photo friday: here and there

I'm currently reaching that level of sexual frustration where it's making me a little bit crazy.

And I know I've said it before, but when I get like this I want I start thinking about getting a tattoo... a big, huge tattoo. That and jumping random strangers on public transport.

But at least I understand that part of it. I have no idea where the hell the tattoo part comes from.

I'd like to blame it on the current rash of hot weather... it's been, as they say, "sweaty jockstrap" weather... made worse after it rained quite heavily last night and again this morning. Humidity sucks balls.

But I've had similar outbreaks of this feeling in the depths of winter.

The only thing is to ride out the feeling without doing something stupid or, how should I put this... sexually irresponsible (which mostly consists of sleeping with someone I know I should be sleeping with and wish I hadn't directly afterwards... or sometimes during).

As I said, the weather has been weird over the last week... and doubly so over the past couple of days. Lots of rain, but it's still been really hot...

Then this morning sometime after 4am a thunderstorm rolled across the city and I think it may have perched over my apartment building for a little while, because it woke me up... which is rare in itself.

But because I was awake, I opened the house up to try and cool it down, and I couldn't really go back to sleep with the house wide open... so I've pretty much been awake since then... and I only got to sleep at around 1am... so, yeah...

This afternoon was a little bit of an exercise in not really having the energy to do anything much.

Another reason for the lack of energy this afternoon was probably that I was in a big fat food coma after the first ever Fork on the Road food truck extravaganza.

I ate so much food!

I had a little taco from Taco Cat (tasty, but their service was a little wonky), a mushroom and haloumi burger with pineapple from Veggie Velo, a "Sherbie" drink (apple, pineapple, mint and something else) from Juice Junkies, a couple of spring rolls from a random place and a little peanut butter brownie from Four Seeds which was scrummy.

And I'm glad we all went down early though... because once people started to show up just after noon Victoria Square was busier than I've EVER seen it.

It would be brilliant if we could have that every Friday!

Because of the heat I decided against going to both Magazine Gallery and Espionage for gallery openings this week, but on Monday I did check out Tooth and Nail and it's a great space.

I also got chatting with the people who own the gallery... so that may become a thing... at the very least I'm going to their birthday show in a couple of weeks. And it seems to be the season for it because Espionage is also having their end of year Allstar show around the same time.

So, yeah... that's totally going to end in me buying things.

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#photoadaynov

I swear that I only started doing this Photo-A-Day thing about five minutes ago, and look, suddenly it's the end of November and I've got eleven months worth under my belt.

For the most part this month didn't present any particular challenges... I think I only missed one day (Day 22) but caught up with it the following day when I saw the Burger Theory truck. This month also presented an unusual opportunity (Day 14) since I had to go down to Glenelg for a conference, and I took some time beforehand to snap some photos, including one of the jetty.

It was also a light month for Lego... only three photos this month (Days 11, 20 and 23), which brings the grand total for Lego to 40.

The most popular image this month was Day 16... although personally I really liked Days 10, 14 and 20.

• Day 1: Something beginning with 'c' (C is for chemist)
• Day 2: Colour
• Day 3: Breakfast (if I'm being honest, this was "second breakfast" or just "artfully staged for the purposes of Photo-A-Day" breakfast)
• Day 4: TV
• Day 5: 5 o’clock (the storm clouds were rolling in at 5pm)
• Day 6: A favourite thing (Benzo, my favourite street artist)
• Day 7: Reflection
• Day 8: Something I do everyday (check out cute guys)
• Day 9: Small (these little tiny bugs were crawling all over me while I sat in the park)
• Day 10: Can’t/won’t live without (Farmers Union Strong Iced Coffee!)
• Day 11: Night (I went with the homophone version of this, but I also took the shot of this knight at night)
• Day 12: Drink (from the La Cantina Co food truck)
• Day 13: Where I slept
• Day 14: Man-made (this kinda made me want to live by the beach, it was great wandering along before starting my day)
• Day 15: In my bag (I've photographed my regular bag a couple of times already, so this time I chose the bag I got from the supermarket)
• Day 16: The view from my window
• Day 17: The last thing I bought (bright green drink that tasted a lot better than it looked)
• Day 18: Happened this weekend (revisiting the old Bond movies before seeing the new one)
• Day 19: Something awesome (getting artwork and underwear in the mail on the same day)
• Day 20: Work/play (Little Traveller filling in for me again... but in duplicated form)
• Day 21: What I wore (this is pretty much what happens every day when I get home, although I generally don't leave it all on the floor)
• Day 22: Grateful (I'm grateful to food trucks in general, but Burger Theory specifically
• Day 23: Black (my Lego minifigure bad guys collection... bandit, spaceman, gangster, knight and ninja)
• Day 24: A sound I heard (this nice lady playing the violin in the Mall)
• Day 25: Sky
• Day 26: In the cupboard (I don't really have any photogenic cupboards)
• Day 27: Tree
• Day 28: Vehicle (food trucks again)
• Day 29: Big
• Day 30: On the wall

And with that we enter the final stretch for 2012... check out the December list!

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random bootay hotness

Some days are just "please drop your pants and show me your butt" kinds of days.

Today is one of those days... so today's Random Hotness is about the buttz! In this case, the butts of Corbin Fisher models.

And even though he's showing the least amount of butt, Jackson in the top left corner with his sexy beard and that crisp tanline. Very nice.

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more lego couples

My brain isn't working on some of the higher levels this evening... and is working on some levels it probably shouldn't be...

So instead, here's some Lego couples I prepared earlier...

"It's true what they say my love... men are from Earth

and t'Vongi are from Ctani Zeni"

"It's really hard to paddle out on the board when you don't have any knees!"

"Having no balls is the least of my problems... my tennis racket doesn't match my shirt!"

"Tarzan! That's inappropriate banana related humour!"

"Tomorrow it's my turn to put the bone in my hair and
have you drag me around, okay honey?"

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movies: skyfall

I want to set the tone for this review by saying that when Skyfall was over, what I really wanted to do was get up and run around in circles, yelling "SQUUEEEEEE" at the top of my voice.

After two movies with Daniel Craig in the role of Bond, James Bond, I finally feel like we've gotten a proper Bond movie.

Skyfall feels exotic, it feels big and bold and brassy. It has brilliant moments of classic Bond action. And it had me bouncing in my seat on more than one occasion with a big stupid grin on my face.

I'd just like to get the one thing that I didn't like out of the way first so that I can go on and gush about everything that's right about this movie.

Unfortunately, the thing that was wrong with Skyfall is, in part, one of the things that was wrong with both Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace.

The villain, played this time around by Javier Bardem, didn't feel especially threatening or all that charismatic. He's not Auric Goldfinger, he's not Francisco Scaramanga, he's not Kananga, he's not Franz Sanchez... in fact he feels a little bit like a mix of Alec Trevelyan and Renard but without the charisma of either. He's basically a nutjob with some unresolved Mummy issues.

And unfortunately there's a little bit of Mr Wint and Mr Kidd in there... with the horrible yellow hair and the slightly effeminate attitude. It felt... dated and a little bit like "really, we're doing THIS in 2012?".

Having said that though... it is surprisingly a very minor complaint in what was otherwise an exemplary movie. And not just an exemplary Bond movie, just as a movie, period.

Writers Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan have put together a brilliant script full of sharp and wonderfully acerbic dialogue with not only some moments of brilliant humour, but also a ton of references to Bond's 50 years of movie history. There was a bunch of stuff I did catch but I'm sure that there was a whole ton of stuff that completely went whizzing past me.

The chemistry between Craig and Judi Dench has always been incredibly strong, but Skyfall allows them possibly the most face-to-face time yet, and they're brilliant together.

Equally brilliant in her interactions with Craig is Naomie Harris as fellow MI6 agent, Eve... the two of them have some of the best dialogue in the movie... and for a movie with dialogue that is as good as this, that's saying something. Harris is the perfect counterpoint to Craig's Bond and their scenes remind me of some of the brilliant dialogue from all those 30's and 40's movies I love so much.

Ralph Fiennes, Albert Finney and Ben Whishaw all have perfect character moments (the casting of Whishaw as the new Q is absolutely spot on, although every now and again I did get a very Voldemort vibe from Fiennes which was a little weird) and once again I come back to how incredibly sharp the script is that, with the possible exception of Bardem, nobody really puts a foot wrong.

Director Sam Mendes and cinematographer Roger Deakins have constructed a truly gorgeous movie. Which is really no great surprise given some of the movies that Deakins has worked on in the past, including his previous collaboration with Mendes, Revolutionary Road which was stunningly beautiful.

Deakins does manage to make even the most mundane of shots gorgeous though... it's easy to make the bright lights of Shanghai beautiful (and they really are spectacular) or to show the Scottish highlands as mysterious and foreboding, but there were two shots, one of Dench with a collection of flag draped coffins and another of water and steam on glass as Bond seduces his way to the villain that amazed me with how stunningly beautiful they were.

And the action... both the photography and choreography of all the action scenes feel like proper, classic James Bond action. The fight scenes aren't all shaky-cam and impossible to work out who's doing what to who... Deakins pulls the camera back and actually let's us see what's going on.

Even the opening title sequence was the best of the three Craig movies. While I didn't really like the Adele song when I first heard it, it does work perfectly as the title song, and they've gone back to the basics of naked ladies without quite as much wanky computer generated imagery for the title sequence.

Skyfall is the Bond movie that I've been waiting for since Craig took the reigns... it pays homage to the legacy of the character without falling into self parody or being too "wink wink" at the audience.

I thoroughly enjoyed myself throughout the entire movie and I can't quite remember when I last sat in a theatre with such a big smile on my face for almost the entire 143 minute running time. Even with my complaint about Bardem, Skyfall both lived up to my hopes and exceeded my expectations.

yani's rating: 5 porcelain bulldogs out of 5

feeling that christmas buildup shopping saturday

With the exception of a couple of bits and pieces that can only really be picked up a couple of days before the big day, Ma and I are pretty much done with Christmas shopping.

Wheeeeeee!

It wasn't really that much of a different day than any of our recent shopping excursions, although I think possibly because it was going to be quite a warm day that a whole bunch of people decided that they would do their shopping before the heat of the day set in.

Although it's days like that that make me realise that the supermarket very often doesn't have all that many staff members working first thing on a Saturday morning. Either that or the age of the people they do have working on Saturday mornings mean that they very often turn up late.

I could be generalising though.

After shopping we did some random wandering around Target to no real avail, and Ma spent a surprisingly large amount of money on random junk at Coles for various people's Christmas presents (you know, those people that you don't really know that well, but you still get them something).

Then after the usual unpacking and watching of really, really, really, really old and often odd movies on GEM, we headed into the city... again.

The Kmart in Rundle Mall finally opened this week, and it's a little bit weird... partly because I can still identify where pretty much everything used to be when it was Toys R Us. Even though it now looks completely different, and they've moved the escalators and replaced the lifts and totally reconfigured the store. But I know that that section used to be where you came up in the escalator but is now shoes... and where the men's undies are was once Nintendos and Playstations (so it still contains things that men like to fiddle with). It's weird... it's almost like seeing the previous version on the back of my eyeballs.

Weird.

It's a little bit of a disappointment to be honest... while it might be the only "two level Kmart in Australia", it also feels like it's one of the smallest. All the departments feel small, with the possible exception of clothing... and there's no audio visual department (not that I really care about that so much any more). And the aisles seem really narrow.

And since they started doing their "low, low, low, low, are you fucking kidding me, low prices" thing, the quality of a lot of their stuff has understandably dropped off. So, yeah... woohoo there's a Kmart in the city... but, you know, it's a Kmart...

We did, however, see a group of teenagers wandering around the store, and one of them was wearing a top hat, another was wearing a panda hat and fairy wings and a third was wearing a pink pig jumpsuit with a red tie.

Young people today... I ask you!

Anyway, we wandered down to Lush so Ma could pick up a few bits and pieces for randoms, poked our noses into Crumpler and went down to grab another juice and a couple of the dip packs from DJ's Food Hall.

Then we headed out of the city to pick up my Joshua Smith piece from These Walls Don't Lie. I had to restrain myself though since there were some Dan Withey pieces there that I was kind of coveting... and if I hadn't already bought one of his pieces, I might have succumbed. Truthfully, if Ma hadn't been with me I probably would have succumbed anyway...

And, as has happened before, once I got the Smith piece home I realised that it's FUCKING HUGE! Whether it's because I'm viewing them in an environment that's large and open, but as soon as I get them in my house, they're enormous.

It's beautiful though. I just need a new house to display everything. Anybody want to rent me somewhere big enough for me and all my art? Somewhere as close to the city as possible, with air-conditioning and with lots of good strong wall hooks?

Yeah, because that's going to just drop out of the sky like that.

Anyway...

That was pretty much it... and next week the official ramp up to Christmas begins... as usual the first and third weekends in December will be the Tree Trimming and Christmas Goodie Making respectively... and then Christmas will all be over before you know it. I am looking forward to having some time off though.

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photo friday: balls in the sand

It's been a... dull week overall.

I'd intended to head out to Tooth and Nail gallery after work and after my chiro appointment this afternoon, but I would either have had to hand around the city for about an hour and a half or turn around as soon as I got home and go straight back into the city.

I'm not sure if the gallery is open on weekends, so I may not get a chance to go and see it.

Speaking of galleries, I spoke with the owner of These Walls Don't Lie on Sunday and arranged to pick up the piece I bought from the Halloween show tomorrow. Woohoo.

As I mentioned, I had my first fortnightly chiro appointment today, but I feel like I've slid back a bit... partly due to going to fortnightly, and partly due, I think, to the fact that I've been feeling "normal", so I stopped paying attention to my body and it's taking it's revenge.

I think I've also been sitting up far much more than previously which probably hasn't helped.

And since there isn't much else to tell beyond the fact that I got the limited edition Transformers teeshirt from Ript Apparel in the mail this week (woohoo)... I think I'm going to take myself off and lie down...

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random wietse hotness

This week's Random Hotness comes from photographers Sandro and Maykson from a shoot in Bangkok.

The model with the long blonde hair and perfect butt is Wieste.

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lego rockstars

This week's edition of Lego Photoshoot features the four rockstar characters... the Punk Rocker, the Pop Star, the Rapper and the 80's Rocker Girl.

The Punk Rocker is actually one of my favourite minifigures (which is why I used his body for Little Boyfriend 2.0) and I love the Rapper's hat. The girls are a little bit too 80's for me, although the Rocker Girl does remind me of one of the characters from Jem...

"Alright, you wanted the bricks, you got the bricks.

The brickiest band in the world... The Yellow Face Bricks."

"Where there is desire, there is gonna be a flame..."

"Where there is a flame, someone's bound to get burned!"

"Let's go crazy, crazy, crazy till we see the sun..."

"I know we only met but let's pretend it's love."

*Waaahwaaaaaa waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah*

*Dum dum da da da dum dum da da da dum dum*

And bonus points if you can identify the songs I quoted without the help of Mr Google!

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it's a seasonal shopping saturday

Ma was getting her hair did this morning (it must have been the week for it), so I took myself off to the supermarket for some solo shopping.

As usual, because I was shopping on my own, it took about half the time it normally does. But because I got started later than normal Ma messaged me that she was on her way down just as I was finishing.

We seem to have abandoned going to most of the suburban shopping centres, most notably Marion, since I hurt my back, in favour of going into the city.

And this week wasn't much different... at least Ma had an actual mental list of things she wanted to get and places she wanted to go.

There were also a couple of errands I wanted to run, but mostly it was just a lot of watching Ma poke around stores.

We headed down to David Jones' Food Hall again to grab something to eat... although since I did really feel like a milkshake, we ended up at their juice bar and had a virulently green concoction and a couple of their "dip packs"... which is just a little container of dip (I had hummus) and some chopped veggies (my perennial favourite, celery). It was quite nice for a change.

After we were done in town I wanted to go and pick up the artwork I bought from These Walls Don't Lie, so we headed out there (taking the long way for no good reason), unfortunately when we got there there was a note on the door saying they were closed for the day.

Bummer.

So that was about it really... and I think that that's pretty much all of the Christmas shopping done. I'm sure there will be other things that crop up at the last minute, because there always are, but we managed to get everything finished much earlier than usual which is good.

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photo friday: three thousand posts

This is my 3000th blog post. Hence all the photos featuring threes and groups of threes.

Three thousand. It's a big number, covering the last seven and a bit years.

Although given that I've stopped worrying about doing a post a day, it took me about three years and four months to get to 2000 posts, but to get from 2000 to 3000 has taken an additional three years.

Over the last 3000 posts I've done 197 movie reviews (not counting 17 DVD review posts), hosted an impressive 372 Random Hotnesses and 607 featured photo posts... there have been 60 travel related posts as well as the newest of my post categories, Lego, which has already racked up a slightly impressive 43 posts so far.

In the last thousand posts I've added a Me and Macbeth page detailing my ongoing obsession with the Scottish Play... I've abandoned the Unconscious Mutterings posts, and I haven't made a saunatime post in the last three years.

I still need to find some time to go through and tag a bunch of posts with an "art" tag though... since I do a lot of art related outings.

In news unrelated to my blogging output...

Yesterday was Haircut Day... so once the appointed time rolled around I took myself off to Tink's house for the aforementioned cutting of the hair.

The cutting instructions weren't much different from any of my recent haircuts, beyond the fact that I wanted it slightly blonder and to take the short sides slightly higher up on my head.

And then we just chatted. A bit more of a random chat than usual, but pleasant nevertheless.

I did feel a little guilty earlier in the week when I received a text message the salon letting me know that Tink was working a couple more days a week... and here I am seeing her at home.

Once my colour was in and we were waiting for it to "cook", we ended up half watching Beauty and the Geek... only really because they'd just had the makeover episode and I think the very first episode was on then I was getting my hair cut last time.

It's not really a great surprise to me, since I already know that my tastes run all the way to the nerdy end of the spectrum, but I was definitely crushing on several of the post-makeover nerds.

I do question whether they make the nerds really nerd up for the show though... tell them not to shave or get a haircut, just so that their transformation is all the more dramatic... especially since a couple of them were actually quite attractive after their makeover, whereas beforehand they just looked like stereotypical pop culture nerds in really dated clothes.

It seems to be around this time of the year when suddenly there are a lot of parcels currently winging their way to me.

I came home on Wednesday to find a "you have a parcel" note in my mailbox which I picked up on the way home last night (vinyl toys from Villain, including a couple of add to Ma's Christmas present), then today a book I ordered for Ma for Christmas showed up at work (Dancers Among Us), my present to myself of Christmas underwear is currently on route to me from Aussiebum and I had a sudden craving to buy some mesh shorts, so a pair of those are on their way via Amazon.

Plus I think there are a couple of crowdfunding rewards that are about due to be sent my way, one of which is six dozen handmade marshmallows (they are six different flavours though, which somehow makes it okay), and by the end of the month there should be a new watch, a pair of sunnies and a documentary on the guys who perform inside the monster suits/makeup for the movies on their way.

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