Frocks that Talk

If you're not already acquainted with the Secret Lives of Dresses series, now is the time.

Laugh and cry with the Jelly

A very lovely post.

Merry Christmas

I'm in Melbourne, visiting family and friends over Christmas. It is very hot and dry. The city is overhung with smoke - vast tracts of bush are on fire. Most of the news coverage about the fires is about property, property, property. But I wonder about the critters getting roasted - there must be thousands of them. Wombats in their burrows. Koalas in their treetops. This morning, eyes sore from not enough sleep (it's SO hot!), I lay on my parents' couch and asked my brother, who was sitting at the table reading The Age, "What's happening in the world". Here's what he told me:

A Japanese guy went into hibernation. He got caught on a cold mountaintop, all his organs shut down... he stayed like that for 27 days... but then he thawed out.

That copper who killed the Aboriginal man isn't going to be charged with murder. He broke the man's ribs and pulverised his liver so that it stopped working, but there's not enough evidence to charge him with murder.

Two teenaged girls killed their friend and put her in a wheelie bin.

Happy holidays.
Happy holidays.

Bloggo Troppo Nomino

Over at Club Troppo they're calling for nominations for the blogosphere's best essay-style posts of 2006, to be republished on Online Opinion. The posts have to be between 500 & 1800 words. I've nominated three of my favourites: Ampersand Duck's Gathering Strength, Laura's My Day! Starring Cat! + Many Foods! from Sorrow at Sills Bend and Crazy Brave's Austrayan Values: a sense of bollocks.

And I've self-nominated some of my stuff from Sarsaparilla: Viva La Muff; Dancing Shoes and Caesar Salad.

The Art of the Insult

Richard and I went to the Dendy Newtown last night to see the Borat movie. I was SO in need of a good laugh, it was wonderful. There was a woman in the row behind us braying like a donkey for much of the time, but I enjoyed that too. The movie is just so incredibly politically incorrect... potentially insulting to just about everyone. There was only one scene that worried me. At a Southern dinner party Borat declares that the women sitting either side of him (a heavily made-up redhead & a glamorous blonde) would be very popular in his home country. He then adds that the other woman at the table, a quiet person with short grey hair, would be popular not so much. There was a longish silence. For me, this was the one place in the movie where he went too far. Perhaps that's the key to this sort of very confronting comedy - always taking it too far for someone. George Saunders has written a brilliant "memo" in The New Yorker - I recommend it as an antidote to the movie if you're planning to see it.

Pet Blog

"A blog is like a pet rock. You promise to always cherish and nurture it, and then you do not." This is a quote from David over at Lorraine Crescent. Anyway I've been thinking a bit (usually at about 4am when I can't sleep) about changing the focus of Marrickvillia slightly... so I can cherish and nurture it a bit more. The girly swot in me doesn't like not doing things properly and sometimes I just don't have time to do what I want on Marrickvillia by way of photos of places in Marrickville and interviews with people.

So I figure, it's my blog, and I live in Marrickville, so why not write about myself? I know there's nothing radical about that, actually it's what everyone does on their blogs! I am my own biggest resource, and I don't have to go out and interview myself to write something, so you can expect more about me from now on - including the two teenagers (daughter and nephew), all the pets, having had cancer, my gorgeous husband of nearly 2 years, my writing & research interests, my work at UTS, my clothes, what I'm having for dinner, my 10 month old godson (who is my husband's biological son and the child of our dear dear friends in London), my headaches, my garden, etc etc...

What's on my mind at the moment - I'm cross that Hugh's skateboard has been stolen. He left it on the front verandah. I forget that he's a country kid and we need to actually tell him stuff like "don't leave things on the verandah". Anyway it's gone now, along with the 2 phones, the ipod and numerous small amounts of cash that he's had stolen this year, mostly from out of his bag at school. Maddening!! The other thing on my mind - I did a word count for my book yesterday (it's a cultural analysis of cosmetic surgery) and realised I need to cut 13,000 words out of it. It's currently 103,000 and has to be 90,000 before I send it to the publisher next week. How to do this I'm not quite sure. Remove all adjectives? Delete entire sections? We will see, and back to it I now trundle...

Barbies and Kens

Once a month or so there's a market outside the RPA hospital in Camperdown. Yesterday I spotted these baskets of Barbies and Kens ($1.00 each). I liked how the vendor had separated them along gender lines. I also like how most of them don't have any clothes left.

We went to Liverpool...

Where there isn't no trees, no scented breeze
no fields of waving corn.

Richard was looking for a mookudulu (or tawa) - one of those round flat iron things for cooking Indian breads - so yesterday we headed out to Sydney's Liverpool. The trip on the M5 and then the Hume didn't take long from Marrickville, about 25 minutes I think (I did fall asleep on the way back). After two scorching days in Sydney for Spring - mid 30s - it was relatively cool and we enjoyed the cloud cover. Liverpool was packed, with queues filling up some shops. Most people were Indian, the women all in saris. We had forgotten it is Festival of Light time so I suppose the crowds were much like our Christmas. I took lots of photos and was asked in one big grocery store by an Indian with a very distinguished set of moustaches what I was doing. I then felt like an inner-city dickhead for the rest of our outing.


On the M5


Yes, a Bollywood Chinese Restaurant.


Beautiful Gods - this statuette was thick plastic, about the size of my hand.


There were boxes of plastic fruit & veg (notice the potatoes?) and gorgeous real eggplants.


And piggies, hippos and elephants - some of my favourite creatures.

Bad behaviour

Read this excellent post to find out what happens when bloggers meet.

Un-Marrickvillia

Sometimes when I'm away from Marrickville I see things and think "that would be fun to put on the blog, if only it was in Marrickville". Like this man who was walking along George Street in the city near Chinatown holding a statue of the Virgin Mary and a bottle of vitamin pills. He asked me if I was Catholic, I said no, he said "Jesus loves you", and I felt ridiculously happy for about half an hour. Or like this petrified dead bat that was on the front porch of a terrace house in Carillon Avenue, Newtown.