shake that cola drag

The Annual Four-Eyed Frenzy

2008-07-10T11:26:00.002+12:00

The film festival total stands at a respectable (but not excessive) seventeen this year:

Friday, July 11

6:15PM

Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer

Sunday, July 13

1:15PM

The Adventures of Robin Hood

Tuesday, July 15

8:00PM

Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story

Wednesday, July 16

6:15PM

Blockade

Preceded by: Amateur Photographer

8:45PM

Taipei Story

Thursday, July 17

4:00PM

Be Kind Rewind

Friday, July 18

2:00PM

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S. Thompson

4:15PM

Planet B-Boy

Saturday, July 19

12:15PM

The Order of Myths

Sunday, July 20

6:15PM

The Kid Brother

Monday, July 21

4:30PM

Crazy Love

Wednesday, July 23

6:30PM

I Think We're Alone Now

Friday, July 25

6:30PM

The Cool School

Saturday, July 26

5:00PM

Revue

Sunday, July 27

1:15PM

The Red Balloon

Followed by: White Mane

6:15PM

Not Quite Hollywood

8:30PM

Anvil! The Story of Anvil

We are, as usual, heavy on 'documentaries about weird shit' (Tiffany's stalker! Obsessive abusive relationships! Propaganda films from behind the Iron Curtain! Ozploitation movies! The real Spinal Tap!) and 'vintage things you will never otherwise see on the big screen' (The Red Balloon, Errol Flynn's Robin Hood, Harold Lloyd's The Kid Brother). The Lloyd film also has the dubious honour of being Brent's media studies class field trip, which means I am the other supervisory adult trucking in from Otara on a bus with over 20 teenagers to watch a silent movie with an orchestra in a 1929-opulent orientalist movie palace. (By the way, follow that link. The panorama will blow your mind.) B assures me this whole trip is going to be totally fine. Naturally, I'm picturing that scene in The Wire season four, when Bunny takes his teen charges to the fancy restaurant and they all turn sour in an instant. (Yeah, I know, I tend to predict doom too much.)

Dixie

2008-06-17T09:09:00.001+12:00

A few weeks ago I was telling Ben this story, and he was all 'why is this not on your blog?' and so... yeah. Here is the weirdest thing that happened to us during WOMAD weekend. We were driving on the outskirts of small-town New Plymouth at about 10pm, looking for our hotel. We're trucking along in the dark, and suddenly we see a tiny vehicle on the footpath to our left. As we come closer, we realise it's one of those mobility scooters that the elderly and handicapped use. Driving it is... basically the modern version of dust bowl migrant, with a wife-beater and a mullet, and on his vehicle is flying - I kid you not - a *full sized Confederate flag*. It was car-dealership-sized. I can't believe it didn't tip his scooter over.

The whole thing happened in a flash - it was so crazy it was almost like we hallucinated it, but there were four of us in the car. So... I have so many questions! I mean, when they say 'the south will rise again', do they mean *this* far south? And where did he even *get* a Confederate flag, and why would he be carrying it around with him in the dark on the outskirts of town, and... I mean, wow. Just wow.

I'm just twenty-two and I don't mind dying

2008-06-04T08:12:00.001+12:00

It's not 'Who Do You Love?' but it is pretty damn awesome, nonetheless. RIP Bo.

From Whence it Sprang

2008-05-20T09:16:00.001+12:00

I don't think I've ever explained the title of my blog, and thanks to the miracle of YouTube, you can see its inspiration. There are several in this series, but I particularly like Nancy's eye make-up and mugging in this version of the advertisement. They're all great, though.

OMG!

2008-03-02T09:47:00.001+13:00

I have just realised that the main sample from Warren G's 'Regulate' is from Michael McDonald's 'Keep Forgettin''!

(You all knew this already, right? I'm fifteen years late? OK. As you were.)

Alert: I am about to say something positive about librarianship.

2008-02-08T09:01:00.000+13:00

It's a red letter day! Sometimes, my job is not completely tedious. Sometimes, I get to search through public domain photographs for appropriate website illustrations. Sometimes, I find incredibly cool things of badassery, like this photo of a Black Panther in 1970 at the Lincoln Memorial. Thank you, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

how you ain't gonna fuck? bitch I mean! I'm the GODdamn reason you in VIP or: feminism, hiphop, false consciousness, and my inconsistent principles

2007-12-16T13:08:00.000+13:00

I am a bad feminist. Here is why I am a bad feminist: I am about to write a post in which I defend the indefensible. Here are six mainstream hiphop songs I love which are either partially or wholly... wrong. Wonderfully wrong.

Ludacris, 'Stand Up'

Why It's Wrong: it gives us our post title (unfortunately the video is censored so thoroughly that the 'new' first line of the verse makes no sense), which manages to encapsulate everything that's gross about the 'sex for goods' gender imbalance; the women are a giant cliche and all about their butts (and, to a lesser extent, their boobs); the lyrics encourage drunk girlfights.

Redeeming Qualities: the production is one giant BOMP of joy (thanks Kanye, I think); Ludacris is the flow equivalent of Lewis Black - angry and hilariously funny, often at his own expense; and the video contains giant things. Giant things rule.

Notorious B.I.G., 'Hypnotize'

Why It's Wrong: why *isn't* it wrong? Aggressive, scary, horribly violent and sexist, contains gratuitous Puff Daddy; the line about the girl tied up in the basement is fucking chilling; and, uh, the video is astonishingly stupid and contains dumbass interludes.

Redeeming Qualities: bassline, beat, and chorus, which ride roughshod over everything else and force me to love them.

Jay-Z, 'Girls, Girls, Girls'

Why It's Wrong: hmmmm. I can't possibly imagine what a feminist would have to object to in this song, can you? Jay-Z, the man with an adoring girl in every port, all of them waiting for him to turn up and reduce their entire beings to a couplet in his song; oh, and the casual racism is nice too.

Redeeming Qualities: the oldschool soul samples are pure delight; and I'm sorry, but Jay-Z is so fucking funny and inventive. I can't believe he makes the conceit of this song last as long as he does - every description is great! Apologies, my sisters. I sold you out.

Ol' Dirty Bastard, 'Got Your Money'

Why It's Wrong: erm, well, it's a song about pimping, general sexual exploitation, and threats of murdering women who don't come up with the cash. Oh dear.

Redeeming Qualities: ODB (RIP) is so completely ridiculous, grunty, and ranty that he undercuts his hateful lyrics at every turn (nothing is *less* sexy than Ol' Dirty saying 'sexy sexy sexy' - I tend to assume that he's like the 90s version of Screamin' Jay Hawkins or something); I have never laughed so much at a song as I have at this one; catchiest chorus ever thanks to Kelis; handclaps! Plus: bonus blaxploitation video is hilarious.

Justin Timberlake, Snoop Dogg, 'Signs'

Why It's Wrong: well, there are much, much worse Snoop songs. MUCH worse. This is just a generically sexist song, really: fickle hot girl won over by the cash-heavy gangsta, lots of scantily clad chicks in the video. However, that exchange where Snoop says 'you with your friend right? She ain't trying to bring over no men right?' has always struck me. Snoop, are you that challenged by the mere prospect of another dude at your party? Weird. Disturbing.

Redeeming Qualities: this Neptunes production job makes all human beings dance. It is a scientific fact. I challenge you to put this on at a party and see what happens. Also: Justin sings and dances; Uncle Charlie preaches; and Snoop does that thing he does with the laidback tone. It's pretty much pure love as soon as you hear the first 'Cupid don't fuck with me', and you never look back.

Ghostface Killah feat. Ne-Yo, 'Back Like That'

Why It's Wrong: hello, Ghostface? This is the double standard calling: I would like to let you know that you are a thoughtless, casual misogynist, because you cheated on her first, and she responded in kind, and now you're cutting off her finger to get the ring back and threatening her with 'my girl cousins, they gonna rock you!'? Dude, I gotta say, that's way uncool.

Redeeming Qualities: Pretty much everything else. Ne-Yo sings his little heart out on yet another catchy chorus with some old-school-soul-sampling production (I think there's a pattern emerging here for me); Ghostface gives us some interestingly rage-filled background to the whole sorry saga, because he is a fine storyteller; and I'm all about the random ranting at the end ('got my swagger back and all that!')

So, what have we learned? (Apart from 'never trust a female with no skills', of course.) I think we have learned that something which makes me dance or laugh has an enormous amount of leeway, and that storytelling trumps orthodoxy, and that, yes, I am a bad feminist. I'm not sure what to do about this, though...

Why Brent and I Are Thoroughly Ridiculous

2007-12-06T14:52:00.001+13:00

In honour of Sonnet's List of Things She Calls Linus, I have made a list of all the things we call our dogs in the privacy of our own home. (Seriously, we are *this close* to being characters from Best in Show.)

Ellie's Nicknames

Elsinore
Ellsworth McGillicuddy
Ellington O'Shea
Elderberry

Vinnie's Nicknames

Vincent
Vindaloo
Vinsworth (a pattern is emerging here)
Little Gentleman (a tribute to Anchorman)

Top 10 Reasons Why The Pixies Still Rule, As Pondered on the Bus Home Yesterday

2007-10-19T15:05:00.001+13:00

1. Black Francis, inevitably
2. Complete invisibility on commercial radio, so they are thereby guaranteed to avoid the edge-blurring sameness of classic rock oldies, forever and ever, amen
3. Kim Deal. Kim Deal. Kim Deal
4. Surf music guitar
5. Cod Espanol a la Peggy Hill
6. Loudness
7. Short songs. I cannot emphasise this enough. Leave them wanting more. Do you know how long 'Allison' is? One minute and seventeen goddamned seconds! Intro, verse, chorus, guitar solo, and they're OUT. I second that emotion!
8. Incest, incomprehensibility, and aliens
9. Singalongability
10. No image problems, because they didn't have one. David Lovering is the biggest dork-dresser of all time. And no one has ever given a fuck, and that is completely awesome

My Hero

2007-10-19T11:42:00.001+13:00

Oh man, am I shamefully fucking late on this shit. For some reason Brent and I were overcome with some kind of weird tastefulness for the entire recent New Zealand run of this show on MTVNZ, and we didn't record it. Yet we managed to catch the reunion show and woooooowwwww. Yes, I too love New York. What a thoroughly horrendous, stupid, mean-spirited, crazy, wonderful woman she is.

Bless all Cantabrians

2007-10-10T15:29:00.001+13:00

You know, I've said some pretty mean things about Christchurch in my life, and I feel ashamed of those mean things right now. Even if you hate the game and attendant hoopla more than life itself, this shit is pretty heartwarming on a basic human level. Thanks for your maturity, Cantabrians, because I was starting to think this whole country was pretty damned mean-spirited. And it turns out that no, it's not, and I can feel OK about us after all.

2007-10-02T10:35:00.001+13:00

And shit, while I'm squeeing, let's take a moment to be happy about the Big Day Out. January 18, 2008: Arcade Fire, Dizzee Rascal, Bjork, LCD Soundsystem, The Clean, Paul Kelly, Billy Bragg, The Phoenix Foundation, SJD! Wahey! (Please, please, please let everyone I like be on the Green and Blue stages, in a row, without clashes... unlikely, but... please.)

2007-10-02T08:29:00.001+13:00

And another thing: I got a Justin Timberlake ticket, thanks to the beneficence of my mother. I am ridiculously squee about it. I am also mentally fourteen years old.

2007-10-02T08:21:00.001+13:00

It occurs to me with horrifying clarity that Chutes Too Narrow came out in 2004. Didn't it? Which means I forgot 'Saint Simon'. And, uh, I also really like that Phantom Planet song, 'Lonely Day'. Does this make me... an emo?

More Pointless Musical Ranting

2007-09-15T11:33:00.001+12:00

Crap. It just occurred to me that I never finished my top 40 of the 90s, and Lawrence just asked the same crew to compile a 'top 20 of 2000-2004' - which, I must say, I found immensely more simple. I'm not sure why, as I'm a big, big fan of the Oughties so far, so you'd think I would have the same kind of crushing emotional burden. Perhaps it's the smaller scale, or my more mainstream/poptimist tastes this decade, or that there are some songs so huuuuuuuuuuuuuuge that they were impossible to ignore, or... I don't know. Anyway, I even managed to rank them! Which is unheard-of (and possibly inaccurate). Rules: it had to be released as a single; the ranking is subjective, as in 'my favourites', not objective, as in 'most important'; and I limited myself to one track per artist because otherwise there would be some unfair advantages to Jay-Z, Kanye, The White Stripes and the Super Furry Animals. Track list, 20-1:

Since I Left You - The Avalanches (The only flute sample on the list! Ethereal and joyous.)

No One Knows - Queens of the Stone Age (My favourite air-drumming song. Proof that I only like loud, hard stuff if if you can sing along and dance to it.)

Hate To Say I Told You So - The Hives (Ridiculously badass. How can this song rule so much when the riff is just one giant recycling project? I don't understand it.)

Trick Me - Kelis (Milkshake is more, uh, 'important', but I like this one better. 'Freedom to you has always been whoever landed on your dick...' That economical little guitar part makes me happy.)

What You Waiting For - Gwen Stefani (I am the only person I know who loves this song. The only person. I don't get it: that awesome metronome beat! Those Missing Persons vocal tics! The weird-ass synth-guitar attack at 1 minute 40 seconds! 'You're still a super-hot fe-male!' It's a fucking ridiculous, over-the-top, amazing, stoopid piece of work. Still not sick of it. And it's a hit song whose subject is being anxious about... having a hit song. Heh.)

I'll Be Around - Cee-Lo (Timbaland's verse is hilarious, and I could listen to Cee-Lo read the phone book. Plus how infectious is this production? Nice work, Tim.)

Envy - Ash (It would be any old Ash song, except for those girlie 'ooooh-ooooh-oooohs'. And it kicks ass!)

Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go!) - Garbage (The only great song they've done since about 1995? Well, maybe that's harsh, but that squelchy backing track, and the handclaps, and listen to the *bells*! The bells in the middle eight! Oh my god that's great.)

H to the Izzo - Jay-Z ('He who does not feel me is not real to me, therefore he doesn't exist. So poof! Vamoose, son of a bitch.' The best thing Michael Jackson's been involved with since 1983: that Kanye West is a clever man. This fought 'Girls, Girls, Girls' and '99 Problems' for the top spot - but hey, it's the anthem. Get your damn hands up.)

(Drawing) Rings Around the World - Super Furry Animals (It's droney *and* poppy! Eat your heart out, Dandy Warhols! If you listen veeerrrrrry carefully towards the end, you can hear the New Zealand telephone-recording-lady saying 'please hold on while I try that extension'. It really is rings around the world!)

Rock Your Body - Justin Timberlake (Poor old Michael Jackson. Why can't he do this any more? Not being able to afford a Justin ticket this year is an everlasting regret...)

Listening for the Weather - Bic Runga (She seems to write perfect songs - melodies and lyrics - absolutely effortlessly. 'Busy with their starring roles in their own tragedies.' Every time she hits that high note in the chorus, I turn into mush.)

Groovejet (If This Ain't Love) - Spiller feat. Sophie Ellis-Bextor (I could listen to this on repeat for six straight hours. I bet someone has: one of the last gasps of ecstasy. I almost put Kylie's 'Love at First Sight' on this list, too, but thought it covered too much of the same ground.)

Take Me Out - Franz Ferdinand (I don't know what I could say about this that someone else hasn't said. It's like some dance-rock mini-epic. With puns.)

Seven Nation Army - The White Stripes (Isn't it kind of ridiculous that this mighty, mighty brick shithouse of a song and 'Hey Ya!' came out in the same year? What was in the water?)

All Falls Down - Kanye West feat. Syleena (This wins the 'which Kanye song?' battle because, well, fuck me if the catchy bugger doesn't say something sort of profound in three minutes forty-five seconds. 'They made us hate ourself and love they wealth.')

Something to Talk About - Badly Drawn Boy (Ahhhhhhh. This is so mindblowingly pretty. How does he *do* this?)

Do You Realize?? - The Flaming Lips (Yes. Yes, I am a dirty stinking hippy. Yes, I cried during The Flaming Lips' set at the Big Day Out. Inexplicably comforting, transcendent and beautiful.)

Work It - Missy Elliott (She and Timbaland together are just awe-inspiring. It's... a Blondie sample, and a chorus you actually can't sing along with because it's backwards, and the sound of an elephant, and some bleeps and bloops, and some jokes, and... all these things somehow combine to make something utterly wonderful and bizarre and danceable and silly.)

Hey Ya! - OutKast (If there's a bigger song this decade, I don't know what it could be. The crazy thing is that it's fucking *great* too. Every single part of it is a hook, somehow: there are handclaps and grunts and synth parts and backing vocals all creating this giant Catchy Monster of a track, and then the lead vocal is... so idiosyncratic and compelling. And that's before you even get to the 'breakdown', which will utterly destroy the dancefloor at any decent party. 'Lend me some sugar. I am your neighbour!' One of those songs which fades out and you're like 'where did it go? Can it be that short?')

Bubbling under, apart from those already mentioned: 'Gone Fishing', The Phoenix Foundation; 'Hot in Herre', Nelly; 'Clint Eastwood', Gorillaz; 'Don't Tell Me', Madonna; 'Imitation of Life'', REM; 'Crazy in Love', Beyonce; 'A Little Less Conversation', Elvis vs JXL; 'I See You Baby', Groove Armada; 'Pretty (Ugly Before), Elliott Smith; 'Toxic', Britney Spears (amazingly); 'Get the Party Started', Pink; 'Hurt', Johnny Cash; 'Northern Lights', Goldenhorse.

Reason 1387 to love The Muppets

2007-08-17T18:12:00.001+12:00

I have a theory about The Muppets. Actually, I have several theories about The Muppets, but one of the most important is that their appeal lies partly in how obvious it is that they really, really love songs. All kinds of songs. They're like a big old mp3 player on shuffle: you don't know what's going to come out next. Music-hall, vaudeville, the Beatles, the Great American Songbook, Broadway, disco, soul, rock - they really have such a generous musical spirit. I credit them as a big part of my early musical education: who else would teach me about songs like 'Lydia the Tattooed Lady', or 'Lady of Spain'? And although they can make a song ridiculous like no one ever has (the Viking warship version of 'In the Navy' springs to mind), there is often a kind of beauty to that ridiculousness. Which brings me to this clip of Linda Ronstadt singing 'Blue Bayou' with Floyd, Janis, Animal, that hairy dude on the xylophone... and a delightful chorus of percussive frogs. I honestly think this is one of the prettiest versions of this song I've ever heard - and also the silliest, by some considerable margin. Kudos, Muppet Band!

Cheaters

2007-07-15T12:11:00.003+12:00

Then clip two: the confrontation! The 'meeting with the client' takes place in the car park of a strip mall (natch). Joey Greco really comes into his own here, with a truly magnificent showing of fake tasteful sympathy, and an underlying (yet terribly obvious) desire to get the money-shot. He's like King Cockroach, with a scuttling film crew of sub-cockroaches. I really love the way the cheatee isn't acting emotionally enough for him, so he attempts to make her more upset by saying something lame about the cheater 'only being honest with his dog'. Way to be, Greco! The actual players in the drama follow the usual pattern: the cheater initially denies, then falls back on apology, then blame; the cheatees start off blaming him, but then predictably round on each other. This clip is a good one because it allows for a thoroughly undignified exit: gather up your wet laundry and carry it away, my friend! Note that Joey Greco hovers around the confrontation, twisting the knife wherever he can in an attempt to make everything more and more dramatic. I particularly like the way he gazes manfully after the car as it takes off: you can tell that he thinks he's looking rather heroic.

Cheaters

2007-07-15T12:11:00.001+12:00

Let me share with you just a little bit of the joy that is Cheaters. Clip one: the set-up. Please note several Cheaters stalwarts: the music bed is always just a little too loud; there are always some 'tasty licks' from an electric guitar to underpin the hot mess to follow; Joey Greco starts off as a malevolent little cheeseball gremlin (don't worry, he will only get worse). Then there's the voiceover dialogue, which is so marvellously overwritten that it deserves its own parade. Never say 'dog' when you could use 'loyal canine'! Never say 'goes' when you could say 'proceeds to leave the area'! The call for more suckers is also wonderfully worded. 'Exercise your right to be informed': let us exploit you and say that we're helping you out! I also love the way the investigators are apparently 'licensed'. By whom?

2007-07-09T21:18:00.001+12:00

Flight of the Conchords were just quoted on *Sportscenter*.

Stunned, meet mullet.

2007-07-09T10:43:00.001+12:00

Literal LOLcat: yesterday, I made some spinach and feta muffins (well,
silverbeet and feta, actually, because the vege shop was out of
spinach, but that's incidental to the story). I left them to cool on a
plate on the kitchen worktop, covered with a tea towel, and Brent and
I went to visit my mother for a while. When we came back, my cat was
curled up on them, asleep. The integrity of the muffins was somewhat
compromised. I now have spinach and feta... coasters.

2007-06-21T11:04:00.001+12:00

Man, all I seem to do on this blog is get tagged, lately. This is probably a sign that I should write more. Anyway, Marika sez:

Instructions: Each player starts with 7 random facts/habits about themselves. People who are tagged need to write on their own blog about their seven things, as well as these rules. At the end of your blog, you need to choose 7 people to get tagged and list their names. Don't forget to leave them a comment telling them that they have been tagged and to read your blog!

OK, seven random facts about me.

1) I never won any prizes at school until sixth form, when I won the Sociology prize *and* the Sociology cup (yes, there was a Sociology cup. Why? I don't know). Unfortunately, at the prize-giving assembly, this necessitated two consecutive walks across the stage to accept the prizes, so I had to tear frantically down the stairs, across the floor in front of the stage, and up the other side at terrific speed. It rather undercut my immense 16 year old dignity. (Ironically, I have come to regard Sociology as a rather problematic, ahistorical, bean-counting discipline in later life.)

2) When I was born, I had to be assisted with one of those weird suction-cup things because I was facing up instead of down. This caused my head to look slightly like a Smurf's hat. My mother, who was one of the last, blessedly generally anaesthetised of her generation, woke up to find a child she thought was deformed. Oh, did I mention that we were in Venezuela and her Spanish was limited? Yes. It took some time for her to have things explained in an intelligible way.

3) The herb I use most at home when cooking is coriander/cilantro. It is a major factor in Indian, Thai, Malaysian, Vietnamese, and Mexican foods. Annoyingly, it is also one of the herbs my next-door-neighbour-and-gardener mother hates growing, because it goes to seed so fast and needs so much space. Thus, I have way more sage than I know what to do with, and way less coriander than I need.

4) The show I miss the most from living in the USA is not anything actually awesome, like, say, The Colbert Report or Conan O'Brien - that shit is downloadable. No, it's Cheaters. It never shows up on any file-sharing networks, because it is a horrible schadenfreude-y nastiness low-budget reality show, originally filmed in Dallas. Brent and Gary and I loved it so much. We watched it religiously on a channel with absolutely no reception and terrible snow.

5) When I was a really little kid, my father made me a slide and swing set from scratch. I don't know how he managed to make a workable, non-splintering slide from wood, but he did. He also made me a mock-Tudor playhouse with a real glass window. This does not in any way detract from his general assholery in later life. I think my mother was a good influence on him. Unfortunately, I have not inherited a) his mathematical ability or b) his DIY skills. I can, however, cook nearly as well as him.

6) I have over fifty pairs of shoes, fifty handbags and fifty brooches. I also have more than one cape. 'Who wears a cape?' Yet with minor variations, I wear the same thing to work every day.

7) My first Beatles albums were Please Please Me, With the Beatles, A Hard Day's Night, Beatles for Sale, and Abbey Road. The first four were my mother's original albums from the 60s. The last one was my uncle Gary's original album from the 60s. (They were all scratched to hell.) As a result, I never heard arguably the best Beatles music until my teens. I received The White Album as a reward for getting chickenpox in 1989. I got Revolver last - and it's my favourite! When I met Brent, we discovered that we followed the same pattern of Beatle-album-collecting, at about the same time. It was a sign.

Bonus random fact number eight: I never tag people when I'm told to. Suck it, tag-rule-makers!

2007-05-15T16:45:00.001+12:00

Yesterday, after work, I got on the free city circuit bus, and a woman started singing Dave Dobbyn's 'You Oughta Be in Love', and a person was filming her from the opposite seat with a wee camera. I don't know, guerrilla art installation? Music video? But here's the weird part: everyone was initially kind of embarrassed, and then after about thirty seconds, the whole bus started singing along. Including me!

2007-05-02T14:05:00.001+12:00

So, Marika tagged me. And for once, I will respond! (Trip to Europe: awesome. More later.)

FOODOLOGY

Q. What is your salad dressing of choice?
A. Balsamic vinaigrette. If I'm feeling creamy, ranch.

Q. What is your favorite fast food restaurant?
A. I assume you mean a chain? Given NZ's limitations in this area, I'm going with Burger Fuel.

Q. What is your favorite sit-down restaurant?
A. Cheap: that little Malaysian place in New Lynn. Less cheap: Bouchon Creperie in Kingsland.

Q. On average, what size tip do you leave at a restaurant?
A. None! Hahahahaha! For we pay our waitstaff a living wage! (Actually, I'll round up the bill sometimes, as a bonus. In the US, I usually went with 20%. It's easy to work out and you don't look like an asshole.)

Q. What food could you eat every day for two weeks and not get sick off of?
A. There are quite a lot of these, I think. But I'll go with toast and Vegemite. Or toast and jam.

Q. What is your favorite type of gum?
A. I feel like gum is a have. It inspires your stomach to get all hungry, but you never get the payoff. And your jaw hurts. And the flavour disappears too damn fast. Given all that, Brent usually uses this stuff called 'Extra Professional' (don't ask me what's 'professional' about it), and that's what I have if I'm going to have gum.

TECHNOLOGY

Q. What is your wallpaper on your computer?
A. At work, it's a 1981 Robin Morrison photograph of the sadly defunct Paua Shell House in Bluff (an erstwhile wonder of the folk-art world). At home: a dumb picture of my dog.

Q. How many televisions are in your house?
A. Three. Only one has Sky. And one of the minor TVs is just to play video games on.

BIOLOGY

Q. What's your best feature?
A. Ack. Next!

Q. Have you ever had anything removed from your body?
A. Blood plasma. Teeth. Oh no, wait, none of the teeth were forcibly extracted.

Q. Which of your five senses do you think is keenest?
A. Any but sight. I am a four-eyes.

Q. When was the last time you had a cavity?
A. The last time I went to the dentist, two years ago. I am not the greatest cavity-withstander. I probably have nine fillings.

Q. What is the heaviest item you lifted last?
A. Either a box of donated books about Latin American history, or a suitcase from the Europe trip. That bag of Johnny Walker whisky for my mother was pretty heavy, too...

Q. Have you ever been knocked unconscious?
A. I fainted once. Those trilling birds circling your head aren't just in cartoons.

BULLSHITOLOGY

Q. If it were possible, would you want to know the day you were going to die?
A. No! Wow, that would suck.

Q. Is love for real?
A. Duh.

Q. If you could change your first name, what would you change it to?
A. I wouldn't change my name. My name kicks ass.

Q. What color do you think looks best on you?
A. As a wee kid, my mother consistently dressed me in blue and/or brown. (Yes, it was the seventies.)

Q. Have you ever swallowed a non-food item by mistake?
A. I have swallowed several bugs in my lifetime. Are they a non-food item?

Q. Have you ever saved someone's life?
A. No.

Q. Has someone ever saved yours?
A. Oh! Once when I was little I fell into the neighbour's pool. He got me out pretty fast, though.

DAREOLOGY

Q. Would you walk naked for a half mile down a public street for $100,000?
A. US dollars? Just call me Lady Godiva.

Q. Would you kiss a member of the same sex for $100?
A. I've done it for free. Sure.

Q. Would you allow one of your little fingers to be cut off for $200,000?
A. My *little* finger? US dollars? Maybe, depending on painkiller availability and reconstructive surgery options. I mean, that would totally crush my mortgage into submission, and I could then become a lady of leisure (see below).

Q. Would you never blog again for $50,000?
A. There's always Livejournal, isn't there?

Q. Would you pose nude in a magazine for $250,000?
A. No. That's way too big an audience.

Q. Would you drink an entire bottle of hot sauce for $1,000?
A. Probably not. I may be cheap, but I'm not that cheap.

Q. Would you, without fear of punishment, take a human life for $1,000,000?
A. Oh dear. No, I probably couldn't go through with that. Even if it was Hitler.

Q. Would you give up watching television for a year for $25,000?
A. Not an option. Do you *know* me?

Q. Give up MySpace forever for $30,000?
A. I hate MySpace. I just find it confusing. I am old. Yes, in other words.

DUMBOLOGY

Q: What is in your left pocket?
A. Nada.

Q: Is Napoleon Dynamite actually a good movie?
A. No! I'm so glad you asked that. It's funny in parts, but you never invest in the characters enough, and the 'laughing at quirky nerds in suburbia' trope is getting old. The opening credits are the best part. Rushmore mines the same territory but is about one hundred billion times better.

Q: Do you have hardwood or carpet in your house?
A. Oooh, both. Walls are Scandinavian-wash wood, floor is carpet. Did I just blow your mind?

Q: Do you sit or stand in the shower?
A. Stand. Is there a seat in your shower or something?

Q: Could you live with roommates?
A. Nay. I have a very high need for home to equal personal sanctuary.

Q: How many pairs of flip-flops do you own?
A. Two. I only wear one, though.

Q: Last time you had a run-in with the cops?
A. Define 'run-in'. I reported a stolen bag...

Q: What do you want to be when you grow up?

A lady of leisure.

LASTOLOGY

Q: Friend you talked to?
A. On the computer? Lawrence. Or Rachael. In person? Danni and Gary, weirdly enough.

Q: Last person you called?
A. My mother.

RANDOMOLOGY

Q: First place you went this morning?
A. Work.

Q: What can you not wait to do?
A. Get paid so I don't have to keep eating ramen noodles.

Q: What's the last movie you saw?
A. Something on the plane. Notes on a Scandal. Or Borat.

Q: Are you a friendly person?
A. Yes! Although I might be less eager-puppy friendly than I used to be, in general. Is this maturity or just fatigue?

2007-03-23T09:38:00.000+12:00

Maybe it's my privileged 90s alternative concert upbringing, but until last night I don't think I had ever seen a girl on someone's shoulders flash her tits at an 'I love you'-mouthing lead singer. And it's unlikely that I'll ever see it again at the same show as a full-fledged 80s-California-punk moshpit. The weird and wonderful world of the Eagles of Death Metal, ladies and gentlemen!

Brent calls them the ultimate chicken-walking band, and he is not wrong. That show was all kinds of fun. I think I might love that skeezy truck-stop gay-biker faux-fey-southern lead singer, and all he stands for.

2007-02-10T09:04:00.000+13:00

Ahem. Hi. I just wanted to say that I am hugely thrilled by those low-cost laptops Google is organising for developing countries, because... you can power them with a treadle! Like an old-school sewing machine! How awesome is that? I want one.

2006-11-06T16:54:00.000+13:00

Oh, that was easy! (I wonder why I have a mental block about these things... it's not a direct 'save as' link, though - you do have to click through to the site briefly if you're desperate to hear some of my awesome teenage taste.)

I forgot to say earlier: Lawrence specified songs you liked at the time, not songs you discovered years later. This makes everyone's list a little less cool and a little more truthful! So I might as well be chronological and start with 1990, a year lost so far in the mists of time that even my horrible perm is now invisible... thank god. I was fifteen.

Dub Be Good To Me - Beats International

You have to hand it to Norman Cook here: it's an early sort-of mashup! The Clash with the SOS Band, I believe. Of course, this is with the benefit of a 'series of tubes' and years of music-nerd-dom behind me. At the time I had no idea what made up the constituent parts, and I just thought that this was, erm, 'jam hot'. Luckily, I still do. I've heard this song 20 times over the last few days and I completely love it. So what does 'Tank fly boss walk jam nitty gritty' mean anyway? And what's up with the awesome humming-dude breakdown? How on earth did anyone think of doing that?

2006-11-06T16:48:00.000+13:00

Miraculously, I have managed to whittle down my list of songs into a top 40 of the 90s: my favourite songs from that decade. The last few rejections were a total killer, and I was pretty surprised that some of my long-term artistic favourites didn't make the cut at all - Beck, for example, was pipped at the post, and one of my favourite albums ever, The Sundays' Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, was nowhere to be seen. The rules of the game involved no double-ups on artists (this removed a Massive Attack song in a pretty soul-crushing maneuvre late in the day, due to Tricky's appearance elsewhere on the list), and the need for all the songs to have been singles (although I think a few of these don't quite follow that rule to the letter). Unlike Lawrence, I am physically incapable of ranking these songs, so they're going to have to be 'in no particular order'.

If I can find some nice website to host my files, I may actually get all mp3-blog on your asses. Watch this space for the list to appear, slowly but surely...

2006-11-02T20:16:00.000+13:00

Today, a man came into the library and asked me to find him 'the latest book' on quantum physics. I found him one, but it came out in 2002. He then asked me to go into the future - 2010, to be precise - to get him one. 'They exist, you know!' he said, completely seriously. 'We just have to go and get them!'

I am afraid I failed to provide 'excellent customer service' in this particular instance, as I was unable to travel to another dimension. I feel like such a failure.

2006-10-16T23:14:00.000+13:00

The Goodnight Kiwi

When I was a kid, staying up long enough to see the Goodnight Kiwi (which signalled the end of broadcasting for the night, Americans) was a sign of true decadence. The sound of this little theme tune is like someone gently massaging a nostalgia lobe. I even feel sleepy when I hear it.

(I also love that there's a tiny amount of completely unexpected NZ-retro stuff on YouTube.)

2006-10-16T23:04:00.000+13:00

OK, I think I have to take back my happy pronouncements about the 90s Top Forty. This project is grinding me down into a fine powder of stress. The song list hovers around 100, and every time I drag a file into the supportively named 'rejects' folder, another song rises like a phoenix to take its place. I have also forced myself to a 'one song per artist' limit, which allows for more variety, but is basically the most frustrating thing ever. One Blur song? I mean, c'mon! Curse you, Lawrence! :)

2006-10-10T09:38:00.000+13:00

I love historical photos. I love dogs. Finally, an exhibit which brings together these two things! Scope out these terrific photo albums of people and their little furry pals. Warms the heart, it does.

2006-09-29T13:33:00.000+12:00

Oh my dear sweet lord. There is a Tim Gunn bobblehead. 'Make it work!'

2006-09-27T10:10:00.000+12:00

Lawrence made me a 'top 40 of the 90s' CD compilation. This idea grew from an incensed conversation he had with a friend after C4 did a 'top 40 of the 90s' countdown show (which was, apparently, quite crap). I have been listening to these CDs over the past few days, and have discovered a few things:

a) the 90s ruled

b) I apparently didn't hear half of the great music being released during that decade

c) my 90s top 40 would be almost completely different from Lawrence's, and yet it would still kick ass

So yay!

2006-09-22T11:52:00.000+12:00

So the distribution workers get a national collective agreement in all but name, and pay parity between the three worksites. It was nice of the NDU to let Progressive spin this as though they won because there is no national collective agreement, when in real terms the bullying Progressive lost their battle to divide and conquer.

This industrial dispute has given me a tiny smidgen of hope that old-school union movements didn't completely die in the 1990s. For some time I've been worried that I'm some kind of nostalgic throwback, mentally chanting my 'power to the people' stuff while everyone else joined a libertarian party or something. I suppose it helped that Progressive is Australian-owned - there's nothing like a bit of 'we are the underdog!' nationalism to bring a community together. But I'm pleased that our country, recently labelled as one of the most business-friendly in the world by the OECD, still has some of that egalitarian worker-supporting spirit to share around. I think the workers support campaign raised over $200,000 in four weeks, in a country of four million people. That's pretty cool.

2006-09-15T16:14:00.000+12:00

Today is the 90th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme. I learned this morning that it killed more New Zealanders than Gallipoli did - one in every seven men. The other day my mother told me a story I'd never heard about my great-grandfather George, who was at Gallipoli. He was a medic, and one of his jobs was to collect the ID tags from the corpses lying around. When he came home to Invercargill, a pretty small town, he saw a regular classified advertisement in the newspaper from some local parents, asking returned soldiers for any information about their son, who was missing. George remembered that the son they were looking for was (of course) one of the corpses from which he had collected ID tags.

That's sad and horrible, but the kicker to the story is that George could never screw up the courage to tell those parents that their son was dead. He kept thinking he should get around to it, and he never did, and finally one day they stopped advertising in the paper, so they probably never found out for sure. And my great-grandfather felt guilty about his inaction for years and years, until he died in 1995 at the age of 101.

2006-09-14T16:14:00.000+12:00

There are some cool photos of of the picket lines and empty supermarket shelves at aucklandsburning. And the dispute already has its own Wikipedia entry.

2006-09-14T08:34:00.000+12:00

I don't care what you all think: Rick Springfield's 'Jessie's Girl' is a bitchin' song.

2006-09-13T15:18:00.000+12:00

Russell Brown linked to this - the Daily Show's first segment after the September 11 attacks. It's funny, because I don't have a particularly good memory for things, particularly during stressful periods, but I remember this Stewart monologue vividly. Some of the stuff about liberty seems sort of hollow and ironic now - and perhaps it should have then, too. But I remember being comforted by it. In fact, I know Brent and I were waiting for the Daily Show to come on to give us some perspective or something: it was a very confusing and scary time to live in the US (although perhaps not as confusing and scary as it is now!).

I feel like this monologue lifted Stewart from a satirist to... I don't know what. Someone great. I do truly admire and like him, which is a bizarre thing to say about a TV host on a news parody show on Comedy Central. Here's to you, Jon.

2006-09-09T12:48:00.000+12:00

Aha - it all becomes clear. Woolworths Australia, who own Progressive, have a management exchange programme with Wal-Mart. That damn company really *is* the root of all evil!

2006-09-08T15:50:00.000+12:00

Here's to the locked out members of the NDU. Two weeks and counting without any pay. Progressive Enterprises: you are a bunch of aggressive wannabe 19th-century industrialist arseholes and I hope that billion dollar profit chokes you. Solidarity! I am donating my last ten dollars this pay period to the cause.

(Selfishly, I really hope Progressive sees the light soon and gives their workers a fair deal, because they're the only supermarket chain that does delivery. Am I going to have to boycott them and go back to getting my own groceries every week? The horror!)

2006-09-01T14:45:00.000+12:00

I can't get over this. Last night, I watched an episode of a television series I love. In one key scene, although it was never spelled out explicitly, two of the characters were clearly high on ecstasy. OK, sure, you say, no big deal, it's been done before... but on *Coronation Street*? That near-fifty-year bastion of TV1? The most popular show with retired folk apart from the nightly news?

Look, the last time anyone took E on Coronation Street, it was Tracy Barlow in 1994, and she had renal failure and had to have a kidney transplanted from her very young stepdad (who later died tragically as the result of a kidney-affecting racist beating, I believe). Message: E is a bad, scary drug destroying our yoof!

Now the message appears to be 'we are very happy for you to get loved-up on telly, but don't confess to your boyfriend that you kissed his boss while high, because it's never as good an idea as it seems, even if you think it's all going to work out well because your judgement is impaired by MDMA'.

Hee.

2006-08-31T15:50:00.000+12:00

Righto, back to inane bullshit. You know, I thought I was well over the 'bizarre juxtaposition surprise syndrome' that the onset of the lengthy computer/mp3 player random music playlist has given us. I'll listen to the wildest fluctuations in musical style over the course of a day without batting an eye. But I think I just outdid myself: The Minutemen's 'Themselves' followed by Dolly Parton's 'Heartbreaker'. Even I couldn't avoid noting how weird that was.

Oh, and while I'm here, the most ridiculously coincidental Creative Zen moment of the last month was The Beatles' 'Rain', followed by Missy Elliott's 'The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)', (then something else we'll ignore for the purposes of this anecdote), and Ann Peebles' 'Can't Stand the Rain'. Wacky.

2006-08-29T16:46:00.000+12:00

I usually talk about inane bullshit here. Mainly because I don't have enough time to devote myself to lengthy discussions of things. And because I am, as we know, a fundamentally trivial person. But I want to mark the first anniversary of Katrina somehow.

Standard disclaimers: of course there have been worse natural disasters in my lifetime, by several orders of magnitude. (The Boxing Day Tsunami is almost unimaginably bad.) There are also scores of other historical examples of negligence, and contempt, and scorn, and racism, and inhumanity I could list right now. But - just for me, and I'm not saying it should be that way for everybody else - Katrina and its aftermath are so heartbreakingly horrible that even thinking about it makes me all teary-eyed. Which can get a bit embarrassing at work.

Last night, we watched the opening three minute montage of Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke, set to Louis Armstrong's version of 'Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans'. It was too late to watch any more because we had to go to bed. Besides, both of us were probably going to cry. I am dreading watching all four hours, but I know I must.

It's not like I ever lived in New Orleans: I was in Baton Rouge for several months, and I visited it a few times for Mardi Gras and Halloween. I spent a few weeks in Bridge City with my father, drinking coffee in his local cafe and going to his local dancehall. I explored the Quarter, went to the record shops and restaurants and antique stores and stupid tourist shops. Brent and I spent a great New Year's Eve 1999 there, and did a walking tour that encompassed everything from nunneries to slave-holding pens to the film sets for King Creole. We saw Bob Dylan there in early 1999, and ate great hamburgers at a place with a waitress that looked almost exactly like Jimmy Page (friend Gary was not sober enough to keep this discovery to himself, unfortunately). My father and some siblings live(d) there, but we are not close; my closest US family members live in tiny Cajun Simmesport, three hours' drive away in Avoyelles Parish. I'm no New Orleanian by any stretch of the imagination, and I'm sure I never went near the Lower Ninth Ward.

But New Orleans was a beloved city even by those with no real ties to it. A significant number of New Zealand's middle class subculture of obsessive travellers can talk about Cafe du Monde and Preservation Hall, and the food, and the music, and the buildings, and the Mississippi River, and the Spanish moss, and the Garden District. It was different and beautiful and its music and culture were important to the west in general, not just the USA.

Most of the people who made New Orleans special and important didn't live in the French Quarter. A lot of them lived in shotgun houses in poor neighbourhoods. A lot of them were black. To watch those people on the news last year, stranded and ignored and desperate while every authority figure utterly failed them, was something that put the final... kybosh, if you like, on my feelings that the US can fix itself, can dig itself out of its hole of fear and confusion and inequity and despair.

What continues to depress me a year later - and perhaps this is a function of the high proportion of libertarian dickheads on the internet - is the way in which so many people on the web blame New Orleanians themselves, as if they shouldn't have lived in their own hometown. And the other ridiculous idea bandied about is that the job of fixing New Orleans is so huge that the US government can't do it. The richest country in the world, which is spending billions and billions of dollars on a failed war, can't step in and save one of its own richest cultural and historical centres? Can't fix the levee system? Can't overrule silly old Nagin? Are you fucking kidding me?

No, the real reason that 60% of New Orleans still doesn't have power, and that the federal government has backed out of a gazillion dollars worth of aid, and that no aid even arrived until May this year, and that there are still little old ladies living in gutted cypress shacks in deserted neighbourhoods, and that most people are rebuilding their own houses without knowing whether they'll survive the next big storm, is that if you're poor and black, no one at the top of the totem pole gives a good goddamn. And I suppose they never have. In fact, they actively despise you. Your petty little desires to have your home and neighbourhood and friends and family back again, the way they were? Why, that's ridiculous! How dare you expect empathy and help?

So, now I live very far away, and despite reading about it extensively, I don't really know how bad it still is. Maybe New Orleans will do a Lazarus and it'll all work out in the end... but the way it made me feel last year to watch those people begging for help - that definitely hasn't gone away.

Here's a

for the (still, I believe, inaccurately tallied number of) people who died in the storm and its aftermath, while they waited for the help that didn't come in time.

2006-08-28T13:12:00.000+12:00

Wow. I'm making a habit of this 'quoted on Public Address' thing. Well done Brent! You give me my best material.

2006-08-25T18:00:00.000+12:00

So the FDA has finally approved the morning-after pill. Um, yay! Although frankly, I can't believe it's taken this long. Hey, US sisterhood, keep this on the downlow, but you could have just taken about six normal contraceptive pills. It's the same damn thing.

2006-08-12T15:29:00.000+12:00

Hey! Marika has a blog now, instead of a static-ish site! How very... *Web 2.0* of her!

2006-07-25T10:52:00.000+12:00

Like a lot of feminists - I suppose like a lot of people, generally! - I'm morbidly fascinated by sex tourism. This article in Harpers about chick-quests to the Ukraine is pretty fucking creepy. It's not the 'finding a woman through an agency' bit that's gross - I mean, anything that helps you to connect with someone, whatever - but the uneven power relationships inherent in the whole scenario that makes it so squicky. The women have no money and no prospects and are dolling themselves up in the hope of being taken to a 'land of opportunity'; the men are touring these places specifically *because* the women there are desperate to please. So this underlying inequality, which is gross in itself, is then overlaid - on the men's part, at least - with this bizarre combination of misogyny and romanticism which I think stems from an inability to understand one really basic concept: women are people too. So it's impossible to generalise about 'all American women' (bitches!) or 'all Ukrainian women' (horny 50s housewives!). You can't judge what someone will do in the future based entirely on them having a uterus. Approaching a relationship as a partnership seems so utterly foreign - more foreign than the Ukraine! - to these guys, because they're seeing women as some kind of alien species - a species they seem to love and hate in equal measure - who exist across a great gender divide which can never be truly breached. It's crazy as shit.

2006-07-07T13:00:00.000+12:00

Please check out Rach's latest lj entry. The first photo is great and makes me happy, but what I really love is the second photo, because a) it makes this a *themed movement* rather than just a random event and b) whoever did it dug deep into their shitty-song memory. They didn't just give us the obvious first reference again. Oh no. They 'Ice Ice Baby'ed it. I love them for that.

2006-06-28T11:49:00.000+12:00

Brent took this photo yesterday while driving home. He says this person stands at this bus stop in Te Atatu, holding up an LP of Aladdin Sane, *every single day* at about 3.30 - 4.00 pm. (I never see this in person because my bus comes past about an hour later.)

What is this? Art? Crazy fandom? Wackiness? Batshitinsanity? Any suggestions?

2006-06-23T14:52:00.000+12:00

In honour of the soon to be released Strangers With Candy movie (which I am probably going to have to see through legally dodgy means due to everything Sedaris-family-related being completely obscure down here) I give you one of my favourite Jerri Blank quotes from the TV series:

'Jerri, what does V-I-C-T-O-R-Y spell?'

'Fandango? Hobocamp? Ho...hobocamp!'

2006-06-23T11:07:00.000+12:00

A red-letter day: quoted by Russell Brown!

2006-06-22T15:48:00.000+12:00

I work with Shahzad, but I don't know him very well. Until today, I only knew him as a nattily dressed and wonderfully courteous person, who always has a smile and a greeting for everyone. I also knew that he is originally from Iran and that there was some difficulty associated with his past life there. Today, Public Address published an interview transcript with him. It is a truly amazing and moving story of how he came to New Zealand as a refugee, and it's well worth reading. (Particularly now, when people here and in the US seem to have such negative associations with immigrants and refugees.)

2006-06-22T14:02:00.000+12:00

When it comes to the dogs, I try to be responsible. I, with Brent's help, deflea them and worm them and wash them and walk them and take them to the vet regularly. I also, per the law, register them with the local city council, and today the yearly registration bill came in the mail. I haven't paid a separate one for Vinnie before, because when I adopted him from the pound last year the registration fee was included with the adoption/desexing fee, and I didn't know how it all broke down. But I am now very pleased to inform you all that there is a specific value attached to dog genitalia. If you wanted to buy a dog penis, it is worth the princely sum of $39.00, since Vinnie, a desexed male, costs $149.00 - $39.00 more than Ellie, a desexed female. Cry sexism! ('and let slip the dogs of war').

(Actually, I do kind of understand why the council does that. Male dogs *are* more likely to roam, pee and hump on things, and generally be a pain in the arse. But not so much with desexed male dogs. I mean, all they've got is that little... lipstick. The troublesome bollocks are out of the picture.)

2006-06-21T13:46:00.000+12:00

'It's a celebration, bitches.' Today, I paid every single bill online. I ordered my groceries for delivery this evening. I bought concert tickets and had them emailed to me. I ordered organic fruits and vegetables for delivery this afternoon. I ordered imported Mexican salsas and some habanero sauce from Christchurch. I also ordered two medicinal items from the chemist. All while sitting on my ass at work. The internet: is there anything it *can't* do?

2006-06-16T11:34:00.000+12:00

New Zealand's only real pay-TV service, Sky, introduced a kind of fake Tivo-thing called MySky six months ago. Yesterday, despite the hefty leasing/installation fee, we got it installed (that extra mortgage money came in handy!).

It is now officially the Best Thing Ever. Seriously. My love for it grows with every passing moment. I need never miss another episode of Coronation Street, or Jerry Springer, or that ultra-bitchy UK show about doing up houses and selling them on called Property Ladder, but which Brent and I call All Your Ideas About Everything Suck And Are Completely Wrong. Will I miss the next series of Shameless? No! Will I miss episodes of the Muppet Show due to it being on at the ungodly hour of 12.30am? No! Can I record all the day reruns of the Amazing Race that I missed? Yes! Last night, when we were watching Oprah's 20 Year Anniversary Special (or as we re-christened it, The Incredible Exploding Superego), we were able to *pause live TV just at the moment where Tom Cruise makes his special, horrifyingly scary Scientologist-face and jumps on the couch*! And then rewind it! And play it over and over again, in gales of hysterical laughter!

Sheer joy. I want to cradle the big phallic remote with rubberised grip in my arms and croon to it Lennon-esquely: 'oh my lover, for the first time in my life, myyyyyy eyes are wide open...'

2006-06-13T10:21:00.000+12:00

God. Next I'll be posting one of those 'hang in there!' kitty office posters. But my pets are cute, dammit! Cute!

2006-06-09T13:50:00.000+12:00

Look at this terrific page of old advertising images during the pre-drug-prohibition era. Give your child morphine when it's teething! You know you want to!

2006-05-30T09:04:00.000+12:00

I urge you to go and read bigblacksexcop's awesome smackdown of The Da Vinci Code, which deserves to be read by a wider audience. (Not that my blog is going to give anyone a wider audience, but anyway.)

2006-05-19T15:03:00.000+12:00

I didn't think YouTube could be any more awesome, and then I found the video for Michael Nesmith's 'Cruisin' (Lucy and Ramona and Sunset Sam)', a song I have been obsessed with since the age of seven. I had never seen this before five minutes ago (New Zealand in the early 80s had two TV channels and half an hour of music videos a week). That's twenty-five years without seeing Lucy and Ramona's 'blemish-free complexions' - on roller skates, no less! How have I survived?

2006-05-16T16:50:00.000+12:00

It's taken nine years, but someone has finally made my thesis worthwhile by referencing me in an academic journal. If you open the .pdf link to the article at the bottom of this page,

you will see me mentioned in footnotes 25 and 28!

Oh, the excitement.

2006-05-12T14:11:00.000+12:00

I just want to let you know about Siobhan's blog, as I am overwhelmed with guilt about forgetting its address, and have now found it again and linked it in my sidebar. She is very humourous, and a relatively new Wellingtonian. Wellington is all classy and cultural. We could do with more culture around here.

2006-05-10T14:09:00.000+12:00

Sherlock Licorish!

I met the man today and told him he has the best name ever. He seemed quite chuffed.

2006-05-04T11:04:00.000+12:00

Ellie's next film project is co-directing the new adaptation of The Lovely Bones. She has a personal interest in the subject.

2006-05-02T11:02:00.000+12:00

Sunshine Estigoy. A patron name for the ages!

2006-05-01T22:11:00.000+12:00

Stephen Colbert, I love you.

2006-04-28T11:52:00.000+12:00

In praise of the awfully unhip Don McGlashan.

As I was battling my way to work this morning, late, through sun and rain (at the same time), belting out whatever came on the unPod (I am a sing-alonger, always), the Muttonbirds' 'Giant Friend' popped up. You know what's delightful? How aggressively Don insists on singing in a Kiwi accent. Always. And you know it's a deliberate artistic decision, because the accent of a pop singer is always, by default, American. The Beatles changed all that for the UK, of course, but it's not as if every artist hailing from there uses their own provincial accent. And for us it's worse, because we have two layers of pop-culture colonialism, two layers of artifice to get through. Not only do we have to reject the default accent, we have to reject the British alternative (just listen to some NZ punk bands from the 70s, all glottal stops) too. It's really weird, and also liberating, to sing a song with all of our weird vowels. Dorky but true.

It's also liberating to not have Ice Cube's 'Put Your Ass Into It' come up on my Friday commute. I swear, 5000 songs on that machine, set to random, and every single Friday I'm there, driving and singing along with 'I've got dick for days, you've got ass for weeks!' I mean, I love that song, but what are the odds?

2006-04-26T13:32:00.000+12:00

Brent has been here nearly four years, long enough to use local idioms. Now when he wants to get the attention of his students or our pets, he shouts 'oi!'

It's cute.

2006-04-25T14:49:00.000+12:00

Oh, and happy Anzac Day, team. I made the appropriate biscuits for the day this morning. You can see why that recipe's lasted the best part of a century - it's fast and simple to make, sweet, high in protein, yummy, and keeps for ages. I imagine if I was a soldier in the trenches in World War I, an Anzac biscuit would be just the ticket. Here's to you blokes. Especially the poor bastards still over there. Never again.

2006-04-25T14:20:00.000+12:00

Today, I discovered that our house has the same square footage/metrage as the average American house in 1950 - 1001 square feet, or 93 square metres. The average American house is now over twice that size.

2006-03-23T13:28:00.000+12:00

Unfortunate patron name of the day: Wanting Wang.

2006-03-17T16:47:00.000+13:00

Dude. I forgot to mention two posts back that I also learned to drive! Probably the key achievement of the last two years...

2006-03-15T14:11:00.000+13:00

My three-sentence review of Godard's Le Mepris/Contempt, as given to Lawrence this morning:

'I hate you! You're not a real man! Here's my butt.'

(I'm sure it was meant to be telling us very meaningful things about the nature of film and society and America and Europe and Odysseus and Penelope and husbands and wives... lots of dichotomous pairs... and instead all I could think about was Brigitte Bardot's butt, which was practically its own character. My lord that was a nice ass.)

2006-03-13T10:13:00.000+13:00

It occurred to me the other day that over the last few years I have learned quite a lot of new things, without all that pesky PhDism hanging over my head. I have learned to knit. (Sort of. In fact, with autumn starting I should really finish the pending projects.) I have learned Maori (again, sort of. Rudimentarily. Enough so that Korero Mai on Maori TV is a not totally incomprehensible experience). I have taken two classes on editing, proofreading, InDesign, and general book layouty things like kerning and the appropriateness of serifed fonts. (Woo!) I have refined some of my cooking techniques to include Mexican foods (necessity, the mother of invention). And here's my latest project:

The ukulele!

I bought it for sixteen dollars on Trade Me. I am totally in love with my ukulele! And thanks to the wonderment of teh internets, I am able to learn chords for the most incongruous of songs!

2006-03-09T13:19:00.000+13:00

File this under things that everyone else noticed years ago because they are in the epicentre of popular culture and actually watched it when it first came out, but that I must mention now because I only just saw it on DVD and thought it was cool. (Give me a break, I'm in New Zealand.) In the episode of Arrested Development called 'The One Where They Build a House', they exactly re-create that incredible stunt Buster Keaton does in one of his movies, where the front wall of a house falls down on him and he ends up going through the front door. And which Bluth character took part in the re-created stunt? Why, Buster, of course.

2006-03-08T11:00:00.000+13:00

Patron name of the day: Xavier Mercedes Lillian Black.

2006-03-03T12:25:00.000+13:00

Hi, I'm Danielle. You may remember me from such blogs as Shake That Cola Drag and The Wee Hoosie. Some months ago, I was waiting for the council to sign off on our house. I was also pretty furious about the Katrina thing. It's now March. I'm still waiting for the council to sign off on our house, and I'm still pretty furious about the Katrina thing. So, yeah. What's up with you?

Note: the Arctic Monkeys are good, but they are not as good as everyone seems to think they are.
Note 2: the Flaming Lips documentary The Fearless Freaks is well worth watching.

2005-12-07T14:59:00.000+13:00

Enjoyable signage from recent months.

2005-12-07T14:51:00.000+13:00

*That's* what the US is doing wrong! They haven't made this whole enterprise *competitive* enough!

2005-12-07T14:50:00.000+13:00

OK, so the total ad is for your legs. Still, I felt kind of dirty with that on my bus stop...

2005-12-07T14:48:00.000+13:00

Bands playing in Onehunga in August. Yes, this year. No, not 1987.

2005-12-07T14:47:00.000+13:00

Funny if you're American. A lot of pitching and heaving on board...

2005-12-07T14:46:00.000+13:00

2005-12-07T14:42:00.000+13:00

I didn't know you could toilet-train them.

2005-12-02T22:03:00.000+13:00

One of the many Things I Can't Believe I Didn't Know: Mikey Havoc is engaged to Waverly from Shortland Street.

2005-11-23T11:28:00.000+13:00

I dug out Midnite Vultures yesterday. I always loved it (apparently more than most Beck fans), but I've decided that - once again - dude was way ahead of things. 'Hollywood Freaks', apart from the ridiculous lyrics, sounds just like one of those OutKast-doing-Prince songs...

As we used to yell just after we got this album: 'He my nuuuuuuuun!'

2005-11-23T09:44:00.000+13:00

Why John Cusack rules. From a joint interview in Salon with Harold Ramis:

Ramis: I went to college in '62, so everything exploded, the '60s happened when I was in college. I came out in '66 and went to San Francisco, and suddenly...

Cusack: Which was when I was born.

Ramis: So you missed San Francisco.

Cusack: Are you kidding me? I grew up in '80s America. That's why I have that Nietzschean blackness that I can access so well. I mean, you were in the Summer of Love and I was in a mall.

2005-11-21T16:21:00.000+13:00

I downloaded some highlights from Snoop's Rhythm & Gangsta the other day. Now, it may just be that it's easy to rhyme, but every song I got contained an exhortation to smoke Snoop's killer weed! Remember a few years back when Snoop said he'd given up on the smoke? Yeah, I never believed him then either.

It's that time again!

2005-11-08T14:48:00.000+13:00

First pohutukawa blossoms are in effect, yo!

2005-11-06T11:19:00.000+13:00

People like fireworks.

2005-11-06T11:06:00.000+13:00

The first annual Meat Challenge! Won, incidentally, by an extremely tiny female who ate most of her body weight in steak...

2005-11-06T11:03:00.000+13:00

I want YOU! To celebrate Guy Fawkes' Day.

2005-11-02T14:19:00.000+13:00

My mum is 60. Which freaks me out. Here she is on the day:

2005-10-30T09:47:00.000+13:00

Someone wrote this letter to Salon:

The recent media focus on Rosa Parks reminds me of the shock I experienced in college when I first learned that prior to her moment on the bus, Parks had been an activist with her local NAACP, and had attended the renowned Highlander School for civil rights leaders. Since then, I have felt there was something insidious about the portrayal of Parks as a simple seamstress who was too tired to move to the back of the bus - that as a child, I was denied a lesson about the power of political organizing, and about the intentionality and autonomy of a brave young civil rights leader, in favor of a quaint fable about a humble Negro who accidentally caused change to happen.

Yes. Yes. It was a planned action. People had been acting up on public transport in Montgomery at least since black soldiers returned from fighting in World War II and were forced to defer to white civilians. Parks had a history of activism. This wasn't some happy accident. Of course she was still very brave, and a wonderful symbol of the movement. But I couldn't agree more with that letter-writer.

(The fucking Neville Brothers. Shitty song *and* bad history.)

2005-10-28T09:43:00.000+13:00

When you think nothing can shock you any more... that nothing else can make you laugh in incredulous disbelief at its profound cheesiness... that nothing about western society has the power to make you blink twice... don't give up! Look at this:

The Holy Land Experience.

A Floridian theme park in which Christ's crucifixion and resurrection are reenacted every three hours. Make sure to stop by the Jerusalem Street Market for souvenirs, and the Oasis Palms Cafe for authentic middle eastern cuisine...

Just... wow.

2005-10-26T10:23:00.000+13:00

I don't know what 'Primary hard disk drive not found. Fixed optical drive not found. No bootable devices' means, but I'm willing to bet that it's really really not good at all. And that repetitive clicking thing? Funky, yes, but not encouraging.

Sigh. Live, laptop! Live!

2005-10-24T18:30:00.000+13:00

Maybe it's just been a long day of work (on Labour Day, no less!) and baseball tragedy, but for some reason this thread is amusing me no end.

Rage Against the Miami Sound Machine. Ween Latifah. Hee!

2005-10-23T11:55:00.000+13:00

So my laptop has gone a bit bung, and I had to reinstall Windows, and it's still giving me quite a high proportion of blue screens of death, and it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps I should back that thing up before I lose every photo I've taken for the last four years. I was burning a CD of all the photos and discovered, in one of those weird outer rim areas of the computer, an entire folder of our LA/San Diego trip in 2002 that I'd totally forgotten about!

It's me! Live! At the Hollywood Bowl!

2005-10-20T22:53:00.000+13:00

Don't get me wrong. Baseball is my favourite American sport. I watched the Ken Burns baseball series twice. In my ill-fated years of grad school, I wrote an essay which was partially about the role of ballparks in the growth of mass urban leisure in America in the early twentieth century. I have teared up more than once when watching a group of paunchy, goateed men jump up and down in unison on a pitchers' mound. Today, I was nauseous for three straight innings, and thrilled that my predictions about the Astros' rough-as-guts Dust Bowl Migrant pitcher, Roy Oswalt, came true. I'm happy for Biggio and Bagwell, who have played for the team for so many years with so little reward. I'm happy for Houston, who didn't have the luxury of a curse or the comfort of having any kind of mystique about their forty-five year losing streak. All of those things make me feel good.

But really, what I'm happiest about is that Brent doesn't have that awful, haunted gaze into the middle distance any more. That 'Houston Sports Fucked Me Again' stare. It's hard to live in a house with a Baseball Goth, and the past two days have been tough going. So thank you, Oswalt. I am very grateful.

2005-10-18T14:51:00.000+13:00

New Yorkers! You need meat pies!

2005-10-06T19:19:00.000+13:00

I'm 31.

The inevitable and particularly wondrous birthday handbag:

Come back, Danni! Come baaaaaaaack!