Robyn's Secret Passage

My wallet is in a state of disarray. When I bought some milk from the dairy this morning, I got one of those newfangled 50 cent coins with the change. “Here is a new coin,” the dairy man said to me in case I was about to erupt in rage and accuse him of short-changing me.

So now the delicate size-based hierarchy of my wallet has been upset. The 10 cents are poking their tongues out at the little 50 cent and have declared that it’s actually only worth 15 cents.

The tuataras on the 5 cents are denying their impending extinction, pointing out they’ve been around for 225 million years and ain’t plannin’ on goin’ nowhere.

The kiwi on the 20 is also refusing to leave, noting that his extinction has been predicted since 1990 and yet he’s still around and anyone who says otherwise is a jealous hater.

The Endeavour on the new 50 cent says that even though he is smaller, he still has the same number of sails and can still sail the seas of colonial oppression, thanks.

The $1 and $2 coins are strangely quiet, perhaps recognising that it’s best for them to say nothing at this stage.

Obviously this is going to require a bit of tact and diplomacy to handle. I’m thinking of getting the Queen (the sensible, middle-aged version on coins from the mid-’80s to mid-’90s) to step in as a mediator, otherwise I’m going to be stuck using EFTPOS for everything.

I ♥ synonym spam. It’s the kind where certain words that trigger anti-spam filters have been replaced with synonyms to try and bypass it. In this case it sort of worked. It got through the anti-spam filtering on the mail server, but my email client recognised it as spam.

But I’m glad, because this one is brilliant.

just wanted to see if you were still wanting the doctrine of getting slim?

I definately am, that is why i am so gay i hit upon

It was super convincingly having someone to help me out.

wildly. fluently I was close
Japan Nobs, by shopping dint
have meat Paul for the clergy and

Carson

Thanks for sharing, gayboy Carson.

Because it is Saturday and there is nothing else to do.

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People hassle Britney Spears and say she is dumb and a bad mother, but actually I think she is actually quite smart. She and I have a lot in common because I am actually only exactly three months older than her and I don’t think that is a coincidence because I believe in fate. Anyway, here is why Brtiney and I are soul sisters.

1. We were born *exactly* three months apart. Yes, that’s right Britney was born on 2 Demcember 1981 and I was born on 2 March 1982. This means we both grew up in the same cultural environment and had similar experiences as “chidren of the 80’s”. But I consider myself forunute that unlike Britney my birthday is not near Christmas lol

2. We both liked Mickey Mouse as children. Britney was Mouseketeer and on the Mickey Mouse Club. I had a Mickey Mouse soft toy that my uncle brought me back from Hong Kong and I still sleep with it on my bed to this day. I also have Mickey Mouse coffee mug that I have my coffee in!!!

3. We both went out with a guy called Justin when we were teens. Yes, this is true. When I was 15 I went out with this guy called Justin Watkins. Like with Britney and Justin Timberlak, this was also my first boyfriend, but sadly our relationship did not last and he was actually two-timing me with this girl called Carmel and so I dumped him.

4. We both like singing and dancing. I did jazz ballet and comtemporary tap lessons from age 6 to 13. I had to stop when I broke my foot in form two on a school camp bush walk :( But Now I am thinking of starting again and doing salsa dancing because I heard that is good for weight loss. I also have been singing and I auditioned for the first NZ Idol but they told me I was too “theatrical”, whatever that means!!!

5. We are both proud mothers. I am a proud mother of Ceylla (4) and Jack (14 mths) and stepmum to Brydan (10). And Britney has one baby boy and another baby on the way and is stepmum to two gorgeous girls.

6. We both have had relationship issues. I broke up with Ceylla’s dad when I was pregnant with her, but then I met my current partner Simon (my soulmate) who is everything you could want in a man but hand’s off he’s mine lol. I met him on Trade Me and he did me the honour of marrying me this year and now Ceylla has a new dad and a little baby brother. Britney had trouble with Justin but now she has met her soulmate Kevin Ferderline.

7. We both like frappochino’s!!! Yes whenever I go to St Lukes or in town you will always see me with a frappachino just like Britney! I loooove strawberry’s and cream ones. Sooooo naughty but sooo good!!! And sometimes I walk down the street with my sunglasses on and I feel just like Britney.

So when people hassle her, well I just think they’re jealous and if you look at Britney you can see that she is really just an ordinary girl like you or me and is actually quite normal!. And she is my role model and heroin.

I saw Ben Elton performing stand-up at the Aotea Centre tonight. It was a really enjoyable night’s comedy. I want to attempt to describe the comedy, but I won’t because I know that my retelling a) won’t be funny, and b) will probably ruin the jokes for future viewers of the DVD (there’d better be a DVD).

I will say, however, that it was politically themed, but reasonably clever, and still with a few good ol’ knob gags. He even made a mother-in-law joke, which seemed to be most subversive of the lot, given that Ben Elton was one of the subjects (and cover stars) of Roger Wilmut’s 1989 book “Didn’t You Kill My Mother-in-Law?“, about the young comedians of the 1980s who dragged British comedy out of the sexist old-man comedians telling mother-in-law jokes and into a brash, rude, politicised new era.

But what affected me the most were his observations on consumption and size. I mean, we kind of knew that everything was getting bigger and that we are consuming more, but since when, Mr Elton asked, did we start selling coffee in pints? It’s true! A Starbucks grande size is 16 fl oz, otherwise known as one pint. When milk used to be sold in glass bottles, that was a pint. Now we drink almost that much milk in one go in a latte.

Entertainment, education and knob gags. It made the $60 ticket price well worth it.

At the moment I am officially celebrating two things in the world of pop:

1. The 10th anniversary of the release of the Spice Girls’ “Wannabe”
Me and my beatnik friends weren’t sure what to make of this when it came out. I mean, they were, like, a “manufactured” pop group, and therefore evil (but no one was really sure why), but this song was insanely catchy and we all secretly liked it but no one was really sure why.

Then the Girls went on to release 12 singles, five of which were absolute scorchers. I mean, if “Who do you think you are” is not the shit, then surely “2 become 1″ is.

They spawned a slew of imitators, but no one really managed to follow in their footsteps. They can also be blamed for the “Idol” phenomena. Oh, and it turns out that while they originally came together via an audition, they ended up being as shrewd and controlling as any good follower of Madonna should. Zig-a-zig ah.

2. The release of the first single of Justin Timberlake’s second solo album
I was alerted to the release of SexyBack by a noticed on MySpace (Justin is my MySpace friend!!!). I listened to it and immediately noted that it was in a similar vein to “Like I love you”, but it has swear words in it (He says the MF word!!!).

The name has a double meaning – as well as a straight translation as “nice arse”, Justin’s also on a mission to bring sexy back, because goodness know there’s been a lack of mansex from the pop charts. (Actually, there has, so maybe he’s on to something).

The new Justin album is called “FutureSex/LoveSounds”, leading PopJustice.com to worry if perhaps Justin’s spacebar had broken. One is very excited about this.

Interested parties can out examine photographic evidence of the Great Blend.

Seeing them reminds me of when I got up on stage it was suddenly a bit hot under the lights, so I took off my jacket. Then suddenly it got cold, but by then the discussion had started so I didn’t want to disrupt things by putting my jacket back on. Also, I had a bottle of water, but didn’t want to put it on top of the table, so I was holding it underneath and fiddling with the lid. Yeah, there’s some exclusive behind-the-scenes gossip pour vous.

Oh, and there’s also this one of me and MySpace Matt posing. How embarrassing.

I had a rather good time at the Karajoz Great Blend last night. I arrived to hear that due to the fog at Wellington airport, guest speaker danah boyd’s flight had delayed, but that she was – probably – in the air.

I had a sausage (organic) and a beer (Monteith’s Golden) and said hi to Moira, James, Mark, Amanda and Darren and soon enough danah arrived and the evening’s events got underway.

First on the programme was a screening of Star Lords, a video mash-up involving bits of Star Wars cut together with Lord of the Rings to make it seem like they were fighting each other, and then there was some breakdancing, lolz. I dunno. I don’t think I’m enough of a fan of either of those films to really get it.

They showed a few other clips including one that was a montage of American flags and possibly made a political statement, but may have also just been a guy mucking around with editing software. Either way, the New Zealand flag says more to me about my life.

Next up was danah boyd, who gave a brief version of her “Why teens heart MySpace” speech. The thing that surprised most of the audience was that most American towns now have curfews for teens, meaning they can’t go out on the streets after around 10pm. They can’t hang out at the mall or outside the 7-Eleven, so they hang out on MySpace.

After the break it was time for the panel discussion, so I took to the stage. Russell gave me a really nice introduction, running the gamut of my interweb life, including the David Hasselhoff Experience to Sensible Erection. WTF.

I was joined on the panel by danah, Peter McLennan, Justin Zhang and late addition MySpace Matt who has – at last count – 5496 MySpace friends, and is a caricature of a MySpace emo boy. I’d surely hate him if he weren’t so open about his, well, fakeness.

The panel discussion was mostly centred around MySpace. There hadn’t been much of a Q&A session after danah’s speech, so people still had plenty of questions for her. However I got to talk about how internet communities are different now to how they were then, and also how people still use IRC these days, but less because stuff like MSN and AIM are easier to use. Not to mention texting. I was a good discussion, but there was a lot of stuff I didn’t get to say, so I might write that up later.

Afterwards SJD played, but I kind of wandered out of the main hall and didn’t get around to wandering back in. Instead I had a nice chat to various people I’ve known online and offline for years.

I ended up going to a cold Chinese restaurant with Morgan, Claire, Lin and Simon and had some rather good food and conversation. (I came away from it with an excellent idea for a novel, so now I just have to get around to writing it.)

It was all a good way to spend a chilly winter night in Auckland. Arigato, Mr Brown for organising another great Great Blend.