#jackmuirhead2012

I can eat, like a lot. More than most American's. After a weekend away we (the danes, their american room mates and i) decided we hadn't eaten enough shit in 48 hours, there was football on tv and we had beers. so it was definately burger o'clock. named "roffes" or something like that when pronounced in broken danish-english, Soren claimed to have some kind of idea what we needed so we bought 3kg of mince for the four of us, a bag of cheese, a packet of bacon, two large onions and 12 eggs. and two loaves of bread. To offset the calories we would be subjecting our fragile arterial systems to i cleverly purchased lettuce and a tomato. The following is a photographic account of how to quickly trim a few years off your life. v exclusive culinary knowledge being put to use that's cheese, not eggs. construction. it's got salad on it, it's good for you. smiles lasted roughly 3 bites.

Saturday was the first home game of the season. The first college game and the first american football game i've seen in person. It was everything friday night lights told me it would be. Cooked the boys eggs and banana pancakes for breakfast then headed off to a color fight put on by the school. Students are given large packets of coloured and scented potato starch to throw at each other. It's messy but a lot of fun. + + = After a shower we put more colored stuff on our face, paint this time, this was a terrible idea. Couple of sneaky beerbongs later and we were to the game, via the tailgate. Tailgating is madness, BSU is a dry campus so tailgating is the one time everyone just gets fucked up (pardon my french). Basically tens of thousands of people take over the carparks, set up their outrageous colored trucks, vans, barbeques and marquees. Red cups overflowing with beer, the smell of charred meat and more potato salad (well it is idaho) than the 35,000 people in the stadium could eat, these tailgatee's simply sit around, chat and watch the game on TV's bigger than the screen's found in the stadium. It's fantastic, everyone is like a family and tradition is so strong, some tailgates contain 3-4 generations of BSU Bronco fans. Getting a tailgate spot is next to impossible now as when claimed they are never relinquished. Lucky we have awesome local friends with prime real estate, ribs and plenty of beer. The game itself was great, the crowd and atmosphere is like nothing i've experienced before in Australia. Everyone gets into it, there are chants and you basically stand up the whole time. The stadium is color co-ordinated by seating which creates quite the spectacle. It's also really long and really hot. America's passion for sport is impressive, it's intoxicating and the group of us really loved every minute of it. BSU got up over Miami, Ohio 35-12 or something, it was a whitewash with some good highlight plays and exciting moments. Suitable drunk we got burgers and crashed out, well after i did after i spent 30 minutes scrubbing my face with detergent, dish liquid, a scourer and makeup remover. My face is still kinda orange but at least i don't look like this.

Boise is home to the ridges to rivers system, a trail system of about 140km's of multi use tracks that wind from the greenbelt surrounding the Boise River all the way up to Bogus Basin, a winter playground during winter. My mountain biking class (aka trail running class) is a great bunch of dudes who basically all want a break from uni whilst earning credits. Regularly stoned during class they are a top bunch of dudes and i owe them a lot for donating me bits of pieces (ONLY BIKE RELATE PARAPHERNALIA THO MUM & DAD, I SWEAR) This is the first week i've actually had a bike to ride so i didn't have to run with the group (which whilst endearing also kinda sucks). Luckily i borrowed a solid bike set up with shocks that wasn't too heavy, it felt weird getting on some wide handlebars and fat tires again though. We meet and cruise around the trails for about three hours every Thursday night, there are a few skill levels so we separate normally, my fitness is fine but i struggle on the downhill technical stuff, almost ate shit about 30 times including a pretty spectacular front mono balls-stem moment. Coming down the trails at dusk is pretty sketchy as you can't really see shit, there are some really big rocky parts and it's super sandy as we haven't had rain in a while. The climbs and traverses are spectacular, undulating and a lot of fun to ride whilst definitely being a workout. Past Thursday i did a sort of triathlon day having run at cross-fit in the morning then swimming a kilometer or so at midday then flogging my legs at night. I certainly earned a good night out on the town with a friend and a couple beers afterwards. We got out mostly stack free, one dude having a mechanical mid street crossing and eating shit and the other dude falling like two meters, he was pretty lucky not to get seriously hurt but was pretty dazed. It's a fantastic trail system and I'll definitely get up there for a run sometime soon not to mention another 5 weeks of classes.

Wrote my second piece for the newspaper. Retrospecively i kinda dislike this article, it's formatted horribly and clunky. The points made are sort of point of view as well, after chatting to friends in other parts of the U.S. i think it's pretty different all over regarding everything mentioned in the article. In future when possible i think i'll write stuff out and let it sit for a couple days before re-editing it. You can check it out here

today my editor Tabi pulled me from my professors class without warning or explanation and then we went and had a beer and some shots. and she paid. find me a cooler class.

Film Styles and Genre's remember watching movies in class in primary school as a reward, well i do that every tuesday night between 6 and 10pm. We (Roughly half the pro-athletes at the school it seems, easy class much?, some film nerds and I) gather in a freezing lecture theatre (coz american's don't care about the environment air con and sprinklers are constantly on.) and complete a quiz on the weeks readings, quizzes are big here, if you've done the weeks readings (normally about 80 pages per class per week) it's not so bad. Quizzes make roughly 50% of the grades for all my classes. We discuss the chapter we read, lately it has been broad topics like form, convention, genre and style as well as some more specific things found in movies like depth, function, evaluation, narration and motifs. It's a good class, i've always liked movies, tv and most types of visual productions, this class is a neat way to begin to understand the things you always noticed but never really understood or put a name to. Last night we discussed the intricacy of plot vs story, i like this quote: "Film makers construct the plot from the story whilst the audience constructs the story from the plot. After discussion we watch a movie, typical classics (Citizen Kane, Battleship Potemkin & The Wizard of Oz) as well as more indepth consideration of the concept of Genre (in this class, Western: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Blazing Saddles) and Auteurs (Jarmusch's Dead Man & Down By Law). Post viewing discussion normally meanders off topic fairly quickly, the class is a discussion class so that's a fairly good thing, we have a good set of minds from a range of industry as well as some contentious points of view. It makes for a fun class, plus we get to eat snacks and stuff just like a real movie! None of the films so far have really grabbed my attention, i've never been an old movie buff, but i think it's good in that the environment makes you witness, nitpick and analyse them. Even if the film's are not engrossing, looking at them analytically keeps you interested. It compliments my Video Production class as well when looking at how things were shot, lit and edited. If i watched them at home i'd likely alt-tab within the opening credits, it's a problem with watching for films for enjoyment these days, unless at the theatre or with a group of people i often phase out or do something else. I searched around but i couldn't find the article i read a while ago about how the internet has altered the way we process information. It focussed on reading but it applies across all the medium's found on the internet, if something doesn't catch our attention right a way we are unlikely to follow it for more than two to three sentences. Anyway the class is good and learning more about the cogs, nuts and bolts of films is fascinating.

I got a lot to say, this place is special. For now photos.