Five for Friday

Well, this just seems wrong.

The suspended coffee movement in Brisbane.

A smartphone app for Melbourne bars and pubs. Because every person I know enjoys indulging in Melbourne's nightlife. 
 

The Vintage Dress Company. A New Zealand Company started by a former flight attendant with an eye for delightful vintage fabrics.  

Image courtesy of The Vintage Dress Company website.

Sedating children on long-haul flights; this will sound un-PC but I approve. Parenting blogs explode at 'near child-abuse' but parents who have ever taken a child on a long-haul flight think it's the ideal solution. Read one mother's account here.

I took a lot of long flights myself as a child and I think I was ok but with every landing, my ears would hurt so much from the pressure that I would scream at the top of my lungs. If I had been gently sedated, the whole experience would have been much less traumatic for myself, my parents and the rest of the plane.

On the flip side, I have been on flights with screaming, chair-kicking, running down the aisle, peek-a-boo playing children and I just want them to sit in their damn chairs and shut up.

Honestly, I'd sedate myself on long-haul flights if I knew which drugs to use. 

Flight of the Conchords: Feel Inside (And Stuff Like That)

This is going to Make your Tuesday.

The boys from Flight of the Conchords have released a new song Feel Inside (And Stuff Like That) and it's fantastic. They enlisted a bunch of children to help them write the lyrics. They asked the kids questions about feeling sick and where money comes from and their answers make up the rhymes. The boys then enlisting professional musicians to sing and produce the song.

All proceeds go to New Zealand charity Cure Kids.

Check out the video - the first part is the interviews with the kids, followed by the song.

Get your tissues out

This is one of those articles that makes you feel all choked up and adoring; Bikers Against Child Abuse making abuse victims feel safe. Seriously, that article. It's amazing stuff. It sort of makes me want to hug everyone involved.

This is the situation: in Arizona, and many other states across the US, ultra-tough bikies have set up non-profit clubs specifically to protect and aid child abuse victims. They make contact with children who've been abused by people they trusted, children who no longer feel safe, and do everything, around the clock, to give that kid some security and a new sense of protection.

The bikers aren't looking for trouble. They are there so the kids don't feel so alone, or so powerless. Pipes recalls going to court with an 8-year-old boy, and how tiny he looked on the witness stand, his feet dangling a foot off the floor.

"It's scary enough for an adult to go to court," he says. "We're not going to let one of our little wounded kids go alone."

In court that day, the judge asked the boy, "Are you afraid?" No, the boy said.

Pipes says the judge seemed surprised, and asked, "Why not?"

The boy glanced at Pipes and the other bikers sitting in the front row, two more standing on each side of the courtroom door, and told the judge, "Because my friends are scarier than he is."

What kid wouldn't feel safer, knowing that their new best friend is a giant, built-like-a-tank, leather-wearing biker? And while the bikers are vetted by cops and the CPS, they represent a slightly less constrained force than the police, who are sometimes bound by regulations that prevent them from acting. There's another anecdote in that article, about a 10-year-old living with her grandmother. She'd been abused, and her abuser's family turned up at her grandmother's house, harrassing them and terrorizing the small child inside. The grandmother called the cops, but she called the bikers too. The cops made the abusers leave, but then they had to leave too; the bikers stayed on that grandmother's front lawn for three days, and even though the abusers drove past a few times, they didn't get near that little girl again.

See? Don't you want to hug somebody?