Demeter Fragrances

Found these while googling for perfumes that won't make me sneeze.



Demeter Fragrances = quirky everyday scents.

Some of the more interesting scents are: Snow, Pink Lemonade, Christmas Tree, New Zealand, Mildew, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and my personal fav, Laundromat (though as awesome as they sound, I'm holding out for Alaska)

They can be found at http://www.demeterfragrance.com/ but unfortunately, they don't ship outside the US of A because they smell. Literally.

Isabel Lucas

I love Isabel Lucas' style, particularly the assortment of vintage dresses she owns. She's so anti-Hollywood, its nice to see someone going for coffee in something other than metre-high heels and minimal clothing.



I hope her career extends beyond recognition for being that "robot chick from transformers," mainly because she's Australian and this country's hope for producing good actors/actresses died with Heath Ledger last year.

Food, Glorious Food

I was commissioned to shoot a wedding yesterday. Because I don't like desserts (I know, there's something wrong with me - I blame it on some psychological dessert-related childhood trauma) I spent most of the reception taking pictures of all the food:

Birthday

In light of my upcoming birthday, I put together a list of things I want and as usual, instead of wanting things that might, oh I dunno, increase productivity or at least motivate me to do something beneficial for my future, all I find myself wanting is the first season of Medium, floral Doc Martens, a lomo fisheye and this awesome Salvador Dali clock:

July Playlist

Praise You by Fatboy Slim

Still my favorite music video ever. Spike Jonze is awesome.

Probably the best petition ever

This morning I stumbled on this petition:


and possibly even more amusing was the signatures list:

Today begineth..

OPERATION don't kill these pansies like all previously-owned goldfish (I think about you every alternating Tuesday dear Glaedr/Shruikan/Hannah Jr/Harry Osborn II)

Here is a picture of aforementioned pansies (and didn't I get funny looks carrying these babies home.)

I also managed to score Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment at Borders for a mere $9.95! So long, Angus & Roberston, no longer will I be perusing your terribly catalogued shelves & puke-stained carpeting!

Terminator Salvation made me lose my faith in humanity

Okay. It wasn't that bad. If you're a die hard Terminator fan (check!) and you're willing to remain ignorant of the little things, then I guess TS wasn't such a bad movie. However, as I am generally quite vocal about films that disappoint the pants off of me, I have compiled (yet again) a fun list of plotholes to share:

- So Kyle Reese is the seventeen-year-old father of thirty-year-old John Connor. Yeah, I bet that makes for some interesting family dinner conversations in the Resistance base. (John: So Kyle.. do you think, in maybe ten years, you would let me send you back in time to your inevitable death to impregnate my mother with me? Please? I'll be your best friend?)

- How on Earth John Connor managed to infiltrate the Skynet HQ without ONE machine noticing him is beyond me. And when it came to evacuating/blowing up the base, there was only two machines there to stop them? Oh hai Skynet, if you're really smart enough to annihilate the entire human race you should really schedule machine vacation time better

- I was also mildly impressed that he managed to hack into the software with his super charged phone software. Can you say.... iphone?

- The Terminator with the bandanna! 'Nuff said.

- So... the Resistance is holed up underground in a dirty base surrounded by forest with cameras, guard towers, a river and a mine field, yet their airspace is on an open field. Might as well put a neon sign saying "attack here!"

- Did Sony hoard all their plasmas in a fallout shelter or something? Seriously, did anyone see how many LCD screens they had? Why bother fighting? Let's just twitter Skynet and ask them to end this war!

- Kyle Reese was #1 on the kill list. So the machines captured him, threw him into a cell to be eventually grabbed by a Terminator and put into a machine to be killed. When did Terminator become James Bond?

- Same goes for John Connor. CGI Arnie picked him up and threw him about five times before actually attempting to kill him. Remember the good old days when Terminators actually terminated their targets? They might as well call them Throwinators, considering they didn't kill one person. Oh, James Cameron where have you been all my life.

- John Connor sounded like Batman. And Batman sounded like an angry Christian Bale. I had my fingers crossed he would go away and come back and taaa daa ... Batman would go all American Psycho on the Terminators. Or at least have a screaming tirade "Do you just walk around blowing up humanity all 'da da da da daaaa?' Do you call yourself a professional?!"

- Probably the most crucial point - how is this future like the original future shown in the first T1 - with the lasers and the big machines crushing skulls on the ground and the utterly doomed humanity? Yes, yes, its an alternate future, but its kind of sad that it doesn't have the same terror to it that it once did. I kept thinking I would happy to live in the ruins of LA amongst patrolling terminators if it was with Kyle Reese. ;)

Why Music Matters

This is c+p'd from Amanda Palmer's blog

Why Music Matters
Karl Paulnack, Director, Music Division
The Boston Conservatory

Dr. Karl Paulnack’s Welcome Address to parents of incoming students, September 2004

“One of my parents’ deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician… I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I might be more appreciated… I still remember my mother’s remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school. She said, “You’re wasting your SAT scores!” On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And they loved music: they listened to classical music all the time. They just weren’t really clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the “arts and entertainment” section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it’s the opposite… Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.

One of the first cultures to articulate how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you: the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.

One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940 and imprisoned in a prisoner-of-war camp.

He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose, and fortunate to have musician colleagues in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist. Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.

Given what we have since learned about life in the Nazi camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture — why would anyone bother with music? And yet even from the concentration camps we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn’t just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, “I am alive, and my life has meaning.”

The responsibility I will charge your sons and daughters with is this: “If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you’d take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at 2 AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you’re going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.

“Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music, I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that’s what we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives.”

----

By the way, I saw Star Trek the other day and it was awesome!

Post Secret

I love these quirky postcards from PostSecret

"Stimulating" the economy

A few days ago, I learnt that I'm not the only person in the world who thinks the word "stimulate" is an inappropriate word to describe repairing the current financial crisis.

Whenever I hear the word stimulation, I really can't help but giggle. Of course, I had always pinned it down to my emotional immaturity, but last week, I discovered that other people were of the same frame of mind.

Take this almost-fake scenario involving someone who may or may not have been me:

Person: Good old Rudd, stimulating the economy by giving out free cash. Finally, I can pay off my ferrari.
Other person: Ha, stimulate the economy... more like STIMULATE MY PANTS.
(silence ensues)

A certain friend of mine who sleeptalks in Spanish was telling me that whenever one of her co-workers gets their Rudd money, they walk into work yelling "I just got stimulated!" It's amusing, these little things, but it really makes you wonder: was there really no other word more suitable to describe solving the economy other than "stimulate?" I'm pretty sure I can think of a hundred topics of which the word "stimulate" would be much more appropriate and none of them involve the economy. At all. (wink wink, nudge nudge)

I guess there's always the idea that "stimulate" euphemizes this global shindig, by making it seem less harsh. That I can understand - stimulating the economy doesn’t sound quite as bad as “trying to escape from the collective grave we dug ourselves.”

Anyway, I'm going to stop writing and start baking, but I'll probably add a thousand edit points later on.

Stimulating read, no?

PS. For non Australian readers (unlikely! but anyway..) our Prime Minister Kevin "K-Rudd" Rudd is handing out cash as a short-term solution for our finance problems. It's a nice gesture, putting our country into further debt, but if I think I know Australians (and I'm pretty sure, I do!) I know that 90% of people went to the pub or put deposits on cars.

Synecdoche, New York

A month ago, I watched Charlie Kaufman's latest brainchild Synecdoche, New York and have been meaning to blog about it, but never found the words to describe it.

In fact, I still don't have any words I feel are befitting of its genius, other than "wowesome" and "synecdocool" which really.. aren't words at all.

So I'll just leave you with some pictures.








"Now it is waiting and nobody cares. And when your wait is over this room will still exist and it will continue to hold shoes and dresses and boxes and maybe someday another waiting person. And maybe not. The room doesn't care either."

Education

"Too much of current education is concerned with rote learning that has little relationship to real problems and real life."

While pondering the meaning of life today (cough), I found myself asking this very same question. Which I read off of a newspaper.

But in all honesty, how much of today's education is applicable to real life situations and less to impractical/social situations? Here is normally where I would use a valid example, but it’s a pretty well known fact that I have few friends and using one in this topic would be akin to tying a noose around my neck and saying “swing me!”

So, for argument's sake, let's use Joe Kerr. Now Joe was great at Biology at school. He kicked academic ass in most of his subjects and he liked cutting things up. Joe decided to study medicine and become a doctor. He aced all the university textbook crap and was doing great until he started on his prac, where he realised "(Oh shit!) I have no compassion or people skills," and was inherently sadistic at heart. He later went on to become Batman's nemesis.

A slightly more relevant example: I know someone who got a high OP, yet can’t cook anything that isn’t microwaved, has no appreciation for the aesthetic, and doesn’t know what “circumstance” means. I could never have an enjoyable conversation with said person because I know it would shit me to tears of their obvious ignorance and stupidity. Of course, this person could consider the same thing of me.

There are many different types of intelligence and most of the time, school only teaches you the one they think matters. You can cram as much as you can while you're there and ace all your subjects, but in the long run, it doesn’t teach you to be logical, and it doesn’t prepare you for the real world.

Anyway, I guess my point is that there’s a massive divide in concern to the association of textbook theory and practical application. Does knowing random facts make you smart? No, it makes you sometimes-witty. Does writing a blog make you sound clever? No, it just makes you sound like an opinionated idiot with a penchant for Batman metaphors.

At the end of the day, all you can do is learn all you can and hope it is somehow relevant to real life.

EDIT: I liked high school, I really did. But after being out of school for two years, I guess I was hoping on more fonder memories than fun lunchtimes, and sitting in the library drawing/reading and listening to The Hush Sound. I really don't think I learnt anything at all... well, other than the fact that I learnt that I didn't learn anything at all.

Six beds better than yours

Although I am very well aware that I have surpassed the age at which possessing a bunk bed is the height of cool, I couldn't help but fawn over a few of these babies:




My personal favorites are the Uffizi (3rd image) and the Soho Twin Bed (4th), though I do think the kid's bunks are very cute. I love the practical use of space.

Sources: (L to R) Sirroccohome (Kidzoneshop.com.au), Troms (Ikea.com.au), Uffizi (Argington.com.au), Soho Twin Bed over Futon (Simplybunkbeds.com), Cronulla Loft Bunk Bed (Awesomebeds.com.au), Metro Bunk (Futonsrus.com)

Twilight

I happen to be apart of a very small demographic of females my age who currently do not have Edward Cullen at the top of their TO DO lists. To be quite frank, he is currently on my TO DIE list, right beneath Tom Cruise and Katie Holmely famous only because they happen to dress their spawn better than themselves. Okay, inappropriate and slightly off-topic. Let's just say, I love hearing about Twilight about as much as Fabio can't believe it's not butter.

My life is being terrorized ever since the sexual fantasy of a thirty-year-old woman, incarnated into a teenage girl with no emotional backbone, falls in lust with the face of a hundred-year-old vampire (and he, with her scent!) and is printed into a series, hereon known as Twilight.

To be fair, I have nothing against the series or Stephenie Meyer, other than the fact she has too many e's in her name. In fact, to prove myself a good sport, here are some things I actually enjoyed about Twilight:

1) The wittiness/tension between Bella and Edward (it slowly died with each book, but I enjoyed it while I was there)

2) Knowing that Edward was more interested in eating Bella than sleeping with her (sucker!), and being able to appreciate the rarity of that ever happening in teenage novels or in real life.

3) Watching the movie and not getting sick of listening to Bella stuttering her way through scenes ("But Edward.. you can't.. jus.. bjuh.. plea... how can you sa... your so... i jus... blakjds!")


Things I enjoyed less about Twilight

1) The dwindling originality (let's add some werewolves to square off against the vampires and make Bella's best friend fall in love with her and we're all set.)

2) Being reminded of glittery, god-like Edward's beauty in every. single. scene.

3) Plot inconsistencies (my favorite is when Edward dumps Bella and her so-called "maturity" and resolve disappears like coke in the hand of a crack whore. Real cool, Bella. You're a role model for girls far and wide.)

4) It's sense of appeal by means of a super handsome protagonist, other than things like, oh i don't know... literary tools for unliterary tools.

5) So... why are Edward and Bella in love again? I mean, besides the fact Bella thinks Edward is really hot and mysterious and is flattered when he stalks her, and Edward is intrigued by the fact his jedi mind skills don't work on her. And he think she smells good (and less in a healthy way, more of a I-want-to-eat-your-skin way). The book constantly tells you that they can't live without each other, but never enough are we reminded why. Gosh darn it, Meyer.

6) It's success in affecting the lives of people who, in no way, want to be associated with it!


Yes, yes. I should ignore it. Well, you try going into a bookstore without a cashier reccomending you read Twilight (if it wasn't disconcerting enough to see New Moon twiddling its thumbs next to Jane Eyre in the Classic Literature section) or better yet, buying a pack of gum from K-Mart without overhearing a conversation between two cashiers and a customer about how swoon-worthy and musically talented Robert Pattinson is- a conversation which lasted three minutes, despite the fact the lady was only buying a book and a baking tray.

Just as I finished mourning the loss of Harry Potter (and coincidentally, my childhood!), I get caught in a four-year-long vampire eat human saga. Life is officially a school bully and I am his bitch.

EDIT: In no way was this blog intended to belittle Twilight fans. I acknowledge that I didn't read Twilight because I thought it was going to stimulate my brain like Kevin Rudd just did our pocketbooks (zing!), but my point is that hearing too much of one thing will drive you mad (seriously), hype nearly always equals failure (unless you've written something called ... The Dark Knight), and people who think Twilight is literary (it's not) are super lame! Don't worry, Ashleigh Hanlon, this isn't aimed at you. Love you long time.

Teapottery

How cute are these teapots from teapottery?




I may not be a tea drinker, but I do know an awesome Christmas present when I see one!

Dear Michelle Williams,

Please send your stylist my way!




I love how she holds herself on the red carpet, and in general. She always appears so effortlessly chic and modest. Plus I would kill for her collection of boots (the mere few showcased are just a small sample of the plethora of awesome boots she owns.. so jealous)

Also, her 2006 Oscars dress - marigold chiffon Vera Wang (top left) - is my favorite Oscars dress ever. I loved it so much, I even bothered to google the name and when the Oscars air every year I make snooty comments about other people's dresses - "Yeah, that's nice... but it's no Marigold Vera Wang." (Here would be an excellent place to add a disclaimer: I know nothing of fashion and plan never to learn - The Devil Wears Prada taught me well - but that is one beautiful dress)

Where The Wild Things Are / Girl Skateboards

Anyone who knows me knows I am a massive fan of Spike Jonze, otherwise known as the king of quirky cinema (he directed Adaptation and Being John Malkovich for you non-cinema nomads.. not to mention every awesome music video under the sun). In fact, I've even made a hobby of uncovering the methods behind transferring his brain into my head.

But, I digress.

Jonze, who has just filmed the children's classic, Where The Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, has released a set of skateboard decks via his skate company, Girl Skateboards.




My unrequited affinity to Spike Jonze may make me a tad biased when I say these may be the COOLEST THINGS I HAVE EVER SEEN. And while my coordination skills are akin to the limbless, or - this is where I try to sound socially acceptable - Bella from Twilight, I am going to buy one anyway, hang it on the wall of my room and air skate whenever I please.

Bloggity Blog

And... i'm blogging again.

Because I'm not quite sure where this is heading yet, here are some cute salt and pepper shakers in exchange for not having anything remotely profound to say (I found them whilst searching for question mark shakers, which apparently don't exist... yet)