Guitar Hero World Tour

Being fans of Guitar Hero 3 for X-Box 360 we decided to buy Guitar Hero World Tour.

We bought the full kit which includes:

• A much better looking guitar: check out that beautifully vanished plastic base!

• A rocking USB microphone:

• And perhaps most exciting: the drum kit:

Star Power!

If you've played Guitar Hero before you'll be familiar with Star Power.

It's basically a power up which doubles the amount of points you earn while playing.

Tilting your guitar up activates star power (acting like a tool is optional).

Also once activated, electricity shoots off your character and for a moment everything tastes blue.

 

Star Power on the drums?

So it doesn't take a genius to work out if tilting one's axe activates star power for a guitarist then tilting the drum kit must activate it for a drummer!

Unfortunately I couldn't seem to activate star power on our defective drum kit. In fact there must have been something really wrong with our drum kit because I was completely crap at it, lol.

At least that's what I thought until my diva wife pushed me off and jumped on! ;-)

In all seriousness though, we had the kids on the weekend and all four of us played in a band together. It was great family fun. Chloe played lead guitar, Alex played bass, I played the drums (mainly cause neither of the kids wanted to, lol) and Jules showed us she's a closet rapper on the mic! Her rendition of "No Sleep Til Brooklyn" would have made the Beasty Boy's proud! lol ;-)

Dumb and Dumber

This is gold. Two hand-cuffed men fleeing from a New Zealand court-house had their escape plan foiled by a lamp post when they ran by either side of it.

Not able to comprehend simple laws of physics the men apparently expected the lamp-post to slice in half as they ran by it.

If I were the judge I would have made the two share the same cell as part of their sentence, lol.

Two men survived at sea in a giant esky

This is a true story, though it sounds like the plot for a joke! Two men were rescued from sea after surviving in a giant esky for 25 days when their fishing boat sank.

When asked what went through their mind when they realised their fishing boat was sinking they said their first thought was "Save the beer!!".

The men said they survived the past 25 days mostly by keeping up their liquids and eating the occasional shark that wanted to pick a fight with them. They said one of the sharks was "this big". When asked how they passed the time they said they were kept occupied by chatting up the local mermaids.

The two men are being charged for navigating a vessel with a blood alcohol content 3 times over the legal limit.

Prezzies!

Another thing that's been consuming our time over Xmas has been this prezzy that I bought Jules. It's called Khet (formerly known as Deflexion).

It's a board game played by 2 people. Each player has a laser on their end of the board and most of the pieces have mirrors on them. You move or rotate your pieces to manipulate how the laser beams bounce around the playing field. When a piece is struck by a laser and it doesn't have a mirror or it's mirror is facing away from the laser then that piece is removed from the board. The end-goal of the game is to blast a hole through your opponents pharaoh (the symbolic equivalent of a king in chess).

Sadly the lasers in the game are a little weak - it only slightly tingles when you put your tongue on them! So I raided all the remote controls around the house and wired the lasers directly into a huge 128 array of AA batteries!

It says on the box not to stare directly into the lasers so I made sure to only stare at the reflection of them, you know, to see if there would be any new side effects yet. In short, the good news is we were able to sell our toaster this week, lol. ;-)

 

Xmas Experimentation - Part 2

Experiment 2: Creating Quicksand

After the giant worm moved into a neighbours garden we began our next project - creating quicksand.

We were surprised to learn that quicksand is a mixture of various molecules (none of which is sand) consisting mainly of H²O and Cf⁵ (A.K.A. cornflour).

Unfortunately my poor skills in the kitchen translated to an inability to mix the cornflour and water which resulted in a consistency of, well, water. :(

So after completely exhausting the cornflour supplied with the kit we raided the kitchen cupboard for more raw materials.

After adding several spoons of cornflour and finally achieving the ideal consistency we were ready to test our creation. Fortunately the science kit comes with a willing test subject: an innocent and naive miniature giraffe.

 

Much to our disappointment the giraffe survived the quicksand...so we intervened and decided to study the effects of a giant wooden spoon beating down on his vulnerable giraffe body...in the name of science of-course...mwwoohaahaaahaahaaaaa!

 

Unfortunately, due to a miscalculation in quicksand & spoon dynamics, the giraffe DNA combined with the corn flour molecules to create a fire-breathing super giraffe!

Xmas Experimentation - Part 1

Man what a week it's been...for science! I've been home with the kids and to pass the time we've been working through a science kit that Alex got for Christmas. It contains a bunch of different experiments ranging from making your own worms to building The Hadron Collider. Of-course, in true scientificness we documented our findings.

Experiment 1: Creating our own worms (aka, Playing God)

Like all good scientists we approached this experiment with extreme caution, trying not to expose ourselves to the highly toxic worm goo (Wg²).

 

In fact it only took us a few minutes while exposed to the radioactive chemicals before we discovered the safety equipment we were meant to be wearing.

Sadly, after successfully creating a couple small worms, Alex's God-like command over the creation of worms went to his head and he became mad with power!...

 

...and in hind-sight his tripling the dosage of radioactive worm goo was a mistake.

Fooies

Jules and I went and saw the Foo Fighters live in concert last night. It's the second time we've gone to see them and both times Ticketek sold out of decent tickets within minutes and we were reduced to buying tickets for 'restricted viewing seats'. And even though we were seated so far away from the stage that the sound reached us seconds after the stage light did, it was possibly the best concert I've ever been to.

They had an interesting setup - there was a runway stretching out from the main stage reaching to a circular runway in the center of the hall. The circular runway was a bit strange as it seemed lower in the center, was covered with a sheet and had cables running up to the ceiling. It kinda looked like a trampoline death-trap type thing. About a third of the way into the act all was revealed as we noticed the ceiling above the "death-trap" lowering: a second stage already set up with a bunch of instruments was lowering from the ceiling, and the band moved over there. Pretty sweet.

They had extras that played with them during their Skin and Bones tour there so they had extra instruments like a violin and a big ass bass guitar and played stuff from all their albums. To top it all off, for their encore, they played 10 extra songs - 21 songs all up. Jules and I were completely buggered by the end of the night and we didn't do anything, lol, I can only imagine how Dave Grohl felt running from one stage to the other all night while playing guitar and screaming in tune at the top of his voice! lol

 

I'm sorry you couldn't make it Shanmiester!