Robyn’s Secret Passage

Yesterday I was in the bathroom when I heard my neighbours come outside for a smoke. The husband was telling the wife about his exciting plans. He wanted to organise a gig in a park. He wanted to get a bunch of bands playing, as well as a reasonably well-known and successful pop band. There’d be a gold coin donation “at the gate” or “there’d be a collection bucket passed around”, and a hot dog stand. “We’d get the city council in on it,” he explained, so it would “be all legit”.

Obviously there’s more to organising an outdoor concert than just booking the bands and food. There’d stuff like the sound equipment, security, crowd safety, and other stuff that probably only seasoned professionals know about. But just from his excited rant, it did seem that he didn’t really know what he was talking about.

The wife could tell this. She never once responded with anything positive, but instead went to neutral responses like “Uh huh” and “Oh, right”. He kept repeating his idea, seeming to want a bigger, more encouraging response from her, but she remained distant, probably not quite wanting to tell him that his idea wasn’t all that solid. After he repeated his plans for the third time and again got a lack of response from her, he finished with, “well, I think it would be a really great idea and I reckon it would work really well,” almost as if he was saying what he wished she’d say.

I don’t normally put stuff in the pockets of my jeans, but yesterday I put a tube of lipstick in a pocket. Then today, when I was gathering up my clothes to put in the laundry basket, I was distracted and just put the jeans in the basket without checking the pockets.

When I picked up my washing from the Chinese laundry, the lady showed me the delightful sparkling dark golden smudges all over my clothes. Oh crap.

I’m going to have to retire a couple of tops, but fortunately my jeans aren’t too badly effected. The glitter is easy to get rid of, it’s the greasy base that’s going to be harder. I’m glad it was mostly fair cheap or old clothing, stuff like my gym gear that would have been replaced soon enough anyway.

But it really sucks to have to deal with a basket full of stained clothing.

As a pleasant distraction from the troubles of this world, here is a photo taken down at the local fruit shop:

The one thing I don’t like about long weekends is before and after all the non-conversation I have with various people in shops or other situations is either, “So, are you going anywhere for Labour weekend?” or “So, did you go anywhere for Labour weekend?”

I don’t have a beach house or even a tent, so as much fun as a sunny holiday would be, I find myself stuck in the city and unable to answer either of those questions in the affirmative. I guess it’ll all be over by next weekend.

I saw “Intolerable Cruelty” today. Instead of writing a review of it, I will rank the cinematic oeuvre of the Coen Brothers to give an idea of where it fits in for me.

1. O Brother, Where Art Thou
I love this movie so much. I think I saw it about six times at the movies, including once dubbed into French. It’s perpetually fresh and always enjoyable for me.

2. Fargo
I like how it takes the cliche of the bumbling small town detective, flips it and makes her the smartest character in the film. And how brilliant crimson blood looks on icy white snow.

3. The Man Who Wasn’t There
It’s a tale of karma, beautifully filmed in black and white. The moral being that you’ll never, ever get away with it.

4. The Hudsucker Proxy
I like this because of the screwball humour. Jennifer Jason Leigh vs Tim Robbins in stylish 1930s industrial tale.

5. Intolerable Cruelty
Hey, so it ends up fitting in the middle of all the Coen brother’s films. It was good story, with a next enough twist at the end. A bit of silliness, some genuinely funny moments and a touch of tenderness. But it did a drag a little, y’know.

6. Blood Simple
I’ve only seen this on a worn out old VHS copy, but the simple noirish tale was enough to get me hooked. I think I need to revisit it on gleaming DVD,

7. The Big Lebowski
I know lots of people love this film, but it never really did much for me. Especially John Goodman’s character. I would maybe watch this again if it was on TV.

8. Barton Fink
I’ve only seen this once, probably when it first came out, and I can’t remember much about it other than that I didn’t particularly enjoy it.

9. Raising Arizona
I’d heard so many good things about this film, then I finally saw it on DVD earlier this year and I was so bored that I stopped watching halfway through, and I hardly ever do that. It had its moments, but it failed to grab me.

10. Miller’s Crossing
Urgh, go away you stupid boring film.

Finally, I noticed this sentence in an article about body image in the Observer:

There is growing demand for operations which tighten the vagina in the hope of increasing sensation during intercourse; and no male inbox is complete without at least one offer to add ‘three inches to your length’.

It seems very likely that “male inbox” is meant to be “mail inbox” and that some sub-editor has mistakenly changed it thinking that somehow there are clever spammers out there that can send their penis enhancer spam to only male recipients. But then, considering the first part of the sentence, could it be the sub-editor thought that “male inbox” was slang for the aforementioned part of the female anatomy?

Oh, it’s so hard being a woman in the music industry.

I just saw an interview on C4 with Julia Deans and another guy from Fur Patrol. Ms Deans was wearing a really horrible, boxy jacket that made her look like a grey square with a fluffy red head. The interviewer moved onto asking about “Lydia”, so bits of the “Lydia” video were played. Part of the video showed the sleazy guy who’s sitting at a nightclub table across from the blonde Lydia. Just as that part of the video played, the interview cut back to Julia Deans. The sleazy guy in his sleazy jacket cut straight to Julia sitting there in her horrible jacket. Then, to make things worse, the “Lydia” video came back and showed Julia looking really good as the sarcastic, eye-rolling, pierced nightclub singer. That made the Julia of today not just look like a grey square, but like a homeless person who’s gone on a job skills course and has been loaned an ill-fitting jacket for their interview as a toilet cleaner. Yeah, life is tough.

Oh, and then there’s the ruckus surrounding Dicko’s comments regarding Paulini’s dress on Australian Idol. She looked, as Murray so excellent put it, like a polished brass potato. Dicko advised her to either dress more appropriately or lose some weight. It was pretty blunt advice, and probably could have been worded better, but it was good advice. Paulini was performing a Destiny’s Child song when she wore the dress, so she probably had Beyonce in mind, but Beyonce is svelte, Paulini is not. Paulini isn’t overweight, she doesn’t need to lose weight, but on the other hand, she doesn’t have the skinny-ass figure that is necessary to get away with looking stunning in the dress she wore.

I’ve read reactions in the Australian media to Dicko’s comment, and some have hailed it as a giant leap backwards in getting young women to feel good about their bodies. Other people seem to have interpreted it as him saying her only options were to cover her hideously fat body from head to toe, or to start starving herself, develop a devastating eating disorder, and to drag the young women of Australia down with her. Oh no!

Really, all Paulini needs is a copy of “What Not To Wear”.

Oh oh oh. Waikato bitter (maaaate) had a funny billboard with “Winter. It’s outstanding”, and below it the billboard had two round shapes sticking out, like nipples under a t-shirt. A woman from the Women’s Health Action Trust complained to the Advertising Standards Complaints Board because she felt that the ad was offensive to women, particularly breastfeeding women. The ASCB ruled that the billboard was suggestive, not definitive, and was not exploitive or degrading. Very good. But then, in the article about this in the Waikato Times, the WHAT complainer was quoted as saying, “we really don’t support breasts being used for advertising.” Oh, while we’re at it, let’s lobby to remove human beings from all advertising.

Drip III: Fixed

My landlord arranged for a roofing guy to come today. He showed up, I showed him where the leak was, he climbed up on the roof, found a couple of broken tiles, fixed them, and now when it rains I don’t hear water dripping in. Hooray! I’m still not sure about what has happened or will happen to all the water that’s in the ceiling. I suppose it’ll either find its way down to the ground or evaporate.

Teeth

I went to the dentist today. He comment, just like my old dentist did, about how healthy my teeth are. He told me about another patient of his who had about six root canals, and the thousands of dollars it cost her, and all the pain she had to endure, and therefore how fortunate I was.

I never used to regularly brush my teeth when I was little. I only started when I was about eight and I got a tiny filling in one of my molars. Since then I’ve only had other tiny fillings in my molars. I only brush my teeth once a day, first thing in the morning. I hate going to bed with a toothpaste flavour in my mouth, and I don’t like brushing after eating. I do chew gum for a little bit after I eat something that has bits that get stuck in my teeth and might use floss if there are any bits stuck. And that’s about it.

Of course, it didn’t stop one of my teeth chipping when I bit down on a fork earlier in the year. The dentist smoothed that off for me, and now my tongue has nothing to play with.

Oh no

The new Strokes video was just on TV. I hate them because I downloaded, um, I mean bought, um, or was given a copy to review, their new CD. I listened to it once and haven’t listened to it since. Then I saw the “12:51″ video and after a few seconds of seeing the Strokes doing their low key rock star thing, I melted and was ready to give my first-born son, my life savings and/or virginity to them.