Ah, feels like home

One of the reasons I like watching Kiwi Reality Shows is to hear a familiar accent. Aaah... I'll go back to New Zealand for a day and it'll seem normal again. Then, after being back home for two weeks, I'll be back in Australia laughing at the Aussie Ocker accent. It's the way it goes.


Turns out the Pie Policeman has gone internet viral, even though this incident happened five years ago. The brief conversation is spawning rap songs from devoted YouTube fans. Here's one from Jarrod The Kiwi:



Notice the guy is trying to hide a bright yellow torch in the crook of his arm. He ended up in the police cell, in case you're wondering. He never got his pie.

Dead Ringer

Last week I saw a dead ringer for Susan Boyle in the underground carpark at Aldi. Me thinks Susan Boyle might've had a gutsful of the limelight and emigrated Down Under, like all the other witness protected British immigrants, currently residing (mostly) in Perth under suspiciously Australian sounding names.

Anyway, I didn't actually accost the woman to ask if she was Susan Boyle because, if she's not Susie, the dead ringer might be none too impressed by the comparison, preferring to think herself more of a West End type. I once told a hairdresser she looked like Suzanne Paul ('thousands of luminous spheres') and she butchered my hair.

Pays not to open your trap when the easily offended wield stainless steel scissors. I had trouble digging myself out of that hole, even when I explained that, despite everything else, Suzanne Paul is a relatively good-looking woman. Nobody wants to look like the bird with the very annoying voice. Not when her claim to fame is starring in a New Zealand infomercial for Natural Glow.

Anyway, I got to wondering about what happened to Susan Boyle, as it would seem she's already had her day in the sun. Not so. Susan now has her own entry in Wikipedia, a Susan Boyle fansite and put out an album of signature songs. Susan has had a complete make-over and latest Google results show her performing at the QVC (whatever the hell that is). There's nothing like a bit of money to make anyone look glam. I'd say, after the makeover, Susan Boyle is on a par with Cilla Black et al. Just goes to show that when it comes to beauty these days, the monied come up trumps. Money has always equalled time; nowadays, money equals beauty.

Good on her.

Except now, whenever I hear Elaine Paige on the iPod, I imagine Susan Boyle singing it. What's Elaine Paige doing on my iPod? I have no bloody idea how 'I Know Him So Well' got on there. Serves me right for ripping songs indiscriminately from the collections of former flatmates (former for a reason).

Dan's been shagging about with my favourites playlist, chuckling whenever I bust out with, "Jeez, did YOU add that to My Favourites?"

I'll see him chuckling away to himself in the corner as he waits with bated breath for me to notice. He's added a whole heap of eighties tunes full of synthesisers. I don't know about you, but I always picture Brett and Jemaine when I hear the synthesiser. That particular instrument, along with many others, has been sullied by the Flight of the Conchords pair.

Good on ya Dan. It pays to take joy in small triumphs. What else is there, really?

Sand in the Sandpit

Damp Sydney sand, seven bucks per 20kg bag from Bunnings. What proportion of 40kg do you think will find its way into the carpet, between sheets and between the cleavages of toes? I suspect a sandpit at the back door will be SIMILAR TO as seen at the beach.

What An Endorsement

For a long time, I've been envious of the appliances Dan apparently has at his office. They have a coffee machine (with real coffee), all sorts of tea, a fridge with a freezer, numerous magazine subscriptions, a Wii (well, not in the kitchen I hope) and now a pasta-making thingy-me-bob. All I ever got working in the PS was free hot-water and a disproportionate amount of kitchen duty. But then, whoever said life was fair?



Be honest: Have you ever purchased anything because you were persuaded by an Infomercial? Would you do it again? What could be better than television endorsement, with a gob of over-whitened teeth extolling the virtues of the onion slicer?



Why, of course not. What you really want is 'SIMILAR TO as seen on TV'!! Even better than the real thing, so they say.

Don't Mess With My Marmite

I'll be corrected, I know. It's 'vegemite' in Australia. Both vegemite and marmite co-exist in both Australia and New Zealand, yet for some reason I was brought up on marmite. I think my mother prefers marmite. I like them both equally. Others will tell you there's no difference.

Anyway, it doesn't matter anymore. Attention has been redirected. Some bright spark in the marketing department at Kraft decided this classic breakfast spread needed a bit of a makeover, a bit of a revamp. So they have put out a new version of vegemite and asked the public to suggest names.

I think Kraft went out of their way to go with the most controversial one: iSnack 2.0. Cos, like, you know, if you want to be trendy you just stick a lower-case i in front of a word and there you are. Not surprisingly, the name was suggested by a computer nerd.

When are we going to stop hearing words with an unnecessary 'i' in front of them? Like any other super-trendy thing, there's nothing that will look more dated in ten years' time. Anything with an 'i' in front of it will sound a bit like all those tunes from the 1980s which made full use of the new-fandangled synthesiser. Anything suffixed with '-licious' is already starting to sound a bit early noughties. And anything prefixed with an 'i' makes us all sound a bit egotistical, don't you think? "I" want this, "I" deserve that. I suspect this trend was started by Apple, with its very popular iPod brand, though was quite possibly inspired by the Japanese, who some years ago took the English word 'My' and prefixed it to all sorts of words to mean 'individual'. e.g. "I'm going to walk up this mountain MY-PACE".

As for the vegemite issue, many more creative names were suggested, as you'd expect with 48,000 entries. The name has since been dumped. Pa-mite was a personal favourite, but round here, it'll be known as vege-cream.

Cos that's what it's like, if you're wondering. (They're selling the jars with iSnack 2.0 labels for cheap at Coles, so I bought some.) Except it's not cheap at all, because it's basically a creamy, less potent version of Vegemite, in which case you might as well buy yourself a big jar of Vegemite and use less.

It looks like Nutella. I'm sure that'll fool many an unwary Japanese exchange student.*



(*I have yet to meet a Japanese person who enjoys Vegemite. It doesn't help that it looks like chocolate, and therefore lulls the foreigner into a false sense of expectation.)