Year: 2010

how conservative are you? (a fun test)

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I just found this great little widget, developed by Slate, that – in a press of a button – can determine how conservative your online news reading habits are. And how open-minded you are. And whether you can see both sides of an issue.

Get your reality check here. Fun! (Don’t we just love a test that tells us something about …us?)52173_4_468

Slate writes:

Maybe democracy will survive the Internet after all. Many hands have been wrung over the supposed tendency for consumers of online news to seek out sites that validate their own political opinions. Like minds, the theory goes, surf alike.

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fully sick rapper….does Fashion Week. gorgeous, darlink!

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A few weeks back Fully Sick Rapper Christiaan van Vuuren and I chatted via email about his 106 days in hospital quarantine. And how boredom, and a wish to share his TB story, led him to write crazy-head raps. The kid is so heartfelt and switched-on. I rather love him. And the post was re-posted around the world. Hoorah!

He’s now 126 days in …and he’s been driven to produce this distracted fashion clip:

Now, I think I love him even more. This clip’s friggen gold. And as someone who finds the whole Fashion Week caper a not-so-pleasant exercise in The Whole World Worrying About What Everyone Thinks of Them…it’s timely. (As an aside, Fashion Week has always distressed me because I usually hit a point where I look around and see everyone miserable because they are forced so violently into ego-tainted disconnection…but that’s another story).

Paris, London…Hospital!!

“This is the future of fashion. And it is the past of fashion. It is both the future and the past of fashion. It is the forever…. It’s fucking fashion infinity.”

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Sunday life: why we should resist bottled water. Like, now.

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* this post has been updated

This week I don’t drink bottled water (actually, I haven’t drunk the stuff for several years, but I’m kinda ensconced in this “look what I happened upon this week” theme…so let’s just ride it for now).

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Recently I aborted a liaison with a guy because he didn’t recycle. To be fair (to me?), it wasn’t that he didn’t recycle per se. It was the reasoning he gave for why he felt entitled to leave the carrying out of one’s tuna tins to the communal bins to everyone else. “If I start,” he moaned. “Then where do I stop?“ What he meant was, if I give a shit about my cans, won’t it just open a Pandora’s box of care from which there’s no turning back? A life of cutting plastic windows from envelopes, keeping a bucket in the shower and hypermilling? Won’t it set in train the collapse of the whole merry house of cards? Yes, yes, my friend, it will.

All of which is a loose segue to a subject I’ve been busting to cover: bottled water, and how quitting it makes life better.

Drinking bottled water complicates life. It clutters flow with needless stuff.

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clever guerilla green bombs. nice.

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This is an innovative use of something outdated and slightly crapp-ola (a lolly machine) transformed into something clever and randomly good (garden bombs).57369_8_468

I saw this on Springwise. They explain the concept best:

The brainchild of Los Angeles-based Common Studio, Greenaid aims to facilitate what it calls “guerrilla gardening” in the many forgotten grey spaces of the urban world, including sidewalk cracks, vacant lots and parking medians. It has reclaimed old, quarter-operated candy machines and converted them for use selling seed bombs—mixtures of clay, compost and seeds that can be thrown anonymously into derelict urban sites.

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The most efficient apartment ever

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This is quite freaky: Architect Gary Chang has created a 24-rooms-in-one-32-square-metre apartment (translation: he’s taken a tiny apartment and converted it such that it functions as 24 different rooms….using sliding walls). Check this out: The New York Times describes it in more detail: The wall units, which are suspended from steel tracks bolted into the … Read more

lady ga ga’s tattoo: an inspiration (!)

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I never thought I’d find solace on the inside of Lady Ga Ga’s arm. 58856919

But there you go. She got this tatt done at some late-night Japanese ink parlour…quoting her favourite philosopher Rainer Maria Rilke:

In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. And look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself, must I write?

I like it. But me, I’d probably gone with one of Rilke’s other quotes, like this:

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Justin Bieber: close up and clear

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I got close to Justine Bieber this morning. How close? This close:IMG_0163

Close enough to get what the screaming thousands of teen girls outside the Sunrise studio (where I was filming this am) are on about. He sells happy and fresh and clarity and unadulterated. And I bought it.

That’s what happens when you’re discovered overnight and there hasn’t been enough time for your enthusiasm to be watered down. In myyyyyy daaaaaay, you had to play in the garage a few years, graduate to the pub circuit, hope a scout from Stock Aitken and Waterman passes by, negotiate a deal and get a T-shirt line printed. Then maybe get a record released in three Christmas’ time. By which time, your zeal has been zipped a little. You’re 25 and a little hardened and cynical and compromised.

Justin has bypassed this due to the wonders of the inter-web. And his energy is clear and pure as a result.

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Sunday Life: the gorgeous value of strangers

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This week I embrace my “consequential strangers”

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Down the road from my place is one of those cheap nail bars with the vibrating vinyl chairs and wall-mounted TVs that’s always screening Dr Phil. I’m not a fancy nail person; I tear or chew mine. But one of my Favourite Things To Do In The Whole World is to go in for a $25 pedi, merely to take part in the funny human vibe of this place.

I love it. There you have Lena and her extended family from Vietnam buzzing with the efficiency of drone bees and bossing around the well-heeled, alpha-female PR executives and eastern suburbs wives who frequent the joint, telling them to choose their polish colour faster and berating them for putting their shoes on too early.

Gorgeously, it’s a social contract that suits everyone.

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have a sunny weekend xoxoxo

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In my neck-o-woods it’s going to be a scorcher this weekend. The water here in Sydney is 23 degrees. Blimey.

One of Eugene's shot from this morning.

Which has posed a dilemma this week. I just got my hair coloured – darker for the cooler months. But my hairdresser has asked me to stop swimming so much, because it’s making my hair dull. I ignored her, but it does make me wince a little when I look at my salty, ratty mop just now.

Therein lies my dilemma as a girl who hates beauty regimes, doesn’t brush her hair, hates shopping etc, etc etc…BUT who works in an industry where she has to look and play a certain part. Square peg, round hole?

I tell you it’s exhausting. What to do with running top tan lines when you have to wear a strapless dress? I have a scab on my nose and shoulder today from running into a wall on my bike…and have to film on Monday. Oh dear.

My first day at Cosmopolitan, I arrived on crutches.

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