Simon Butcher

My usual metro this morning from De Brouckère was late, which in itself isn't unusual. Despite being «La Grande Vacances», a late metro still converts the locals into pig-headed selfish morons, unable to understand that forcing themselves through a small doorway with twenty alighting passengers is not only impolite but incurs further delays for everyone.

One particular woman and her son did just this, blissfully ignorant to the obvious fact that once everyone had left the carriage there was plenty of room to embark. They hogged the open doorway arrogantly, refusing to move to let other passengers pass easily. So far this could describe any morning's journey to work, and most days I'm simply amused (or bemused) by the sheer aberrations being played out before me.

Upon arrival at the next stop, Gare Centrale, this woman's son, who must have been no more than 8-years old and no less than 6, started screaming painfully; «Maman, maman, mon bras! Il blesse! Il blesse!»

My family lived in Hobart for the first three years of the 1990s. It was there that I met Nick, who is ultimately to blame for my addiction to adventure games. Nick encouraged me to try Space Quest Ⅰ, and from there we ended up playing stacks of graphical adventure games together.

Over the past few months, I've been able to revisit these old and nearly lost gems, with the aid of software emulators such as Nick's NAGI for the old Sierra AGI games, FreeSCI for the early 1990s Sierra SCI games, and finally ScummVM for those brilliant LucasArts games of the last decade.

According to the InBev marketing department, it's barbie-season. Fantastic news, but I'm still not going to drink their crappy Jupiler grog. Or Stella for that matter. Click on the ad for a look, since it's a some-what clever adaptation of the Jupiler logo.

I was starting to believe we'd had summer in place of spring and it was now autumn, but sure enough though summer has finally arrived this weekend. Perfect timing, as the 127^th Foire du Midi officially opened last night.

I've been pretty busy with work lately, so today a day was taken off to do something not many people would do: Drive up to the Netherlands on a work day and go and visit a new amusement park. In this particular case, John (who also wrote a trip report), Aline and myself ignored the warnings of bad weather and headed to Walibi's sister park, Walibi World (not Wally's World — ahem).

With the exception of a few large electrical storms and brief showers, the glum weather of the morning pushed off and we were lucky to enjoy mostly blue skies in the very green but awkwardly laid-out park. The park seems to be roughly the same size as Walibi Belgium, however designed in a more hub-and-spoke manner with most of the paths being dead-ends.

To its credit though, the heavy greenery and the winding path layout hides many rides and pathways without becoming a labyrinth, effectively making the park seem larger and quieter.

More importantly though, pity us poor IT sods who still have to take a bunch of manual steps to prepare systems for the coming new financial year. Woe unto us.

Walibi have spent a fortune on advertising over the past week, keenly promoting themselves by way of their new Walibi Heroes campaign. Essentially the idea is that you rock up to the park, buy lots of crappy merchandise, ride on a bunch of prescribed rides to collect little stamps in your “hero portfolio” in order to become hero of the day, month, or year. Ultimately, this all depends on how many of your friends you can convince to vote for you pretending to be a statue of yourself within the park.

I did not return to Walibi for this reason, but rather to finally experience the first-of-its-kind Vertigo, which has suffered various set-backs for the past 18 months. The ride finally opened while I was in Greenville, so obviously I had to check this thing out.