74 - Holiday MAGIC
Hey there, !
Holiday Magic was this school holiday program that my parents signed me and Steph up for nearly every holiday when we were in primary school. It was a marvellous program run by some excellent people - I remember being so excited when I saw the programs because it was a whole holiday of FUN in store!
To a young kid like me, the activities they planned were absolutely magical. They were things like:
- making damper
- making tie-dye t-shirts (it was the early 2000’s!)
- making wax moulds of our hands (actually super cool - I still have the one I made when I was 6!)
- learning how to play table tennis
- Olympic days?! (I think this was when Sydney was hosting the Olympics)
- excursions out to Treasury Gardens (where I found out I had hayfever rolling down a hill!)
- field trips out to Puffing Billy, the Collingwood Children’s farm, Scienceworks, the Royal Melbourne Show
- going to the movies (always the most sought after day to go - look above! - Pokemon 2000, El Dorado, Emperor’s New Groove - a golden age tbh)
The list goes on and on! I don’t think they really exist any more…the only thing I could find online was that Holiday Magic was a multi-level marketing organisation in the States.
I hope it wasn’t the same thing…
The vivid memories I recall weren’t really of the activities themselves though; it was in those in between periods when we were kind of…free to do whatever we wanted:
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They had a Nintendo 64, which had to be shared amongst a crowd of kids. I remember waiting ages for my turn, only to completely fail at playing Smash, or Mario, because, well, I didn’t know how to play! It was fun to watch others play, and as the kids got picked up and had to go home, I’d have more time on the N64…alas, I never really got better.
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I brought my Gameboy, full of counterfeit / ripped versions of games (The classic Hong Kong 504-in-1 - not just Pokemon Red or Blue, but Green and Purple as well!) that were often in Japanese. Honestly, I was just glad I got to play them at all LOL. There was one friend of mine, Victor, who had the English version of a lot of these games, so he could help me through things. I remember trying to play through Dragon Quest but it was all Japanese so I didn’t know 1. what I was doing for actions 2. what the people were asking me to do and 3. how to progress at all. Being able to read the actual translation on his Gameboy was a DREAM.
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I won a massive jar of lollies in one of those ‘guess-the-number’ competitions. Mum recently found it again in the basement (with the lollies all eaten, of course). I think the jar was the size of my head at the time, and it was demolished very quickly. I also won one of those raffles where you just put your name in and you win a plush toy. Man I was lucky when I was young - where’s all that luck gone now?!
Young Vince and his nostalgia - where will it end! As we grew older, I think my parents saved money by not sending us to these things, and instead we just fended for ourselves at home with violin practice, cooking our own lunches and whiling away the days at home. But that’s a story for another day!
What did you get up to on your school holidays?
Chat soon :)
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Carribean Rollerama - I went back recently, after an incredibly long time; it’s probably been upwards of 15 years since I had been back to this roller-skating rink and I LOVED it. It’s exactly the same as I remember - smelly, sweaty, and the only place you can escape that is on the rink where the wind rushes past you at speed and cools you down. The games are just as dumb, the snack bar is just as unhealthy, and it’s exactly as fun as I remember. Hit me up if you want to go - I’m so keen!
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Matt Levine’s Money Stuff - not really ‘real life’ but close enough; I found out about this columnist, Matt Levine, who writes about the financial world in an extremely clear way, and has been doing so for a number of years. I liked his analysis recently of how it might have actually been a rational decision to buy the ‘wrong’ stock (e.g. buying GME in Australia, or the wrong ‘Signal’ based on Elon Musk’s tweet) if you believe that other people are dumb enough to buy it. And if others think the same way you do, then it will still increase in price because you all believe someone is dumb enough to buy it. Irrationality at its finest:
More shares of Signal Advance traded on Monday, after everyone knew it wasn’t the right Signal, than traded in all of 2020, and at higher prices.
🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway
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Grandparents or Day Care? How to make decisions - this is the weirdest stumble upon article I found; an economist wrote about how to make a decision between keeping your kids in childcare or with their grandparents during a pandemic. It’s a really solid framework that she developed to make decisions, and applying to a real-world situation - pretty much my whole job as a strategist, eh?
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Tokyo - the city fed by its konbini - my ideal article; learning about something completely random in a different city that I already experienced, but didn’t understand the importance of until I read this article. On one hand, Tokyo’s konbini (convenience stores) house pretty much any type of food you want, and it’s freshly delivered 3 times a day (what an achievement!). On the other hand, a lot of it gets thrown out as waste because it isn’t fresh any more. Cities are fascinating!
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Books by the Foot - you know those bookshelves in movies, dramas, or even Zoom backgrounds of people on the news? This company probably supplied them with the books they needed.