The structure of your tale deceived me for a moment into thinking that it was over.

Just finished watching, as per usual for my Tuesday evening, QI. The first episode ever, and it wasn't actually very interesting. Just rather crude. I don't think I learned anything new except that the Archbishop of Canterbury is deaf in his left ear. Useful stuff. Got my grandparents to watch the first two episodes of Jeeves and Wooster with me and I think they liked it.
The cat went up to the screen and put her paws on Bertie's face at one point, which was mildly hilarious, considering she's never paid any attention to the TV before. I loooooved watching Grandad and Grandma figuring out what had happened three minutes before darling Wooster did and their chortles when he caught up.


I made soup yesterday and left it on whilst I had a bath and forgot about it. Grandma heard it sizzling (yep, sizzling. Not a good sound for soup) and called me in. Dear reader, it was a brown crust on the floor of the saucepan with a soup bone sitting forlornly like a whale whose pool at Seaworld has been drained by evil terrorists. Buuuuuut, I put water and vegetables and barley in the pot this afternoon and just swallowed down two bowls of the stuff. One of the best soups I've ever concocted... isn't that befuddling? And I couldn't do it again if I tried.


Just been listening to the soundtrack from The Last of the Mohicans (on YouTube) whilst I type this. I hated that movie, hated it so much. Daniel Day Lewis looked like a git. I don't care whether his acting was award-worthy or whatever, Hawkeye is the most annoying male character in film and literature. Just look at him in this picture. I know he's meant to be all 'ooo, gorgeous abs!' but to me it just looks silly. I mean, the two main Indians are not going about in loincloths - they look sensible and sane and respectably clothed - why does the stupid white guy stand there in his underwear? The guy on his left doesn't look like an idiot, despite the loincloth thing (it makes sense for him to wear one, as a Native American it's his culture. And it just doesn't look silly) but that doesn't make Lewis look any less embarrassingly like he's been caught disrobing.

This film is the reason I've never watched Braveheart or Gladiator. Yep, I'm more a fan of the kind of period film in which everyone swans around wearing glorious clothes, dancing til dawn and smouldering at each other through marvellously well-manicured eyebrows. Not films in which the heroes are brutally maimed and the women who did briefly get to swan around in glorious clothes end up being slain horribly. Even though The Last of the Mohicans made me feel like jumping off a cliff myself (only people who have seen it will get the pun) it has an EPIC soundtrack. All those violins! Delicious! Should I post the last scene here? *Chews fingernails* It's not family friendly, I'm afraid, and a terrible plot spoiler for those of you who may someday actually view this ghastly creation... but it has seven minutes of pure soundtrack over the top of the pretty depressing action. *Surfs YouTube indecisively* I know! I won't put the end clip here (although I will give you a link. But that's not the same) - but I won't give you just soundtrack either. Somebody's done a clip with Irish dancing! Yay! This I can watch without imagining a tomahawk in my guts. Even if you don't like Irish dancing (and how could you not?), just listen to the music. Feel the awesomeness just sailing out at you. (Weirdly, it's one of those songs that just sound fantastic in different ways when covered by different people with different interpretations of it... click on all the links, I dare you. But not at the same time! The last one is pure adorableness.)

Well I don't think I'm going too far, Jeeves, when I say that this just about takes the giddy biscuit!

I suppose I'm one of those fellows my father always warned me against.

Finally did the sensible thing and bought some gloves! Surprisingly, I'm still able to type with them on. Brilliant.
It's such a funny world. Such a bizarre upside-down confusing wonderful world. Don't know if I'll ever get the hang of it, but such is life!

I need to start living in reality instead of theory.

Took Genevieve to a girly high tea this afternoon. It was very pretty; all the carefully prepared little food items, the pretty dresses, the fancy plates; the punch!

I've had this song stuck in my head all day - just thought I'd purge my soul of it and post it here (now you can have it stuck in your head!) :

At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies.

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

Guten tag. Just found the cord for my MP3 & camera - I can upload photos and listen to music again! Hurrah! So here's some pictures for you of my recent life... Joshua no longer has to wear the helmetty part of his pressure suit! Yaaaaay! Gorgeous child...













Reading another G. K. Chesterton book - Heretics - I'm a wee bit addicted now, I think. His style suits me down to the ground. It's only once every blue moon that you find a writer who expresses so perfectly what you already think - in ways that open windows in your mind. I feel happy when I read Chesterton. Brilliancy. Aaaaaand I got this book as a parcel in the mail, which always makes me happy. On Book Depository, peeps! Free delivery worldwide! Don't bother ordering through bookshops anymore - books are cheaper in the UK, even given the exchange rate.

I feel frothy.
I don't even know what that means. Probably it means silly. My mind is flitting from thing to thing like a dying butterfly. So far, my progression of thought (and concurrent internet surfing) whilst writing this has gone thus - G. K. Chesterton - Oscar Wilde - Catholicism - Hilaire Belloc - Stephen Hilaire - Blackstump - Matt Corby.

Blackstump! Please book a ticket, it is awesome and amazing and awesome. I'm going to find out what electives I want to do in advance this year. Must not forget to book ticket - I'm not allowed to go for the family deal coz I don't live with my parents any more. Waaaah.


My mum is soooo pregnant. It's quite scary. Not the idea of a new baby; babies don't frighten me in the least. It's the thought of a new sibling that scares the pants off me. A sibling nearly twenty years my junior. Isn't that just terrifying?


Interesting fact for the day - Oscar Wilde died of an ear infection.


There are so, so many things I want to do. And I have no idea where to begin.

This clip reminds me of my maternal grandma somehow. She taught me a lot about being a lady.

Jeeves lugged my purple socks out of the drawer as if he were a vegetarian fishing a caterpillar out of his salad.

Fighting With My Addiction To Parentheses And Failing.

170th post! Huzzah! (Isn't it a pretty number?) Made smashed potatoes, steak and lebanese beans for my Lee-babies this evening (should go and make my own dinner sometime soon... if I can find any food!); I was singing 'Bring Him Home' in the kitchen whilst I cooked (with big operatic hand flourishes), and Joshy, the second youngest (he's 2), started echoing me on the last note of every line. "Let him beeeeee" - "Beeeeee" "Bring him hoooooome" - "Hooooome"! A-dorable.


Dang. Just missed QI. And tonight's theme was 'Gothic'! The literal exact word for what I'm studying right at this very moment! Argh! Just got my books for this study period. I love getting parcels. And the book I'm supposed to be finishing this week from last week is only 100 pages long! Score. I should have it down soon - it's a gothic novel of the 1700s, called The Castle of Otranto. Really looking forward to getting into this unit. :)

Why do I have nothing interesting to say? This is really quite depressing. My MP3 is frozen? That's not interesting. Just also depressing.

Borrowed the Les Miserable soundtrack from Marickville library; would so so much love to see it live! The movie with Liam Neeson and Geoffrey Rush is amazing. (Although it's the only movie in which I've ever really hated a character played by Claire Danes.)

Really do recommend it, though I half wish I had read the book first. There seems to be some sort of jinx on me finishing Les Miz - the first time I ordered it at Angus and Robertson the bookshop's computers had a meltdown and I had to wait four weeks instead of two for my copy. Then, when I was halfway through it (and, no joke, it's a seriously hefty volume!) it mysteriously went missing and hasn't been seen since. The second time I decided to order with QBD instead of A&R - my order went missing. I had to re-order. And then, when I was two-thirds through the book, I left it in the backyard and it got rained on! I have another copy now, ages later, but this, unlike the others, is not my usual 'Penguin Classics' edition, so maybe I'll get to read the ending someday... it's an amazing, redemptive story, that much I know. You feel so much for the convict turned philanthropist turned fugitive hero... and also so much for the legalistic, police-inspector anti-hero. Not to mention all the sympathy that 'les miserable' - the miserable people of France themselves - inspire!

Speaking of Victor Hugo. (Yes, we were speaking of him; he wrote the above book.) He also wrote the muchly famous novel: The Hunchback of Notre Dame. (Although the original French is Notre Dame de Paris. Hugo hated the English title because he meant the book to be about the cathedral and its surroundings: it isn't Quasimodo-central) I actually managed to finish this one; long, depressing but fascinating look at depraved human nature. Seriously, I can't in any way see how any person affiliated with Disney could ever have looked at this story and gone 'Hey, what a great idea for a kids' movie!' I only watched it for the first time a few days ago. (With Jayden :D)

Hard as it may be to believe, Frollo is actually more sympathetic in the original. All that stuff he tells Quasimodo is true - about the mother abandoning him and all. In the original book Frollo starts off as a loving older brother/guardian to a juvenile delinquent uni student - a man who takes on the deformed baby foundling out of the goodness of his own heart. It's the gypsy girl, of course, who sets off his long descent into utter depraved craaaaziness. (She is, by the by, a vacuous, shallow airhead, who - spoilers - actually does die at the end.) The plot is tons more complicated than the Disney adaptation. Weird as it sounds, Quasimodo is the changeling child that the gypsies swapped Esmeralda for... so she isn't even really a gypsy. Her own birth mother is the one who betrays her to Frollo at the end - what's worse is that they realise, as the soldiers ride to arrest her, that they're mother and daughter. It's absolutely horrible. Oh, and Phoebus is a totally horrible person who uses Esmeralda and doesn't even remember her name.
The whole Hellfire sequence, (which I shall address shortly), from the Disney one, (in which Frollo struggles with his lust for Esmeralda and decides she shall 'be mine or burn' or words to that effect) happens in monologue/conversation several times: here's a little direct quote for you.

"Then, running, and drawing her after him, for he still kept hold of her, he went straight to the gibbet, and pointing to it: 'Choose between us,' said he, coolly."

Now, as to why anybody would want to make a kids' movie about a mixed up, physically deformed man, a depraved priest, a playboy soldier and an idiot gypsy... I have no idea. Despite cutting out most of the story and quite a bit of the eeeeeevilness, our beloved animating company certainly stepped straight into the deep end with this production. Have you listened to Hellfire? Talk about adult content! Images; words that will trouble children for decades. Basically, no. I won't post it here, profaning my blog with such disturbia. And the rest of it! Seriously depressing stuff! The ugly guy is beaten up in public, the gypsy mother dies in the first five minutes, people are burned alive, nearly hanged, dodgily molested... what the heck? There's even poledancing! Why, Disney, why?

I must go to sleep now. Busy day tomorrow.
Kisses and hugs.

My soul belongs to God I know/I made that bargain long ago/He gave me hope when hope was gone/He gave me strength to carry on!

Don't believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose.

I am a sad, sad person. To demonstrate: I cried on the bus this evening whilst reading about C. S. Lewis's death... which happened 28 years before I was born. So... yeah. I also just sat down and watched Mulan 2, which wasn't as horrendously bad as I expected it to be. Didn't cry in that, probably because my beloved Lee-babies explained the twist and ending to me beforehand (they love spoilers. I don't know if I'll ever be able to enjoy Harry Potter - if I ever read it - knowing as much as I do now... because of their desire to remove any surprises!)

Bleuhhh. I feel like a deflated beach ball or a romantic poet or something. Somebody hug me! Quickly!

Clap your hands if you believe in fairies!

Today I made a giant pot of spaghetti bolognese, whilst listening to James youtubing National Geographic videos about killer whales and helping Joshua make noodles out of playdough...

Ahaha! Just nipped out, mid-blog, to watch QI . Coz I'm cool like that. The only people I recognised (besides Stephen Fry, whose nose is really really wonky... thanks Monica for pointing that out *incredibly distracted*) were Barry Humphries and Bill Bailey. Apparently the red stuff that oozes out of meat when you cook it isn't blood. It's myoglobin, not haemoglobin, and it does something different to what blood does. I love information!


Argh. I hate these evenings in some ways. My brain is broken - keeps playing the same thoughts over and over again. Here's one of the worst for you: what if I never ever meet somebody that I can love and who loves me back? Romantically, I mean; there are several people whom I love very much in the non-romantic way (and you may count yourself in the very selective list, my dear reader. Yes, you may. (unless you are Hurstville library. In that case I feel unsure of my feelings towards you, considering the extraordinary amounts of money you have charged me for overdue books over the years.))


I mean, seriously. Whatever will I do with myself if I wind up a crotchety old lady, dying with the name of God on her lips, without those lips ever having tasted true love's first kiss? (belated Warning: I reserve the right to be as sentimental as I please here) Come on! Please? Please, no?!

Good night dear readers. Please pray that I sleep through the lonely, chilly 3am that is sure to come in only a very few hours.

I want the soundtrack from Doctor Who. Listen til the end of this one - it's epic!
And the second is just an incredibly well edited fanvid I found on Youtube. I'm a nerd, don't judge me!

I feel we're about due for a new adventure... I wonder what it'll be...

Hello all,

All you sweet little pieces of sunshine - meant in an entirely non-ironical fashion.

I did some (fiction) writing yesterday, for the first time in ages. It was a good feeling. A very very good feeling, like happiness. :)

I wish my life had a soundtrack, written by Henry Mancini, Murray Gold or Alan Menken.

I haven't uploaded any phone photos for ages - coz I lost the little cord thingy that attaches said phone to the computer. But I found another cord... so here's my recent life in pictures...

So I haven't been doing a whole lot lately.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGXqUSpyyb0&feature=related

Nice things of late:
Warm pajamas & dressing gown
Hot chocolate
Having Tay & Jay sleep over
Disney films
Yet another velveteen jacket - this one has ribbons and lace!
Making soup
Pregant bellies everywhere - particularly the one on my mother
Having the use of a car - heavenly!

I feel we're about due for a new adventure... I wonder what it'll be...

"Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde."

- G. K. Chesterton

Been reading a lot of Oscar Wilde lately. I completely and utterly don't understand him. In the slightest bit. He's sort of one of those writers whose sincerity is buried beneath a gazillion layers of wit and sarcasm and cleverness. If you sit down and read his plays and his fairytales and his poetry and his love letters all in one go like I did the other day you'll be completely bewildered and dismayed by the shallowness and depth alternating in such quick, clever beats. I know I'm rather homophobic (and freely admit it: if I'm going to be a coward, at least I'll be an honest one) because I just don't know how to deal with the issue of homosexuality. I (don't want to offend anyone! At all! Sorry!) don't know anybody who openly struggles with it, and don't know what I'd do if I did. My motto is 'love everyone because God does', but I don't know (probably because I've only ever dealt with this issue theoretically and not practically) how to specifically do that, coz I don't believe in pretending everything's OK when it isn't. If homosexuality is condemned by the Bible and biology I'm not going to sit by and say it's an acceptable lifestyle to offer to our children, but I really don't want to hurt more people's feelings than I have to. One of the guys from my church is a male nurse whose colleagues are mainly 'on the other bus': he says that all of them have at least attempted suicide. That's a demographic I don't want to go about hurting with my insensitivity.
Wow, cleaning out the dark corners of my mind in public here.
I hope I haven't engendered the hatred of any of my beloved readers.

All the same, I wish Oscar Wilde would explain himself. His stuff was so darn good. And so darn contradictory. And so bizarre. What was going on there?

So never will wine-red rose or white,

Petal by petal, fall

On that stretch of mud and sand that lies

By the hideous prison-wall,

To tell the men who tramp the yard

That God's Son died for all...

The Chaplain would not kneel to pray

By his dishonoured grave:

Nor mark it with that blessed Cross

That Christ for sinners gave,

Because the man was one of those

Whom Christ came down to save.

- The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde

The man was a genius!

And now for something totally different...

Cartoonies

Just watched Disney's Robin Hood with Jayden, who can turn even the mildest of children's films into a giggle-fest of innuendo.

Well, um, because I can't think of anything else I'd rather blog about right now, I'm going to go weird-nerdy and list all my favourite cartoon lads:

Roger from 101 Dalmatians

"Melody first, my dear, and then the lyrics. Hmmm?"

I know, I know, this may seem a little obscure, but stick with me here. He's a musician/songwriter from the 50s/60s who is fairly good-looking (despite the schnoz), charming, in an endearingly bumbling fashion, unselfconscious, entertaining, good sense of humour; British accent; strong, family man who stands up for his, um, dogs. Yes, the dogs are a bit of a drawback (all seven million of them) but I think I'd be willing to put up with at least the two they had at the beginning if I were Anita...

Prince Philip from Sleeping Beauty

"Now, father, you're living in the past. This is the 14th century!"

He's just lovely. The first Disney prince to have a personality, or any opportunity for real derring-do. Sings, dances (only briefly though...), takes initiative and defeats the bad guy - using the Sword of Truth and the Shield of Virtue! The only weapons, my dear... As a kid, I always identified with Aurora - blonde, kinda ditzy and vague, loves to sing and walk around barefoot, enjoys a nice nap... and who could ask for more than a Philip?

Robin Hood, from, you guessed it, Robin Hood

"Marian, my darling, I love you more than life itself."

Total sweetie. All the way. Even if he is some kind of anthropomorphic, tunic-wearing fox thing. I'll admit it was an odd decision for Disney to make the classic legend all animal-y, but they still couldn't destroy the pure awesomeness of our favourite outlaw. (Although Kevin Costner did manage that, somewhat later, in a movie I will never ever again watch.) I won't even list his lovely traits.

Derek, from The Swan Princess

"She's like... And then... How about... Am I right?"

His hair, as I have before mentioned, is a total 90s letdown, but his broad-shoulders, knee-high boots, singing voice, and sheer determination (once he realises that he's an idiot) to find and marry his lady-love are surely endearing.

Cornelius, Thumbelina

"Every day I'll take you higher - and I'll never let you fall!"

Well, he may be only sixteen years old and a fairy (with a 'funny name'), but since I have loved this film since my earliest infancy (or at least since 1994, the film's release date, which is further back than I can remember) I have adored Cornelius.

Prince Naveen, The Princess and the Frog

"One minute I'm a prince, charming and handsome, cutting the rug, and the next minute - woah!"



The latest addition to the Disney canon - and very different he is to the rest! Definitely possessed of the most personality - the most flaws, the most growth, definitely. And totally gorgeous. Just watch the movie.