But then I thought, hey rather than doing a talk, because I’m scared about talking in front of people, I’ll record myself and then I’ll sit there and I’ll play it, on the tape… and for some reason I thought it was a really good idea. So um, so I tape recorded myself. And I would have done it like heaps of times, you know, to get it right. And then we played it. And I remember everyone was just looking really puzzled and I was so embarrassed because no one could actually understand me…
- Andrea Bell offers a brief synopsis on her progressive childhood speeches in Unheimliche Manoeuvres. This is recorded by Jessie Borrelle on her new and clever sound design blog, Let’s Okay.
I asked Christine Thompson, who with her husband David had raised this herd, whether everybody should be forced to make the connection between animal and carcass. No, she said, because it might put people off eating meat and that was not in their commercial interests.
- From Hoof to Plate: Jay Rayner visits a slaughterhouse and asks, is seeing an animal killed and butchered for the table something all meat-eaters should witness?
LOVE this Stories from the Street project by Melbourne Writers’ Festival. The rest of the program looks good too, as I’m sure you’ve heard. One would have to be living under a rock not to have seen the frenzy about the fact that Joss Whedon is keynoting the festival this year. I will unforuntately missing out on all the MWF fun for the third year in a row. Dangnation!
Another writer that is sending people into a frenzy at the mo is also related to MWF (and the Wheeler) – Brett Easton Ellis. Awesome writers in their own right, Kathy Charles has written on Less Than Zero (my fav!) and Elmo Keep on American Psycho – both short essays worth reading. (I burn with desire to have an author photo as cool as BEE’s! Note to self: next time, more scotch, more smirk, less smile.)
This is the worst! God, what are you doing? It is worse than you can ever, ever imagine. It is so bad. I am trying to imagine that I am anywhere else but here. I try very hard. I am at a rock and roll concert, I am there, the music has taken me there, I’m down in front of the stage where the men are dressed like demonic, flying superheroes, with batwings, and the spitting of fire. There, that was a great show! I am right there, can smell again the engine fuel. And then I am yanked unceremoniously back to the immediate, awful present when the needle (which is puncturing like a sewing machine would, only without thread, and much, much faster, and you are the fabric passing beneath) hits my spine and something shoots along it, insanely quick, and ricochets into my skull, like a drilling I can feel through my body, rattling the table under me. But it was only for a second then gone. And I am here again, in the room, on the table, looking very intently at the wall that I see I am hitting with a fist without realising. I can be nowhere but here in this moment, I am perfectly awake, I am wholly alive. It is terrible, terrible pain. It has been three minutes.
- I cannot mention Elmo Keep without linking to one of the best things I read last year, The Tattoo in Meanjin. Read the essay, then check out the tatt. Swoon!
Really looking forward to State of Design‘s talk, Four Goals for Promoting Urban Cycling. Amazingly, they have one of my favourite bike bloggers of all time on the panel – the dude who runs Copenhagen Cycle Chic. (Man do I love me that website!) Come join me at BMW Edge to ogle Melbourne’s hot cycling community take part in this serious and timely debate about the importance of incorporating bike culture into urban design.
10.00pm:
50ml olive oil – 403
1 oreo – 50.63
10.30pm:
50ml olive oil – 403
12.00am:
3 tablespoons peanut butter – 382.88
- So World Vegan Junk Food Day has been and gone. I did not partake. (I did, however, inhale a whole lotta homebaked calorific goodness at a potluck, which fortuitously fell on the same day.) But the Fat Fueled Vegan did a stellar job and took in 11,340 junky calories across one single day! To put that in perspective, Tour de France riders eat between 6000-9000 calories a day while racing. Veganator outlines how he did it in My journey in calorific surplus. I love how towards the end of the day he is eating straight olive oil. Mate, I salute you.