Underbelly

So we've been watching the edited, safe-for-release in Victoria episodes. We may be the only people in Victoria (with the exception of mine and Dean's parents) who haven't seen the DVDs. Still. Even we could work out who the blurred person was. And they weren't even wearing a blurred wig!

Thoughts so far (up to ep3):

Carl Williams being referred to as "Fatboy" keeps cracking us up. No wonder he (allegedly) shot the Morans.

Witness Protection sucks. Geez, a caravan in Warrnambool? Twice? They couldn't even spring for a bloody motel?

That Roberta Williams is one classy chick. *snerk*

And I got half way through last night's episode and remembered what happened to Tracy Seymour. Then spent the rest of the episode hoping like hell I'd remembered the wrong case. But I hadn't. *sigh* (Although the details I remember - with one, fairly major exception - are different to what was portrayed, which makes me wonder how much was fictionalised about that particular case. The one detail though, wasn't one you're likely to forget. And having googled slightly, I'm pretty sure that they based her predominantly on the case I remember.)

Other thoughts: It amazes me how much of an expectation that they should be allowed to do what they bloody well want these guys have/had. Tracy Seymour didn't ask to be put in the position of having to choose whether to lie for her ex or testify, she was forced into it by her ex-husband. The people in the nightclub didn't ask to be witnesses, they were forced into by Gangitano and Moran's alleged actions. But all of them were pressured to not testify, so as the Carlton Crew and Seymour's ex-husband could "win" against the police. It did occur to me that the police almost needed to make sure the witnesses in the nightclub case were able to interact as a group - because individually they were very open to pressure whereas in a group they might not have been. Yeah I know there are evidence problems with that.

I do wonder what effect all this has had on the various kids. Pretty much all the Crew had kids, Seymour had a child, Barbaro and Moran were murdered at an Auskick event, either in front of or near their kids (we're not up to that episode yet).

And geez that Roberta Williams is one classy chick. *snerk*

Actually...

If they do do a third Underbelly-type series, I hope they pick up Packing Death, by Lachlan McCulloch. Because that was extremely funny, most of the protagonists are dead - and the ones that aren't keep doing stuff that can only really be regarded as, well, kind of stupidly amusing. In a bad way I know.

Anyway, I think it would film well. Especially if they can get Richmond council to let them shoot at the clock again.

tired

I can't believe how incredibly tired I am. Part of this is because our smoke detector decided to go off 3-4 times during the night for no readily discernable reason - that would be the point where Dean got the ladder and took the batteries out of it. So out of two functioning smoke detectors we now have none. In a weatherboard house. We're totally cactus.

I don't know what it is with the smoke detectors - we never had this kind of problem with them in the other house. Yeah, they'd go 'meep' when the batteries got low, but we were doing the whole daylight savings battery changing thing with them so even that never happened that often. Only when we bought el cheapo batteries from the dodgy milkbar - which didn't happen after the second time.

Since we moved though, both our detectors have decided to go off for absolutely no reason in the middle of the night. Also occasionally in the evening. Possibly also during the day, but neither of us were home to hear it. Sometimes they stop by themselves, and the other times we took the batteries out. The first one we thought must be that the batteries were nearing the end of their life, and the alarm had decided to go out with a scream rather than a meep. But then we replaced the batteries... and it went off again at 3am. Our current theory is that the house gets cold enough that the points shrink in the alarm and it sets something off - but really, our old place was much colder than this house, so surely it would have happened there too?

I think we might have to investigate good brands of smoke detector.

On the good side, Dean is now off crutches and walking almost normally again - just in time to climb a ladder at 3am to take the batteries out. Heh.

left behind stats

Because this has been bugging me for a while and I need to put the stats somewhere.

OK: AoG - ~215,000 members from here.

Children aged 0-14 (2007): 4.1 million (from here.

OK, I really do need to write this. Dodgy fic or no dodgy fic, it can't be worse than the original, surely.