Scandal

I recently snapped this little vignette from a friend's daughter's Barbie Dream House.





If you can't quite make out the picture, there's Barbie passed out on the floor, surrounded by skewed and overturned furniture, and a naked man lying unconscious on top of her with his face planted in her chaise longue.


Frankly I'm a little worried about what sort of television my friend's daughter has been watching.

Cracked

My New Years Resolution for 2012 is to replace some of my fat with fit. It's just a difference of a single vowel, but is it easy? No, of course it isn't. If it were, we'd all look like the people who model expensive underwear, instead of like the people who ogle the people who model expensive underwear.


So I've been doing lots of exercise and going to the gym and trying to eat more restrainedly. But the healthy eating part is being thwarted by this:





These things are not beetroot chips. They are little pointy bits of beetroot-flavoured crack. I don't know their secret, but they've captured a perfect blend of sweet and salt. And although the ingredient list isn't terribly specific, they taste as if they've been fried in olive oil, adding a fruity undertone to the flavour. Whatever they've done it works, because I've been inhaling them like a man possessed... assuming that one can be possessed by a demonic force with a fierce taste for beetroot.


Fortunately they only come in 45g bags, which offers at least some portion control. But I still have to deal with the fact that they're organic, which makes me appear to be eating them for annoying hippie earth-nurturing reasons, rather than the fact that they taste of crunchy ecstacy.

Brained

Sorry I haven't posted much lately. To compensate, here is a demented girl with hammer singing a threatening song about Jews.





Or something like that. I don't speak Italian. Or Crazy.

Kitty

One of my Christmas gifts last year was a cat to call my own, ironically made out of the material used for most catscratchers. There's an element of cosmic vengeance to it.





It's actually a lovely piece of design, with each section slotting perfectly into the next and a solid sense of heft to the finished product. I have given it the traditional perching place of the domestic cat, and it waits by the front door to either welcome me home or attack my ankles with its cardboard claws... again, as is traditional for its ostensible species.

Quantified

Q: How awesome is the internet?


A: This awesome:





via regretsy.

Jolly

Merry Christmas to all from Blandwagon, Angry Johnny, the Evil Monkeys, Ursula Andress, Roger Corman, and everyone else here at Get On The Blandwagon!

Effington

Last Saturday I went to The Ellington to hear some jazz. If you haven't been to The Ellington... imagine a cool Melbourne jazz club, then run it through the "Perth" filter in Photoshop. It's still kinda cool, but only in relation to what's around it (most specifically the big "designer" McDonalds they just opened across the street).


The assiduous reader of this blog will already know my opinion of Perth jazz musicians: they're highly talented, but overindulged. The uncultivated audiences of this city are supposed to be pathetically grateful to be allowed to come into their presence, and to expect them to provide a well-planned, carefully arranged or, heaven forfend, entertaining show is the height of presumption. I only went to this particular show because I hadn't heard of the performers, so there was a chance that some of them might still be humble enough to care what the audience would enjoy hearing.





What I actually got was a mixed bag. Half of the time the performance was exactly what I wanted: a mixture of classics and original numbers, with the standards given fresh new treatments that reflected both the potency of the original and the elan of the musicians. The other half of the time, it was more of the usual Perth jazz crap - long, complicated, tedious, interchangeable solos of great technical merit but no beauty, each one utterly unrelated to the (much shorter) song that bookended it. Jazz pianist Benny Green can hammer out a version of 'Down By The Riverside' that stamps and swings in his signature style and showcases his vast talent... and never, for one second, stops being 'Down By The Riverside'. Give Tal Cohen the 74 year old standard 'Caravan', on the other hand, and within thirty seconds Juan Tizol's masterwork is but a distant memory, one to which you will only return several subjective hours later when the song concludes.


If only they could have seen the looks on the faces of the audience. When Saffron Sharp sang unexpected but well-designed harmonies with her backing singers, or her double bass player flicked out a complicated rhythm that was echoed back by the other instruments, we were captivated. By contrast, around the third or fourth minute of the seventh or eighth very long, freeform Carl Mackey sax solo, we were swirling ice around empty glasses, showing each other photos on our iPhones, fiddling with our jewellry, or just gazing blankly off into space.


Philistines, obviously, unworthy of the greatness before us.