Forbes Billionaires’ Club
SBS is showing some stuff from America about the world’s billionaires. The point of the spot is the women who are (finally) on it. One is JK Rowling – a billionaire from just one set of books!* Another is someone at eBay, another Oprah,** and one from China who did something with paper.
Woohoo! That there are women on there now. Boo hiss that it’s only 1% of the whole list who are self-made women. Hello, gender equality….
*Yeh yeh, plus the merchandising – but still just from one set of books.
**Who, despite being painful, must be one helluva smart cookie, and I can’t help but admire her: female black.
Ghostrider…
… was forgetable.
We went to see it on the spur of the moment today, since we were at Highpoint anyway. We’ve been wanting to see it at least partly because bits of it were virtually shot in our backyard (virtually as in nearly in our backyard, not virtually as in concerning computers. And where ‘nearly’ is a few km away).
Basically, disappointing. I don’t know what Cage has done, but he is looking less craggy and character-ish, and more Tim Allen, which was a bad thing for the character in this film. I thought the effects were ok, although J disagrees about that; the female character was pretty pahetic – partly her acting, largely the script. With which I have several major issues – like lack of character and/or plot development. It would have been heaps better if the devil characters had been more interesting, and there had been more back story: like, why were they going against Mephistopheles? And why were they so damned easy to beat? I think I’ve mentioned this before – I like it when villains actually make sense, when you can appreciate the twistedness of their logic. And the same goes for Meph himself, here: yep, he’s the Devil (well, it seems like he should get the ‘the’, but I’m not convinced it’s justified), but… so what? I need a bit more to go on!
It was redeemed by being about half shot in Melbourne. It is always fun to spot places you know/ have been to in films. The amount shot in the cemetry didn’t seem to justify the weeks that the film crew spent there, blocking off the road….
In the news
No more Buffalo Chalet?? Very sad indeed… we love it up there in summer.
And apparently Keating called John Howard a dessicated coconut… I love it!
Bad, bad…
In looking for that last link, I think I opened up a great big box of trouble for myself. Yes, it turns out there is a great deal of Muppets on YouTube. Who’da thunk it?
I love Harry Belafonte, so finding that little gem warmed the very cockles of my heart. And I’m not sure when exactly the Star Wars bit was made… either it was right at the time, in which case I guess Mark Hamill really was the star you wanted, or it was a lot later and Mark Hamill was all you could get… looking at Hamill, I think it’s the former, because he’s not toooo ugly yet.
The chocolate… and the moose
My husband is totally obsessed with the chocolate moose skit from The Muppets. Mention chocolate, and he will generally say something like “and then de moose.”
Human Power
I love this idea – generating power from your body for useful things! Very scifi. I especially like the idea of creating energy to power the lights at your gym while you work out – how motivating is that?? Unless you pedal, you’ll be in the dark… that’s how I’d bill it.
Guilty pleasures
I am happy adn secure enough in my indy/metal/rock skin to be able to admit to the odd guilty pleasure.
I don’t mind the odd bit of Christina Aguilera.
I am curently watching Kylie’s Showgirl tour.
I love that it is on ABC! If it was Channel 10, I would so be ditching it because the ads would frustrate thehell out of me.
She really is a showgirl too – I do not get the feather headdress. And I am a bit uncomfortable with the boys running around and dancing in their Speedos, although I guess it does demonstrate a certain amount of equality of the sexes – we can exploit each other in the same ways. Seems to me, though, that chicks who have male dancers tend to do so in a more almost camp way, or tongue in cheek; perhaps this reflects the perception of male dancers being homosexual? At any rate, it is often – although now always – less overtly sexual than female dancers with male performers.
That’s my 2c.
Fun at church
J got out a Bible this morning, in preparation for reading Romans 1 before the sermon… and there was a medium-sized cockroach. Eeek. Then it disappeared; then he opened the Bible, and there it was again, so he squished it in the pages. At least he died in Romans – a righteous death if ever there was one.
I made him open the Bible later and scrape it out, so that some poor Ridley student doesn’t get a shock sometime later. Well, they’ll still get a bit of shock because there was a bit of guts left, but you know….
This a couple of days after chasing a fly in Queenscliff, and Anne finally splatting it, and green stuff going everywhere – it looked like it was fly guts, but it was actually detergent that that was on the fly swat.
Church really was good, though, aside from the cockroach, and then afterwards we had pretty much everyone – maybe 40 or so, including 6 kids and a month-old babe – back here for a BBQ. Great weather for it, which was a blessing, and even better because I didn’t have to provide salads – other people did that. I did have to make a tomato sauce run, though….
Authors and authority
I’ve noticed this before, but it struck me anew this morning.
Authors have authority.
Those with authority are authors in some way, too.
It puts an interesting spin on the whole Barthes of the author is dead thing, I think – an idea I have never subscribed to anyway – and also means an interesting way of thinking about the place of authors and how we think about them and who can/should be ‘an author’.
I have no answers to the questions raised, but I like pondering the issues.
Darwin and its rain
Apparently Darwin is flooded. At least, that’s what the news said – I don’t know what they’re counting as Darwin, whether it’s just Coconut Grove in its tidal zone, or if it’s way out at Bees Creek, or exactly what. Maybe I’ll hear from my brother at some stage. Ha!
Randomly Yours, Alex 