Tuesday, July 24, 2012

the original flash mob - Germany 1935...





Cabaret is one of my Top 5 films and this scene is one of the most powerful from it. It's about the terrifying way that the Nazi Party used Germany's youth to advance their cause.

Very creepy!

Check out my novel: http://www.amazon.com/The-Anzac-Girl-ebook/dp/B004VS7I8E

Sunday, July 15, 2012

the download Santa...

My daughter is so funny. I wanted her copy of Game of Thrones to watch. This text conversation ensued:


Friday, July 13, 2012

Why are films like wild animals?



John Lasseter of Pixar:


"We don't actually finish our films, we release them."

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

why is everyone always hatin' on the clowns?

First they came for the clowns... But I didn't say anything, because I wasn't a clown.

Look, I feel sorry for the lady in the clip below. I really do! 


But I actually feel sorrier for the clown; look at the poor guy trying to be funny while the woman with the clown phobia screams and cries and basically behaves like he has come to kill and then dismember her. If not the other way around. 


Poor old clowns. They are being persecuted everywhere we look. And it's not a new phenomenon.

Stephen King took us to new heights of clown bigotry in It. Michael Richards from Seinfeld fanned the flames of clown hatred for years, but did anybody care?  John Wayne Gacy was a serial killer first and a clown second, you know.

As Shakespeare said so movingly about the deep down humanity of us all: "If you prick us, do we not bleed tomato sauce? If you tickle us, do we not laugh - then jump in a tiny car and try to run you over? If you poison us, do we not die - for half an hour, gagging and clutching our chests and pretending to hang ourselves with our own ties?"

Next time you are tempted to revile a clown, remember what the Bible has to say about it. 

Clownliness is next to godliness.

Sunday, July 8, 2012

Thursday, July 5, 2012

The Porn Identity...

You have to laugh.

About five years ago, I drove into my driveway after doing some shopping and noted happily that one of the offspring had taken in the supposedly empty garbage bin without me having to ask.

Whoopee!

So. I get inside and my then eighteen year old daughter comes rushing right up to me. This is not normal. Although we've always had a relatively cordial relationship, the rushing to the door to meet Mummy the minute she walks in phase of life finished some years ago.

So Daughter, looking kind of crazy in the eyes, says, 'Mum! Someone put a bag in our bin.'

'They what?' I say. 'For that matter, WHO what?'

She says, 'They put a BAG in our BIN!'

'Hmm...' I wasn't sure why this was such an emergency. 'Yeah? And so?'

Someone put their garbage in our bin. Not that I want someone else's stinky garbage in my bin, of course, but I'm not going to the coppers about it or anything.

But Daughter's all agitated. 'No. No, not a garbage bag. A BAG bag! Come and look at it.'

I made her wait while I put the cold groceries in the fridge just because it was fun to watch my normally cool calm and collected grown-up jig around like a five year old who needs to pee.

Finally, I put her out of her misery and let her drag me out to where we keep the bin by the back door. I go lift the lid and peek into the newly emptied bin. Sure enough, there is a very big, very nice canvas bag in there obviously very full of something.

Something that someone didn't want but that they didn't want to throw away in their own bin. Something they needed to be rid of so bad they didn't mind losing a very nice canvas bag over it.

I look at my daughter and say, 'So what happened? Did you see who put it in there?'

She says no, she just went to bring in the bin and felt it was still heavy so she had a look and there it was - the bag - the mysterious sinister bag.

I looked back down at the bag and I felt a bit sick. If I'd been married, f#@% feminism; opening that bag would have been a job for my husband. I know. I know. I've watched too much NYPD Blue but I honestly thought, Oh God, I hope there's not a head in there. and then, even worse, Oh, God, I hope there's not a dead baby in there.

Daughter says, 'It's something really gross, isn't it, Mum? Oh, God, I hope there's not a dead puppy in there.'

'Don't be so ridiculous,' I say. 'Of course there's not a dead puppy in there.'

We stood there, looking apprehensively into our garbage bin until it became clear that, yes, there was definitely an unidentified canvass bag in there and, no, no knight in shining armour was going to come riding up, thrust us to safety behind him and deal heroically with the pesky damn thing for us.

So finally, I reach into the bin towards it, as if it's going reach right back at me and grab my arm. When I hold the zip fastener between my fingers, I breathe out heavily as if I have just cut the right wire while defusing a bomb on a TV cop show. I unzip it a little, wincing, certain I am going to see a dead eye staring back out at me through the hole.

Zip. Hmmm... Plastic. Ziip. A little further. Ziiip. Looks like DVDs.

Daughter, who is looking over my shoulder, goes, 'Oh fantastic! Movies! Look - Liar Liar!' The colours were basically the same as Liar Liar and she LOVES Jim Carrey.

Yay! It wasn't dead puppies or abandoned babies or decapitated mob boss heads! It was just movies! Neither of us stopped to ask ourselves why someone would throw Liar Liar away in someone else's bin in the dead of night. I know there are a lot of people out there who don't like Jim Carrey - but that seems extreme...

I zipped a little further and looked a little closer and, well, it wasn't Liar Liar at all. More like Stripper Stripper. Dicks and mouths and tits all over the shop.

Someone abandoned a great big bag of porn DVDs in my garbage bin! My daughter and I hung over that bin, laughing our guts out. It wasn't a dead baby. It wasn't a severed head. It wasn't dead puppies. It wasn't even Liar Liar. It was just a bunch of dirty old porn.

I told one friend and he thought I should go to the police. I thought that was a little extreme but he said, 'You know, there's a reason they're not putting that out in their own garbage bin. There could be anything on those DVDs.' Ew. Thanks for that one, bud.

I called another friend and she said, 'You should put it on ebay.' I must admit that was the first thought that crossed my mind as well. I don't know what that says about me.

When we'd had a good laugh and gone through all the things that it could be - a schoolkid who nearly got caught, a husband whose wife decided to clean out his shed for him - my friend said to me, 'Of course, the biggest question, Christine, is... Why do these bizarre things always happen to you? Out of all the bins in the entire city, whoever it was was ALWAYS going to abandon their bag of unwanted porn in your bin.'

I was going to bring the bag inside my house till I decided what to do with it, but what if it was just a temporary measure for some crazy pervert and he came back that night to get his Bin Porn back and found it gone?

I couldn't risk a crazy pervert banging on my door in the middle of the night shouting at the top of his lungs that he wanted his porn back! I left the bag right where it was and then in the morning when we checked, the bin was pleasingly empty, just as it should have been when Daughter brought it in from the street the day before.

Ah, all was right in our white bread, suburban world again!

So after all these years, what made me think about the case of Mysterious Bin Porn?

Daughter has grown up. She has made that necessary pilgrimage away to live in the big city and now returned to her home town - older, wiser, deeper in debt, more open about the shenanigans of her teenage years.

I mentioned the Bag in the Bin episode and we both had a new big laugh about it all.

'That was so funny,' she more or less says, 'this happened, that happened, blah blah blah...' She's a natural comedian and I laughed along at her recollection of the incident. '...and then my friends came and got it out of the bin in the middle of the night.'

Whaaa? I looked at her. 'Your who-sie what out of the wherefore in the when?'

'Oh. Didn't I tell you that part?'

'No! You didn't tell me that your friends were a bunch of perverted bin porn thieves!'

The story emerged: So hilarious did she think the story was at the time that of course she was immediately on her phone texting all her friends about our sinful bin full of porn.

Word got around and a few days later she learned that several of her male buddies had formed a deviant swat team, infiltrated our yard after all the lights were out and claimed the canvass bag full of dirty goodness as the spoils of war.

Never doubt the desperate hunger of the teenage male sexual appetite.