Spatula Forum

Assorted linkbloggery

Wow, we move to this side of the world and Australia bursts into flames and Fiji has (yet another) coup. Can the rise of Sauron be next?

So we had our first New Zealand camping trip this weekend, to the gorgeous little peninsula of Tawharanui about 80km north of Auckland. Being New Zealand, it rained on us much of Saturday but the weather here is such that if you don't like it, wait 10 minutes and it'll be completely different, so there were some nice spells, and Sunday was utterly gorgeous. There's approximately eleventy-billion beaches in New Zealand to explore so that will keep us busy for many weekends. Go check out some photos over at my Flickr page!

...Very strange to see that for the second time in a year a family got lost in the woods of Oregon not too far from where we used to live. The tragic tale of the James Kim family seemed to be top news everywhere I looked on US web sites last week. It was odd to see our former home of Oregon once again take center stage – the road they were stranded on, this very remote quasi-highway between the coast and Grants Pass, was the same exact road Avril and I drove on a little more than a year ago (our account of it was told here). Where James Kim died was just an hour or so south of Roseburg. I remember thinking at the time we drove on that curvy, curvy little road how easy it could be to get lost there – and that was in September, well before the snows. For many folks it's pretty inconceivable that you can get lost, lost for good, in modern America - but there's still a lot of remote places out there.

Over on BlogCritics you can find two swell reviews I've done recently that I haven't posted here -- go henceforth and read!
• "LoudQUIETLoud: A Film About The Pixies," a swell documentary covering the band's 2004 reunion tour.
• "33 1/3: Nirvana's In Utero" by Gillian G. Gaar is a nifty pocket-sized look at the grunge band's finest hour, in my humble opinion. Check it out!