Z Day

Here's the thing. I'm one of those people who quite often find themselves considering what the hell I would do when the inevitable zombie apocalypse kicks off. When the Bear and I had finished emptying out bags from Tesco after a particularly big food shopping trip, I surveyed our well stocked shelves of canned goods and fridge and thought to myself "We are so sorted if there's a zombie outbreak in the next few days." I even considered how we could concoct some manner of zip line to cross the street below our top floor apartment, over to Spar in case we ran out of milk or Jaffa Cakes.

Every so often I have dreams about zombies and most recently I had the best one yet. In it, the Bear and myself were holed up in a flat above a shop overlooking a street riddled with shuffling zombies, but we were accompanied by none other than the Mythbusters. Who better to improvise ways of blowing the shit out of the undead than those people? (Except maybe MacGyver.) I'm going to need to get Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman on board with my zombie survival plan, quick smart.

Anyway, my hypothetical plans have gone into overdrive lately, as I recently tore my way through the tremendously brilliant World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks (a fantastic-as-usual Christmas present from the Bear). I never realised books could be scary, but there were quite a few parts of this one that freaked me the fuck out. It very nearly ended up in the freezer on more than one occasion. I also got scared while reading it on the train, as the realisation dawned on me that a train carraige is surely one of the worst possible places to be in a case of a zombie infestation.

Yesterday, the Bear struck zombie survival gold when he unearthed the most amazing and perfect zombie proof house and sent me the link to it. People, I give you "The Safe House", located in the outskirts of Warsaw and designed by KWK Promes, the marvellous bastards. Behold!

Big fuck-off wall to keep the damned at bay? Check.


Jaw-droppingly beautiful interior in which to comfortably ride out the plague of the undead? Check.


Exterior that can be sealed up to render it an impenetrable self-contained fortress of awesomeness? Check.

Oh, did I mention that it has a retractable walkway to the top floor? WELL IT DOES.

Suck on that, zombie jerks.

Back To 1955

Oh my aching feet. Last night I, along with the Bear, T Cup, the Incredible Mulq and various others bedecked in fifties finery danced our sexy socks right off at the shoot for The Dead Flags and their ingenious Back To The Future themed video. The red and white dotty dress I wore to the Blog Awards was whipped out once again, this time with a ponytail and neck scarf to Class of '55 the bejaysus out of it.


Up until that point, I spent my long weekend pretty much offline, under the radar and armed to the teeth with scissors, glitter and paint as I was tasked with the aquatic style decoration of the venue. I found it most amusing that for someone who ticked the 'no religion' box on the census form, I spent a sizeable amount of Good Friday cutting different shapes of fish out of coloured paper. I think that between the Bear and myself, we cut out something in the region of two hundred fish, not including the bigger and be-glittered fish and seahorses that adorned the stage and pillars. It was ridiculous, but the upstairs of the Grand Social completely looked the part for the Enchantment Under The Sea dance, if I may say so myself. Here's a sneaky still from the shoot:

My banner has tidier lettering than the original, despite my initial intentions to match the movie version. When it came to painting them in though, my natural instinct to stay inside the lines took over entirely.

I'm extremely excited about seeing the final result for the video, the song itself is insanely catchy and has been rattling around my head for the last three days. Rest assured that as soon as it comes online I'll be shoving it in all of your lovely faces from every conceivable angle. In terms of the internet, anyway.

No McFlag ever amounted to anything in the history of Hill Valley

Continuing the theme of fantastic films from the eighties, I'm sure you'll all agree that Back To The Future is one of the greatest films of all time. If not, then I'm afraid things between us just aren't going to work out. Watching all three of them in one sitting is my idea of a day damn well spent. Only recently the first film was on TV, and I had switched to it just in time for the deadly Johnnie B. Goode scene at the Enchantment Under The Sea dance, which delighted me no end, as it's one of my favourite parts. In which case, you can imagine my excitement when The Dead Flags revealed that the video for their comeback single will be a recreation of THAT VERY SCENE. Get outta town!

So, to pull off this most epic of tasks, they require people all dressed up in 1950s style finery to twist and shout for an hour or two in The Grand Social next Tuesday, 26th of April. I for one am chomping at the bit to get myself into my polka dot dress and high school ponytail for it.


The occasion calls for circle skirts, pearls, bobby socks, layers of tulle, corsages and dainty neck scarves for the ladies, and blazers, skinny ties and quiffs for the boys.

They just weren't ready for it yet, the moody bastards. But their kids are going to love it.

So throw together an outfit not unlike the ones worn by the Hill Valley posse above and get yo' sexy ass over to The Grand Social next Tuesday. Details on Facebook here. Be there or be square.

See Ya Later, Navigator

Last night I experienced a most glorious nostalgia buzz. The kind of nostalgia buzz that only an eighties film from your nineties childhood can create. The eighties film in question being Disney's magnificent Flight of the Navigator. I think that, along with The Goonies and Batteries Not Included were mine and my brother's most watched videos as sticky little children.

We used to call it Night of the Flavigator, under the illusion that we were being hilariously witty in doing so.

The nostalgia was almost overwhelming (although at that stage the buzz was quite possibly fueled by prosecco as well as childhood memories), as I hadn't seen it since I was about nine years old. Imagine my surprise when it transpired that the cool older girl with purple in her hair that befriends David, our confused hero was actually Sarah Jessica Parker all this time. With one hell of a 1986 head on her.

Told you so.

Anyway, all of that is completely besides the point, as what really surprised me was that I had entirely forgotten about the Puckmaren and more importantly, HOW MUCH I WANT ONE. For those of you who also need their memories jogged, I am referring to the unbelieveably cute and weird looking little alien that David meets on board MAX, the spaceship.


I realise this post will make little to no sense for anyone who hasn't actually seen Flight of the Navigator and if that is indeed the case, then get the hell off my lawn until you have. There's a chilling rumour of a remake doing the rounds, which displeases me greatly. There's something so genuinely charming about these fantasy/sci-fi kid's movies from the eighties and nineties, in that you know there were actual sets and props and freaky-looking Jim Henson-y puppets involved, whereas nowadays everything is green screened and 3D'd to within an inch of its life. Leave well enough alone, Disney jerks. But get me a Puckmaren, dammit.

The Joy Imperative

A little while ago, the ever delightful EleventyFour asked me to design the artwork for her debut EP, The Joy Imperative. It was officially released yesterday, the 11/4/11 (Eleventy Four Eleventy, obviously) and I got tremendously excited when I saw it for sale on iTunes.

I mean the design, of course, as the wonderful whimsical tracks within are obviously the superb work of Eleventy herself.

It was my first time designing for a CD case and I had so much fun doing it. It's so deadly seeing it as a real actual thing on a shelf in a shop.





I scattered references to the words of the songs on the CD throughout the collage style design, as well as the five icons on the cover and disc which represent each track. The "Around the World" ticket (Route 114, get it? Eh?) refers to a line in Small Wonders, "Put me in your pocket and we'll sail all over the world", while the loveheart sweets come from The Friend Song, the lyrics of which include indoor friends, outdoor friends, let's meet up for cocktails friends and myriad other friends which pop up represented as sweets here and there on the inside and back of the packaging.


The Joy Imperative is a terrific collection of sweet, funny songs which has been reviewed most splendidly in haiku form no less, over on Swear I'm Not Paul. As well as iTunes, it's available on Amazon and Bandcamp, where you can order physical copies as well as download it. It's also available to buy in Freebird Records (Secret Book & Record Store) and Tower Records, both on Wicklow Street, Wingnut Records in Galway and Plugd Records in Cork and 10% of the profits go to DePaul Ireland, so support your independent record shops now, ya hear?

Drawn This Way

As most of you are surely well aware by now, I'm a tad obsessed with old school pin up girl art. I've previously mentioned that I wrote a dissertation in college about the origins of the pin up girl, the coasters on our coffee table are tiles adorned with saucy thigh-flashing hotties and for my birthday last year the Bear knocked it out of the park with a Vargas girl double whammy of a vintage deck of cards and a 1972 collection of Playboy centrefolds. So when I spotted a link on Facebook, courtesy of Anne-Marie, that contained a gallery of pin up girls and the photos on which the artist based them, I got a bit excited. It's a mad kind of before and after, where the artist quite clearly selects bits and pieces of the models in the photos to put together a winking, impossibly streamlined and downright gorgeous Frankenstein cutie.









If you want to see more, and let's not kid ourselves, of course you do, the full gallery is here.

Quelque Chose #11

The Bear: Can I have a Stinger bar? Or will that ruin my dinner...

Me: Of course you can! Sure that's the beauty of being a grown up!

The Bear (returns with Stinger bar in hand): Did you just call me a grown up? How dare you.

Limp Biscuits

Is everyone else as bewildered by the new Jacob's Mallows ad as I am? It kicks off with the fuzzy and familiar "Kimberly, Mikado and Coconut Creams" jingle, but before it ever gets a chance to lull the unsuspecting viewer into a false sense of security, we're assaulted with some sort of R&B auto tune disaster and a watered down Pussycat Doll rejects crashing the Mad Hatter's Tea-Party acid trip. Watch it below, if you dare.



It's bizarre. I'm all for rebranding and trying out a new approach for something, but personifying biscuits that are automatically associated with licking and sucking (easy, now) as a tacky girlband just feels incredibly inappropriate.

Genuine biscuit girls in your area, call now on 1800 69 69 69.

The whole Alice In Wonderland schtick falls flat and anyway it's been done to death at this stage. Even Harvey Norman ads at the beginning of the month were beating us over the head with Mad March Hare rubbish, and back in 2004 Gwen Stefani did it infinitely better in her What You Waiting For? music video. Their costumes, which are meant to represent their respective biscuits have the look of a lame Katy Perry rip-off, and just wait till you hear about their oh-so-diverse personalites. Apparently "Kim" is spicy and fun, "Mika" is naughty and mischievous and "Coco" is ditzy and fluffy. Reader, I'll rely on you to roll your eyes here for me, because if I roll mine any more they're going to clean fall out of my head at this rate.

Gwen and Katy give a far superior cutesy Wonderland vibe.

Kim, Mika and Coco even have a Facebook page where they inform us that they live together, which is all a bit Biscuit Girls of the Playboy Mansion, or y'know, a brothel run by Mr. Kipling. All their flirty winking and finger licking comes off as rather cheap and desperate, and I know ads are always using sex and tits to flog stuff, but some just pull it off (har har) better than others, like this Virgin Airlines ad.

Blow-job faces a go-go. Or as the Bear more succinctly put it when I showed him these photos, "insert cock here".

I honestly don't know what Jacob's were thinking. I know it's all meant to be a bit of light-hearted fun, but I find it jarring and unsuitable for what's been a family-favourite style product for as long as I can remember. There's also an excruciating two and a half minute music video that's an extended version of the ad, containing such lyrical dynamite as "I'm hip, I'm hot, I'm everything you're not" and "I'm a naughty girl and it's making me hot". You can watch it here, but you probably shouldn't, unless you're the type of person who gets a kick out of burning themselves with candle wax or poking their bruises. You have been warned.

Thunderstruck

Years ago, when I was only small, I remember queuing up to get my face painted and when asked what I wanted to be, I answered "Cheetara". The face painter in question hadn't the faintest idea what I was talking about and my seven year old self must not have been much good at explaining the concept of Thundercats. I'm fairly certain I ended up with my face painted like a tiger. When I was in college I screenprinted the Thundercats logo onto a tshirt for myself and got excited when I found a Cheetara action figure in a Kinsale junk shop. Because that's how cool I am. (By cool I obviously mean a giant nerd.)

As it happens, Thundercats are making their way back to small screens later this year. The new show features a redesigned Cheetara and a much younger and somewhat anime-looking group overall.



I think I like the look of this new version, although I'm a bit torn, as the orange leotard is more or less synonymous with the character at this stage.


Granted, original cartoon Cheetara's hair was veering ever so slightly towards Mulletville, but her badass blue eyeshadow and orange markings were tremendously cool.


The eighties comic book version more or less ditched the "business at the front, party at the back" hairdid and became rather less orange as a whole.


The franchise got a reboot in 2002 with a new series, and Cheetara was drawn as quite the amped-up ride, all massive rack and deadly boots. The 2011 incarnation of my second-favourite cat lady is quite manga-ish in style which I'm not entirely sure about, and since I saw someone online describe her new look and shaggy blonde mane as something akin to Ke$ha, I can't quite shake the idea.



The bastards.

Quelque Chose #10

"The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues."

Elizabeth Taylor

Sure who will we get in trouble with? The Blog Police?

I may not have made it as a finalist in this year's Irish Blog Awards, but when yet another winner turned out not to be there on the night and Rick O'Shea was offering their big foam trophy to a crowd that remained seated, I skittered up to the stage to grab it. Fuck this, thought I, I'm having some manner of prize for myself. Although, after the ceremony bit the Bear did head for the stage and unattended glass trophies after saying "You deserve an award Kitty." If something is unclaimed and unguarded then it's not really stealing. Right?

I was the girl in the Minnie Mouse type dress, for those of you who were at the awards.

The Bear and myself had a ferocious amount of fun and it was brilliant meeting Eli Mordino, Hermia, notRuairi, White Rabbit and The Licentiate, to name a few. Jumping into a taxi to go back to a house with some of the above turned out to be an amazingly good call. There were card tricks, a mesmerising game with zombies in it and magic mind-reading a go-go. Let it be known that Nordies put on a damn entertaining show.

The next morning, whilst packing up our hangovers, the Bear noticed a crowd across the road from the hotel, staring up at the building. When you're staying in the most bombed hotel in Europe and a crowd of spectators are gathering below your eighth storey window, this might be a cause for concern.

The terrified blonde girl in a harness that appeared outside our window moments later solved the mystery right away though. For you see there was a group abseiling down the front of the Europa for charity that very morning.


I refrained from taking a picture of said terrified girl, for when I gave her a bemused smile, she looked less than impressed. She appeared to be somewhere between scared out of her wits and seething with anger for ever agreeing to the stunt and may have been likely to smash through our window and grab me by the throat. Or something less dramatic.

Seeing as this was the last year of the IBAs, I do hope that there'll be an alternative event of some description next year, as there are loads of bloggers I'd still love to meet. All we really need is an excuse for a massive piss-up, and ideally one with significantly less politics and martyrdom involved.

National Drinkin' and Fightin' Day

Yesterday, the Bear and I spent a most delightful St. Patrick's Day in Pea's wonderfully located apartment at the top of Dame Street. A day of drinking and divilment indoors is my preferred type of Paddy's Day, and the ridiculously great view of the parade from Pea's living room window as it passed underneath us made for some tasty green icing on the cake. Seriously, if I was outside on the street and looked up, I would have been so jealous of us. The theme of this year's parade appeared to be Big Scary Dogs, which made for some fantastic floats and there seemed to be a great macabre undercurrent throughout, with slices of steampunk and New Orleans funeral thrown in for delicious measure.


In what seemed like a weird coincidence, we had been talking about Falkor, the lovely big dragon doggy from The Never Ending Story (Atreyuuuuuu!) as it was on TV as the Bear and myself were leaving the house. We just managed to catch the heartbreaking scene where Atreyu's horse sinks to his doom in the Swamp of Sadness, a scene that damn near traumatised me with grief as a small girl. Anyway, moments later this evil version of Falkor was to be seen trundling towards us. Only he had a brass band and foxy corseted singer on his back instead of an enthusiastic child.






The remainder of the evening was spent feck-acting about on the Wii, where I topped the score board with my mad hula-hooping skillz and sucked ass at Guitar Hero. I challenge anyone to a Wii Fit hula-hoop-off as I will say here and now, I can guarantee that I will bring you down to Chinatown.

Just on the Wii though. I can't hula-hoop in reality to save my life. Useless skill #68.

(Title courtesy of Dave Flag's Facebook update.)