Five for Friday

Neil Gaiman on entitlement issues; namely fans expecting George R. R. Martin to produce his next book immediately.

Some of the world's amazing places.

Charming artwork and obscure words.

Frank Warren, 'the most trusted strange in the world' is the keeper of post secret. Started out as a spontaneous project, people from all over the world tell him their secrets. He now posts them anonymously, of course, on his website Post Secret. The secrets we can never tell can be told to him. Read more on Mamma Mia.

Phoodie: my latest food blog discovery!

Image courtesy of Phoodie.com.au

Five for Friday

Thanks to the Australia Writer's Centre Best Blogs competition, I've discovered a new travel website. Time Travel Turtle. This is what I wish I could do with my life! 

I love this; the Australia Christian Lobby did not renew their domain name, so it was bought by the Australian Cat Ladies. You really must check out their values. I think the logo should give you an idea.

Politeness reinforcement - does anyone else believe in this? Personally, I have made people move their bags so I could sit down on trains. Makes me feel righteous. 

Fantasy holiday homes. I have an important birthday coming up next year, maybe this could be an excuse to splash out? 

 Casa Passerini in Tuscany Italy, one of the properties on Hosted Villas.

And finally - Joffrey Bieber. Uncanny. 

Five for Friday

The Australian Writers Centre runs an annual competition to find Australia's best blogs. See the 25 finalists on the AWC website, and vote for a winner!

Are we all enjoying watching the world gear-up for The Great Gatsby? Again? The fashion world is of course swinging in 20's revival. Brooks Brothers, along with Prada have released a Gatsby-inspired collection. Brooks were responsible for the mens' costuming and I for one and not ashamed to admit that I would melt for a man in this tailoring.

 

I kind of want to do this 5 minute DIY, thanks to Frankie Magazine.

Nine friends have been playing a game of tag for 23 years

Alison Brie (of Community and Mad Men) recreates internet memes with startling accuracy.

Five for Friday

This week Embassy Bar is re-opening as the CBD's first craft beer bar. Is this a little unbelievable to any other local Brisbane-ites? 

A cooking couple’s 100 rules of dinner. Some fun, some practical but worth a read for those of you who enjoying cooking. Also a great cooking blog, if you're in to that sort of thing. 

Some example 'rules': 

• 18. Kitchen chairs should be red. Or at least fun.
• 59. When cooking steak on the grill, get a nice char over hot coals and then move it to a less hot part of the grill — i.e. over indirect heat. Test for doneness by pressing down on the meat with your finger. When it’s ready, it will have the consistency of the flesh at the base of your thumb. Once it’s firm, you have overcooked it.
• 77. If you cook dinner for someone, and that person is not super forthcoming with his or her expressions of happiness or gratitude, you must (a) fight every urge to ask them if they like it, and (b) think twice about cooking for that person again. 

Courtesy of A Dinner Love Story. 

The home made gin kit. Otherwise known as the perfect gift for any of my friends. 

Reasons my son is crying. Incredibly un-PC perhaps but after a while also very funny!

World's most colourful cities. I want to visit them all.

  Júzcar, Spain (top) and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (bottom). Images courtesy of Travel and Leisure.

Five for Friday

Check out Trending City for all the amazing things happening in cool cities all over the world. Brisbane included!

I know a lot of friends who will understand this; We could all do with a little less 'busy' by Fat Mum Slim.

30 saddest endings in literature. Warning: contains HUGE spoilers. Obviously.

A shout out to our nation's capital which celebrated its' century this week.

And finally, a video to make you smile.  

Five for Friday

Should I eat this shit? A website that tells you if you should eat something. 

To celebrate getting 1 million followers on Twitter, Lonely Planet have released their Best Travel 2013 guide free for download. 

Brisbane's latest mobile food enterprise, following in the very successful footsteps of the Bun Mobile: Wandering Elephant. 

Gucci releases new leather handbag line with a passport detailing the life of the cow it came from. The accessories version of 'meet the meat'?

The Australian Writers' Centre have opened their annual Australia's Best Blog competition, so if there are blogs out there that you really enjoy and value, nominate them for an award. This is a great opportunity to give recognition to people who put a lot of time and love into a project that brings enjoyment, help or entertainment to others as well as themselves.

 

Happy Friday

Five for Friday

First big announcement, one of my favourite people has made a return to blogging! Another Brisbane local girl, she and her own blog partner talk about 20-something life, bars, beauty, fashion and fun on Adventures In Colour.

Do we need a new punctuation mark?

It's not often that I genuinely lust after an H&M collection, though I do desperately wish we had the chain here in Australia, but this collection, I WANT!

I adore discovering new, accessible food blogs and here is Tales of a Truffle Pig. Sure, the writer is based out of Sydney but she posts about food and eating all over the country and even from Brisbane, I can enjoy her opinions on beer and recipes for zucchini and bacon slice!

Jennifer Lawrence is tied with Emma Stone and Meryl Streep as the person I want most to play me in a movie about my life. So this week I was thrilled to not only discover a new sarcastic gifs tumblr, but one that went nuts with Jennifer Lawrence gifs post-oscars. She's known for being rad in interviews, so there is an internet-library of potential material.

Five for Friday no. 55

She killed at Superbowl earlier this week: Beyonce has a blog. It's free like blogs should be but you need to sign up for it, which I just don't care enough to do. But I am intrigued, so could someone else sign up and let me know?



6 myths about travel that cost you money.

Bean Hunter website. Reviews coffee and cafes all over the world. And yes, they do have an app for that shit. 

Have your say on Brisbane City Council's draft new City Plan. 

Excellent Lego brain teasers.

Five for Friday no.49

Mash up of movie trailers for 2012.

12 enjoyable names for relatively common things.

Generation Y Expat (Why Not) travel blog for young professionals.

The worst words for 2012.

It's 200 years since the release of the first edition of the tales of the Brothers Grimm. 

Five for Friday no. 40

How can I have done 40 of these things? The internet is truly vast and the ultimate vessel for the ridiculous.

The Museum of Broken Relationships. Most depressing yet bizarrely intriguing idea ever?

I just discovered a new blog put together by smart women. The Hairpin.
 

A sweet little animation on unusual plurals. For those of you who are language nuts.

I just discovered that there is a gender-neutral third-person singular subject pronoun: thon.

How did I not know this existed? Isn't anyone else interested in this?

Monster University.

Five for Friday no. 30

One timely entry for the week: 88 years of Olympic Games logo design.

25 of Australia's best fashion blogs.

Adorable rock, paper, scissors necklace.

Dammit, this tumblr makes me laugh in a desk-shaking way.

Pixar's story rules, told in Lego.

Five for Friday no. 27

I desperately want one of these travel bags from Sweden covered in Josef Frank designs, which I adore.

Perfectly Timed Photos. Only look if you have an hour to spare because you WILL get sucked in.

Things I saw and liked – a new tumblr I follow.

Target have released the next list of designer collaborations and it is some list. It really depresses me that most of this will never see Australian shores, but one can hope.

Local Brisbane fashion blogger Professor Barbie on dressing for that job interview. Plus, I like discovering local bloggers. 

 Image courtesy of Professor Barbie in the Playground.

Friends who blog

On Sunday I discovered that an old work mate was an avid blogger and I'd never had any idea. She doesn't write the sort of stuff-and-nonsense blog that we do here. She's a Canadian-American girl who fell in love with and Aussie, moved to Brisbane with him and they are now living in Canada. So her blog is about connecting with all her friends all over the globe, keeping them informed, telling them about her experiences in different cultures and maybe doing a bit of fun rambling as well. If you were a someone who moved around or is living far from home, it's the sort of blog you might have yourself or really enjoy. It's called  Yellow Crayon. I have no idea why.

I also recently discovered that another former work colleague and Brisbane girl runs a blog called Suburban Pup. Within the last year she has become the proud owner of two puppies and her blog is all about the trials and tribulations of first-time dog ownership. It is also full of simply adorable photos! A must-read for local dog owners.

Next, a blog I've known about for a long time, Entwined Happiness. Written by a girl very similar to me - Brisbane, works in marketing, generally awesome - except a whole lot more responsible - home and dog owner - her blog is a little like mine in that it is about ordinary life and the things we do, our friends and fancies. Whereas ours is a little frivolous, Rachael also talks about the trials and tribulations of owning a labrador, renovating a house and helping to organise weddings. 

Finally, the last of my known-friend blogs in Snug as a Bug in a Rug. My one and only girlfriend to also be a Mum (to the CUTEST BABY EVER!) blogs about being a mum, being a teacher, being a girl guide and somehow staying awesome so all her irresponsible non-mum girlfriends want to hang out with her and Bub. 

So do check these guys out, they're all really interesting women, or at least I think they are. And if you're a  friend who blogs and I haven't mentioned you, I'm really sorry but tell me and I'll make amends.

Five for Friday no. 24

Paramount Pictures' epic 100th anniversary photo as featured in Vanity Fair.

25 things you didn't know about Mad Men.

This post in A Pair and a Spare makes me feel better about my long-term secret desire to own sequined shorts.

Photo courtesy of A Pair and a Spare.

Geolocated tweets mapped in real time.

Grilled pineapple guacamole. I want it now!

Happy blog-i-versary to us!

On 22 April, Jane and I shared a momentous occasion and we didn’t even notice it. It was our one-year blogiversary. We have been doing this random, who knows what the hell we’re on about blog for over a year now. This is a Big Deal! And we didn’t even know! 

To be honest, that’s kind of indicative of our lackadaisical attitude to this blog in general but we are getting better at it. In the 8 months we were blogging last year we posted 115 times. Now, in the first 5 months of 2012 we’re up to 108 posts and counting. So we may not be up to a-post-a-day level but we’re getting there!

The original purpose of this blog was to force us to read all the books on our bookshelves and then review them as proof that we have done so. Looking at my original list:

One of our Thursdays is Missing – Jasper Fforde
The Alchemaster’s Apprentice – Walter Moers
In Defence of Sin – edited by John Portman
The Heart has its Reasons – the Duchess of Windsor
The Diviners – Rick Moody
Sophie’s World - Jostein Gaarder
The Flaneur – Edmund White
The Subterraneans and Pie – Jack Kerouac
The Group – Mary McCarthy
The Book of Revelation – Rupert Thompson
Soul Mountain – Gao Xinjian
Guns, Germs and Steel – Jared Diamond
Twelve Bar Blues – Patrick Neate
Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
Dangerous Liaisons – Pierre Choderlos De Laclos
The Inheritance of Loss – Kiran Desai
The Red and the Black - Stendhal
Turkestan Solo - Ella Maillart
Man of My Dreams – Curtis Sittenfeld
Harry Potter und die Heiligtumer des Todes – J.K. Rowling

I have read 6 of those and started but not finished 7. I’m thinking that this is a sign and I should just admit defeat and get myself some new books to not read. I might hold a book-swap party and cleanse myself of all the randomness on my shelves, thus completing my challenge in our cheating master-stroke.

We don’t have many followers, though I have been told that people do look at our blog, even if it is just to read the moustache puns. If you are a regular looker but not follower, please consider ‘following’. It will give us a warm glow inside and we might gift you a book to say thank you! 

I have been debating whether or not to continue with this blog. It takes a lot of time and does distract me from writing that best-selling novel I keep putting off. I've been saying to myself that I would wait until we'd done it for a year and then re-evaluate. Well, a year passed without my noticing and here I am, still prattling on.  I suppose I'll keep going. For now, at least.

1796 Foods

A blog review of another blog. Otherwise known as ‘Damn I wish I’d thought of that’.

Dear Jane put me on to this blog and I have a total love / hate relationship with it. It’s a really good blog that is good to read and has great pics and most importantly, a brilliant concept. I hate it because I did not think of that concept first. 
 

1796 Foods is one women’s journey through two different version of the same book; “1001 Foods To Eat Before You Die” Her aim is to eat every food or meal that is mentioned in the books. The reason there are 1796 of them and not 2002 is the deletion of duplicates. 
 

Banoffee Pie. Photo courtesy of 1796 Foods.

The photos are fun, the meals are usually interesting and reading through it makes you want to go out and have food adventures! Some of the foods are so simple – walnut oil, Waldorf salad, lemon meringue pie. Others are a little less known, such as this one:

 
"701. Porkolt Csirke
Porkolt csirke is basically what I’ve known as chicken paprikash - a Hungarian stew with chicken, peppers, tomatoes and paprika topped off with soured cream. It’s full of some of my favourite ingredients so I knew I was going to really enjoy it."
 - 1796 Foods

 Goats Butter. Photo courtesy of 1796 Foods.

Seriously, why did I not think of this? Now I'm going to go out and find goats butter.

The idiots guide to self-photography.

I simply cannot take a good photo of myself. I barely manage to 'take' a good photo anyway but when I am wielding the camera I usually end up looking disastrous.

This isn't much of a problem as I don't feel a need to photograph myself that often. It has only recently become a wish after I developed a mild addiction to sartorialist websites.

I love a good sartorialist website. I also love the word sartorial. I find them inspiring. Sometimes they inspire me to want to buy new clothing but more often they inspire me to experiment more with the clothing I have and maybe be a bit more adventurous with my next purchase.

So the self-photographing issue arises because sometimes I think of an outfit related blog idea or maybe I just want to take a photo of my adorable outfit and find a reason to blog. But I then chicken out and my outfit is never recorded because I'm not good at taking photos of myself. I also have a pet peeve that most personal fashion blogs contain waaay too many photos of the same outfit. Show me three, not ten!

Attempt #1 to take self-portrait. Showing a friend how much I appreciated my christmas present of a necklace made of a tie.

Anyways, for those people who like to or want to take self-portraits, here is a simple little guide on how to take nice ones from Shrimp Salad Circus. For that bit of confidence we all need. It's short, it's comprehensible and it's persuasive. So persuasive in fact that after reading it I went out and bought myself a camera remote and stole my boy's enormous tripod (haha) and took some photos of myself.

Attempt #2. Still not good but working on it ...

You can also check out this guide on how to take good outdoor photographs from A Beautiful Mess, all of which is very good advice that I did not follow because I felt silly enough taking photos of myself without doing it in public view.

Better photos to follow soon.

Five for Friday no. 2

Flower ice cubes. Having seen this photo I just want to recreate the idea. I want to try it with juniper berries in ice for afternoon GnT's

Photo from A Cup Of Jo.

I don't particularly like Switzerland, but I think I should take Chuck there, and we should visit this restaurant.


For those of us not lucky enough to be in New York at the time, here is a website overview of the Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty exhibition.


Re-learning to sew is one of my projects for 2012, and this Superman Dress is a good example of why I want to be able to make my own clothes!

Photo courtesy of Cation Designs.

I'm not planning any travel in 2012 but budgetary reasons, but the world's best inexpensive hotels makes me wish I was.

It's about style, not fashion.

I look at a few fashion websites regularly. Not because I’m that fashionable, I just love to look at the clothes, the style and occasionally I see outfits that make me salivate a little with envy. I most regularly look at The Satorialist and the New York Magazine’s fashion blog The Cut.

I think I may have a new regular favourite though; Advanced Style. It’s a street style blog but blogger Ari Seth Cohen only snaps persons of a more ‘advanced’ age. It’s brilliant. The men and women he snaps look amazing sassy fun and fabulous. I couldn’t agree more with the blog’s byline;

Proof from the wise and silver haired set that personal style advances with age.

When I’m out and particularly at the theatre, I see so many men and women whose crisp white or grey hair is the perfect topping off to their thoughtfully put together outfits. Maybe it’s that they come from a generation where people actually got dressed rather than just putting on clothes: a generation of suits, handkerchiefs and your Sunday best, long before throw-away fashion existed.

Writer Ton Wolfe, photographed by Ari Seth Cohen and featured on Advanced Style.

My Grandma is a little old for it now but I know that in her day she had a certain style, even when living in Yeppoon. Most of the best and most admired clothes I own today either come from her or my mothers’ closet.

Even if you don’t look at fashion blogs you must check out this profile of 100 year old Ruthie. If I look as good as her when I’m even 80, I shall be a lucky old woman.

I was going to blog a list of great fashion and style websites but I’m feeling lazy this morning so will just give you the link to a thrown together list I made for my previous workplace’s blog.

Writer and artist Beatrix Ost, photographed by Ari Seth Cohen and featured on Advanced Style.