Get On The Blandwagon!

Brained

2012-02-02T00:42:00.003+08:00

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

2012-01-09T16:43:00.003+08:00

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

2012-01-02T13:10:00.001+08:00

Q: How awesome is the internet?

A: This awesome:

via regretsy.

Jolly

2011-12-25T00:02:00.000+08:00

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

2011-12-20T15:25:00.004+08:00

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.

Giving

2011-12-19T14:42:00.000+08:00

In modern Australia most sensible people have chosen one of two options when it comes to Christmas presents. Either they do a Secret Santa thing and buy one present for one family member each, or over the years they estrange all difficult family members until they're left with just two or three who are happy with a jar of festive peanuts.

Being estranged from the sensible community myself, I still do things the old-fashioned way. Between family, friends and the girls in the office, I had twenty three presents to buy, steal, make or regift this year. Further complicating the issue is the fact that I'm by nature a careful and considerate gift giver. Even for people I don't particularly like, I can't just wander into Kmart and get the first thing that falls into my price range. I have to trek all over the city, visiting many stores, until I find something I think they'd appreciate.

One byproduct of this extensive and intensive shopping is that I tend to come across things I never would have seen otherwise, and yet realise I can't live without. I end up buying a present for myself half as often as I buy one for someone else.

So far this year I've acquired the following:

iPod transmitter, $55, JB HiFi - "While I'm getting a DVD for my nephew, I really should check out their iPod accessories since my old transmitter broke. Ooh, shiny!"

Coconut shell necklace, $10, Fremantle street vendor - "I need a coffee after buying a book for those frien... ooh, interesting!"

Hoodie, $66, online T-shirt market - "My friend will love this T-shirt. Hey, they do the same design in a hoodie! Awesome!"

Cufflinks, $30, hipster boutique - "Would my sister like this pendant? I don't kno... wait a second, those cufflinks are cool!"

Shirts, $4, Good Samaritan thrift shop - "I've finally got the perfect gift for Junior. What's next? Hey, this street has a Good Sammys!"

Ceramic cargo containers, $45, William Topp - "Should I get these for my friends? They might not "get" them. Still, they're very cool. In fact they're TOO cool for the likes of them. And they'd look great in my kitchen..."

Pop art melamine tray, $25, William Topp - "Well I'm back to look at those earings I noticed on my last visit, maybe for my other sister. Hmmm... on second thoughts they're a bit meh. And expensive. But hey, this tray is REALLY cool..."

My expenditure for those twenty three presents comes to just under $400. Stuff for me comes to $235. I'm doing well.

VII

2011-12-12T13:33:00.004+08:00

Nearly a week ago was the 7th blogiversary of Get on the Blandwagon!, and let's be honest, it hasn't been a good year for blogging. After I got back from Copenhagen in May, the wheels seem to have come off the Blandwagon... then rolled down the hill, gone over a cliff, and exploded into flames at the bottom, as Hollywood has taught us is customary in these matters.

Still, even when marriages have reached the stage of silent resentment and vindictive sniping, anniversaries are still observed. And so it is with blogs.

According to The Get On The Blandwagon! Modern Blogiversary Gifts List, the correct gift for the 7th Blogiversary is rare earth magnets. Perhaps to remind recalcitrant bloggers of the value of sticktoitiveness.

Santazilla

2011-12-09T23:22:00.004+08:00

I've been over at my friend Junior's house this evening, admiring his new Godzilla poster...

... and making it more Christmassy...

Joy

2011-12-05T11:34:00.007+08:00

With the arrival of December my thoughts have turned to Christmas... well, not so much "turned" as "been forced off the road by the mad careening Christmas juggernaut". I put out my usual nativity, hung garlands of tinsel around my exploitation movie posters and my backlit picture of Johnny Cash flipping the bird, and put Sufjan Stevens' loopy Christmas carols on high rotation.

But when it came to the Christmas Tree, I decided I needed to go in a new direction. My minimalist, post-modern "tree" has over the years become stretched and tired, evolving from a funky spiral into an overgrown pencil shaving.

So I left it in the back of the cupboard, went down to The Reject Shop, and bought myself a new tree for $30. It's wretched, as you'd expect from a $30 tree. But I managed to make it a bit more interesting.

I've seen a couple of inverted trees in magazines, so I thought I'd give it a try. It's not as easy as it looks - you wouldn't believe how reliant the standard fake Christmas Tree is on gravity to hold itself together.

First I had to drill holes in the sections of the trunk and screw them together. Then I had to screw cuphooks into the base and hang the tree using rubber tap washers from the hook in the ceiling.

Still, the final result is fun and inexpensive and a little bit transgressive. Plus Santa can fit a lot of presents under it.

Finalitea

2011-12-05T11:19:00.003+08:00

The final Serendipity Dinner attracted nine diners. I was at a work seminar all day, but as it finished at 3pm I actually had more preparation time than ever before. And, serendipitously, I needed it. The main course took THREE HOURS to prepare, although I had time to clean the kitchen and set the table while things were simmering. But it was still tight. As it was I had to make the entree, from scratch, in between building negronis and passing around blini for the assembled guests.

Fortunately the entree was an easy and surprisingly excellent white bean soup with garlic crostini. Main course was a gourmet red wine and chorizo Shepherd's Pie, topped with colcannon and served with a green salad. Dessert was two new homemade icecreams: creamy pistachio and cranberry, and basil with marscapone. The pistachio and cranberry was probably nicer, but the basil won praise simply for being unexpected. True, it had so much sugar that we all have diabetes now, but at least we weren't bored.

Honeyed

2011-11-20T23:20:00.003+08:00

The third Serendipity Dinner was the largest and, I think, the tastiest of the three so far. There were nine at the table, but it was actually the least stressful dinner, largely because my timing is better and I wasn't still up to my elbows in flour or chicken gizzards when the first guests arrived.

Entree was an easy pea and pesto soup, originally created by Nigella Lawson. Main course was a classic Beef Bourguignon with creamy mashed potatoes and garlic green beans, based on a recipe gleaned from the internet. Dessert was my own creation: a balsamic pear and raspberry cobbler with homemade honey and almond icecream.

Since the recipe for that last dish is mine, I'm happy to share it with the internet. Most recipes for similar icecreams require pfaffing about with egg yolks, but I said, "To hell with that!" and it still seemed to turn out okay. It's all a ploy of Big Egg.

Honey and Almond Icecream

1/4 cup honey
300ml cream
pinch of salt
500g no-fat greek yoghurt
80g slivered almonds.

Put almonds on a baking tray and toast in the oven until golden brown. Put honey, cream and salt in a saucepan and heat until honey dissolves into cream. Allow to cool. When the mixture is still quite warm but not hot, add the greek yoghurt and stir until well-combined. Pour mix into icecream machine and churn until slushy. Pour into container, stir in almonds then freeze.

Foody

2011-11-11T23:17:00.005+08:00

The second Serendipity Dinner for 2011 was even more successful than the first. There were eight of us, but there was so much food that we were all groaning with fullness by the end of it.

Entree was a salad of chorizo, broad beans, shaved pecorino and mint served on toasted sourdough. Main course was Greek Chicken: a baked chicken dish in a tomato, red onion, capsicum and garlic sauce, topped with black olives and fresh oregano and scattered with flat leaf parsley and fetta, served with a green salad and crusty bread. Dessert was individual apple puddings with baked apples and caramel sauce, served with butterscotch custard.

Recipes inevitably serve far more than they claim they will - I still have more than half of the Greek Chicken, and there are more than a dozen apple puddings left. I'll be eating nothing but leftovers until the next dinner.

Hook

2011-11-08T16:11:00.003+08:00

Most people want to give a certain impression when they decorate the entry halls of their homes. They wish to make a statement of their sophistication, good taste and wealth, with a view to impressing the neighbours and/or passing Jehovah's Witnesses.

Unfortunately this means that their entry halls tend to be a bit boring.

Happily my friend Junior, by contrast, just likes robots.

From left to right: Crush, Kill, Destroy, Hugs

And yes, it's all my fault: I bought them for him in Copenhagen.

Tasty

2011-11-05T12:49:00.003+08:00

As I've been doing for the last couple of years, I've devoted every Friday night in November to my Serendipity Dinners. It's based on a philosophy of abandoning control freakdom and passing the difficult mechanics of the dinner party into the hands of Fate. I have no control over which people come, or how many of those people, and I challenge myself to new dishes for every course.

And weirdly enough, it generally works.

The first dinner was last night, with a dinner for four - the first Serendipity Dinner is always the smallest. This was actually a plus, because I'd forgotten how much preparation needs to go into these things, and I only arrived home from work an hour before I was expecting the first guest.

We started with cocktails and canapes: gin & tonics and blinis with marscapone and lemon chutney.

Entree was grilled haloumi with lemon, garlic and chilli. I made the faux pas of taking a bite and blurting, "Man, this is fantastic!", which is pretty much the equivalent of calling out your own name during sex. But everyone else seemed to like it too.

Main course was a roast poussin recipe that I adapted for ease of preparation: chicken breasts slit into envelopes and stuffed with pistachios, cranberries and sour cherries, dusted with finely sliced chillis, ground coriander seeds and allspice, then roasted, and served with a green salad.

Dessert was "mangomisu", a mango-based reinterpretation of the classic tiramisu: layers of sponge fingers soaked in orange juice and vodka, slices of mango, and a whipped blend of cream, egg, sugar and marscapone. True to the paradigm of happy accidents that is fundamental to the Serendipity Dinners, the recipe produced far too much for a single mangomisu, so I am able to take a second one to lunch tomorrow and wow a completely new batch of people with my culinary brilliance.

Cruel

2011-10-27T16:25:00.003+08:00

Something popped into my inbox earlier today that set my teeth on edge. Exactly what that was I will get to in a moment, but first some background...

Subiaco is an inner city suburb which was, up until the late 1970s, a working class area. Then the 80s hit, the Yuppies arrived, Laura Ashley convinced them all that living in a turn-of-the-century workers' cottage was just too darling, and the area became rank with BMWs, sundried tomatoes and pastel polo shirts.

Since the 1980s things have simply gotten worse. Now it's Mercedes, Prada, lawyers, molecular gastronomy and enough carbon offsets to sink a yacht. The average home price in this city is $500,000, but in Subiaco it's sitting at just over $1.22 million.

So of course Subaico has something called the "Earthwise Community Centre", and of course it's hosting the 2011 Cruelty Free Festival:

The 2011 Cruelty Free Festival – Saturday, 5th November 2011 from 10am to 4pm

At the Earthwise Community Centre, 315 Bagot Road, Subiaco

This event celebrates cruelty-free living, social justice and sustainability. There will be information stalls, cruelty-free products, food, cooking demonstrations, family entertainment including activities for children, and live entertainment provided by local bands.

FREE ENTRY ~ pets welcome!

For more information, look up the “ Cruelty Free Festival WA ” page on facebook or go to website crueltyfreefestivalwa.org.au

Hope to see you there!

Many people think that I'm an unquestioning tool of the right wing hegemony, but this sort of rich, smug, overpriviliged eco-virtue makes me rage like Leon Trotsky at a royal garden party. You just know that the crowd is going to be full of doctor's wives with organic moisturisers, hybrid SUVs and Pomeranians that have better access to medical care than the average outer suburban child.

I hope they all get food poisoning from the cruelty free fair trade heritage variety wheat grass juice.

Although, to be fair, I guess this compensates for the 2011 Cruelty Festival held last Saturday in Girrawheen...

Reinvigorated

2011-10-24T11:54:00.008+08:00

After more than a decade of wear and tear, not to mention the flood of March last year that made it swell and pucker like a supermodel's lips after a bad collagen injection, the hardwood floor in my living room was dull, scuffed and discoloured.

However last week I finally got some professionals in to repair and sand and repolish. It meant moving out for three days, and dealing with varnish fumes when I did eventually get to move back in, but it was worth it.

Unfortunately the floor's liquid gleam has made everything else in that part of the house look dowdy and old-fashioned. So I spent the weekend weeding my way through ten years of accumulated art, occasional furniture, objects d'art and dustbunnies and paring everything back to a more modern, minimal look.

Well, minimal for me, anyway.

The only new things are the Mini cushions on the couch. But I've edited out a lot of useless little dustgatherers and moved some of my larger artworks into the room. As a result, it feels a lot calmer.

Quite unintentionally this has become a dark little area, featuring Angry Johnny, the Evil Monkeys, Bad Dog and a whole lotta bits of dead animals. I'm guessing the feng shui will be less than optimal.

Recycling

2011-10-23T14:51:00.005+08:00

Some years ago I bought a pastel drawing by a local artist at auction. I like the ethereal, insubstantial quality to the portrait, but the frame, clearly chosen by some genteel old lady in the 1980s, was so ugly that I kept it in the spare room.

But I recently bit the bullet and had it reframed. And, being a thrifty person, I had the framer install the Evil Monkeys picture from my lightbox into the old frame. I was then going to paint it, but it turns out that the silver in the frame echoes the gleaming plastic in the photograph, and it looks pretty cool. With art, context is everything.

Meanwhile the new frame for the portrait is taller, with a bigger, plain white mat and a simple wood frame. The wider mat prevents the frame from visually blocking the image - its white spaces bleed out into mat and better express its serene simplicity.

Bewdy

2011-10-16T22:26:00.003+08:00

Saturday saw me off on another rogaine, this one right smack dab in the middle of spring, and thus blessed with gentle weather and native orchids going berserk with beauty.

On the last rogaine I caused no end of consternation with my blistered feet and my utter lack of preparedness. This time I took care of the latter by learning from experience, and brought everything I knew or suspected I’d need. As for the former, I avoided it by two means. First, I wrapped my toes in so much fixomull that they resembled a foot fetishist’s remake of ‘The Mummy’. And second, I bought a new pair of rogaining shoes.

It’s surprisingly easy to buy good rogaining shoes. One simply walks into an adventurewear shop (the ones filled with folding hats, shirts that couldn’t get wet if you held them underwater and many-pocketed pants) and buys the ugliest shoes one can find. The ones that are the most lumpy and hideous are guaranteed to be perfect rogaining shoes. I’m working off the theory that rogainers, being huge fans of nature, don’t want to own anything that might compete with the attractiveness of the Australian bush. This theory would also explain why they all drive Subarus.

My team did a little better in this rogaine, placing in the top 43%, as opposed to being in the top 47% as we were last time. However our pleasure at doing better was tempered by our displeasure at picking up unwanted parasites. Even though I was wearing long pants, a thick shirt and shoes so abhorrent that any sensible creature should have fled at the sight of them, I still managed to collect three ticks. I was not happy about this.

Frankly if I wanted weird-looking bloodsuckers attached to my thigh, I’d go on a date with Lemora.

Win

2011-10-07T17:55:00.002+08:00

Today is my birthday. How do you think I've celebrated it? Was it:

a) with lunch at a smart restaurant?

b) a day off work just to relax and enjoy myself?

c) spending $50 on rare Ursula Andress movies from Amazon?

I think we all know the correct answer. I don't know whether to be pleased or appalled with myself.

Trio

2011-09-25T23:07:00.002+08:00

Three song that have been earworming me lately:

Shaft in Africa – Johnny Pate

If this doesn’t get you wriggling and grooving around the room, then I’m sorry, but you have no ass.

I Take To You – Lena Horne

It's so bright and jaunty that you can hear the 1930s optimism just bouncing out of it. Then Hitler had to come along and ruin everything. Stupid Hitler!

It Doesn’t Matter Any More – Eva Cassidy

The original Buddy Holly version was a stupid, disposable and bizarrely perky 1950s breakup song. But this version by Eva Cassidy, based on an interpretation by Linda Ronstadt, actually feels like a song of heartbreak and loss. You can feel the awful, resigned sadness drifting out of it.

Consolation

2011-09-19T10:58:00.001+08:00

I've had this old cabinet sitting in the corner of my kitchen for a while. It's ugly and too small for the space, so after looking around the shops and being unable to find anything I liked, I decided to make a console table to replace it.

My inspiration was a pile of old church pew end posts that I acquired from a friend.

I teamed them with some composite pine planks from the hardware store.

Like all good frankenfurniture, the design evolved as it progressed. The fact that the old pew posts are slightly irregular made getting everything square and level a nightmare. The screws that secure the battens holding up the top shelf simply would not screw into their guide holes, as the wood shifted fractionally from drilling to screwing. Nothing I did would persuade them, leaving me with blistered hands and a lot of stripped screwheads. But eventually it came together, and it'll be fine so long as no one, you know, touches it.

Ironically I deliberately made it exactly the right size to accomodate the giant vintage map of Italy that I found on the side of the road... then decided to put the map in the dining room instead. But it looks fine with a different piece of art.

Leak

2011-09-18T22:27:00.005+08:00

I was having some problems with my gutters overflowing. I don't know if my house has subsided or something, but the top of one section of guttering seems to be below the level of the downpipes. This means that whenever it rains, this section overflows instead of draining.

While on one level I understand gutters, they seem like an answer to a question that relatively few people have asked. Yes, they divert rainwater sluicing off the roof, which prevents erosion and allows rainwater harvesting. But they block easily, they cost a lot, and they're generally made of steel, which rusts. Most are designed so that they flood backwards rather than forwards, and if you have boxed eaves like mine, this means that they either flood the roofspace or leak through the cracks and pour down one or both sides of the windows.

When I noticed exactly this thing happening during a recent storm, I decided I'd had enough. So when it stopped raining I went outside with a ladder and my trusty drill and bored a dozen holes in the side of the guilty section.

Problem solved. True, gravel in the courtyard is being eroded, but hey, water is not being diverted into my living room. Call me crazy, but not having my hardwood floors damaged and my rugs sodden seems worth it. Me and my nutty priorities.

As an added bonus, when heavy rain strikes, I get a precisely spaced curtain of water outside the living room windows. It looks like a team of obsessive compulsive Roof Elves taking a synchronised whizz off the roof.

Now that's an Olympic event I'd like to see.

Widicuwous

2011-09-17T23:57:00.009+08:00

I’m running low on fodder for my on-going Festival of Bad Cinema, so when I was in the city recently I dropped by 78 Records and picked up ‘Savage Cinema’, a collection of twelve exploitation movies from the 60s and 70s. The fact that at least two of those twelve were featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000 gives you some idea of the impressive level of horribleness.

First out of the gates: 1976’s ‘Death Machines’

I really don’t like this proposed revamp of the Washington Monument…

Using methods never even slightly explained, an evil organisation led by Isaac Asimov (judging from the shadowy silhouette with sideburns the size of chipmunks) wrests control of the assassination market with a trio of bullet-proof, mind-controlled karate champions. One of their jobs - wiping out the teachers and students at a suburban karate school - results in whiny bartender and karate wannabe Frank Thomas losing a hand but gaining a thirst for revenge. His desire for vengeance is tempered by his love for Florence, a codependent nurse he meets at the hospital, but even so he knows that more will die unless he can stop the Death Machines.

However all of his moaning and erratically scripted dialogue with Florence just distracts attention from the true hero of ‘Death Machines’: Madame Lee, manager of the day-to-day operations of the assassination business, and the greatest female character in the history of bad cinema.

“Hewwo evewybody!”

She draws her eyebrows on an inch or so above where they should be. She sports a wig that looks as if she’s wearing an immaculately arranged cocker spaniel on her head. She has a speech impediment so pronounced (if you’ll excuse the pun) that she’s barely comprehensible, let alone effective. And given that she’s shown swilling wine in virtually all of her scenes, one can only suspect a serious drinking problem.

“Ah shiwaz, my one twue fwiend…”

But while beauty is skin deep, crazy goes right to the core. Madame Lee’s business model relies heavily on the “Kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out” school of project management. Want to expand your business? Throw someone off a skyscraper. Making a pitch to a prospective client? Decapitate his driver. Freshening the product line? Shoot your assassins in the head.

“I’ve been weading ‘The Seven Habits of Highwy Ineffective Cwiminals’…”

My personal philosophy is more along the lines of the old adage, “You can catch more flies with honey than you can with slaughtering them and putting their heads on tiny little pikes as a warning to others.” But maybe that’s just me.

I should add that while Madame Lee is the greatest female character in the history of bad cinema, she was not played by the greatest female actress – this was, thankfully, the sole performance of Mari Honjo’s career. If only the role had been given to Ursula Andress*, we could have averted the entire energy crisis of the 70s by powering the world on this movie’s awesomeness.

Sadly, and in a complete contradiction to the prevailing ethos of the 70s, Whiny Frank and Florence not only survive to the movie’s end, but vanquish Madame Lee and her henchman. Madame Lee dies as she lived: with enormous hair and a ridiculous look on her face.

“Tell my wine waiter… I wuv him...”

The Death Machines escape, however, and are shown fleeing the country via an unspecified airport.

Note that the Black Assassin has been cunningly disguised as your Year 11 English teacher.

This final image is frozen, to allow the thought of the Death Machines loose in the world to sear into the audience’s consciousnesses. And it stays frozen, with music playing over the top of it, for a total of sixty seven seconds. This was presumably intended to be the background for the closing credits, but said closing credits were not created, perhaps because everyone from the director to the assistant best boy refused to take any responsibility for this craptastic mess.

But I’ll leave this review reflecting on happier times, with Madame Lee captured in all her magnificent, incomprehensible glory. In this scene she’s either setting up a meeting with a local crime boss, or ordering some new bookcases from Ikea… it’s impossible to tell.

* As the astute reader already knows, I’m all for every character in every movie being played by Ursula Andress, from Willy Loman to Willy Wonka. What can I say; I dream of a better world.

Monkeying

2011-09-13T11:24:00.000+08:00

A few weeks ago I noticed that my Evil Monkeys lightbox was looking a bit faded, which is not surprising since it's just a photo printed on standard photographic paper with a bright flourescent light shining through it, and I've had it for around five years.

So I've been casting about for a new image to put in the lightbox. It occured to me that the poster of Johnny Cash I've had on my bedroom door for over a decade, which was torn and getting discoloured, could be scanned, cleaned up and given a new lease on life. So I took it into the office to do a high-resolution scan, got a friend with photoshopping skills to erase the tear, the fold lines and blu-tak discolouration, and paid the company that printed the Evil Monkeys to print the refreshed image.

However, when I opened the lightbox to remove the Evil Monkeys, I discovered that what I'd assumed was fading was in fact just a yellowing of the clear plastic cover. Underneath that, the actual photo was as clear and vivid as the day it was printed.

Dang it!

Oh well. I was ready for a change anyway. I swapped the yellowing cover with the one at the back, which was fine, and replaced the Evil Monkeys with the Angry Johnny. The lightbox is now looking crisp, sharp and ready to kick your ass.

Swampy

2011-09-12T22:58:00.001+08:00

This is actually a pretty good representation of what the inside of my head looks like.

Sweet

2011-08-22T21:36:00.004+08:00

And now, a musical interlude from the Annoying Hipster Orchestra!

Seriously, count the hipster cliches. There are at least thirteen, not counting the six pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon you just know is hidden behind that plant.

Trudge

2011-08-19T16:25:00.003+08:00

Last weekend I went on another rogaine. This was a serious, hardcore rogaine; a 24 hour marathon as opposed to the 6 hour sprint last April. I knew it would involve camping, which is to me what going to a Promise Keepers conference is to Christopher Hitchens, but even so I was looking forward to it.

I arrived a couple of hours before the rogaine was to commence, which for serious rogainers is the equivalent of snipping the blue wire just as the bomb’s timer counts down to 00:00:02. One is supposed to spend many hours poring over the map, closely examining the location of every control and creating intricate plans for reaching them in the least time and distance. Instead I glanced at the map, approved the rough plan that my teammates had devised, then set up my tent, ate some pretzels, had a brief reminder on how to use a compass, complained about the lack of mobile phone reception, and underwent the half-anticipated grilling on my total lack of preparedness.

Serious Rogaining Friend: Did you bring everything on the list?

Me: Er… probably not.

SRF: Did you bring a plate and a cup?

Me: No.

SRF: Eating utensils?

Me: No.

SRF: A camp chair?

Me: No.

SRF: Spare shoes?

Me: No.

SRF: What the hell did you bring?

Me: Let’s see… pretzels… electrical tape… and a bottle of whiskey. Ooh, and shot glasses!

SRF: You are beyond useless.

And so it was established that I am not a serious rogainer. If you’ve ever met a serious rogainer, you’ll immediately realise two things. One, they all own at least one Subaru Forester. And two, they dress as if they’re trying to give Scott Schuman a stroke. Luridly coloured water-, fire- and bullet-proof jackets, huge ugly shoes, and cargo pants that are so overengineered that they could appear on ‘Grand Designs’.

Naturally I was wearing my understated Zamberlan walking shoes, a nice polo shirt from The Gap and some frayed Blazer chinos: basically cotton and leather in tasteful earth tones. The only reason why the serious rogainers did not immediately pick up torches and pitchforks and attempt to drive me into an old mill was that I also had a long, thick, heavy duty vinyl poncho in the world’s least attractive shade of beige. I looked like some sort of boring but kinky fetish monk.

At midday precisely we were sent on our way, the serious rogainers shooting off like startled gazelles, and my team wandering out with a sedate but purposeful dignity.

It was a much nicer time of year for a rogaine than last time. Birds sang in the trees. Tiny native orchids bloomed underfoot. Young kangaroos bounded through the undergrowth in a blur of fur, legs and tail.

It took us four and a half hours to cover around 15kms and nine controls, before we stumbled back to camp for some food, rest, and the treatment of my inevitable blisters. We were exhausted, but it’s surprising how quickly one recovers, and within two hours we were ready to head out again.

Our second session involved a little night rogaining. When we began there was only a spatter of intermittent drizzle, but after half an hour a small storm front moved in and proceeded to enthusiastically dump rain. And then, naturally, we got lost. It turns out that when storm clouds are blocking the moonlight, and you only have weak LED headlamps, it’s pretty hard to navigate through the bush. However with a mixture of luck and cleverness we not only made our way back onto a recognisable path, but also managed to find the control we’d been searching for to begin with… only an hour and a half later than we’d expected. After that it was relatively smooth sailing, “sailing” being the operative word as the gravel roads had become babbling brooks.

Getting back to the camp three and a half hours later, soaked, tired and sore after walking around 11kms, we discovered that the tent I’d pitched wasn’t waterproof. Everything in it had been soaked. Fortunately a friend who is one of the organisers had realised this and rescued our stuff, hanging it in his own, waterproof annex and blasting it with a heater hooked up to his generator. Within an hour or two it was dry enough to use again. We pitched another, better tent and went to sleep.

As the wind batted at our tent during the night I realised that my original tent, still set up outside, was a) not pegged and b) no longer weighed down by our possessions. But it was cold, and past midnight, and I was too tired to care.

Sure enough, the next morning my tent was nowhere to be seen. I eventually found it a hundred metres down the road, still in one piece and structurally intact, wedged upside down between a tree and someone’s Mitsubishi Magna.

Unlike the proper rogainers, who had either been out rogaining all night or had burst out of camp at daybreak in order to hit as many controls as possible, my team rose late and ambled out with less than two and a half hours remaining. We found another three controls, covering around 6kms, then trudged back for more bacon and cake.

Oddly enough, as it turns out, we didn’t win. We came 62nd. But it was out of 133 teams, so it wasn’t that bad. We scored 860 points, a mere 3,500 points behind the team that came 1st. They, of course, were serious rogainers, who had run rather than walked, and foregone sleep in order to rogaine continuously for almost 24 hours. So, you know, your basic sick freaks.

Balls

2011-08-02T14:13:00.004+08:00

Late on Sunday evening I noticed that the police had blocked off a street around the corner from my house. It turns out that a person was attacked on that street for unknown reasons by four men... or at least that's what was reported by the ever-reliable ABC.

The article doesn't say whether the assailants threw the baseballs underarm or overarm.

And since the attack took place on a cul-de-sac called Whitby Court, the ABC helpfully included a map centred on the townsite of Whitby, more than fifty kilometres away.

Your tax dollars at work!

Fun

2011-07-15T15:04:00.003+08:00

Technology is awesome, but I’ve noticed that many technophiles tend to have a rather optimistic view of human nature. They’re the ones who assumed that radio was going to broadcast fine opera to the masses (rather than breakfast radio), that television was going to be an educational boon (rather than a mindless distraction) and that the internet was going to be dominated by the thrill of hot porn (rather than the inanity of Facebook).

This naivety continues today. As the rate of technological advancement accelerates, futurists like Ray Kurzweil make predictions like this:

"By the late 2020s, nanobots in our brain, that will get there noninvasively, through the capillaries, will create full-immersion virtual-reality environments from within the nervous system. So if you want to go into virtual reality the nanobots shut down the signals coming from your real senses and replace them with the signals that your brain would be receiving if you were actually in the virtual environment. So this will provide full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all of the senses."

Well yes, that might happen. But I immediately notice that Kurzweil’s sunny little technoworld assumes that no one in the future is a sociopathic jerk.

Let’s face it, if this prediction comes true and we all have VR nanobots in our brains, every SINGLE day thousands upon thousands of suckers (the same people who fall for email and phishing scams) will click on a bad link and have goodness only knows what downloaded directly into their brains.

Bear this is in mind, technophiles: if you think it's bad having to fix your mother's computer when she foolishly clicks on a file called cutekitties.exe, just wait until she's downloaded a nanobot virus that locks her brain into a virtual reality of torture porn.

Flippy

2011-06-28T16:05:00.001+08:00

On Saturday night I went to a 70s-theme party, and on the way there I made an interesting discovery regarding a possible reason why scooters were so huge in the 60s and then largely abandoned in the 70s.

I rode my scooter to the party, dressed in my finest vintage polyester shirt with a collar of typical 70s proportions. As I hit top speed, the collar started to frip back and forth in the wind, vibrating between my shoulders and my helmet with a sound like an outboard motor. The noise was huge, drowning out the sound of the scooter's motor, and perhaps it was my imagination but the scooter’s performance seemed a little worse than usual, as if I’d deployed a mini-parachute behind it. Which, in a manner of speaking, I had.

I arrived at the party with my ears ringing, and possessing a level of insight into the perils of extreme fashion that had previously eluded me.

Fettching

2011-06-20T20:53:00.004+08:00

And now, A Gallery of Weird Images Featuring Bobba Fett:

Homely

2011-05-25T21:05:00.000+08:00

On my final day in Copenhagen there was packing to do and transport to organise, so there was only a brief amount of time to run out into the city and revisit the most important place in Copenhagen:

Then it was off to the airport for the painfully long flight back to Australia. I was dreading it. Worst of all, the only way to fortify ourselves for the 24+ hour flight was with wretched American coffee.

The Admiral and I were both sad to leave the cool, stylish surroundings of Copenhagen. Even the airport is a bastion of designer minimalism, full of wood panelling and soaring glass walls. But we were both needed back home, me to return to my job, and him to warn people about traps.

The trip back was a lot more pleasant than the trip over, largely because I didn’t have anyone sitting next to me for the two longest legs, and I actually got a couple of hours of sleep between Amsterdam and Singapore.

It also helped that my final leg was with Singapore Airlines. One of their stewardesses leapt at the chance to demonstrate her bartending skills and made me a fine pre-dinner Singapore Sling. Then I had a reasonable little shiraz with dinner, and a fat glass of cognac after dinner. And I don’t really remember much after that.

I’ve got to fly with classy airlines more often.

Wrought

2011-05-23T20:07:00.008+08:00

Any design junkie visiting Copenhagen has to pay homage to the masters the craft by visiting the Kunstindustrimuseet, or, in English, the Danish Museum of Art and Design.

I’ve visited several museums on this trip, but the Kunstindustrimuseet was the first that grabbed me tight and made me want to linger. It’s arranged chronologically, beginning in the present then wending its way back through the centuries. Each era and design movement is evoked using spectacular examples of the style, whether it be a magnificent Art Nouveau cabinet or a sleek Bauhaus chair.

You may be thinking, “Oh, wow, a cupboard and a chair and a tapestry of mermaids feeding lemons to orcas. The fun never stops for Blanders, does it.” If so, you clearly don’t comprehend the beauty in the collision of engineering, physics and art that enabled these designs. It’s all about people seeing the creative possibilities of new technology, whether it be fibreglass, plywood or plastic.

Also you're an arseclown.

Of course no museum of Danish design would be complete without featuring the greatest use for plastic ever:

In fact I was so entranced that I didn’t even think to take photos of the Admiral. At least not until we hit the pub afterwards.

Civilisation

2011-05-22T19:46:00.000+08:00

After a week on a ship with an interior following the same design principles as the average drag queen, I decided to spend a couple of extra days in Copenhagen enjoying the pleasures of good design.

I started out in Copenhagen’s beautiful Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, a sculpture museum based around the collection of the son of the founder of Carlsberg Breweries. The lobby is a luxurious but typical piece of late Victorian architecture, with mosaic tiled floors, ornate brass stair newels and stained glass barrel skylights . However it opens into the museum’s central atrium, which is not typical at all.

It’s a Winter Garden filled with shrubs and trees, some nearly four storeys tall. There’s a pond filled with goldfish, and birds chitter in the trees. It’s dotted with classical sculptures and through the trees you glimpse other galleries filled with artworks.

The photos don’t capture the almost magical feeling of having a beautiful garden at the core of an art museum*. It feels utterly civilised.

It’s also very old-fashioned, harking back to the 18th and 19th centuries, when museums were all about luxuriating in the beauty of the past rather than learning improving lessons about Babylonian irrigation systems or the role of the maternal ideal in medieval religious painting. One gallery, filled with Roman statuary and mosaics, also boasted a grand piano and tall urns of flowers, suggesting that it doubled as a venue for elegant social functions.

While the museum has amassed a lovely collection of paintings and a formidable range of ancient artefacts, it’s primarily about the sculptures. Pieces by Rodin and Degas are complemented by 20th century Danish works and two thousands year old figures unearthed across Greece, Italy and Egypt. My favourite piece was probably the 1903 depiction of Perseus Slaying Medusa by Laurent-Honoré Marqueste, breathtaking in both its sense of emotional drama and in its physical delicacy, with each individual snake of Medusa’s hair flawlessly carved out of the marble.

Unfortunately I don’t have a picture of it. I was busy with other things.

*This photo from Wikipedia captures the sense of the garden better.

Rebounding

2011-05-21T00:14:00.003+08:00

All good things must come to an end. Similarly all garish, gaudy, endlessly-food-crammed things must come to an end too. And so it was that the MSC Orchestra made its stately way back into the port of Copenhagen, pausing only to blast its deafening, herald-of-the-apocalypse-loud horn at a tiny sailboat that came stupidly close to not getting out of its way. I’m pretty sure the Orchestra was in the right, but even if it wasn’t, I think that the natural rule of thumb is to always give way to a sixteen storey ocean-going skyscraper.

The Admiral and I bade goodbye to a couple of the crew with whom we’d been friendly, sobbed loudly at having to part with the buffet, and gave a gigantic meh to the rest of the passengers, then headed ashore. On the way back into central Copenhagen we thought it only proper to stop and see the Little Mermaid, Denmark’s most famous icon.

Zowie!

Actually that’s not the Little Mermaid. That’s the Big Mermaid, who doesn’t appear in any official tourist publications but is nevertheless an attraction. She’s carved out of granite rather than cast in bronze, but like her smaller sister she sits on the seafront and is admired by tourists. Or at least the male ones.

This is the Little Mermaid:

Or rather this is Admiral Ackbar, hogging the camera, as he has the entire trip. Not that you’re missing much: the Little Mermaid is under constant siege from several hundred Japanese tourists, dutifully snapping their obligatory pictures of her. Any photo of the Little Mermaid is really the Little Mermaid Plus Entourage.

Eventually the Admiral agreed to get out of the way, but not out of focus.

He’s quite a ham for someone made out of calamari.

St. Petersberg

2011-05-19T14:55:00.001+08:00

The cruise itinerary saved the largest and most intense port of call for last: St Petersberg, on the extreme eastern shore of the Baltic.

Russia is the only country visited by the liner that requires visas, and so the only way that the lazy, cheap and/or disorganised passenger could go ashore was as part of a formal excursion group. I chose the longest and most expensive option, which visited a couple of churches, a battleship, a market and, as the highlight, the Hermitage Museum.

The first church was the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, the resting place for the mortal remains of almost all of the tsars and tsarinas of Russian history. It’s not exactly a sombre or subtle interior, but then I guess that sums up the Russian royal family.

The second church was the Church on the Spilled Blood, built on the site of the murder of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Again, about as solemn and understated as an episode of 'Jackass'.

Then there was the battleship Aurora, which fired the blank shell that signalled the revolutionaries to commence the assault on the Winter Palace that began the October Revolution in 1917. And look how well all that turned out. Now, according to our tour guide, it’s more notable for being infested with pickpockets, and she refused to let us anywhere near it. I had to keep a close eye on Admiral Ackbar, but you can’t keep a naval man away from maritime history.

Lastly we had the Hermitage. It’s easy to explain the Hermitage - it's simply one of the largest and most impressive art museums in the world - but it's impossible to describe it. It's spectacular on spectacular for hours on end, until the superlatives cease to mean anything. Imagine the fanciest, most lavish interior you can concoct, then build something even fancier and more lavish. Then do the same thing again with different materials. Then again. And again. Hundreds and hundreds of times.

Each of the hundreds of rooms is filled with amazing things. Any single item in any room is a treasure so wonderful and beautiful that it would be the greatest thing one could ever own. And yet it's just one of literally millions of other treasures, anonymous in the maze of rooms instead of getting the dazzling spotlight it deserves.

For example, here's one of Catherine the Great's coffee tables:

It's painted with romantic scenes of Italy. Only it isn't painted.

It's made of up of thousands of gnat-sized glass mosaic tiles, so tiny and perfectly laid that their colours blend imperceptibly. And it's just one of maybe a dozen similar tables scattered through a couple of back rooms.

It's far, far too much to take in. One needs a lot more time. But, as the tour guide said, if one spent a minute looking at each item in the Hermitage, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it would take more than five years to see everything... by which time you'd be long dead from sleep deprivation.

With the extraordinary glory of the Hermitage, it's a shame that the rest of St Petersberg is such a dump. Dilapidated and dusty buildings, traffic that verges on the Third World, and the Mercedes and BMWs of local gangsters parked wherever the hell they like, whether it be across a crosswalk or nose-first into the footpath on a street corner. In the centre of the city I saw a trio of very young, very beautiful doxies park their boyfriend's glossy Toyota Landcruiser at a 45 degree angle in a parallel parking space, half on the street and half on the pavement, then go teetering away on their skyscraper heels, giggling and adjusting their flimsy minidresses.

Everything in St Petersberg seems to be over the top, from the shennanigans of the royal family to the apartment buildings with gun placements decorating their forecourts.

It's aggressive, decadent and unrestrained. Mind you, I just typed that while looking out over the city from Deck 13 of my luxury cruise liner, in a big wicker armchair next to one of the swimming pools, while sipping a Mai-Tai, so who am I to judge?

Tallinn

2011-05-18T23:06:00.007+08:00

The cruise's third port of call was the Estonian capital, Tallinn. Principal industries: tourism, textiles, battered old cars, unfashionable haircuts and recovering from communism. The main draw for tourists is the Old City, one of the most complete medieval cities in Europe.

There isn't a lot left of the original medieval aesthetic; just a crenellated tower here and a fortified wall there. But the architecture is there, buried under the renovations of dozens of generations. Baroque, Rococco, Art Nouveau... then it stops, around the time that the Russians swept in and created their usual bleak moratorium on renovation and restoration. Fortunately the Soviets don't seem to have shown much of an interest in obliterating the Old City, as they did elsewhere, instead limiting their trademark Brutalist concrete sprawls to outside the city walls.

Not surprisingly, two decades after the fall of communism, the Old City is now flawlessly restored and maintained, while the 30 year old Soviet stadium just outside is an abandoned and crumbling ruin.

Overall the Old City has a ridiculous chocolate box charm. No serious business is conducted within its walls, just the sale of trinkets and snacks for tourists. Even the churches seem to be there to add to the charm rather than to facilitate the worship of God. It creates an odd sense of disconnect when you realise that you can buy the same tacky snowglobe at thirty different stores but if you want a newspaper or a carton of milk, you're screwed.

It wasn't until we left the confines of the Old City and ventured into the surprisingly modern new central business district that we came to appreciate the tourist trappiness of the Old City. We stopped at an old-fashioned but stylish city cafe, and were gobsmacked by the low prices. 1.5 Euros ($2.10) for coffee. 1 Euro ($1.40) for a piece of delicious ricotta cheesecake. 0.65 Euros (90 cents) for a savoury pastry. This after we'd paid 3 Euros for a paper cup of hot but extraordinarily terrible wine at an Old City street stall.

One other thing I purchased in an Old City antique shop was expensive but irresistible: a tiny antique iron devil.

Admiral Ackbar is mortified.

Meanwhile...

2011-05-17T22:57:00.001+08:00

The Adventures of Admiral Ackbar and the Frozen Pomegranate Margarita of DOOM!

Hmmm...

Oops...

It's a trap!

Stockholm

2011-05-17T18:19:00.001+08:00

Stockholm is in many ways like Copenhagen. It's more multicultural, the 19th century buildings are grander and the landscape on which it is built is more exciting – a scattering of hilly islands separated by channels of rushing water – but it has a similar feel, with a focus on the ocean and a fetish for good design. And more Volvos than is usually considered decent.

However I saw no sign of ABBA while I was there. Frankly I felt cheated.

We started on the Old City island, full of charming narrow cobbled streets and a nice mix of tourist shops and real stores for actual Swedes. Like Copenhagen it's very human scaled, designed to allow human beings rather than cars to move from one place to another. The pedestrian is very much in charge, which creates a sense of empowerment for the individual; we're no longer just things that get in the way of the flow of traffic.

The island is dominated by the royal palace, which had a particularly pale, blonde, blue-eyed symbol of the nation standing guard in an impressive uniform. Some of the tourists assumed that he was one of those immobile living ornaments that stand outside Buckingham Palace, and tried to take photographs with him, until he loudly chased them away, because he was an actual palace sentry, and he clearly took his job seriously.

Then, as part of the design-junkie agenda of this holiday, we were off to the Architecture Museum, an institution entirely populated by slim young men with wispy beards and women with assertive haircuts, all wearing black. The museum was full of dry, rather intense displays about the history and ethos of Scandinavian architecture, but it was certainly informative, and it had plenty of Admiral Ackbar-scaled models for him to explore.

And even some scaled to allow him to act out his Godzilla fantasies.

There was also a special exhibition of the weird, probably drug-induced Age of Aquarius freakiness that typified cutting edge design in the 70s. Lots of beardy design fascism envisaging a future of people forced into plastic living pods, eating food pills and wearing matching jumpsuits.

After touring the museum I spent almost as much time in the gift shop, where I bought a fake moose head (as you do, or at least as I do), and a photo mobile. Then I bought a very designer coffee from a particularly slender and wispy young man and took some arty photos.

Kiel

2011-05-16T15:48:00.003+08:00

The cruise's first port of call was Kiel in northern Germany, on a day that swung between charming sunshine and gloomy downpours. My party noticed a bizarre tower that looked as if it had been stolen from the set of District 9 and went to investigate.

We couldn't get very close, but we found a couple of vantage points to admire its Brutalist sci-fi presence. Admiral Ackbar was intrigued.

Since it was a lovely spring day, momentarily at least, we went for a walk in a large park, admiring the fresh greenery, the last of the spring flowers and a veritable phalanx of adorable baby ducklings. I also reacquainted myself with stinging nettles. Hurrah.

Later I went searching for some kitschy token of my visit, but unfortunately rainy Sunday mornings in provincial Germany are not conducive to good souvenir shopping. The only place open was a frustratingly awesome flea market selling nothing but children’s' toys and clothes. I could have picked up used Lego and Playmobile for a song, but getting it back home would be a big trial for little reward: yes, a Playmobile dragon is awesome, but what do I actually DO with it once I've dragged it halfway across the planet?

I also took a turn through the Cathedral of St Nicholas, a grand German church almost entirely surrounded by casinos, porn shops and lap dancing clubs. The earliest part of the church dates from the 13th century, but the most striking and beautiful part of it was the mid-20th century stained glass windows. They were modernist reinterpretations of Bible scenes, rendered with an absolutely exquisite eye for colour, composition and design. They were quite possibly the most beautiful church windows I'd ever seen.

I was a little disappointed about my lack of souvenirs, but at least my other travelling companion had a good time. He admired the native wildlife...

And he made a new friend...

Before being nabbed by the long arm and firm buttocks of the law...

Cruisy

2011-05-15T15:22:00.001+08:00

It’s the first evening of my week-long cruise around the Baltic Sea on the MSC Orchestra. If you’ve never traveled on a luxury cruise liner, you need to, because it’s awesome, in the shameful yet indulgent way that dancing around your living room in your undepants at 2am to Smash Hits of the 80s is awesome.

Everything about this ship is laid on with a trowel. Every venue, from the theatre to the several bars, has two musical acts each evening. Every dinner has six or seven courses. The ship is 300 metres long, holds 2,500 passengers and has nearly 1000 staff and crew. Especially after the designer minimalism of Denmark, the brash, crass decor philosophy is like a blow to the head. The Savannah Bar, which was the location of the check-in procedure, looks like it was decorated by a Russian Mafiosi’s trophy wife, all fake leopard skin couches, shiny gold mirrors and life-sized ceramic cheetah lamps. The other entertainment areas of the ship are more luxurious renditions of the interior design at your local multiplex: a hundred clashing colours, fairylights all over the place, lots of reflective surfaces, and carpets so garish that they look like Rose Hancock Porteous threw up on them after eating her own weight in licorice allsorts. Which, given her jet setting lifestyle and substance abuse problems, she probably has.

Admiral Ackbar (and friend) in the glory that is the Savannah Bar.

For example, I've written my last couple of blog posts in cramped airliner seats or my downmarket hotel room in Copenhagen. This one is being written from a sleek art deco armchair in the L'Ilcontro Bar on Pianoforte Deck, sipping a cosmopolitan while a silver-haired gentleman named Igor plays 'Autumn Leaves' on a white lacquer and lucite grand piano, from a platform in the centre of an indoor pond fed from a three storey high waterfall.

And believe it or not, this is the most discreetly decorated bar on the ship.

Given the average age and socioeconomic class of the passengers (the average passenger is, conservatively, one hundred and twelve - I've seen six old ladies in wheelchairs and one child of any description) it’s not surprising that everything is imbued with a sense of the middlebrow, one so relentless that it forms a solid and looming wall that threatens to tip and crush any dissent that might be offered. As a case in point, take the short 'Salute To Broadway' show in the theatre this evening. Leaving aside the choice of songs, which were all from event musicals that your parents will have seen in the last decade ('Phantom of the Opera', 'Mamma Mia' and 'We Will Rock You' rather than 'South Pacific', 'West Side Story' or even 'Hair'), every song ended with the principal performer carrying the final note for an inhumanly long time, in a way guaranteed to make your mother coo, "Ooh, aren't they talented!"

And the truth is that they were talented, but we didn't need cheap theatrics like holding a note for longer than the Korean War to realise that.

So who are all these tacky people? I’m extremely bemused. The shipboard TV channel is full of Public Service Announcements of the Bleeding Obvious: wash your hands after using the toilet to avoid germs, don't throw your garbage into the sea, don't flush diapers down the toilet, don't set up a moonshine still in your cabin, and so on. I’m forced to wonder exactly what sort of semi-civilised mouthbreathers have signed up for this cruise?

But there's no denying the intoxicating sense of crude, flooding abundance on this ship, from the food to the cocktails to the decor to the entertainment. It isn't tasteful, but it is lavish, and it takes a disturbingly short time to get used to it.

Copenhagening

2011-05-14T14:59:00.000+08:00

Part of the reason why I'm taking this particular holiday is to feed my interest in architecture and design. Copenhagen is at the epicentre of 20th century design, so while here I'm going to the design museums, flea markets and other temples of Cool Old Stuff.

It turns out that awesome design in Copenhagen is limited neither to the museums nor to the mid-20th century. I've never been to such a design-savvy city. I knew that the Danes were skilled in industrial design, but they're also idiosyncratically talented at food, fashion, architecture and what can only be described as "lifestyle". They're a little like hipsters, only nice.

One of the most notable things about Copenhagen is the city's ubiquitous bicycles. Everybody rides everywhere. Businessmen puddle along in their suits. Mothers pack three or four children into the tea chest-sized carriers on the front of their three-wheelers. Trademen cycle about with their tool chests fixed to special racks. The bicycles have their own, extremely sacrosanct lanes on the main roads, and woe betide any pedestrian who wanders into them, because the traffic WILL run them down.

Note the killer glint in her eye.

The unexpected thing about the plentitude of bikes is that it seems to remove all of the really annoying aspects of cyclists. There are no lycra-clad, hyper-competitive, high-strung jerks on expensive carbon-fibre fetish bikes. The businessmen, mothers, tradesmen and others just wear their normal clothes and get about on simple but gorgeously retro machines.

The other reason for me to visit Denmark is to worship at the Birthplace of Lego. Unfortunately that's technically in Billund, a tiny town more than three hours by train and bus from Copenhagen. So instead I paid several visits to central Copenhagen's big, glossy Lego store.

Sadly the product range, while very diverse, was no cheaper than it is in Australia. In fact some of it was more expensive. Even so, I found a little friend in the Marked Down bin to accompany me on my travels, and we got to know each other over a glass of iced coffee in a chic cafe.

"It's a frappe!"

I figure it's a good idea to take an Admiral with me as I depart on my cruise tomorrow. I just hope that we can both withstand fun of this magnitude!

Amsterdam

2011-05-13T14:54:00.002+08:00

Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport is the first at which I've had to remove my belt. Not because it set off a scanner, or because it has a history of setting off scanners, but Just Because. And of course the metal cap on the end got snagged on the label of my jeans and wouldn't come loose, leaving me standing in front of a hundred irritable strangers tussling with the back of my pants while being ogled by a Dutch customs officer. I understand that you can pay good money for that sort of thing in Amsterdam, but come on, I'm only transiting.

One thing that typified the pragmatic and unembarrassed Dutch mind occurred when I stopped by the men's toilets. It was fairly crowded, with every stall occupied and a steady stream (if you'll excuse the pun) of men using the urinals. Amid all this, an unflappable black cleaning lady was cleaning things as they became clear. It was only as I was leaving the rest rooms that it occurred to me, "Wait, not only was there a woman in a fully occupied men's toilet, but the guys were completely unconcerned about getting their penises out in front of her." I'm pretty sure that doesn't happen in Australia.

I'm feeling stale and grimy but other than that I'm fine. Judging from past experience I will crash very suddenly and very completely around 6 or 7 this evening local time. Or perhaps sooner, given my scant sleep last night. Or afternoon. Or whatever it was. We were chasing the night all the way from Kuala Lumpur to Amsterdam, making a late Spring evening stretch out to over eighteen hours.

Later (Addendum)

2011-05-12T01:47:00.002+08:00

The leg I’m on is the longest of the three, a thirteen hour marathon of flight. I've watched ‘I Am Number Four’. And ‘Tron Legacy’. Then ‘Gnomeo and Juliet’, then ‘The Social Network’. And there's still two hours left of this flight. Because it's locally just after 3am the interior of the plane is dark, which limits what it's considerate to do. Sure, I could switch on my little spotlight and read, but the light leakage would disturb everyone for a seat in every direction. Even typing on my netbook or watching yet another movie makes my seat light up. It'd annoy the hell out of me if one of my neighbours was doing it.

Still... more than two hours to go. I can't face another movie. I've exhausted the amusement value of every game on my iPod. I can't sleep. I tried my best, but even after slipping myself a mickey (codeine, you complete me) I only managed to nod off for an hour and a half. I dozed for maybe an hour sans pharmaceuticals, but I just can't sleep sitting up, in a confined space, with the heaters turned up too high.

Ironically the Dutch, coming from a comparatively chilly country, keep their plane too warm while the Malaysians, from the tropics, kept theirs too cold. It seems to be part of the human condition to overcompensate, at least when it comes to airconditioning.

Seriousy, air lines, you can fly me across the planet for less than $50 an hour with video on demand and gin on somewhat less demand, but you can't work climate control airconditioning? You have giant heat sources if it's too cold (the engines), and a giant cold source if it's too hot (the air outside, currently around -58C). It shouldn't be that hard.

Just under two hours to go...

Later

2011-05-11T14:43:00.001+08:00

I probably should have mentioned this earlier, but I'm on holiday at the moment. And unlike my usual holiday activities, which alternate between futzing about the house and going on vintage clothing spending sprees in Melbourne, this time I'm leaving the country for the first time in over a decade. Not to be one who does things by halves, I'm travelling over 15,000kms to visit Copenhagen, and go on a luxury cruise around the Baltic Sea.

I'm currently just over 10kms above the Strait of Malacca, doing 837kph, according to the battered little LCD screen a few inches away from my nose. The seats on this KLM Boeing 777 are crammed closer together than they were on my previous Malaysian Airlines 777, and if I let my mind dwell on the fact I actually get a sudden wave of claustrophobia. It doesn't help that I have a morbidly obese Chinese man in the seat next to mine, who apparently considers his seat to be some sort of economy class throne and has regally commandeered both armrests. He appears to be asleep at all times, except when he senses a catering trolley nearby, at which point he attains full and suspiciously instant wakefulness.

At least I'm on the aisle, so I can lean out, and stretch my legs, and not consider the horrible mental image of having to clamber over his gut if I want to go to the toilet or stretch my legs.

Groundbreaking

2011-05-02T22:51:00.004+08:00

Sometimes it pays to be in the right place at the right time. On Saturday morning I rode my scooter down to my favourite cafe for a spot of breakfast, and when I went to park in the motorcycle bays opposite the cafe, I was unexpectedly treated to a sneak peak of an exciting new car. Behold the 2012 Jeep Bastard!

It's new, it's shiny, and it makes you feel as if you're the most important person in the world! And the versatile design of the Jeep Bastard allows you to park in spaces that are impossible for normal cars. It's going to be the biggest thing in hardcore urban adventuring since that really good sale at Louis Vuitton!

Plus there's another thing to bear in mind if you happen to see this particular Jeep Bastard (license plate 1DNF-157): if you snap off a windscreen wiper, aerial or piece of plastic trim, it showers you with candy!

Oriented

2011-04-18T21:16:00.002+08:00

Over the weekend I went rogaining with some friends of mine. It was six hours of striding through the Australian bush... then trotting, then walking, then finally plodding, verging on staggering, all while trying to navigate by map and compass. I wore some old hiking boots that turned out to be less than appropriate for covering 17kms of rough terrain, and now I have so many blisters that it's like walking around on bubblewrap.

But at least I got out into nature. Wildflowers, birds singing in the trees, the babble of brooks...

Or not, as the case may be. It was 34C (94F) degrees. Despite the fact that it's mid-autumn, there was no water whatsoever, and the watercourses on our maps were dustbowls. There were no flowers at all. In the moments when my party stopped moving and talking, there was no birdsong or even insect chirping; just a dead, empty silence. I saw a single bird in six hours.

As I left in the evening there was something like a fine mist drifting through the trees, which looked wonderful and evocative until one remembered that it was actually dust thrown up by the cars. The sand is so powdery that it's more like a gas than a solid, hanging in the still air for minutes after it's been disturbed.

Still, for all the heat and dust and dry lifelessness, it was an interesting experience. Rogaining is part science and part art: being able to use a map and a compass and a timer, but also being able to read the landscape to tell where one is from the rocks and the foliage. All I have to do is get some shoes that don't turn my feet into water balloons. And maybe wait for spring.

Robbin'

2011-04-08T19:58:00.004+08:00

It only took me a couple of weeks to buy a new scooter, but what with the excitement of AndressFest '11 and everything, I haven't mentioned it till now.

The new scooter is a couple of years older than the old scooter, but had done exactly the same number of kilometres when I bought it. It hasn't been maintained to quite the same loving standard, but it's lived most of its life undercover and it runs reliably, and frankly it was the nicest example I could find within the very limited number for sale in this city. Of course the man selling it lived at the other end of the freeway from my house, so once I'd bought it, it took me more than a hour to ride it home, sputtering along the back roads at a maximum speed of 65kph.

After I bought some new riding gloves and sunglasses, and a top of the range bike lock, I'm pretty much back to where I was before the old scooter was stolen.

Two other things worth noting about the new scooter are that it's a sexier colour (a Manly Black, rather than the Ladyboy Yellow of the old scooter), and it also came with a decal that the previous owner applied. Primarily, he told me, to annoy his teenaged daughter.

I don't think that I'll convince anyone that Batman chose a 50cc Piaggio to be his new Batbike. Still, it's possible that the Global Financial Crisis might have hit Wayne Industries in a very big way. Sing along, everybody! "Na-na na-na na-na na-na cut-backs!"

Dreamy

2011-04-04T14:12:00.002+08:00

The other night while I was watching TV I saw an ad for Squinkies.

I'm not a parent, so I'm probably naive about these things. But is the target audience for Squinkies really awake at 12.30am and watching 'Freddy v. Jason'?

Fetching

2011-03-30T00:03:00.001+08:00

Over the weekend I made a couple of new acquisitions.

Firstly, on Sunday morning I was given these artificial grave flowers, which are probably around a hundred years old.

Some friends were bushwalking in the Kalgoorlie area and found them lying in the dust, presumably in a long-forgotten graveyard. They assumed that both the leaves and the flowers were tin, but the flowers are actually fine porcelain. The craftsmanship on them is quite astonishing.

Secondly, late on Sunday afternoon I finally managed to get inside an antique shop in Maylands that has wonderful things in the window but never seems to be open. I quickly discovered the reason for this: the owner is insane.

Not just insane... barking delusional old Russian man insane. He talked - loudly, aggressively, bitterly and endlessly - the whole time I was in his shop. Why does no one in this country appreciate fine antiques? he demanded as I browsed through the silverware, in a way that suggested that any answer other than smiling and nodding would only make him angier. This vase is Lalique, this soap is Savon de Marseille, that jug is Carlton Ware, but you philistines only want your bigscreen TVs! I have a book here about Lord By-Ron (pronounced as if he were a minor character from a Superman comic) but nobody here even knows who he is! Why do you people not appreciate art and culture and learning? If I were in London I would have people in my store all day long, but here I only had four customers yesterday!

You'd have more people in your store if you opened for more than ten minutes at a time, I reflected. The Lalique vase is a very crude example, there's a crack in that Carlton Ware jug, and I may not be the most cultivated man in the world, but even I know that it's pronounced Marsay, not Marsales. You noisy old bigot.

I eventually shut him up by waving money in his face and declaring that I wanted to buy some candle holders. It calmed him down, briefly, as if he had suddenly remembered that people who want to give you money = a good thing. Unfortunately handing him money meant that I was a captive audience until he'd wrapped the items and found me some change. However I've had a few dealings with blathering nutjobs over the years (mostly from my time working with ham radio enthusiasts), so I've learnt how to hurry them along and cut them short. If I hadn't, I'd probably still be trapped in a stullifying conversation about vacuum tubes that began in 1995. The trick is to remind yourself that, probably through no fault of their own, these people can't read social cues. As such, you don't have to worry about appearing rude.

So when our transaction was complete, I simply thanked him and walked out of the shop, with him still bellowing about Stewart crystal and ignorant Australians to my retreating back.

I do like the candle holders. They're not signed, but judging from the style and the craftsmanship they're probably from the late 60s or early 70s, and possibly Danish.

Thin

2011-03-29T21:38:00.007+08:00

In an age in which accomplished Hollywood actors are more than happy to do TV, it can be hard to remember that things weren’t always this way. Back in the 1980s, if you were a successful movie actor, making the transition to TV was the kiss of death for your career, the thing you only did when all other avenues were closed. Only the callow, the desperate and the washed up considered it.

And made-for-TV movies? That was the most ignominious humiliation of all.

Other than doing a sequel to a made-for-TV movie, that is.

Which brings us to our final AndressFest ’11 film, 1989’s extravagantly-titled ‘Man Against The Mob: The Chinatown Murders’.

Detective Frank Doakey (George Peppard) is an honest cop who is assigned to investigate the murder of a bum on the Los Angeles docks. But as he delves further into the case, more bodies start to appear, including a couple of beautiful young Chinese girls. The people in Chinatown refuse to answer his questions, but Doakey is persistent and slowly uncovers a conspiracy of sex trafficking, crooked cops, mafia hits and, of course, Ursula Andress’ acting.

Ursula plays Betty Starr, an evil nightclub owner, and gets three costumes, three scenes, and a chance to catch up with George Peppard, with whom she starred in the 1966 war epic ‘The Blue Max’. Ursula puts in a serviceable performance, but it’s clear that both she and the producers of ‘The Chinatown Murders’ are coasting. She makes no attempt to give a character named Betty Starr an American accent, and the scriptwriters didn’t bother to change the name to something better suited to her teutonic vowels. And just because it’s supposed to be the late 1940s doesn’t mean that Ursula has to change the hairstyle that’s served her well for twenty years. After all, it’s only TV, dahling.

Despite all this, the funny thing about ‘The Chinatown Murders’ is that it’s actually an engaging little movie. Some of the supporting characters are miscast, and the sets betray the budget mindset of the TV movie, but it’s a well-crafted story and the film snaps along at a good pace. George Peppard, especially, plays his role with aplomb that the rest of the cast can’t quite match. Frankly many of them have more determination than talent, but hey, that’s the world of the TV movie. Ursula works quite well when she’s flirting and delivering veiled threats with Doakey, but I’ve seen more convincing death scenes from little kids forced to eat brussel sprouts.

The other flaw in hiring elderly, washed up actors is that they tend to have let themselves go. Ursula was still in good shape, but her male co-stars had clearly not been hitting the gym to more accurately play tough 1940s policemen.

Here’s a little gallery I like to call ‘Great Straining Beltlines of The Chinatown Murders’:

A few more sit-ups and a few less pies would have made a big difference. But meh… it’s only TV.

Primative

2011-03-28T21:06:00.009+08:00

What Ursula Andress’ body of work lacks in quality it certainly makes up for in quantity. In 1976, for example, she starred in four different movies, which was more than Audrey Hepburn, Meryl Streep and Jane Fonda combined. True, all of those movies were terrible, but then no director ever cast her expecting finely nuanced cinema.

A case in point is 1976’s ‘Africa Express’. Let’s face it, when one of your co-stars is a monkey, it’s pretty much guaranteed that you’re not doing a classy BBC adaptation of ‘Pride and Prejudice’.

Although now that I think about it, that would be totally awesome.

AndressFester PM wanted everyone to know that, technically, chimpanzees aren’t monkeys.

The film begins auspiciously, with Giuliano Gemma playing cards with Jack Palance while his pet monkey Biba helps him cheat. Jack Palance, doing the usual bad guy schtick that paid his taxes between 1968 and 1991, becomes suspicious and the inevitable fight breaks out. Giuliano barely escapes with his winnings and his life, and Jack vows revenge.

PM insists that you remember that chimpanzees aren’t really monkeys. Apparently this matters.

Meanwhile, somewhere nearby, a train is hijacked by a gang of villains searching for three people. Two of those people are shot and killed, but the third, Ursula Andress, escapes in disguise after beating up a nun and stealing her habit. While walking down a lonely road she meets up with Giuliano in his truck, and he, believing her to be a nun, offers to take her to the local mission. It's soon after this that we encounter the movie's single greatest scene: Ursula Andress lasciviously eating a banana while dressed as a nun.

Basically it’s the high point of the 1970s, if not the entire 20th century.

With the sexual tension and the attendant whack of Catholic guilt running high, Giuliano delivers Ursula to the mission and tries to get back to his life as a delivery man. But he can’t get Ursula out of his mind, especially when he discovers that Jack Palance is gunning for both of them.

It turns out that Ursula is a British secret agent, a concept just slightly less unbelievable than that of her being a nun. She has evidence that Jack Palance is running an international ivory poaching gang, and it’s clear that Jack will stop at nothing to silence her. Only if she and Giuliano, plus his pet monkey, various natives, a drunken riverboat captain and some fat German chorus girls work together will they stand a chance of defeating the evil Palance.

Seriously, PM demands that you all acknowledge that chimpanzees aren’t monkeys. I think they’re reptiles or something. I don’t know.

While considerably better than ‘The Loves and Times of Scaramouche’, 'Africa Express' was still an awful, awful movie. When Italian misogyny meets the Zimbabwean sense of humour, the results are bound to be dire. The dialogue was as clunky as one would expect from something that had been dragged, kicking and screaming, from Italian into English. The moments of comic relief appeared to have been sourced from a cut-rate local version of Benny Hill. The cinematography rendered Africa's famous natural beauty as a drab and anonymous landscape.

So why was this movie made at all?

Ah, yes. Take that, quality cinema!

Fandango

2011-03-26T00:06:00.001+08:00

You've got to feel sorry for Scaramouche.

For a start, it must be hard living up to the prestige of receiving a shout out in one of the most iconic rock songs of all time. While the rest of the Bohemian Rhapsody crew went on to greater things (Galileo getting a series of space probes, Figaro becoming a retro Japanese car with a cult following, and Beelzebub doing rather well for himself in Hollywood), Scaramouche went on to do an Ursula Andress movie, and as such has now been completely forgotten.

That movie was 1976’s ‘The Loves and Times of Scaramouche’.

The opening credits font: straight from a 10 year old’s pencil case to the silver screen!

It's the French Revolution. Feckless lothario Scarmouche spends his time dashing around Paris, making love to innumerable women and dodging the flashing swords of their enraged husband. Things take a decided turn for the worse when he is mistakenly blamed for an assassination attempt on the life of the Emperor Bonaparte, and, while making his escape, he and his best friend Whistle are dragooned into the army and packed off to Italy to fight the Austrians and the Russians. Once they get there, Scaramouche immediately seduces the only hot blonde within 50 miles.

Yes she’s blonde and attractive, but she’s not Ursula. This is of course an outrage.

When they try to desert from the army, Scaramouche and Whistle accidentally set off a conflict between the Austrians and the Russians. The Russian commander surrenders to them, which thwarts their plans to just slip away from the war. On their way back to their base, they come across the Empress Josephine, played by our Ursula, and inevitably Scaramouche has his way with her.

Apparently women shaved their legs in the 18th century. Who knew?

Or should I say, who cares?

Josephine and Scaramouche part ways, and he and Whistle continue back to their base. In attempting to hand over the Russian commander, and thus become heroes, they become embroiled in the increasingly, and annoyingly, madcap attempts of the real assassins to kill Napoleon, whom they have lured out to the front.

Then Josephine joins them, which allows for at least one scene absolutely crucial to the development of the plot.

This is possibly the breast scene in the movie, or at least the most mammorable.

Eventually the real assassins are found out, there’s a big chase scene with covered wagons, and they are vanquished. Then, as a riff on the James Bond theme plays, Ursula rises up out of the water in a homage to (or rather a clumsy lunge at) her breakout role in 1962’s ‘Dr No’.

"Do you expect me to talk? Because I don't really do talk."

And here we have the problem with the entire rendition of the movie. Ironically, given that Scaramouche is traditionally a stock character in European theatre, in this movie the real stock character was Ursula Andress. By the mid 70s Ursula was so famous, even iconic, for being a smoking hot sex queen that she was included in movies simply to represent the concept rather than to act a role. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, given that there are ficus plants that could act more convincingly than Ursula. But it's still sad to see Ursula inserted into a film as a piece of lazy conceptual shorthand.

As for the other, non-Ursulan parts of this movie… they were terrible. The fight scenes were ponderous and drab, the humour was about as fresh as a Frenchman’s underpants, and the entire soundtrack consisted of awful, synth-heavy music which was about as thematically appropriate as scoring the shower scene from 'Psycho' with the theme from 'Murder, She Wrote'.

So ‘The Loves and Times of Scaramouche’ was basically a disaster. Fortunately the assembled AndressFesters knew two things. One, there was still plenty of booze. And two, our second movie for AndressFest ’11 had a monkey in it. You can’t go wrong with a monkey.

Or so we thought.

Spice

2011-03-25T23:17:00.006+08:00

AndressFest is over for another year, and once again we’ve tasted the best that bad cinema has to offer.

Six men and one very tolerant woman met at my place to celebrate the wonder that is Ursula. As usual I had prepared some appropriate food and drinks. Some people claim to see the Virgin Mary's face in tortillas, but at AndressFest, we see Ursula Andress in the snacks.

But not her face.

As is always the case at AndressFest, I invented a new cocktail to celebrate the woman of the hour. I wanted to create something that reflected her attributes and appeal… but having exhausted all of my culinary boobie references on the snack food, I was forced to be more esoteric with the booze. To that end, may I introduce you to... the Spicy Ursula!

The Spicy Ursula

Combine 5mls of Becherovka* and 25mls of chili vodka in a glass. Top up with lemonade, then pour 5mls of grenadine into the centre of the drink, so that it sinks and forms a layer at the bottom. Garnish with a whole red chilli.

It’s Ursulicious! This may explain why I drank so many of them... although the movies of AndressFest ’11 could have something to do with that as well.

* wretched cinnamon-flavored Czech bitters, given to me as a Secret Santa present by someone who clearly wants me dead.

Downy

2011-03-16T00:16:00.004+08:00

Apparently there is a correlation between women who crochet beanies to sell on etsy.com and miserable boyfriends. Who could have suspected such a thing?

Colour me shocked, for one. In a highly scientific study infused with more hipsters than a Park Slope organic bakery, urlesque.com brings you 20 Sad Etsy Boyfriends.

OO

2011-03-11T15:23:00.002+08:00

What can one say about AndressFest, my annual festival of Ursula Andress movies? Other than "No, please, have mercy!" or "Gaaah! The pain! The pain!"?

Bah! Such people are wimps. AndressFest is only for those who are valiant of heart, strong of stomach and perverted of brain. These are the brave souls who will be joining me at 7pm this Friday night, 18 March 2011, for the pleasure, the pain and the requisite amounts of alcohol associated with AndressFest '11!

If you think you have what it takes to appreciate the peaks of Ursula's career - both of them - please email me at yevadwerdna(at)hotmail(dot)com for details. If you don't... well, I pity you.

AndressFest '11 - because Ursula Andress movies don't watch themselves, you know.

Revision

2011-03-07T15:14:00.003+08:00

While getting a feel for the second-hand scooter market, I came across this advertisement:

Is it just me, or does "The scooter was revised" sound rather ominous? Although admittedly not half as ominous as the idea of going "overseases", presumably with The Precious.

But whatever this "revision" entailed, it must have been impressive to warrant the $75,000 price tag. I've narrowed the possibilities down to a) the scooter being granted the power to raise the dead, b) solid platinum wheels, or c) the Lingerie Model Riding Pillion upgrade package.

Soul

2011-03-01T21:09:00.007+08:00

How does one tell the difference between a masterpiece of trashy exploitation cinema, like ‘Slave of the Cannibal God’ or ‘Women in Cages’, and a piece of dull incoherent dreck that can only be tolerated with liberal infusions of hard liquor?

I find it useful to ask these four simple questions:

1. Was it made in the 1970s?

2. Is the title more or less meaningless?

3. Was it filmed in a third world country?

4. Is Pam Grier notably absent?

If the answer to any of those questions is “no”, there’s a chance that the movie might actually turn out to be enjoyable… especially as regards the Pam Grier bit. If, however, the answer to all questions is “yes”, then you’re probably watching 1971’s ‘The Beast of the Yellow Night’, and it’s time to admit that you’re totally boned.

I really tried to pay attention, and it’s not as if I’m not inured to the slings and arrows of incompetent filmmakers. But seriously, I couldn’t work out what was going on. What little I could discern is as follows:

In 1946 a man gets lost in the jungle. On the verge of starvation, he meets the devil, who makes him some sort of offer.

He accepts, and the devil seems happy enough. I guess that’s not a good thing, unless you’re the devil. He gives the man a big pile of steaming offal to eat, which seals the deal. I think. Or maybe the devil had just run over a bunny and decided not to waste it.

Thirty years later, the devil puts the man’s soul into the body of some guy who is about to die. I didn’t catch why, but he’s the devil, so it’s probably not to bring more rainbows and cupcakes into the world. This is odd, because I’d thought the whole point of the man selling his soul to the devil was to save his life, and yet there doesn’t seem to be anything left of him except his disembodied soul. Then again, if anyone’s going to gyp you in a deal, it’d be the devil.

The guy, now with extra soul, stops being about to die and gets better. His wife, who never wears pants, seems happy.

However it’s clear that the guy now has too much soul. We know this because he occasionally transmogrifies into James Brown.

Ironically, given that he’s James Brown, he doesn’t feel good. In fact whenever he turns into James Brown he goes around killing people and eating their innards. Maybe this is what all James Browns do, but the movie didn’t make it clear one way or the other.

When he’s not being James Brown, the guy upsets his business partner. The wife continues to not wear pants.

When he is being James Brown, and finishes killing people, he finds sanctuary with some old blind man. This gives him a chance to come down from his Brownian bender and turn back into a boring white dude.

Meanwhile, the wife does not wear pants.

The police manage to draw a connection between the guy and the James Brown-related killings. However they are unable to keep him in custody on suspicion of being James Brown, because this is not a crime except perhaps in Alabama.

Eventually the guy and the old blind man escape together, in order to achieve something. I didn’t catch what this might be. Join the competitive ice dancing circuit, possibly. Unfortunately they are stopped by a police roadblock, James Brown rears his ugly head, said ugly head bites the old blind man to death, and the police bring him down in a hail of bullets.

And so The Beast of the Yellow Night, assuming that the title refers to the monster dude and not some other character, dies. The devil turns into a snake and slithers off, chuckling to himself, which must be pretty hard to do when you’re a snake. Whether or not he’s achieved his evil aims is unclear, since we never knew what those evil aims were in the first place, but I guess if he’s the devil they had to be evil. Now at least he has some free time to do whatever it is the devil does when he has free time. Have pie with Hitler or something, I don’t know.

There’s also an implication that in death the guy is now free from the devil’s control. So perhaps he’d only leased his soul to the devil. Presumably the devil now gets to lease a fresh new soul and the guy gets to auction his off at one of those depressing public sales. Win win.

Except for the members of the audience, who are now drunk, bored and inexplicably feeling like a sex machine.

Worth

2011-02-25T17:48:00.001+08:00

Over the last ten years property prices in my city have tripled. One of the interesting side effects of this explosion is that the commissions for real estate agents, which are charged as a precentage of the price of the property sold, have naturally also tripled. The workload hasn't changed, but the job suddenly pays three times more.

Unsurprisingly, as a result, people with no interest in either sales or property but a large interest in money have flocked to the profession, and the city is lousy with underskilled individuals trying to flog houses. It seems that anyone with expressive hair, a poorly developed sense of shame and a failure to graduate from high school can be a real estate agent.

A case in point is a young lady named Jodie, currently selling this property in the suburb of Wilson.

Call me pedantic, but I'm bothered by the errors in this blurb. With so many to cover, it's probably best to do them in order of appearance:

Australian Property Alliance is pleased to present this beautiful architecturally designed home in the highly sort after suburb of Wilson.

One, it's architect-designed, not architecturally designed. Two, Wilson is a highly sought after suburb, not a highly sort after one.

Featuring 4 Bedrooms, all with built in robes, 2 Bathrooms including ensuite from the master bedroom and another separate wash closet.

It's called a water closet, not a wash closet.

Modern open plan Kitchen, Family and meals area and separate Lounge/Theatre room.

Why is "meals" not capitalised like the other rooms?

Stunning outdoor alfresco, perfect for entertaining, low maintenance gardens and storage room.

It's "al fresco", not "alfresco". It's Italian. It literally means "in the fresh air". Therefore an alfresco (sic) is by definition going to be outdoors. Let me know if you ever find one in a basement.

Well positioned in private complex of 8. This property is close to all amenities and only a short walk to the Swan River.

Sweet merciful crap. It's only a short walk to the Canning River, not the Swan River. This would be unforgivable even if it WASN'T PRINTED ON THE MAP CONTAINED WITHIN THE LISTING!

What more could you ask for

I'm going to be bold and ask for a question mark.

Apparently the commission on this half-million dollar property isn't worth Jodie's time to run a spellcheck, correctly identify major watercourses or insert punctuation. And to be fair, she did get the name of the suburb right - what more can we expect for a measley $10,000 or so?

Forthcoming

2011-02-18T22:19:00.001+08:00

Everybody say "Ahhh..."

Or possibly "Oooh..."

Yes, it's the most wonderful time of the year: AndressFest!

Get ready, people. Only one month to go...

Lost

2011-02-15T18:26:00.002+08:00

Early last Thursday evening I left my office, trotted downstairs, and walked out to my scooter to ride home. As I passed the scooter bays, lost in my thoughts, I developed a sudden feeling that something wasn't right. I couldn't figure out what it was. I walked back the way I'd come. Was it something I'd forgotten in my office? No. I turned around and walked back to the scooter bays, and finally the feeling coalesced into an actual thought. My scooter was not where it was supposed to be.

I ran through all of the possible explanations - did I actually drive today? Did I park it somewhere else? Am I suffering from momentary scooter blindness? - before coming down with a sad little thud to the only possible explanation. It had been stolen.

It's not easy to steal a scooter. The steering is locked, it won't start without the key in the ignition, and the helmet is locked away in the seat bin. The only way to steal it would be either to use some sort of master key in the ignition, or to pick it up and carry it to a waiting ute or van. Both require a certain amount of forethought. Plus it was a sunny afternoon, in a nice suburb, in a carpark shut away behind electronic boom gates, not late at night on some ghetto street. It seemed like a lot of risk and effort for a bottom-of-the-range Piaggio Zip, but I'm not a criminal so I don't necessarily grasp their motivations.

After my boss kindly gave me a lift home, I rang the police. As is always the case when I phone the police, to report a theft or an accident or a burglary, their response was brusque. Reporting a crime means having to enter information into a database, and that smacks of effort. Of course actually investigating a crime is absolutely out of the question. I gather the police force is now little more than a useful data collection service for the insurance industry. Which is not much help to me, as it's not cost effective to insure a $1,500 scooter.

It hurts that my poor little scooter is probably in pieces by now, hacked apart in some backyard motorcycle repair shop for the value of its components. There's little chance of it being sold whole, since the thieves don't have the keys and any check of its license plate or VIN would show that it was stolen. The most logical thing for a criminal to do would be sell it for its anonymous parts. And this pains me, because it was a wonderful scooter - carefully maintained, quiet and comfortable to ride, and with tens of thousands of trouble-free kilometres still in it.

The other depressing thing is the issue of a replacement. Leaving aside the one and half thousand dollars it'll cost, Piaggio no longer make 4-stroke 50cc scooters, and second-hand ones sell very quickly. I'd forgotten that I only found mine because the previous owner had put it in the wrong section of gumtree.com.au, making it invisible to most searches. I've found a few for sale, and put out my feelers to the owners, but there has been a lot of interest in their machines, and no one has answered my texts or emails.

I find that I'm sinking deeper and deeper into sadness about it. Besides the scooter I'll also need a new helmet, new riding gloves, new sunglasses and a new garage door remote. And worst of all, once I get a replacement, there's absolutely no reason why it can't just happen again. I could chain it to a post, but let's face it, if criminals are well-prepared enough to have skeleton keys or a van standing by, they're well-prepared enough to have bolt cutters.

There's no closure, no chance of recovery, no investigation from the police and no guarantee that it won't happen again. Just me, with a big pile of work to do and money to spend to get back to where I was on Thursday morning.

Show

2011-02-05T00:18:00.001+08:00

On Thursday night I fulfilled a longtime dream and caught a concert by the man responsible for more music on my iPod than any other. It was a performance by Sufjan Stevens: musician, hipster Presbyterian (“Hipsterterian!”) and all-round groovy whackjob.

Sufjan made his name as a folk musician, crafting melodies so exquisite that he could play them on a banjo and still make them cool. But with two most recent albums he has taken a sharp turn into technology, replacing his banjo and piano with drum machines and synthesisers. The concert I attended was intended to showcase the latest album.

A Sufjan concert is not like a concert by any other group of musicians. For the audience, there's almost a sense of voyeurism. There's no banter between the members of the band, and every song is tightly choreographed. No solos, no improvisation. It's like watching a well-organised circus.

In this particular show, there is a certain child-like aesthetic. They play dress ups with feather boas, tinfoil hats and tinsel. They adorn themselves and their equipment with flashing lights, and plaster everything with day-glo tape. They're as self-involved as little kids putting on a show for the assembled adults.

Sufjan doesn't talk about himself, or even about his music, except in generalised terms. It's as if he's afraid of anyone knowing anything too definitive about him. Nor does he treat his fans to any new material. He doesn't even smile, except once or twice, in a self-deprecating manner as a dry witticism falls flat or he realises he's just said something flaky or pretentious.

Meanwhile his backing singers/dancers have a tightly structured routine, full of gestures as stark and stylised as soviet statuary. But there's no smirking irony in their dorky dancing. They're serious about their dorky dancing. They know that it's dorky, and they realise that its dorkiness is fundamental to its appeal. It's completely self-actualised; think of it as how Jung would want us to dance if he were in a position to insist on it.

All of this may give the impression that I didn't like the show, but that's not the case. I absolutely loved it. There's something very "New York" about the band's total devotion to the artifice of the program. They covered themselves in flashing lights and fluorescent tape because they completely bought into Sufjan's primitive-meets-science-fiction conceit.

I’ve often wished that more people could just throw themselves into creating art, without feeling the need to remind themselves and others that they still have one foot in reality. I think that Sufjan might agree with me on that point.

Overshot

2011-02-01T13:46:00.003+08:00

Every time I log out of my hotmail account I'm confronted with ninemsn.com.au, the website compiled by people almost too stupid to write for the benefit of people almost too stupid to breathe. Today this little link was featured:

Yes, why not look to 'Mad Men' for that 50s aesthetic. While we're at it, let's look to 'Happy Days' for the styles of the 40s, or 'That 70s Show' for the cutting edge look of the 60s.

Nasty

2011-01-28T16:43:00.004+08:00

Something has gone wrong with Australian journalism when an article like this is titled, 'Relocation package 'sounds promising'', and not 'Bogans on the move!', which would have been a far more evocative headline.

In fact the whole damn article needs a serious rewrite if it's going to get to the heart of this glimpse into modern boganity. Fortunately I am here to oblige:

The proud son of an illiterate mother, Shayne (sic) Parker has recently found casual employment as a barely-skilled labourer. However he is willing to give up this precarious employment if rumours of opportunities in flood-ravaged Queensland turn out to be true.

"If it's as it seems, it's a very good offer," he said.

His 20 year old girlfriend Thaleia, whose own mother named her in a fit of pseudo-classical creativity intended to wrest a moment of beauty from a drab and unfulfilling life, is planning to go with him. She did not comment on the issue of her self-esteem, which is apparently so woefully low that she'd move across the country with a man on the strength of nothing more than a vague status of "partner". This lack of ambition has also lead her into "studying to be an apprentice chef", which is presumably a step down from studying to be an actual chef.

Also joining them in Queensland is Thaleia's brother Danny Kotzem, named after one of the other men who impregnated Thaleia's mother, who, like Mr Parker, has no discernable skills. Lastly there is Jaime-Lea Potgeiter, who sees no problem in moving five thousand kilometres away from the father of her unborn child, or else has established that he has no interest in the matter. Or perhaps she simply has no idea of the identity of the man in question.

When told of the quartet's plans to move to Queensland, Governor General Quentin Bryce raised an immaculate eyebrow and opined, "they'll probably fit right in."

Curses!

2011-01-26T23:53:00.006+08:00

Hollywood's relationship with the literary world has always been rocky. Sometimes the film version of a novel can capture the essence of the source material (as was the case with 'The Lord of the Rings' trilogy) or develop a new perspective on its themes (as with PD James' 'The Children of Men'). But more often Hollywood just molests the novelist's creation like it was the last starlet in Los Angeles.

Such was the case with 1949's 'Omoo Omoo The Shark God', purportedly based on a novel by Herman Melville.

Naturally the script had about as much to do with the writings of Herman Melville as 'The Muppets Take Manhattan' had to do with the collected works of Truman Capote. As a matter of fact, 'Omoo', the title of Melville's novel, is Polynesian for "rover" or "nomad", and has absolutely nothing to do with pearl-eyed shark gods. But Hollywood was never going to let a little technicality like that get in its way.

The film opens on a ship sailing for Tahiti. Captain Roger Guy is gravely ill, and seems to believe that his only hope of survival lies at their destination. Eventually his beautiful daughter and his crew learn that his illness is actually the result of a native curse, cast against him when he stole the pearl eyes from a Tahitian idol on a previous voyage to the island. As word of this gets out, the crew become divided over whether to return the pearls and save the captain, or keep the pearls and sell them for a fortune. Unfortunately the Captain hid the pearls on Tahiti, so they all have to bide their time until they get there.

Other than the captain's illness the mechanics of the terrible curse are never fully explained, although I gather it had something to do with the crew being forced to endure reel after reel of badly integrated stock footage wherever they went. Few things could be quite as hellish as standing around gawping at a charging tiger, while fully cognizant of the fact that there's more chance of seeing Bjork in Tahiti than there is of seeing a tiger.

Or standing on the deck of a ship watching an octopus attack its prey, while pretending not to notice that the octopus' suckers are splaying on the glass of its aquarium.

Eventually Captain Guy is beaten to death by his evil first mate, and the curse, fully appraised of the western laws of inheritance, transfers itself to his daughter. When she finds the pearls, the first mate steals them from her, and he in turn becomes the object of the curse. Frankly the curse is so powerful that I wonder why I bother with Presbyterianism, given that Omoo Omoo the Shark God clearly has omnipresent powers. It’d be just typical if, after centuries of war, argument and research, it turns out that obscure shark god worship is the one true religion.

In due course the evil first mate is speared by a native, the pearls are returned to their rightful home in the eye sockets of the idol, and everyone rejoices that the adventure is over and they can finally stop being assailed by endless theremin music.

Given this successful translation of Herman Melville’s novel to the silver screen, it’s no wonder that Hollywood has continued to pillage the great works of western literature for ideas. It can then take those ideas and beat them with baseball bats until they are just smears on the sidewalk, which are then scraped up, mushed back into some semblance of life, and then shown to a waiting world. Personally I'm looking forward to the following new releases in 2011: 'Hookin' Up!' by Henry James, 'Bloodbath High' by PG Wodehouse, and Charlotte Bronte's tender coming of age story, 'Alien v Predator III'.

Whee!

2011-01-18T00:37:00.003+08:00

Question: What happens when you edit the vehicle physics properties in Grand Theft Auto 4 to give the cars less than zero friction?

Answer: Hilarity!

Sweep

2011-01-11T15:50:00.002+08:00

Ever since I got back from my Christmas holidays I've been overwhelmed with a need for spring cleaning. The fact that it's the middle of summer is neither here nor there. Now that The Flatmate has moved out (as part of his whole "getting married" paradigm), I'm suddenly more conscious that the entire four bedroom house is a) mine to do with what I will and b) a dirty, slovenly mess.

Over the weekend I cleared out and reorganised my wardrobe, cleaned my bedroom, and reorganised and cleaned the living room. The living room was the most difficult task, because I had to replace the 100cm Sony Bravia LCD TV that The Flatmate had taken with him. As I am a man, and thus driven more by competition than by good sense, I went out and bought a 107cm Sony Bravia LCD TV.

Unfortunately the two-level art deco dresser that was just big enough to accomodate the old TV was just small enough to not accomodate the new one. So I had to swap it out with the chest of drawers from the entry, which didn't match the art deco coffee table that sits next to the TV, so that had to be swapped out with the Moroccan tables from the study, which in turn pushed the marble plant stand and antique telescope out of balance, so they had to be rearranged, then the contents of each cupboard had to be transfered across, but not before said contents were weeded and rationalised...

Let's just say that once you start messing with these things, they tend to snowball. And speaking of snowballs, or at least dirtballs, if anyone wants to open a museum of dustbunnies, spiderwebs and insect carcasses I am in a position to make a substantial bequest.

The cleaning mania continued last night, as I hauled my fridge out of its nook and gave both the fridge and the nook a thorough clean, including the tiles on the floor which I know for a fact last saw the light of day when the World Trade Centre was still standing. I also cleaned out the cupboards in the bathroom (why do I have four containers of dental floss?), tidied my bedside tables (why do I have five sets of headphones?) and rearranged the glasses in the glass cupboard (why am I so anal retentive as to arrange my glassware from left to right in order of desirability?).

There remains much to do: clean out the remaining kitchen cupboards, decommission the old fridge that The Flatmate used and put it into storage, tidy the laundry, and tackle the mountain of empty DVD cases, old credit card statements and random computer cables that make my study look as if it has Aspergers Syndrome.

Review

2010-12-26T21:26:00.002+08:00

And now, some Blandwagial Christmas Thoughts:

- I've eaten too much ham.

- I've eaten too much turkey.

- I've eaten too many variants on little Christmasy desserty things based on shortbread.

- At my parents' place it's 23 degrees and gently raining. At home it's 40 degrees and unbearable. I've never been so happy to be trapped in a building with my family.

- My parents have Foxtel. I've watched so much lifestyle TV that when I close my eyes at night, a tiny Shaynna Blaze-Vaughan rushes in and redecorates the inside of my eyelids, then Peter Maddison drops by to add a conservatory.

- I felt bad because I cheaped out and gave my 13 year old nephew an oversized lava lamp that I don't want any more instead of a proper Christmas present. Then I discovered that he thinks it's the coolest thing on the planet and his friends are burning with jealousy. It's good to know that I understand the 13 year old mind.

- For Christmas my parents gave me a silver-plated icebucket and a pitchfork. I can't for the life of me imagine what they think I get up to in my spare time.

M

2010-12-21T14:54:00.006+08:00

It should be noted that my last post (the one about the inevitability of me buying blaxploitation music compilations) is the 1000th installment of Get On The Blandwagon! Somehow I've found enough to bang on about for one thousand different posts. Or one thousand and one, if you include this one.

So what sorts of topics has this blog examined over the last thousand posts. Here are some enlightening comparative statistics:

Important People

Number of posts mentioning Ursula Andress - 31

Number of posts mentioning Roger Corman - 11

Number of posts mentioning Jesus - 9

Temperance

Number of posts mentioning gin - 16

Number of posts mentioning vodka - 12

Number of posts mentioning mineral water - 3

Financial Maturity

Number of posts mentioning my vast MST3K collection - 51

Number of posts mentioning my vast Lego collection - 10

Number of posts mentioning my vast mortgage - 5

Important Holidays

Number of posts mentioning Christmas - 50

Number of posts mentioning AndressFest - 27

Number of posts mentioning Thanksgiving - 2

Number of posts mentioning Valentine's Day - 1

Theology

Number of posts mentioning God - 14

Number of posts mentioning Satan - 12

Number of posts mentioning Buddha - 1

Number of posts mentioning Allah - 0

Number of posts mentioning Pam Grier - 6

Quality cinema

Number of posts mentioning Alfred Hitchcock - 0

Number of posts mentioning Federico Fellini - 0

Number of posts mentioning Coleman Francis - 6

If you identify any other telling statistics, please let me know. I'm prepared to be alarmed.

Blackmail

2010-12-20T15:12:00.005+08:00

I was browsing in a CD store on Friday night and I came across this. The price was steep, but there was never any serious question of me not buying it. I honestly don't think I had any choice in the matter.

Two CDs of classic blaxploitation movie music, including Curtis Mayfield's 'Pusherman', Isaac Hayes' 'Shaft'... and the theme from 'Blacula'. As if that wasn't enough, it also came with a book about the black action genre, and had a picture of Pam Grier on the cover that seemed to say, "Buy this CD or I'll kick your ass."

You can see why I was powerless before it.

Mature

2010-12-14T23:48:00.002+08:00

The awesomest thing you will see today.

Try doing that with My Little Ponies!

No, seriously, please. It'd be cool.

Respect (redux)

2010-12-13T14:26:00.003+08:00

Fans of schadenfreude and karma will be delighted to know that one can never escape the long arm of the Australian police. Or at least that I can't escape it.

As mentioned a few posts ago, I recently managed to slink my way through a Random Breath Test station while tanked up on champagne. On this matter the police remain blissfully ignorant, or if not blissfully ignorant then just blissfully impotent, which has much the same effect from my perspective.

My success here has been offset, however, by a separate win for my state-sponsored nemeses. They have brought all of their advanced technology to the fore and managed to catch me in a speed trap. Reckless maniac that I am, I was doing 99kph in a 90 zone, while driving to a house party in the country.

I'd thought that the posted 90 limit was some sort of printing error, since the trap was on a quiet rural backroad that should have been, under any sensible scheme, a standard 110 zone. But apprarently not. The cynic might believe that the absurdly low limit was actually a cunning ruse to tempt drivers into speeding - if doing 99kph on a paved country road can be sanely classed as "speeding" - but said cynic would not be adhering to the spirit of road safety.

The bustling metropolitan thoroughfare in question, clearly bristling with the schools, side streets and invisible dinosaurs that require the speed limit to be low and strictly enforced.

Fortunately the speeding citation only carried a $75 fine and no loss of demerit points, which is good, because I don't have many points left and I shudder at the thought of not having a license. But happily that day of automotive crisis has not yet come, and I can still legally cause fear and consternation on the roads. Or at least as much fear and consternation as one can create with a dinky little convertible and a bright yellow scooter.

Cariyay!

2010-12-12T16:10:00.001+08:00

Since it was a nice day and I needed the exercise, on Saturday I decided to walk to my favourite cafe for breakfast. On the way I wandered into a couple of garage sales.

While I appreciate garage sales in principle, in practice I'm rarely awake early enough to get anything decent out of them. The good stuff goes quickly, as any experienced garage sale follower will tell you.

But I'd woken early on this particular morning, so I was walking to the cafe at around 8am. I came across one garage sale on Chapman Road, and bought a pretty patchwork bag made from scraps of old saris as a Christmas present for my niece. Not bad for a dollar. A few minutes later I stumbled across a different garage sale, and encountered this, laid across the bonnet of the seller's car:

It was love at first sight. I stroked it, feeling the warmth and softness, and wondered how I could make it mine. What would they want for it? $300? $400? Maybe I could bargain a bit. I asked the woman for the price.

"I'll check with my husband," she said. "I think it was $45."

Happily she didn't notice my mouth hanging open. She went inside and I heard her calling out to confirm the price.

"How much did you want for the rug? Was it $45?"

"Yeah, $45."

"Okay." She came back out, looked at me, looked at the rug, grimaced slightly and said, "$40."

"Sold," I said, trying not to sound too gleeful.

The skin is caribou. The husband shot and skinned it himself in Alaska, and then moved heaven and earth to get it all the way to Australia. But apparently the wife hated it. So now it's on the floor on my living room, making me happy and warming my toes.

Sickth

2010-12-07T13:37:00.002+08:00

'Tis the season to be jolly well astonished that another year of Get On The Blandwagon! has passed. I mean seriously, why? Why do I write it? Why do you read it? Why haven't I been hunted down and murdered by Leigh Sales or Tiger Woods or infuriated lesbians with long memories?

Oh well, their loss (and inability with IEDs) is my gain. Here we are at the 6th anniversary of Get On The Blandwagon!, celebrating six years of speaking truth to power, as long as "truth" is taken to mean "banging on about Lego, underorganised dinner parties and Ursula Andress' breasts" and "power" is taken to mean "a largely disinterested internet".

As usual, I like to take the opportunity of my blogiversary to look back over the last year and take stock of my achievements. This year it seems to have been primarily about pouring scorn on various organisations and individuals, which suggests that my ranting old crank gene is kicking in right on schedule. As such, I'd like to nominate the following list:

Top 10 People or Groups of People I Have Alienated Over the Last Twelve Months

10. Mormons

9. Chardonnay drinkers

8. Western Power

7. Diversity departments

6. The state police

5. The Prophet Mohammed

4. Eric Van Lustbader

3. Cory Doctorow

2. The Lillyman

and, by quite a significant margin...

1. People selling stuff on gumtree.com.au

According to the Get On The Blandwagon! Modern Blogiversary Gifts List, the sixth blogiversary is properly marked with gifts of iPod accessories. So get onto gumtree, people, and find me something stunning.

Loss

2010-12-06T16:50:00.002+08:00

Late last week somebody hacked my home wireless network with the apparent aim of downloading as much video as they could before they were forcibly stopped. The network is password protected, but that didn't prove to be an impossible barrier. Starting around 8am, they downloaded around 250MB's worth of data each hour, every hour, throughout the day and all through the night, until they exhausted our limit and my ISP throttled the bandwidth down to 128kps. Then they apparently gave up on it... leaving The Flatmate and me with severely limited internet for the rest of December.

Fortunately after I contacted my ISP they arranged to shift me onto a different plan that gave me more download limit for the same money, so our broadband is back up and running. In addition, The Flatmate has changed the password for our network and changed the settings so that, regardless of passwords, only registered machines can access it. Of course there's every chance it could happen again, but if worst comes to worst we can just switch off the router whenever we're not using the internet. And call the police.

The question that springs to mind is this: who searches for a nearby wireless network, cracks its password protection, then drains its bandwidth by the fastest means possible, discarding it like an empty juicebox when its exhausted?

We normal people makes excuses, looking for the rationale we would use if we found ourselves doing the same thing. Perhaps the hacker thought that he was accessing an unlimited network from the nearby university, and thus being not taking anything that couldn't be instantly replaced? Perhaps the culprit was a lonely Chinese student hitting back at the racism he encounters every day by exploiting his uncaring neighbours? Maybe he's a guy so addicted to HD streaming video porn that he finds himself stooping to all sorts of chicanery to get his "fix"?

I don't think it's any of these things. I thinks it's just that he's a psychopath, in the literal sense. He wants to download vast amounts of data and has the programing skills to find a way to not pay for it. The concept of inconveniencing or hurting other people, or that those other people have to pay for his data, doesn't enter into the equation. It's not that the moral angle is overridden: it simply doesn't occur to him.

Which is not to say that I won't set him on fire if I ever find out who he is. I'm just recognising that it takes a person with a complete absense of empathy to do this, and we normal people have difficulty comprehending such a thing.

Ill

2010-12-04T23:20:00.002+08:00

How did I ever manage to get along without this website?

Kim Jong-Il Looking At Things. For all your Kim Jong-Il looking at things needs.

Secret

2010-12-02T22:04:00.005+08:00

Now that it's December, it's time to put up the Christmas decorations at the Fortress of Blanditude. So tonight I've hung my arty spiral tree from the ceiling and festooned it with festoonery, I've garlanded tinsel across the kitchen island, and I've set up my nativity in the entry.

At least this year I've managed to avoid inserting any historical incongruities.

Respect

2010-12-02T13:34:00.002+08:00

Last night I went to a Christmas party at the home of a friend of a friend, and a festive time was had by all. After much tasty wine and canapes, sordid anecdotes from people who have much more interesting lives than me, and gales of admiration for the host's frankly gigantic Christmas tree, we all tottered off around 10.30pm.

How much have I had to drink tonight, I wondered as I burbled home along the Graham Farmer Freeway. I've had a fair bit, but I feel perfectly clear-headed and alert, so it can't have been that much. Let's see, I had three glasses of that nice champagne. And a glass of the shiraz that I thought smelled like freshly baked bread. And was it two half glasses of the cabernet? Hmmm. Actually it's a good thing it's a Wednesday night rather than a weekend, otherwise I'd be worried about running into a Random Breath Testing station.

Naturally as I crested the next hill I saw flashing blue and red lights up ahead. I was so sure that it couldn't be an RBT that I assumed there'd been an accident. But as I came closer I saw the line of traffic cones arranged to make a bay for cars to pull in and have their drivers tested. The bay was empty. Even as I registered this, one fat policeman peeled away from his colleagues and sauntered across the bay to fetch a new batch of cars.

Aw crap, I thought.

I let my car drift up slightly in speed, without making any sudden moves, and closed in on of the car in front of me, so that the natural break in the traffic appeared to be right behind me. And this little psychological trick worked: my MX-5 was the last one to scooch through, just barely, before Constable Tubby waved his orange glo-stick to direct the car following mine into the breathalyser lane.

No doubt some readers will get pissy at me for drinking and then driving, perhaps imagining that I was blindly swerving across the freeway singing 'One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer' at the top of my lungs while taking liberal swigs from a bottle of pilfered cognac. However this was not the case. Was I over the limit? Possibly. Was I in a fit state to drive my car? Absolutely. I was surprised, given the amount I'd had to drink, but there are a lot of factors that determine how a body processes alcohol, and I guess they were aligned correctly for me last night.

Which is a long-winded way of saying if you don't approve, bite me. If God had wanted me busted, he would have made that fat copper move faster.

Selection

2010-11-30T21:51:00.001+08:00

Sweet

2010-11-30T12:11:00.001+08:00

My final Serendipity Dinner for 2010 was the most popular of the four, with thirteen guests crammed around an extended dining table that snaked out of the dining room and into the kitchen. I was disappointed with my main course, which felt a little ramshackle, but the entree turned out well and the dessert was, I think, the best of the year.

Entree was sundried tomato bruschetta. Main was a gourmet barbecue: rump steak with red capsicum and chilli jelly and balsamic onion relish, pork and apple sausages, barbecued corn cobs, a green salad, and baby potato salad with rosemary and red onion. Dessert was ginger marmalade icecream with persian fairy floss and spiced pastry chopsticks.

The ginger marmalade icecream was even better than I imagined it would be. Using ginger marmalade rather than plain ginger softened and expanded the ginger flavour, making it distinct but not overwhelming. As for the persian fairy floss, it's one of those trendy new foods that hasn't yet become available in downmarket suburbs like mine, so I had to drive over to Mt Lawley, in the heart of the Foodie Belt, to find it. If you're not familiar with the area, Mt Lawley is the sort of place in which one doesn't batt an eyelid at paying $90 a freakin' kilo for spun sugar.

Since it was a) the best of the bunch and b) my own creation and therefore not subject to copyright, I'm giving out the recipe for this serendipitous dessert below.

Ginger Marmalade Icecream with Persian Fairy Floss and Spiced Pastry Chopsticks

Icecream - stir together 200mls cream, 200mls milk, 200mls no-fat greek yoghurt, a pinch of salt, 1/4 cup caster sugar and 1/4 cup ginger marmalade. Pour into icecream maker and churn for half an hour, then pour into suitable container and place in freezer.

Persian Fairy Floss - drive to painfully posh supermarket in fashionable suburb and pay $90 a freakin' kilo for a small bag. Please note that you need significantly less than a freakin' kilo to serve thirteen people.

Spiced Pastry Chopsticks - place a sheet of frozen puff pastry on a baking tray, and sprinkle liberally with caster sugar and powdered mixed spice. When it has defrosted, slice into long, finger-width strips with a butter knife. Bake in a hot oven until puffed and golden.

Boop-Boop-A-Don't

2010-11-29T14:16:00.006+08:00

I’ve been bemused for quite some time by the modern mania for Betty Boop. She has all the merchandise of a character from a current hit cartoon without the current hit cartoon itself. She’s been cut adrift from her place in the animation archives; a cultural signifier that doesn’t signify anything. Somehow – and I would kill to know why – she’s achieved a critical mass of cachet that makes her image desirable to bogan women for no appreciable reason. She is simply The Thing To Have, with no further justification.

As a result, it is possible to find things like this on gumtree.com.au:

The tone is set by the Care Bear in the background, who seems to have been anally impaled on some sort of plastic spire, and the Jim Beam bar fridge with an appallingly low energy efficiency rating. And is that a replica sword on a wooden plaque hanging on the wall? I certainly hope it is. But let’s concentrate on Betty herself, as covered by the reluctant vendor:

reluctant sale i have decided to sell my beautiful betty boop statue she is in as new condition she costs my husband over $2000 when he bought it for me she is stamped on the bottom of her foot i am not prepared for her to go down in price as i stated she cost over $2000 when my husband bought her for my birthday ,to a collector this is a must have i have other statues of betty boop but i am not prepared to let them go as yet ,,, i just made the decision today to sell my beautiful statue ,so please contact only if your interested ,, please only genuine people reply no dreamers please ,, $1200 is the price no lower ,,,

It would be easy to sneer and scoff at these people, but I’m going to look for the positives in this situation. And hey, I’ve found three!

1. There is a man out there who is not simply willing to spend $2000 on a giant resin statue of Betty Boop for his subliterate wife, but willing to do it more than once. That’s true love, my friends.

2. You have to admire the tenacity of a woman who has managed to produce a sales blurb despite the fact that both the shift key and the full stop on her keyboard don’t work. I suspect that Betty Boop’s moxie is contagious.

3. There are two types of buyers who might want a giant Betty Boop statue – genuine people and dreamers. This implies that, for some people, owning a giant Betty Boop statue is a long term, carefully considered life goal, not just some idle fancy that occurred to them in the moment. I envy those people. If only my life goals could be met with $1200, a few square feet of spare space, and a severe head injury.

Blot

2010-11-24T14:37:00.000+08:00

After a couple of comparatively subdued Serendipity Dinners, they roared back into overdrive last Friday with eleven people attending the third one. On the menu was barbecued tiger prawns with mango and ginger mayonnaise for entree, a retro 70s style pork and chorizo jambalaya for mains, and an artery-hardening baked honey and vanilla cheesecake with mulled wine sorbet for dessert.

However I made the mistake of serving Manhattans as aperitifs. While this is an exquisitely tasty cocktail, it's not the best thing to drink on an empty stomach, and as a results virtually no one drank the wine as they were all lightheaded before they even sat down at the dining table.

Ah, alcoholic pacing; my old nemesis.

Beautiful

2010-11-16T23:12:00.001+08:00

... who promptly lost it, leaving them both up a certain creek without a paddle.

Ideas

2010-11-15T20:27:00.002+08:00

The second Serendipity Dinner for 2010 was the smallest one yet with only four people. I put this down to the fact that I smell. But at least the other three of those four people were delightful, and smelled like new mown grass and summer rain.

On the menu was a salad of honey roasted pumpkin, spinach and pine nuts for entree, penne in creamy blue cheese sauce with black olives and asparagus for main, and a very crowd-pleasing hazelnut cake with a filling of mashed strawberries and cherry brandy for dessert.

Unfortunately now I have to come up with something similarly crowd-pleasing for next Friday's dinner. I will go to the supermarket and see what speaks to me. Last time it was a bottle of drain cleaner, and it told me to kill the President, which while tempting wasn't all that helpful.

Want

2010-11-07T23:09:00.005+08:00

The internet throws up many weird and interesting things, such as this picture from a tumblr blog:

I think that there's something intensely adorable about a little girl having Simon the Enabling Giraffe as her imaginary friend.

Lucky

2010-11-05T23:48:00.003+08:00

I had a lot of fun with my Serendipity Dinners last year, so this November I've decided to run them again.

For those just tuning in or suffering from amnesia, the Serendipity Dinners are a series of dinner parties held every Friday in November. I invite virtually every person I know to nominate which one(s) they want to attend, then sit back and wait for serendipity to arrange the guest list for me. The only stipulation is that people give me 24 hours' notice that they're coming, so that I can buy enough food.

I left the advertising fairly late this year, so there were only six of us for tonight's dinner: clearly serendipity needs a fair lead in time to work its magic. But we were six quality people (or at least five quality people and one idiot who's too lazy to draw up his own guest lists), so the evening went swimmingly.

As per the rules I set down last year, the menu was entirely made up of new dishes - it forces me to try new things rather than relying on old faithfuls. For entree, taleggio and mushoom tarts with a little garnish of baby rocket. For main, roast turkey with a port, fig and cranberry sauce, with roast pumpkin, roast sweet potato and buttered peas. For dessert, grilled pineapple slices with toasted macadamias with homemade burnt banana icecream. As you can probably tell, the oven got a good workout on this occasion.

If you're a local reader of this blog and you'd like to attend one of the three remaining Serendipity Dinners, drop me a line at yevadwerdna (at) hotmail (dot) com. I've already had confirmations for each dinner so at least it won't be just you and me staring awkwardly at each other.

Bangin'

2010-10-27T15:49:00.003+08:00

Observations from a Tito Puente tribute gig at the Charles Hotel.

- Jazz is great, but mambo is awesome.

- The barmaid is either new or used to a lower order of clientele. I order a gin & tonic, a vodka & tonic and a bourbon & Coke. All arrive in beer glasses.

- The band leader claps at the performers to spark them up into mambo mania, and a single old duffer in the audience takes this as a cue to clap along... completely and vigorously out of time.

- At the next table is a party of Jazz Jews, complete with retro clothing and yamulkes. When two of them get up to dance, they demonstrate all of the natural rythmn for which their race is famous*.

- It occurs to me that playing the congas is halfway between percussion and dancing. It's one of the few instruments that requires you to jump around while you're playing it.

- Both of the latin percussionists wear little smirks on their faces, as if to say, "Yes, I do realise that I am far cooler than every one of you bovine lumps. Also my girlfriend is hot, and uninhibited."

- In an effort, perhaps, to attract a hot uninhibited girlfriend, a pugnacious, possibly steroid-abusing old man over at the bar is pounding along on an empty stool as if it were a conga drum. And when I say pounding, I mean beating the crap out of it. The vibrations travel down the stool, across the floor, and up our stools. It is the most annoying thing since Fran Drescher.

- Seriously, is there any music better than mambo?

*ie none whatsoever.

Overwhelming

2010-10-25T12:06:00.000+08:00

I spent a lot of time over the weekend cleaning and tidying my house, and one of the jobs I undertook was to sort and put away all of my DVDs.

When normal people sort their DVDs, I suspect that they put them in similar catagories to those used by their local Blockbuster - Action, Comedy, Drama, Horror, etc. My collection, however, seems to fall more naturally into catagories like "AndressFest" and "Blaxploitation".

Not including my comprehensive library of MST3K episodes, which with duplications and special editions runs to around 180 discs, the collection breaks down as follows:

TV shows: 17

Blaxploitation: 10

AndressFest movies: 8

"Good" movies: 10

"Bad" movies: 247

So for every good movie in my collection, like 'Serenity' or 'The 39 Steps', there are twenty five awful ones, like 'Blood Orgy of the She Devils' or 'Oasis of the Zombies'... not including the awful ones starring Ursula Andress or Pam Grier.

I need help.

Transference

2010-10-19T14:38:00.006+08:00

Everyone in Hollywood has their talents, whether they be actors, directors, stuntmen or trophy wives. However even A-list individuals can be strong in one area but fail miserably in others. The great Peter Fonda, for example, was an iconic actor who faltered when he got on the other side of the camera and churned out movies like 1973's 'Idaho Transfer'.

Parts of the movie were clever. Creating a time travel movie with absolutely no budget is a notable feat. It also had evocative sound and visual effects and a plot that teased out concepts obliquely. However it was marred by terrible dialogue, worse acting, confused editing and an ending so blazingly dunderheaded that it defies belief.

A team of research scientists has accidentally discovered time travel, and are able to insert themselves fifty six years into the future. One of the vagaries of the process is that nothing metal can go with them. This means that before "transferring", the travellers need to remove their jeans and any other item of clothing with metal fasteners. One could argue that it would be less troublesome and more logical if everyone just transferred in sweat pants, but then there wouldn't be any scenes of softcore sapphic nuzzling. Priorities, people.

The time machine, as designed by Russ Meyer.

Of course they keep this invention secret from the government agency that funds them, even after they discover that the future isn't looking too swell. In 1973 it was generally accepted that the government would use any scientific breakthrough to have more Vietnam Wars, ban Procol Haram or put valium in the water supply.

In the future something has gone horribly wrong. The world has been radically depopulated by some unknown disaster. There are only vague clues: sealed cars full of dust, a stalled freight train stacked with human remains wrapped in plastic, tiny pockets of survivors suffering massive mental and physical retardation with a life expectancy that barely covers their teens.

Someone from the future left a crappy rusted 70s car by the side of the road? Impossible!

You would imagine that the characters would immediately set about discovering what had happened. It would be relatively simple - find the nearest population centre, locate a gas station or a diner, and read the latest newspaper or news magazine that was lying around. Break into a police station or emergency services office and read whatever telexes and memos you could find. Find a hospital and check the most recent patient records.

But this is the 70s and they're teenagers, so the idea of methodical research and analysis never enters their solipsistic little heads. Of course they know what went wrong: it was The Man, the government, those Wall Street and Madison Avenue fatcats. They ruined everything, leaving only The Youth to save the future.

Unfortunately The Youth are annoying 70s hippies, who are more accustomed to sulking, histrionics and Olympic-level whining than going about recreating civilisation. And so, of course, they bully each other, complain, have tantrums, go crazy, and then die.

But apparently all is not lost. After ducking government agents, her homicidal colleagues and the vast weight of her own moaning, "heroine" Karen resets the transfer machine and sends herself many hundreds of years into the future. She staggers for days through a landscape even more denuded than it was before, eventually collapsing on a roadside, where a family in a futuristic car find her. The father picks her up and deposits her in a compartment in the rear of the vehicle, and as the door closes we hear her begin to scream.

The dialogue from the family, once they get underway again, implies that Karen is now "fuel" for their car. Their car runs on hippies? Or on whining? Either way, they can now drive to the moon and back if the mood takes them.

To be fair, whining hippies are a renewable resource.

And so another 70s movie ends with everyone dying and, more importantly, with everyone in the audience happy that they're gone. The 70s really was a very misanthropic decade.

Rotten

2010-10-12T22:45:00.000+08:00

Yet another reason why Steve Jobs is Evil:

Sufjan Stevens’ new album on iTunes - $17.99

Sufjan Stevens’ new album on his website - $8.40

In related news, Sufjan Stevens’ new album is weird but awesome!

Cut

2010-10-03T22:26:00.002+08:00

I had my hair cut on Saturday morning, and in the process I discovered that the staff at my local barber shop have been replaced by pod people.

Normally when I go in to get my hair cut, around once a month, I'm treated with bland, indifferent politeness. They sometimes have a vague recollection of how I like my hair, but I usually have to remind them of the details.

This time was different. A new girl, possibly the commander of the pod people, offered me a seat and threw an apron around me. A moment later the senior barber bustled up and cried, in a tone usually reserved for long-lost brothers, “Well g'day stranger! We haven't seen you in ages! How have you been?”

“Er... I've been fine... thanks,” I replied, completely thrown.

“What have you been up to? And who's been cutting your hair?”

“Um... I was in around three weeks ago."

"Really?"

"Maria's done my hair the last two times.”

"Oh, okay. Espresso?"

"What?"

"Would you like an espresso?"

"Er... yes? Please?"

"I'll go get that for you. You just sit there and relax!"

And so a few minutes minutes later there I sat, sipping the first espresso I've ever been offered in all the years I've been going there, wondering exactly which beloved customer they'd mistaken me for. However they remembered the details of how I like my hair cut, so maybe they did actually know who I was.

I can therefore only conclude that they are pod people, perfect replicas of my barber and his staff but from an alien species unfamiliar with the human emotion of “disinterest”. Presumaby they have the twin aims of destroying all humans and achieving excellence in customer service.

Alarm

2010-10-01T12:23:00.004+08:00

I admit that Wednesday's "What if I'm pregnant?" picture was not in the best of taste. By way of compensation, please accept this picture of a tiny owl wearing a Jayne Cobb hat.

Warning: adorableness in these quantities can cause injury and death. Do not look at this cute litle fwuffle nutkins for more than three seconds at a time.

Pure

2010-09-30T11:22:00.004+08:00

The Pew Research Center is an American polling organisation that exists to make me feel smug and superior. Why there's an entire institute devoted to facilitating what comes naturally to me after watching three minutes of commercial TV news is unknown. But I appreciate the effort.

Their latest achievement is the Religious Knowledge Survey, a poll of 15 questions based on the history and tenets of the US's dominant religions. You can try it for yourself here.

According to the survey I am more religiously informed than 99% of Americans, and thus a shoo-in for sainthood and/or holy superpowers. Although admittedly that rather depends on your esteem for the religious education of Americans.

Some interesting, if not actively startling results from the survey:

- 6% of Jews don't know when their Sabbath begins.

- 41% of white Catholics and 53% of Hispanic Catholics don't know what their church's doctrine of transubstantiation is.

- 33% of evangelical Protestants don't know The 10 Commandments well enough to pick a fake one.

Several blogs I read have been making much of the fact that atheists seem to know as much, if not more, about religions than the people who purportedly believe in them. It's a little unfair, though: there are no questions about the beliefs of atheists for the atheists to get wrong and, as a result, look foolish. I'd have a little more respect for it if the quiz had included questions on the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the Darwin fish.

Ouch

2010-09-29T23:27:00.003+08:00

Efficient

2010-09-24T11:06:00.002+08:00

I've been interested to find out what sort of fuel economy the new scooter is achieving. Four stroke motors are supposed to be slightly more efficient than two strokes, and they don't burn oil with every stroke of the piston. I imagined that the savings would just about pay for the premium fuel the new scooter needs.

It turns out that “slightly more efficient” is grossly misleading. My old scooter used about 4 litres per hundred kilometres. According to the figures I've gleaned from filling up the tank this evening, the new scooter uses less than 2.4 litres per hundred kilometres!

At current petrol prices that's just over $1 to ride to work and back. By contrast the old scooter would have been $1.80. The car would be about $3.60. And The Flatmate's new Landrover Discovery 3 would be around $7. Sucker.

Now I just have to figure out what I'm going to do with the extra $200 or so a year that the new scooter will save me.

Feeble

2010-09-21T14:48:00.003+08:00

I recently noticed this in the online classifieds:

I like to think that it's a couch designed to be offered for seating, then whisked away at the last second with a loud "A-HA!".

Sunny

2010-09-20T14:24:00.002+08:00

There are times when it's best to stay at home, indoors, warm and safe from the elements, preferably with some sort of exploitation movie from the 70s.

However Sunday afternoon was not one of those times. It was its antithesis: the sort of day that drags a person out of the house like a sunny, pleasantly tempered gorilla. It was a day that so perfectly typified the glory of spring that I suspect it may have received a payoff from the Tourism Commission.

I rode my scooter down to Coffea Cafe in Applecross, and sat under the jacaranda trees and Tiffany box blue skies, with the sounds of the city drifting faintly in the background and the spring sun making a welcome return from its winter hiatus, and had a pot of lemongrass and ginger tea and listened to some friends playing jazz.

It was very good. They’ve only been playing together for two months, but they sound as if they've been paired up all their lives. They play sophisticated versions of jazz favourites, in a smooth way that makes a cup of tea feel like a cocktail. Their repertoire covers classics ranging from the songbooks of Irving Berlin and Cole Porter to the work of Van Morrison and Norah Jones, but I suspect that even if I requested a number by Throbbing Gristle they could make it sound urbane.

Both musicians are prodigiously talented. The bass player trained at the Conservatorium, and has been performing in and around the local music scene for twenty years. As for the pianist, I don't know where his talent comes from, but I've narrowed it down to either the sale of his soul to the Devil, or a genetic mutation caused by a bite from a radioactive Nina Simone. Not that it really matters, although I hope it's not the first one: I'd hate to see him consigned to Hell for all eternity just so that I can hear an exquisite version of 'Almost Like Being In Love'.

Eventually autumn and winter will return, bringing their chill and damp and making it impossible to sit outdoors listening to jazz. However that's a good six months away, leaving plenty more Sundays to go down to the cafe for tea, music and sunshine.

Weedy

2010-09-19T19:57:00.006+08:00

While my abilities in procrastination are considerable, occasionally they fail me and I actually do something. Last week I bought some reconstituted limestone blocks, and this weekend in a flash of proactivity I built the retaining wall I've been thinking about for several months.

Next thing you know I'll be painting the house or putting in french doors. Or, as you can see from the pictures, attempting some weeding.

Original

2010-09-18T00:03:00.000+08:00

The history of film is a funny old story, as one can tell from a viewing of the odd 1932 drama ‘The Mistress of Atlantis’.

It’s interesting to watch movies from the early days, when actors, directors and scriptwriters were still coming to terms with the mechanics of filmed entertainment. They were learning, slowly, that making a movie didn’t just involve filming a play. Concepts like the close-up, the panning shot or even editing were still new.

The Americans released the first talking movie in 1927, and from there began their ascent into global cinematic domination. Unfortunately in 1932 the fuzzy tennis ball of world cinema was still in the court of the Germans, and while German films tend to be visually arresting and filled with symbolism, they have a tendency to drop the ball, fuzzy or otherwise, in terms of plot, dialogue and character development.

‘The Mistress of Atlantis’ is no exception. It recounts the tale of two Frenchmen who embark on an expedition to discover Atlantis, working off a theory that it was not located underwater but rather in the middle of the Sahara. Like you do. As they get closer to where they think it is, they are captured by what turns out to be Atlantean soldiers.

In Atlantis itself, they discover certain incongruities. Despite being lost for millennia the Atlanteans have gramophones that play chipper Can Can music, and the royal salon is filled with 19th century furniture, a decent wine cellar and a tittering European butler. It turns out that the Mistress of Atlantis is actually a chorus girl who captured the heart of the late Atlantean king on one of his furtive trips to Europe years earlier, and who now rules in his place, albeit with so much ennui it could suffocate a camel at twenty paces.

One of the men falls in love with the icy queen, and a servant girl falls in love with him, and the queen falls in love with the other man... and basically there's this whole bizarre love quadrangle going on. Spurned by the man she wants, the queen orders the other one to kill him, even though he is his best friend. This being nihilistic German cinema he does so, only to instantly regret it. He escapes the clutches of the queen with the servant girl, and together they ride off into the desert... only to discover that they don't have enough water. She dies, and he nearly dies, only to be rescued at the last moment. Years later, after recounting his story to another legionnaire, he heads back out into the desert to find Atlantis again, only to be swallowed up by a sandstorm and, presumably, killed. As such, ‘The Mistress of Atlantis’ presages the 70s fad for killing off most of the cast in the final reel by nearly half a century.

With that in mind it occurred to me that if 'Mistress of Atlantis' had been made 20 years later, in 1952, it would have been a far different creature. Instead of droopy French legionnaires moping about the place, we'd have lantern-jawed American heroes who manfully punch their way out of any difficult situation. Instead of an aloof and almost expressionless ice maiden, the Mistress of Atlantis would be stalking femme fatale given to camp announcements like "Guards, seize them!" and "You dare defy me?" Instead of the gratingly "comic" butler, we'd have... well, actually, he'd still be there, but perhaps with a little more physical comedy thrown into the mix. Basically it would have been a lot less dour German Expressionism and a lot more bright American Actionism.

And of course if 'The Mistress of Atlantis' had been made 20 years later again, in 1972, it would have featured even more ass kicking, more incidental nudity and quite possibly Ursula Andress in a seashell bikini. And that could only be a good thing.

Bites

2010-09-17T20:39:00.007+08:00

There's a certain trope in cinema that tells a cautionary tale of what befalls nice, middle-class white people who venture beyond their urban habitat into the wild natural environment. If done well (ie with violence and boobies) this ends up as something like 'Slave of the Cannibal God'. If done badly (ie with resolutely clothed idiots stomping uneventfully around the jungle) it ends up as 1972's 'Piranha'.

Our film opens in Caracas, as Arthur, a diamond-seeking tourist, and his sister Terry, a photographer, arrive to go on a tour of the Venezulan wilderness. Their guide is an expatriate named Jim. They set off on their motorbikes, and eventually meet Caribe, an American hunter who has gone native. He offers to show them the depths of the jungle, and when they accept things start to turn ugly.

So far, so standard. Unfortunately the basic trope requires the protagonists to be nice, middle-class white people, and this doesn't describe Arthur, Terry and Jim. They're white and middle-class, but they're not nice at all. They're loud, bossy, entitled douchebags, and almost as soon as they are introduced the audience is looking forward to the time when they become piranha chow. And this is a problem. Frankly, you can't have heroes and heroines whom everybody wants to see dead within five minutes of meeting them.

The boys are both noisy bores, but Terry is a singularly repulsive creation. Dressed in ugly flared denim pantsuits of varying hues, she strides into each scene making imperious demands about what others are or aren't allowed to do, then collapses into a screaming helpless heap when the logical consequences of her demands unfold. Like many hippies, she has plenty of ideas about how things should be done but refuses to take any responsibility when those ideas fail.

The irony is that there's no sense that the audience is supposed to hate these people. We're supposed to be going, "Oh, no, will Terry survive?" as opposed to chanting, "Piranha! Piranha! Piranha!" every time she opens her big over-privileged yap-hole.

But having appalling protagonists is not the greatest of 'Piranha''s sins. Its greatest flaw is its misleading title.

When you call a movie 'Piranha', you make certain conceptual claims. The primary one being that the movie will contain piranhas, and not some ham-fisted point about Man being the most dangerous "piranha" of all. In fact unless you're fluent in Spanish and realise that 'Caribe' is Spanish for 'piranha', you probably won't even realise why the movie was named after a carnivorous fish at all.

Beyond all that, it isn't even a cogent metaphor. A single piranha will give you a nasty bite, true, but its mouth is tiny. The only way to get killed by a piranha is to the lie in shallow water for several hours being very careful not to move. Even Hollywood piranhas (far more rapacious beasts than their real-life brethren) are like zombies: the threat comes from overwhelming numbers, not from the prowess of an individual. So naming your bad guy "Piranha" is basically saying that he's a small, ineffectual creature who could only be a threat if you cloned him a few thousand times.

Still, he manages to kill almost all of the main cast, so in the end it's hard not to like him.