It occurs to me that I've been on the Internet for fifteen years and I've never once posted a picture of a cat. Surely some mistake. Here, therefore, are the baby photos of one furry sweetie and two hellions.

( Kittenspam! You know you want to! )

For all the cretins currently screaming at referees, wrenching microphones out of the hands of country singers and, especially, yelling at the President of the United States, I have just three words.

The Code Duello.

The NZ Herald has a story about the outbreak of pneumonic plague, one of the nastiest and most enthusiastically infectious diseases known to humankind, in Ziketan (Qinghai Province). Helpfully, they have appended a Google Map showing Ziketan which also proffers you directions there. Er, no. Think I'll pass.

I need a whole new mathemetical concept to encapsulate the amount of work that does not get done with three kittens in the house. And another one to describe the even larger negative volume of work both left undone and actually undone that occurs when three kittens are sitting on my keyboard and batting at my screen.

Today I happened across a music vid from somebody called Alexandra Burke, crucifying Hallelujah. She's apparently one of those gladiatorial singing contest winners, and she has an astonishing voice, but it was less a case of missing the song's point and more of the point dwindling to a speck as it flapped away over the horizon. My favourite part was the sexaysexay little shoulder twitch as she sings the last bit. Oh, God.

New rule. Before you get a license to cover Hallelujah, you first have to prove that at some point love has crushed you. Utterly. To a soul-crunching, job-losing, twelve-step-requiring powder. Otherwise, back away. Now.

Tonight my new best mate Ethan Hawke and I got together again. Sort of. Well, he was onstage in the second of Sam Mendes's Bridge Project productions, The Winter's Tale (and I wasn't).

The Cherry Orchard was good, but this was absolutely stonking. Everyone was faultless, but the honours have to go to Ethan - who knew he could do funny? This was the only genuinely hilarious Shakespeare I've ever seen.

This production goes on to Madrid, the Ruhr and London. If any of these are near you, pawn your granny and go.

Our major client is a government department, and at regular intervals they get us to run the process which dishes out wodges of funds to [name redacted]. We'd never got round to adding up exactly how much, but out of idle curiosity, we did today.

Wow. Just the two of us, in charge of $190 million. That's quite a lot, really.

If only the New Zealand taxpayers could see their way clear to tossing us a million or three of that. You know, as a gratuity. For services rendered. But alas, as others have found out to their cost when they've attempted to redress this oversight, the department tends to have rather definite views about that. Curse you, checks and balances!

On Saturday, I saw Ethan Hawke, Sinead Cusack and Simon Russell Beale onstage in Sam Mendes's production of The Cherry Orchard. Then on Sunday, on a perfect sunny day, I steered an 11 metre yacht up the Waitemata harbour....**



... and under this.



What's more, I managed to turn the boat around and sail it back underneath the Harbour Bridge without either capsizing the boat or skewering a bunjy jumper on the mast.

Yes, such is my glamorous life.

*All right, this might not actually be my typical weekend, which is less yachts and movie stars and more workworkwork and America's Next Top Model. But it's nice to ring the changes occasionally.

**Which is a lot more difficult than it looks, ackshully.

I think America's Next Top Model would be vastly improved if at the end the losing girl plunged through a trapdoor.

The sadness of Patrick McGoohan's death is mitigated just slightly by the LJ poster I came across who was rhapsodising about how great he was playing opposite Mrs Peal (sic) in The Avengers.

Right, I'm off to China and stuff for a few weeks. While I'm away it would be appreciated if you could try not to elect any Republicans, or more locally anyone actively invested in grinding the faces of the poor.

Also, while I'm enthusing about tech stuff I would be remiss if I didn't pay homage to my new Asus EEE.




Not only is it so teensy I can put it in my handbag and so adorable it makes everyone who sees it go aah, it cost $300. For a whole computer. Yum. How do they do it?

I've never quite got the point of MP3 players. Very possibly this is because I work from home, so I have no need to take my music anywhere because it's already here. Whatever. The point is that I finally understand what they're for.

You know how you have to have a book with you at all times, and the prospect of being, say, stuck in a lift or waiting for the dentist without one makes you turn an odd parchment shade? (At least, I hope you know this.) And it's even worse when you travel. On one finger, heavy papery things and draconian weight allowance. On another finger, the knowledge that you actually don't get a chance to read all that much overseas because you're constantly completely caned by having too much fun. (I know some people have holidays where you lie by the pool with a paperback in one hand and a drink covered with umbrellas in the other. I've yet to master those.) Yet, on the other hand, there's that primal fear of running out of books.

And that's why I now understand the purpose of MP3 players. They're for taking talking books on holiday. You'd think this might have occurred to me earlier, but last year I was in Botswana, and good luck plugging in a charger in a tent in the middle of the Kalahari. There aren't even any passing electric eels. However, this year I intend to visit countries which contain walls and electrical sockets therein. And that's why I just bought an MP3 player.

I could have just done the Apple thing. But lots of people I know moan about theirs having broken. So I settled on the Cowon iAudio 7:



This little chubster isn't exactly as svelte as its fruity cousins. But there's a point to the porkiness: when Cowon upgraded the model, instead of making it slimmer they improved the battery. And it now has a sixty hour battery life. Sixty hours. Sixty. Why, you can traverse whole countries in sixty hours! Add to that a fun interface you swoop your finger up and down, a 16GB hard drive and the ability to see it as a drive on the computer without struggling with proprietary software, and I urged them to wrap it up post-haste.

It's not the ideal choice if you're looking for something that could get lost between the cracks in the floorboards. Nor is it much use for viewing video. But when you want to take a couple of dozen books with you - and who wouldn't? - it is, veritably, the shit.

Wow! My new camera contains ten megapixies!

At least, I think that's what they said.

Today I had to squish lots of little MP3s into big fat ones. The utility was taking an aeon even with keyboard shortcuts, with all the highlighting and sorting and whatnot, so I fired up the ol' DOS window, rattled off a bit of code and it was over in a trice.

Sometimes there's nothing for it but to kick it old style. If that's the expression.

From the NZ Herald:

Dame Helen Mirren has revealed she was date-raped twice when she was younger, but never reported the crimes.

The 63-year-old actress - who won an Oscar for her performance in The Queen - she said she was too scared to say no and was forced to have sex.

Mirren said: "I was date-raped, yes. A couple of times. Not with excessive violence, but rather being locked in a room and made to have sex against my will.

"If a woman voluntarily ends up in man's bedroom with her clothes off... it's such a tricky area, isn't it? Especially if there is no violence.

"I think she has the right to say no at the last second. But I don't think she can have that man in court under those circumstances.

"I guess it is one of the many subtle parts of the men/women relationship that has to be negotiated and worked out between them."

Argh.

Helen, I'm very sorry you were raped. But there's no such thing as a polite rape, a sort-of rape or a rape that isn't illegal. It's not a "subtle part of the men/women relationship". It's an unsubtle part of the justice system. Either you were raped or you weren't, and obviously you were. Yes, even if you were voluntarily in his bedroom with your clothes off. How depressing that this still has to be said in the twenty-first century.

Amongst the grim chaos that is modern air travel, there is a refuge. And that refuge is the ridiculously pretty Blenheim.



Instead of grilling you about whether you absent-mindedly packed any bombs, the airline agent admires your cute green Benetton suitcase and asks you where you bought it. Instead of being intensively scanned by machine and human for dangerous substances, you wander across the tarmac entirely unsearched and with your nail clippers sitting unmolested in your handbag. Where they should be.

(That's not to say Blenheim's entirely unconscious of our dangerous times, of course. After all, there's a no parking zone in the bit of street just outside the air force base.)

And that's not the only attraction Blenheim has to offer. When you go out to eat on a Saturday night you can find parking - in the main street! And you can buy Cloudy Bay's 2007 sauvignon blanc from the cellar door at a fraction of the price they're getting for it overseas. Ah, Blenheim, mon amour.

Some days you select your cuisine; some days your cuisine is thrust upon you. Hence today's menu: Unwanted Meat Pack Stew (cooked in Only Unoutrageously-Priced If Free With Flybuys Le Creuset), accompanied by Whoops Forgot The Yeast Neutron-Heavy Bread.

Next year I will be going to Zambia, where I will be tracking lions on foot.

This, it has to be said, sounds like a somewhat insane idea even to me. In fact, I saw someone doing it on TV last year and swore that would never be me. I was about five feet from lions last year in Botswana in a totally open vehicle, but there's something about the thought of being on their level that makes all those atavistic hunter-gatherer hairs on the back of your neck stand up and wave desperately for help. And actually walking towards lions, rather than slinking away from them (don't run! Never run!) as unobtrusively as possible, seems possibly certifiable.

Thing is, though, that in Botswana the national parks don't allow you to walk, and we only got to get out to have a cup of tea and admire zebras and hippos and stuff. (And in camp, of course, which was liberally set about with hyenas and honey badgers et al.) But when we did, it was a trillion times cooler than sitting in the vehicle. Hence, Zambia and the lions and the feet.

And assuming we don't turn into a mobile lion smorgasbord, we will also be spending a few days in the Chimfunshi chimp sanctuary, where we'll be playing with and looking after the chimps, which naturally I can barely type without squeaking with excitement.

For what all this is costing I could put an extension on my house, but what can you do? It's Africa. There's nothing like it. There is nothing like it.

Not that I would ever deny it, because geekiness is ubercool, but you know you're a geek when you get a hand-painted Dalek card and a die-cast Tachikoma* for your birthday. From two different people.

*A model one, not a real one. Although how cool would that be?