T'was The Night Before Picnic

Lads. I got the tickets. But fuck me, was it a struggle of the uphill kind. After staying up watching the screen and continuously harassing people to vote all night Monday, the Bear and I watched the clock count down to midnight and delighted in the fact that I was in the lead and therefore had won. Hooray!

Game over.

But then the votes kept going. The bottle in second place, designed by Dick Dastardly (which, by the way, had appeared out of nowhere the day before and shot from zero to over 200 votes in 24 hours...not suspicious at all, right?) suddenly took the lead. But it was half one in the morning at that stage, well past the deadline, so it was still ok. We thought.

The next morning, we watched in horror as the votes kept piling in for Dick Dastardly, and while trying to find some reason as to why the competition didn't close on Monday like the official terms and conditions stated, discovered comments from the organisers on their Facebook page saying that closing time was midnight on Tuesday.

TUESDAY?

Those unbelieveable cunts, thought I. At that stage I was a good 40 votes behind Dick Dastardly. Both me and the Bear had tapped out all possible ways, means and people to get votes over the last two weeks. There was nothing else we could do. Disappointment She Wrote. I was bloody distraught and felt completely cheated. I put up a thank you on Facebook to everyone, and resigned myself to the fact that it was all over and there'd be no Picnic for me this year.

But then all of a shot, people started to rally around the cause of sending me and the Bear on our way to Stradbally. The votes started creeping upwards in my corner, my fantastic buddies and sprawling clans of cousins got on the case and the gap between me and Dick Dastardly was slowly narrowing throughout the day. By the time 9.00 in the evening rolled around, it was quite literally neck and neck, he'd be two votes ahead, I'd catch up and go four ahead, he'd frustratingly sprint into a ten vote lead, all the while his name was being vigourously cursed on Facebook, with accusations aplenty (he's a robot! he's a plant!) being bandied about by assorted friends and relatives.

My profile page that evening read like a live blog of the whole thing, it was madness. One cousin reckoned it was more exciting than the Eurovision and said she wasn't going to bed till it was over. Another fantabulous cousin and her fiancee put up a competition on their salon's Facebook page to get their clients to vote for me, the big legends. (The salon is Mint, by the way - ladies of Kilkenny, do pay them a call, they're only brilliant.) The whole ordeal had somehow morphed into a massive team effort, scrambling for the lead. So, for the second night in a row, we watched the clock count down to midnight, desperately appealing to FB profiles like Boob.ie, Maeve Higgins, Lady Umbrella and anyone else we could think of for votes. But Dick Dastardly had pulled away and taken the lead when the clock struck twelve.

And once again, the votes kept going. At half one my Dad rang to say I was leading. Back home, my parents, brother and his girlfriend had become vote generating machines. My mother was even temporarily kicked out of Facebook for posting the same message (ie. Kitty need VOTES! etc) to so many people's pages, the brat. I had to call it a night at some stage though.

The next morning I was still leading, the voting hadn't closed, but eventually it was announced that it HAD closed at midnight and votes were being counted. The winner was to be declared that morning. After midday, Dick Dastardly had been pleading on the fan page for the winner to be announced, accompanied by a screenshot of his bottle design in the lead at 12.05. While out for lunch with the Bear, Deadly Jumper Boy rang him to say I had won. My bottle design had the Winner banner across it in the Gallery page. What the what?


I wasn't convinced and wouldn't allow myself to get excited until I had heard from the organisers, but felt as though they could hardly go back on the decision now. Two hours later, they officially declared a draw and awarded tickets to both me and Dick Dastardly, "in the interest of fairness". Read: to make up for the disastrous handling and utter confusion throughout the entire competition.

Well thank fuck for that. Days of nail biting stress and being completely oblivious to the outside world, coupled with frantic phonecalls from assorted relatives going something like "We have him now Kitty, twenty ahead!" and "HOW IS HE STILL GETTING VOTES?". It was exhausting. Delighted though.

Thank you so much for voting. You rock.

However, it does mean that instead of getting a decent early night to recharge the old batteries before the impending weekend of mischief, I'll mostly be packing, decanting rum into plastic bottles and weighing up the practicalities of wearing a playsuit at a festival with Portaloos.

Electric Wellies

Everybody! You know how you're on Facebook, yes? I need a favour. A teeny, tiny favour that will take but four clicks of your mouse finger, and if all goes to plan, will send me to Electric Picnic. I would be most indebted to you all if you would be so kind as to vote for me in a competition on Ye Olde Book of Faces.

Just click HERE and go through the Start My Design and Irish Residents Only pages (because this appears to be a lie, as people outside Ireland have been able to vote) and a Gallery button will be in the top right corner.


For those of you that have already been hounded by me on Facebook, I apologise for flooding Red Lemonade in general and whoring out the blog to meet my own needs with this hustling for votes carry on. I'm probably being silently defriended over it as I type. Anyway, if you've already voted then I thank you most sincerely.

Help me get to Electric Picnic y'all!

Also I'm pretty sure that the guy in second place kicks puppies. Like this one.

And we just can't have that, now can we?

The A-Team Movie They Should Have Made

The new A-Team movie is shite. Sorry. But the good kind of shite, in that I enjoyed its shiteness and was in good form leaving the cinema. Unlike Kick Ass, where the Bear and I were just annoyed afterwards and stomped home angrily to rewatch the new Star Trek so we would have seen at least one good film that day. We had to give up on our game of taking a drink of Coke every time they said "plan" though, or we all would have had to leg it to the bathroom halfway through and might have missed some of the many many montages, terrible lines (for example: "Damn I'd forgotten how beautiful you are" - how Jessica Biel didn't laugh in his face for every take I'll never know) or the bit where Hannibal disguised himself as Liam Neeson.

But I digress. For you see, back when the rumblings and casting choices of an A-Team movie were doing the rounds, a friend of Billy Flag's (whose name I can't remember) told him the best ever possible idea ever in the world ever for an A-Team film. Ever. Gather round.

The film starts with the team (the original cast, mind) being arrested, black-bagged and shipped off to Guantanamo. A montage shows them being tortured, waterboarded and what have you and explains that in the process of all this hardship, Hannibal dies.

The screen fades to black.

20 years later.

Obama comes into power and decides to release the prisoners, so we see the doors to each of their individual cells slide open with a loud metallic bang. They walk out one by one, squinting in the light, hug each other in relief and look sadly at the door of the cell that held Hannibal. However, a fifth door is heard opening. They stop, and look around at the doorway, trying to make out who this fellow prisoner could be. A lone figure stands in the shadows and slowly emerges, one step at a time. The camera pans up to reveal....







......

FUCKING MACGYVER

That's who, bitches.

Now you just try and tell me that's not a film you'd pay good money to see right now.


Exactly.

Ab Fab

I passed one of these new bubblegum pink Absolut ads that seem to have popped up all over the shop lately and noticed down at the end of the photo, the line "A vision from Zooey Deschanel and Ellen von Unwerth" and thought...que? That Barbarella-styled blonde in the 1960s sci-fi outfit is quite clearly not everyone's favourite ridiculously beautiful cool girl Zooey. But that, in fact, turns out to be the case. I quite like the look of the whole thing, although I'm not convinced that the uberpouty mouth is altogether right. It reminds me ever so slightly of Ducky from The Land Before Time.


She's in another Absolut ad looking more like herself as a blue feathered showgirl-type bird of the sexy variety in a gilded cage, which I'm also rather liking.


It's not just Zooey that's taken to flogging vodka though, as there's a series of ads featuring Kate Beckinsale looking foxy in an Attack of the 50ft Woman style shot, also going blonde-and-therefore-near-unrecognisable in a psychadelic swirly setup and vamping the bejaysus out of it as a ridey Bloody Mary. Hot stuff.

Comrade Kitty

Although it's now August and technically Autumn, this particular month is always regarded as summer, is it not? It is by me. Which makes my latest purchase all the more pre-emptive, it being a coat more suited for winter style weather and general coldness. But whilst wandering around TK to the Maxx and being relieved that it wasn't frantically mobbed, (I can last about four seconds in there when it's busy before I want to start kneecapping folk) I came upon this coat of loveliness in a fetching military green for €50.


I can't wait for winter so I can stalk the streets of Dublin pretending to be a Russian spy. Keeping with the Soviet theme, I came upon this t-shirt in Penneys for a fiver (a FIVER like, Jaysus I love Penneys) which cheekily rips off Alexander Rodchenko's Shout poster.

Now where did I put those night vision goggles...

Table Top Hotties

Since we got our sexy table, the Bear and I have had to balance our cups o'tay on various old issues of Style magazine or whatever else came to hand, to avoid the heat from the mugs messing with its lacquered surface. So when we came upon these cheeky pin-up girl tiles at a market in Amsterdam, they seemed like the perfect method of not melting Greta Garbo's face with tea. Success!


At the same market we also picked up this 1950s style table lighter for a scandalous €2. You're welcome, sexy table!

Dutch Gold

Amsterdam. Quite the delightfully crazy bitch of a city. The craic quota was well and truly through the roof for our week of mischief. It was just me and the Bear for the first four days, with the rest of the twenty-seven strong group arriving for the weekend with the excuse of a birthday loosely holding together the idea of a massive session in ye olde Amsterdam.


Antics included:

* Being generally amazed at the gorgeousness of the canals, narrow streets and the demented angles that all the buildings seem to lean at.

* Trying to decipher what flavour the bright blue ice cream with "smurf" in its name was. We never did figure it out.

* Finding it really quite difficult not to stare at the particularly hot lingerie-clad ladies in the neon-lit windows as we ambled past. And equally difficult not to stare at the rather more robust ladies that take the Sunday morning shift.

* Giggling our way around the Sex Museum, which really just amounts to a badly organised collection of things with naked people on them. Good for a laugh though, and true to form the man on the ticket desk made sure he got a good look at my boobs on the way in. In fairness to them they had some nice cheeky advertising for their 25th anniversary, when the Bear came across this coin in his change at one point:


* Learning a total of five Dutch words. Kangarooballen, slagroom, aardappel, bioscope and winkel. Which mean space hopper, whipped cream, potato, 3D and shop, respectively. Needless to say, I wasn't exactly engaging in any Dutch conversations during my time there.

* Waking up to find that both the Bear and I had been playing host to a mosquito orgy over the course of the night, as our arms and legs became the new Amsterdam hotspot for them to party down at. The tiny winged bastards.

* Cycling in a wobbly and momentarily terrified manner (as I've been cycling in or about four times since I was thirteen) to the Anne Frank House. Whilst queuing, the Bear asked me if I had read the book, to which I replied; "No, but I know the story. Y'know, from the bit with Peter in Family Guy." I kid, of course.



* Screaming our collective tits off on the mental rollercoasters in Walibi World, a former Six Flags park about an hour outside the city. There's nothing quite like being flung upside down and hurtling through a corkscrew bend before breakfast.

* Commandeering the couches by the window in the somewhat crack den-like surroundings of Hill Street Blues, as Deadly Jumper Boy asked me what the story was with my Jessica Fletcher obsession. Seeing as he's as yet unaware of this here blog, this was based solely on my Facebook updates. He doesn't know the HALF of it.

* Fisheye tomfoolery courtesy of the Lomo camera that Santa was nice enough to give me last Christmas. It was my first go with it, so the results aren't exactly spectacular or anything, but it was certainly fun to use.

Amsterdammit

The Bear and I got back from Amsterdam yesterday, having survived seven days of Dutch shenanigans. The subsequent time has been spent in a heap on the couch, catching up on telly (Britain's Next Top Model, The IT Crowd and the really quite good nudey-fest Spartacus: Blood & Sand), other blogs and finishing the Steig Larsson books (which I am loving despite myself and my previous condecension for this idiot Girl Who Plays With Matches and Kicks Bees In The Face. I'm totally sold). Between that and being practically asleep at my desk for the most of the morning today, proper blogging will have to wait just a little longer. Soon my pretties. Soon.

The Sugababes of Thrash Metal

At a birthday party a while back, Dave Flag and I bonded up a storm over heavy metal and the fact that we had both attended Ozzfest in 2002, getting to see Drowning Pool before their lead singer snuffed it a few months later, just HOW AMAZING Slayer were and how nobody really cared that Ozzy didn't show up.

The conversation eventually led to us agreeing to go see Sepultura in the Academy tonight, with the Bear in tow. As I drunkenly put it last Friday night while trying to explain them to one of the lads; "they're a Brazilian thrash metal band, and kind of like the Sugababes of metal". In that their lineup has altered somewhat over the years. I'm pretty sure that's where the similarities end. All I know is that the teenage metalhead/smiley-and-therefore-rubbish-goth in me is only delighted at the prospect.

Also, just to make things interesting, the Bear and I are heading off to Amsterdam tomorrow afternoon for a week. Manys the hijink to be had. Manys the hijink indeed.

O My Love, Ow My Neck

Check it. New video from The Dead Flags for their ridiculously catchy song O My Love, O My God, off their equally fantabulous album, Gentlemen's Club.



One Saturday a few weeks ago, the Bear and I danced our bottoms off for two solid hours in The Joinery in Stoneybatter as part of the sexy crowd in this very video. We also ended up spending the following Sunday in unbelievable pain, taking turns to lie on the couch and wincing when we had to reach for the remote. The Bear messed up his neck for the day, but it made for some spectacular slow motion headbanging shots in the final cut, so it wasn't for nothing. Being a dancing girl in a video is certainly not as easy as it looks. Especially not the next day, when filming was followed by an almighty session. The kind where it's daylight when you're going home to bed. I do love that particular kind.

(Also, if you're looking for something to do of a Friday night, this Friday night that is, the boys are playing the Clockwork Apple show upstairs in Whelan's. Tenner in, 8pm. Do it.)

Stripperella Slippers

Whilst reading Go Fug Yourself recently for an occasional dose of bitchy fluff about famous people's clothes, there was a post about this Taylor Momsen bird. I reluctantly know that she is/was in Gossip Girl and now fancies herself as a singer or something. I wish I could be cool and not have a clue who she is, but I have a stupid ability to retain information about actors and actresses, to the point that I've been referred to as KMDb more than once.

Anyway.

In this particular post she was being berated for dressing like a skanky ho-bag, or at the very least for dressing wildly inappropriately for someone on the wrong side of statutory. Taylor's latest jailbait outfit included a pair of stripper shoes. And not just any kind of stripper shoes:


Stripper shoes WITH A BUILT IN TIP JAR. Seriously, click the picture to enlarge to see the dollars in the platform of her shoes. There's so many filthy euphemisms that could be made here about coin slots (which these shoes inevitably have), but I'm really not going there. While I do realise that these shoes are pretty knacktastic, quite a large part of me thinks that they're kind of genius and I really like them.

Don't you judge me.

Pin Ups and Presents

Birthdays are great, aren't they? People you like give you nice things and more often than not there's cake involved. And cake being involved in any situation is never a bad thing. (Go on, try to think of a situation where cake wouldn't be a good idea.) For my birthday this year, I absconded to Edinburgh for the weekend with seven foxy ladies, which totally beats last year, where Michael Jackson selfishly went and died the day before and stole my thunder. The absolute cheek of some people.

So I've decided to show off some of my lovely presents, including a stack of graphic novels and some rather brilliant DVDs.


The Bear went and outdid himself this year, (seeing as I'm so ridiculously gay for classic pin-up girls) with a 1972 Playboy collection of Vargas girls and a vintage deck of Vargas playing cards. Drool.

Oh, and Dita Von Teese button pins. Allow me to say - Schwing!

I can't even begin to describe how amazingly gorgeous every individual card is, so I won't. I'll just use this photo instead.


They just don't make sexy playing cards like they used to.