of my word. Here is your link. Andrew is married to Peta. Peta is Dan‘s sister. Dan is Joel‘s brother. Joel’s music can also be found here. Joel is cool. I am also cool. There are several links both literally and physically (maybe).

May 22, 2006

The day I became an Iconoclast

Monday mornings are bad. Today I woke myself up stupidly early to get into the office before a corporate breakfast. This was my first bad Monday morning as a full time professional worker. I turned up bushy eyed and bright tailed. Well actually I had no tail. But my early morning coffee did the trick. Breakfast was a selection of traditional hot breakfast foodstuffs eaten at a local animal sanctuary – surrounded by the animal inhabitants of said sanctuary and several interstate visitors looking at hosting corporate functions in Townsville.

Those of you familiar with my artistic opus (I’m not sure it was a magnum opus and it certainly wasn’t a magnum [of either the pistol variety or the ice cream]) Progress In Art may be sad to learn of its untimely demise over the weekend. Due to an absence of picture hanging capabilities in my bedroom (and uncertainty as to whether it would be appropriate to hammer nails into the wall for that purpose) I had placed the rather fragile masterpiece rather precariously on the fluro light on my wall. It looked pretty good there. The lighting was just right. For those of you who haven’t seen it it was basically the insides of a broken discman attached by sticky tape to a framed pane of glass. I was playing some music with a bass line (you know the notes played by the left hand, often below middle C – not the fishing line you’d use to catch bass – English is a fun language to play with) and the subwoofer in my room shook the wall causing the frame to fall to a rather crushing, crashing and smashing halt on the floor below. This made me sad. Mostly because I had to clean up the broken glass. But that was my second most brilliant creation ever. A triumph over the inherent stupidity of postmodern art. Clever on many, many levels. And now it’s gone.

It’s sad when the biggest bit of news you have to report is a broken piece of homemade artwork.

I went to my first Willows working bee on Saturday. Then I went for a cruise around the bay between the mainland and Magnetic Island. It had free food, drink and a band. Yesterday I went to church. Tonight I’m having dinner with the youth minister at Willows to discuss what I’ll be doing with the church this year. It looks like I’ll be co-ordinating the young adults stuff. Consider yourselves updated.

Until next time.

Goodbye.

April 3, 2006

Happy as Larry

I think I’m now officially a North Queenslander. Not only did my first weekend in the tropics include a trip to a Cowboys game (well it was really a trip to a Manly game but who’s counting) but I also managed to survive my first cyclone scare. Tropical cyclone Larry managed to cause all sorts of mayhem up north and even though it didn’t hit Townsville it managed to postpone my first day of work. Well, it at least put it off until lunch time. I arrived in the office at 2pm in a fairly exhausted state having spent the previous night watching cyclone updates on TV. I wasn’t particularly worried about Larry as I have no valuables up here other than my car which is fairly comprehensively insured. Larry passed us by, leaving winds and rain in his wake. Many stupid local residents braved the killer jellyfish to experience a rare bit of swell at the beach. I was not one of those people. The prospect of being attacked by the killing stroke of a jellybean sized ocean dwelling monster doesn’t appeal to me at all.

In other news up here… The Cowboys beat Manly in a scrappy game which featured some dubious refereeing. I went to the football with an old friend of mine from Maclean, it was cool seeing someone I haven’t seen for many years and even if he is a Broncos supporter it’s nice to have someone else up here who isn’t in the grips of Cowboy fever. Football is like a religion up here.

I’ve found a permanent abode, I’m living in a house next door to the church up here. My housemates are Tim, a marine biology/science student who was president of the AFES group up here the same year I was president of QUT Christians, and Dave, A graphic designer who works from home. Dave is clean, Tim is messy and I’m the happy medium. Tim is also a wrestling fan. Those of you who have plotted (as in observed on a graph, rather than planned) my descent into wrestling fan status over the last year will probably be currently sighing or making disapproving clucks. It turns out wrestling fans have this different level of conversation that other people just can’t appreciate. Words that are foreign to others are now commonplace. It seems jargon is not restricted to the church. It’s nice to be part of another social subset.

Other than cyclone excitement things up here have been surprisingly smooth, new city, new house, new job, new church, new friends, new appreciation of fruit… someone once told me changing all these were amongst the most stressful human experiences. I’m not feeling it yet. In the wake of the damage to banana farms up here I went out and bought a kilo of yellowy goodness just to beat the price hike.

Kudos must be given to some commentators on my last post – Kutz for his grammatical prowess and my cousin Miriam for her cyclone pun.

I’m at work at the moment so no musical eliteness (or should I say 1337ness for you internet geeks) this week. However next post I aim to use song titles as many times as possible throughout my text. So that’s something to look forward to.

March 21, 2006

My very first post

Welcome.

For those who came in late… to steal a well worn line from a comic book hero… here’s some information about the creator of this blog:
My full name is: Nathan Macleay Campbell.
I’m 22.
I like stuff.
and things.
I guess you can read more about the particular stuff and things I like on my profile.

At the time of writing I’m two days out from beginning the next adventurous stage in my life. I’m about to move 1400kms north to Townsville where I begin my life as a fulltime worker.

In order to cash in on the tradition of great Hollywood D-Grade movies like Ernest Goes To Camp I’ve decided to put the words “goes to” in between my name and my destination in the title of my blog. I’d like to think my adventure north is at least on par with Ernest’s trip to summer camp. I hope my adventures will be at least half as wacky as his were. I’d also like to think that reading about my adventures will be less painful for you than sitting through an Ernest movie. If you haven’t seen an Ernest movie you’re not missing out on much. They’re basically as painful as fingernails being scraped along a blackboard for an hour and a half.

There’s a lot of things I like about reading other people’s blogs that I’ll aim to recapture here. There’s a lot of things I don’t like about reading other people’s blogs that I’ll try not to include here.

So here you have my thoughts on my impending departure: I am simultaneously excited and nervous (I’m not sure what the adjectival form of the word trepidation is but I would have used it there, maybe trepidated?) Until last Sunday night I’d been pretty cool about the whole moving away thing casually farewelling friends with the knowledge that I was about to make a new beginning somewhere else which, at least in my mind, isn’t all that daunting. I’m really looking forward to starting my new job with Townsville Enterprise, who you can find here. I’m looking forward to meeting new people. I just didn’t think it would be that hard to say goodbye to old people but on the upside it’s not like I’m dying and there’s always me in blog form if you miss me too much. It’s much harder for me to be cool, calm and collected when other people are displaying their emotions. At the moment my emotional compass is pointing more towards the excited end of the spectrum but it fluctuates depending on what I’m doing with my time. I think making huge life changing decisions is like eating Pringles, once you pop, you can’t stop. To explain that analogy and further explain how i’m feeling I’ll use another analogy – you can’t get off the rollercoaster in the middle of the ride, you just have to sit back and enjoy it. There’s no pulling out now so I guess there’s no place for second thoughts even if I was considering having them. Which I’m not. But if I was I wouldn’t be any more because that analogy explains everything. I am clearly wise beyond my years. Or not.

So now to my favourite part of other people’s blogs the bit where I show just how good my taste in all things aesthetic is. The bit where I record for the ages what I’m listening to, watching, wearing etc. I’m going to restrict it to what I’m listening to this time round but if I find good websites I’ll put links and stuff.

This post was brought to you by the band MUSE and the album Absolution.

March 15, 2006