So You Think You Can Host?

Natalie Bassingthwaighte is an embarrassment to soap-star-turned-electro-pop-front-women-come-reality-TV hosts everywhere. She might be the worst host full stop since David Letterman's 1995 Oscars travesty.
Not that I don't like the girl. By all accounts she's a real sweetheart, and as much as I'd rather fingerbang a rhino than listen to a Rogue Traders album, I think she's pretty damn good at what she does in the musical arena. Charismatic, sexy, the vocal skill to carry it off live. Leader of the pack, if that's what you're into. And as far as her turn as Izzy on Neighbours, she was cheeky, sultry and compulsively watchable. For a while there Natalie was the reason Channel 10 at 6.30 was many people's dirty little secret.
But something happens to the poor girl when she isn't playing make-believe. There's more wood in her face than on a year 9 school camp. Maybe she's upped her botox intake. Maybe she's still genuinely stunned by the vastly inane contributions of the so-called judges. Or maybe the poor poppet is just plain out of her depth. My money's on the latter. All the evidence is there. She doesn't blink. She speaks v e r y s l o w l y. If there's a cliche within arm's reach, she'll find it.
I feel for her, and feel embarassed for her, and ache for her to find some animation and pray she finds her groove. But then the less sentimental part of me reaches for the remote and blessedly changes the channel. And writes a strongly worded letter to the powers that be, begging them to leave Nat to the world of fiction.

To Tatt, or Not To Tatt Too (or To Shut Your Pie-Hole)

Other than the dude on the right, a lot of people have tattoos. I contribute to that fact. The difference between LizardMan and I (and, presumably most of the rest of the tattooing community) is that I didn't get my tattoos to completely subvert my ink-less identity. Oh, there are degrees of intended subversion, and intended augmentation, and intended cool-ification.

But assuming that Lizzo's head-to-toe inking (and bone grafting and piercing and stretching and slicing and levering) is a meaningful and defining transformation is probably fair enough. And given the literal nature of the transformation, it's probably fair to assume he was comfortable with the general public making assumptions about - or even asking - what it means and how it defines him.

On the other hand, for the general public to feel entitled to ask what my clearly symbolic markings mean is just plain fucking wrong.

I seem to have reached my limit of boozed-up retards in pubs grabbing me by the wrist and examining my tatt like it's public property, then demanding to know what it "means".

How about "choke on my scrotum, you socially-stunted silverback".

Maybe its purely an exercise in aesthetics. Or maybe since it isn't literal means it's private i.e. it's none of your fucking business what it means. If I had've wanted all and dipshit sundry to "get it" I would have had a prose paragraph written there and a nice brochure printed up for visitors to take home.

The End of the Internet

A good friend of mine and I were discussing cyberspace. The weird ether of thoughts and fears and data and 1's and 0's. How many people have poured themselves into an intangible mess of instructions and light.

And we got to talking about the End of the Internet. He let me know there is a site (in fact there are many) claiming to be the End of the Internet. Pretty pedestrian, but there you go.

And he told me he was disappointed by the End of the Internet.

Rightly so, I argued. It would be like finding the end of an idea.

But he corrected me. It wasn't the concept he was disappointed with. He just thought there should be some girls.

So I claim this post to be nominally the End of the Internet. And here, my friend, are some girls.