I can't believe you can put your back out by sitting down funny when you're 27, but apparently you can. Due to this, today was spent on Panadeine Forte enjoying a solo Sunday. On a solo Sunday, there is no better movie to watch than Weekend. 

It's kinda weird that for a group of people that are supposed to rule the cultural scene, there really are no good gay movies. The only gay movies that seem to get made are ridiculously bad comedies that go straight to DVD, and then despite their failure seem to have a sequel subsequently made every fortnight (See: Eating Out). Weekend is the only gay movie I've seen which reads true to actual gay life.

The movie is full of truth bombs but I thought the key one was that gays go out of their way to avoid offending straights. Even with their best straight mates, or with family, most gays will go into very little detail about what they actually get up to in their personal lives, and then will just brush the rest off with a joke or two. As a result, most people often seem a bit clueless about what goes on. This movie is probably the best window I've seen to how gay life really is.

Previous to this, the only gay movies I thought worth watching were both Chinese:

Lan Yu (which is also a really good movie about Beijing in the 80s).

Eternal Summer : (full movie with English subtitles available here).

Can Coke please stop it with the names and the desperately trying to be part of our lives already?

December 2011 - in great blog tradition it is time for a run-down of what I've been listening to all year. According to the most played song on my iTunes - a cover of Dreams by Passion Pit. According to the majority of my Facebook postings: anything by T.I.

Digging a little deeper, if I was going to name a top ten for the year it would be, in no particular order:
(Disclaimer: as per previous lists, these songs might not necessarily have been made in 2011, they just need to have been a big part of my 2011).

Little Dragon - Ritual Union
If you saw me walking down the street and mouthing words this year, it was either me talking to myself or me singing this song.

Drake - Marvin's Room
Drake is everything I've ever wanted to be: half black, half Jewish, and a former Degrassi actor. As a serial drunk dialler I could relate to this song way too much. Except for the whole being a now successful celebrity part of the song.

Yoga Lin - Wake Up    林宥嘉 － 自然醒
I really resisted liking this guy, principally because his English name is Yoga, and he is from the Taiwan version of the X-Factor. I couldn't stop listening to this song tho in the last half of the year, and he is now competing with my others for Dave's "No 1 Mando-pop Idol Forever" status.

George Harrison - My Sweet Lord
Just love this song more than ever right now.

Sebastien Tellier - La Ritournelle
I never really liked this guy before because I a) didn't get him, b) thought his Eurovision performance was a bit boring.

I only discovered this song this year and it was kind of  the game changer, I now even like his Eurovision performance.

Rihanna - We Found Love
It remains unclear how much time I've spent on YouTube watching this clip so far.

Jonathan Boulet - You're a Animal
I think this guy deserves to be successful so much it's not funny.

Beyonce - Halo
Is it wrong for me to admit that this was my gee-up song of the year?

Jamie XX - Far Nearer
Just crazy good.

Florence + the Machine - Take Care (Drake + Rihanna +Jamie XX cover)

This is just from a couple of weeks ago but pretty much features everything I've liked about music this year.

Kinda in the middle of a very unsuccessful job hunt at the moment and it's doing my head in. GFC f***ing sucks.

My new plan (my job plans tend to change on a six-hour basis, which is also further complicating the job hunt process) is to throw it all in, relocate to Lismore, work in a country bank branch, and become a pillar of the rural community. I may even join the local Lion's club.

Why Lismore?

Why not:  Look at the new house I can buy for the price of an apartment in Sydney:

You could seriously host your own music festivals/bush doofs in the backyard there.

Drinking red wine on a Sunday night, dreading work, and listening to 90s grunge.......and finding out that Dinosaur Jr are doing a cruise with The Antlers.......!

This makes no sense, but I want to be on it. Desperately.

Tonight is my first ever Halloween party. I'm generally not very keen on costume parties and so have always avoided them, but decided to get into the spirit of things this year. 

My first thoughts were that the great Halloween costumes would have been things that were truly topical at that time. E.g. Sarah Palin costumes in 2008. With that in mind, I thought the most topical costume for this year would have to be something along the lines of:

As I'm going with my mate John, I thought we could make a duo of 2011 fallen villains with him going as Osama.

At the time, my only dilemma with this was - how can I replicate that facial hair. But since then, peeps have been putting to me the following arguments:

1. That's racist. 

Ok, no-one actually put this argument to me, I just read about it on the internets. 

To be honest, I can kind of see where people are coming from in this, in that turning up to a party as a terrorist or a dictator reinforces negative North African/Middle Eastern stereotypes. But I think that only holds true if people at that party can't separate two individuals in that region from the hundreds of millions of other people in that region. So I'm interested in more people's thoughts on that, but am not entirely convinced.

The second argument was more compelling:

2. Would you wear this to a party?

Here I'm kinda stuck. 

The weekend is now uploaded on Youtube to be commemorated for time immemorial

In the meantime just sit back and take in Bruce

Recently I had a debate with a colleague over whether we could remember a time prior to chicken salt, Australia's delicious fish and chip shop condiment. I strongly recall a time when there was only one salt option for your chips, not two. My colleague felt that I was 'full of shit' and that it was in fact invented a long time ago.

By the time I got around to checking the wiki page on chicken salt, the colleague had already edited the wiki entry to say that it was invented in 1950 by a farmer in Quakers Hill. This addition was taken down...but it got me thinking....wiki thinking.

I have since decided that my new hobby will be: Wikipedia. It combines my other previous hobbies of the Internet and..well...the Internet. I've signed up and am aiming to work on contributing from this weekend. My first task will be helping out in the English page for one of my favourite Taiwanese pop-stars: Shin.

Stay tuned for updates.