All posts by Alistair Lattimore

About Alistair Lattimore

My name is Alistair Lattimore, I'm in my very early 30's and live on the sunny Gold Coast in Australia. I married my high school sweet heart & we've been together for longer than I can remember. Claire and I started our family in September 2008 when Hugo was born and added a gorgeous little girl named Evie in May 2010. You can find me online in the typical hangouts, Google+, Twitter & facebook. .

Let There Be Light

Since Claire & I moved into our house a couple years ago, we’ve had a constant battle with the lights throughout the house.

Like most modern houses, it has a mixture of standard light bulbs and the small halogen lights. Neither one of those types of lights have been particularly long lasting, however the small halogen down lights have been particularly flaky.

In the last few months, we’ve had a collection of different light globes blow throughout the house and after replacing the blown light bulbs – no banana. We tried switching different bulbs from other light sockets, different brand lights and different types/styles of lights but to no avail. Claire and I were at the point where we thought the light socket had some how died because no matter what we tried, we couldn’t get the lights to work.

Today we tried again and were able to get them to work with a lot of wiggling & jiggling of the light bulb in the socket. I’m not really sure how that works but even when screwed in tight to the socket, the light bulbs won’t shine but after unscrewing them a little, wiggling this way, jiggle that way – they seem to come good. You’d assume that if it works less than 1/4 of a turn from tight, that it’d definitely work when tight but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Despite the annoyance of them not working for so long, its good to have all the lights in the house working again.

Man Vs Metro

Bear Grylls - Man vs WildBear Grylls is the face and host of Man Vs Wild, a massively popular TV show where Bear is dropped into some of the most inhabitable, remove locations on the planet and demonstrates first hand how to survive.

Having a black belt in Karate, Bear spent three years with the British Special Air Service (21 SAS) division where he specialised as a combat survival instructor, trained in evasive driving, parachuting, demolitions, trauma medic, unarmed combat and jungle warfare.

Elliot Loney on the other hand is not trained in any of those things but does a mean Bear Grylls impersonation, first seen when Bear got lost in a camping store and now as he manages to navigate his way to safety from the treacherous urban jungle!

Dynamic Sculptures

Reuben Margolin is an American sculptor known for creating beautiful mechanical, moving or kinetic sculptures that are inspired by nature and powered by math.

I’ve written about Theo Jansen’s Standbeests before, which are amazing wind powered PVC beach walking kinetic sculptures and you can see why the art from Reuben has my attention completely.

Spend a few minutes and be mesmerized by his art and the incredible attention to detail it takes to combine hundreds or thousands of individual components, lots of motors, cranks, wire and more into spectacular fluid art installations.

Jabbawockeez Jupiters Theatre Gold Coast

JabbawockeezLast night Claire and I attended the opening night of Jabbawockeez at Jupiters Hotel & Casino in Broadbeach.

I was fortunate enough to get a pair of tickets from work for not only the opening night of their incredible dance performance but also the grand opening for the $20 million refurbished Jupiters Theatre. The newly renovated theatre now has capacity for 1929 seated guests or 2150 including standing room, which is double what it had before the renovation started in September 2011.

The night kicked off with one of the Jabbawockeez in a janitors uniform entertaining the crowd as everyone got seated, interacting with the audience and generally having a good time. Once everyone was seated Craig Peachey, who is the Acting Managing Director of Jupiters said a few words, welcomed all of the distinguished guests and then our newly elected Queensland Premier Campbell Newman said a few words before they were ‘swept’ off the stage by the janitor.

Jabbawockeez was the collaboration of three dancers from different styles, who joined forces to form a new style and group known as Jabbawockeez in 2003. They started out small in San Diego and Los Angeles but their big break came in 2006 when they appeared on Americas Got Talent where they took the place by storm and have been growing in popularity ever since. Jupiters Hotel & Casino have managed to get them from Las Vegas to the Gold Coast for the next five months.

One of the key features of Jabbawockeez, which is different to most other dance groups you’ll see is that all of the dancers are wearing the same clothing and have expressionless white masks on. Initially I thought it was a bit of a gimmick but with such a dynamic high energy performance, it really lets you focus on the dancing and not worry about identifying an individual dancer who just did something amazing; they are all amazing and you don’t know who did what amazing piece of the performance.

Claire and I absolutely loved the MÜS.I.C (muse-i-see) Jabbawockeez performance, which was directed by choreographers Tabitha and Napoleon of So You Think You Can Dance US fame. The music that the dancers performed to was fantastic and ranged from Queen to Prodigy and everything in between. The new state of the art sound system in Jupiters Theatre was absolutely pumping. While the music was loud, the thing that really hit home, literally, was the incredible bass; bone shaking!

If you’ve got an opportunity to see Jabbawockeez in the next few months while they are here in Australia performing at Jupiters Gold Coast, I’d definitely recommend it – they were fantastic and well worth your time and effort!