Table For Two

Back when the Bear and I moved into our deadly new apartment, we soon realised that we were without a coffee table, (or tea table really, since neither of us actually drink coffee) and an upturned cardboard box held together with tape from the move would only do for so long.

So we bought this retro expandy table off eBay.


Then, seeing as I have something of a penchant (that's right, penchant) for old pictures of sexy ladies, we bought a heap of vintage magazine pictures of Greta Garbo, Jayne Mansfield, Carole Lombard, Sophia Loren and Brigitte Bardot, also from the Bay of E.


The whole lot was then handed over to the lovely people at Pre Loved Style, who we came across at the Dublin Flea Market. They got to work tarting up our table and lo!


We kept the colour (and as it happens, the slightly more nekkid) pictures for the middle panel underneath. So now I get to put my cup of tea on Bardot's bare bottom. Which not many people can say.


Plus it also has that fantastic photo of Sophia Loren giving Jayne Mansfield's rack the dirtiest look EVER.


Nice.

The Hungriest Tree I Ever Did See

I do love a bit of frisbee in the park. And I'm quite a fan of the King's Inn park, off Bolton Street, for said frisbee throwing. It's a great spot seeing as it's normally pretty quiet and knack-free, plus the first time I was there was on my third date with the Bear. But best of all, it's got a magic bench.

You heard right, A MAGIC BENCH.

Look at it!

IT'S BEING EATEN BY A TREE!

Ah God it's great. I can't help making stupid "nyom nom nom" sounds when I go past it, it'd just be plain wrong not to really. I wonder how long it's taken it to eat this much of the bench. On the first day the bench was put there, did the tree think to itself; "Fuck this for a game of soldiers, I'm HAVING me some of that. GET IN MY WOODEN BELLY YOU TASTY BENCH."


Ha! I crack myself up.

Coupe du Monde '98

Football.

That's right, football.

I'd say that football has been mentioned...oh...about....NEVER on this blog. To the extent that I had to make a new Sport label for this post. However, with the World Cup fast approaching, everyone's getting into a frenzy with predictions for the final and which team they drew in the office sweepstakes (I got Serbia and Cameroon. Sake.) and after reading NotRuairi's great retrospective on where he was for each World Cup, I've decided to share the tale of how I once got to attend an ACTUAL WORLD CUP MATCH.

Oh yes.


In 1998, I spent one month of the summer in Lyon in France with my family, as my Dad was insistent on me and my brother having spectacular French, as well as wanting to improve his own. (I actually did have pretty kickass French once the Leaving Cert came around, but sadly most of it has escaped from my brain since then.) One evening, in the midst of all the Word Cup goings-on, there was a free outdoor concert on featuring a Belgian singer called Axelle Red and Chris Rea, of all people. Anyway, after we'd had enough of the songs in French and Rea singing stuff that wasn't Driving Home For Christmas, we retired to McDonald's for a go of their deadly brand new ice cream dessert, the McFlurry. It was all rather exciting to my thirteen year old self. Actually, considering how excited I still am by those milkshake shops that can make any flavour you want, it's safe to say not much has changed in that respect.

Seriously. It makes my teeth cry.

So there we were, happily making our way through every available variety of our futuristic ice cream and trying to figure out how the hell we'd go about getting to see one of the matches. It was at this point that a man I could only describe as shady leaned over from the next table and asked where we were from.

"You are Irish!? I like the Irish. I know how to get World Cup tickets..."

He proceeded to tell us how all we had to do was drive to a tiny post office in a tiny village and be there at 7 in the morning the next day. And in that very post office there would be tickets for sale at the counter. Now, while the guy himself seemed shady as fuck, the actual instructions seemed reasonable enough. So off we went the next morning in our rented car to the little Postman Pat village, and in that very post office we managed to buy four tickets to a match in Saint-Étienne...

IRAN vs YUGOSLAVIA

Boom. You may laugh, but it was Yugoslavia's first time in the World Cup, and for all anyone knew they could have been a superstar team of players (whose names ALL ended in "-vic"). Because they were the relative underdogs, we joined in the chants of "YU-GO-SLAVIA!" that reverberated around the stadium. It was fecking brilliant, there were at least three Mexican waves and the ball soared out from the pitch right towards me and my brother, but then some old guy in front of us stood up and managed to punch the ball directly back where it came from. The cunt. Anyway, Yugoslavia won 1-0 and we were at the end where the goal was scored in the second half. And it was only brilliant.

So concludes what is likely the only post that will ever mention football on this blog.

The end.

Raspberry Ripple

Hello people. You like your ears, don't you? They're pretty good to you, being all on the side of your head and not letting your sunglasses fall off your face and such, right? So give them a present and have a listen to The Dead Flags funktastic (I almost typed fucktastic there, but y'know, I think that works too) cover version of Prince's Raspberry Beret.

It's here (scroll down a bit in the music player) and it's fucking DELICIOUS.

Twist in the Tail

This is a little teapot/teacup combination dealy which I own. What I like about it is that the two gossiping ladies look like they have tails. I do realise that its actually some manner of nice twirly seat that they're sitting on, but I've decided that they have tails and that's it. I like it when people have tails. Not like inbred, mountain-folk type deformity tails, but proper big floofy tails like Squirrel Girl.

See? I didn't make her up.

Also, the whole people with tails thing reminds me of the super fascinating 19th century French actress Sarah Bernhardt. I do love me an eccentric old bird, and Sarah certainly delivers. She had a coffin she sometimes slept in and preferred to take on roles where the character died at the end. She also collected chairs and had six chameleons and a lion as pets at home. (What is it with these 19th century eccentrics and their big cats?)


Anyway, my favourite mad thing about Sarah is that she apparently asked a surgeon to attach a tiger tail to her spine, but he told her it was impossible. The jerk. How amazing would it have been to go see Hamlet and the leading man is not only actually a lady but has a freaking TAIL onstage? I would go see that. Anyway, it's probably not actually true, but I choose to ignore this fact and have decided it is. Just like my teapot ladies have tails and are NOT sitting on chairs.

Easy Rider

A few weeks ago, the Bear got a heads up on a casting call for an ad where they needed big hairy biker types. Now, the Bear isn't actually a biker (seeing as he doesn't have a bike) but could most certainly pull the look off with aplomb. That's right, APLOMB. He had two days to get his act together and dress the part for casting day, which meant I spent a Wednesday rifling through charity shops from Capel Street to Camden Street, in the search for Things A Biker Might Wear. The coolest thing I found, by a long shot, was this belt buckle for a fiver. A fiver I tells ya!


I also found the Harley Davidson bandana in the photo, which he keeps threatening to wear in real life. In fact, he had actually been threatening to get one for a while instead of a haircut, but I wouldn't let him. I've since begun to wonder whether the entire thing was a scam for him to get a bandana.

The crafty bastard.

Keeping Up With The Cardassians

While the Bear was watching an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine this morning, I amused myself by mentally replacing every reference to Cardassians with Kardashians. As a result, I want to see an episode of Star Trek where the actual Cardassian characters are swapped for the Kardashian sisters. Or at the very LEAST I want to see some sort of deathmatch between them. Bumpy-faced, reptilian aliens versus three bikini-wearing sisters of Armenian descent who don't seem to do anything much. Apart from one of them having a sex tape.

I wouldn't go putting my money on the Cardassians straight away though, that Kardashian on the far right looks like she'd actually kill someone just for the hell of it.

Graffiti Boy

Old Man FM, or 4FM as it's also known have this as one of their billboard ads of late. When I saw it, it put me in mind of how I met my first boyfriend. I was in Sixth Year and there was a supervised study that used to run for Leaving Cert students a few evenings a week after school. Everyone had a designated place to sit in the study hall, which used to have these huge tables that around four people would sit at. They were metal tables painted grey and as such were really easy to doodle and write on.

One evening I was sat at my table and instead of doing homework, I proceeded to draw the band logos for the likes of Slayer, Pantera, The Offspring, Machine Head, Nirvana etc etc. I was something of a metalhead back then and a rubbish goth, seeing as I was way too smiley to really pull the whole thing off. Anyway, I had built up quite a little gallery on this table over a few weeks and one day I noticed that someone else had been adding to my doodle collection. Then some other person scrawled about how crap they thought all those bands were across MY heavy metal table, the cheeky fuck. So I proceeded to slag them off, via more scrawling and Mystery Doodler Friend wrote something like "Stick it to the scobe!" in agreement with me. (It was a bit like blogging using a table and a pen, now that I think of it.) So somehow we ended up having little conversations, all through the medium of this mild act of vandalism, until he wrote his email address down.

After that, we exchanged emails and spoke on MSN Messenger and in the meantime I had figured out who he was. It wasn't too difficult seeing as there weren't many people in my school who wore Coal Chamber t-shirts to PE and were into that type of music in general. Eventually we started talking in real life and it pretty much went from there.

Unfortunately he turned out to be a controlling, jealous, possessive douchebag, and after a year and a half we called it quits. One messy breakup and five years later, I get an email from he who was later to became the Bear through a dating site I had joined. Now it's an altogether different story, seeing as he's just brilliant, so it's a much better conclusion this time around.

It also appears that I'm incapable of initiating relationships in real life. Fuck it, at least I don't need to now. YEAH.

Llama Girl and the DOD

Oh my. A weekend of sitting out in the sunshine and turning slightly pink, only eating things that came off the barbecue, copious amounts of Bulmers with ice and partaking in four-player MarioKart Wii till the small hours of the morning. (My swearing abilities increase tenfold when I'm having a particularly bad race. Or when someone picks Yoshi before I get a chance to.) All of which took place back home home (on the range, like), where there's a deck to sit out on and alpacas to befriend.

Behold a selection of said alpacas

As luck would have it, David O'Doherty was doing a gig a mere twenty minutes away from my house on Sunday night. I had discovered this fact during my spell of inconsolable jealousy when he was supporting Flight of the Conchords at the Olympia and I was woefully ticketless. As such, I became determined to at least see him live. Especially since the last time was Electric Picnic in 2008 and this just would not do.


The great thing about the venue was that it was so small he barely needed a microphone, and our seats were about two feet away from the side of the stage, to the extent that when he thanked the crowd for coming he actually just said it to me seeing as I was the closest one, as he put it. The gig itself was a minimum of eight kinds of deadly, the first half mostly featured his reasons for being late (an untrustworthy and seemingly quite pervy Sat Nav was to blame) and in the second half the tiny Yamaha keyboard was unleashed. During the course of the gig, he ended up asking me and the Bear what we'd been up to that day, which led to about ten minutes of David asking me questions about alpacas. I was subsequently referred to as Llama Girl, and he even worked them into one of his songs. Which was exactly as fucking deadly as it sounds.

Weapons of Mass Destruction

Imagine if He-Man, Rambo, The Transporter, John McClane, The Terminator, Machete, STONE COLD STEVE AUSTIN and oh, I don't know...Jet Li were all in a film together, running around blowing shit up.

Well imagine no more! The Expendables is a ridiculous, overblown, forget-storyline-let's-just-take-out-some-bad-guys film coming out in August and it looks AMAZING. The trailer doesn't really tell you anything but that matters not! What DOES matter is that Arnie, Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis are in a crazy ass movie together with every other action hero from the last oh, twenty years. Apart from Jean Claude Van Damme (who was offered a role but he turned it down claiming that there was no substance in the character. Substance? I forgot that JCVD was one of the most respected actors of our time), Wesley Snipes (couldn't do it since he's busy being in jail for tax evasion or somesuch) and Steven Seagal (didn't get on with one of the producers). All they need is MacGyver, but some people might say he's not actually a real person. I hate those people.



They've got hilarious names like Lee Christmas, Dan Paine, Toll Road, Hale Caesar and Tool. Brilliant. They're like man versions of Bond Girl names. It's a shame that Wesley Snipes couldn't do it though. I'd love to see if the script for this could ever top his classic line from Passenger 57.

"Always bet on black."

Savage.

MargaDita

Here, enjoy some sideboob

Lately, lovely Dita Von Teese (who I love, in case you hadn't guessed by now), has taken to flogging Cointreau. As such, they've made a "webisode" (read: glorified ad) featuring lovely Dita as the surprisingly pale Mexican bird who invented the margarita. I'm not sure if I like the particular portmanteau that comes of smashing "web" and "episode" together, it's a bit jarring or forced or something. What I DO like is looking at lovely Dita and the video in question. So let us partake in gawping at the veritable ride which she, in fact, is.




Ahh. Wasn't that nice? If you want to see the moving version of these very pictures, then the web episode (take that, Marketing! I won't bow to your made-up words! Although I will plug your ads seeing as I have an unfailing fascination with your spokesride) can be found here.

Bad Robot

So. Yes. T Cup has jumped ship and I must say it feels quite strange to be blogging solo. So...onwards then I guess.

Allow me to introduce you to Marvin:


He's my little red cycloptic robot necklace from Topshop. A while ago, I was at the Bear's parent's house and was chatting to his aunt.

"That's a lovely necklace, Kitty" said she.

"Oh thanks! I got it a while ago, he was half price because he only has one eye!"

As soon as the words came out of my mouth, a thought ran into my head, shrieking and flapping its arms. I had COMPLETELY forgotten that The Aunt had a glass eye. Thankfully, she also has a sense of humour.

Fucking scarlet though.