The process for most TV shows to get on the air involves a pitch, a script, and then a pilot is made to try and convince the executives that the show is worth continuing. Most, if not all, the readers of this blog already know this, I’m sure.

In earlier years, most ‘green lit’ shows didn’t include the pilots as the first episode; it was often remade after some tweaking or ditched altogether. Sometimes the pilots would air in a special and more often, not. Some pilots never air at all, and are locked away forever, never to see the light of day again.

A few weeks ago, Justine and I caught the tail-end of a documentary about Adam West. The section we watched focused on West’s more recent years, when he was trying to break back into television (but didn’t feature Family Guy, so I suppose it must have been made before that show). West did a pilot for a show called ‘Lookwell’, which was co-written by Conan O’Brien.

Lookwell – in a way – reflects West’s actual life. The show focuses on an actor – Ty Lookwell – who, 20 years ago, played a TV detective named Bannigan (which is a running joke throughout). Now, out of work and bored, Lookwell tries to solve real crimes. The local police department gave him an honourary badge, which Lookwell flashes at every opportunity to show his ‘credentials’. Not to mention the crazy leaps of logic he makes.

Since we were looking at failed pilots, I also grabbed Heat Vision and Jack which featured Owen Wilson as a talking motorbike and Jack Black as a former NASA astronaut who becomes the smartest person in the world… during the day.

You can find both of these pilots on YouTube. I used a downloading service to grab the FLV then a converter (I forget which) to transcode them into AVIs.

I haven’t gone out with the sole purpose of taking photos for rather a long time now, so when Dad asked if I wanted to join him and take some shots at King’s Domain I thought it was a good opportunity to do so.

I met up with Dad and Chris near the RACV historic vehicle display – which Justine and I also visited last year – and we wandered around taking photos at will. It was good to get back into the swing of things, and I’m hoping to go out again in the next week or two – anyone up for a tour somewhere?

We also paid a visit to the Shrine, where Richard was saving the country by taking photos. At midday, there was supposed to be a firing of cannons, but a minor problem occurred when the ammunition hadn’t turned up.

A few more shots were taken, and as the others went off to grab some lunch, I returned home to spend the rest of the day with Justine, who had finished work

It’s either been a while since I’ve discussed it, or done it, but last night I felt the urge to cook something I’ve not cooked before.

Unsure of what to cook, I searched the Internet for a short while before deciding to cook a Mediterranean-style chicken dish. With the range of food styles substantially narrowed, I settled on a Greek Chicken Casserole. I read a small number of recipes and concluded that the flavours and ingredients in Greek food weren’t what I wanted to eat. Spanish came quickly to mind, and I resumed my search.

I had nearly settled on a Spanish Chicken Stew when “What about Paella?” popped into my head. Now determined to cook a Paella dish, I searched for a few more minutes until I finally settled on a Chicken Paella recipe.

A brief trip to the local supermarket and we had the small number of ingredients we were missing. After an hour of chopping, stirring, pouring and waiting, the dish was finally complete.

The great thing about Paella – and many other things I cook – is that it only uses one dish, which is great for someone lazy like me. Paella is an easy dish; you simply cook the meat, chuck in onions and garlic, then the vegies. Add rice and stock and once the stock reduces, eat!

The recipe I mostly followed is easy and though it takes an hour to cook, doesn’t require many involved steps. I didn’t add chorizo since Justine wouldn’t eat it, nor did I add some of the herbs since we don’t have them.

Paella has earned itself a place on our recipe list. Next time, I’ll add all the ingredients, and possibly add a bit more stock so there’s some “juice”. The recipe called for two cups of rice, though half that would have been more than enough.

Well, for the past two-and-a-half hours, we’ve been slowly baking in our house, trying to stave off the heat. At either a few minutes before or after four, the power at our house turned off.

After the power had been off for around ten minutes, I attempted to call the “power outages” hotline (I initially thought each power company had one, but it seems they all share the one) for the next 45 minutes to no avail — the number was either busy, reported as non-existent, or the phone network simply failed.

Finally, after an hour and ten minutes of no power, I managed to get through to the recorded message saying power had been cut to “some areas” for two-and-a-half hours. Wow. No explanation other than “we were told to”.

At six, a neighbour had a TV blaring (no idea how) so we listened, over 100,000 suburban homes had no power because of bush fires disrupting power flow. Wow again.

Incidentally, the hottest part of the day today in many areas was between 4:30 and 6:30, which is when the power was out; the temperature hit over 42 in some areas, so it was obviously not very comfortable.

Two-and-a-half hours after the power initially disappeared, it came back. At least we’ll be able to cook dinner tonight!

Most of Saturday, Justine and a bunch of female friends overran our house with the sole purpose of sticking photos onto albums in a fancy manner — more commonly known as scrapbooking.

Much of that day, Chris and I had a play date (that’s what Justine called it, and she wouldn’t lie to me about these things) where we played Wii. I am extremely surprised at the longevity of Wii Sports, especially since it’s a pack-in game.

Around half-seven, Justine and I joined Trav and Ange in the city — along the new Docklands precinct — to eat out at Bopha Devi, a Cambodian restaurant.

We decided to park in an open air car park (most are at the Docklands), but the one we chose and pulled into appeared to be closed. Only after a few moments I realised that the chain across the entrance wasn’t because it was closed, it was the way to stop people entering and exiting! Approaching slowly in the car, the chain suddenly dropped to the ground, and we drove over it. Cool.

Justine was initially a little apprehensive at eating Cambodian; she didn’t think she would like anything on the menu. It turns out that was completely wrong. All four of us ordered an entrée and main, but we shared them all which turned out extremely well. For the entree, we shared chicken and crab rolls, fried pumpkin dumpling things, and chicken ribs with sambal sauce, delicious!

For the mains, we had two types of curry (I ordered a wet fish curry and Justine ordered a dry chicken one — Justine’s was nicer) and two types of noodles (Trav ordered some strange buckwheat ones which were only OK, and Ange ordered some nice fat prawn noodles).

Totally stuffed, we went for a short walk on the long pier (with gelato!) while I tried to recover from a severe case of overeating.

As we left the car park (you put a token in to drop the cable) a bunch of young yahoos in an expensive four-wheel drive rushed up behind us to save the seven dollar parking fee. I was disappointed to see that the cable didn’t fly up into the bottom of their car like the signs had promised, but I suppose it was nice we could help them out.

Arriving home, I felt a little sick which I attributed to overeating but it may have been due to the food itself. Either way, I had recovered by morning so it wasn’t an issue.

A very nice dinner and we’ll have to do it again soon, guys.

OK, so it’s been a while since I’ve posted. I’ve been lazy. In the time between this and the last post Christmas has come and gone (thanks to everyone for the hospitality and gifts; sorry I didn’t do the ‘haul’ roundup as usual), as well as the New Year. The drive-in the other week was cool, too.

At the behest of Justine, we made a trip into the city today to visit the Melbourne Museum. I hadn’t been to the museum since it was on Swanston Street and the underground train station nearby was called ‘Museum’ station. The exhibits at the new museum were — for the most part — quite underwhelming. The only exhibits that gave me any sort of pleasure actually centred around Melbournian history over the last hundred or so years.

The first, a short history of Melbourne, showed objects and explained what Melbourne life was like. I learned that Little Lonsdale Street was a slums to compete with some of the best slums in the World, as well as a red light district. Much of that exhibit wasn’t interesting but some of it was interesting enough to make me want to write about it here.

The second exhibit I found interesting was CSIRAC, which was Australia’s first computer and the World’s fourth (Wikipedia says fifth, but the exhibit says fourth, strange). The machine has six large cabinets to house it’s memory, which totals something like 2000 bytes of memory. Other large cabinets run the valve-powered 1000 Hz CPU and the 30,000w of power supplies. Obviously punch cards were a thing of the future in the 1950s, since CSIRAC actually used rolls of punched instructions. An amazing thing to see and it’s really the only unique thing I found at the museum of any interest to me that wasn’t a reproduction of the real thing.

There were also a couple of other 1960s computers which were interesting, but didn’t compare with CSIRAC.

So, Melbourne Museum: It’s OK … I guess.