Yesterday I had a serious jones for some noodles, so I headed on down to Kim’s Club, the neighbourhood Korean supermarket, and grabbed a few things I fancied the look of (a few different noodles, and a bag of Korean fake onion rings). For lunch I had Potato Noodle Soup, which I reviewed some months ago, and it was really, really good. But today I had a new pot-style Kimchi noodle, and here is the review: Nong Shim Big Bowl Kimchi.
Category: Reckons
Tagging is NOT street art.
Charmingly, over night someone decided that the wall around our property looked like a great place to shit. By which I mean, paint their revoltingly tacky tags. They also painted one of our neighbors’ cars, I helped him get it off with a bit of turps and some elbow grease.
Then I went ahead and turpsed off the worst of the paint on the walls and windows (the windows were nice and easy) and repainted all the walls. There was a certain sense of urgency, as we had some people coming to look at the house to rent it at 12:30.
Who’d move into a freshly spray painted house? Not me.
If your browser doesn’t suck, rolling over the images will show you the cleaned up walls and suchlike.
Oopsie.
Turns out watching all this American television is bad for your bandwidth, last month we went 4 gigs over our cap, mostly in the last few days of the month, and this month we accidentally hit 10 gigs by the middle of the month. So, we’ve been speed limited to 64k. This. Sucks.
I don’t know how people live with dial-up connections any more, you can’t. do. anything. at. these. speeds.
Kids, don’t blow through your cap!
World famous in New Zealand.
With the kind assistance of the second youngest Mr Reeve, I can proudly present to you the video of ‘my’ thing on 3 News.
Everyone who saw my extended appearance on the old TV show The Drum knows that if I talk too much, I say things I completely don’t mean, and regret it for years (it would have helped if the ever lovely Jennifer Weathercenter hadn’t asked such exclusively stupid questions).
Now, well, it turns out that if you do exactly what you’re told, you just end up being boring, and probably regret it a little bit then too.
One day I’ll do it all exactly how I want, and then I’ll be happy.
This first one is just the teaser bit, which features Claire, she didn’t speak on camera, but made a much better performance when she was interviewed for Radio Live than I ended up doing for TV3.
I didn’t put it up sooner, ‘cos I had to sort out a weird problem with the player completely messing up my whole page.
And this is the whole thing as played on TV3, I’m only on for like 8 seconds.
I don’t know where that line about seeing everything came from, I didn’t see everything, I never ever said I saw everything. I heard the crash, I saw the car and driver go around the corner, then I saw the kid on the ground. I didn’t see the crash, I didn’t see the kid flying through the air, or anything else.
National Radio vs. The Monkey
Today we’re doing it with audio, please forgive the experiment. Let me know if you like the format.
(Click the image to listen. You must have the flash plugin.)
My point with the email was, I guess, that I’m a New Zealander, this is my home – the only home I’ve ever known. And saying that Maori have been here forever is not only wrong, in some ways it’s used as an exclusionary tactic to say "we belong here, this is our land, you’re just out guest". Because the reality is that they had a head start of just 500 years, which sounds like a long time, and it is, but it’s nothing like the tens of thousands of years that are sometimes claimed.
All of the peoples in New Zealand came from somewhere else, and in this sense there are no true natives, not Maori, not Pakeha.
The point of posting it here today is less clear. But I hope you liked it all the same.
Things and things and stuff.
I’ve been writing ‘things that aren’t this websote’ lately, you may have noticed.
The other day I put up another noodle review, another one from Trident, this time from their Sensations range – Pad Kee Mao. They’re not very exciting.
We’re thinking very hard about moving house again – and to this end we went and looked at a lovely place in Epsom this afternoon, the garden was nice, the inside was us sized (but certainly no bigger), and so forth. We’ll see what happens with that.
We’re considering the move thing due to, frankly, being sick of living with other people. If it wasn’t little things like Heloise wearing cast iron hobnailed trollish stomping boots when she walked around the Paice Ave place; it was the far more revolting sound of painful shrieking anal sex (with or without horrible little toys) from our last flatmate. Also his cooking. Honestly, if you’re ever offered any fresh baked muffins or bread by that guy, say no. Muffins aren’t supposed to taste like vinegar. He was completely clueless in so many ways – but quite an accomplished bad debtor. Oh boy but we had a lot of debt collectors dropping by, chasing him down.
So, we’re considering moving, even though I really really hate moving house.
In entertainment news, I’ve been watching a lot of American television. Have you seen ‘My Name is Earl’? It’s Jason Lee’s newest thing, I’ve only grabbed a handful of episodes, but it’s pretty good so far.
If you have seen it, do you remember the second episode where Earl tries to make up with his scary old psychopathic friend for letting him do two years in jail for a crime he didn’t commit, well the same actor is a crazy guy in my favourite TV show of the moment – Prison Break.
If you haven’t seen Prison Break, you’re nothing to me, and I don’t know if I’d even bother to scrape you from the bottom of my shiny shiny shoe.
Talk about your awesomeness. I bet they blow it eventually, but 10 or so episodes into the season, and they still haven’t.
What else have I been watching? I mentioned Surface already I think, I’m still not sure how I feel about it, but I’ll keep watching it until it really drives me away.
Oh, but Lost, season 2 is pretty good. I don’t really care if I spoil it for you, but I’ll speak circularly here… The thing with the others, and the someone who gets shot by that nasty skank bitch? That was horrible with the backwards talking and all the shh shh and "they’re getting very close" and so forth. Oh boy.
This has really devolved into little more than stream of conciousness, so bye for now.
Maggi Noodle Temptations – Sesame Chicken
I guess it’s been a couple of weeks since I last posted any noodles, so feast your eyes on Maggi Noodle Temptations – Sesame Chicken. Just don’t bother feasting your mouth on them, they’re boring and over-priced.
It’s a trap!
I’m afraid I may have just challenged myself to write another book. With a title like that, it’ll be hard not to.
Writerly things.
I’m not looking forward to November, a lot of untalented hacks who should be doing other things (masturbating to pornography they found on the internet, for example) will be attempting to turn their hands to writing crappy novels as fast as possible.
I only mention this because I’ve actually been working on a few books (one weird-fiction, one SF, and one vanity non-fiction), off and on, for a couple of years, and I’m really happy with my slow, meticulous, loving, progress. And I think that NaNoWriMo actually cheapens the process taken by, for want of a better term, "real writers."
That’s not to say that I think writing is in any way restricted to any sort of elite few or anything like that, I just think that if you want to write, you should write, not wait for some stupid competition and then write just to reach some artificial wordcount, updating your progress daily, and frankly wasting your time ‘cos no one. in. the. world. needs another goth-vampire-faerie tale. Or story about a writer who can’t think of a real story to write, so writes a story about a writer who can’t think of a story to write. If you can’t think of a story to write, don’t. fucking. write.
Has anyone ever tried to read anything written for NaNoWriMo? These people are just going for wordcount, and it’s horrible.
So if you’re an untalented hack desperate to prove you’re more creative than you actually are, go for it!
And remember, I’m the boss of the world, and you’re just a dick with a keyboard.
Painterly things.
I’ve started to think a lot about Christmas, might seem a bit early to some of my generation, but the reason is I’m semi-decided on painting all of my gifts this year, and even with my slapdash style it takes a fair bit of time to push all the paint around to where I want it to be. I’ve sketched out a series of four paintings, so far, and they’re all weird self-portraits. I think it’s funny as hell to give people a gift which is a portrait of yourself. But they have to also be good enough that people will actually hang them. Another reason this is a funny gift is that not everyone is likely to actually like my style at all, but the etiquette of gifts is pretty much that they have to be used, hence having to wear the ugly jumper your nan gave you when she comes to visit, you know what I’m saying.
The problem is, if I make paintings I’m really super happy with, I’m just going to go ahead and keep them all and give people snickers bars wrapped in newspaper, closed with a length of dirty string.