meet the chairman

Last week my life was so boring I had to write about a movie I saw, but not this week. This week I don't even know where to start, so much has happened. There must have been a bottleneck in the cosmos or something, a kink in my hose of happening stuff.

First of all, I went to Wat Po. Wat Po is the famous Thai temple with the famous gigantic gold-leafed reclining Buddha in it. I took lots of pictures but my camera finally went to 7th heaven, so I can't post any pics. Anyway, it's typical that I'd start off the week so Zen, then spend the rest of it doing things that diametrically oppose the very foundation of Buddhism vis-a-vis the concept of desire as suffering and the rejection of material possessions as the path to enlightenment and all that jazz. Anyway.

Besides looking at the Buddha you can get a massage at Wat Po, because there's a proper massage school there. Luckily, Roget informed my massage lady in Thai that I had a sore back, so she could begin poking her spindly little fingers into my spinal muscles straight off the bat instead of wasting time with that relaxing shoulder rubbing baloney. In retrospect, it's quite possible he said something other than 'my girlfriend has a sore back'. Something like 'make fat farang girl squeal like stuck pig'.

Anyway, it hurt. She twisted my back into a pretzel shape and dug into my hamstrings and pushed her hands actually into my stomach to reach some back muscle, because your stomach bone's connected to your spine bone, apparently. I survived though, and the feeling in my legs is slowly returning. No, I feel good now. But at the time I kept thinking of Itchy & Scratchy.

Secondly, which is probably the biggest deal if you measure things monetarily, as I do, is the Mustang. This is really Roget's thing - my thing by association, though. It was quite surreal. Sunday night he's on the interweb drooling at cars, Monday night we're driving home (and suffering mild carbon dioxide poisoning) in a Mustang. It doesn't have seatbelts or a left windscreen wiper or any lining in the trunk or hazard lights or a handbrake or a working left window and we have to propel it with our feet like the Flintstones, but whatever. Mustang!



Thirdly, we went to an Indian wedding reception which had a twelve-tier, like five metre tall wedding cake (I'm not exaggerating - they cut the cake with a sword. A SWORD!), a powerpoint presentation of the wedding, a brazillion sari'd women in the Grand Ballroom of the Sheraton, free food and alcohol and plenty of disapproving looks at the two western women who must be sluts because you can see their necks/knees. Spent most of the night with Biddy down in the cocktail area where I got drunk and instead of asking for two waters, asked for two toilets.

Fourthly, Chairman Meow, ie. the bit where my blog devolves into daily pictures of and musings about my cat and what he's thinking and how he's really like a person and how cute he looks climbing up the curtains. I saw him at the cat society and since it was the week of parting with vast amounts of money, I decided there was something cool about being broke and hungry while your designer cat hides under the furniture oblivious to his $15 kibbles (no matter how many we throw at him).

I'm sure he'll start paying for himself in love and companionship as soon as I can extract him from under the sideboard. So far threatening him with torture hasn't worked, but I'm sure once we demonstrate to him with stuffed animals what we do to those who don't comply (strangulation, hanging, decapitation, destuffing etc) he's sure to come round. Isn't he cuuuuuuuuute? More pictures when my camera reincarnates as a new, better one (expected to occur sometime after pay day).



bye!

pretty biddy

...just saw the shrewish picture of us further down the page and put forth a convincing argument* for me to post a pretty one of us. So here 'tis. The rest of the new posting is just down a bit, GOD you figure it out!


*ie. hit me repeatedly in the eyes with the soy sauce bottle.

poseidon

This week it was my turn to choose the movie. Since returning from Aussieland, we've seen two him-films (hilms) at the cinema in a row: MI3, which I vowed to only see on pirated DVD but relented because we got a love seat) and Block 16, which is a cop one with Bruce Willis and Mos Def in it, where they fuck the system and blur the lines between right and wrong etc.

So I chose Poseidon. Obviously, it's based on The Poseidon Adventure of 1972 with a big fat Shelley Winters in it. It's one of my all-time favourite films - I remember cracking up my three best friends when I was 11 (sans flatulence-related joke) after one particularly momentous scene...

Cue Shelley Winters resurfacing after a tense 50-second underwater thing where she either saves someone or leads them all to the next bit before promptly keeling over with a heart attack.

Ernest Borgnine: (something like) (crying) The lady had guts!
me: She sure did!
my friends: uproarious laughter

So imagine my dismay when I realise that (PLOT SPOILING) there's no Shelley Winters character! And therefore no opportunity for me to have current companion in hysterical fits of laughter!! With a 20 year-old joke!!!

Anyway, reinforcing the fact that overweight older ladies regardless of rockingness have no currency in modern cinema isn't where the pissing off of me by spoiling an old classic ends. Not only is there no Shelley Winters character, the whole main cast has been reinvented for today's lobotomised movie goers. Yes, there's still a little kid you constantly wish violent and painful death upon, but THERE'S NO UPSIDE-DOWN LAVATORY SCENE! That was like the second-best scene (Shelley Winters death scene ranking #1). (The water pouring into the main ball room, panicked people scrambling up a curtain to the mezzanine but not making it scene ranking #3.)

Minority groups are covered by Richard Dreyfus(s?): an aging suicidal homoseck who you know is gay because he has a subtly camp TEN CARAT diamond stud in his left ear, makes a speech about being dumped by his boyfriend and calls the waiter 'gorgeous'. Then there's the fiesty Catholic Latino chicka stowing away to New York, strangely devoid of any Spanish accent, never even saying 'que?' once and sporting trashy accessories a la Madonna, circa (pron: theerca) Like A Prayer.

Aaaanyway, other things that shat me were: Fergie's death not actually depicted nor precedent to her singing; the damsels in distress attempting to manouver through fire and flood wearing taffeta evening gowns; Emily Rossum; the ballast system thing (please don't bore/confuse me with the actual details of ships/physics); Kevin Dillon's character being as multi-dimensional as one of my third-grade Magnadoodle creations; and the last scene where they don't all get their faces chopped off by the gigantic propellor.

Oh, oh, and this: Kurt Russell leading his shell-shocked charge through a bunch of charred bodies, pontificating the effects of a flashfire on one's respiratory system, ergo: "it burns the lungs like rice paper". Lovely image, Captain Sensitive.

In Thai news, the flash floods are starting, mum sent me enough 'personal care items' to stem the flow of every suffragette in history (even on their heaviest days), and Dallus is being really demanding still.

And last but not least, Jon goes to Cairns next week for some big film festival thing. It doesn't make much sense to me to have it somewhere so remote, like all tropical and rainy and shit. Why don't they host it in Europe, France for instance? Meh, what would I know.

I also coined a new word this week, which someone has probably already coined in terms of actually putting it on a coin somewhere. Faux-it-all: n. like a know-it-all but without the actual knowledge. One who fauxs to the extreme just to impress you, when ironically everything they say just makes them look more of a dick, usually - and unfortunately for them - because what they're fauxing about is one of your specialties.

the end

secret women's business

an unscheduled post for the ladies...

if you ever plan on coming to Thailand and think your trip might coincide with some untimely period-having please be advised that nowhere here sells tampons. Nowhere. I'm exaggerating - big stores do sell tampons. One brand of. One horrifically generic brand of hermetically sealed (as in, plastic wrapper shows no tab, no seam, no visible entry point or clue as to how the tampon even got into the wrapper much less a hint of how to get THE FUCKER OUT), fluffy, structurally unsound, ribbed (for my pleasure?), Collins-class submarine-shaped cotton plugs.

understandably, this recent discovery has caused a few nervous breakdowns but hopefully by sharing my pain I can lessen that of the rest of the oppressed sex.

psst, Thailand:

and the winner is... sydney

hi y'all, I'm back in The Land Of Sweating to Death now and I type this as the mercury hits seven hundred - quite a contrast to the minus zero Kelvin Melbourne treated us* with last week.

I know you all like to read about and see yourselves on my blog, so I'm going to include everyone I ever did anything with while I was in Australia (from the last week obv, from birth might take me a bit long). I didn't take very many pics which is too bad, but that was because I was busy with my mini DV forcing people al-jazeera style to record final messages for me. Which, just like al-j tv, turned out to be disturbing yet entertaining.

The flight out of BKK was uneventful - Emirates hosties have silly hats, the food was good and generous in portion, the man sitting next to us was an interesting Iraqistani and from all reports no snakes were present on the plane. Overall, a success.

On arriving in Sydney in flimsy summer attire, we ran as fast as our left-veering trolleys would allow us to get a cab to engage in the usual crap about where we just came from how long we staying where what for holiday business pity you don't stay longer yeah we're a bit tired so can you please just stop talking to us FOR FUCK'S SAKE. Had a sleep. Rang Aarron eighty billion times (voicemail, bitch - have you heard of it?) Visited Doc and his lovely lady, V. Spoke to Jo to arrange a lo-key gathering at the Dolphin - a civilised thing.

Fast forward to midnight and everyone is completely wasted. The Collider crew - who do the design for Dallus - were prostrate on the floor in front of rage and spilling beers on themselves; Aarron, Jo and I gathered 'round the dining room table for gossip and... stuff; Roobs, Dom, Padstow and Mon rocked up a bit later to eat left-over food (mon), complain about bad sushi (paddy), do the dishes (Dom) and just generally appear confused about things (Roobs); and Kathy pinballed from person to person with a seemingly never ending supply of conversation.



The moving pictures are much more exciting - as you'll find out once I release the video evidence (currently in post-production). At some stage Ben Ward appeared with some strange couple of no real importance to the story (or anything else) and oh! Sarah came home, too, with a boy, and we were giving him sex tips and yelling things at him like "remember to take your socks off!" and other inappropriate and embarrassing bits of 'advice'.




Come dawn, most people had sneaked out or passed out, beneath beach towels or in Riverdance poses, and the rude German girl had left and Roget and Roobs were in the kitchen baking themselves and smoking cigars (!?) and Kathy Baker was sunk into the bean chair swigging directly from the Absolute bottle (much to the other Ms Baker's disapproval). About then those left standing headed to Rose Bay.

What transpired over the next few hours isn't completely clear. We sat around, we blathered incoherently, drank, anaesthetised ourselves (some more than others) and I delivered two powerful lectures - one on the Branch Dividians (the Waco Sevvie nutjobs - a rather objective dissertation I thought, even though the fault clearly lies with the ATF), and one on Theodore Kaczynski, more popularly known as the unabomber. The fact that my diatribes were so warmly received was due less to my commanding orative skills and more to the comatose state of my audience at the time. They were like that when I started, though, so I know it's no reflection of me.

After all that, there was Aarron's b'day dinner, a large amount of packing and moving (props to the Roget3000 removal machine I brought with me) and some hanging out with mum in Campbelltown. We went to Melbourne for some R&R after that, but none of you probably want to hear about it cos you weren't there and GOD how boring would that be. But here's a pic anyway. Aw.



Stay tuned for the director's cut of Jo's House. Scarier than The Omen III.

*Heretofore, all words that would suggest a collective me refer to Roger, my manslave, whose aliases include Roget (with a French accent), Ferrero (as in Ferrero Roche - an obvious connection, really), Fez (for short) or just 'hey you'. That's him in the background on the bridge with the black jeans and blue backpack.

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