Oh, Johnny, how could you disappoint me so ...

8 July - Started the morning by riding good ol' baby blue downtown to Simon's where I got him taken apart and boxed up - had breakfast at the elbow room (get your ass over here girl!!!) then waited about 45m trying to find an overpriced taxi who would take me and the boxed up bike over to Kristl's for storage. Later on in the afternoon met up with Casey to watch the latest Pirates of the Caribbean - not the worst sequel i've seen all you (MI3 easily took that accolade) but a complete waste of my time. Convaluted plot, implausible character interaction, over the top and completely unrealistic action sequences and for far too much of the fillum the screen was taken up with messy 'lets blow the budget' CGI effects - to top it all off, the movie doesn't even end - it just trails off into a To Be Continued scene with Geoffrey Rush stepping in at the last minute with a leering grin (and I don't care if i've ruined the film for my limited readership, Jerry Bruckheimer ruined the film for me by making it). Spent the rest of daylight practicing skids and trackstands at Strathcone Park (feel like such a kid doing that) then off to the Chinatown night market to watch bad karaoke and eat nice pork buns. Whilst there I finally broke down and tried the famous scientology stress test - the very, very young tester had me hold on to the two electrodes of the stress tester (cannot for the life of me remember what it's actuallycalled) and then asked various questions about my life and watched the needle quiver - apparently i'm not a very stressed person after all, asked questions about my work, relationships and other bits and pieces and everything was a-okay. Not that I believe that the tester could detect anythinglike stress in my body but perhaps if he'd asked a year ago he may have gotten a different story. However, despite 'passing' the test he told me if I wanted to spend $47 the scientologists could senme on the path to success. Politely declined. Had some beer at the Brickhouse (great place - just like the living room I wish I had) where we tried to explain the ins and outs of the messenger world to the coatcheck girl then had and another one at the Morrissey downtown (a f**king horrible place).