Great Gynae Day Out

Have you ever wanted to know what Gynaecologists do during a convention? Then head over to PCEC and find out.

No Ordinary Rabbit

Hee! Nothing to fear but holy hand grenades and wizards named Tim.

What Monty Python Character are you?
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Good news

The sandwich has been found.

Warning: link may be hazardous to your health.

One voice becomes many

I've always felt that the best hip-hop is heavily infuenced by - if not all about - pain. It's hard to beat the pain of being abandoned and vilified by your government and fellow citizens. It's hard to beat 10,000 corpses rotting in the Lousiana heat. It's hard to beat being forced to fend for yourself amid alligator and gang infested ruins for a week while bureaucrats argue and politicians take photo ops. Great source material. Great song.

Kudos to Ponderance for the heads-up.

A womb with a view

This is the alien parasite that has attached itself to my beloved ToxicPurity's insides. It's been there 11 weeks now and measures 4cm already. If anybody has any idea how such a thing might have happened please leave a comment. Use diagrams where necessary.

QOTD

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

Never Mind Names, What About The Date?

Got bled today in the name of bub - first trimester screening for HIV, rubella, and, according to my doctor's handwriting, squiggle, wiggle, and wavy line.

The pathologist looked over the details on my form, dialled her secret decoder disk, and announced that my due date would be the 4th April. My doctor reckoned 27th March, while Skribe and I figured early March by looking up a calender. So I'm apparently two weeks more pregnant than first guessed, but the baby's arriving later?

Huh. Bub's barely a tadpole and already a procrastinator.

Your lips are too big, your eyes too wide

According to this story, cabbies in Nanjing will be banned from having shaved heads, long hair or moustaches. Those who are rude or deemed messy will also be banned.

"Strange haircuts are also banned under the rules, and female cabbies who wear too much makeup will face criticism," said one government official. Women in China get it so easy. Men get banned but women just get criticised. How fair is that?

The new rules are aimed at improving Nanjing's image during the National Games, and presumably as a testing ground for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Just imagine if we were to establish the same rules in Perth. We'd lose half the fleet. Ban being obesely overweight and there would be no cabbies whatsoever.

QOTD

I think the really sad thing about the fuck up in New Orleans is that if Bush were allowed to run again he'd win.

ToxicPurity Plays 5 Questions With...

... Curtin University's Western Independent (also known as: What happened to Grok? Or was there a real newspaper at Curtin and I never noticed?)

Anyway, at last Wednesday's Awards Night, Enid asked if I would answer some questions for her paper. These were the questions she sent me, and these were my responses:

How/ why did you start blogging?
We've been online since the early-mid 90s, and so we've been blogging in one form or another since then. As to why, well, everyone has something to say, something to tell. We're no different. This is simply one outlet for communication. Also, both of us have always been lousy at keeping diaries. Online journals, however, are more like open letters. You are writing for an audience, even if you never meet them face-to-face. And your audience talks back. That's the difference - and great attraction - between merely keeping a diary, and blogging.

How would you describe to a non-blogger the content of your blog?
We blog about the film and television industry where we work, and about the quirks of Perth, stupid human tricks... anything that catches our fancy really.

What are your thoughts on blogs as a form of self-expression and online community?
Blogs are no different from any other form of self-expression. It's as easy to lie and create a fictitious persona in a blog as it is in prose or film. One could argue that the very act of blogging in effect creates a fiction about oneself, just as the act of keeping a diary creates a fiction about oneself, or the act of conversing with another person creates a fiction about oneself. It's about how we want to represent ourselves.

That said, blogging is a fascinating activity because it is both private and public. To express one's thoughts, opinions, rants... demands a willingness to expose one's inner self to an anonymous audience. You are at once vulnerable, and an exhibitionist - an intriguing position to be in.

And you're not alone. That's what the online community is: groups of virtually anonymous people partaking in conversations that they could not or would not have in other circumstances.

Has blogging brought you any celebrity status?
Uh, yeah. I rant for the cash prize and glory. Absolutely. Get your ToxicPurity T-shrts here.

What do you see for the future of blogs?
People were blogging before the word "blogging" was coined, and they will continue to blog long after the word "blog" is obsoleted. Even in those nations where blogging is restricted (China and the UAE, eg) people defy their governments to blog. Why? Because when people have something to say, they will find a means to say it. The methods will change as technology - and access to new technology - changes, but the impulse to communicate, to express oneself, to bitch and rant and moan and babble about everything and nothing remains unchanged. Call it a basic instinct: the need to talk to another human being.

Sweet Murder

Just think, if the Germans had won WW2 it might have been called the Violent Crumble.

Basil and Parsley

We finally planted off our seedlings.

Digital Frames

So, you've put your digital photo collection up on FlickR, but it's not quite the same as having a framed photo of your loved ones on your bedside, is it? Bit difficult to carry a pic of Sweetie/Bub/Fluffy in your wallet when it's just a bunch of bits, right?

Maybe you need digital frames for your digital snaps. Depending on the model, you could have one that includes built-in speakers and automatic light sensors, use it as a keychain, or wear it as a pendant.

Picture frames with remote controls. Like we need another remote controlled device? And yet... it's so pretty...

Simpson Obsession

So I guess this answers the question of what Jessica Simpson would wear if she won an Oscar. But what would she wear if she met Groucho Marx or if she was a cop on the beat or a Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader? Find out at Darkbean's flickr page.

Kudos to Mahmood for the heads up.

Operation Canute

After the stunning successes of the War on Poverty and War on Terrorism, the Bush Administration today announced that they were declaring a War on Weather in the wake of Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans. Codenamed Canute the operation will see a ban on the manufacture and sale of baked beans and a bounty placed on Amazonian butterflies.

Great Music

I found a great musician the other day. His name is John Schmidt. His stuff is mainly classical piano, but he also sings. His song I Do is to die for. You can listen to his music via streaming at Soundclick or buy mp3s and albums on his homepage.

WA Spring Poetry Festival 2005

The Gallery Watch shoot at City of Melville's Art Awards was cancelled at the last minute - boo! - leaving me all dressed and with nothng to do on a Friday night. It *was* going to be my first proper go at presenting and interviewing on camera, but there'll undoubtedly be other opportunities to make a fool of myself later on.

Almost went along to watch the shoot covering the WA Poetry Festival launch do at the Town Centre, but came to my senses and went shopping for things to surprise Skribe with instead. Hey, I like a good poem as much as the next person, but a social function full of poets is no sane person's notion of a good time.

The following week marks National Poetry Week proper, and it looks like there're some fun activities organised for within the city and elsewhere. Pity it's the same week I have to undergo a barrage of tests for bub's sake. Barely a tadpole and already messing with my life. O joy.

Good call

I received a call this morning from one of the committee members of CTV Perth congratulating me on Byte Me, the first episode went to air last night on Foxtel, which was awfully nice of him. He loved it and was impressed when I told him that that was the weakest of the episodes.

How Do You Say . . ?

We don't communicate enough as a people. In this spirit of mutual learning and the desire to improve relations between different cultures and language groups, I present The Swearsaurus, or, How To Swear, Cuss, and Curse in 165 Languages!

Shoot Me Already

Busy formatting the latest ep of Gallery Watch after bashing my head all morning against one of Adobe's non-repeating inconsistent bloody bugs. It's out now, so I don't care anymore.

The photographer from Western Suburbs Weekly showed up right on schedule and discovered he knew about as much as we did - not much at all - about the story WSW want to run on us and the training course we recently taught in association with the Office of Multicultural Interests.

Spent a fascinating half hour or so watching him set up a shot where Jonno got to "direct" an interrogation scene for a fictitious ep of BBN. Then had to pretend to edit GW as Jonno "supervised".

According to the quirky boundary definitions set up by the community newspapers, of all the people involved in the training course, only Jonno and I qualified as living in Western Suburbs and were therefore the only ones appropriate for being interviewed. Hold on, I've never seen an issue of the WSW. Doesn't that mean I don't live in a Western Suburb? And weren't we supposed to be interviewed? Oh, you mean by the photographer? Oh, okay. That's news to him, too, apparently.

Community-based organisations... gotta love them.