My Month in Pictures.

It’s been a little while since a “My Week in Pictures” post so, what with Christmas and all that jazz, I thought I’d catch you up on what’s been going on in my life over the past month. First up…

… Christmas partying in the Garden of Eden, honey.

The theme: heroes and villains. Some notable costumes: Rebecca Brooks, Shane Warne, Joan of Arc (to which some philistine partygoers knowingly replied, “Oh, like Noah’s wife.” Hmm.), Darth Maul and a Planeteer. Funnily enough, my original idea for a costume was a Captain Planet and the Planeteers group effort, but I thought Adam and Eve was more appropriate so I coerced my coworker Jackson into baring almost all for, you know, authenticity purposes. It turns out we made the right decision, as we won best group costume!

The Muppets movie.

I won four free passes to see The Muppets early in December, thanks to the folks at All Star Comics. I got swept up in the awesomeness of it originally, so I plan to see it again once it’s on general release. Review pending.

Baking Christmas goods.

Okay, “baking” might be too strenuous of a word. My Mum did most of the hard work while I whipped some cream for a chocolate ripple cake. Mmm…

Rocking around the Christmas tree.

This being my first Christmas at my place, not the family home, there was an abundance of presents under the Christmas tree, including an overnight bag for my Mum, some books and ornamental items for my room for me, a fondue set for my housemate, Eddie (personal joke), not a lot for my sister as her present is still en route from the U.K., and chocolate goodness for everybody! What did you get for Christmas?

New Years Evil movie marathon.

Both my housemate and I aren’t big fans of New Years, so we decided to do a housemate-only all-day movie marathon. We watched MacGruber, Black Swan, The Good Son, Silence of the Lambs, Trick ’R Treat, The Last House on the Left (both 1972 and 2009 versions) and I Know Who Killed Me. As you can see, they’re mostly thrillers/horrors, hence the “New Years Evil” title. Yes, we need to get lives.

White Christmas.

As I’m sure you heard/saw/read about on the news, many parts of Australia suffered extreme weather conditions on Christmas Day. What started out as a hot, low-30s day ended up with golf ball-sized hail storms and flooding in Melbourne. While my area didn’t cop the brunt of it, we still experienced somewhat of a white Christmas.

Christmas Eve Eve party.

For the past two years my friend Laura has held a Christmas Eve Eve party (23^rd December). Last year I wasn’t able to attend as I was back home in Bendigo, but this year my Mum came to stay with me, so I left her home alone and hit the town Brunswick. We ate, drank, listened to Carols and played Christmas celebrity heads. The night was bittersweet, as Laura’s moving back to Perth, where she’s from, next week.

Related: [The Early Bird Catches the Worm] Getting Our Pirate On, Christmas Party Style.

[The Early Bird Catches the Worm] Top 11 Films of 2011.

Elsewhere: [All Star Comics Melbourne] Homepage.

Magazine Review: The Big Issue, 1–14 March, 2011.

Did you know that there are approximately 7.5 readers for every copy of The Big Issue sold? Which is great for circulating The Big Issue’s content to different kinds of readers, it sucks for the people selling copies out the front of The Body Shop (where I was first exposed to the magazine in my hometown of Bendigo in country Victoria) or at Parliament train station, where I picked up this week’s copy.

But when I read those stats on Girl with a Satchel a couple of weeks ago, I wasn’t surprised. A colleague of mine usually brings in his copy to the staff lunchroom, which makes the rounds at work. He’s gone overseas for a few weeks, so I decided to be the one to provide the communal Big Issue during that time. I do hope that more people will fork out the fortnightly five bucks it costs to be exposed to some great Australian writing (“compared with $4.70 for your weekly copy of Who”) but until then, I can take solace in the fact that I did my bit.

There’s still a week left to get your paws on a copy, and I suggest you do, as there are some great articles in there, a lot of them dealing with the social revolution tool that is Twitter, which features on the cover. And for you us pop-culture junkies, there’s Liz and Shane and their Twitter antics, too:

“Celebrities, meanwhile, have embraced Twitter as an opportunity to prove their Everyman concerns without having to directly engage with, well, every man or woman. Kourtney Kardashian, for example, recently tweeted her two-million followers: ‘Does anyone else get scared that being on their phones too much or sleeping with your phone near u is so bad? Or am I paranoid?’ I wonder how many fruitlessly replied, ‘Omg, I totes have a brain tumour! We should be BFFs!’ (Note to tweenie Tweeters: she couldn’t care less.)” (p. 15).

You’re such a visionary, Kourtney!

On a more serious note, editor Alan Attwood writes of the similarly prophetic Steven Johnson from Time magazine, who wrote ‘How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live’:

“He argued that all those tiny tweets add up ‘to something truly substantive, like a suspension bridge made of pebbles’. He concluded: ‘The weather reports keep announcing that the sky is falling, but here we are—millions of us—sitting around trying to invent new ways to talk to one another.’ And that, surely, can’t be a bad thing” (p. 4).

We’ve read all the articles about Twitter being a valuable tool for social change, particularly in Egypt, and there’s no shortage of that in the feature article, from which the above Kardashian quote is garnered. Worth the $5 cover price for this article alone.

Another article I loved this fortnight was Patrick Witton’s on “Sharing the Load” of the hellish daily commute.

I wrote last week about two friends of mine who spend at least two hours in their car getting to and from work each day, which sounds like my worst nightmare. Sure, I used to travel upwards of four hours to work from my aforementioned hometown, but that was on the train, where I could get valuable reading, sleeping and daydreaming done. Driving to work allows the driver to indulge in (hopefully) only one of those activities. Then again, I don’t have a license, so I have no idea how much daydreaming gridlock allows…

Witton profiles the car-pooling phenomenon in America, where there are designated pick-up and drop-off points, between which complete strangers ride in silence, and drivers take advantage of the express car-pool lanes. Like a bus, but without the mentally disturbed drunk espousing the apocalypse.

There’s also the teenagers in Jakarta, who make a living from hitchhiking along the highways, getting paid to be picked up so solitary drivers can hightail it to work in the express lane.

Fascinating stuff.

[Girl with a Satchel] The Big Issue Blitzes Readership Survey (But are Aussies Being Tight?)

[The Early Bird Catches the Worm] Newspaper Clipping of the Week.

On the (Rest of the) Net.

(Sorry, only one picture this week as I wrote this quite late at night—hey, 9pm is late for me, okay! I live the lifestyle of a grandma. In fact, I think my grandma stays up later than I do!—and just wasn’t inspired.) 

There’s a lot of content worth reading on MamaMia at the moment:

“Would you wear Nicole Richie’s wedding dress?” Yes, if it were a little less poofy and a little more ivory. In fact, it is somewhat similar to the wedding dress I have created in my mind for my own wedding. Now, to find that pesky groom…

By the same guy who brought you the brilliant “17 Arguments Against Gay Marriage & Why They’re Bollocks” comes the equally as brilliant “10 Things You Need to Understand About Asylum Seekers”.

This is worth taking a look at if you care at all about where your supermarket eggs come from.

And finally, is Shane Warne punching above his weight? He sure is, but really, who cares? While I can’t stand Warney and think he is the king of the douches, good on him for bagging someone as hot as Liz Hurley. But shame on her for allowing herself to be seduced by said king of the douches.

Rachel Hills on what’s in and what’s out for 2011:

“Fool: Binge drinking.

“Cool: Binge thinking.

“… Fool: Staying out til 3am because it’s a Friday night and that’s what you’re supposed to do.

“Cool: Staying in on weekends if that’s what you feel like doing, going out on weeknights if there’s something cool on…

“Fool: Internet fameballs and feigning a glamorous life in the hope of inspiring envy in others. Lifecasting.

“Cool: Mindcasting. Reading other people’s blogs instead of just trying to get them to read yours.”

Tiger Beatdown’s fun facts about straight people:

• “Most of them are not dangerous!
• “Some of them are actually quite lovely people.
• “Straight people are not as violent as they are portrayed in action movies.
• “Straight people are your neighbors, your friends, members of your community. You may be related to a straight person, or even share a room with one in the hospital.
• “I mean it TAKES ALL KINDS, amirite?
• “Tomorrow, while you are attending the daily Straight Pride Parades that form the totality of public life in America, take a moment to tell a straight person you support their life decisions.
• “Tell them you know many fine straight people.
• “Then put your hand near their ear, and pretend to find a silver dollar there. They love that shit.

“Straight people will NOT:

• “Try to make you straight. [Early Bird note: This does not apply to me and my best gay friend/husband Jason, whom I will never stop trying to make straight!]
• “(Not that it would work, amirite?)
• “Make it impossible for you to appreciate Ani DiFranco on rainy days.
• “Make you want to move to Florida.
• “Inject a lot of brown into your wardrobe.
• “Drag you on a cruise and then spend two weeks complaining about how few deck chairs there are.”

Just one of the reasons SJP and SATC ruined NYC:

“Cheated on your boyfriend? Threw a public hissy fit? OMG, it’s just like that one episode of ‘SATC’! So don’t sweat your own stupid, overly dramatic behaviour… everything will be okay when the credits roll in 20 minutes. Or, you know, not.”

Sady Doyle on the Julian Assange rape allegations:

“.. You know who doesn’t stand to profit? Like, at all? The women pressing the charges. Because (a) rape victims almost never profit from taking their cases through the legal system, which is why so few do, and (b) they’re already facing substantive personal smearing and stereotyping and in some cases having Keith fucking Olbermann insist they have ‘ties’ to the ‘CIA’ (oh for FUCK’s sake), and (c) they’re not pressing some airtight case here. Because, as we all know, the only AIRTIGHT rape case is one where Julian Assange jumps out of the bushes with a chainsaw and an assault rifle and you try to fight him back with your bare hands but ultimately he cuts off both your arms with the chainsaw thus ‘proving’ that you ‘resisted’ him, and oh also, he’s not Julian Assange, he’s a homeless man of colour named Stabs McMurderson, and you’re not an average woman, you’re a fourteen-year-old blonde white virgin who’s walking home from the Jesus School of Sewing and Homemakery. I would add that the whole thing would have to be captured on tape, but there have been ACTUAL RAPES that were ACTUALLY CAUGHT ON TAPE and they didn’t get through, because the defence alleged that the girl was ‘faking’ unconsciousness because she wanted to ‘make porn’.”

My friend said I wasn’t unique in having a blog as every sixteen-year-old and their dog has one. Some friend, right? (Love you, April!) I’ll pay that, but according to Gawker, blogging is an old person thing now.

Mick Foley is Good.