Actually I said just take an inch off...

Could Sweeney Todd be the best film ever made? I mean just going by this picture? I say yes, and it's got nothing to do with my love of a) Johnny Depp b) murderous barbers c) Helena Bonham Carter, or d) all of the above. Oh and is there a name for that big thick grey streak through Johnny's hair? Because, um, I love that too.

Ho, ho, ho?

Je-sus Christ, these are the creepiest Santa's (snapped in India) I've ever seen in my life. Why hasn't someone made a horror movie about them yet?

The Last Pauper

Oh crap. I’m pretty sure the depression and the terror and the vows to never do that again are supposed to start after Christmas but I’m getting to the front of the line right now because I am poor. Very, very poor.

Oh okay, fine, I’m not living on the street, or eating cold beans out of a tin or anything but Je-sus, where has my money gone? Certainly it is true, as a dear friend noted, that my book collection has expanded somewhat to fit my pretty new bookcase, and yes, I admit, I might have gone a little overboard with one or two small purchases this year but frick, this must stop.

So my plan is this, and I think you’ll agree it’s a pretty cunning one. I will simply gorge myself on Christmas – not just on the food but on the presents, the booze, the socialising. I will suck out every little drop of marrow from its bony, um, bony something and feast. This is to prepare me for the coming famine, in which there will be no (or, rather, fewer) meals out, minimal extravagant morning mochas and no more amazon.com at all. Drastic, I know, but these are desperate times, friends.

In the meantime I’m going to have a bloody great Christmas, or, as I prefer to call it, a Last Supper. All of you enjoy yours too.

Riddle me this...

I love a good quiz. Better yet I love a good quiz at (almost) Christmas time when extra spools of time are just rolling about for you to pick them up and it's quite acceptable to do fuck all for three hours and still be wearing your dressing gown at the end of those three hours. Oh what was I saying? Yes, check out this rather good quiz, which includes gems such as:

"A handy visual system that gives people with no personality some palpable criteria to judge each other by"

(The answer: fashion).

And as I'm currently without internet capabilities at home and may not blog for a day or two, to anyone I don't speak to in the next couple of days have a brilliant Christmas and a drink for me.

Well, well, well...

Smugness goes before a fall.

“Actually work’s going well,” I’ve told a handful of people this week. “Good stories, think my boss doesn’t hate me blah blah blah.”

It was all true – things were going well, I had written some good stories and I wasn’t feeling completely out of my depth. In fact I can confess to you alone, dear reader, that I was feeling quite comfortable. Quite competent even. Oh Kate.

When will I learn? Will it take more than spending working my arse off to find a new angle on a story for which the well is well and truly dry, finally coming up with what I think is a pretty good story only to have it chopped in half and jammed together with another story on the same subject? For the second time this week? I would sit down and cry but that well, too, is dry from over use.

Frick, lesson learned, weekend earned and I’m off to get drunk.

NOTE – Since soliciting friends on my blog has become the closest I get to a social life in these days of 11-hour days, if anyone wants to see the Leonard Cohen doco I’m Your Man (coming out next week) then I’m your girl – call me, we’ll talk about it.

Chairman update

The cat and I have reached a truce. She will eat a mouthful of drugged food if I will leave her alone the remaining 23.5 hours. It is done. I'm a cat person agan - hurrah.

Mother? Not Mother?

I am starting to feel a bit old. It's not so much the fact that two lovely friends of mine recently got engaged, nor even the fact that I agree just a teensy bit with Charlie Brooker when he says:

"Clubs are such insufferable dungeons of misery, the inmates have to take mood-altering substances to make their ordeal seem halfway tolerable. This leads them to believe they "enjoy" clubbing. They don't. No one does. They just enjoy drugs.
Drugs render location meaningless. Neck enough ketamine and you could have the best night of your life squatting in a shed rolling corks across the floor. And no one's going to search you on the way in. Why bother with clubs? "Because you might get a shag," is the usual response. Really? If that's the only way you can find a partner - preening and jigging about like a desperate animal - you shouldn't be attempting to breed in the first place. What's your next trick? Inventing fire? People like you are going to spin civilisation into reverse. You're a moron, and so is that haircut you're trying to impress."

No, no what is making me feel old is the idea of Lily Allen being a mother. I like Lily Allen - both her music and my perception of her personality. I can see why she drives people up the wall but, frick, she's only 22 and I've always sort of admired her ballsy attitude but... a child? Jesus, this is what people do now, is it? Have brilliant fledgling career, find some boy and breed?

I shouldn't be harsh because I don't have anything (ok much) against people who want to procreate but at 22 - really? You're going to spend the next 18 years of your life looking after this thing, are you? It's parenthood from here on out?

Actually I really should shut up because at least I like Lily Allen, other then the other halfwits who seem to pop them out at absurdly early ages. Better Lily Allen, I should feel, than the female equivalent of that dude who beat his "difficult" child With. A. Belt. And yet... Either way I shudder at the idea that I could have had a child three years ago, making me the same age as Ms Allen. Bloody Hell. Putting aside the poor state the damn child would be in by now how different would my life be? I wouldn't have the job I do, or the job I had, meaning I wouldn't have the friends I do, do the things I do and, by assocation, think the things I think. My view, backed up by absolutely nothing in the way of evidence, has always been, that having a child means putting yourself second for the next 18 years. I may be a hideous selfish person in recognising that I may never be ready for that, but at least I realise that, unlike the hoard of fucksticks breeding right now and, yes, You Know Who You Are.

So, okay, I may be old, but look at the bright side = I would feel even older if I had a motherflipping three year old child, instead of a brilliant book collection and a cat composed entirely of silky magnificence.

Whine, anyone?

What a weird experience it can be working on a breaking story. Unlike ye olden days when I had days, if not a week, so sit on my arse and hunt for a new angle trying to keep ahead of a story can be a bit of a thrill. Of course it can also be a huge pain in the arse.

Case in point: when I left work yesterday I’d written a corker of a story for page one. My first page one, hurrah, I was bloody stoked. Then I get up today to find it’s not only been bumped (which, you know, okay) but is barely recognisable, though admittedly greatly improved, and now wearing a joint byline.

I know most journos must, sooner or later, have the experience of writing their wee hearts out only to have the story chopped and changed and half of what they wrote nowhere to be found but it is not a very nice one. Even worse when I discover the bleeding Fin has the stuff that was dropped so I can’t even recycle it for tomorrow.

Meh, I’m sorry, I’m just whining.

Next week: hilarity.

Chairman Meow

I am currently cat sitting for a dear friend of mine. In the course of these cat sitting duties I am required to give her a daily tablet. It sounded easy enough when I agreed to do it, honestly. The cat in question is is soft to the couch, teensy tiny delicate and adorable to look at. I think I might hate her.

We got off to a bad start when I accosted her with a towel on Day One. The idea being I would bundle her up, open her little jaws and pop the tablet in. Weeelll not so much. The first part was okay - I bundled her up alright, or kinda, but she hissed and spat like a bitch and I was one part scared of being bitten and one part sorry for her so I let her go, figuring I'd wait a few hours until she was used to having me in her house, started to trust me and realised I was actually A Cat Person.

So we move to Day Two when I decided to get things off to a cracking start. I got the tablets out, opened the bottle, shook one out, snapped it in half, put the other half back in the bottle... only to realise belatedly that Miss Kitty knew all too well what all those sounds meant and was now hiding under the bed.

"Come on Maisie," I cooed, down on all fours "come on sweetie." Nuthin'

Then I made error number one, which was shoving some random crap under the bed to force her out. Er no, she didn't go for it but folded herself into an area the size of a hamster's rump and stared back at me with something I horribly suspected might be fear. Error two was trying to go back to Plan A.

"Come on, darling," I called to her, slowly and guiltily extending my hand beneath the bed in the universal sign of friendship, "I didn't mean to scare you, come to - oh fuck! fuck!"

The little bitch had shredded my hand. More than that she'd left one of her beastly claws embedded in my skin.

Right, I thought, two can play at this game. This was where things began to escalate and Go To A Bad Place. I decided to try a new strategy, reasoning that a month of trying to corner the little thing and stuff my fingers down its throat was going to be a long month indeed. So I simply I took all her food up off the ground, crushed a tablet into the bowl and mixed it up with a bit of fresh food. I put it down, the cat eventually emerged, sniffed it and retreated in disgust.

"I can wait!" I called after her retreating tail. And wait I could. But so, apparently, could she.

Returning home on the afternoon of Day Two (today) I found the food still uneaten. Only mildly concerned I could be starting down a bad road that ended with me starving a small, mostly innocent creature to death I emptied out the old stuff, crushed another tablet into the bowl and mixed it with some fresh food."Come and get it diddums!" I called. The cat eventually came, sniffed it and retreated.

Nevertheless I remained confident. I was, after all, a human and she was a mere feline. When it came to balancing on stuff or licking her armpits she had me beat but when it came to cunning and willpower I did, I felt, have the advantage.

"It's a battle of wills, now," I told Andy confidently. "What can she do? Sooner or later she's going to get hungry."

It was the 'what can she do?' that tempted fate, I believe. Because five minutes later I returned to the bedroom to find the little minx had shat on the floor, ignoring the presence of two clean litter trays. She paused to glance over her shoulder at me with an expression that clearly said Try Me, Bitch and disappeared under the bed.

The battle has begun...

DISCLAIMER: Lindsay, if you're reading this, er, don't be alarmed. I may have made a catskin windcheater out of your cat by the time you return but otherwise the flat is completely fine.

Mistakes, mishapes, mistakes

People do things that are bad for them all the time. Well, no shit.

We do them even though we know they’re bad, of course we do. Why? Not, most of the time, because we want to self destruct but because things that are bad for us are often fun. I eat that delicious iced donut because I know it will taste fucking good, even if I’ll regret it later while staring at my gently undulating stomach. I open that second bottle of wine because I want the finest wines available to humanity even though I know I will vow to give up drinking forever as I chip my tooth (again) on the toilet bowl. I send that text message because it’s fun at the time and I can’t bear not to send it, even if I know it’s very ill-advised and I’ll be red-faced when I see the recipient.

But the line between doing things that are bad for us but can be borne and doing things that cost us too much is very fine. Like the line between being a heavy drinker and an alcoholic; between being greedy beggar who could stand to lose a few kilos and being obese; between indulging in harmless fun to doing things that actually make you miserable.

I… don’t really have a point but these are the lines that all of us have to manage every day, constantly, is all I’m saying. And sometimes, shit, it’s really hard. And, no, I shan't tell you what I've been doing but none of it is good - sigh.

Raymond Chandler breaks my heart...

This post probably belongs on the lending library blog but I'm too lazy to stop now that I've started and this is, after all, a short one. Namely a plea that anyone who hasn't read Raymnd Chandler or who thinks that noir is outdated and that most quintessential of hard-boiled private investigators Philip Marlowe has become a caricature should think again and get thee to a bookstore or library.

Amazingly funny, so cleverly paced you don't even notice you've been reading for two hours and sometimes hardbreaking Chandler is, quite simply, required reading for anyone who has an interest in... you know, anything. I'll leave you with the opening lines to The Long Goodbye and the warning that there will be a quiz on RC next time I see each of you - so read up:

"The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers. The parking lot attendant had brought the car out and he was still holding the door open because Terry Lennox's left foot was still dangling outside, as if he had forgotten he had one. He had a young face but his hair was bone white. You could tell by his eyes that he was plastered to the hairline, but otherwise he looked like any other nice young guy in a dinner jacket who had been spending too much money in a joint that exists for that purpose and no other." (The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler)

Party time, party time

Meeting the partners of people you work with is always cool because they never look the way you expect them to. It's always the straight-laced fucker who has some awesome kooky wife with crazy glasses who insists on wearing what looks suspiciously like a pair of curtains, someone always surprises you by turning up with a complete hottie and, this weekend, I nearly put my foot in it after the complete operation breakdown of my (frankly already a piece of shit) gaydar.

Meeting people's partners is fascinating because it gives you a weird insight into their personality that you never get otherwise. I don't just mean you find out if they're a t or a sort of a man but I get bizarre amounts of pleasure watching people interact with their spouses and trying to figure out how their relationship works and what makes it a good match. But, you know, pr'aps that's just me. I might need some hobbies.

In a festive season crammed with Christmas party upon Christmas party these sorts of pleasures are what make the endless work-related festivities bearable, or even worthwhile. I often loathe work parties because it smacks a little of some sort of hideous en masse team building exercise in which we bond over cold sausages and warm wine but this year I've been having a ball. Granted I did make the error of leaving a certain party on Friday night before the fisticuffs broke out (for which I'm still kicking myself, I assure you) but the rest of the time, through several parties, I have rather enjoyed finding out more about current and past colleagues, including who has a degree in classics and the mind of a scholar, who once saw Midnight Oil play three times in one week and who is a total lush. Oh wait that last one was me.

When I'm a among a blaze of lights

When I’m among a blaze of lights,

With tawdry music and cigars

And women dawdling through delights,
And officers in cocktail bars,
Sometimes I think of garden nights
And elm trees nodding at the stars.

I dream of a small firelit room
With yellow candles burning straight,
And glowing pictures in the gloom,
And kindly books that hold me late.
Of things like these I choose to think
When I can never be alone:

Then someone says ‘Another drink?’
And turns my living heart to stone.

(Siegfried Sassoon)

Pros and Cons

This happened yesterday about 3.30pm on a day with an early deadline when I was trying to skive off work on time to attend a party and mop up some free booze:

"Hey (editor's name), how much do you want on that Neptune story?"

"Not as much as I want on the lead you're about to write."

"Um what?"

.

"Oh yeah we need a lead - you're writing it."

One of the things I have found hardest about the new job is the shadow of a daily deadline. When you have a weekly deadline you can reflect on your stories a lot more. Opening paragraphs can be fiddled with, angles considered overnight and the whole thing generally polished.

.

With a daily deadline everything has to be done immediately. You have to make decisions faster, think not less but quicker and trust yourself more. The pay off, of course, is seeing your story in print the next day and feeling a thrill of 'I did that' pride.

.

On the downside (again) my blog readers have to read this self congratulatory slush. It's all about pros and cons, isn't it?

Apologies for being a slack blogger, I have been occupied with two of the following three things:

• Packing up my wordly belongings and swearing to chuck half the shite out... just as soon as I've moved.
• Being wretchedly hungover.
• Having a brilliant time.

"All fled, all done, so lift me on the pyre; The feast is over and the lamps expire." (Robert E. Howard)

I know this is morbid but I have always been a bit fascinated by suicide notes.
.
Yes, yes, that does sound a bit wrong but it’s a strangely rewarding feeling to read someone’s last words and wonder what they were thinking at the time.
.
Captain L.E.G Oates’ famous remark, for instance, as he left Scott’s tent during the ill-fated Antarctic expedition, knowing he was slowing the others down and after having begged them to leave him behind, “I’m just going outside; I may be away some time” might be stretching the definition of a suicide note but it never fails to give me chills.
.
French writer Nicolas-Sebastien Chamfort’s - “And so I leave this world, where the heart must either break or turn to lead” - has always been a favourite for poignancy, while at the other end of the scale there is Hunter S Thompson (and you can insert your own ‘who went out with a bang’ joke here) whose note I find weirdly comforting:

“No more Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun for anybody. 67. You are getting greedy. Act your old age.
Relax. This won’t hurt.”

Meanwhile if you’re going to use your death to get back at someone who has treated you poorly you could do worse than cribbing from poet Sara Teasdale who left this stinging slap for the lover who’d left her:

“When I am dead, and over me bright April
Shakes out her rain drenched hair,
Though you should lean above me broken hearted,
I shall not care,
For I shall have peace.
As leafy trees are peaceful
When rain bends down the bough.
And I shall be more silent and cold hearted
Than you are now.”

Why yes I have just spoiled the end of Bladerunner for you, why do you ask?

So you decide who the bigger spanner in this scenario is.

Is it the dicksnap who thought it was a good idea to have my call to their mobile company greeted with a recorded voice so very intent on Keeping It Real?

Honestly, what marketing wankhead came up with the concept to humanise said recorded voice by giving her a name (“Lara”), forcing her to use colloquialisms (er white hot rage has erased the memory of what they were but they were there) and feigned sincerity (“He-ey, looks like we’re having technical difficulties. I’ll have to put you through to one of my colleagues. I’m really sorry about this”)?

I don’t particularly care if I’m talking to a robot. I don’t really care if I’m talking to a person. What I don’t want is some kind of patronising-as-fuck she-robot on the other end of the line, pretending to care about my problems. I just want a new phone.

So that’s spanner number one.

Spanner number two, sadly, is the human on the other end of the line who dialled the phone company’s number, talked to the she-robot, hung on the line, was transferred, was transferred again, hung on the line… and then remembered she’s not even with Vodafone. Nor has she ever been. Hmm.

Milestone time

Well I've had my eye on the counter for a bit, watching it slooowly inch towards 5000 and there you go: today it made it. Brilliant. I should celebrate with some kind of hi-larious blog but, um, I feel like death. I'm sorry... but thanks, dearest reader(s).

You might think there’s nothing worse than being betrayed by someone you love but you’d be wrong. There is. It’s called being both betrayed by someone you love - by which I mean those two adorable will-they-won’t-they-or-have-they-already film reviewers David and Margaret – and having to sit through two hours plus of slushy pretentious wank as a result.

Reviewing Into the Wild, the story of Chris McCandless (otherwise known as “Alexander Supertramp”) who flags off the lure of Harvard law, donates his college fund to Oxfam and takes off on a road trip that eventually leads him to Alaska, Margaret said the following:

“He’s written a beautiful screenplay and taken risks with the direction, which all pay off, and he’s elicited magnificent performances, especially from Emile Hirsch. It is so close to being a masterpiece…”

Well thanks, Margs, but I’ve been burnt before. No offence but around about the time you slammed Pulp Fiction and gave The Fast and the Furious four stars I started to tready warily around you, keeping my distance as I would from a well-intentioned but senile aunt trying to feed me buttons and telling me they’re boiled lollies.

Let the casting vote be Davids, sweet David, who likes complete cheese as much as he enjoys obscure Norwegian crap even David Lynch would dismiss as ‘weird’. This is what David said:

“(Sean Penn’s) a good director and this is a very good film. I was completely captured by this story, by this epic adventure…”

Well. Well, well, well. Welly, welly, welly… The thing is it is an epic adventure and it is a great story. It’s just an awful shame the movie sucks balls. Only Sean Penn, who takes himself about as seriously as the Holocaust, could distil a potentially beautiful story into a pile of clichés that beat the viewer over the head from the start and doesn’t let up until you’re lying on the floor among stale popcorn by the end, whimpering softly.

Granted Emile Hirsch, playing Chris, does a great job and looks sometimes quite breathtakingly hot while he does it and Hal Holbrook, playing a 90-year-old tearjerker, is indeed tearjerkingly efficient but a stubbled hottie and a red-eyed octogenarian does not a masterpiece make.

David and Margaret can expect their letters returned unopened and the photo collage David made of the three of us to be consigned to the bin. The dream is over.

But I can still enjoy my new flatscreen when the earth has died, right?

I don’t know if anyone has had read today’s Australian Financial Review (I’m thinking maybe not...) but something jumped right off the front page at me today. An article on Kyoto, greenhouse emissions blah blah (please don’t stop reading) cites an interim report from consultants Pricewaterhouse Coopers that says Australia could cut its emissions by 30 per cent by 2020 without damaging the economy.

Did you hear that all you stupid bints who go on about how much all this ‘saving the world’ malarkey is going to cost our lifestyle? And yes I am talking about someone in particular who is not a blog reader but who may or may not pay my wages so um, let me just keep right on going there...

Anyway this is pretty amazing stuff if it’s true and something I don’t think I’ve read anywhere else. One of the consultants said: “We are not going to bankrupt the economy, we are actually going to save some money.”

And this isn’t in Socialist Weekly or the short-lived by much-loved family newsletter I wrote and printed between the years of 1991 and 1992 – it’s the Fin flipping Review. Why are we not doing this already? Why did we not do this yesterday?