Whew

Tesla cancels Cybertruck in Australia and NZ after 7 years of deposits

Tesla has officially cancelled the Cybertruck for Australia and New Zealand. Reservation holders are getting emails today telling them their orders are void and their deposits will be refunded.
Australians started putting down A$150 to reserve the electric pickup in November 2019. That’s almost seven years of waiting for a truck Tesla now says it won’t build for them. […]
Australia wasn’t a small market on paper. A crowdsourced survey of reservations from 2020 put it third behind the US and Canada, with about 3% of all Cybertruck reservations. Tesla never confirmed regional numbers, but by 2023, crowdsourced tracking put total Cybertruck reservations at around 2 million.Tesla quietly closed the Australian reservation page in May 2022 and replaced it with a “Get updates” button. It didn’t refund anyone at the time. People who had already reserved just kept waiting.
Then in 2024, Tesla shipped a Cybertruck down under for a display tour, and Elon Musk told shareholders that year: “We might be able to certify it for other markets sometime next year.” Next year came and went, and the truck never got a right-hand-drive version.
That’s the core problem. The Cybertruck is built only in left-hand drive. Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and Japan all need right-hand drive, and Australia also requires certification under its own design rules. That’s a big bill for a truck with a truck that is already having demand issues in North America.

Not bad news, to be honest. I’m unlikely to ever encounter one if it did go on sale here, given how rarely I go anywhere, but I know what the roads in Sydney—which are bad enough as they are—would be like with them taking up even more space…

An unexpected sequel

The whale story from a few days ago continues!

A whale carcass that washed up on Sydney’s eastern shore last week has re-emerged at Malabar, prompting Randwick Council to close the beach.
At least two large pieces of the decomposing whale were floating against the shore this morning, having been fenced off by the council late yesterday.
Randwick Council moved the carcass higher up on the beach out of the water and was arranging with contractors to properly dispose of the whale remains. […]
The young whale washed up at Lurline Bay just north of Maroubra Beach on Thursday last week. Council closed both Maroubra and Coogee beaches as a precaution on Thursday.
Council and the Indigenous ranger group Gamay Rangers responded to the carcass.
Senior ranger Rob Cooley said on Thursday their preference was to let nature take its course as the carcass was too hard to reach with machinery and was in an advanced state of decomposition.

Given that this whale was apparently first spotted at Manly before it ended up here, I’m feeling like nature’s in no hurry to deal with it. A couple more days and it’ll probably be in bits in Botany Bay and washing up at Kurnell…

Meanwhile in Brazil and Serbia

This is quite major news. For reasons I frankly don’t understand, Brazil has some multiple-round voting system whereby winning in the first round is no guarantee you’ll win the election… but this is apparently the first time it’s actually happened that way. Lula was significantly behind Flavio Bolsonaro in the first round, but somehow turned that around on the second go and won the whole thing. Bolsonaro is spitting chips, obviously, cos that’s what his daddy did the last time Lula won… and he wants the result annulled because he’s protesting the fact that voting booths were allowed to stay open a couple of hours longer than usual despite the fact that his own campaign had called for this to happen. Of course, if Flavio had won, he would’ve been president in name only; I’ve no doubt daddy would’ve been calling all the shots from his jail cell.

Similar (hopefully) good times in Serbia, too, with their president Aleksandar Vucic kind of grudgingly accepting he’s been given the arse by voters there… apparently he couldn’t legally stand for a third term anyway, but he could still have been prime minister, so Serbia could still have been stuck with him if his party had won. Won’t be happening now, though. Curious about this Student List crew who beat him; the BBC piece describes them as having “no obvious leaders” and their “members are not used to politics”. Hopefully inexperience doesn’t get in the way of good things being done.

Oh, and Israel has an election in the next day or so too. I have little hope that the results there will be as positive as these ones, of course.

The Werewolf and the Yeti

Opted for some more Paul Naschy tonight; as the title suggests, this is one of his Waldemar Daninsky films, and an authentic Video Nasty as well (nice to have one of those for one’s October horror viewing), one of the handful that’s still never been released in the UK apparently (Arrow? 88 Films? Why aren’t either of you on top of this?). Speaking of titles, the literal rendering of the Spanish one, “Curse of the Beast”, is actually more accurate; there is markedly more werewolf than yeti to be had here.

Anyway, I’m clearly watching the Daninsky series well out of order, but I’ve always gathered that there’s little continuity to the series, with his origin being different in almost each one. In this instance, Daninsky joins an expedition to Tibet in search of the yeti, picking up after another expedition in search of same ended kind of terribly; perhaps needless to say, so does this one, albeit not in the way you might expect. Naschy is credited with the script, but the film felt to me like he actually wrote a number of different film scripts, took bits of each and just slammed them into one another while hoping for the best. I charcterised The Hunchback of the Morgue as “somewhat unbalanced and not entirely coherent”, and, well, this one is the same but even more so; the pacing and structure are so odd it feels like about 20-30 minutes of material that might’ve made it hang together more was either cut from it or maybe never even filmed. On the plus side, if the film is a mess it’s a pretty attractive one, shot almost entirely on location… Spain obviously stands in for Tibet throughout (a bit less happily, Spanish people obviously largely stand in for Tibetan people too) and looks pretty beautiful in doing so. And there were no burning rats in this one, which is an edge it has over the hunchback film…

Something we don’t see around here every day

There’s a goddamn dead whale in between the two beaches nearest to me.

A whale carcass has forced the closure of two busy swimming and surfing spots after washing up between Coogee and Maroubra beaches in Sydney – but there are no plans to remove it.
The whale’s heavily decomposed body was found on Thursday morning at Lurline Bay, a rocky cove surrounded by cliffs in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.
It’s believed to be a juvenile humpback.
Local council said nearby Coogee and Maroubra beaches would be closed until further notice to protect oceangoers as whale carcasses have been known to attract sharks.
“We have cordoned off the area to leave this creature in peace and safe from the attention of people,” Randwick Council mayor, Dr Clare Willington, told reporters.
The council has also contacted Surf Life Saving about introducing extra drone patrols, but Willington said it was a precaution as there had not yet been reports of an increase in shark activity.
Willington said there were no plans to remove the whale and that staff were working with Gamay Rangers about a culturally and environmentally sensitive approach to take.
“This is a natural occurrence and in time nature will deal with the carcass,” Willington said.

In other words, presumably not this way:

I actually did see a live whale out here once when I was quite young, not sure exactly when but it was mid-to-late 80s… Dad had got word from someone that there was a whale at Malabar, so off we went to see it; not much to see, mostly just the tail fin breaching, but still, I saw a whale, which I haven’t seen since. I know whales come down the east coast in the latter part of the year, but this is only the second one I’ve heard of coming to my particular area…

Candyman

Apparently it’s not actually true that Tony Todd negotiated a fee of an additional $1000 every time he got stung by a bee in that scene, which would’ve netted him another $25k or so, but he would’ve deserved it if he had done. Candyman stems from a Clive Barker story I haven’t read (haven’t yet got to the second half of Books of Blood), but despite that I did wonder a few times while watching the film if it wouldn’t be better as a short story than as a film… though you would’ve missed out on Todd’s amazing voice if it hadn’t been made into a film, so. As I said a few posts ago, I’m limiting myself to first-time watches this month, and I’m also trying to knock a few “big” titles off the watchlist too… you know, ones that most people into horror who aren’t me have already seen years ago and I’m preposterously late to… and I watched Candyman tonight cos I was under the impression it was one of the more major gaps in my horror knowledge. Was it, though? I liked it, but I think I was hoping for more from it. Candyman struck me as a film with evident aspirations to be something other than just your regular slasher; this old Slant review describes the titular evil as “a svelte, sexual monument, far removed from the silent brutality of your average serial slasher”, and that’s certainly fair and accurate, plus a lot of violence is actually left offscreen with a lot of the worst stuff just being verbally described. But I felt like I wanted more from it than I got, and I definitely could’ve done with more actual Candyman; Tony Todd is great and his voice (even if electronically massaged) is great, and the character is really interesting, I like the whole idea of him manifesting because his “congregation” stops believing in him and he wants his legend to continue, but there wasn’t enough of him. It’s good, and at times it’s really good. There were just things that didn’t really work for me that stopped it being great.

I’m not racist but

Destiny Church leader Brian Tamaki says he’s been denied entry to Australia

Destiny Church leader Brian Tamaki says he has been denied entry into Australia over “inflammatory and concerning” statements online.
Tamaki took to social media saying he had flown to Brisbane for a church conference, when he was detained by the border force.
In the video, the religious leader says he was interrogated for 12 hours, before his visa was cancelled. […]
He claimed Australian Border Force documents said his presence in Australia “may risk the good order of the Australian community, or a segment of the Australian community, namely the Sikh and Muslim communities”.

How inflammatory and concerning are we talking about?

Tamaki had earlier this week appeared in Manukau District Court, where he denied claims he incited rational disharmony.
In June, he accused Modi of purging Christians in the South Asian nation.
“He [Modi] is currently purging India of all Christians and burning church buildings down,” Tamaki had said in a video posted on social media.
“I think we should reciprocate in kind. Let’s purge New Zealand of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims. And, while we’re at it, if they’re burning churches down, why don’t we burn mosques and their temples down? Tit for tat.”
Tamaki told media outside court that he had challenged religion, not race.
“They’re trying to say it’s racial, and I’m saying to them it never has been. I don’t dislike or hate anybody,” he said.
“In all my 35, 40 years of ministry, it’s about acceptance, it’s about love, it’s hope and faith.”

Right. There’s nothing racist about about targeting these particular religions, apart from the fact that they’re almost entirely practised by, you know, non-white people. Brian himself is notably non-white, coming from Tainui ancestry, but he’s assimilated so well to white society I don’t think he even likes other Maori. Not sorry if he’s been blocked from coming here, we already have too many people like him…

Will ye no go away again

Sighted on Tumblr: Practising Piper, Dornoch Show by Glyn Satterley. I kind of love that this poor bastard looks like he’s been exiled to some remote isle. far from human habitation with no one but the photographer within miles of him. And frankly, if he was practising the bagpipes, that’s probably what most people would prefer happened…

The Diabolical Dr. Z.

If there’s one thing I’d never have expected from a Jess Franco film, it’s a Robert Bresson joke. And yet that is essentially how this one begins… fortunately Franco soon remembers this is a film by him, and so even references to classier films and filmmaking (to say nothing of humour; the rest of the film is played fairly straight) go out the window almost immediately; The Diabolical Dr. Z. is nothing if not a Euro-exploitation B film, and a fair example of that sort of thing. This is kind of an early version of She Killed in Ecstasy, in some respects; in that film it’s the wife of the experimenting doctor who takes revenge for his death, and in this one it’s the doctor’s daughter. However, in this case she’s employing her late father’s mind control technology to do so, which is a twist the latter film avoided (Soledad Miranda was enough by herself there); the film struck me as a bit giallo-ish apart from that, though that might be because of Daniel White’s score which sounds awfully similar to some of the music on a DVD compilation of giallo trailers I have… Dr. Z. is also blessed with camerawork by Alejandro Ulloa, alas that he never worked with Franco again cos Ulloa could’ve elevated some of his later works if this is indicative (he would also have films by Lucio Fulci, Sergio Corbucci, Eugenio Martin and Paul Naschy to his credit). It’s not a film about which there’s an awful lot to say, really, and that’s perfectly fine. It’s a Monday night, I don’t need anything heavy, I need an efficient Euro-exploitation B film, and Dr. Z. gave me what I was looking for on that front.

You can click to enlarge these screengrabs I took: