Daniel85

You know the drill. Supermarket. New limited edition food product. Buy, take photos, write about it.

Words can’t describe how awesome it is to see the standard Kinder Surprise red-and-white packaging all pimped out in Halloween get-up. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the Kinder Surprise visuals fucked with before, so hopefully this will lead to all kinds of seasonal and promotional shit in the future.

I’m a bit confused as to why this is coming out now. It’s nowhere near Halloween. At first I thought it might be a tie-in with that new Monster House movie, but then I realised there’s a difference between a house and a hotel. Maybe they’re trying to ride on the coat-tails of Monster House, although I don’t see it being a huge Shrek-or-Nemo-like success.

I like how the words ‘Value 3 Pack’ are done in a suitably scary font. I like to imagine Vincent Price saying it.

There’s our dramatis personae (click so you can actually see it). I remember as a kid getting the free catalogue with the new Kinder Surprise line-up each year. I wasn’t even that into the toys (except the gnomes… god, those gnomes were good), but getting a free glossy magazine was right up my alley.

‘Yo-yeti’? ‘Dracool’? ’DRAGOGATOR’?!?! The only explanation I can offer is that some Kinder employee fished a list of rejected Pokemon names outta the trash behind Nintendo HQ.

Aww. I was kinda hoping the eggs would be Thriller-ised too.

Hard to believe that all that came outta three little eggs. I bet those Germans would be real good at Tetris.

And three frustrating hours later, the fruit of my labours! The thing that was hardest to put together wasn’t even a damn Monster Hotel toy, but a Mexican bandmember. What is it with Mexicans lately?

I’m glad I actually was ”lucky enough to find one today” (see the boxfront), cos otherwise there woulda been some pain at Kinder HQ.

I don’t get what’s supposed to be so scary about this Doublesam character. And I find it very hard to believe that they’re both named Sam.

Probably the only redeeming factor about this whole affair is the kick-ass mini-poster above.

I think they all look so happy because they have their own hotel. Monster Hotel is like the only place these poor guys can go without being harassed by regular folk. Just look at the pure glee on Dragogator’s face! He can’t fucking wait to get his key and just go chill up in his room. Eat a couple of Toblerones, maybe catch a flick on hotel cable.

About the only guy who doesn’t look happy to be there is Yo-yeti. I think that’s because everyone is so enamoured of his silly name that they’ll just call out “Yo! Yeti!” all day, and he’ll turn around to see who it is but they’ll have disappeared or flown away or something. That shit could get old real quick.

I could write twenty-thousand words on that picture, but I won’t.

I’ll leave you with an animation of our mariachi band member. Enjoy.

And now, because no-one demanded it, another filler entry of Spider-Man panels!

This lot is from Amazing Spider-Man #151 (one of Ross Andru’s last issues as penciller, and Len Wein’s first as writer). It’s a pretty cool issue, actually, wherein Spidey disposes of the clone Peter Parker, JJJ throws a party to celebrate the engagement of Ned Leeds and Betty Brant, and finally one of the coolest Spider-Man villains ever, Shocker, turns off the lights in Manhattan. 

Before I get onto the party, I just want to prove how cool Shocker is. Observe:

He screws around with the Manhattan power grid, just to spell out his name in unlit buildings as a big ‘fuck-you’ to Spider-Man. How awesome is that?

That’s from much later in the issue, though. The party takes up the main part of the action. Jameson was really reluctant to throw the shindig, even though Betty Brant had been his loyal secretary for like 70 years (give or take) by this point.  

Harry Osborn, creepiest supporting cast member in comics. I think James Franco is my least favourite casting choice in the Spidey movies, because he makes Harry too much of a pretty boy. Ideally, Harry Osborn would be a CGI composite of Conan O’Brien and Michael Jackson, which is probably the only way to capture the downright creepiness of his countenance.

Now why’d I bring up that panel…? Oh yeah, Dr. Pepper. You don’t offer someone a sip of your drink, you freak. I don’t know what weirds me out more- Harry’s offer, or the fact that MJ accepted.

Check out that player in the bottom left corner. He’s got the hair, he’s got the moustache, and you know he’s got the girl.

I’m beginning to think that Len Wein was getting kickbacks from soda companies, with all this product name-dropping. 

For basically the whole party JJJ’s been playing the tight-wad host, going around telling people to turn down the record player or turn off the hallway light to save electricity. He even ordered the waiting staff to stop opening tins of caviar, cos presumably the guests were wolfing it down like salsa. Wouldn’t be a problem with me; I hate that shit.

Oh very droll, Jeeves. Ve-ry droll.

Have a look at Peter’s funky threads. Not enough people wear safari suits anymore. And hey, that other waiter stole Han Solo’s pants.

I’ll be honest; I didn’t really get interested in Pirates 2 until I saw the action figures in K-Mart a few months ago.

They really struck me, because pirates + action figures = awesome. I’ve felt that way ever since Mattel’s Hook action figures hit back in 1991. Hook was a great movie, and the fact that an action figure was made of ’Thud Butt’ is all the proof I need that there is a God. The Hook figure line doesn’t get much respect from toy collectors, which is good for me cos I think I’m like the only person in the world actively collecting it, so I’ve managed to get some pretty good deals.

Anyway, back to P of the C.

The one figure that really impressed me was Davy Jones. I knew absolutely nothing about POTC 2 at that point, but the sight of a dude with a beard of tentacles and a giant lobster claw for an arm got me pretty interested.

Then the trailer started playing on TV, and I saw this guy:

Not the best pic, I know, but that’s how he appeared in the trailer, which can only be because Disney wanted to make him a drawcard mystery, like how Lucasfilm made Kenner black out the images of the Ewoks on the Star Wars figure cardbacks, so as not to give the game away. I would really like to think that a whole bunch of kids saw this trailer and decided they had to see this movie, if only for the hammerhead guy.

I knew from seeing Davy Jones and Hammerhead Guy that Pirates 2 was going to be something special. Sure, the last film had ghosts and undead pirates, but this one had a crew of half-man/half-sea creature freaks!

That shit is right out of an 80s cartoon, I swear.

After seeing the movie (which didn’t disappoint– Davy Jones playing that organ is one of the best things in any movie ever), I did some Googling on the hammerhead guy. Not much out there, but I did find out that his name is ‘Maccus’, which I thought was dumb at first. Turns out, though, that it’s a Celtic word for ‘hammer’, which makes more sense. Still, the Masters of the Universe fan in me wishes he had a name like ‘Hammor’ or something.

If there’s one good thing I take out of all of this, it’s a restoration of my faith in good old fashioned kids’ entertainment, which has taken a hit in recent years. Who knows- what with all the superhero movies, the Pirates movies, the Turtles and Transformers movies… maybe Hollywood can finally get the kids off that anime crap.

Came across these while kicking it around my local Safeway recently:

I don’t think there’s been any advertising for them (but then, a product like this would probably be advertised during the morning cartoons, and I’m never up before 10 AM), so I dunno how long they’ve been around. Could be old news for all I know.

Let me tell you a little something about Tiny Teddies. They first entered the hearts, minds, and stomachs of Australian children in 1990, in ‘chocolate’ and ‘honey’ form. They’re loosely ripped-off (I mean based on) what the Yanks call ‘Teddy Grahams’. 

Now, in 1990 both the Care and Gummi Bears were still going strong (and who could forget the Ewoks?) so kids would eat up any product related to those small, fuzzy natural born killers.

Wait a minute! Eat up? Small bears? Small… tiny. Bears… teddies. Tiny Teddies.

I think it’s pretty safe to say that’s how one of the brainstorming sessions at Arnott’s would have gone in early 1989.

Anyway, I remember when they had just come out, there was a display at the Safeway on the corner of Shannon Ave and Aberdeen St (G-Town represent!) which consisted of a massive edifice built of boxes of Tiny Teddies. I was five years old at the time, and so right smack in the middle of the group Arnott’s was aiming for. I don’t recall if there had been much advertising for Tiny Teddies, or if seeing them in-store was my first exposure, but I do know that I wanted them bad.

My memory is a little hazy as to the exact sequence of events, but I think I was walking down the frozen food aisle with my mum when I saw the awesome spectacle of a ziggurat of Tiny Teddy boxes. I must have stopped and she kept going, cos I remember running up to her later, ready to make any kind of deal necessary to have those things in my belly within the hour. Strangely enough, she agreed to let me get them without my having to make the brocolli pledge, and I ran back to grab a box.

I dunno if I was just so excited that common sense physics went out the window, or if I was simply a stupid kid to begin with, but I just reached right into the middle of the masterpiece of whatever high school kid had pulled display stacking duty and grabbed a box of honey Tiny Teddies.

Sure enough, the whole damn thing came tumbling down.

I don’t remember what happened after that, but I don’t think I cared too much. I had my Tiny Teddies and a kick-ass ‘remember when’ story to boot.     

Back to the matter at hand, though.

There’s been a whole bunch of crazy Tiny Teddy shit going in the last few years, and I’ve tried to keep up as best I can. First there were new flavours, then whole new products (the Dunkaroo-esque ‘Tiny Teddy Dippers’, plus the Godzilla of the Tiny Teddy universe, the over-sized ‘Tiny Teddy Creams’, and the ill-fated savoury-flavoured Tiny Teddies).

I’ve always felt that there should have been a Tiny Teddy cartoon. I know that it’s not the early 80s anymore, and you can’t get away with shit like that in children’s programming, but come on- they could make it a positive, edifying multicultural thing. You’ve got the black/chocolate Tiny Teddies, the white/honey Tiny Teddies, and the half-caste choc-chip Tiny Teddies. And you know what the strawberry ones could represent.

No good? Ah well, it was worth a try. 

With this Tiny Teddy On Safari thing we get a hint of the Tiny Teddies actually engaging in some kind of activity beyond just existing to be eaten. (I’ve always felt the ‘Meet them, then eat them’ tagline in the advertising was a bit creepy. Kind of like those Cadbury ads where the chocolate people take bites out of their environment, pets, and each other.)

You’ll probably have to enlarge that to read the text. It’s worth it, believe me. Rex the Rhino, Ellie the Elephant, and Leonard the Lion. Leonard is such an uninspiring name for the King of the Jungle. I’da called him ‘Lucius’.

The standard fun-’n'-games on the back of the box. At least finger puppets are a bit more useful than one of those freakin’ mazes you usually get. 

So here’s what’s on the inside. I was going to try and do a David Attenborough sort of thing here, y’know, like “observe the creatures of the plastic savannah in their-’ oh, fuck it. Richard Attenborough was always my favourite Attenborough anyway.

There’s your lineup. I hate those fucking giggling ones. I think they’re there to laugh at the fat one, to show kids that it’s not okay to be obese. Hey, that could be a public service announcement. “Remember, kids: it’s not O-kay to be O-bese!”

Upon seeing the lion, I decided perhaps Leonard is the right name. He’s just so wimpy. The elephant, on the other hand, is goddamn scary. Those eyes…

I was pretty happy that these biscuits came in the honey flavour, because as far as I know you can’t get boxes of honey Tiny Teddies now; it’s  only available in those cumbersome multipacks with the little baggies that contain like six and a half Tiny Teddies. Those are okay for my two year old cousin, but I don’t need that many layers of plastic slowing me down. I want to just open a big box of Tiny Teddies and stuff my face with handfuls of them. I guess they had to go with honey on this one, though, because ‘chocolate’ and ’safari’ would just be inviting racism claims.

Yesssss. There’s my man Grumpy, clearly the best of the Tiny Teddy gang. If you compare the actual Grumpy to his animated avatar on the box, he is about 100 times more pissed off in biscuit form.

Here’s a line of Grumpy Tiny Teddies, just cos.

I think one of the things kids are supposed to do with Tiny Teddies is create their own little stories with them before eating them. The danger there is that you form attachments and don’t want to eat them, so you end up with ten year old grotty food on your mantlepiece. But anyway, if I was doing a story with the contents of this box it’d be all about Grumpy and his lion posse terrorising everyone else.

How do we get down to one Grumpy, you ask? Well, there’d be a Battle Royale amongst all the Grumpies to decide that. Every non-successful Grumpy would die by being uppercutted into my mouth.

If Nesquik got its own cereal, why not Tiny Teddies? It’s pretty practical, actually, cutting out the tedious dipping process and just getting some good old biscuit + milk action right into ya. Kelloggs + Arnott’s, you know what to do.

As part of my continuing mission to chronicle all the “limited edition” craziness that the junk food hustlers keep pushing at us, I bring you McDonald’s(’s? How the FUCK do you make something that’s already possessive possessive?) latest offering:

The Legendary El Maco

I actually hadn’t heard about the El Maco until my brother came back from a trip to town (and let’s face it- what else is there to do in Geelong but cruise down Ryrie Street?) and said ‘I ate like four of those El Macos’. I did a doubletake at that, a devilish grin spreading across my face as I put dos and dos together, realising that this must be some crazy Mexican- or Spanish-themed McDonald’s product. My bro pronounced it ‘El Mah-ko’, which had me thinking “McDonald’s and tacos- together at last!”. Unfortunately, that relationship remains unconsummated, cos it’s just a burger. But so much more than just a burger.

I must say that the television ad for the El Maco is brilliant. For those who haven’t seen it, it’s a parody of those god-awful McDonald’s ads that have been running over the last few months. You know, those ones where the adults suddenly stop in the middle of important stuff like standing in line at a cafe or parking their Benzes, and their ‘inner child’ jumps out of a trap door in their torso and goes to McDonald’s. “Feed your inner child” is the tagline, I believe. Anyway, the El Maco ad has a Hispanic looking fellow (complete with elaborate moustache, Mariachi uniform, sombrero, and guitar) jump out of the belly of a whitebread guy to go and grab an El Maco. “Feed your inner Mexican,” says that annoying voice-over guy who seems to be in every Australian ad lately. You know the one.

It’s a pretty funny ad, and it just goes to show that even though they’ve changed their image drastically over the last few years, McDonald’s isn’t above a bit of racial stereotyping.

Now, in the in-store promotional material, and also in the advertising, this is touted as “the return of the Legendary El Maco”. I’ve honestly never heard of it before, and that hurts me more than you can know. I really would like to think that if a burger had become ‘legendary’, I’d know about it.

The only other Mexican-themed McDonald’s burger I can remember is the Mexican Chicken Burger that had a couple of runs in the mid-90s (accompanied by the sheer brilliance of Spicy Shaker Fries). Now that was a burger of legend.

I love the idea of a burger in a box. If we can’t get back the old styrofoam burger containers (thanks a lot, hippies!), then I want to eat burgers out of cardboard boxes as much as I can.

Down the side of the box is a line-up of the El Maco’s ingredients. It’s basically a Big Mac (it does have two all-beef patties) with taco sauce, tomato, and sour cream, so I guess if the El Maco is to you as the Ribwich to Homer Simpson, then you can just make your own at home long after the legend of the El Maco has faded.

Mmm… appetising. The mess actually makes it look like a Whopper, don’tcha think?

Vivisection of an El Maco. It makes me feel good inside that once the El Maco has ridden off into the sunset, I’ll have been the only person with the foresight, nay, the vision to have taken a picture of the inside of one.

As for the taste of the burger, well, it’s like I said- you could make this yourself with a Big Mac and a couple of leftover sachets from an Old El Paso meal kit.

I’m so happy that they actually entered it into their receipt database as “El Maco”, rather than something generic and lame like “Promo. Burger” or “Ltd. Ed. Burger”. There’s something strangely amusing about seeing “El Maco” printed on a McDonald’s docket. It’s like some stoners working the night shift decided to fuck around with the cash registers and print off made-up stuff.

You might as well all go out and try the El Maco before it’s gone. If only to give your inner Mexican a break. 

The caravan park where my grandparents’ holiday house lies is one of those more up-scale affairs, which kind of defeats the purpose for me. I like tacky caravan parks, with broken signs and thirty year old vending machines. One of the good things about holidaying at dodgy caravan parks and motels is that after a couple of days you forget all about the crappy life you wanted to escape from for a week or two, and just can’t wait to get back to it.

But anyway, regardless of how nice the gardens and hygienic the communal toilets, this place was pretty boring. There’s a rule that you have to over 55 to live in the park (I’m not making this up), and because it’s not summer holiday season, there were no holidaymakers there. So it was just me and the seniors.

The good thing about this is that when I discovered the games room (about halfway through my stay), I had it all to myself.

The idea of arcade games at caravan parks appeals to me, cos of how the movie The Last Starfighter. Unfortunately, I didn’t get recruited by Star League, but I did get to waste my hard-earned on the couple of machines that held any interest to me.

It’s a good thing there was no-one else around, actually, cos otherwise I probably would’ve felt too creepy taking photos of a games room.

Pretty standard fare in there. From left to right: Hook pinball, Strikers 1945, Sunset Riders, X-Men vs Street Fighter, unknown out of commission game, another Sunset Riders, and Final Lap 3.

Oh, and that sign up on the far wall?

Half the fun of arcades is stuffing your face with Cheetos and slamming down Pepsi while playing Mortal Kombat or something.

The machine I was most interested in playing was Hook pinball, cos Hook is one of my favourite movies.

I suck at pinball, but I think I got my dollar’s worth in the light-up eyes on the skull. And at least now I can say I’ve played the NES, SNES, and pinball versions of Hook.

The only other game in the room that interested me was X-Men versus Street Fighter.

Aww jeah. Two of the biggest franchises of the 90s, thrown into combat most mortal.

The X-Men in this game were based off the animated series, which makes sense considering how huge that show was in the day.

My line up was:

Wolverine and Gambit! Could it get any more 90s?

Choosing Wolverine was a no-brainer; the guy fights like a mofo. His character animation there looks like he’s taking a humongous crap, though. And Gambit… well, I ain’t the biggest fan, but I love playing as him in games cos he gets to throw those charged playing cards. Tell me that ain’t several kinds of awesome.

I got sent up against Cammy and Rogue in the first round, and they kicked my guys’ asses.

It never works. But it’s comedy gold.

Here’s a good example from Defenders #111, wherein Patsy Walker (the Hellcat) has just reunited with her estranged father (after a weird thing where she was led to believe Satan was her real father):

“The Nestles”!!! Hahaha, I love it.

Nice Cliff Huxtable sweater and pipe, too. 

I forgot to post my most favouritest picture from the Big Banana:

I just think that’s so cruel. They’re already disabled; don’t make it any harder on them.

(Although with some Benny Hill chase music, seeing a guy in a wheelchair frantically going this way and that looking for the toilets before he a-splodes could be quite amusing.)

Probably the thing I was most excited about on this trip was seeing the Big Banana. It’s the king of Australia’s ‘big’ tourist attractions, and so a must-see for any low culture aficionado.

My experience with other ‘big’ things is limited to my many childhood road trips between Geelong and Adelaide, which is a decidedly less touristy route than the NSW coast. Still, South Australia has its share of oversized attractions, including the Big Rocking Horse (which is fucking huge, or at least was when I was 10), and the Big Lobster. I think the Big Lobster is my favourite, simply because of the ridiculousness of erecting a giant red crustacean in some nowhere town.

Anyway, we’re not hear to talk about lobsters and rocking horses. The Big Banana is our game.

There she is. The angle of the picture is not some kind of artistic device. You can’t get a front-on shot without standing out in the road, which is a busy highway. Three thousand Japanese tourists are lost each year…  

God, I love mascots. This little guy is all over the Big Banana compound (yes, compound- I like to think of it as a military facility). 

Told ya he was all over the place. I like that banana split one. Such an inviting look.

A shot of the underbelly of the Big Banana. There were information displays inside the thing, but I couldn’t read ‘em cos it was too dark. I wasn’t keen on hanging around inside there for very long either.

Ah, the gift shop. There was so much crap in there I could’ve been taking photos all day, but I settled for taking just one because the staff were starting to look at me weird.

Apart from having every conceivable banana-shaped object for sale, they also had a lot of clownfish stuff. Cashing in on Finding Nemo, I guess, but now they’re stuck with a bajillion squishy clownfish stressballs that probably aren’t gonna move anytime soon. 

Any large tourists attraction is bound to have a whole system of hangers-on crop up around it, and the Big Banana is no exception. You can’t go wrong with old-timey candy makers. I like how apparently this candy maker is ‘famous’. Yeah, a fucking rock star.

Noooow we’re getting somewhere. These are all the peripheral banana-related things at ‘the compound’. A nut house and a farmer’s market. I choose to believe that the nut house is just that: an insane asylum, presumably for people who have been so awed by the Big Banana that they’ve gone stark raving.

I just had to call bullshit on this. World’s Largest Puzzle? Surely in all the years of human endeavour we’ve managed to make a bigger puzzle than this. Surely.

Yeah, probably should have put this at the start of the article, but I am not scrolling up now, no way, no how. I kinda wish I’d gone on that little vehicle thing up there. Looks kinda like a Federation Runabout, probably the funniest vehicle in all of Star Trek. I like to say it. Runabout. Runabout.

I like how they’re touting ’a whole new Big Banana experience’. I’d be interested to see how this differs from the old Big Banana experience, but yeaaaahhh…. I’m not going back there. Ever.

Wish I’d had time to go on this ‘Skywalk’, cos I love lookouts. They sort of make you feel like you’ve achieved some kind of mastery over the natural world.

I would really like to think that they built this part of the Big Banana experience in the late 70s/early 80s, and called it the ‘Skywalk’ to get in on some of that Star Wars action. I would like to live in a world where that is the case. 

If the Big Banana compound is a solar system, this Trike Ride thing is Pluto. No, it’s fucking Planet X. They put it way over the other side of the carpark, and down a massive hill, so you’d really have to like motor-trikes to head over there.

And if you’ll kindly direct your attention to the sign to the right of the Trike Rides building, you’ll come to our next attraction:

The Snow Slope! This thing looks cool, but I didn’t really have the time/energy to go check it out. They also have an ice rink (somewhere- couldn’t find it!). I wonder why they decided to branch out into winter sports. It can only be because they wanted to get into the lucrative frozen banana business. I wish they’d had a picture of that banana guy over on the snow slope, but wearing Hoth gear. That’d be awesome. 

There was an orchid store on site, which probably takes the prize for ‘Most Unrelated Business Operating At The Big Banana’. My grandad is a bit of a green thumb, so we had to go check that out. It wasn’t as big a waste of time as I thought, because it turned up that awesome sign you see above. It got me to expecting some really crazy ass, Little Shop of Horrors style plants, but nah- just regular orchids.

I’m done now.

Well, here we go with the first article to be, how you say, crapped out from the festering sphincter of my trip to Coffs Harbour/Northern NSW.

My grandparents paid for my flight up there so that I could spend some time with them, cos they’re not making the trip down for my 21st birthday. Not that I give a care about the 21st thing, but that could just be a front to hide the fear of having to grow up. But not in a creepy Michael Jackson way.

Anyway, the first day I was there they handed me a bunch of tourist pamphlets (the mid-north NSW coast is Tourist Country) to see if there was anything I was interested in doing. In hindsight, I should’ve tagged more things as ‘want to do’, because 11 days in a 2-bedroom holiday house in a caravan park with your grandparents and about a hundred other retirees is a LONG TIME.

One of the only things that struck me as interesting was the ‘ECO-House’, an emporium of recycled goods drawn from the garbage dump upon which it is built. It’s actually in front of the dump, but I like saying ‘upon which’. 

Now, as everyone knows I’m a pathetic little dude who can’t get over the past, so second-hand outlets are Mecca to me. I thought this one would be awesome, but unfortunately it wasn’t, so instead of letting my time and the battery power in my camera go to waste, I’ll just be making fun of a few things I saw there.

Shall we…?

Nice big pile of household detritus, huh? I was kind of hoping that I’d hear the Transformers transformation sound effect, and this mess would assemble itself into a big ol’ robot. No such luck, would you believe?

I had to take a photo of this, because I love print advertising, which probably goes back to my childhood reading of magazines and comics. My mum used to have shitloads of those crappy housewife magazines lying around the place. I liked the cigarette ads the best, cos like every single one hinged upon the idea of windsurfing. I think if I took up windsurfing I’d have to become a heavy smoker, too.

And hey- it’s been a while since I’ve seen Spring Valley juice. I wonder if they still sell that stuff.

Detecting a theme, here? I wish I had something insightful to say about what these cairns of discarded household items represent, but nope. It’s a pile of mattresses, folks, take it or leave it.

Here we have some kind of animal enclosure, or a CAGE FOR GNOMES. Seriously, click to enlarge to check out the construction of the doors, with that Z-frame thing. You don’t go to that much trouble for rabbits or parrots. That’s a gnome cage, my friends. 

I know I posted in this pic in my last entry, but I just like it so much. They had this knight dude standing outside the entrance to the main building (which I neglected to get a shot of… but it had this awesome wooden sign that looked like they have over the entrance to summer camps… you know, like Camp Leialoha or something). I took a shot of my grandad with Sir Rustalot, but grandad wasn’t as reticent as me. He put his arm right around the good Sir as if he was an old drinking buddy. I, on the other hand, don’t know if I’ve had a tetanus shot, hence my stand-offish pose.

It pains me to see Super Nintendos treated in such a manner. For the Americans in the audience, this is the PAL version of the SNES console. I think it looks far better than your NTSC version, so there.

Haven’t seen that many pink bikes since I went to the Gay Velodrome.

I think Captain Obvious might have paid a visit to the ECO-House, cos check out the sign they put on the tree pictured above:

No wee-wee, Watson! I mean… no shit, Sherlock!

Well, that’s the best of the ECO-House for ya. More blog entries on my trip to come, including the Big Banana and a breakwater wall at the head of a river where every single rock has been painted by tourists. You won’t wanna miss it.