drawing the line

I can be pretty oblivious to 'signs' that are presented to me but the other morning when my iPod had died and I was walking to the bus I found myself with the theme song to Baywatch stuck in my head. Now call me crazy but I think that has to be a sure indication that I've been watching too much of it. Which is really only once in the weekend but I still think that is about twice as much as I should be. Especially because the last episode featured yet another soft porn montage with some girl walking along the beach in different skimpy outfits and lying in the sand stroking herself. HOW did they get away with having this on the prime-time tele?!

I also happened to stumble across Top 100 Facts for Chuck Norris the other day, in fact about an hour after my last blog entry which mentioned him. Freaky coincidence. (And I promise I wasn't searching for it, it just appeared. That's destiny.) The Chuck Norris facts are hilarious, and even better for anyone who remembers Walker: Texas Ranger. Some of my tops favs were:
• Chuck Norris does not hunt because the word hunting implies the probability of failure. Chuck Norris goes killing.
• Chuck Noris puts the "laughter" in "manslaughter".
• Chuck Norris sold his soul to the devil for his rugged good looks and unparalleled martial arts ability. Shortly after the transaction was finalized, Chuck roundhouse kicked the devil in the face and took his soul back. The devil, who appreciates irony, couldn't stay mad and admitted he should have seen it coming. They now play poker every second Wednesday of the month.
• Superman owns a pair of Chuck Norris pajamas.

I could go on but I'll stop there.

And just when you think you've heard of it all
I did think that unicycle hockey pretty much took the cake on WTF things- and in fact I still do but somewhere is in the top10 would have to be a Corduroy Appreciation Club. Thanks to A Dress A Day for that link. The first meeting was held Nov. 11, 2005, and the second on January 11, 2006, since Jan. 11 is the date which, after Nov. 11, most nearly resembles corduroy. It is a delightful feature about someone who was asked to be a guest speaker at a meeting of the Corduroy Appreciation Group. Before we parted, I asked Mr. Rohan what it was about my writing that had made him think I would be a good keynote speaker, and he mentioned one of my novels in which a character refers, early on, to a favorite corduroy jacket. “I was disappointed, though, that it didn’t come back the rest of the book,” he said. “I kept waiting.” Read it. It's a gem.

WTF?

I've got two words to say to you- unicycle hockey. (Oh yeah and by the way, that site is a bit nasty on the eyes, you have been warned.) Yep. You read me right. Unicycle hockey. Hockey whilst on a unicycle. I've been meaning to blog about this for just ages. Every Thursday night when I finish climbing, there are people playing unicycle hockey one on of the courts outside the gym. I derive a pure and simple joy from watching people tool around on one wheel with only a stick for balance as they chase a ball around the court. It has everything- suspense, action, coordination and, of course, humour.

What I want to know is WHY and HOW? I mean they have a FAQ page on the site which I checked but it has questions like: 1) What is Unicycle Hockey? 2) The History of Unicycle Hockey 3) The Rules of Unicycle Hockey etc etc but nowhere are the questions written in by the public: 1)WHY? 2)What in the name of God made someone decide to play hockey whilst pedaling around on one wheel? 3)How on earth do people find out about this? 4)Did I ask WHY?!

There is a little girl, I'm guessing belonging to one of the players, who usually wheels around while they're playing. I'm sure she can't be more than 10 years old and she does a pretty impressive show of keeping up on her pink unicycle. It is just cute.

so many excuses, so little time...

So.

I have finally started as designer on DIVE magazine so am both busy and challenged and oh so veryvery glad to be back doing design. But the process of learning new ropes whilst teaching my replacement the old ones takes up quite a bit of time. Hence no spare time. Hence no blogging. I'm sure you've all been pining (hahaha) so today I shall endeavour to fill in the gaps.

things that go bump in the night
The other weekend I house/cat-sat for a lady from work. I heartily indulged in long overdue quality kitty time. She's a needy kitty, I'm needy- it was a match made in heaven. On the Friday night I watched two episodes in the DVD of Supernatural that I had got from my online rental place and then decided I needed to go out and forage for essentials like milk before the shops closed. I had chosen this series because it has Alex from Dark Angel and Dean from Gilmore Girls and is by the makers of X-Files so if nothing else, I was interested. I can guarantee now that most of you out there would probably rather watch something else. But not be, oh no. I don't how I developed the penchant for trashy b-grade shows but it's definitely there. And cable TV just caters to this even more. There are different categories of course- there's Baywatch, which has to be the equivalent of a car crash. I mean it's awful but I really can't seem to look away. And then there's A-Team which I think I like because of nostalgia (same thing with MacGyver but that isn't showing here). Oh my God- and Walker: Texas Ranger. I mean that show is TRUELY awful but when I was first year at uni, I would come home from my Wed evening shift at the supermarket, grab dinner and sit in front of Walker- with headphones on (everyone else was asleep my this stage and there were super light sleepers in our house) with almost religious dedication. And then you get all the sci-fi stuff which really doesn't have to be very good at all to capture my interest. Buffy, Angel, Firelfy*, Tru Calling, Torchwood, Battlestar Galactica**. I could sci-fi my day away. Patsy's house has the glory of all all Sky Channels so I even got to see Vampire High on the horror channel. I was a bit perplexed by that. I would've thought that something on the horror channel would be scary but this wasn't even b-grade enough to hold my interest for a full half hour episode. Which is just sad. But I digress. Supernatural, although not the fabbest of the fab, is by the makers of the X-Files and as such, has that same slightly creepy element which isn't all-put scary, just a slightly tense. So when I went out for milk at 7pm, when it happened to be totally dark and felt a lot later, I noticed that the moon was almost full and my brain clocked that it was just 2 days after Halloween. Patsy lives near where I work so I know the general area and saw this shortcut/lane thingy which I guessed would take me down the hill and it looked wide and well lit so I headed down it. Only to find out that it went alongside a cemetery. And not some slick, modern deal, oh no, this was a pokey little dark plot of land complete with long grass and tilting headstones. I have a vivid imagination and let me tell you, you could not have paid me enough money to walk across that grass because I know some rotten skeletal hand would have punched its way out of the ground to grab my ankle. I just knew it. I could feel it in my waters.

trying something new
There have been some rather hilarious (as in OHM WTF?!) updates in my social life but due to the public nature of the internet, I'm waiting to see how they resolve themselves before I share the car-crash comic value with the rest of the world at large, in particular the person they involve. I'll limit it now to saying that I might have a date on Tuesday. I mean I'm definitely going out for a drink with someone I have never met before (and blind dating was the one thing I had vowed never to do again (I lie, there are several things I have vowed never to do again. Work in a supermarket is one of them.) even though the only blind date I ever had was really dinner with someone I'd never met but two of my friends were there as well for safety buffers so it wasn't really a proper date at all.) but I don't know if it's a 'date' as such. Murky waters. Much room for schadenfreude for you folks. I may or may not keep you posted.

in conclusions
Apart from work and fully exploring the potential glory of cable TV, all I've really been doing is climbing which, thankfully, is going well at the moment. I feel like I'm closer to consistently climbing the same level of stuff and near the start of next year, Graeme, my climbing buddy, and I, plan to do a lead climbing course which beings us one step closer to being able to climb by ourselves outdoors which is the ultimate goal.

There were so many other tales I wanted to tell but priority goes to getting something up seeing as it's been so long since I've written anything...

*notice my Joss Whedon tendency
** I am in no way calling these shows crap, by the way. I will defend Firefly and Angel to the death (probably yours) as well as others.

Long time, no blog!

Hey! Wow! I won $2.65 on a bet in the Melbourne Cup! Best result I've ever had!!

not the gumdrop buttons!

When I was at high school, I, like most girls, would cover my A3 art folder with pictures. Unlike most girls, I would not have pictures of Leonardo DiCaprio and Johnny Depp plastered across my folder. Oh no. I got my Dad to photocopy cartoons out of his Farside books and I put those on in a tidy, OCD arrangement and then protectively cover sealed them. In the last years of high school I branched out to putting some Escher images on there as well. At the start of the school year, I would sit in the car on the way to school, bookmarking the pages I wanted Dad to photocopy for me, occasionally sniggering when I came across a particularly good one. Dad would always comment that the ones that made me laugh out loud were usually the sickest ones and to be fair, he wasn't wrong. (Although it's hard to go wrong with a good lemming suicide cartoon.) Well today I stumbled across something that reminded me of a mixture between Wylie Coyote and Farside material. Bunny suicides. They range from the simple to the very complex. I've sticking in an example of each here but check them all out.