Aussiehalley - Halley Down Under

Quote of the Day

JAMIE: Everyone needs a gay farmer.
-Big Brother '06 (AU)

Yes. We watch it and we like it. Don't judge.

posted by Halley @ 8:54 AM 0 comments

Chuck

Click for cuteness

posted by Halley @ 1:38 AM 1 comments

posted by Halley @ 11:08 AM 0 comments

Knit 1, Penguin 2

Oil tankers=bad
Hand-crafts=good

"Knitters save endangered penguins lives"



(Yes, these are the little fairy penguins we saw at the end of January. It's about an hour drive from Melbourne.)

posted by Halley @ 10:59 PM 4 comments

With apologies to Shakespeare

If you wonder why you haven't heard much about the thesis lately is because it's research. In theory, it means I sit at a desk and type, or sit at a desk and read and then type. Here and there I've been to some shows, a few of which I've mentioned. But mostly it means sitting at a desk and typing. In theory.

In actuality, it usually means sitting on a couch and watching Ellen. But by the beginning of May, I'll have a full first draft. In theory. No really, it has to happen.

The road from here to there is likely to have a lot of whinging and whining. I'm likely to call you. Don't try to avoid the call - I'll just try again. Research hath no fury like a procrastinor scorned.


In other news: I am deciding on plans for this fall. It looks most likely that I will end up at a program either in DC (American Univ) or in Chicago (The School of the Art Institute of Chicago). I have no further information on the subject. (If only I did...) I don't want to be rushed into anything here... I have until Monday-ish to make this decision, and I will take that whole time. For serious thought. Or Oprah.

And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought;
And enterprises of great pitch and moment,
With this regard, their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action. (Hamlet, III.i)

posted by Halley @ 8:47 AM 4 comments

Quote of Monday night:

After making our way through a tiny*, stanky-ass, cobble-stoned alley to a Chinese food place, the following exchange took place over some MaPo Tofu and mixed veggies and rice...

ALAE: I come from a long line of virgins.

VANIA (Alae's mom): It's more like, you come from a long line of whores.

Male shrieking ensues.

While Alae struggled to maintain the utmost standards of Victorian propriety and virginity (which I say because I know he'll take that as a compliment as he reads this), Alae, you should know we loved your mom! She's great. You should invite her out more often. And you can come, too.


*Seriously, the buildings were little more than shoulder-width apart. We thought it was a joke, where our gullibility was being tested to see if we'd follow down an alley that looked like 1) someplace you should never walk down, and 2) noplace you'd find any restaurants. We failed the test, but made off with some good, cheap Chinese food.

posted by Halley @ 8:20 AM 0 comments

Why is this matzah different from all other matzahs?

I read the box. I looked at the picture. I gave it a polygraph test. But it turns out that those machines really can be beaten, because the box I bought was of wholemeal matzah. It told me it was regular and it lied. My box of matzah lied to me.

So it's wholemeal. Super. Everybody's sooo health conscious. I'm very happy for everybody. Everybody can get their healthy wholemeal matzah. Mmm, it's so good, in a healthy-kind-of-cardboard-n-twigs-way. Great.

However. These boxes should be better marked. Like writing 'wholemeal' somewhere on the front. Or back. Or sides. Perhaps I'm just overzealous, though.*

I opened the box and pulled out a piece that was dark brown and hippy-crunchy-grainy looking. I read the box again and it didn't say anything other than 'matzah' on it. To be fair, it tasted fine. But I only bought one box, so I had nothing to change it up with. For example, regular, better-tasting versions. Call it my American upbringing, but I like a nice piece of regular, white matzah. Maybe a piece of egg matzah here and there. But no. Just the wholemeal.

And the wholemeal doesn't get along with the rest of the food items in the cabinet, unlike the easy-going regular matzah. The wholemeal is always smoking a bowl, or holding rallies against the pasta, or pulling open the ziploc seal to try to free the animal crackers. It tolerates the small box of chocolate-covered matzah (it is a cousin, after all, even if it practices differently), but it has no patience for the Craisins and dried fruit, working at cross-purposes/outcomes from its own.

In response to this imposed health-consciousness, I made sure to eat plenty of other crap. For example, Christine and I went out the other night to Stalactites, a 24-hour Greek place downtown here, and had some saganaki and a nice big bowl of chips (fries) with an array of dips (tzatziki, hummus, babaganoush). Nothing like a slab of fried cheese to soothe the savage Passover-induced food crankiness.

Cheese turns out to be the cure for most ills, I find. The wholemeal matzah with a schmear of cream cheese works out jes' fine.


*For those curious souls playing along at home, wondering how I eventually found out it was, in fact, wholemeal matzah, here it is: after looking at the box many times, using it for a few days, I noticed, in small letters off in the corner of the top of the box, it said 'wholemeal'. I still think it should say it on the front.

posted by Halley @ 1:31 AM 4 comments

The Aussies are nuts #542

How nuts are they?

They're so nuts that it's been cold* and raining outside, and the outdoor seating options at the cafes are still completely filled with coffee-swilling Melburnians.


*It has been suggested that cold here is not necessarily really cold. However, on the days in question, one would be sufficiently attired for sitting outside if one were wearing something with long sleeves, a coat, and various and sundry knit items.

So there. It was cold. I will hear no more indictments of my cold-weather credentials.

posted by Halley @ 9:05 AM 3 comments

A pocket full of pecans, and now maybe I could go for a bottle of wine...

I'm at the market yesterday, at our favorite wine stall, brought over to the counter by a nice little botrytis. The woman looks at me for a second and finally comes over. I ask if any of the muscats I'm now looking at are available to taste. They looked fruity and I was in a fruity mood.

She gets uncomfortable and says, "Ummm...how old are you?"
"27."
"Oh! Wow. Um. Well, um, I thought you were older than you looked, um, I had to ask, I didn't really think you were..." and she's going on and on.

The drinking age in Australia is 18. The woman wasn't sure that I wasn't, perhaps, underage. As in, 17 or younger.

This beats the time I got carded for a PG-13 movie. Not R, PG-13. (Who cards for PG-13, anyway? Loser.) I was 18. And the ticket-seller thought I was 12. My charming, sensitive friends thought this was hysterical and laughed until the movie started.

Yes, feel free to take me anywhere and get the kids rate. I could save millions...
And when I'm forty, I'm fully going for the college student discounts.
But for now, I make sure I have ID on me wherever I go.

posted by Halley @ 8:30 AM 5 comments

Quote of the Day:

People in New Jersey are trendier than anyone else in the rest of the country.

-Christine

posted by Halley @ 2:38 AM 1 comments

I'll be taking marching band application tapes now

I leave Melbourne around 11am on 13 July. I travel for approximately 24 hours and then arrive in Chicago around 11am on 13 July.

That is, the second 11am above is on Melbourne time(which by then is already 14 July). For those of you on the committee preparing the parade float to meet me at the airport, that's 8pm Chicago time. On Chicago's 13 July. Or July 13th. Either way.

posted by Halley @ 4:22 AM 2 comments

Once more, with feeling...

It happened again.

Today at the gym, after I asked a question, the instructor asked me if I was Canadian.

I don't think it was because of my maple leaf bathing suit or because I said, "What are you talking aboot Michael J. Fox, ya hoser, eh?" In fact, I don't believe she even thought I was Canadian.

But the Canadians here (and most places) are a testy bunch. Though they seem pleasant enough on the surface, they have the population running scared. If you ask a Canadian if they're American, they get very upset. And to a limit, they have a right to be. Every large, boring country with more moose than people has a right to their own identity. Though, I think that upset limit comes in somewhere before "tantrum" level. On the other hand, if you ask an American if they're Canadian, we don't particularly care, on the whole. In fact, it's almost a compliment. "Ooh, you mean I look like my government provides me with health care? Why, thank you!"

So here the standard question from Aussies when they hear an accent that sounds like all the American accents from tv is, "Oh, are you Canadian?" Here, if no where else, there is a Canuck default. Good for them.

Hosers.

posted by Halley @ 4:05 AM 2 comments

On hypocrisies...

This is more of a travel/journal-y blog. In it, I was going to tell of the wondrous things in Aussie-land (like the jokes a commercial here makes about the Finnish. Seriously, who makes fun of the Finns? It's hysterical.). During this time, I was going to take some time off from some of the activist organisations, and you were all going to get some time off from the emails and phone calls on any number of pressing issues, but all usually stemming from (in one way or another) the idiocy that calls itself the Bush administration. This "time off" project was going fairly well, in fact.

So I'll just say this on the topic of the anti-immigrant movement: FWHAT?!?! Unless you are American Indian, you have no right to spout anti-immigration rhetoric. As in, "Someone let me in, but now that I'm here, no one else can come in."

Someone who says it better than I do: A short piece on the propaganda, by Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez. I think the part about Bush's financial "choices" are especially interesting. In a later post, she makes interesting points on how he's not actually a conservative politically in his financial policies, etc, and how a truckload of his policies make the actual conservatives crazy. [On a related point, have you heard how he doesn't think young people should be given the vaccine for HPV because if they were making the correct moral choices (abstinance) they wouldn't need it. Yes, because telling people (young people in the US, adults overseas, everyone but married straight couples anywhere) never to have sex always works real well. Jackass.]

Yeah, so I guess this post turned political. I think we all knew that would happen. Sue me.

posted by Halley @ 9:19 PM 0 comments

Alabama, Alaska, Arizona....

I love maps. I can stare at them endlessly. They've brought to me such realizations as:

1. Russia is really freakin' huge.

2. Ohhh, that's where the Phillippines are.

3. Hawaii is not off the coast of California.


I've added a guestmap down on the side bar there (under Stuff...). Stick a pin in it. I'll even let you lie, if you want, and say you're off somewhere exotic. Like Canada. Or Connecticut. Up to you.


(We were so happy to have a big map on the wall, we took a picture.)

posted by Halley @ 8:11 PM 2 comments

E for Effort

Argh.

Okay, so I have tried numerous times to upload the performance. Each time, a connection is lost before it finishes and I have to start over. At my office, the file is too big and the school's server won't let it through to upload.

If at first you don't succeed, try again. Then quit. You've got other shit to do.

So, if you are one of those interested in seeing this particular moment of insanity in my life, drop me a comment and I'll send you a copy on dvd. (And if anyone has had better luck uploading than I do and would be interested in helpin' a sister out, lemme know.)

For the record, the Joan Didion line should be, "We play role doomed to failure before they are begun." In this particular copy, I happen to say "until" instead of "before". Changes the whole meaning.... But this was the retaping we did and it's done and that's it.

(Extra boring details:)
If you saw the copy from the actual night of the show, you'd know I said that line correctly (along with a few others) and you would hear people laughing at appropriate moments. But I'm also rushing a bit and my face is washed out, though not as badly as previously reported. Imagine that: me, overexaggerating in the heat of the moment. Shocking.

posted by Halley @ 7:54 PM 1 comments