Duncan Rintoul visits, May 2005

Originally uploaded by Tim Johnson.

One of our friends, Duncan Rintoul, who we hadn’t seen for quite some time emailed us out of the blue over the weekend to say he was coming to Canberra and arranging to catch up. Actually, it’s not quite true that he emailed – because he didn’t have our contact details, he found our site (this one) on Google and left a comment, which is automatically emailed to me. Anyway, we’ve had quite a fun night catching up, hanging out, sucking down a few brews and eating some great Indian food.

I should also comment on the movies that Duncan has subjected me to. Since Duncan is staying with us, we hired out a couple of DVD s to watch this evening; we got “Napoleon Dynamite” and “Anchorman“. They’re both strange, and yet funny as well. Napoleon Dynamite was such a random film – things just happened and it was odd, but it was funny at the same time; it’s one of those films that I think would improve with several watchings. Anchorman was probably not quite as funny, but there were some cool bits – particularly the cameos by Jack Black and Ben Stiller.

Anyway, all that aside – it’s cool having people stay, and we look forward to having Duncan and Kate down again sometime in the future, or visting them maybe (rather than driving by and figuring out where there apartment was without stopping in due to time constraints, as we did the last time we were in Thirroul).

After my post earlier about ‘Talking to My Sock’, Larissa changed the name of her site. It is now much more amusing. And I have proof, in case she changes it back:

Many blogs allow you to leave comments – Larissa gets lots on hers. I used to allow it, and got some interesting discussion (check out discussion about St Andrews Cathedral), but turned it off because I was getting too much comment spam.

Anyway, Larissa indicated her annoyance that she couldn’t leave comments, so I have allowed comments on new entries. What I’ll probably do is allow comments when I first make a post, then disable them after a week or so in order to prevent spam.

Some may notice that on the right hand side of this page in the ‘Links’ section there is a reference to my sister, Larissa’s, weblog – titled Talking to Myself. I just wanted to give her a bit more of a plug, but apart from that I would like to take this opportunity to comment on the name of her blog. I find that title interesting on two counts:

1. It implies she writes her entries for her own amusement and interest, but she seems to get more visitors than I do and many people read her site. Obviously the title is a lie, or at least, has become inaccurate.

2. I think a more interesting title would be ‘Talking to My Sock’.

That’s actually an in-joke; I misheard Larissa when she was telling me the name of the site the other day, but I think that ‘Talking to My Sock’ would be a very good name for a blog, even if it does conjure images of Sunday School puppets. I have a similar and also funny story about another mondegreen that happened last year, I think it was. I emailed with one of the developers of the ESV online, because I noticed a missing space between sentences in Luke 23:56. It turned out the problem was on another Bible site’s copy of the ESV online, but he did comment that “Ointments on the Sabbath” would be a cool name for a band. I was inclined to agree.

Incidentally, an article that Larissa wrote about Dan Brown books for the CASE journal is result number 6 when you Google for larissa johnson. We both thought that was pretty cool. Oh, and Tegan took the photo of Larissa that they used in the article. That’s cool too.