The collected works of ScottyB

My holiday is over already.

10 days goes pretty quickly, especially now that we are approaching Christmas.

Time flies when you’re having fun as the saying goes. And even though I’ve been pretty much confined to the house for most of my week vacation, I’ve had some serious fun. It’s been a nerdy sort of fun - plenty of PS3 gaming in there. Managed to finish Motorstorm yesterday (and was grossly disappointed to find out that there are no rewards for battling the arduous ‘Apocalypse’ ticket 21.. but anyway) and working solidly through Ninja Gaiden Sigma.

Even had some time over the last few days to get out to the pool. We’ve had some crazy (suddenly) hot weather here which is always good for toning the skin in before the ‘real’ Summer gets here, preventing insta-burn just walking from the car to work as has occurred in years past.

The long weekend has come and gone, the oldies are back and I’m off to work again tomorrow.

Such is life. At least it’s been an awesome past week.

On the way up to Williamtown to pick up my parents yesterday, I was driving along, when suddenly, a little black/brown ‘ball’ caught my eye up on the road ahead.

At first, I thought nothing of it, just a piece of rubbish or a chunk of truck tyre or something.. but as I hurtled closer, I realised that the object was moving. It had a shape.. and somewhere under the big lump were little feet, slowly powering it across the (no doubt hot) asphalt road surface.

The car beside me and I both slowed down as we realised it was indeed, a little Echidna making the crossing along the busy highway.

No haste at all.. he (or she) just ambled across in front of us like it had all the time in the world, completely oblivious to the obvious danger of its crossing. Cute little thing - I have to admit, I’ve never seen one up close before, certainly not in the wild - just in Zoos and photos.

Hope the other road patrons were as thoughtful as we were!

Godspeed little Echidna

There’s been a bit of a Hillary Swank fest lately, with ‘Freedom Writers’ and ‘The Reaping’ both appearing on the new release shelves at Video Ezy at virtually the same time. I got aroud to hiring out the latter while I was on holiday.

“Thousands of years ago there was a series of bizarre occurrences that many believed to have been the Ten Biblical Plagues. No one thought they could happen again. Until now.”

Sounded cheesy.

But I’ll watch anything and I’d read that there were some pretty wild special effects in this one, so decided to give it a whirl.

Without giving too much away, I have to say that while the visual effects aren’t exactly ground-breaking or academy-award winning material, they are nothing short of impressive and effective for the film. The river of blood - I guess CGI - was extremely well done, quite a faultless representation.

Biblical plagues arrive in the town and scientists are sent out to ‘disprove’ the religious theory. And have quite some trouble doing so.

There are plenty of cheap scares - and the plot is a little hard to follow sometimes, but there was something about this one. I enjoyed it, even though it wasn’t spectacular.

Link: The Reaping at IMDB