Monthly Archives: December 2000

Roses

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It’s the festive season which can mean only one thing: receiving gifts of Cadbury’s Roses chocolates.

Why Cadbury’s Roses? What have these remarkably unremarkable chocolates done that made them such a popular gift item?

There’s a 1996 Australian romantic comedy called “Dating the Enemy” in which a man and a woman mysteriously switch minds and discover how the other half lives.

In one scene the man’s-mind-in-the-woman’s-body is suffering from PMS and consoles himself by sitting on the couch going through a box of Roses.

Then the woman’s best friend comes in and sees what she’s doing and exclaims, “granny chocolates!” She points out that if you’re going to feel sorry for yourself and pig out on chocolates, Roses are not the ones you do it with.

The experience of receiving Roses as a Christmas gift is summed up nicely here from a long lost World Wide Jeb journal entry (courtesy of the caching powers of Google):

“We had Christmas of course, and don’t you find you’re left over with a truckload of chocolates by the end of the day? Chocolates are that great I-honestly-don’t-know-what-the-hell-to-get-you present. I got 4 boxes of Roses chocolates, and I’ve noticed something. Every single flavour of Roses chocolates sounds like a product from the Body Shop. Take a look at the box next time you eat some Orange Cream, Classic Fudge, the list goes on…”

And that’s what it’s like. You’re so full with Christmas dinner that the mere thought of eating even one tiny chocolate is enough to make you feel sick, so all there is to do is play with the chocolates. Counting up the different flavours, maybe sorting them out into the order in which you’ll eat them.

I was at the supermarket about a week ago and noticed a woman pushing a trolley filled with what looked like party supplies. Adding to the chips, orange juice and beer, she was throwing in about 20 250 gram boxes of Roses chocolates.

I doubt they were going to be party food, so they must have been Christmas presents for some lucky employees. That thought depressed me a little.

Just image having a job where you work really hard all year, putting in some overtime, doing stuff that you weren’t asked to do. Then at the end of the year what recognition do you get? A $7.30 box of boring old granny chocolates.

Giving Roses chocolates isn’t just limited to Christmas. Typical gifts to give your sweetheart have always been roses and chocolates. But Cadbury’s have taken the initiative and named a boxes selection of chocolates Roses. Why shell out $100 for a dozen red roses, when you can pick up a packet of choccies for $10!

Of course, now there are more exotic types of chocolates – even The Warehouse is in on the act stocking semi-exotic Guylian chocolates. But Roses will always be the favourites of the dude who wants to get his girlfriend a present but isn’t sure what to get her (that, and most petrol stations sell them).

So, why Roses? I’m not sure, but given that we listen to songs about snow and winter wonderlands while sweating profusely and watching our skin pinken in the summer sun, I think the act of giving and getting Roses is just more silly season madness.

Web Designer

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I left my old job as a producer on a portal and when people find out that I’m only semi-employed at the moment they keep telling me that someone as skilled as I am should have no trouble finding work doing web design.

People think I’m a web designer. Sometimes it’s people I’ve only just met, other times it’s friends or family members. People like this are not paying attention.

I am not a web designer. I have never been employed as a web designer, unless you count when I did my Dad’s work web page back in 1996 which he paid me $50 for.

Yes, I did the design for my own site, but I pretty much copied it off another person’s web site. I didn’t go so far as stealing the HTML, but I didn’t come up with the idea of the design on my own. Before that I copied off mid-’90s Suck.com.

People have told me that I would be a better web designer than a lot of the people out there who make web pages for a living. Ok, that’s probably true, but I’d probably also be a better checkout girl, or call-centre worker or accounts receivable clerk than some of the people who hold those jobs. I’m not about to drop everything and jump behind a cash register just because I’d better than someone else at doing it.

The same goes for web design. I could do it professionally, and I wouldn’t be terrible at it, but I wouldn’t be great at it either. At my old job I worked with web designers. Most of them were really good and could come up with truly excellent designs, even with the most minimal of badly-written briefs. I can’t do that. And to add to it all, web design is hard work for me and I don’t really like it all that much.

I’m not about to enter an occupation in which I would perform to a mediocre standard, and not even enjoy doing what I was doing.

You want to know what I’m good at, what I really like? You’re looking right at it.

Waterfall

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Just the other day I was browsing through the home appliances section of a department store. Having done all my Christmas shopping I was free to wander and ogle all the things that I do not need. Amongst the muffins makers, wet ‘n dry vacuum cleaners and cordless toasters was something that caught my eye.

It was a mini indoor fountain. A trickle of water ran down some rocks and was recycled back up again. Very feng shui, I would imagine. I was intrigued at this fountain and took a closer look at its box.

The box offered all sorts of descriptive passages, virtually taking me away to another world as I read them.

“Soothing sounds of cascading water create a stress-free ambience,” it read. It also claimed that the fountain was a “natural humidifier”. Yes, and so is flushing the toilet when its blocked.

Another part of the wonderful box blurb was that it “moisturises the air”. Well, I guess it would be pushing it to expect the box to read “creates dampness in your home”.

And if that weren’t enough, it also claimed that it “masks distractions so you can stay focussed.” Ah yes, the baby’s crying, the dog’s yapping, Brittnee wants to be read to and Jayden is playing Eminem really loudly. Forget them, just turn the waterfall on and all your troubles will fade into insignificance.

Intrigued by this wonderful invention, I did a little bit of reasearch and discovered there are companies out there who specialise in making these kinds of products.

Also available are little radio-like things that, instead of playing music, play “soothing sounds”. So if you have rising damp and don’t want to risk a mini waterfall, instead you can listen to such sounds as “summer night”, “ocean waves” and “spring rain”. Or you could just buy a cheap bedside radio, and tune it off a station and just have static playing as you drift into a peaceful slumber while Brittnee and Jayden battle it out in the next room.

Anyway, a couple of days later I was in a fast food restaurant and a few metres from where I was sitting there was some sort of leak above the ceiling, causing water to trickle down. This created a noise not unlike that of the waterfall machines.

Did it sooth and relax me? Did it moisturise my ambiance? Er, no. In fact after a while I stopped paying attention to the trickle and instead eavesdropped on the young couple on a blind date in the next booth (“I was so nervous last night. I had a dream about pot. Yeah, I’ve been trying to cut down because I’ve been smoking it, like, every day, and that’s not good, eh?”).

So if you were perhaps thinking of getting me one of those waterfalls for my birthday or Christmas, you’ll need to stop thinking that. I used to live next door to an Irish pub – I don’t need no indoor waterfall to help me relax.

Things To Do II

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It’s been a while since I’ve updated this, but since then I’ve gone from being unemployed to semi-employed, or rather, I get to say I’m freelancing.

As a result I have to do things and don’t have as much time to spend dicking around doing nothing. Also, my digital camera and/or my computer has gone mental and as a result I can’t upload any recent amusing pictures I’ve taken.

So instead here is a collection of older pictures that have been sitting around on my computron 2000. In order to give them a bit of cohesion, I have used my creative skills and constructed a jolly fictional narrative. It shall be called “Things to do in Dorkland when you’re semi-employed”.

10 December 2000

So I was out walking one day when suddenly the futility and emptiness of modern life dawned upon me. “Oh!” I thought to myself. “It’s all rubbish!” I decided to turn to drugs to drown my sorrows.

Then as I strolled along Symonds Street a bright red poster caught my eye.

Yes! That was the answer! Life might be a bunch of arse, but it’s nothing a good hug won’t solve. I grabbed the nearest person, a taxi driver going into the Chinese food place to get some lunch and hugged him. I don’t need no drugs, I’m high on life!

With this new-found highness, I strolled down the end of Mount Eden Road and noticed a sign advertising some land the city council was selling.

The use of red was pretty eye-catching, but what was even better was the use of the MS Comic Sans font and double spacing of “M a g n i f i c e n t ! !” If I happened to be looking for some land in scenic Mount Eden, I certainly would not hesitate to purchase it based on the savviness of that sign!

It was but a short stroll to Queen Elizabeth II Square where I noticed a sign outside the old post office crediting the “copywright” of a quote on it.

Oh, ha ha ha. “Copywright”. Is that the copyright that a playwright holds on a work?

Still high on life and giggling merrily at the silly things that people put on signs, I journeyed over to Royal Oak where I noticed a sign for a stonemason that looked like the person who painted the sign hadn’t planned ahead and suddenly found themself running out of room mid-word.

But unlike all the other signs that had obviously been designed by professionals, this one had a certain naive charm. And y’know, I expect good signs from signwriters and good walls from stonemasons, not the other way around.

Back in the city centre, I noticed a sign taped to the window of a cafe down Queen Street, advising passers-by that “no change is given for parking metres”.

It’s just as well that I don’t have any metres that need to be parked, then.

I headed off to the Auckland Domain where I saw a food van selling hotdogs, ice cream and other treats parked right next to a couple of portaloos.

Coincidence? Or is one necessary because of the other?

Tiring of the amusements of the city, I once again headed out into the suburbs, returning to Royal Oak. I saw a sign painted on the window of a bicycle shop suggesting that “[o]n a fine day why not “bicycle to work”".

By putting “bicycle to work” in quotes could really mean anything. It might actually mean “On a fine day why not stay at home spending all day on the couch watching talk shows and soaps and eating five tubes of Pringles before you realise how meaningless your life is and start on that bottle of wine you were saving for Christmas.” But I think that a bicycle shop probably wouldn’t go for that line of advertising.

Well, time was getting on so I decided to end the day with a walk up Mount Victoria. Imagine my delight at seeing a woman with a huge bubble butt!

Well, what an eventful day I had.

Information

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I don’t have a lot of personal information on my web site. I’ve never felt the need for a bio page about me. There are certain pages on my site that have various bits of information about me, but nowhere is there a page with handy facts about moi.

I like it like that. It makes me seem more mysterious and exotic, y’know?

But that’s not the case with everyone on the web. So many personal web sites I come across have pages that detail the basics of the author’s life. Education, hobbies, likes and dislikes. It’s a cross between a badly written resume and those friendship books that were popular at school.

As loathe as I am to use this phrase, it so often is case of too much information. I don’t care that Shihad is totally your favourite band. I don’t care that on Thursday night you were really bummed out. As a wise rap artist once said, “keep it in your pants” – and off the web.

So why do people do this? Why do they reveal these personal, yet often mundane details of their life? What is it that possesses someone to upload the fact that on Saturday night he was listening to Mariah Carey & Westlife – Against All Odds (Take A Look At Me Now).mp3?

First, a semi-famous quote. It’s from the 1999 documentary “Home Page” which is about various people who put their life up on web. This is what Carl Steadman (semi-famous for, among other things, co-founding Suck.com, but you knew that, right?) said about why people put so much of their lives up on the web:

“Everyone’s looking for their Bobo. Bobo is that person that makes it all okay, and that’s what home pages are about. You’re looking for Bobo. It’s hard to say who Bobo is, or what Bobo is, or how exactly you’ll find Bobo. But maybe if you put up enough about yourself on the web, Bobo will find you.”

So the idea is that if you admit to listening to that Mariah Carey song, maybe someone will stumble across your web site, read that, see your picture (thoughtfully located at the top of every single page on the site), and think to herself, “Hey, that sounds like my kind of guy.” Then she’ll email you and you can meet up and if you’re really lucky she might show you her tits.

My web site has no bio section. I’m not going to tell you what my likes and dislikes are. You can try and figure out stuff about me from my writings, but the thing is, some stuff is so old that I don’t necessarily agree with what I’ve written anymore. Tricky, but I like it that way.