Back from the dead

There's been a very interesting update to the Mrs Candy post of ~18 months ago. Unlike Elvis, it seems Mrs Candy really is alive and her wonderful site is as good as it ever was. Don't forget to read the comments- Mrs Candy commented on my blog! Starstruck :-D

VTAY & CJ meet in the real world

Gam and I met our first blog-person in real life today- CosmicJester! He was just as personable in real life as he is on his blog :)

Google image meme

I got tagged by EC for an unusual meme.

Here are the instructions:

A) Answer the questions below. Do a Google Image search with your answer, take a picture from the first page of results* and do it with minimal words of explanation.

B) Tag other people to do the same once you’ve finished answering every question.

1. The age you will be on your next birthday:



2. Your favourite place where you want to travel: (Katherine Gorge- dunno if I have a favourite, but I'd really like to go there)



3. Your favourite place: (Anywhere with Gam)



4. Your favourite food: (Truth is I don't have just one- Kiymali is just my newest favourite!)



5. Your favourite pet: (Self-explanatory, only it's obviously the wrong Feifei)



6. Your favourite colour combination: (Aqua/green)



7. Your favourite piece of clothing: (My green 'Tahiti' sarong... the next best thing to going naked)



8. Your favourite TV show:



9. First name of an important person in your life: (Gam)



10. The town in which you live: (So it's the island of St Lucia, not St Lucia, Brisbane... but I didn't think to type 'St Lucia, Brisbane'... and I can always dream)



11. Your first job: (Music theory teacher. I was a 14-year-old self-employed music theory teacher, not a sexy music theory teacher).



12. Your dream job: (Ok, I would not want to spend the rest of my life being a porn director... but if I had loads of money I would soooo do it just once).



13. A bad habit you have:



14. What you would like to do before you die: (I swear, what I want is really wholesome and has nothing to do with burlesque! I was surprised anything came up at all for what I typed)


I tag Gam, because I'm too lazy to tag anyone else.

Cory Bernardi- protecting Aussie marriage from teh gay

"My preoccupation with other peoples' love lives is ruining my relationship with my wife! It's all the fault of those damn homos!"

Cosmic Jester has a post up on Liberal fucktard and all-around rampaging bigot Cory Bernardi, who has recently made a name for himself for going beyond even the bounds of the Liberal party in terms of the anti-gay bigotry he espouses. Here's a quote that CJ pulled from one of Bernardi's speeches:

"We do not expect the RSL to broaden their membership to include bohemian peaceniks, we do not ask the Country Women's Association to include men and we do not ask the National Rugby League or the AFL to include women in their teams," Senator Bernardi said.

"Why is it then that we defy the same sort of logic when it comes to marriage?"

Fuck you, Cory Bernardi. Gam and I are married, but we didn't get married to join any club that would have you as a member. Marriage is about love, not bigotry, not about excluding other adults from enjoying the ability to publicly affirm their relationship. Our marriage isn't about other people- it's about us. I suppose we should all feel sorry for Bernardi if his entire married life is spent thinking about the kind of sex that same-sex couples have. As Cosmic Jester put it:

But Cory Bernardi has a sick and twisted sexual fetish really takes it toooo far. The sick degenerate fucker can only love his wife if gays and lesbians are continually discriminated against, pervert!

[...]

If you cant get a hard-on for your wife if heaven forbid gay couples were extended superannuation inheritance benefits then for fuck sake see someone about it, don't force your sick desires on an unwilling country. Get help now you disturbed individual.

If the small sampler of Bernardi's bigotry here hasn't been enough for you, go read the whole of CJ's post, and you're guaranteed to have a bad taste left in your mouth.

What's next for 'logic' in Bernardi's universe? "We do not expect public swimming pools to allow black children entry..." has thankfully been consigned to the dustbin of history. Hopefully this latest product in the same line of bigotry will meet the same fate.

I'm perfect, now take me seriously!

From the blurb for an article in the Style section of the New York Times:

Although women and men are creating blogs in roughly equal numbers, many women believe that they are not taken as seriously as their male counterparts.

The opening paragraph of the article was as follows:

FOR two days last week, many of the men’s bathrooms at the Westin St. Francis Hotel here were turned into women’s bathrooms. The stalls on the second floor were lined with note cards featuring nurturing messages like “You are perfect.” Nearby, women were being dusted with blush and eye shadow, or having the kinks in their necks massaged.

People like that are wondering why they're not taken seriously? Are you kidding me? I'd be embarrassed to be seen at a place like that.

UPDATE: Oh, it gets better. They convened a panel, titled Is Mommyblogging a Radical Act? For fuck's sake.

He's still got it!

"I mean really, I love her to death, but girlfriend had it so tight that she looked like her cock was about to burst out."- Tom Gaylord

Tom Gaylord has returned from the non-blogging wilderness and has set up house once again at Gay Sky Hooker. Outrageously NSFW of course, but this blog isn't safe for work either so you shouldn't even be reading this at work, should you? Hmmm?

And except for once or twice where I couldn't wait to get home before I had a rant about something, I totally practice what I preach. Mostly. Besides, I don't want to frighten my office-mates. I like them.

Meme: Why I blog

Tagged by Mikey. There are 3 rules, and I quote Mikey:

Rules are A) three reasons why I blog. B) Tag people. Actually there's another in between rule, which is to list the rule, which I have done anyway.

I've probably talked about 'why I blog' somewhere on here before, because I'm very good at self-indulgent musings. Whether or not those reasons will match up with what I write here I don't know, because there might be more than 3 reasons for why I blog, or I might just be inconsistent. Or just making shit up. Anyway, here goes:

1. If something bothers me I like to rant about it. Blogging is a much more satisfying way to rant about something that pisses you off because it connects you with other people who are pissed off by similar things, and you can have the satisfaction of ranty-solidarity. Besides, it gives you the satisfaction of being able to say "See!? I told you such and such was a bad idea".

2. I hope that one day Gam and I will have kids. Since I was always incompetent when it came to keeping a diary, I never had any hope of leaving our kids an interesting tome of memories to flick through. Somehow blogging is so much easier than keeping a diary, and I like keeping the blog as a repository of memories of things we've done and places we've been. Also it'll be a little piece of history in its own way.

3. Hmmm... That's about it, actually. There are only two reasons why I blog. Unless I think of something later that sounds really insightful...

I tag Patrick, because he hasn't updated his blog in ages, not even with photos from his Vietnam trip or food he has cooked lately... I'm hoping to coax a post out of him :)

Wenches galore: the Vintage Girly Magazine blog

Here's a great blog I found via Fleshbot today: Vintage Girly Magazines. Fully of classic men's mags and little clips of 'strippers'. The one of 'Sensational Sandra Storm in action!' is worth seeing just for the historical value in learning what used to constitute adult naughtiness in those days... I think- no, I'm positive- I've seen more adult-oriented material on Rage on a Saturday morning... As for 'Red-Headed Riot', I think you could quite safely take the kiddies to see it- it might have been 'stripping' once, but I think the trick was having so many clothes on to begin with made it seem so much naughtier when they got down to panties and a pastie-fied stocking bra (invented to work around the obscenity laws of the time). Classic, and accompanied by some great music!

Thankyou *sniff* Thankyou!

A couple of days before our wedding I got an email from Susan Prior, the editor of Online Opinion, saying my post 'Porn is no one religion' had been voted one of the Best Blogs for 2007... I never knew that 'Best Blogs' existed, nor that we had been nominated and that voting had been going on (or I totally would have voted for myself...). So now it's been posted (sans porny pictures, and with 'P*rn', not 'Porn' in the title!) on OLO and when I retrieved the ten day old email from Susan letting me know the post was up from my hotmail junk folder*, Gam and I went and had a look. We were pleased (and somewhat surprised) to see that the comments were largely very intelligent and well-informed- only one or two nutbag anti-porn types in there.

One person thought I should have saved my breath- generally something to keep in mind for anyone annoyed by the crap that appears in the opinion pages, and something I tell myself every time I see a Miranda Devine column, but the difference in this case was that my criticisms of Adele Horin's article didn't arise in the context of a long history of annoyance at stuff she'd written. In general, I find Horin's writing inoffensive and unremarkable at worst, and quite enjoyable at best. I also get a bit annoyed at the occasional war on porn that the media feels the need to wage to get some hits- everyone loves to click on the articles that have a whiff of sex about them: one has only to look at the top 5 articles on the home page of the SMH or The Australian to know that- without having any reasoned views either against or in favour of porn. Porn is too easy to bash, and criticisms of it, however baseless, are too readily accepted.

So thanks to whoever nominated the piece, and I hope everyone (or at least the people worth pleasing) enjoyed it... or at least enjoyed the pictures :)


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* I'm always forgetting to check my junkmail folder, so if anyone emails me and I rudely don't reply, it's probably because Hotmail has picked it up and stashed it in junkmail, meaning my email won't pick it up. My apologies if this has ever happened, and if there's anything anyone needs me to respond to in a hurry it wouldn't hurt to let me know via the comments that you've sent an email!

RIP, Mrs Candy (?)

Update 20/07/2009: I have been informed, a year and a half on, that Mrs Candy is in fact alive and well! I've been asked not to share the details of the information I received, which I won't, and I have also been asked to delete this post, which I also don't intend to do. However, let the record stand corrected.

===========================

I was inspired just now, after spotting a flurry of recent hits on my post 'Bush doesn't make for bad sex', to visit The Perfect Phallus- a blog started by a lady who called herself 'Mrs Candy', where men would submit detailed photos of their 'phallus' from different angles and Mrs Candy would post them on her blog, along with commentary.

There is now a note in the sidebar:

The Perfect Phallus is dedicated to the memory of its founder, Mrs. Candy, who lost her battle with ovarian cancer on December 28, 2007, and whose love for the aesthetic beauty of the Phallus was indefatigable and unmatched.

Noooo :( Mrs Candy was a very cool lady. May TPP live on. Apparently some of her real-life friends got together to keep the website alive. It just won't be the same without her, I'm sure.

Earliest childhood memory meme

Earliest childhood cat:
Jasmine, who was part of the family when I was born.
(Photographed by my Dad, maybe even before I was born).

Was tagged by Mikey for this. Firstly I'd like to get it out of the way that I'm now a meme dead-end, so the five tags are out, but I will tag Patrick, who always has something interesting to say.

Aside from that, here are the rules for anyone else who fancies having a go- consider yourself tagged:

The rules for this one are simple.

1. Describe your earliest memory where this memory is clear, where clear means you can depict at least three details.
2. Give an estimate of how old you were at this age.
3. Tag five other bloggers with this meme.

I've already decided it would be impossible to declare that a single memory that I'm able to dredge up at a particular time would be my earliest- I'm one of those people who has totally random memory flashes to a really early time, but can't necessarily recall them on demand. I'm going to be greedy and list 3 I can recall:

1. Being made to go to bed in what is now the front room of my Grandma's section of the house at 7pm because that was 'bedtime'. The location puts the memory at me being younger than 6 or 7. I was resentful because, being daylight saving, it was still light outside. I still hate daylight saving!


2. Watching TV. This puts the memory (memories) at me being around 2 or 3 years old, as the TV died when I was that age, and Mum and Dad decided not to replace it- we didn't have another until I was 11 or 12. I remember watching Playschool and thinking it was for babies. I remember watching Sesame Street and loving every minute of it. I remember watching Dr Who with my Dad and thinking it was really scary. I also remember some show at 6 o'clock that featured some guy with dark hair and thick-rimmed glasses. I also remember my Grandma turning on the TV for my brother and I while Mum was away (at tech doing her sewing course, I think), and there being a blue screen- Grandma explained there was a strike at the ABC (I had no idea what a strike was, mind, and didn't ask... for years I probably thought 'strike' was whenever the TV didn't work).



3. Lingering in front of a gumball machine while shopping with my parents (in the credit union plaza in Kempsey, I think). An older boy (maybe 7-10 years old, but he seemed huge) asked me if I wanted one. I don't remember whether I said yes or just nodded and put out my hand, but I wound up with a big gumball in my mouth and then went running after my parents, who had exited the plaza. They promptly lifted me up and made me spit out the gum into a bin - again I think I was around 3 years old, as my brother was in a stroller and I had to be lifted up to be able to spit the gum into the bin. I don't think I tasted bubblegum again for years!

4. Another early memory (prompted by Mikey's story about throwing a ball in the pool!)... somewhere at South West Rocks (maybe Horseshoe Bay)- I was about 2 and had my little floatie (one of those ring-shaped ones), swimming around in the shallow water, when I spotted a bunch of older kids with a large inner tube they were sitting on the edge of and floating up and down on the waves. They looked like they were having a ball, so I thought it would be a great idea to sit on the edge of my floatie. It promptly tipped me backwards and upside down with my head underwater and my legs in the air over the edge of the floatie! I remember opening my eyes and seeing under the water, then all sorts of splashing and women shouting...

Mum told me that Richard was a baby and she had hold of him and that I had floated away- when I tipped upside down she couldn't reach me and another woman had to save me from drowning. I don't remember the nearly drowning bit at all, but I do remember thinking as I tipped upside down that it wasn't always a good idea to copy older kids...

I told you they were nuts!

Family First just can't get enough of the crazies! It looks like they are set to become Australia's version of the Republican Party even though they have just a single senator. Of course they've hurriedly shuffled the disgraced Andrew Quah out the back door as soon as the news hit, but the party doth protest too much, methinks.

Gam remembers Andrew Quah from his days haunting Vibewire and says that he was "absolutely nuts", so I'm going to leave it up to him to post the pictures of the man dubbed 'Australia's smallest loser', ironically by a blogger who would probably agree with a lot that Andrew Quah had to say had he not whipped out his wang and waved it around on gay websites.

Nuts.

Represent!

Mikey has a hilarious post on Joe Hockey's foot in mouth episode where he admitted that the government is running a fear campaign. Mikey makes some great suggestions as to how John Howard might achieve a representative coalition government, seeing as Howard is so keen on pointing out the union speck in Labor's eye of late:

"But less than an hour later, Mr Hockey was much more forthcoming, saying that if Labor was to be representative of the community only 20 per cent of frontbenchers should be trade union members."

[...]

The number of Lawyers in Oz? Well according to this snapshot there's around 94,000 people employed in the legal system in Oz. And there's about I think 16 lawyers in the Coalition ministry. So 94,000 divided by 21,000,000 (which we know from the truly fucking awesome citizenship test is the approx pop of Oz) means 0.4% of the population are involved in the legal profession - which extrapolated against a cabinet of 30 results in this 16 being alas reduced to 0.13%. Which, as luck would have it would probably be the mass of a single human head - let's be fair and let them decide who it's going to be.

More here.

Enough of the 'unions are scary' bullshit.

Mikey has a good post up on why unions are important to Australian workers.

An oldie but a goodie

Last night one of our lovely readers, aka the Bevester's wife sent us some pictures of a banner they made out of her Mum's handmade kitchen curtins (!) for the 2005 anti-Workchoices IR rally, noting:

it was not long after attendance at this rally that we got mail sent out via unions saying 'we will provide banners for you - please don't bring your own - want to get the right message etc etc'

Which I thought was a bit odd given that the best thing about the first one was the sheer organic feeling of outrage at the new laws evidenced not only by the sheer number of people but their handmade signs. I'm all for the handmade signs- we even made a point of photographing them at the 2005 rally. Come to think of it, there were hardly any handmade signs at the 2006 rally.



She also sent a photo of some graffiti by a... disappointed (some might say disturbed, or even deranged) voter after John Howard's 2004 election victory.



These photos have probably already been posted on the Bevester's blog (and maybe Mikey's) but they're definitely a timely reminder of why hundreds of thousands of us rallied for rights at work over the last two years and what we're up against this election.

It's in the bag, baby! ...Or is it?

This post by comicstriphero pretty well sums up my own feelings about the impending federal election.

Despite all my fretful, paranoid self-chastisement upon each and every optimistic thought.

Despite the hours spent going back over old news articles and blog posts from October 2004, in an attempt to re-live the sting and despair.

Despite the analysis of the ‘softness’ of the current polls, which should really have brought me back down to earth.

I admit it.

I have gotten my hopes up.

"Yeah baby! This thing is in the bag! Nothing could possibly go wrong now!"

I guess it might seem like there is nothing wrong with this...

More here.

Animal meme

Got tagged by Magic Bellybutton. This one doesn't look like it requires as much brainpower as Mikey's latest tag (which I've conveniently ignored... sorry Mikey!) so I'll give it a whirl:


An interesting animal I had:

More gross than interesting, but one of my earliest memories is of sitting in the bedroom I shared with my baby brother with a container (probably the perspex 'grub box' my dad had made me for keeping insects etc in) full of those disgusting american house cockroaches. I had decided to keep them as pets. Mum quickly put a stop to that, and although I don't remember what she did with the cockroaches I can pretty well guess. My protest when she tried to take them away? "But I love all creatures!". Either I was a born hippy or the Disney 'Little Golden Book' of hymns that my Grandma gave me as a kid turned out to be a bad influence with its "All things bright and beautiful" nonsense... I still love most animals, but I have a bit of a phobia about those horrible cockroaches. My parents still rib me about the "But I love all creatures!" quote.


An interesting animal I ate:

The only 'interesting' animal (by Western standards) that I've ever eaten was kangaroo, in a kangaroo pie somewhere in Taree. I didn't really like the strong flavour. I realise eating kangaroo meat is a lot better for the environment but I haven't been able to bring myself to do it since, mainly because of the taste. Ok, and the fact they are terribly cute...




An interesting thing I did with or to an animal:

At the animal-sanctuary section of the Mokolodi game reserve in Botswana I encountered a cute little duiker who hit me up for food by dancing on its back legs (just like Feifei does), and I shared some of a non-spicy bhuja mix with it... I had to ignore the stern 'Do not feed the animals' sign because it was just too cute. Note: these little antelopes are the size of a medium-sized dog, but that doesn't mean that they're too small for fat Americans with big guns to shoot for fun, as a google image search will attest.




An interesting animal at the museum:

I still remember seeing a stool or a wastepaper basket made from an elephant's foot at the Australian Museum in 1990, when I was in grade 1. I wrote about it in class in a 'book', accompanied by an illustration. My parents still have the book. I think this qualifies as 'interesting' only because of the mindset it must take for some idiot to think that shooting an animal and making a wastepaper basket out of its foot is a good idea.


An interesting animal in its natural habitat:

I could probably go on all day here...

I loved seeing rock hyraxes in Botswana (here's a funny youtube video of one- knowing how timid rock hyraxes usually are and how vicious baboons could be it's pretty astonishing).

Not sure if the warthogs I met at the Gaborone game reserve count as being in a 'natural' habitat seeing as they'd become relatively acclimatised to humans, but feeding them rusks and muesli out of an ice cream container and seeing their cute bristly snouts (and smelling their stinky warthoggy smell) up close was extremely cool. Again, wasn't supposed to be feeding them, but at least I went to the effort of taking along healthy foods that time (they weren't impressed with my snow peas, however).



Going snorkelling around a bommie at Heron Island with my family at 16, my brother and I took it upon ourselves to dive down to the same depth as a dive group (probably 10 metres or so) where we saw a large green turtle. Having never seen a turtle up close before (or since), getting to see and touch it was pretty neat. We even have photos somewhere.



Note- I'm a tag dead-end now. Anthony used to be my tag bitch and he retired from blogging, so now I have no-one :(

fuizaibing

While searching for information on the Edamame restaurant in Hawken Village, St Lucia, we found the blog of a fellow uni student who had been there (noting that "Not many students here, probably because of the price"). His blog is pretty funny, albeit small, but definitely worth a look. I loved his lottery list above, and also pinched his 'motivational picture of the day' (below).

You can only die once.

George Bush's Jesus

Continuing the religious theme, White Jesus has appeared to surfercam.

It's only a matter of time before we see news footage of pilgrims lining up to kiss the shrine...

Wondering

Where Larry, aka Mr Watermelon Rant, might be. He hasn't posted for ages. Don't tell me he has a real life? Hope everything's ok, Larry!

While I'm at it I want to give a shout out to Anthony, who quit blogging some months back. Hope everything's going well for you, Anthony, wherever you are :)