My mothers cat's name is Khan. Not, as one night assume, from the Star Trek character, or even (though temperamentally they are similar) from the great Leader-Warrior Genghis Khan.

In fact she was named after a lawn bowler (we fostered Khan as a kitten and the mother cat's name was Millie, hence Khan was named after Millie Khan New Zealanders great Grandmother-Commonwealth Games medalist in lawn bowls).

ANYWAY, the question is: will Khan (the cat) respond to William Shatner screaming KHAAAAAAAANNNN on repeat?

With You Tube as our guide and the speakers on full the answer is no.

Didn't even lift her head off her (sheepskin) bed.

Also today is (here at least) Christmas! No Christmas can be more fun than my Poppa's, he owned a bike shop and so every Christmas eve at night he would drop all the bikes off to people's houses so they could be under the tree on Christmas morning.

At every house there was a drink. Good thing then there was pretty much no one else on the road at that time of night at that time of year. It wasn't beer for Santa, Kiwi dad's broke out the good stuff.

It's 25 here and the sun is blazing. This is what Christmas was always like, no wonder I didn't like it in the Northern Hemisphere.

Enjoy it if you do it, my family is already planning "baby's first Christmas" bib's for Spiro, I can't help but feel that there will be some fights when I put him in the maple leafs one instead.

I think this may be the longest time I've gone without posting in LJ. Basically, I've been working on 5 projects at the same time that all have a deadline of... right about now. :P

When not working on 5 projects, I've been watching TV and going to the Dickens Fair! Today will be my third time and I'm going with lastcatastrophe. :D I really love it and it's only on between Thanksgiving and Christmas so I want to just go as much as possible. I wonder if I should have bangers and mash today, or English tea again. Maybe I can have both...

I've been watching some of the movies I've had on my DVR for months... years... and I really enjoyed War of the Worlds, The Prestige and Eat Drink Man Woman.

Ultimately, War of the Worlds was a flawed movie because of the ending, which was really rushed, but at the same time I don't think they had much of a choice because at this point, everyone knows how the story ends and dragging the movie out for the "surprise" ending that everyone already knows is pointless. I really enjoyed most of the movie though because they did such a good job depicting the sheer horror that people experienced, and it was suspenseful and surprisingly scary. Also, the desperation of people in dire circumstances leading to violence, always very fascinating to me.

I really liked The Prestige too. A lot of it was the Victorian setting. I loved the clothes and atmosphere and it was actually really cool to go to the Dickens Fair the next day and be in Victorian London. :P We actually watched a magician perform the disappearing bird cage trick and I was super excited! Then Chip pestered me repeatedly to explain to him how it was done, haha. The other thing I liked about it was the obsession the magicians had with wanting to be the best, and the escalation of revenge which made me a little bit nostalgic for the Hong Kong dramas my mother used to watch when I was a kid where there is all kinds of escalating despicable acts in the name of revenge and then in the end everybody dies or goes mad. Good times.

Eat Drink Man Woman was a fun movie. Unsurprisingly, being a Westernized Chinese person myself, I dig Chinese movies made by Westernized directors, heh. There were so many scenes of food preparation and cooking and unfortunately I didn't enjoy it because it just reminded me of being a kid and everything making me throw up. :( To this day I mostly avoid Chinese food. I did like that it was filmed in Taiwan and I liked looking at all the buildings and streets and... I know the movie was made in 1994, but was it set in an earlier time? It's really hard to tell, sometimes countries just look like they're 20 years behind the times.

On Sunday I went for a walk around the beach and yesterday around (what passes for in New Zealand) some stately gardens in bloom.

How is that snow working out for you folks? How is the sleet and frozen rain?