One of the most addictive things about my Sony Nex-3 is using it with old manual focus lenses which you can buy for fairly low prices on ebay. My latest acquisition is a Minolta MC Rokkor-PF 58/1.4. It’s the fastest lens I have, and while I’m sure I need to practice a bit more to get the hang of using such shallow depth of field, the learning process has been kinda dreamy.
The chittering noise from my living room sounded rather different from the usual spectrum of lizard sounds that you get used to in the tropics. I walked out of my study in the direction of the noise, looked around, grabbed the curtains and jiggled them, and then I saw it.
We looked at each other unblinkingly for a moment. Then I calmly walked away, telephoned Alec (who had gone into the office to do some work) and said that he needed to come home and help me wrangle a bat.
I wasn’t particularly scared of it, but I figured it would be better to have both of us around in case the bat-wrangling went horribly wrong and someone needed to get to hospital for a rabies jab. Also, we were due to go out to a friend’s house for the evening and I didn’t want to give Samuel L. Batson free rein of the house while we were gone. So I closed off the rest of the house, opened the balcony door in the hope that the wind and light might make Batrick Swayze’s position somewhat untenable, sat down in the living room to keep my eye on Guano Reeves while waiting for Alec to get back, and busied myself thinking up some more names for Keira Nightly.
I got so absorbed in this task that I looked up at some point and Barack Obatma was gone! I wish I could have been more welcoming and let Batti LaBelle hang round till it got dark enough to fly away comfortably, but the high resolution of my camera screen had alerted me to the INCREDIBLY DISGUSTING ticks infesting Batalie Portman, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to give them the opportunity to explore my home.
So long, Oprah Wingfrey! Let’s never hang out again.
They say you’re meant to put in effort to keep the thrill in your relationship and you know, I’ll be the first to admit that walking around the house bedaubed with green facial mask goo while continuously singing the Ponyo Ponyo song is probably not the way to drive my man wild with desire. Of course, it’s also true that said man’s idea of hot hot love these days is opening the oven door to take out his freshly baked bread.
Given the depressing picture of terminal marital decline I’ve painted, it would be fair to assume that we spent Valentine’s Day eating McDelivery in front of the TV and guffawing loudly at some juvenile dude comedy like Blades Of Glory while chugging beers. It would be fair to assume this because that is how we spend many, many days. (Happy happy days.)
But in fact, we had a totally cheesy Valentine’s Day this year!
Literally.
The white gooey dollop is delicious, creamy home made ricotta (too wet, I know, I got impatient and didn’t drain it enough). And with the whey left over from the cheesemaking, Alec made bread.
I think we did pretty well at getting into the spirit of Valentine’s Day. This time next year, we’ll be walking the streets wearing matching T-shirts, me clutching a posy of wilting roses and Alec carrying a huge teddy bear with “I Lurv U” embroidered across its belly.
It’s not clear why the guy trying to sign up for online dating in this short skit confines his prospective dirty screen names to authors only, but I still laughed loudly and childishly.
And then of course, I had to come up with my own list of cuncontenders. Feel free to add yours!
Edit (29 Jan): More additions, contributed by John’s Jamie!
I’ll be the first to admit I cram too many awful puns and awkward references into my post titles, but that still doesn’t mean I deserved to open my feed reader and see The Guardian’s Lap lands Selfridges Santa with sack despite elf warning.
I have not always been a big fan of the current Pope but upon reading this article in the NYT, I felt all our theological differences melt away. Truly, I can now wholeheartedly accept and follow his leadership of the Cat-holic church, and am keen to learn and absorb his many teachings about the Cat-echism. Furever and ever, amen.
A while back on this blog, a small but vocal band of dedicated commenters mounted a Make Alec Blog campaign, no doubt hoping that an Alec blog would provide more of the bizarre nuggets of Alecness they had come to enjoy here from time to time.
I’m not sure if the original Make Alec Blog campaigners still read this blog, but anyway, I thought it was worth announcing a partial victory for the cause! Some may be dismayed to learn that he has chosen to focus the blog on chronicling his bread-baking exploits rather than his miscellaneous daily humiliations, but don’t fret, some of his entries so far suggest that the two are surprisingly similar.
Before you all head off to Alec’s blog turf, never to set foot here again, I wish to state the following for the record:
Everything he writes about me is a DAMN LIE! I am an infinitely supportive and understanding spouse, not in the least bit given toward irrational unnecessarily hostile pronouncements that his fucking dough fucking fermenting in our fucking fridge is going to come to life in the night and murder us in our bed.
Anyway, do pop over to read and/or participate as you see fit. I mostly support this development in our life, but if he starts getting more hits than me, I might have to refocus this blog too. On pr0n.
Well, I can’t say I intended my last post of 2006 to be about feminine hygiene products, but so it goes. Not with a bang but a Whisper, with apologies to Eliot.
And so 2007 begins. I hope you weren’t expecting anything profound, because there’s not a whole lot of profundity that I can smoothly segue to from the topic of sanitary pads. After 14 days of futile efforts to meaningfully introduce what will be one of the most important years of my life so far, I think the best way to get through this impasse is to stop trying for insightful and settle for inconsequential. So please forgive the throwaway nature of this post and feel free to kick my ass in the comments, though you can also save the ass-kicking for my next post, in which I will blame reality TV for my problems in life. (Oh, and if you’re in Singapore, watch Channel 5 at 7.30 pm today for a convenient summary of one of those problems. GO BENJI!)
My good friend is the sort of thoughtful person who always brings people a little something when she goes travelling. She recently returned from a tiring, stressful work trip to Panama, for which she couldn’t check-in any luggage and was subject to stringent cabin baggage restrictions due to her transit in LA. While in Panama, her duties kept her too busy to see much more of the place than the supermarket near her hotel.
Under such circumstances lesser mortals (i.e. me) just wouldn’t have bothered with bringing people souvenirs but my friend was clearly unfazed. I met her shortly after she returned and was presented with a sanitary pad. On the wrapper, she had written “Greetings from Padnama!”
Truly, we get the friends we deserve.
For Nabokov fans, this random gem from a Craig Raine article in the Guardian about Ron Mueck’s current Edinburgh exhibition:
Vladimir Nabokov once asked his protégé, Alfred Appel, how academe was weathering a period of widespread student unrest in the 1960s. Appel reported that things at his university were quiet: a nun had complained that couples were “spooning” at the back of lectures. Nabokov pounced: “You should have told her to thank God they weren’t forking.”
I’d love to go to this exhibition. There were only a few Ron Mueck pieces in the Saatchi Gallery when I went, but they captured my attention more than skanky beds and stuffed sharks.