Daniel85

So… Laura and I are off for our weekend in Portland tomorrow, bright and early on a 7:45 train. AmTrak should be an interesting experience.

The hotel we’re staying at is pretty nice: http://www.hoteldeluxeportland.com. It has a classic Hollywood/Art Deco theme, so it’ll be a nice setting for our little getaway.

I managed to pack within a decent timeframe, which is a first for me. I’m usually still packing right up until the morning before a trip. Here’s all the stuff I crammed into my bag:

We’re only going for two days, so all that junk may seem a tad superfluous… but I love packing for trips. I love packing every possible thing I can. I pack more books and miscellaneous reading material than I usually read in a year, articles of clothing that I’d never wear in regular rotation anyway, an entire cupboard-full of snacks, and enough notebooks/pens for a Hemingway safari.

I don’t know why it is that I love trip packing so much. All the little gadgets and knick-knacks and essentials crammed into every pocket of your bag… it’s just so cool. I think maybe this worship of objects comes from being a boy of Generation X/Y/whatever we are… I just like having my accessories. I’m like a GI Joe or something. “New from Hasbro… Daniel Roberts, Australia’s favourite slacker! With realistic unshaven appearance! Comes complete with five empty notebooks, PEZ dispenser, copy of The Catcher In The Rye, and personal graphic novel library! Also available: Dreamgirl Laura.”

Some DVDs, for watching on the train ride. The chick flicks were Laura’s idea, I swear. Well, Love Actually isn’t bad at all… but The Holiday?! Sadly enough, I have actually seen it before. 

Laura found this awesome 80s toy/fad book last week. Okay, first of all… it’s designed to look like a Trapper Keeper. Second of all, it has chapters about freakin’ Choose Your Own Adventure and scratch-n-sniff stickers. Tell me that’s not awesome.

Plus, the interior design makes it look like a notebook, complete with lined pages. All the pictures are made to look like stickers, and the illustrations are all biro ink sketches, completing the notebook aesthetic. Rad.

So here’s my reading material, plus our Portland guidebooks. Laura actually set me a limit of 10 books, stating something to the effect of ‘You’re going away to a nice hotel. For a weekend. With me. You think you’re gonna need books?’ Still, I thought I should probably bring some X-Men.

And what trip would be complete without mindless glossy magazines and digest-sized comics?

I also picked up the latest copy of Ebony, because it has an extensive Michael Jackson interview and photo shoot. Laura of course gave me endless crap about wanting to buy a black women’s magazine. Fair play. And of course the ‘I’m only buying it cos it has Michael Jackson on the cover’ excuse just doesn’t fly, because she only barely tolerates my obsession with the King of Pop.

Alright, then. Bon voyage. Wait, I’m not supposed to say that. It might actually be bad luck if I ‘bon voyage’ myself. Oh well. Ta-ta!

I finally ended up sending my package-o’-presents home for Christmas. Here’s how it all stacked up:

It turned out to be a little difficult getting all the stuff into the box we had, but I managed to find a configuration that fit it all in with room to spare. I guess all those nights spent playing Tetris under the covers with one of those light/magnifying glass things on my Game Boy weren’t for nothing after all.

The package ended up costing us a princely $82 (USD) to post. Next time, everyone’s getting helium balloons and quill pens for Christmas.

We finished decorating the tree last night, except for the angel, which we put on tonight. That was about the extent of our Christmas activities today, because I was not really in the mood for much of anything with the cold that hobo in downtown Seattle gave me. So we just stayed in today… Laura went out and got me some meds (and an Archie comic– awesome girlfriend!), then she made me some soup and we watched Return To Oz. Good times.

Sorry for the blurriness of the shot, but it’s kind of hard to get a decent shot when you’re also trying to get the lights. You can’t really see, but we have some awesome ornaments on there. Ronald McDonald, Sebastian and Flounder, The Rescuers… awesome stuff.

I’m still feeling a little under the weather, but there’s a bonfire/Christmas ship thing down at the marina tonight which is kind of a big deal, so I’ll probably head out for that. Gotta love local/community-geared Christmas events.

We finally got our Christmas tree a couple of days ago, which is a feat, considering we’ve been talking about decorating our balcony for the past two weeks with no progress. At least we have our Tannenbaum visible through the window now, so we don’t look like the Grinches of the apartment building.

The genius working at the tree lot tied the tree to Laura’s car before any of us were in it, leaving us no way to get in. We all managed to get in after much climbing over gearsticks and handbrakes.

So far we’ve only advanced to the light stage. We may hit the tinsel stage by Christmas Eve.

We went to see Jersey Boys last night. Laura was pretty excited to finally be able to see “the 2005 Tony-award winning smash hit” (Her words. Nerd.) being the huge Broadway nut she is, and hey, it’s Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, so everybody wins. The show was awesome. What wasn’t awesome, though, was the hobo who coughed all over me at the sandwich shop we ate at before the show, and the ensuing cold that I woke up with today. And just four days before our Portland trip, too.

Apart from that, we’ve been pretty busy with Christmas stuff. I finally managed to finish all my Australia-bound shopping, after running around for the last few days trying to get everything to send in time for Christmas. I was subjected to gross humiliation earlier this evening, when we were at a drugstore picking up a few final items. My mum wanted me to get her an American women’s magazine, so as I was buying it the thing wouldn’t scan, leading the lady at the checkout to call across the store “Scott! This issue of Woman’s World isn’t scanning!” And of course he didn’t hear her, so she repeated “WOMAN’S WORLD. It isn’t scanning!” Thankfully the woman recognised the potential embarassment of the situation, and added “For this young lady here”, pointing toward Laura. It was pretty hilarious, in a “you got any economy size bottles of painkillers here?” kinda way.

Things have been pretty busy here, what with getting ready for Christmas and planning our weekend in Portland, so I haven’t been blogging as much as I’d like to. I have a bunch of random stuff from the last few weeks I want to blog about, so maybe at some point soon I’ll just do a random mish-mash entry. Regardless, I couldn’t let another day pass without blogging about the snow we got here last week.

Now, I’ve seen snow before (went up to the mountains a couple of times as a little kid), but I have little recollection of those trips, and I know I’ve never actually seen snow *fall*. I got to see it last Saturday, when we got some minor snowfall that lasted a couple of hours. We were about to head out with some of Laura’s friends when Laura spotted it and alerted me, to my giddy joy.

At first it was just a light flurry, not sticking on the ground at all, which is understandable because we live close to the water. As we drove up to the area where Laura’s best friend lives, though, it got heavier and was actually sticking. We went to get lunch and by the time we left the restaurant there was a shallow, yet beautiful, cover on the ground and trees.

I was pretty excited, and may even have performed an impromptu ’snow dance’, of which (thankfully) there is no photographic record. (Or at least none that Laura could ever possibly convince me to show anyone.)

After lunch we were hanging out at Laura’s friend Lena’s place for a while, and she let us borrow some ski gear so we could go frolic in the wintry wonderland.

The snow cover was just a light dusting, really, but I was overjoyed to see it, partly because I haven’t seen snow since I was around 4, and partly because it’s so incredibly cool to have snow around this time of year. (Excuse the rather fem pose and expression. It was cold!)

So that was cool, if short-lived. That was the only snow we’ve had so far, but it’ll definitely snow again, and I’m hoping we’ll get some close to Christmas. If I have to endure this frickin’ Northwest winter, I better be getting some Christmas snow in the deal, is all I’m sayin’.

What’s up with you guys? Anything going down Down Under? (Shit, I’ve only been here a couple of months and I’m already making lame ‘Down Under’ jokes.) I’m missing the homeland a little. Strangely enough, though, there’s an ‘Aussie Meat Pie Bakery’ about ten minutes away from here. It’s kind of a weird place to have such an establishment. Yesterday we picked up some Arnott’s Shapes, Chicken Twisties, and a Wagon Wheel there. Ah, the tastes of home! I just need a strawberry Big M, maybe 50 cents worth of chocolate Mates, and I’ll be set.

Go read this.

It saddens me that I can’t remember believing in Santa Claus. I know I must have, because all kids are sublimely gullible. Anyone who tells you they never believed in Santa Claus (excepting, of course, people who for religious or other reasons were never led to believe) is a fucking liar.

I know I believed, I just can’t remember what it felt like to believe.

One thing I do remember (partly because mum tells me about it every Christmas… it’s one of Mr Dickens’ “pleasant associations” for me) is asking my mum- point blank- “is there a fat man in a red suit who comes and leaves presents under our tree?” after she’d dodged and ducked the question all Christmas season.

Of course she had to say no.

Later that day- Christmas Eve- mum showed me a Christmas card she’d received as a child, containing an abridged version of the “Yes, Virginia” editorial. It was probably devastating for her to know that her little boy, her first child, had stopped believing. But there’s a different kind of belief that comes after you pass the point of putting out biscuits and milk. At least it does if you have any kind of soul, and that’s what Francis Pharcellus’s editorial has always meant to me.

I’m not religious, and I’m not much of a materialist (okay, I lied about that, I’m a greedy capitalist whore… NINTENDO SIXTY-FOUUURRRRRRRRRR). Christmas has always been about stories to me. Tired old family anecdotes trotted out over Christmas dinner, TV Christmas specials, Christmas movies, the Nativity (despite not being religious, it’s hard to grow up unaffected by it in a traditionally Christian society), Christmas carols, and of course the Christmas carol, “A Christmas Carol“. Yes siree, Christmas is a time rich with story.

As Francis Pharcellus (I can’t stop saying that name!) points out, only through ‘faith, fancy, poetry, love, (and) romance’ can we ‘view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond’.

There’s no fat man in a red suit coming tomorrow night, but there is a Santa Claus.

(No, I don’t mean Tim Allen.)

“Christmas time! That man must be a misanthrope indeed in whose breast something like a jovial feeling is not roused- in whose mind some pleasant associations are not awakened- by the recurrence of Christmas.”

- Charles Dickens, from ‘Christmas Festivities’ (1835).

Seeing as it’s less than 10 days till Christmas, and I haven’t really been blogging much about Christmas, and I carry on like I’m the king of fucking Christmas, I thought I’d better do some blogging about Christmas. (New Year’s resolution: fewer run-on sentences.)

When I was a little kid I used to spend a lot of time at my grandparents’ house, because both my parents worked. I spent enough time there that I had an entirely different range of toys and videos to the ones at home. Grandma defended this separate entertainment republic fiercely, absolutely refusing to ever let me take a ‘grandma’s house toy (or video)’ home.

I can remember among the grandma’s house videos were an animated film of Black Beauty, a video filled with animated versions of classic Golden Book tales (The Pokey Little Puppy, The Saggy Baggy Elephant, etc), and this budget collection of public domain cartoons:

I really vividly remembered that video cover, especially the purple, so I knew exactly what it was when I spotted it at a Video Ezy liquidation sale last year.

The cartoons on this video are all supposedly Christmassy, but there’s actually only one real Christmas toon on there: “Santa’s Surprise”, the classic Little Audrey exercise in racist caricature. Bones through the hair of the little African kid, Chinese kid with a speech impediment, etc. Really uplifting stuff.

The rest of the cartoons were only loosely related to Christmas, either through the season of winter or involving toys or having a religious tone. My favourite short on the video was a winter one, “Jack Frost”. It’s a 1934 ComiColor production, from when the great Ub Iwerks told Walt Disney to go fuck himself and started his own studio. Iwerks’ shortlived ComiColor series put out some solid animated shorts, mostly based on fairytales and scored by the brilliant Carl Stalling.

If you’ve never seen “Jack Frost” (and I’m hoping that some of you have!), do yourself a favour and check it out now: 

Or just read my review of my favourite bits!

The story is basically that of a proud little bear getting his come-uppance from Old Man Winter.

While all the woodland animals are getting ready for winter’s onset, this little shit’s just stuffing around, jumping in the washing basket and stuff.

His mum comes and puts him through the wring-dryer, which pretty much serves him right for not being a productive member of the woodland commune.

Shortly after, Jack Frost arrives to start spreading the news that Old Man Winter’s on his way, so everyone better get the fuck inside their treehouses.

The bear family retreats to the safety of its tree trunk abode, and our little friend gets put to bed. He slips out the bottom Dennis The Menace style while his mum’s still tucking him in…

And gets the shit smacked out of him for it.

Cowering in bed, afraid of another beating administered by his mum’s paw…

… the little bear decides to teach his parents a lesson by running away in the night.

I bet you can see where this is going, with the impending arrival of Old Man Winter and all. The funny thing is that even though this was clearly intended to scare kids out of running away from home, the lil bear looked so cool with his tramp’s suitcase-on-a-stick that it actually made me want to pack up and leave.

Another amusing, confusing reversal of the cartoon’s intent is that I was actually way more terrified of Jack Frost, the good guy, than Old Man Winter, the villain.

Just look at how freakin’ scary he looks, peering in at the window:

I find it really interesting to trace my obsessions and neuroses back to the literature and entertainment of my childhood, and this is one of ‘em right here. To this day I cannot sleep with an uncovered window. There has to be a heavy curtain pulled right across the window, with not even a sliver of outside visible.

In his travels, the bear comes across Jack Frost, who’s all like ‘Yo, son, get the fuck back in yo’ house! Ol’ Man Winter gon’ fuck you up!”

But then the bear is like “Ain’t no thang, J-Fross. I’m a grizzly bear.”

So the bear continues on his rebellious way, to come across a scarecrow. But not just any scarecrow— this is the coolest damn scarecrow since the one in that song we all learned in grade prep, about all the cows sleeping and then up jumped the scarecrow.

The scarecrow comes to life and proceeds to perform what only be termed some kinda German scat-singing breakdance, while a chorus of Ents belt out a Negro spiritual in the background.

As usual, the little furball feels the need to prove how undaunted he is, this time putting up his dukes:

As if in response to his unabashed hubris, a cold wind starts a-blowin’, and the scarecrow is turned into a snowman. To everything, turn, turn, turn… there is a season, turn, turn, turn.

Then outta nowhere, Old Man Winter lopes in with his giant strides and the bear shits himself and runs. It’s actually scarier now than it was when I was a kid…

The bear frantically knocks on every door in every tree trunk, but all the commie critters turn him away. Except the skunk, who’s only too happy to invite him in…

The skunk smells like crap, though, so the bear decides to take his chances with the furious elemental god. (Aww… skunk don’t gots no fwiends….)

The bear jumps in a log to hide, but there’s no fooling Old Man Winter.

He casts some ice from his fingertips to turn the log into a jail cell. If Old Man Winter were any kinda villain, he’d stroke his beard and say “How ironic that the very place you sought sanctuary has become your prison”, but he doesn’t.

(And speaking of villains, I always thought my obsession with winter and snow came from the sheer awesomeness of The Empire Strikes Back, but it probably dates back to this cartoon.)

Thankfully, after OMW pisses off, Jack Frost rocks up. He originally just came to mock the little bear and tell him I told you so, but Grizzly Jr cries like a bitch and admits he was wrong.

‘Jack Frost paused a moment, considering this new development. “Well… just as long as you’re traumatised,” he said finally, dabbing his brush on his magic palette and transforming the bear’s icy prison bars into delicious candy canes.’ 

Still on the topic of finding the origins of one’s obsessions, I think I can pretty safely say my love of candy canes comes from watching this cartoon as a greedy little 4-year-old. I just can’t get enough candy canes come Christmas time.

Jacky Frost and Grizzly Jr hop on the palette, and head home X-Treme Sportz style.

And there’s that creepy-ass little goblin peering in at the window again. None of you are sleeping tonight.

Don’t really have anything major to blog about today, so this entry’s just a mixed bag of random things not worthy of their own entry that still fall under the prevailing Christmas theme.

Christmastime is always awesometime over at X-E, and Matt has found a truly wondrous snowglobe featuring Darth Vader building a snowy replica of the Death Star. It reminded me of this fantastic picture from the back of Hasbro’s Holiday Darth Vader action figure from last Christmas: 

Shouldn’t he have made a Snowtrooper?

My local Safeway has half-heartedly gotten into the Christmas spirit…

And doesn’t everyone look all the more joyful for it?

Finally, from the ’harried dad frantically Googling’ department comes the funniest search engine hit I’ve had this Christmas season:

HOW TO MOUNT PLASTIC SANTA TO CHIMNEY

I love how it’s all in capitals, as if the searcher is ’shouting’ at his computer (remember all those news reports and magazine articles about ‘Netiquette’ in like 1996?) for handy hints on how to get the FUCKING SANTA TO MOUNT WHILE IT MOCKS ME WITH ITS FUCKING HO HO HO LAUGHTER!!!!!!11111seveneleven

Star Wars and Christmas have a long, infamous history together. The Star Wars Holiday Special is pretty much the most mocked thing in pop culture, but even that begins to look like Citizen Kane compared to 1980’s ‘Christmas In The Stars, the Star Wars Christmas Album’.

Poor old Threepio and Artoo. They’re always roped into doing the crappiest promotional stuff. I guess it was a smart move on George Lucas’s part to make the droids such central characters, so that he could pimp them out for stuff like this that not even Mark Hamill would touch.

We know, Mark. We know.

Before the world fell in love with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, R2-D2 was the man. Droid. Among several forgettable holiday ditties on the Star Wars Christmas Album, as well as one totally bizarre one (”What Can You Get A Wookie For Christmas (When He Already Owns A Comb”), there’s a little gem that really sums up the general worldwide love for R2-D2… “R2-D2, We Wish You A Merry Christmas”.

This song is notable for lead vocals by a very David Cassidy-sounding Jon Bon Jovi (back when he was still known as Jon Bongiovi). I believe this album was actually his first professional appearance.

Like all good Christmas songs, this one has a little bit of opening dialogue to set up the backstory. C-3PO surreptitiously invites R2-D2 to ‘plug into the central computer’ (euphemism?). The dialogue is peppered with the kind of pseudo-scientific lingo found throughout all Star Wars… stuff like ‘phase vector’ and ‘quaver converter’ (I didn’t make those up, they’re in the song).

The lyrics run from hilarious to even more hilarious, with such lines as “Our chimney’s big and round, so you can come right down” and “We’ll go in by the fire, and warm your little wires”.

In between those Bon Jovi-sung bits, there’s a choir of children singing ‘R2-D2 we love you, it’s true!’ It really is true, though. Who doesn’t love Artoo?! No redeeming message of peace or harmony or joy to the world here, just sheer idol worship. Great stuff.

The song ends with C-3PO on the verge of actually admitting his endless love for R2, but instead choking it back and saying ‘Merry Christmas’ instead. I think Threepio’s favourite Beatles song is George Harrison’s ‘I Want To Tell You’.

But don’t take my words for it, you have to hear this masterpiece for yourselves…

Click to plug R2-D2, We Wish You A Merry Christmas.mp3 into your sockets!

(The Rapidshare download thing is not as complicated as it looks. Just click on the ‘Free’ button and then wait for the countdown to end so you can download it.)

I don’t think any Geelong locals would disagree when I say that Bay City Plaza is by far the king of the two shopping malls in Geelong’s CBD. Market Square has always been the poorer cousin of Bay City Plaza, although it has gotten better lately with the advent of JB Hi-Fi and EB Games. Still, for many years it’s been a boring, useless mall that no young person would willingly enter. 

Probably the thing that annoys me the most about Market Square is Harris Scarfe, the dumbest department store in the history of retail. They stock hardly anything, and what they do have is overpriced and from dinky brands that no-one cares about. I think Harris Scarfe is just a big scam to take advantage of country folk who’ve come down to the city and don’t know any better (or are afraid of the bright lights and flashy decor of bigger stores).

One thing Market Square does know how to do is celebrate Christmas. Bay City always stuffs Santa’s Village somewhere out of the way, usually upstairs. They can afford to snub Santa, though, with all their cool stores. Market Square, on the other hand, knows the only way it’s going to draw people in during the Christmas shopping season is to put on the biggest fucking extravaganza imaginable every year.

There’s always a big fuss about Santa’s arrival at Market Square, with a big parade and everything, but I loathe humanity far too much to stand on the street in the heat with the… is there a word for ‘throng’ or ‘crowd’ that rhymes with ’street’?

Anyway, Santa’s all settled in at Market Square, holding his usual pride of place in the centre of the mall:

That’s the same old tree that Market Square pulls out every Christmas. I wonder where they store it during the year. It’s pretty big, although my skewed childhood memory has it as more on par with one of the California redwoods, busting out of the ceiling and whatnot.

Here’s the set-up from ground level. I wonder if maybe they’ve scaled down this year, cos my memory from past years has the thing taking up way more floorspace than this. It could just be that it’s only November, and I usually see it during the height of Christmas action in mid-December, with hundreds of people milling around the centrepiece. Their seasonally-coloured clothing just kind of blends into a heaving biomass that looks like part of the display. Naked without the teeming hordes of shoppers, Santa’s throne room is pretty unimpressive.

I missed out on the reindeer, unfortunately. They only brought the poor things out in the pre-summer weather for a couple of days and then whacked them back in the freezer for next year. Bringing reindeer Down Under to please the gawking masses is almost as bad as all those assholes who keep huskies and malamutes as pets down here.

I still have to check out what Bay City has done for Christmas this year. There’ll be photos, if I return. Bay City security is pretty tight.