Pants Man Rules – okay?
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Monthly Archives: January 2008
You’re only young once, but you can be immature forever.
Small Child: Mom… I want a webcam.
Mom: What do you want a webcam for babe?
Small Child: So I can talk to you through the computer.
Mom: Honey… your PC is in the next room… I don’t think you need a webcam 😐
It is usually around Christmas time each year that I start assessing the ‘stuff’ that the Small Child has been accruing over the year and I hate to admit it, but he’s kinda spoiled rotten (though perhaps not quite so indulged as his Dad would have him, seeing that I’ve refused to let a Wii into the house 🙂 He has a small TV and a DVD player/mini stereo system in his room, a not totally crap PC with a 19″ LCD monitor (in my defense it was cheaper than the 17″ one I set out to buy), there’s also a Nintendo Game Cube in the house with about 20 games and he has access to a DVD collection consisting of approximately 97 Disney cartoons and family movies. He also has his Dad’s hand me down iPod mini (battery is a little unreliable) several remote control toys, a couple of push bikes, an overflowing toybox and more books than you can poke a stick at.
Anyway… the webcam request came after a recent request for an Eee PC like Mom’s and I also recall a tentative enquiry about getting his own mobile phone!!! Oh what unrealistic expectations the Small Child does have! He’s already amassed more toys than I had throughout my entire childhood. So I sat him down and started to tell him about all the great things he has that I never had when I was a kid….. and I sounded like my fucking grandmother!!!
I told him when I was little that we had no computers.
When I was little we had no internet.
When I was little we had no video games.
When I was little we had no DVDs or even CDs.
We also had no mobile phones.
We had no remote control toys.
We had no iPods, webcams, laptops or even colour TV for crying out loud!
We didn’t get a colour TV until I was about 8 I think and only had a teeny black and white thing up until that. We got a VCR when I was about 12 and it may well have been the first one on our block. Hell… we didn’t even have a telephone in my house until I was 6 or 7! I shared my bedroom with my elder sister, BigSal, until I was about 14, which meant we had to share all our toys and often clothes too. And most sophisticated thing I’d ever owned (up until I bought myself a $300 Sony CD Walkman at 19) was a hand held Nintendo game of Snoopy Tennis that I got for Christmas when I was 15!
* Just for the record – I can’t play Star Wars Lego for shit on the GameCube, but I totally rocked at Snoopy Tennis!! I was the Snoopy Tennis Queen! Things were so much simpler then…. Oh good Lord I sound sooooo fucking old!!!!!! I guess in some way it’s just the same…. Angel is wanting all the cool stuff he sees around him and I did too I guess. I remember envying kids from school who had one of those fancy Simon Says games… oh yeah – how I wanted one of those…. they were the ducks nuts! That and a Speak and Spell!
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Alcohol+Valium+Sleep= Weird Arse Dreams
l had another bizarro dream last night. LIkely drug induced :S
I was on a boat or in a vessel of some sort that capsized – could have been a submarine (can submarines capsize???). There were a couple of other people, though I don’t remember who they were and for some strange reason we could talk/communicate underwater. The situation felt rather panicked, which is natural I guess if you’re trapped under water, and we were screaming at each other about what we were going to do when we ran out of air. Somehow we reached the decision to make a swim for it to the ‘Inaccessible Island’ but I was aware that that was no such place.
We all scrambled out from our capsized boat/floundering submarine and started to swim and the water was freezing and there was ice everywhere as though we were under polar ice caps or underneath an enormous iceberg or something. I saw a polar bear swimming underwater also…. he left us alone even though I remember being aware that he could well, harm/kill/eat us if he wanted to. Strangely we were still able to talk to each other underwater and we were swimming for our lives. Someone was leading us to the ‘Inaccessible Island’ which wasn’t an island at all…. I had a sense we were swimming for an air pocket trapped underneath the ice where we would be able to breathe until we could be rescued. We made it to the air and I recall bursting out of the water and grasping for air.
And then I woke up.
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Food for thought
Gotta love the internets. I stumbled onto the work of an amazing photographer earlier – Carl Warner. He appears to be a high end creative advertising photographer who specializes in food photography. But the works that piqued my curiosity were some food landscapes… ‘Foodscapes’… that he’s done. Very clever, very beautiful and (having done my photography degree majoring in commercial advertising photography) rather difficult and very time consuming works to create.
The images were created in the studio on an 8 x 4 foot table with the fronts of each of the Foodscapes being approximately 2 foot across. The foregrounds and the backgrounds were shot in layers to avoid spoilage of the subject matter and composited later from what I understand. All the components of each photograph are commonly found in the kitchen.
Red cabbage sunset, cheesy cliffs, lettuce trees and sweet potato rocks.
Cheese villas and pasta curtains.
Bread mountains and cauliflower rocks and corals.
Pasta wagons, mushroom wheels, pinenut stone wall and chili and pepper trees.
Turnip, banana and strawberry balloons, berry produce and fields and roads of grains.
Peas hanging from broccoli trees, bread mountains, cauliflower clouds and a road paved with cumin.
A sea made of salmon, rocks of potatoes, overhanging trees made of herbs and what looks like chocolate cake for rocks!
And this one especially groovy and no doubt horridly perishable – snow capped mountains and snow covered trees made of bacon and cold meats and a sled made of breadsticks and parma ham.
I think his work is amazing. The perspective of the images is fantastic and the lighting is just so. It’s fun to look at the images and figure out what sort of food has been used to create each section of the picture. I’d love to spend my days doing stuff like that (give or take the cold meats which is a bit icky). Carl Warner’s website is here, but be warned it’s one of those painful flash sites that take forever to load.
He followed me home… can I keep him?
I went to see the Golden Compass today and thought it was okay… not great, but still not a bad way to spend a couple of hours. I had read some rather mediocre reviews of the film and more than one news article about the Catholic church being less than impressed so expectations weren’t that high. Actually I couldn’t give a toss what the church had to say about it. I haven’t read the book, so had no idea what the storyline should have been. I definitely felt that it was a bit choppy at the beginning which is probably due to the fact that any movie of this type of book finds it difficult to convey an alternate reality on film in a short period of time to ‘set the scene’. There’s just too much to get the viewer to ‘buy into’ before they can get to the nuts and guts of the plot.
There was plenty of visual effects that probably would have been quite spectacular were it not for the fact that we’ve seen it all before… the LoTR, Narnia and even the Harry Potter films have paved the way already so we’re becoming increasingly hard to impress with the CGI battle scenes etc.
The best bit of the movie for me was the fantastically combative armoured Ice Bears. I totally want one! I’d be fantastic to have one of those things following you around to smite people that pissed me off. Can you imagine it? Why last week alone, I’d have had my Ice Bear take out one Work Cover medical assessment officer, one smash repairer from Wooloongabba, one RACQ customer service representative, one queue-jumper at the Myer sales, one whiney bitch sitting beside me at the Sushi Station, one annoying so called ‘friend’ who only contacts me when they want something and one crazy chickie I know on Facebook who sends me about 30 invitations a week for ridiculous applications I’m not interested in.
Yeah.. having your own personal Ice Bear would rock.
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