Weeknotes #154

We flew to Australia for Christmas. It was easily the worst travel experience I’ve had. I’ll keep it brief but the following all occurred: Emma and John both threw up in the rental car; we almost failed to return the rental car before the shop closed; we almost failed to board the plane before it took off; Emma and John both threw up on the plane; our baggage was delayed by 45 minutes. It was otherwise a pleasant flight.

Christmas was nice and, aside from the flight over, the trip has been good so far. In contrast to our last visit at the height of the ‘Black Summer’ bushfires (Wikipedia), the weather has been just about perfect. I think this is one of those instances where climate change is working in my favour. Take this with an industrial-sized grain of salt but if my rudimentary understanding of Australasian weather is correct, the eastern seaboard of Australia should be experiencing cooler conditions because of La Niña (Wikipedia). That’s not really been the case while we’ve been here, leading me to suspect that perhaps those cooler conditions are essentially cancelling out the more intense summer heat that seems the norm these days. Not great from a planetary perspective but given that opening paragraph, I’m taking my wins where I find them.

Mum and Dad have a plug-in electric hybrid and I think this might be the first time I’ve driven an electric car.

I’ve eaten Oporto once so far. No pad khi mao or stir-fried rice noodles with beef yet.

My plan for the family to enjoy playing Nintendo Switch Sports has been derailed by me not realising that I’d need the Switch dock in order to plug it into the television. I went around to some of the local electronic shops looking for some kind of adapter but with no success. I’ve purchased one from the Australian Amazon but it won’t arrive until Friday.

Last week I said that I was thinking of listening to Brian Phillips’ podcast 22 Goals and, having now heard the first four episodes, I can report that this is an excellent suggestion that you should avail yourself of if you have any interest in sport. If I’d listened to this before the World Cup, there’s a very good chance it would have pushed me to watch the tournament.

Back in 2007, I came across an acoustic live version of the Foo Fighters classic, ‘Everlong’. If memory serves, it came across my radar because of its placement on Triple J’s Hottest 100 of 2006 (Wikipedia). There’s a moment in the song where Dave Grohl sings ‘You’ve got to promise not to stop when I say when’ and a man with an Australian accent audibly replies ‘We promise!’ Perhaps because of this—and the Hottest 100 connection—I assumed that for years it was from some legendary Live at the Wireless performance. I found out years later that nope, it’s from the album Skin & Bones and dates from a series of three gigs in Los Angeles (Wikipedia). In case you, too, love the acoustic version, here’s an 11-minute video from 2021 of Dave Grohl explaining the origins of the song before playing it acoustically.

Oh, and here’s the Skin & Bones version (Apple Music).