TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

The South Australian Government seems to have  made a point of honouring the Australian's who fought in the Vietnam war by naming crossover points of an expressway after various famous battles during the conflict. Possibly the most famous being the battle of Long Tan. Being born at the very beginning of the 1970's it's a war most people of my generation probably know very little about. It's not like the World Wars that get taught in most schools - especially the history behind ANZAC day (which is on April 25th). It's more like the Korean War, except without the comedy of TV shows like M.A.S.H. to popularize it in modern culture. The most my generation really knows about the Vietnam War (unless they've actually done research) is that it was a massive failure for the U.S.A. and by default Australia. People protested it. There's was some chemical called Agent Orange  that was extremely toxic to just about everyone and that many war heroes in movies cla...

A Fire Scout Drone. Just a couple of weeks after I speculated that The Machine Uprising Begins with Quadrotors , tiny autonomous helicopters that could wipe out all life as we know it once they attach lasers, Mashable reports on the U.S. Navy developing Robot Helicopters to Hunt Pirates with Lasers . See the video below. From Mashable's article here's what these 'Fire Scout Drones' are capable of in their mission to identify pirates... These helicopters will use high-definition cameras and sensors, including laser-radar technology (LADAR), to collect 3D images. The technology is called Multi-Mode Sensor Seeker (MMSS) and will be attached to a robot called Fire Scout. Fire Scout and its advanced recognition software will sift through boat images captured by the camera and see if they match targeted pirate boats. Yeah right! These autonomous helicopter drones aren't called 'Fire Scouts' for nothing. You just know that someone...

I don't know about in other countries but in Australia I am of the opinion that Pay TV has ruined television. Specifically television programming on free to air TV. Prior to the wide spread adoptance of Pay TV programming on free to air TV viewing consisted of Breakfast , Daytime, Kids, Prime Time, Late Night then station close. There was the Friday and Sunday Night Movie as well as Saturday morning cartoons to look forward to every week. Then there was prime time viewing each day where you could generally rely on your top rating sitcoms followed by perhaps one hour episodes of your favorite drama. News was always at 6pm followed by some current affairs show. Sports were always televised, mostly on the weekend during the day, with those channels not showing sport putting on a couple of afternoon movies. When a series of anything ended it ended until the new series became available, making way for something else to take its place in the mean time. We also h...

Adam West is in this picture of Julie Newmar - so I'm told. It's been a while since I had a rant about Batman but I've been listening to recent Batman on Film podcasts where the team there again reiterated that a live action Batman should be exclusive to the Silver Screen as an 'event' movie that fans look forward to. I completely disagree. Batman's career on film started in serialized shorts in the cinema back in 1943  and again in 1949 . It was the success of the re-release of the 1943 serial in 1965 that inspired the  1966 TV series and movie spin off . All of these series were quite popular and demonstrate that Batman works as a serialized product. I haven't even mentioned all the Batman TV cartoon/animated series over the years. More so than the films it's Batman on Television (mostly the '66 series and various animated series) that has kept the legend alive for main stream audiences - even more so than Batman comics. Personally I...