Categories: Fun stuff

20 Sep 2009, Comments (12)

What Mr Bucket did next

Author: Helen

As of Monday after next, SO no longer has a job.

He hasn’t been a casualty of the financial crisis. He no longer has a job because things are going so well. Mr Bucket sales are through the roof and he can’t keep up.

You’ll remember that Mr Bucket started Going Off back in March. I forgot to blog about the Rose Street Market fashion-show-with-models for L’Oreal Fashion Week. Which was a whole lot of fun – see the ultra-professional Bucket segment here. Ahem.

He’s started running the stall on St Kilda Esplanade on Sundays and has been included in this book.

Wolf at the Door, a new place in Hepburn Springs, bought a fuckton of T shirts and were sold out by the weekend after that. He also had a writeup in Men’s Style mag – no link for that.

Week after next Mr Bucket moves into his new studio in an old factory in Brooklyn, next to an artisan associated with the Wolf at the Door, who runs a bronze casting foundry.

Oh, and he has bought this thing, which is really cute, but the exciting part for me is that our family mitsu-bashi isn’t the Bucket car any more and I get to do things on weekends like a normal person!

So, life is set to change. It seems all go for the Buckets and unusual and exciting things are happening all the time. SO has his books all in order and is doing his own super and insurance and everything properly. I’ll be looking at the Dow and the Futsi and the All Ordinaries with more than usual anxiety in the next twelve months and hoping we don’t have this W-shaped recession that some party poopers are talking about.

Excuse me while I just go and hyperventilate into this brown paper bag.

26 Aug 2009, Comments (7)

Hey, Chris, about that Miocene cat…

Author: Helen

I felt it was missing something.

Miocene fossil of cat footprint with LOLcat caption O HAI\

There, fixed.

14 Aug 2009, Comments (6)

Lovelace and Babbage

Author: Helen



A big hat tip, or a doff rather, with a big Victorian-era hat – something tall and full of mercury— to Nabs, who has sent me a link to the most wonderful thing on the entire Internets.

No, not the guy who can catch a laptop in his buttocks, although that is definitely up there. I mean the Lovelace and Babbage graphic novel / blog.

Lovelace and Babbage is a steampunk cartoon blog started by the wonderful Sydney Padua, who describes herself as “an animator, story artist, and tiresome bore [yeah, right] working mostly in visual effects in London.” She’s a friend of Suw Charman, the originator of Ada Lovelace Day, which led to “Wouldn’t it be hee-larious if there was a comic about Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage fighting crime? Thanks, I’ll be here all week!”

Start here, with Lovelace: The Origin.

Follow the links at the top bloggy-style, and enjoy.

Lovelace and Babbage, by Sydney Padua

10 Jul 2009, Comments Off

Friday Earworm: Other peoples’ earworms, and other interesting things

Author: Helen

My earworm of the week has been Near You by Dwight Yoakam. But I can’t find a YouTube for that, so I’m posting links to interesting youtubes other people have found lately.

Pavlov’s Cat links to a chilling piece of Southern Gothic by Bobbie Gentry. I’m loving the set design. The little guitar is interesting. Words and chords here.

Boynton shows us Masterchef, 1941. One of those young gels is going to have to do a pressure test, for sure.

And Tigtog gives us a typical hospital emergency scene, featuring doctors who are, er… very highly… trained.

Update: How could I have forgotten this? Erk. Double erk. But as Barista would say, “strangely compelling“.

25 May 2009, Comments (9)

Cack

Author: Helen

Next time you are sitting at the computer (make sure you have the sound turned up), and a dear child comes in and says something like “I can’t find any SOCKS!!”, click on the tab / extra window which you have opened with this link, and click the big blue button. Clutch your head Edvard Munch style.
 
 
H/T: Fetch me my Axe.

23 May 2009, Comments (7)

Earworm of the week

Author: Helen

From a most unlikely source.



Flor-de-lis
Todas As Ruas Do Amor
Composer(s) Pedro Marques, Paulo Pereira
Lyrics writer(s) Pedro Marques
Eurovision Song Contest Semi Finals from the vast Olympiyski Stadium in Moscow, Russia.
 
Let it put you in your happy place. I’ve been to a renewal of vows (for two people with the health cards stacked against one of them) and a funeral in the last month, and not a dry eye in the place for either. Emotions are raw. This song makes me tear up, but in a good way.

16 Apr 2009, Comments (5)

This has left me with a bad taste in my mouth

Author: Helen

Across the US, tens..er…of thousands of republican voters have been participating in “Tea Party” protests, because Boston Tea Party and taxes are bad. Just think of your primary school American history and join the dots. (April 15 is the deadline for tax returns in the US.)

Unfortunately, Fox News and the right-wing astroturf organisations which promoted the Tea Parties have decided to try to be all colloquial an’ appeal to the younger generation an’ stuff, so they have referred to themselves as “Teabaggers” and the protests as “Teabagging”.

Much hilarity has ensued.

P.S. Just for comparison, now that you’ve probably seen these entitled babies on the news making fools of themselves, you might be interested in a real (non-astroturf) protest, at real risk to themselves, by genuinely courageous people who deserve our support.

2 Apr 2009, Comments (9)

Walkin’ back to Happiness

Author: Helen

The AGE: “The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has begun distancing himself from his controversial internet censorship policy in what one internet industry engineer has dubbed “the great walkback of 2009″.
 

 

He laid aside his foolish pride, learned the truth from tears everyone he cried.

Of course, it’s another example of where a politician revises a bad decision and someone who wanted that outcome nevertheless mocks him, for doing a backflip, or a backpedal, or in this case a walkback, which is an artefact of an old software language. IT humour, hurghhh hurgh hurghhhh. Hilarious. POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT: UR DOING IT RONG. But I guess he just couldn’t resist coming out with something so side-splitting.

Helen looks very Amy Winehouse in this clip. Mess up that scary, scary beehive and apply the thick upswept kohl eye makeup and you’d have doppelgangers. The resemblance doesn’t end there, either. They’re both London girls from vaguely similar backgrounds and they both started performing very young, but while Amy’s crashing and burning, Helen only looks in danger of perishing from wholesomeness.

Never mind. The Clean Feed is dead: Let’s talk, hep cats! Work that tweed jacket.

1 Apr 2009, Comments (6)

Writing from the right side of the brain

Author: Helen

Black Dust Dancing - Tracy Crisp, Wakefield Press

A friend of mine, who was a jewellery maker and silversmith, decided she needed to brush up on her hand drawing technique and bought a book called Drawing on the right Side of the Brain. As I remember (this is a while back) the book used exercises like “‘upside down drawing’, ‘blind contour’ and ‘modified contour’ drawing. A whole chapter is devoted to negative space drawing”. It approached drawing in a way that was diametrically opposed to my then idea of a technique that started mostly with outlines. That’s as close a simile as I can find to describe Tracy Crisp’s writing. In the Ozblogosphere, we know Tracy as Thirdcat.

Black Dust Dancing is Tracy Crisp’s first novel. It’s set in a provincial town dominated by a lead smelter, a blokey setting but the women in the novel are kept firmly front and centre.

Oh, and I’d like to know – as the mother of two primary school-aged boys, how does Tracy get the voice and manner of a teenage girl so exactly? It’s uncanny.

Deborah Strange Land:

I have clear visual images of Suzie the hairdresser, and Vicki the doctor’s receptionist, and Libby the mother-in-law, which I have not because Tracy wastes words in drawn-out descriptions, but because I have a sense of the sort of people they are, and then just a few words are enough to flesh out their physical realisation.
…The action comes in conversations and small movements, the little actions and pauses of everyday life. They all build together, piece by piece…

Piece by piece: if you’ve read Tracy’s blogopera, Adelaide Sprawls, you’ve experienced the way she builds a world this way. I loved Adelaide Sprawls, and it frustrated the hell out of me, because the vignettes were like pieces of a vast jigsaw that’s only just begun, with a smattering of pieces in the centre and one or two out on each side, with no bigger picture visible. I was eager to get my hands on Black Dust Dancing but I wondered whether I’d love it or chuck it across the room, unable to understand What in Hell Is Going On. Well, reader, you’ll have a pretty good idea what goes on in this novel, but you need to pay attention. It has the courage of its convictions, but it’s not going to yell at you. There are some story strands that are murkier than others, and there is a point where things do get murkier and more obscure, then tail off. Like real life.

Black Dust Dancing is a story you’re shown, not told, as Deborah says, by the little actions and pauses- the negative space- of everyday life. Jokes, complaints, gestures, eavesdropped gossip and asides. It seems to deal in little things, but out of these little things, big things grow.

12 Mar 2009, Comments (19)

Mr Bucket goes off

Author: Helen

Mr Bucket the microbusiness went orf over the Christmas period and still seems to be chugging along quite happily despite the dreaded GFC.

He sells a lot of t shirts to tourists and asks them to send photos of themselves wearing them in furrin places. My favourite: Transylvania.

Mr Bucket goes to Transylvania

AND! Bucket movie.



This was a real family effort with Mr Bucket’s film student niece behind the camera and Mrs Bucket on drums, soon-to-be-brother in law on guitar and recording console. (Please don’t judge me too harshly for that high hat, it was on a borrowed electronic drum kit, which is a sullen and uncooperative creature).

AND!!…
Melbourne L’Oreal Fashion Week is coming to the Rose Street Market to set up a runway to model the stallholders’ fashions. With real emaciated models and everything. If you think the bucket look is not going to catch on, well, just look at this then! (H/T: Blurb from the Burbs.) That’s happening on March 21 (Saturday).

AND!!…
I was downing a few with a friend in Lane’s Edge cafe in Bourke street, the one which has hosted a few grogblogs, and across the laneway I spotted a trendy young thing wearing a Vote Bucket T shirt.

Surely world domination can’t be far away.

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