Woo! Mess and Noise TOTALLY printed my pictures of Aleks and the Ramps!



But wait! That isn't my name!



Proof that Macromantics is love. And kudos.

Personals in the London Review of Books.

A woman in the current issue, for instance, specifies that she is looking for a man "who doesn’t name his genitals after German chancellors" (not even, the ad says, “Prince Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingfurst, however admirable the independence he gave to secretaries of state may have been.")

In an e-mail exchange also conducted on condition that her name not be used, the woman, a 38-year-old local government arts official with an interest in Bismarck, said she been inspired by a disastrous experience with a date who announced over the tiramisu that he called his private parts "Asquith," after the World War I prime minister.

Miss Cheney is a great proponent of the personals, squeezed between discreet ads for mental institutions, in the New York Review of Books, but obviously the British can go one better. German chancellors. Snort.

Via Bookslut

Sex advice from a dungeons and dragons player

I am a 27-year old virgin. It’s not that I’m unattractive or totally uncool, I just never found anyone I really wanted. But now I’m ready. Where should I go to lose my virginity in a really memorable way?

Chuck, you asshole. It’s one thing to miss the game but you were on Burrito Supreme duty. Get thee over to my place tomorrow and we’ll do a solo adventure that should satisfy your curiosity. Bring your latex dice bag.

Someone showed me World of Warcraft once. They were some kind of dwarf and they made the dwarf dance. That was rad. And hot.

Pet octopus! And cuttlefish!

I DIDN'T KNOW THIS WAS POSSIBLE. Quick! I need to get a few thousand dollars worth of filters, skimmers, UV sterilisers, reverse osmosis units, live rock, powerheads, chemicals, test kits, tanks, lighting and silver sand! And then I need a place to put it all! And then I need three months to completely cycle the tank! And then I need to find out whether it's legal to keep an octopus that will only live for six months, anyway! BUT THEN I WILL HAVE AN OCTOPUS! IT WILL BE MY FRIEND! I'LL NAME HIM HAROLD AND FEED HIM CRABS!!


Canberra was delightful and wondrous and splendid. I played with a small, confident, black and white kitten, who bit my arm and licked my nose. I have a new camera and new running shoes. Back home my room is a disaster and an overwhelming desire to sleep. I have resolved to buy a fish and name him Tibor. The conferences are next week and I... don't know what to do at a conference but I imagine I'll find out.

Right.

Well.

That's all over now.

I finished with my last (half assed) essay on Thursday and went to frolic in the city with Miss Cheney and Squire Frank. We had three bean drink and bought Too Many Things. I am now the proud owner of a pair of red hotpants* and that Monica Belluci lipstick.** I have effectively been sitting on my arse ever since.

I... don't think I care for this 'being done' business.

I applied for a bunch of PhDs and scholarships. I'll find out about those in January and February. They release marks December 7, so I'll find out if I screwed up or did not in fact screw up. I honestly don't know what my chances are. I lost a lot of motivation to do anything other than thesis this semester, and I've long been convinced that one of my lecturers might mark me down. I really half assed the last paper because I simply needed it out of my life. So my plan is this: focus on the next couple of months, make decisions about the future after I find out one way or another re: scholarships and grades and whatnot.

I am going to Canberra tomorrow! So, Canberra people! Give me a call! I'll be in Belconnen! I may or may not have a car! But I WILL have hotpants! And numerous cameras!

* I don't know why, either.

** HOLY GOD LIPSTICK WEARERS!!! I have far too many red lipsticks, but this is astonishingly good. You'll be spending a goodly amount of money, but it is worth it.

It was an unbearable insult to become a corpse. One moment you are a human being protected by modesty, by the sacrosanctity of nakedness and intimacy, and then the instant of death is enough to put your body suddenly at anyone’s disposal - to undress it, to rip it open, to scrutinise its entrails, to hold one’s nose against its stench, to shove it into the freezer or into the fire. - Milan Kundera

There is a week to go and much work to do and my heart just isn't in it. My mood cycles wildly, from dreadfully depressed to happy to apathetic and back again, and I've had enough. I've had enough due dates, drafts, photocopying, and long, dark nights alone with an aching head and a desk covered with paper. It's a balmy, beautiful night, and when I went out to get a disappointingly acrid coffee the streets were full of people enjoying themselves. Writing a paper about dead people is very much not helping my present state of mind, of course, and I don't know how I'm going to face my eugenics paper, which I reckon I'll hand in on Thursday.

Mr Warwick is down from Canberra, which is nice as I get to raid his CDs. Two charming, delightful people are coming to stay on Tuesday, which fills my heart with gladness and anticipation, but at the same time I know it'll be very, very hard to summon the willpower to finish the goddamned eugenics paper when I could be doing other things. However, when Miss Cheney said she could come down I couldn't say no because she is my staple friend and we need to chase pigeons outside the State Library and I am tired of feeling like a cranky, isolated old lady.

Two more sentences about Phillipe Curtius' dirty waxworks and I'm off to bed. Perhaps ironically, I draw your attention to this.

I don't understand your hair.

Don't get me wrong, I like to think I'm down with what fashion is foisting on us these days. I read Cosmo. I tear through NW as though I was studying for a final on Lyndsay Lohan, Stabby Nachos and how much Nicole Richie weighs. I am aware, but I'm not aware as to why pretty, cashed up teenagers would pin and tease their hair until they look like Captain Janeway after a rough night out. Like, I know Rachel Zoe and her ilk are foisting a kind of layerdey, zoned out, Derelicte style aesthetic on everyone now, but what is with massive, yet falling apart hair?

I honestly couldn't count how many I saw yesterday, all the same. Tandoori chicken style spray tan? Check. Allegedly cute-yet-slovenly trackies slung low around youthful hips? Check. A bit too much eyeliner, honestly, you will get conjunctivitis, young lady? Check. A pillowy superstructure of hair with wild, homeless looking tendrils erupting from a foundation of bobby pins? Check.

Is it meant to be cute? Sexy? Do you want to hook the nerdly boys into remembering the competent yet matronly bosom of Captain Janeway? Is it because you miss Fran Fine? Are you making some kind of literary reference to Edith Wharton? WHAT IS IT??

It's times like this I need a (hairbrush) gun.

So I legitimately went to the anatomy museum this morning to feel up some plastins for my neverending dead people paper. This time I learned that the permanently preserved feet, hands, knees and livers felt greasy because they were 70% silicone, which is a neat little soundbite. Later, when I was sitting in a cafe writing up my notes, I scratched my nose and was swept back on a wave of scent memory to Toys in Babeland in Berkeley (n.b: that link is not safe for work, y'all).

Babes in Toyland is a terribly right-on womyn owned sex store, the kind of place where they will earnestly discuss the features of a $200 strap-on harness with a pointed lack of squeamishness. I made the compulsory right-on pilgrimage there once, and handled many a high grade silicone dildo while talking about Annie Sprinkle, (major hottie) Judith 'Jack' Halberstam,
Vaginal Davis and Sheila Jeffreys. Afterwards my hands reeked of silicone.

At first I smiled, then I was horrified with myself. I had just handled body parts donated by living, breathing people for the benefit of others, and here I was comparing their cured remains to sex toys. If I could have slapped my forehead in public without looking like a crazy person I would have. Then I realised that I'd been sitting in this cafe, sniffing my fingers and looking puzzled, for several minutes. Perhaps that particular crazy barrier had been broken.

Miss Chlo and I discovered something strange last night after heading to the 7-11 for Slurpees, as part of an evening we had planned of cigarettes, Slurpees and Degrassi Junior High. Apparently, nothing is sexier to a bloated, faintly oily middle aged man than a chick with a Slurpee. It started when we made our way to the cashier, artfully mixed beverages in hand. 'That's some crazy drinks you have there,' said bloated middle aged man the first at the counter. I think we responded by saying you must always mix - Chlo had brown and red and I had green and red - but our response is beside the point, because he then said, 'yeah, you girls sure are wild and crazy, mixing up your Slurpees like that.'

... okay.

Then, as we made our way home, another bloated middle aged man stopped us in the street. 'Nice drinks, girls,' he said. 'Mind if I have a little?' Then he actually followed us for a few steps while making sucking noises a la Hannibal Lector.

I... don't understand. It's not that the bloated middle aged men were threatening because, honestly, bloated middle aged men are rarely threatening. It's just baffling. How does a red-and-brown, or red-and-green Slurpee indicate wildness or craziness of the E! Wild On type? Are the American halter-top-spring-break-body-shots-at-Senor-Frogs-set particularly associated with the multicoloured Slurpee? Also, why did that man follow us making slurping noises? The Schlevs was right across the street, yo. There are far more efficient ways to obtain a Slurpee than by asking passersby for a little of theirs.

Any suggestions?

I make no secret of my attraction to facial hair. To me, nothing is sexier than a scrawny, unshaven nerd, so Movember can accurately be described as my favourite time of the year. It's such a great idea, fuzzily hotting up Australia's men to raise awareness of men's health issues. Blockhead is a nurse, and she's told me some heartbreaking stories of looking after really young men cut down in their prime by testicular cancer. So, lads, it's time to put away your Schick Quattros and Gilette 'I Can't Believe I Still Have An Epidermis' and let the face pubes fly free.

In honour of Movember '06, I present to you a Gallery of Sex, uhm, Face Muffage.


Chiselled man's man Chuck Norris.


Mr Tom Selleck


Erotic actor Ron Jeremy


Archduke Franz Ferdinand, no relation to the Monkees-esque Scottish band.


Sir Errol Flynn.


Renowned pot brownie chef Alice B. Toklas.


Merv Hughes, confusingly dressed like Mad Max.


World famous Zoroastrian Freddie Mercury.


A pair of platonic hairy manfriends.


Some Victorian guy, who looks like someone's holding carbolic acid, or perhaps tincture of empire, beneath his nose.

Edit: I removed fake boyfriends Buck 65 and George Negus in favour of Tom Selleck, Chuck Norris and Ron Jeremy, figuring my fake boyfriends always get too much play around here.