No Middle Name

TimTam Originally uploaded by No Middle Name . This is what makes Australia great. The things that matter, they do really well. So you have coffee shops that sell hot meat pies for you to enjoy with your skinny latte (so you can feel a bit more butch). They sell dim sim in the fish and chip shops. They worry about biodiversity and saving water, while driving cars the size of small buses. The pinnacle of Australia's greatness, is the Tim Tam. This small, chocolate-covered biscuit is truly a work of inspired genius. It is, to use Scary's phrase, this: fucking aces. Some may point out the similarities between a TimTam and the UK's Penguin biscuit, but they clearly have never tasted a TimTam. It takes the penguin round the back and gives it a bloody good hiding. The chocolatey goodness of the TimTam is fantastic straight out of the packet, but I can hear some of you saying "So what? I can get chocolate biscuits anywhere, anytime. I want something different, somet...

The ED SF Project , a Sci Fiction appreciation site (following on from the closure of sci fiction ).

We bought The Muppet Show - Season 1 on DVD yesterday. I wasn't sure if the kids were going to like it, and the jury is still out - at the moment the Muppets are trading on the success of Mna Mna (doo doo de-doo-doo) in the first episode and will need to pull something out of the bag soon of it's back to Robots and Shark Tale for us. DVDs are much cheaper over here in the colonies. The Muppets cost us $35, which is about £16, and they're selling it for £25 on Amazon (which is usually one of the cheapest places to get DVDs in the UK). Bravo, our Australian cousins.

Boo hiss! The best online SF publishing site, SCI FICTION is closing at the end of the year. Grr. Now how am I to achieve international acclaim? My plan was this: Write great story (possibly to include zombies/aliens/cats). Get it published on scifiction Collect awards Put feet up as money comes rolling in by the truckload I'm currently stuck on the first part.

You'd think that being unemployed would mean I'd be updating this blog every half hour, what with all that time on my hands. Unfortunately, being unemployed means that the only people I meet are my family, and the only things I do are apply for jobs, buy groceries and stare vacantly out through the window. Not exactly exciting blog fodder. This morning, however, I'm awake at 6:30 while the rest of the house snores. My back decided to wake me up about two hours ago, by being just painful enough to stop me from sleeping, but not ohmygodsomeonehasreplacedmyspinewithfire painful - you know, the glamorous kind of pain that leaves you looking pale and drawn in a hospital bed while pretty young nurses mop your brow, perhaps occasionally giving you a bed-bath. Or therapeutic oral sex. I've watched enough House to know that I've probably contracted Von Trapp's Disease, and only have 24 hours before all my organs liquefy and dribble out of my ears. First, they'll trea...

Now that we've been here for 5 weeks, I feel qualified to dispense my hard-earned wisdom. Firstly, visa choice. If you're coming to Australia, don't bother with a temporary visa - go for permanent residency, if you can, it makes things a lot easier. We're here on a Temporary Business Subclass 457 visa, sponsored by my wife's hospital. No problem, we thought, we can apply for residency once we're sure we like it. The problems are: you can't get finance for anything if you're on a temporary visa, so make sure you've got a shitload of cash available to you; you can't buy a home, you'll have to rent (well - you can buy a home but first you have to apply for permission with the Foreign Investment Bureau); you're unlikely to find someone who will give you a permanent job, since they can't be sure you're going to be around in 12 months' time (this is a problem for me, not my wife - who can't change jobs for 12 months anyway); yo...

Do you know what is the scariest thing about moving to another country? Everything. It's all new, and it's all scary. We've left behind family, friends, jobs, decent chocolate, and marmite. If you let yourself think about it for longer than a few seconds, you'd crap yourself. So, you don't. The people that do think it through carefully and thoroughly are the ones who say "oh, we thought about doing that for years, but we never went through with it". The vast majority of people who stay where they are, and are quite happy about it. We, however, are the sort that would always wonder "what if...", eventually becoming bitter and twisted, bringing it up in arguments 30 years later. "Yeah, well, little Johnny wouldn't even have been in the stolen car with the brazilian midget prostitutes, the cocaine-snorting donkey and the nuns if we'd moved to Australia, like I wanted to!" So, we went for it. Crossed our fingers, closed our eyes and...