Worst Vids Ever

The worst thing about You Tube is that one day you have an old tune rolling round your head and you think "That was a great song, I wonder if the video is on You Tube..."

Lo and behold, after just a few clicks, the giants of your youth tumble before your eyes. Instead of going for a nice stroll down memory lane, you end up peeing yourself laughing. Were they all really that bad?

This train of thought started me thinking about what could be the worst video clip of all time.

So far my top three are:

Milli Vanilli- Baby Don't Forget My Number


Olivia Newton-John - Physical


Peter Andre- Mysterious Girl


Runners up: (even though the songa are still great.... well, it's better just to listen to them these days)

Salt'n'Pepper- Push it


Jefferson Starship- We Built This City


Did I miss any of the best?

Love is....

...taking your girlfriend to the aquarium, when you really don't want to go.

Thanks honey!!

Dating in the 21st Century

Phil's friends have recently introduced him to Facebook, and in turn I have been dragged kicking and screaming into the concept.

In order to fill out my profile, I clicked on "in a relationship", and then was prompted to say who I was in a relationship with. I dutifully wrote Phil's name and was instantly, and to my pleasant suprise, transferred to two whole pages of Philippe Roys, all with a little "Add as my Boyfriend" button next to them. It was like putting a kid in a candy shop!. I even rang Phil to give him a running commentary of all the other Philippe Roys I could have as my boyfriend.

In the end I chose my Phil, and was told a message was being sent to him to to verify that we are really was in a relationship. Even the computer doesn't take my word as fact.

Minutes later I get this email from Phil:

Forward from Facebook:

Subject: You have a relationship request from Louise Hubbard
Sender: Facebook

Louise says that you two are in a relationship on Facebook. We need you to confirm that you are, in fact, in a relationship with Louise.

To confirm this relationship request, follow the link below:
http://www.facebook.com/blahblahblah

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

...complete with this message from Phil:

"Very cute, is that how the young things do it nowadays?"

I wonder what happened to just passing a note during study hall?

Irony

At least in Australia, we call these disposable plastic containers Chinese Food Containers, as Chinese restaurants were the first ones to use them for take-away boxes.

The irony is that here in China, only the foreign food comes in Chinese Food Containers.

10,000

Well I missed the turn-over point, but I have officially had more than 10,000 visitors (now 10,152) to this blog since I started it in 2005... and not all of them were searching for Aussie Babes or Phlegm Chunks.

Does Hallmark make a card for this?

..........

Let me take this moment to tell you how pleased I am that someone found my blog by googling "Fat and frumpy pictures"

Yet another example of the quality writing on this blog.

Incredible

This is 3 hours of Photoshop work, with time lapse filming. I don't know who did it, but I take my hat off to them. I'll never understand how I can draw just about anything in real life, but all my Photoshop pictures look like kindergarten work.

Well worth watching through to the end.

Dinner time

Actual conversation in the kitchen this evening:

Phil: (opening a can of beans) "These beans smell like dog food." (Opens another can and smells again).

Me: "I love the fact that you said it smelled like dog food and then you sniffed it again anyway."

Phil: "So?"

Me: "Well most people probably wouldn't go back for another smell once they'd discovered it smelled like dog food."

Phil: "Well that's because most people would consider smelling like dog food to be a bad thing."

Change

I have kept this with me for several years, and thought it time to share. I love the idea of the process of discovering your problems and eventually avoiding them. I also love the recognition that this process takes time, and that it's all part of the journey. In the words of the awesome Ben Folds, "Time takes time, you know".

Autobiography in Five Chapters.
-- Portia Nelson.

1) I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in.
I am lost... I am hopeless.
It isn't my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.

2) I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don't see it.
I fall in again.
I can't believe I'm in the same place.
But it isn't my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.

3) I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in... it's a habit
My eyes are open
I know where I am
It's my fault.
I get out immediately

4) I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.

5) I walk down another street.

Real Woman

Yesterday, for the first time in the nearly two years I have been living in China, I tried on a pair of trousers off the rack and not only did I fit into them, but..... THEY WERE TOO BIG!!!!

I wish I could say that I have lost weight, but actually H&M have opened in Shanghai, a store previously unknown to me as an Australian, but now worshiped as my God.

Though I initially thought it ridiculous to have to line up outside the department store just to enter (I don't even line up for nightclubs), but once inside was overwhelmed by the cheap, reasonably fashionable clothing. In. My. Size.

I bought two pairs of trousers for about US$45, and walked out, feeling as if a weight had literally been lifted from my shoulders.

I used to have to remind myself, as I was told in every shop in Shanghai that I was "too fat for China" that I wasn't really a whale. But, depressed at not fitting into ANYTHING, I had grown to believe it.

Thank you H&M, for stocking "real woman" sizes in a land of waifs.

माँ नेपाली भासा बोल्च

So, now on blogger I can type in Hindi. The only problem being that I don't speak Hindi, though I do still speak Nepali, which isn't the same spoken language, though it uses similar script. माँ नेपाली भासा बोल्चू *. It does look awsome though.

*This in Nepali literally means "I speak the Nepali Language", though I am more than a little rusty.

Documentation

With Phil being Canadian and me Australian, eventually we are going to have to prove to immigration officials somewhere that we are indeed a couple in order for one of us to get permanent residency. I have been looking out of curiosity today at the few photos we have of us together. The trouble with being in a relationship with a photographer is that he would much rather be behind the camera than in front of it, and so visual documentation of our relationship is rather hard to come by.

We literally have a grand total of one normal photo of us together- the rest are in costume, pulling faces or just generally doing ridiculous things.

By far this is my favourite photo of us together- its silliness sums us up perfectly- yet I'm not sure it will be what the immigration officials will be looking for...

Yip Yip Yip uhuh uhuh

These little guys from Sesame Street freaked the HELL outta me when I was about 4 years old...

Gulp!

And I thought I'd had a bad day at work....

BRILLIANT!!

Blogger has been blocked again... off again... on again.... off again... I've lost count.

This doesn't affect those of you outside China, but others inside China can benefit here. The rest of, talk among yourselves for a while.

Ok, so to read any blogger/blogspot blogs in China you need a proxy. PK Blogs which previously worked really well is for some reason not working at all lately. There are several anonymous proxys you can use (my fave being www.anonymouse.org) however you more or less have to perform proxy acrobatics to post or read comments.

I have been tearing my hair out, but the answer is at Lost Laowai

The instructions are so simple even I can do it, it took me about 1 minute to fix, and there is no messing around with proxy windows- it's just as though the block never happened. Go on, do it now! I'll wait right here for you...

GENIUS!

funny coz it's true

This is so me it's scary

"Sshhhhh.... Baby sleeping!"

"Sshhhhh.... Baby sleeping!"

No I'm not pregnant. But I remember when I was a kid and my parents used to foster babies before they were adopted by other families. Mum would put a sign on the doorbell saying "Sshhhhh.... Baby sleeping!" so visitors would know to be quiet. The relevance of this? I think I need a sign in Chinese that says "Sshhhh... Grumpy 27 year old sleeping!"

Currently it is 7-freaking-am, and I am awake on my day off. Ok by now it is 7.38, but you know what I mean.

Phil left for a two-day photo shoot somewhere three hour's drive from Shanghai at 7am this morning. I know that is vague but I'll be the first to admit I wasn't listening very hard when he told me where he was going. Chong Qing? Chong Zhou? Chung Shu? Something like that.

The point of this ramble is that Phil, his assistant Victor and the driver of their van were all in our living room at 7 am to collect the mountains (and I mean mountains) of lights, cameras, tripods, battery packs, computers, ladders, blonds in bikinis... who knows... that have invaded our house as he has gone from shoot to shoot this week.

The puzzle in all of this is that they weren't even that loud, and normally I sleep like the dead (in fact Phil has had to wake me up just to check that I'm alive before). To add insult to injury, on Monday morning I managed to sleep straight through the same thing at 6am, but that time there was not only Phil, Victor and the van driver, but also the Director of Production and the Make-up Artist in our living room.

This entire ramble can be summed up with one word:

WWWHHHHHhhhhyyyyyyyyyyyyyy???????

I'm off to get more coffee.

This photo was brought to you by the Letter B, Number 6, and the ever-wonderful Phil

Photographically sprung

For everyone who has asked me over the last couple of years how I took my funky looking profile photo, I would love to be able to talk about lens and angles, speeds and apertures, or even some mad photoshop techniques.


But the truth is I stuck my head in a flat-bed scanner and tried to stay REALLY still while the scanner burnt holes in my retinas.

So there you have it. The secret is out