Sunday arvo walk in the neighbourhood

Bike polo anyone?


Let's finish with an historical quiz. Put names to the faces.

Mogblogging like it's 2005...

LOL-Tobias has come out of semi-retirement....

Fact

People who sit on hour-long teleconferences, breathing loudly into the receiver the whole time, so that everyone can hear their serial-killeresque heavy breathing = FOUL!!!

Pointless rant #372 - freak weather pattern edition

I saw people on the weekend wearing scarves.

Honest to goodness, scarves.

The minute the temperature drops below 20 degrees, Sydney people freak and bust out the polar fleece and heavy coats. Despite the fact it's still 95% humidity.

Maybe they're adopting the jockey weight-loss regimen and they're trying to sweat themselves down to their racing weight.

Buncha clowns, I tells ya.

Pretty much sums up my reaction to seeing Matthew Newton in the nude on Underbelly last night

The hard questions. Asked here.

Is it wrong of me to ignore an email from a colleague, just because she spelled my first name incorrectly?

And I don't just mean a typo. I mean wrong by about 50% of the total letters in my first name (which, before you ask, is definitely not hard to spell).

The error comes despite having worked together for 12 months, and despite the fact she would have had to have entered my name in when entering my email address.

Well anyway, that urgent email is going to sit there for a while. At least for as long as it takes me to finish this post...

Which, in a seamless segue, is something I was originally going to put on twitter. But I realised that I have been foregoing blogging in favour of the odd random tweet.

In particular I'm quite happy with the developing thread of tweets on the new, 18 year-old admin assistant here at work that manages to insert a reference to McDonalds into just about every conversation.

For example, when I complained of a stomach ache, I was usefully informed that cheeseburgers are a surefire cure for stomach ache. When we experienced a blackout, I was urged to race down to McDonalds as they would most certainly be throwing out a whole load of burgers.

Both of these were absolutely ripping suggestions for a vegetarian such as myself (mmmm, unrefrigerated processed meats - delightful!)

Totally worth signing up to twitter and following me just for that.

A guy walks into a cafe...

"We'll have two herbal teas, bacon and eggs with toast, and scrambled eggs with a side of smoked salmon and mushrooms.

Oh, and we have to be at an appointment in 10 minutes, so
you'd better get onto that straight away."

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to go around expecting that the world will bend to your will and expectations, no matter how unreasonable.

It's like those people on the roads who decide that they want to turn left, even if they are in the right-hand lane of a 3-lane highway. Instead of conceding that they've missed the turn and finding somewhere safe to turn around, they just stop dead in the right-hand lane with their left-hand indicator on, waiting for a gap in the traffic, with not a care in the world for the line of 50 cars banked up behind them.

Or the women who force those double-wide prams down narrow, inner-city streets (taking out many a passer-by's ankles on the way) and then act surprised when they don't fit into the teeny-tiny cafes, already crammed full of people and chairs.

It's a scaled-down version of the blokes who driver Hummers around the laneways of Newtown - Newsflash! The built environment will not magically morph itself to adapt to your choices!

.
.
.

Hmmm, maybe next time I go to the cafe I should ask for a decaf...

I hope you are more original with your policies...

Hang on, hang on.

Haven't I seen that somewhere before?


Obama! You dastardly thief!

I hope Bob and his gang of anthropomorphised work-vehicles and equipment sue his presidential pants off!

Drama! Absurdity! The Occult! Welcome to 21st century communications policy

I hate to make a point with a sledgehammer, but Has anyone seen that play The ISP-Level Filter Trial The Crucible?

Well, according to Wiki, the play begins with revelations that most Australians some village girls may have dabbled in a bit of teh un-legal online activities witchcraft.

These were apparently enabled by off-shore hosted servers Tituba, one of the village family’s slaves, from Barbados.

Stephen Conroy Reverend John Hale is summoned to look into the incident. He is an expert in nothing occultist phenomena and is eager to put into practice a completely disproportionate response his acquired learning.

He questions the other village girls, who, in an attempt to avoid being deemed a pr0n-watcher witch, profess a blacklist of websites people they’ve seen with bit-torrent software the Devil.

The play then tells of a descent into hysteria and injustice as Conroy the villagers accuses everyone else others in an attempt to save his reputation themselves. Anyone who dissents against the irrational and deeply flawed ISP-level filtering witchcraft trials are labelled perverts witches, thus undermining any rational criticism of the trials.

As the bureaucrats Danforth says in Senate Estimates Act III, “an ISP person is either with this filtering trial court or he must be counted as having something to hide against it.”

The filteringwitch trials are the ultimate expression of knee-jerk, politically driven madness intolerance (and the resulting cut in broadband speeds hanging witches is the ultimate irony, coming from the Broadband Minister means of restoring the community's purity); the trials brand all free speech advocates social deviants with the taint of child-pr0n devil-worship and thus necessitate their elimination from the debate community.

Hysteria supplants logic and enables Conroy people to believe that everyday Australianstheir neighbours, whom they have always considered upstanding people, are committing absurd and unbelievable online crimes — communing with the file sharersdevil, killing babies, and so on.

As we all know, The ISP-Level Filter Trial The Crucible is symbolic of the religious right’s 1950s American paranoia about moral decay communism and illustrates narrow-mindedness, excessive zeal and disregard for the individual that characterised the government’s effort to secure Stephen Fielding’s support in the Senate stamp out a perceived social ill.

Should be coming to a desktop theatre near you shortly!

You won't be able to Don't miss it!

Have you heard of the youtube?*

I'm sure by now everyone's typed "Single ladies" into youtube and been blown away by random people recreating, with varying degrees of success, the lip-smacking choreography in Beyonce's film clip.

If not, for shame! And get thee clicky-clicky on this, this and this, stat!

But to add that, check out this clip of 'j-setting', dubbed over with Unk's Walk it Out (said to be Beyonce's inspiration):

As well as being 100% youtubey goodness, it also solves a long-running mystery for me - just where did Jane Turner get the inspiration for Kath Day-Knight's moves!

*Title taken from real life question asked of me about a year ago, by someone who pretends to know about computers. Oh the hilarity!

Je ne regrette rien

So it's roughly a year since we upped sticks and moved back to Sydney.

I could probably deliberate for a few hours on the costs and rewards, the things (and people) missed and the (very) hard-won gains, the lost opportunities and the surprise windfalls.

But it really all comes down to one simple fact.

Right now, at this very minute, summernats is on, and I'm not in Canberra.

As the French would say, w00t!

Bloody hippies!

Protect the planet from gays, Pope says

Saving humanity from homosexuality and transsexuality is as important as saving rainforests, Pope Benedict XVI says.

[...]

Gender theory, which explores sexual orientation and gender identity, could potentially lead to the ''self-destruction'' of the human race by blurring the lines between men and women.

Great! So now, in addition to the homophobes hurling abuse at me from their V8 utes, I also have to watch out for the hippies, hurling energy efficient light-globes at me from their death squads Priuses.

Saw this in the freezer section of woolies t'other day...

I honestly can't decide whether:

1. This is a practical joke gone wrong awesomely right. Ie, junior marketing type comes up with this product name as a joke, expecting it to be ruled out somewhere up the hierarchy or at least in focus-groups. But it didn't, and now it's in stores everywhere; OR
2. This actually tested well in focus groups and no one else shares my cerebral brand of humour.

Having immersed myself recently in Mad Men, I also can't rid myself of the image of Don Draper, dressed immaculately, holding a glass of whiskey and whistfully smoking a cigarette (or four), delivering a meaningful sermon on how 'Breast Munchies' will tap the unfulfilled desires of housewives across 1960s America.

So in conclusion, *massive snigger*!!!

Because I always appreciate getting new music tips from other people...

December playlist:

(Each track is also from an album well worth your time in exploring)

1. Never Miss a Beat Kaiser Chiefs (Off With Their Heads)
2. I'm Not Going to Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance With You Black Kids (Partie Traumatic)
3. You Wouldn't Like Me Tegan and Sara (So Jealous)
4. Hit the Heartbreaks Black Kids (Partie Traumatic)
5. Walking on a Dream Empire of the Sun (Walking on a Dream)
6. Midnight Coward Stars (In Our Bedroom After the War)
7. Revelry Kings Of Leon (Only By the Night)
8. Notion Kings of Leon (Only By the Night)
9. Human The Killers (Day & Age)
10. Sweet Disposition Temper Trap (Sweet Disposition - single)

That last one is astonishingly good, acktchelly.

Excusable? Or just plain embarrassing?

I think I’ve turned into an 89 year-old woman.

Last week I told some kids to stop talking in a movie.

Well, not so much ‘told’, but asked them. “Do you guys want to shut up?! Seriously!”

As the LovelyWife notes, there’s a certain passive aggressive quality to my attempts to force my own personal standards of everyday common decency on complete strangers.

We used to live across the road from a child-care centre which, as you’d expect, was adequately fenced. After about 3 months of silent, repressed rage, I could no longer tolerate the daily, after-hours visits by some neighbourhood kids with their two large dogs.

These dogs, instead of being responsibly exercised in a public park, would be allowed to run and bark and crap freely in the child-care centre’s fenced-off play area. For hours. Their owners using the enclosed nature of the play area as a substitute for active supervision and interaction with their dogs.

A more confident person would have confronted these rather meek looking 13 year-olds and their ageing labradors with something like “you shouldn’t be doing that. There’s a park around the corner.” (Or, perhaps, said nothing at all. I’ve lost track of what is acceptable these days).

My attempt was something more like “excuse me, I want you to think about what happens when your dogs use the kids’ play area as a toilet, and then the kids come and play in the play area, and their hands touch the dogs' poo.”

Brilliant, n'est pas?

Anyway, I still maintain that in both the dog incident and the movie scenario, my emergency interventions were justified.

The movie in question was the unnecessarily complex Quantum of Solace – I’d invested several hours and the not inconsiderable ticket price for the privilege of being utterly confused by:

a) the first 45 minutes of storyline;
b) the whole Mathis denouement (even Wiki doesn’t know if his duplicity was a set-up, or if he was a triple-agent); and
c) Alicia Keys’ upper register

However, it seemed to me that for these kids’ parents, the cinema was serving the same purpose as the child-care centre’s fenced-off play-area was serving for the dog-owners – a convenient, enclosed space in which to park their responsibilities whilst they engaged in some other activity.

There was no way these 10 year-old boys were going to be interested in the full 17 hours of the movie and it was hence unsurprising that they resorted to what can only be described as ‘hi-jinks’ up and down the aisles.

My ever-so-slightly assertive request that they be quiet was triggered when they chose the aisle right in front of us to discuss whatever it is kids discuss in cinemas when they are bored by movies pitched way higher than their age group.

It was seriously impeding my ability to keep up with the secret-organisation-holds-stealthy-conference-regarding-purchase-of-pipeline-during-Tosca scene.

I’m most worried, however, by the fact that last night I ‘shh’-ed some women sitting next to me at the Kylie concert.

I knew they were trouble when they came up the aisle already carrying their shoes. Isn’t that something reserved for 5.30pm on Melbourne Cup day?

Or is it now acceptable to walk out your front door with bare feet and shoes in your hands?

(There’s a whole other post there about choosing footwear that’s so useless you end up carrying it, compromising the utility of your hands and feet).

But perhaps I shouldn’t say that I ‘shh’-ed them – I don’t think I was that assertive.

It was more a case of me explaining to them that their incredibly loud, long conversation regarding how they were going to emotionally blackmail their boyfriends into proposing (well, that’s what I imagine the conversation to be about), was getting “a bit distracting for all the people sitting around you.”

But srsly! Who pays $100 to go to a Kylie concert, and then sits there talking through the whole first half?! I just don’t understand. It wasn’t even a case of the occasional comment here or there, in between songs or even in the instrumental interludes between scenes.

These women were shouting their conversation just to hear themselves over the performance. And I needed all my concentration to understand Kylie’s revolutionary cross-cultural interpretation of Barry Manilow classics.

I feel dismayed.

But I'm not sure whether that's because it feels like no one gives a rats about how their behaviour impacts on others, or if it's because I'm a 'shh'-er.

*insert ennui here*

Free IQ test!

You know what always makes me feel like an idiot?

When I remember that, way back in its first season, I used to anxiously hang out for each new episode of Lost, fully expecting that all the questions would be answered and all mysteries solved.

Genius.

What they are up to now, season 53? And they haven't even finished setting up new mysteries, let alone getting around to solving any of them.

Newsflash! This is not news!

Have you seen the headlines this week?

Bush-Rudd handshake shakey

Bush on handshake: "I don't understand the fuss. Kevin smells and has girl germs. Everyone knows this. Why would I want to shake his hand for longer than necessary?"

International Diplomatic Crisis! Cretinous creationist with the attention-span of a tea-spoon gets a bit distracted after shaking hands with 20 uppity world leaders. Ennui mistaken for informed opinion of Kevin Rudd! War imminent!

I’m sorry, but do we really care?

No one really cared what Bush 'thought' at the best of times.

And with only a couple of months before he slips the keys to the White House under the mat and slinks off into history, I think the real story is, could this be any more irrelevant?

Hot, crowded and conflicted - must be the Newtown Festival!

Yesterday, as the consumer palaces of the inner west echoed emptily, the free community festival of Newtown celebrated its 30th anniversary with record crowds and booming business.

Or anti-business, as the festival's director, Sue Andersen, put it. "The reason it's so unique and popular is, firstly, that it's free, but secondly, because it's not about consumer brands. One year we had a stall for [a large homewares concern], and people shunned it, like there was a big 'boo' over it. We realised it was a big mistake, and have never had a major brand since."

Full article here.

Well, a couple of observations, Sue Anderson:

• My bottle of (tap) water was confiscated at the gate because “water is sold on-site. You can’t bring in any food or drink.”
• Someone forgot to tell Sue Anderson that Fitness First, whose minions were wandering around spruiking their new Newtown venue, is a major consumer brand.

Apart from that, hooray for counterfeit Mighty Boosh t-shirts, fisherman’s pants and those teeny little pancake thingies.

Festivals, hurrah!

Australian Idol: les escargots ont interdit

My top five observations from attending last night’s filming of the Australian Idol Top Five:

1. If there are 3 minutes and 40 seconds for each ad break, and allowing for 6 ad breaks, that means that Andrew G spent a cumulative 22 minutes fluffing and smoothing his fringe. Whilst other presenters/judges would spend the commercial breaks having a drink, chatting to the audience or having their make-up retouched, each and every spare second of Andrew G’s time was spent with the hair stylist. Why don’t they just save themselves the trouble and get him some lego hair.
   




2. I don’t understand how they make such a polished looking program from the big shemozzle that takes place in the studio during filming. It's like a 12-year old's birthday's party in someone's garage. Thanks goodness for unidirectional microphones I guess.
   


3. Everything in the studio is a lot smaller than it appears on TV (except Kyle). We were sitting in the third-last row of seats, but I reckon I could still have hit Luke Dickens fair in the face with an anvil, if I so chose.
   


4. Each of Andrew G and James Mathison had siblings in the audience last night. Not that this was announced. It was just rather obvious. Andrew G’s sister was pretty much Andrew G with longer bouncier hair and a dress. I only worked out that the bloke in the next aisle was not James Mathison, and was, in fact, his brother, when James Mathison walked out on stage in different clothes. It was freaky, people.
   


5. We dropped a friend home to Coogee at the end of the evening and drove past the Coogee Bay Hotel. The place was faecal packed. Go figure.

All poo puns intended

Srsly, I do not want to read another word about the poolato incident at the Coogee Bay Hotel!

Everywhere I turn, there's yet another pointless 'update' - yet another quote from the 'victims' about how 'disgusted' they are.

Really?

You ate poo and you were disgusted? No!

People, this is not news!

I swear, we'll still be seeing 'updates' of this story next January.

In this month's bumper holiday edition of Women's Weekly - Belinda Neal's sensational new shaping underwear! Super-fun holiday knit patterns! Poo-eater Jessica Whyte's fail-safe teeth whitening revolution: "turn that brown frown upside down!"