cute

Awesome. Both the clip and the song – which was nominated for a Grammy!

Loves the 40′s WWII theme, the technicolor colour palette of the era, and the 3x Christinas!

Nice lyrics too… like:
I met him out for dinner on a Friday night/ He really got me working up an appetite

He’s a one stop shop with a real big ugh
He’s a sweet talkin’ sugar coated candyman

I’m sure H-N likes this one!

A HONG Kong man, taken to the hospital to have a cucumber removed from his bottom, told doctors he inserted it in a suicide attempt.

The Sun reported Chin Wei, 62, said the method was a variation of the Japanese ritual suicide hara-kiri – usually carried out with a sword plunged into one’s own stomach.

He was found in a pool of blood by his daughter before being rushed to receive medical health.

Medics said a severe tear to the man’s anus was not life-threatening.

source: NEWS.com.au

Suicide attempt? What else would you tell your daughter if she came home?

We walk into this traditional restaurant, where the elderly maitre d’ welcomes us with a smile and passes us a piece of paper onto which she has written an English word: “whale”. We nod eagerly. It’s what we have come for. Perhaps there have been tourists who have come to this hard-to-find establishment, only to be shocked by its wide offering of whale meat. Not us.

As we are led to our table, we notice the bamboo decor and stone walkways. Japanese businessmen sit and chat over cigarettes and delicately prepared dishes. A polite waitress hands us a menu that is replete with illustrations, but with poor English. We debate; order; and wait.

→ read more

1:20 is GOLD!

I find it fucking hilarious how all the passengers are egging the Chinese woman on and cheering for her.

“FAH YOU! FAH YOU! YOU ARE STOOPID! FAH YOU!” – the extent of her English vocabulary.

I was leafing through the October 1997 issue of Reader’s Digest and found something quite interesting. And since it’s been in vogue for authors here to post about friends, friendship, emo &c., I thought I would type this up to share.

Why do friendships come and go? How does a once-bosom pal wind up erased from your address book? Is a friendship that fades away necessarily a bad thing?

My first inkling that some friendships are meant to be fleeting came in my senior year in university. Friendships there had been especially intense. We’d bonded instantly and tightly, with meandering all-hours conversations about everything from the meaning of life to “What will we wear tonight?” Once I came across a line that seemed to express perfectly my 21-year-old angst. It was from James Michener’s novel Centennial: “God, he wished he could ride for ever with these men… But it could not be. Trails end, and companies of men fall apart.”

Of course! Some friendships are meant to be transitory. Like cowboys who had ridden herd together for vast distances, sharing dusty perils and round-the-campfire coffee, my university friends and I had come to the natural end of our path together. It was time to move on.

Absurdly obvious, the idea was nevertheless enormously comforting. It had once seemed like failure to me, to build a friendship only to have it squelched by sudden distance, either physical or emotional. You move across the country and struggle to replicate daily long walks with phone calls or letters. Or one of you had a baby, and the minutiae of changing nappies transforms the bicycle-built-for-two that was your friendship into a lopsided three-legged stool.

And that’s OK. Because in addition to our friends of the heart – the traditional, everlasting ideal – life is rich with friends of the road who, like Michener’s cowpokes, herd with you for a particular stretch and no farther. These brief friendships are equally intense, equally necessary, equally worth treasuring as any other, and for the duration of that ride you can’t survive without them.

- Paula Spencer in Aspire

Fuel for thought for us all.

some of you may have seen this before

Poo family

Oh dear! To be known as the “Poo family”! I cracked up laughing when I saw this headline.

On a more serious note, think of the poor kids! Even after this scandal blows over, Coogee Bay Hotel will always be known as the Poo Pub, and the Whytes as the Poo family. And there’ll be no escaping it, since all of Sydney and most of the rest of the world have seen this whiny lady on TV.

By the way, I’ve never believed in sending food back to the kitchen or complaining. I always treat people who prepare my food with the utmost respect. This is why.

Statement – Power Failure

30 October 2008

With around 750 exam centres conducting Higher School Certificate exams over a four-week period, the occasional minor disruption may occur.

There are established procedures in place to manage incidents, such as a power failure in the examination room, to ensure the disruption does not affect students completing the examination.

In such cases, the Presiding Officer at the examination centre keeps track of the time students lose as a result of the disruption, and makes up for the lost time.

For example, during the Mathematics Extension 1 exam at James Ruse Agricultural High School on Wednesday 29 October 2008 there was a blackout that affected lighting in the exam hall for 15 minutes.

Students were told at 9.50 am to put their pens down and were told to resume writing at 10.05 am. The students were therefore given 15 minutes to make up for the lost time.

At any school where there is a disruption to an examination, the Presiding Officer will ensure that students receive the full time allocated to the exam.

Students adversely affected by conditions during an exam can also submit illness/misadventure appeals through the principal.

source: http://www.boardofstudies.nsw.edu.au/media-release/2008/mr-2008-10-30.html