About SJPONeill

Retired(ish) and living on the side of a mountain. I love reading and writing, pottering around with DIY in the garden and the kitchen, watching movies and building models from plastic and paper...I have two awesome daughters, two awesome grand-daughters and two awesome big dogs...lots of awesomeness around me...

Daily Prompt: Come Fly with Me | The Daily Post

Posted on 15 November 2013 by SJPONeill

Share a story about the furthest you’ve ever traveled from home.Photographers, artists, poets: show us TRAVELS.

Well, as you may have picked up from my recent ‘movie’ posts, I have been doing a spot of travelling and spent a very nice week in Germany at the end of last month…

I didn’t take any pictures at all of the trip north; I didn’t even stop to take any of the storm damage that was obvious all along the road north from Raurimu to Auckland – this would have been interesting to contrast with the similar storm that swept western Europe the week we were there (and, nope, didn’t take any photos of that either!!) – so my first photo is the mandatory one I always (usually – none from Dubai because my view was only of a rather bland concrete wall) take of the view from my hotel room…this being in Kleve…

Kleve Oct-Nov 13-006

…and another from the hotel stairway looking back the other way…the Rilano-Kleve is very close (five minute walk) to the old centre of town (a five minute drive to the new centre) which has some great places to eat… Kleve Oct-Nov 13-003

The Wednesday night one of our team who used to live in Germany arranged for us to come here in Uedem for dinner with some of his friends…very nice to meet Jurgen and Petra and thanks for a great night out…

…polishing off the night with a bottle of Killepitsch herb liqueur…I had intended to bring a bottle home but out-clevered myself by checking my bag all the way through to Auckland so that I was unable to stash any post-checkin duty-free in it during our brief stopover in Dubai…Prior to heading home we had a chance for a very quick look around the area…this is the bridge at Nijmegen, just across the border in The Netherlands (lesson learned to include the ‘The’ to find The Netherlands in the GPS!). This is the bridge seen in the famous scene from A Bridge Too Far where a horrified Hardy Kruger watches Allied tanks advance across the bridge as he tries to destroy it. It is also where Robert Redford leads a daylight crossing of the river in collapsible boats…

I didn’t do any research before we visited Nijmegen. If I had, I would have known that the actual bunker from which the Germans tried to destroy the bridge was only just along the road from where we stopped (the T intersection above the ‘tec’ in battledetective.com below)…

From Nijmegen, it was only a short drive – an amazingly short drive when you consider the difficulty that the Allies experienced trying to advance along this highway to relieve the airborne forces there – to Arnhem and the ‘bridge too far’, now named the John Frost Bridge after the CO of the parachute battalion that held one end of the bridge for a week against much more powerful German forces…

There is a small museum by the bridge which was closed and a small memorial park with some display plaques and displays…

…one of which was this twisted propeller blade. There was no marking or label with it but we assumed that it is from one of the many Allied aircraft shot down over Arnhem as the Allies tried to sustain the airborne forces by air…

An hour or so later we arrived in Amsterdam and experienced a modern car park building where there are no ramps, just an elevator that services all levels. Probably a good thing that we had such a small car as the elevator is quite tight…

I can’t say that I liked Amsterdam that much…I’d probably revisit it out of novelty value but for the most part it was quite dirty and crowded…

The obligatory stroll along the Red Light District…pretty boring really…

…some interesting old architecture…

…and a novel take on providing extra cycle parking in the centre of the city…

Yes…you can do this legally on some roads…more impressively, you can do it in a Volvo diesel shoe box on wheels…

Crossing the Rhine into Dusseldorf…

No surprises that I got into trouble in this shop…and could have got into a lot more if I had a bigger suitcase…

I quite liked Dusseldorf in the short time we had to have a look around before heading over the the airport…it reminded me very much of pre-quake Christchurch with many old buildings (most reconstructed after the war) and walks along the waterways…if I come back this way, I’d like to spend a bit more time here to have a decent look around…

I felt that I had to take at least one photo in Dubai…this is from our hotel car park back towards the airport…

Flying south from Dubai over the desert – modeller’s note: the sand colour applied by the RAF to its Gulf War aircraft would have blended well into this endless monotone…

Tankers parked up in the Gulf…

…home again…the arrivals hall at Auckland Airport…just a four hour drive from here to home sweet home…

via Daily Prompt: Come Fly with Me | The Daily Post.

Daily Prompt: Standout | The Daily Post

Posted on 14 November 2013 by SJPONeill

When was the last time you really stood out in a crowd? Are you comfortable in that position, or do you wish you could fade into the woodwork?

Photographers, artists, poets: show us STANDOUT.

These guys have some pretty impressive camouflage for moths but it only works when they stay on their patch and don’t come swarming around the house at night where a. the camo doesn’t work anymore and b. there is a great big Lulu dog who just loves to snap things out of the air…the month or so when these things are prevalent is Lulu heaven…

Lulu (Left) and Kirk (not interested in hunting things) getting cuddles

via Daily Prompt: Standout | The Daily Post.

Movies – Dubai to Dusseldorf

Posted on 13 November 2013 by SJPONeill

A darker re-imagining of Superman is what they claimed and to a point this is that…Russell Crowe makes a credible comeback from the disaster of Robin Hood as Jor-El and certainly improves on Marlon Brando’s 1978 hack at the role…I thought the villains were largely unconvincing and not nearly as intimidating as the General Zod and his henchfolk in Superman II and was disappointed that the final battle was not much more than a knock ’em down, drag ’em out kind of thing. The story of Clark’s early years is more credible than any of the previous takes but I remain ambivalent about the lack of even a cameo from anyone from the Luthor family and have high hopes that this will be remedied in the sequel…

More fun with guns…I had low expectations of this movie but it is a must for the home library…it moves fast with an excellent selection of big boys’ toys and plot turns to keep me engaged. I do however have to say that it is EXTREMELY unlikely that any sort of RPG-7 is going to upset an M-1 Abrams with a direct frontal shot…

All the reviews for World War Z that I heard before I left NZ were bad but I have a thing for this sort of movie and had to see for myself. I am glad that I did because, while flawed in some areas, it is an interesting take on the zombie genre and fun to watch. I can only assume that those that than gave it such bad reviews are the same crew that bleated because The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are not 100% true in every detail to the original books. The flaws I found in it are more from poor editing than poor story development especially during the final flight where time is wasted with inflight emergencies that add nothing to the plot but their eventual landing is not shown…in the plane, now on the ground, in the plane, on the ground, plane, ground…did we miss something in the middle – the first time I watched it, I thought that I had nodded off for a few minutes. Only on rewatching the last 30 minutes was it clear that this apparent teleportation was simply the result of poor film editing…

Movies – Dusseldorf to Dubai

Posted on 12 November 2013 by SJPONeill

Emirates have massive movie libraries on their most modern aircraft…they claim 350 across all genres and languages which is a pretty good effort…and this includes a variety of classic aka old movies. I had never seen The Desert Fox and while not a big James Mason fan, thought that I would give it a shot. For its time, it really is quite an amazing movie – I’m not sure how many others would celebrate a soldier who only seven years before had been one of its nation’s most dangerous foes..?

It recounts the tale of Erwin Rommel from the Battle of El Alamein until his mysterious death in 1944 and covers his involvement with the anti-Hitler movement in Germany over that period. It is based on Desmond Young’s Rommel the Desert Fox, which he researched and wrote immediately after the war, and which is considered a credible if not full treatment of one of Germany’s greatest generals. Although no attempts is made to conceal the American accents of all the actors, the plot and story-telling are sound and I found that I quite enjoyed this oldie…

I see that Tom Cruise is ‘starring’ again for allegedly comparing his absences from family during movie shoots with the absences felt by soldiers in Afghanistan and generally I think that he is a bit of a big-headed dork…but…I do like some of his movies and this is one of the ones that I like. I didn’t have high expectations of it but found it, if not challenging, certainly clever in the unfolding of the story and the final realisation of what has occurred on Earth…a little like Wall-E with a darker flip side…

Movies – Dubai to Auckland

Posted on 12 November 2013 by SJPONeill

Despite only having a few hours sleep in Dubai on the flight home – landing at 1159PM and didn’t get out of the terminal til after 1AM for a 9AM check-in that morning, I was quite refreshed for the final leg and managed to clock up seven movies and still be quite chipper on landing in New Zealand…

Another in the Disney/Pixar/Cars mold but good clean entertainment anyway…a sidenote is that there should be a nice line of plastic and paper models come out of this movies as they did for Cars

Giant robots meet giant monsters intermixed with raw Ozzie accents…pretty tired and lacking the kitschy appeal of the Godzilla genre from which is is drawn…

Cop buddies do Hellboy meets Ghostbusters meets Heaven Can Wait…entertaining but definitely on the lite side..

Wolverine has been in five of the six X-men movies and this is the second that has featured the character in the title role…it’s getting a bit tired now and the franchise either needs to be introduce some new X’s or be put out to pasture…

Fun with guns and old people…charming fun and violence…

This should be a noble story of dignity and pride and its pretention is that it assumes this to be so…instead of letting the story tell itself, it relies on cumbersome and unnecessary flashbacks and voiceovers to overcome the weakness of its script. Even Tommy Lee Jones as Douglas MacArthur comes across as stilted and somewhat common, not as the shrewd aristocrat that the man really was. Full of cliches and stereotypes with a distracting and irrelevant search for a missing prewar girlfriend. Stick with the Gregory Peck MacArthur and read Manchester’s American Caesar for the real story…

Boring with no real story…a mercy when it finally ended…mindlessly meandering plot lines and even the action is mediocre…give it a miss in favour of Gigli or Johnny Depp’s disastrous take on The Lone Ranger…

Daily Prompt: You, the Sandwich | The Daily Post

Posted on 7 November 2013 by SJPONeill

If a restaurant were to name something after you, what would it be? Describe it. (Bonus points if you give us a recipe!)

Photographers, artists, poets: show us DINNER tonight via Daily Prompt: You, the Sandwich | The Daily Post.

This is the second chicken recipe that I tried before heading off to the land of beer and schnitzel last month…the full recipe and process are on Sofia’s post Ayam Penyet so you’ll have to pop over there for the nitty gritty…

Mixing the herbs and spices including…

…kaffir lime leaves from our own little kaffir lime tree which has not only survived another winter but which has exploded into life with the coming of the Down Under spring…

…combining herbs, spices and chicken pieces…

…before placing them here to overnight and marinate in the fridge…

After 24 hours of marination, the chicken pieces are removed from the fridge…

…and flattened before being reheated in the wok and served with rice…

…et voilà…

Very tasty, and very filling…one medium size chicken breast was more than enough to satisfy my appetite…

Edit: I drafted this post using the WordPress for Android app and I must say that it is really quite crappy especially in its instability with posts that contain images…I had just had to re-insert all the images after the app stripped them out during the publishing process. Some things, if not worth doing well, are not worth doing at all…

Sherlock gets his rocks

Posted on 27 October 2013 by SJPONeill

As you might be able the deduce from the title, I am not a big fan of the UK series Sherlock...I don’t like it for many of the same reasons I’m not that fussed about the Robert Downey Jr take on Sherlock Holmes either. I especially dislike the superior manner in which it points out all the key clues in such an blatant instead of relying on simply writing a good enough script to illustrate Holmes’ deductive powers. I also also not that keen on Sherlock because the stories are not much more than poor adaptations of the classic Holmes’ stories dragged screaming into the 21sr Century. I much prefer Elementary as a contemporary Holmes tales because a. the stories are original and b. it has Lucy Liu in it.

So, anyway, last night was the first time that I’ve flown Emirates and I must say that the in-flight entertainment system is most excellent: over 300 movies to choose from and a decent size (the better part of 30cm) touchscreen to watch them on. International flights are usually I get to catch up on new release movies and I wasn’t disappointed with the selection last night. First up was Star Trek: Into Darkness which I did enjoy because I do quite like the ‘JJverse’ Star Trek although I was disappointed that the bottom line of the plot was a rehash of the Khan story, with attempts to liven it up by swapping some of the roles from the original Khan story. I don’t think that device worked that well but I’m reserving my final verdict until I see it on the big screen: I was pretty scathing on the first ‘JJverse’ story when I saw out on a small scree but now it’s firm favorite. I was expressed pleased to see Sherlock get his rocks though as he plays the same sort of supercilious superior character as he does in Sherlock. There wasn’t enough time for another full movie before the end of the trans-Tasman leg, so I caught the pilot episode of Elementary just to rub it in + I do really like it…

After a brief stopover in Melbourne, it was back in the air for dinner and into Ironman 3. Quite simply, too many Ironmans…Tony Stark is Ironman, Roadie is Ironman, Pepper is Ironman, even Ironman is bloody Ironman! Much as I enjoy the Marvel universe, this one had a very X-Men feel about it with more super-powered mutated adversaries who seem to come from nowhere; coupled with Tony Stark’s continuing angsting over the events in The Avengers, it started to get a little boring and didn’t really contribute a lot to development of the characters of the universe. I think this franchise really has to get back to a ‘one movie, one Ironman approach’ and some more credible adversaries…

I only got about 20 minutes into GI Joe: Retaliation before I needed a snooze. That not really a reflection on the movie and more a result of my body time being around 3AM. On watching the remainder some four to five hours later, I didn’t think that it was as good as The Rise of Cobra…way too much very passé ‘fight by wire’ and not nearly enough of the cool GI Joe toys that were the backbone of the franchise. I’m also not a big fan of ‘famous actor, cameos and, to be really honest about it, the Bruce Willis character could have been played by anyone. Ditto for Channing Tatum’s character, Duke…what happens to him loses any shock value as the character has been so poorly developed. Perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised as director, Jon m. Chu’s other claims to fame include inflicting Justin Bieber: Never Say Never on the world…

And thoughts of Justin Bieber bring us to the next movie in our journey, the 2013 version of The Lone Ranger. No, Bieber is not in this movie but his presence is about the only thing that could make it any worse! This is one of the worst movies that it has ever been my discomfort to sit through – and I did sit through the whole thing in the unrequited hope that it could only get better…this bloated aberration fails totally to offer even the slightest entertainment value and turns the legend and values of the Lone Ranger into a painful vehicle for Johnny Depp to meander around the screen for two and a half hours with a rotting bird on his head. Do your kids a flavour and get them ANY other version of The Legend to watch instead of this nonsense…even forcing them to watch Gigli to to the William Tell Overture would be a vast improvement…

I always liked the buddy action movies of the 80s and Walter Hill’s Bullet the the Head looked like a good easy to fill the last couple of hours as we approached the Gulf. I might have needed to find something even shorter as Emirates have so many pre-landing PA announcements that I wasn’t able to finish it before touching down – in all fairness, I was in an exit row so had to stow my screen early. Although I still have 7-8 minutes of the movie to go, I can already say that I did quite like this one. It remains true to its action buddy roots but has a very clever and well-executed twist in that Sylvester Stallone’s character is not a very good person at all and the strength of this character is only slightly eroded by the blandness and weak development of his cop ‘buddy’…I think this one is worth a look for this alone….

Tuscan Stuffed Chicken

Posted on 20 October 2013 by SJPONeill

Dinner tonight…chicken breast stuffed with black pudding, served with fancy cabbage and mashed potato…details @ Healthy Food Guide…very yummilicious although both the cabbage and chicken are quite spicy/Herby where the mashed potato is uber-vanilla and too bland for the chicken or the cabbage: I think for next time, the potato would be better mixed with maybe kumara or parsnip to add some flavour and, while the cabbage was excellent, I noticed this afternoon that the silver beet has exploded in the box garden and I may experiment with it as a potential cabbage substitute…

Edit: forgot to mention above to peel the skin off the black pudding before stuffing the chicken. This makes it more crumbly and easier to stuff…

Daily Prompt: Mid-Season Replacement | The Daily Post

Posted on 15 October 2013 by SJPONeill

For many of us the seasons are changing, bouncing unpredictably between cold and warm. Are you glad to be moving into a new season, or wishing for one more week of the old?

Photographers, artists, poets: show us SEASONS.

via Daily Prompt: Mid-Season Replacement | The Daily Post.

Although autumn (fall to those than shunned the Empire) usually hits quite late in the year, we always has three or four months of winter where the garden is a bit of a wasteland…in nine years we still haven’t figured out what the trigger is, or even if there is one, but some time in October or November, there is an explosion of color across the ‘wasteland’, heralding the change of seasons…

The one sure sign that winter is over is when the ponga shoots start to extend into the light…usually we wouldn’t expect to see this until late November or even early December but this week they all lit off together.

This is our citrus triumph – a little kaffir lime that not only has survived nine winters on the Mountain but which also produces some fruit each year. It probably wouldn’t be bigger but it has had a few knock-backs over the years…unseasonal snow or frost, sometimes just not being good enough with the frost cloth.

The scorched earth area in the background is an area still under development that we’re still deciding what to do with. It will probably be a pathway up to the boundary fence through a developing ponga grove…

Mr Maple’s a bit slow off the mark this year but in a few weeks should be a blaze of crimson. You can see why the terra planter (it’s mate has gone the same way too) was such a good deal a few years back…the walls are simply too thin to take the internal weight of soil and tree. A summer project will be to build some more robust wooden planters to replace these ones….might have to get these guys in to give me a hand…