Bicycle rights!

This kinda says it all about militant fixie hipsters... From Portlandia. Don't look the show up on YouTube if you're predisposed to wasting endless amounts of time laughing at hipsters. But just so you know, the funniest clips are "Did You Read...", "Dream of the 90s" and the adult hide-and-seek league.

Shootin the shit with Hunter S

This is pretty old, but still fun. A fresh faced Conan O'Brien tried for years to get Hunter S Thompson to appear on his show, but Hunter would only agree to an interview if Conan came to him. And if they had hard liquor. And guns. Maybe he was bluffing, but Conan showed up with a film crew.

The great Dr Gonzo seems appropriately baked in this clip; almost like a cariacature of Johnny Depp's potrayal of him in Fear & Loathing. Besuited butlers add to the surreal sight, and there's a crazy moment where the safety guy pushes Hunter's whiskey out of the way of the machine gun he's lining up.

My beautiful dark twisted grape madness

Grape varieties that sound like stripper names:

• Midnight Beauty
• Black Fantasy
• Red Flame
• Crimson Seedless?
• Globes??

For the gutterally-minded, there are plenty of opportunities for lowbrow humour in the vines. With sun-softened fruit the current scourge, it's not unusual to hear someone say something like "I don't care how big it is, if it's not hard I'm not putting it in my box." That's what she said.

Meanwhile, I puzzled for days over what the little seal on the Menindees box could mean. This (usually) dry, inland area is not generally known for its performing aquatic mammals, after all. Could it be a printer malfunction? An animal lover's prank? A secret code? Turns out it's the farm's "seal of quality". Daaaaaaaaaad!

Whether you're high or low...

I'm way late on the Janelle Monae bandwagon but this song has been making grape picking bearable for the last few weeks. The video is even better. How good is it to see a hip hop video that's not all flesh and ostentatious bling? (I'm looking at you, Yeezy) And more importantly, where can I get some of these shoes?



I tip on alligators
And little rattlesnake-uhs

The "classy brass" and the ukelele fade-out are just gorgeous. And how great is Big Boi in this? He was always overshadowed by Andre 3000 in Outkast, but by all accounts his 2010 solo record Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty is the business. I love the chorus to his song "Shutterbug" (now party people in the club it's time to cut some rug / and throw the deuces in the sky just for the shutterbug / I'm double fistin and you're empty you can grab a cup) and it has a great video - including some muppets! But I think I prefer the song mashed up with the Black Keys:



Perhaps most of my pleasure in this comes from the phrase "cut a rug"... So reminiscent of the rum-sozzled discos they used to hold at the agricultural college my friends attended just out of school. I didn't turn eighteen until almost a year after we left school, so I spent a lot of my first year in Brisbane bussing out to Gatton and Forest Hill for weekends - where my mates were studying things like "agribusiness" and "animal studies", and where the publicans never bothered to check IDs.

They had the best parties out there - pigs on spits, bands on the backs of trucks, and the aforementioned Wednesday night discos where there were always random themes. And there, dressed as rednecks or Hawaiians or whatever, we'd bust out all our best moves. "The shopping trolley", "the sprinkler", even "the worm" for those with gymnastic leanings and no fear of writhing in the rum spilled on the dancefloor.

Oh my god, that reminds me. Around this same time I was, as I remain, laughably naive about drugs. And I remember someone telling me about how everyone on ecstasy does the same dance - this kind of jerky robot, all elbows and angles, a stylised mime of filling boxes and stacking them.

Years later, shortly after moving to Sydney, I was having drinks with some new friends and desperate to appear urbane. A number of beers in, I was tuning in and out of the conversation when they started talking about pills. Thinking of the box stacking dance, when they mentioned "shelving" I enthusiastically brought up my own experience in this area, to the surprise of the group. It was months before I realised what the process of shelving actually involves (kids - and Mum - please don't click that link). Suffice to say I have never done it, and I hoped fervently that conversation was forgotten...

Smashing pumpkins

As mentioned previously, some clever souls manage to elevate the simple craft of jack-o-lantern carving into an impressively complex art-form. Like this evil cannibal pumpkin above - I think his victim's terrified facial expression is the icing on the cake. Halloween may be behind us now, but hacked up pumpkins are still hanging out on people's stoops, slowly turning to mush. In the early hours of my birthday morning, in quiet, brownstone-lined Brooklyn backstreets, such surplus squash sat leering and jeering...

But all good things must come to an end. And so, one of my first accomplishments as a newly-minted 26-year-old was to aid in the jack-o-lantern disposal process. By tiptoeing up to people's front doors, gingerly liberating rotting pumpkins, and smashing them to pulpy smithereens in the street. I don't know what came over me; I thought the flashes of senseless petty vandalism that were the hallmark of my youth were long behind me. But there was something kinda magical about it; sure it was immature, but if I were still in Australia, or if I were in those same streets a week earlier or a week later, there would have been no pumpkin targets for a late-night mercy mission. And just mentally commentating the words I'm smashing pumpkins! was enough to spark memories of the flannel-clad 90s and an infinite looping Beavis & Butthead snigger...

But a word of warning. Should the same frenzy ever overtake you on an early November night in America, be careful as you raise your booty high before its destruction - they collect rainwater and other rancid liquids which are unpleasant when they splash on your head.

Toilet humour

LOL is a tired old acronym but it does bear thinking about. How often does something actually make you laugh out loud? It happens less than you think, though there are few better feelings that an unstoppable giggle bubbling up from within. My sense of humour has always been pretty lowbrow... my sister’s and my failsafe gag is substituting the word “poo” for “you” in any saccharine pop love song. Actually, just the word “poo” on its own will usually prompt a snigger.

Which is why, when my new room mate showed me her latest read, I couldn’t wait for her to leave the house so I could sneak a proper peek. NB I have had to avoid reading synonyms I would usually employ, like "devour" and "immerse myself in" because the book is called What's Your Poo Telling You.


That’s right – medical advice and poo jokes, together at last. This book is hilarious. It’s all I can do not to type the whole thing out here. Instead I will just list the chapter titles, each addressing a different poo experience: Deja Poo (turds that contain clear reminders of past meals, eg corn), Performance Enhancing Poo (aka the Pre-Game Poo), Floaters vs Sinkers, Soft Serve, The Streak, D.A.D.S. (ie Day After Drinking Stool, known as the AGB or After Grog Bog where I hail from), Ring Of Fire, the Clean Sweep and, possibly my favourite, Poophoria.

"This poo can turn an aetheist into a believer and is distinguished by the sense of euphoria and ecstasy that you feel throughout your body when this type of feces departs your system... To some it may feel like a religious experience, to others like an orgasm, and to a lucky handful it may feel like both. This is the type of poo that makes us all look forward to spending time on the toilet."

Helpfully, each poo category starts off with synonyms for that specific faecal variety. For example, poophoria is also known as Holy Crap or Mood Enhancer... Synonyms for the Sneak Attack include Ambush Poo, Chocolate Surprise, Deuce is Loose or a Shart.

I think this is another of those posts my mum will be really proud of....

Turtle burger

Rusty is this mad guy a friend is couch-surfing with here in Williamsburg. He has a rad band called Justice Of The Unicorns, is never seen without a baseball cap and a ginger beard, and tells the funniest stories you've ever heard. His day job is maintaining one of Manhattan's parks. The image of him hooning around in a golf buggy, mowing lawns in criss-cross patterns "to look like Yankee Stadium" and turning the sprinklers onto homeless dudes who won't move, is surely the stuff of a great sitcom. But what he does in this video, this is amazing. It's probably going to blow your mind. It's the turtle burger.



Rusty can't lay claim to inventing the turtle burger (not made from actual turtles, but suprisingly realistic); he stumbled across it on a fishing website discussion board. Like any great urban legend it's almost impossible to trace the turtle burger back to a single individual - the turtle burger's origins are shrouded in mystery.

It's basically a mince patty wrapped in bacon (in a basket weave), with sausages stuck in for legs, tail and head. The loving slow motion of this video makes the whole process seem so deliberate, the clipped detail of the toes and mouth seem like surgery. And best of all is when they get the deli guys to sell it at the end. Rusty keeps sending random friends in to request it, just to freak out the deli guys.

Desperate to try making one....

Fry society

Stopping for sustenance in Park Slope (a rather posh Brooklyn neighbourhood) today, comfort food was high on our weary, vestigially hungover agenda. When we looked across the road and saw Chipshop, it was like a sign from above. Chipshop does British-style food. Read: everything is fried, everything comes with chips. And real chips - the sturdier, stodgier cousin of the usual anorexic french fries you get here. The fish and chips has been voted among New York's best, and you can even round off your meal with a deep-fried chocolate bar of your choice.

Eschewing the various butties and fish-finger creations, my companions went for the pie and chips, drenched in gravy. The pie was phenomenal - melt-in-your-mouth steak and juicy mushrooms. I resisted the siren song of the deep fried dark chocolate Bounty, and decided to be adventurous and taste the fried macaroni cheese. BEHOLD:

And inside its crispy battered suit? Extremely creamy mac n cheese. It was the size of a softball and 50 times more likely to kill. About halfway through I had to stop and just focus on breathing... felt like I was moving in slow motion from all the cholesterol idling through my arteries. As a stultifyingly unhealthy and fabulously naughty snack, fried mac and cheese does everything you'd expect. It's just a bit too much, even for me...

Hot DOG

First thing you see when you alight from the subway at Coney Island - the end of the line, the very bottom of Brooklyn - is a huge greasy food chain called Nathan's. (not pictured - this burger boy is cuter than the actual yellow and green facade). Nathan's apparently invented the hotdog, and this place is the site of an annual 4th of July hotdog eating contest. Naturally, I had to try it. I got a cheese dog and, in case that wasn't bad enough for me, some chilli cheese fries.

Isn't this the most awesomely repulsive thing you've ever seen? The cheese is luke-warm liquid, pumped out of a plastic dispenser. The chili looks radioactive. By the time I got my haul down to the boardwalk so I could sit and eat, the fries had all but disintegrated under this mushy mash. It bore not even a passing resemblance to any actual food group and yet the only way it could have been more delicious is if I were in Kings Cross at about 4am. Oh and PS, I'm pretty sure I could have had bacon added to both the fries and the dog, had I so desired.

Bish plz

Wandered around Brooklyn Museum in a weird mood today - kept seeing works of art and imagining them with stoopid internet-meme style captions.

Heheh. Heh. Heh. Heheheheh. Surely if a Disney villain and a Rastafarian stoner somehow had a bastard lovechild, it would look like this.

"I love your skirt, where did you get it?"
"It's my mum's old skirt from the eighties."
"Ooh, vintage. So adorable!"
...
(aside) "That is the ugliest effing skirt I have ever seen."

And does anyone else think this looks like George W Bush?