Token Smokin' Hottie: Michael Dorman

I have been a very lazy and thoughtless blogger lately, for a whole variety of reasons. For starters, as most of you know, I have been busily attempting to become a home owner. Apartment owner. Whatever. For another I have been doing a bit of travelling, mostly for work. Finally I have been rather uninspired and uninspiring lately, completely bogged down and generally Bored As Fuck with both the writing I am required to do for my job and the writing I do for free.

Nevertheless, to mark my return to more regular (I hope) blogging, let’s take it back to what this site is really all about: Token Smokin’ Hotties and the women and men who love them (okay that category may only include me but I'm sure there are a few fellow pervs among my slender readership).

Specifically let’s talk about Michael Dorman, of whose existence I was entirely unaware until last night when he cropped up in the Aussie vampire film, Daybreakers.

To answer your first question, no Daybreakers isn’t great: it started really well and looks consistently great but it gets pretty nuts towards the end and the gore factor goes from mild to extreme, um, very quickly. I for one could have done with seeing fewer heads being pulled off bodies.

However, Michael Dorman – who plays the brother of the main character, who in turn is played by Ethan Hawke – is so blindingly delicious that I would heartily recommend the movie to anyone who likes-that-sort-of-thing and has a bit of spare cash, merely that they might drink in the beautiful liquid pools of Dorman's eyes.

He’s so hot, indeed, that I started to get ANGRY every time the camera cut away from him to Ethan “face like a scrunched up towel” Hawke - a decent actor I once swooned over but who is now increasingly beginning to resemble a goblin with a wasting disease.

He’s so hot that he looks good with a gun, this Dorman - even to a stooge like me who usually finds men with guns about as hot as a pap smear. In fact, fuck it, Dorman's so hot he kind of made me wish that I was a gun that he could swing about and slide down the back of his pants, holster and load then cock and …. *long pause while Kate regroups and reconsiders her NRA membership*… I’m sorry, aaand I’m back.

Anyway, the bitch is smoking hot, that’s all I’m saying, and he can act too, which is a plus but not a requisite for the Token Smokin' Hotties of this world. His American accent certainly shat all over that of Sam Neil and Claudia Karvan (who I actually like but who I thought was fucking dreadful in this). Somebody get this guy an awesome script and a hit movie that we might see more of him. And I mean that literally.

Belated thoughts on Dubai #1

Dubai TV is so fucking awesome I can't even explain it. I spent 10 minutes (being driven from the airport to the cruise ship) in the back of one of those cars with a TV in the headrest and saw a dude high-kick three other dudes in the head while his girlfriend got literally stabbed in the back. The weirdest thing was that the whole show/movie(?) was shot in a weird way that made it look kinda exactly like a car commercial. A violent, awesome car commercial. Then, on my cruise ship TV there was this one channel that showed simply a close up of a man, lying in bed, his eyes open and his hand reaching towards a bell on the bedside table. I'm 99.9 per cent sure that channel was just stuffed up and had frozen but what if it wasn't??

Where would we be without it?

I should have mentioned it earlier but...

... I'm in the Middle East for work. No, no not war reporting and flak jackets: this is travel writing of the cruise ship variety which, I think we can all agree, is just as worthwhile and important.

I've never actually seen Brit show Strictly Come Dancing...

... but if this story that Jarvis Cocker wants to take part is true I swear I will download every mothercussing episode there is.

Sorry for the lack of posts...

... I have been spending my time spending money I don't have by buying a freaking apartment. Um, yeah, so THAT happened.

Addiction's a bitch

At first it was just a recreational thing: I definitely only used it on special occasions when I was going somewhere fancy.

Later on, I started using when I was feeling flat and needed a little pick-me-up. Nothing serious: just once a week, mostly on the weekends. It made me feel great.

Within a year I was hooked and using it most mornings before work because, well, I just felt better.

Yes, dear, reader, at the fag end of 2009 I regret to inform you that I am hooked on my bloody hair dryer.

UPDATE: I must have tempted fate because I've broken the fucking hair dryer. Broken-into-three-pieces broken. Balls!

Uncomfortable realisations during a recent phone call:

1. The caller believes his wife is trying to kill his 6-year-old son.
2. He has chosen, for reasons unknown, to share this information with me.
3. He shares the (moderately unusual) name of a man who was sent to Graylands Hospital in the late 1990s for blugeoning and stabbing two men to death.
4. He knows my name and where I work.

Concerns I have about wearing my newly acquired bathing suit on my completely awesome and swanky Dubai cruise next month:

1. Seafolly cites the standard boob cup size for its bathers as a B/C.
2. You can't actually see my nipples but, um, if I move too suddenly you might.
3. Strange men may start tucking $1 bills into my arse if I do.

Christmas: a seasonal tally.

PRO: The tree. God knows I do my best to kill any living thing passed into my possession but there is nothing like a proper Christmas tree, lit with Christmas lights and glowing in the corner of your living room.

CON: Having so many parties/dinners/drinks on that you have to miss catching up with several of your favourite people in the world because you are too drunk/sunburnt/close to lapsing into an coma to make it.

PRO: Gluttony. More cream with your pudding, sir? A little lard spooned gently onto your buttered bread? Why, don't mind if I do...

CON: The two-week hangover that extends from the first office Christmas party to the pain of waking up on the first day of the new year.

PRO: Buying presents. Receiving presents. Spending money I don't have! Debt! Consumerism! Capitalism! No, that's not irony: I just fucking love presents.

CON: Post-Christmas blues. Or what in my house we call 'discovering you have killed the Christmas tree'.

PRO: The way it legitimises alcoholism. No hour is too early for a champagne at Christmas time, no table too well-covered for another bottle of wine to be set down upon it.

The verdict: Christmas wins.

Call me a bleeding heart pussy...

...but for some reason the fact that the fucking BBC is seriously asking its readers Whether Gay People Should Be Executed strikes me as fairly fucked.

How is it that as a 27-year-old "professional" my fridge contains the following...

- jar of crushed garlic x1
- bottle of wine x2 (white)
- bottle of beer x3 (random leftovers from an old party I think)
- butter
- tomato x1 (I'm quite proud of that, though it is wrinkly)
- tupperware container of old, long-deceased pasta sauce x1
- thyroxine pills container x1
- salad dressing bottle x5 (!)
- hollandaise sauce jar x1

I mean, that's pretty sad, right?

Strictly for Gossip Girl fans...

... this is quite hilarious.

No, no, no, no, no. I am sticking my head in the sand...

... and refusing to believe any evidence that the upcoming Sherlock Holmes movie may blow. I mean, can a movie that looks like it satisfies so many of my secret fantasies (Robert Downey Junior in shirtless bare knuckle boxing, Sherlock Holmes!, Robert Downey Junior in shirtless bare knuckle boxing, opium!, Robert Downey Junior in shirtless bare knuckle boxing) REALLY be shit? Computer says no.

my island home

I've been on holiday for the past week and a half. Not a proper holiday - I mean, I'm not tapping this out at the edge of a deep blue pool, sipping mojitos with my spare hand while a pool attendant named Juan offers to re-tie my bikini bottoms. I'm on a Kate holiday, which means a lot of long lunches, sprawling on the back lawn with a book and Buffy marathons, interspersed with bouts of crippling anxiety that I'm wasting my life.

It's been fun, though, if only because it has reinforced my growing awareness that I'm not cut out for office life. It's not that I dislike taking orders (I don't) or thing I possess enough Get Up and Go to work for myself (I definitely don't): I have just come to regard the daily grind as all a bit much, actually. Why, it occurred to me the other day as I lay on the couch, wondering just how and why Buffy went so very much to shit towards the end of its run. does anyone have to work? Can't we all just, you know, Get Along?

I mentioned this theory to Boyfriend Andy who, as usual, was all too ready to prick my new-found sense of joy and excitement. Because he is kind he refrained from observing that I was talking out of my arse and that, without work, not only would there be no couch to lie on, no house to live in and no wine to consume but also no Buffy to watch while I did all of these things. No, instead, he asked me, quite nicely, if I planned to collect corn.

"Someone has to collect the corn, Kate," he said. His words were slightly opaque but he made, I felt, a fairly good point. Someone did have to collect the bloody corn. And my rubbish. And make that beautiful Alannah Hill hat, quite possibly under undesirable conditions in a foreign country somewhere.

Still, call me an old optimist but I can't help believing there lies a middle ground somewhere between Extreme and Profound Despair at The Need to Get Up Every Morning and scrabbling for corn in a field somewhere. Today, for instance, I went to The Queens for lunch. Sitting in the sun, my book propped up beside my salad and wine, it occurred to me that the place was PACKED. It was positively heaving, albeit with the kind of cretins with whom I wouldn't want to share a city, let alone a pub: boofheads with their collars up, slappers who wouldn't shut up about ohmigodhowmuchidranklastnight and some dick whose tendency to laugh uproariously in my ear may have rendered me slightly deaf.

And yet it was 1pm on a Thursday: don't these people have jobs to go to? Money to make and spend? Very possibly they are all on very long lunch breaks, have started their Christmas holidays early or work nights.

And yet. Was it not also possible that they had, instead, discovered an alternative - a way to skirt that whole 'need money to buy food/shelter etc' thing? Could they have found a way to, in short, fuck the fucking corn? I have reason to believe to and, damnit, I'm not leaving my long boozy Queens lunch until I get to the bottom of it.

Lies told by the saleswoman at Country Road today

1. I'm a very private person...
2. ... but I give great advice.
3. The thing about that is you can just wear it anywhere.

Big boobs

Pros: The obvious ones.

Cons: Slogan t-shirts tend to be a tricky area. Wearing my newly-acquired Worst of Perth Perth: the Bunbury of the North shirt to the getting-harder-every-week Paddy Maguires quiz night the other day, for instance, it occured to me that you would pretty much have to crawl into my belly button to be able to read the punchline. Plus whenever someone says "nice shirt" you immediately suspect them of leering at your tits, despite the fact you are wearing an item of clothing more or less imploring them to do just that.

An open letter:

To the girl walking down The Terrace today wearing hotpants, a beret and a giant Nikon camera slung around her neck like she thinks she's fucking Henri Cartier-Bresson,

Honey, no.

Best Regards

Question

Is 27 too old to be:

a)allowing your car to run out of petrol
b)calling your Dad to help you deal with situation a)?

Oh dear

The older one gets the older everything else in general feels and the harder it becomes to believe that one is learning anything or is capable of being surprised by anything anymore.

So I was heartwarmed (and, obviously, slightly flummoxed) by news from a very close 30-something friend that she had just learned how to use Eftpos cards. This week. Yes, this very smart and well-educated friend found herself in the supermarket line when she realised she'd forgotten her credit card. Recalling that she had left it at home, she called her husband and asked him to bring it down. He, sensibly, asked why she didn't just put it on her bank card. It was then (over his hysterical laughter I assume) that said friend learned one's bank card cannot be used simply at ATM machines but to pay for goods and services at a wide variety of locations.

One can only dream that such a delightful surprise lurks around the corner for all of us.