bobalucci

Niscalos (autumn field mushrooms)

Went field mushroom collecting a few weekends ago. Wasn't quite what I expected but we got a few!!

posted by Bob @ 11:37 PM 0 comments

Athens and Rome

The last couple of weeks has definitely seem me raking in the Frequent Flier points. Or possibly doing my little bit towards setting the world on a path to global catastrophe. It all depends on your perspective really.

I headed across to Rome a couple of weekends ago to watch the Wallabies play and to be honest the less said about that game the better. I have included a photo of the best rugby I saw being played on the day between a group of Australian and Italians.

The next day I wandered around the traps in Rome looking at lots of old and very famous things. I also realized that my Roman history was pretty woeful. I had no idea who most of these Emperor dudes were. I mean I only knew of Hadrian because of his wall, and I guess that is because he built it close to where a bunch of my Ancestors used to live. But it seems every second thing in Rome and Athens is named after him.

Subterranean evidence of the reasons for the decline and eventual fall of the Roman Empire.

Anyway here is the mandatory went there took the photo photo.
A week or 2 later I found myself heading through Athens on my way back from Cyprus. I revisited the scene of one of my sporting triumphs as well just for old times sake.

The finish line of the 2004 Olympic Marathon (and the 2003 Athens Marathon) - you pick which one I was involved in.


Lastly me on top of one of the hills in Athens with Endless white Athenian houses drifting off into the smog.

posted by Bob @ 12:41 AM 0 comments

Kalimocho for champions

One of the highlights for the Spaniards of the last couple of months was them taking out the basketball world championships (mens). As all Australian cricket followers know a world championship deserves a welcome back parade.

Being European they did it in an open top bus and being Spanish they did it at 1am in the morning. (pretty much when the teams flight got in from Japan). Likewise being Spanish they were about 1/2 an hour late.

Given I was still sick from my La Tomatina adventures the week before I probably shouldn't have been out, but I was - it's going to be a while more before they win anything that big again, so I wasn't about to miss it.



Hopefully the photo to the left captures some of the spirit. And spirit was the word. Kalimocho was the order of the day.

There were people of all ages but probably an overrepresentation of the 15-30 crowd (not that surprising really), a sizeable proportion of whom were celebrating with Kalimocho - the Spanish celebratory drink of choice - at least when the celebration is all about the alcohol and not much else.

Kalimocho is pretty much 50/50 coca-cola (don't say just cola that is rude - like tee hee you just said a bad word - rude) and red wine.

A fun time was had by all! Oh and the team turned up to celebrate as well.

posted by Bob @ 12:24 AM 0 comments

Spencer/Lang media antics

I thought it might be amusing to compare and contrast the media antics of various branches of the lang/spencer family on the same weekend.

One of my spencer cousins is smarter than me and has been finding his way into the media for a bunch of intellect based reasons - among them competing in the global maths olympiad, on this occasion however for making some robots that can play football.

There is a stated goal in the robotics industry to produce robots capable of winning the football world cup by about 2050. I personally don't think they'll make it. But it would be good to see them do it... even if only so they manage to execute a few graceful dives and beat the Italians at their own game. Ahh I am not bitter....

Anyway back to the main theme - my cousin and his robots made an appearance on prime time NZ TV a few weekends back:

https://tvnz.co.nz/view/video_popup_windows_skin/879790

On the other hand I took a slightly different approach to getting into the mass media. My approach was more about "It's who you know, not what you know" when I appeared in a newspaper article the same weekend. The article was about friends and friendship in general and appeared in the Sunday magazine of El Mundo, the newspaper with the second largest circulation in Spain.

You can read and see the article on the web at:

https://www.elmundo.es/suplementos/magazine/2006/371/1162578165.html

As to why I got a guernsey - well it is in the article.... but of course in Spanish.

To explain then... to go with the article they needed some photos of people with their friends, so one of my friends here (who I was introduced to by one of my Spanish teachers in Australia) was asked to appear in the shoot. The flag made an appearance because we were supposed to have some props of how or why we had became friends.

If requested I can translate bits of it for you (it took me about an hour and a half with a dictionary by my side to read it - told you my cousin was smarter than me). In a nutshell it says Spaniards have an above average number of friends and friendship is a good thing.

posted by Bob @ 12:19 AM 1 comments

Los Estadounidiense son locos (Modern equivalent of these romans are crazy)

I spent a couple of weeks in the US training and on Broadsoft's user conference and one of the hightlights at least from a blogging perspective was the hummer tour that I went on.

It was billed as a "Hummer desert tour", which I guess it was but it was also the "Redneck America tour". We drove for about an hour from Phoenix out to a desert national park and drove around a bunch of dirt roads for about 1 and a half hours finding the steepest bits to make it exciting, staring at cactii and whatever desert wildlife we could find - and there was a bit.




What was more captivating from all sorts of perspectives was trappings of redneck america we were surrounded by. First of all being a dirt national park this was 4 wheeler and dirt bike heaven. There were hordes of them buzzing mosquito like round the park.

But then kind of like a redkneck biathlon they had shooting ranges dotted around the place where there were people shooting the crap out of god knows what. Not too far from where we were driving either. So once or twice they opened up right next to us - scared the crap out of me.

At one point we were driving BETWEEN 2 shooting ranges when there was a fairly loud explosion I presume somebody let something off on one of them. One of those shooting ranges was pretty much shooting into the side of the hill we were driving along. Gun safety anyone?

I was talking to an ex army dude later,who was on the tour, who said they had to have templates of how far their bullets might carry when on live fire extercises, to overlay on their maps, to ensure stray bullets wouldn't end up in any populated areas.

Anyway....these Americans are crazy.

posted by Bob @ 12:03 AM 0 comments

La Tomatina

Not a lot to say about this one. Pretty much a pagan tomato throwing festival with 30k participants. I went there to celebrate 1 participants 40th Birthday. Bucketloads of fun, streetloads of tomatoes - literally. Other than getting fairly sick the week after I got back I thoroughly recommend it.

posted by Bob @ 11:48 PM 0 comments

I'm back (on the blog)

Apparently 3 months is probably too long to wait between posts to a blog. I guess the idea of this whole blog thing and passing on news may have passed me by. Let me turn over a new leaf.

Anyway times have been busy since the last time I posted. I have been to Germany a couple of times, La Tomatina, Prague, London a couple of times, Ireland, The US for a couple of weeks (Washington, Arizona and Vegas) and of course a little bit of time in Madrid. Oh and almost forgot Rome as well.

So I guess it hasn't been for lack of anything to report - merely laziness in reporting it.

So anyway hopefully you will see a few more regular posts from me (if I haven't completely lost all my readers!!)

posted by Bob @ 11:02 PM 0 comments