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WHAT IS BEN DOING RIGHT NOW?

It's a new fresh page ! For old updates go to November through February 21st

DATE UNKNOWN BECAUSE I'M TOO LAZY TO CHECK ...MAY 24th I think
BWA HA HA HA. I am itching to write. I feel the urge to spend two days straight writing.. My abscence is has been long and promises of updates have long been unfufilled. I am in the dark southern state of Tasmania but I WILL BE RETURNING TO THE MAINLAND AT THE END OF NEXT WEEK. BeWaRe! those who doubt me! My TRUSTY CompUter awaites me in the city of Melbourne. This message is merely a heralding to my return. ALL will be revealed soon . (more evil laughter)
Ben
13/03/03 This update comes to you straight from a gamer filled Network game site in the middle of Chinatown Melbourne. I'm not sure what anyone here is saying or playing. It's quite dark and I feel a little odd wasting the kick ass connection on a measly little text update.. but the computer does not have a place to put a CD so no pictures today. That And I haven't bothered to make smaller files in Photoshop. I quickly realized that I couldn't be bothered to figure it out on a bloody mac..damn confusing things. it was 2am and i was tired ok.. sorry. Back to the update.
I went to seen the penguins on an island. I signed up for this tour that took me and a whole group of backpackers down there. The island is a two hour drive from Melbourne. Three hour if count the time spent going from hostel to hostel picking up more suckers. When we were all crammed on the bus(about ten of us) we took off on the less than scenic drive. Our driver babbled on about various sites in a monotone voice "this is the cricket grounds where we crush the pommies(english) every year. Now we're in St. Kilda. This place used to be a real red light district..and now uh it's better. Don't look for to many aboriginies in Victoria because they were pretty well massacred." and so on and so on.
Our first stop was a little winery with a great view of Phillip Bay. We tried the wine while the driver cooked a complement of sausages and veggie burgers. I i can't say it was the best in the world .. but it beat eating at a 7-11. The wine wasn't spectacular. But they didn't charge extra for it so I can't really complain. After the wining and dining, the bus took off again and we headed for a wildlife park filled with Koalas Kangaroos, wombats and a great white shark in a tank of fermaldahyde. It was the most fun of the experiance. I fed kangaroos by hand and I got my picture taken cuddeling a wombat. The best psrt of Australia is one thing..no rabbies. This was fun.
The tour was comprised of people from many different nationalities. Most of which were from the Uk or Ireland. To my dissappointment.. there was another American on the tour. He was a pure tourist on his spring break from the Universty of Minnesota in Duluth. Well..I spent most of my time being embarresed to be an American on that tour. The guy was straight out of the the "evidence of stupitiy interviews" in a Michael Moore film. With his heartfelt let's just bomb them and get it over with comments and his stereotyping of the other backpackers(for instance asking the Irish where there Pot 'o Golds were) It was very easy to see why we are so disliked around the world. Also.. he had no concept that there was a differance between Ireland and Scottland.
Around seven o'clock we made it down to the penguins. All day long the penguins hunt for fish out in the sea. At dusk they return in groups to Phillip Island to roost. This is what we came to watch. By then everyone just didn't care anymore we say a few penguins and the day was done after a two hour drive back to Melbourne.. that's my update.. More later
9/03/03 Today I went to the Australian Grand Prix. It was my first and probably last racing event . The cars went "zoom zoom" and I went "ho hum" It isn't really that boring. The formula one cars were actually quite impressive even to someone who is anything but a motorhead. There was also a celebrity challenge. Various celebrities raced modified mini's around the track. Quite fun to watch actually. Once was quite enough for me though. i have no desire to turn into some avid racing fan who makes sure to attend events around the world. It was raining for a lot of the morning and the admission was quite steep. It was a Huge event for the city and the after effects will be felt for a few more days as the tourists trickle out and the city returns to it's liveable quiet dull artsy state. I think I've done as much self exploring as I can in Melbourne and I'm going to try to do some more touristy things this week. i also took my last picture and I'm getting them developed ASAP. Ben
8/03/03 I am doing something awful. i am updating on a mac. I am still in Melbourne and I really haven't done anything really big. Not enough to write an essay about. Melbourne is a very pretty city and it lacks the big garish tourist attractions like Sydney. Also, it is much easier to get around in. The city centre is shaped like a grid and to get around i can take the tram, bus, or train. They are all very economical and you can buy one ticket that is good on all of them. They let me take my bike on the train so the city has earned big points from me in that regard. I am staying with my Aunt and Uncle a few K outside the city, The house is a street away from a train station and a tram line so geting around is easy.
My relatives car died a few days a go so the location of the house is very convieniant. Before it died, they took me on a trip to some waterfalls it was very pretty. The change in the Australian Landscape is very dramatic..the dry cleared land gave way to lush green prehistoric-like forest. The gound was covered with monstrous ferns and the trees were taller and straighter than you thought possible for Eucylptus trees. I also saw my first snake, i have no idea what it was.. but I almost stepped on it . I'd rather keep my encounters with the bellly crawlers to the zoo. I hold no love in my heart for venom that can killl me in twenty minutes
I've seen two movies since arriving; one was the Cowboy Bebop movie at an independent cinema. The other was Die Another Day at an outdoor theatre near the Botanical Gardens. The Botanical gardens have there own outdoor cinema but nothing has being showing that I'd care to see. The Gardens are also filled with thousands of bats..really big bats. I went for a walk inside them and I heard some screeching in a tree. I assumed it was birds and looked up. Every tree around me was filled with bats as big as my head. it through me back a bit. According to the flyers in the park, they were grey headed flying foxes. Their population in the park goes from 6,000 to 20,000 every year. it's a little disturbing if you are not used to it, especially near dusk when all of them are flying around above your head. Well that's alll for now! I have three pictures left to take and then I can develop them. I'll keep everyone updated!
3/03/03 A SECOND POST ON A BRAND NEW PAGE!! By the way I know when and if anyone reads this. Geocities has this wonderful little site feature that gives me a profile of everyone who goes to the site. Well..just what operating system you use and wether or not you have been here before. By the statistics I can tell that the person who checks the site most frequently is my dad at work. Congratulations dad! you are the winner! I do not know of what but I'll think of something. Perhaps an exclusive photograph that I don't post on the net. In all honesty, there are more updates than there are visitors to the site. A unique IP adress only shows up when I access this site from a new internet cafe. This is a good thing since it really is just a personal site. I'll have to start sending group e-mails out of when I update. After that , I'll check my stats and flame anyone who dares not to read up on my adventures...BWA HA HA HA HA!!!!
In my last post(which three people read) I promised the rules to musical juice. Musical juice is a fantasticaly fun game which involves three wooden pear bins, a pallet jack, a chute, a pear tosser wheel thingy, a big conveyor pear thingy, and one human slowly losing their grip on reality. The object of the game is to make the human crack. To do this, all three pear bins must fill up and over flow before an empty bin can be found to replace them. The rules are as follows

1. The Juice must flow (thank you Frank Herbert)
2.Any thing goes there can be any kind of distraction to make the human crack. Other machine arms.. faulty computers..or over zealous pear sorters. it's all good.
3. For every juice bin that fills up, there must be at least two non-juice bins that fill up or will in the next minute... so that the human is as busy as possible when it is time to play.
4. The bins for juice must be in very short supply all the time . This can be monitored by when the human screams "I HAVE THREE F@##(nG JUICE BINS READY TO OVERFLOW AND THE D@** FORKLIFT DRIVER HASN'T GOT ME ANY MORE!!"
5. One round of musical juice is complete when
A. a bin is changed or
B. A bin is swapped with a bin that fills up slower so time is given before one overflows.(this is how to get three full bins simultameously) When there are 15 rounds in a hour, the game is also won
6. there is no music in musical juice and players can increase at anytime. Many other players join in close to the end of the game to yell at the player when the bins are near overflowing and the right bins aren't anywhere in site.
7. the game must always be played

I will never play that again. i have quit my job and I am in Melbourne ready to travel! Pictures will be up as soon as I develop them and attack them with the right software.That's all for tonight. I must sleep
21/02/03 I really should take an afternoon and edit all of my old posts. The grammar and spelling is horrrendous<--example? In the text editor I've been using, I don't have a spell check and I'm usually to pressed for time to write in word and then cut and paste. Most of the internet cafes I use don't have MS word in their list of programs so I'm forced to make do without. I do all my writing at the Geocities site and save when I can. I didn't really explain what I have been doing in my last update so I will explain in detail today.
I babysit machines. When the pickers pick the pears, the pears are placed in the pear picking bins. The pears that the pickers picked and placed in the picking bins are processed in the pear proccesing shed in the pear processing machine. And the parts of the pear proccesing machine that is in the the pear proccesing and packing shed are most certainly my peril! HOW"S THAT FOR ALITERATION!! By proccesed, I mean that the pears are graded into different sizes and grades. Not a single pear is wasted, what is not a Class 1 or Class 2 pear is a Juice pear. There are no if's ands or but's , the pear's destiny is in a bin full of the most rotten disgusting pears. The bin is sent away where it can be ground(stems and all) into syrup that is used in anything from Cola to Cough syrup. Think of that the next time that you go to the store.
The different grades are what I said, class 1, class 2 and juice. People on the machine choose tha grades and send the pears along the appropriate line where the class one and two pears are divided by about ten different sizes and dumped into bins. My job is to monitor the machine arms that dump the pears into bins and replace the bins when they are full. I have seven of these to watch and monitor, three of which are juice bins and one bin that takes two days to fill. It is the most boring job in the orchad. The machine is loud and not very sociable and talking to humans in the noise is near impossible. Because I am paid by the hour, I am not allowed to remain idle while I wait for a bin to fill or an arm to malfunction. So,I sweep the same piece of floor all day long just to keep up the apearance of being busy. It seems to be working because the person in charge continues to commend me on doing a "good job". I find myself doing a lot of singing to my self, twirling the broom around in a ninja-like fashion,sometimes,I even try talking to the machines when they do something..anything. My neighbor Dave, he has his own machine arms to monitor, named all of his machines after the Star Trek characters. I tried to name mine but all of my names sounded like language from a rap video . It's work and I make more than I would picking. I have been going out picking pears on Sundays for a little extra money. The grading will be going on for about another two weeks and I'm planing to go on to Melbourne and continue my travels around the country. I've managed to save a good deal of money quite quickly here and it should be a while before I have to stop and work.
Cobram Victoria is a very small town. The population swells in the picking season but it has a limited population. There is a tiny movie theater though and I've been entertaining myself on Saturdays by going down and seeing whatever is showing. I live right on the orchad for $14 a week for an unpowered tent site.There is a place to cook,a fridge, free washing machines, showers and droves of white trash alchoholic locals. I get out of the place on Friday nights and Saturday days when every one is either pissed or has a hangover from getting really pissed the night before. Tonight(Friday) is payday and the only night I eat out. It was pizza last week and it'll be Fish and Chips tonight ..mmm... food I didn't cook. I might write more tomorrow morning and I'll put up pictures when I get to Melbourne. Also, The rules to the game musical juice will make it up on this site sooner or later.
Ben