| Posted by Bel | The time is 12.39pm here in Wellington NZ |

For a mere $125, I can look as big a dork as I did in Mr Elgar's class in Form One, hauling around all my durasealled books and the leftover pikelets I cooked poorly in Home Economics.

Posted by Bel. The time is 8.34am here in Wellington NZ.

I do love having the latest fashion news sent directly to my inbox. I don't love when it is filled with body dismorphia, cliched clothing and tacky writing.

The immediate clanger here is the obvious "enhancement" that has gone on with the image of the model on the bottom right.
 
Perhaps it is some snazzy move that I missed the week I skipped America's Next Top Model, but as far as I am aware, Tyra has not yet let us all in on a pose that instantaneously whittles your waist down to the width of your head. Practically miraculous, especially when you have two other photos of normal-sized waist to compare it to!
 
Overall, it was just plain disappointing to get a whole e-newsletter devoted to touting the joys of NAUTICAL. Nautical, you guys! Did you hear? It's in! It's in this summer! And do you remember last summer? Um, yeah - just like then! What's that? The summer before... uhhh... maybe?
 
Pardon? Ever since Jean-Paul Gaultier's debut collection in 1976? Or maybe since Gabrielle Chanel busted out a top she borrowed from the sailors of Brittany back in the 30s? Hmmm... interesting points. Fashion is know for being cyclic, but really, trying to act as if as there is a trend popping up when we've had nothing but blue and white stripes flung at us for season after season seems to be taking it a little far!
 
And it must be said, I love me a good pun [see: above]. This is a trait passed down from my mother, who is also a Scrabble champion and cryptic crossword queen. But "I heart bouys" is weak on so many levels. For one, it just draws my attention again to the fact that they are trying to act as if this whole nautical baloney is new and fun and exciting. 
 
It also taps into a pet peeve of the way mainstream fashion retail stores, which used to cater for women in their 20s with a professional focus, are aiming more and more towards the teenage market.

 

"I heart bouys" is the kind of lame-arse thing you might see mass-produced in Supre, a shop where the sizing alone lets you know that their target audience is people who have not yet developed mature hips and breasts. It's not a good fit with the usual 'wear it from work to the club' stuff that comes out of Portmans, and goodness me, not much upsets me more in the world than inconsistent branding!*

*Things that upset me more in the world than inconsistent branding:

• That funding for evening classes has been cut and Education Minister Anne Tolley has suggested as the option for refugees to New Zealand who were using this as their way to become proficient in English, that they will now be allowed to apply for student loans.
• That the food from Satay Kingdom in Left Bank is cheaper than the food from the Thai place on Cuba, but their portions are smaller and I always feel too stuffed after a Satay Kingdom laksa.
• Murray McCully. I really hate that guy so bad.
• Finally deciding to use a voucher and finding out that it has expired. Gahh!

Posted by Bel. The time 3.08pm here in Wellington NZ.

I reviewed the Swedish film Let The Right One In back in February. I should have known that anything so entertaining and cinematic would eventually be trampled on by Hollywood.

The trailer for the American remake (directed by the auteur behind Cloverfield and several episodes of Felicity) has just hit the web - and, well, it looks familiar, huh?



Please, do yourself a favour and see the original first. As anyone who's been treating themselves to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, etc, can attest, Swedish language films are easy to follow. The language patterns are eerily similiar to English, so you get into it easily with the subtitles and don't find yourself as conscious of them as with some foreign films. (A trait I know puts a lot of people of exploring non-mainstream movies).

America's continuing fascination with re-doing overseas films instead of releasing and distributing the originals has a sad valid economic reasoning. [Read more here on the LA Times if you want to nerd out]

Less than ten foreign films have ever grossed over US$20 million in America - and only one has made more than US$100 million.

To put that in perspective, Tim Burton's recent release Alice in Wonderland made over US$100 million 'domestically' just on its opening weekend alone - and then made US$265 million in just over a fortnight.

Box Office Mojo have all the info in a big juicy table and, although it's interesting to see a few titles there to add to the must-see list, all in all it's pretty dire.

When you realise that an utter bomb like All About Steve, featuring Sandra Bullock's Razzie Award-winning 'Most Awful Performance', made as much money in the US as Amelie (ONE OF THE BEST FILMS EVAH) ...Well. It kinda breaks your heart.

Posted by Lou. The time is 10.53am here in London, UK.

It is 10.53am on the day after the election and my constituency still hasn't declared, and I am listening to a 39-year-old British man having to have his own election system explained to him. This seems the right sort of moment to take a look back on the last 24 hours have been for me - a New Zealander losing their British General Election Virginity - a great big load of WHAT THE FUCK.


WTF#1 - The Role of the Newspapers
I was shocked to wake up on election day and discover that the majority of the newspapers (ie all the shit ones (ie the Murdoch ones)) had front pages telling people who to vote for. With the exception of the Mirror it was pro-Tory scaremongering; but even with Mirror being anti-Tory they still put the focus on to them (rather than carrying a favourable item for Labour) by showing David Cameron in his Oxford boys' club finery. The mildly Lib-Dem papers (Guardian and The Independent) carried more neutral news type items about the election, reflecting the difference in editorial integrity and news focus with their trashy counterparts. I find this quite staggering - TV is governed by rules of editorial neutrality, but why (in a country where the printed news still carries wide readership and influence) not the papers? Or at least, why not on election day? Which leads me to...


WTF#2 - Election Day Campaigning
Coming from a land where all advertising and campaigning materials must disappear at midnight (with the exception of coloured ribbons) I actually thought I'd walked into illegal electioneering when I found myself being accosted by campaigners as I walked into the polling station, with some actually telling people who (and what) to vote for. Whilst normally you could think people already know who they want to vote for, with high turn-out and a closely fought election race this was one where actually quite a lot of people probably hadn't. And anyway, it just feels wrong to be harassed on your way in to do something as sacred and private as vote.

WTF#3 - The Exit Poll
Starting the night off with a hugely unpredicted and surprising exit poll that had the Tories taking a clear majority of the votes (though not a majority of the House) and the Lib-Dems actually losing seats was a sickening moment.

WTF#4 - Voters Being Unable To Vote
Then the news began to emerge that hundreds - thousands! - of people were unable to vote. This is a democracy. The key element of a democracy is the freedom to vote. This is barely comprehensible to me. This is the biggest WHAT THE FUCK imaginable. There is a key thing I need to explain here: in Britain you MUST vote at a specific polling station unless you have applied to vote by post at least a week in advance (or are a student). So for example, I went to my polling station to be told that no actually I needed to go to a different polling station a block further down the street (?!) (oh, and please note here that there was a queue of 15-20 people and it took about 20-30 mins for me to get to the front). So people who work cannot pop out at lunchtime to vote, they must return home and vote at their specified station. So you'll be thinking what I'm thinking - obviously a lot of people are going to go and vote in the evening after work. You'd think the polling stations themselves could figure this out. But it seems that:

• people were turned away from polling stations as the 10pm deadline hit and huge queues of people were left without a vote. This isn't people turning up at 9.55pm then complaining that they couldn't get in. Massive queues formed from late afternoon/ early evening with reports of, for example, Lib-Dem leader Nick Clegg visiting a local Sheffield polling station at 7pm and discovering that people had been queueing there for 3 hours already. Individuals are reporting that they went back and forth to their polling station but there were always such long queues they just didn't get an opportunity to get in and vote. The videos of the queues that were waiting at this point in the night are shocking - masses of people swarming to get in the doors; queues extending down entire blocks. Knowing how long it took me to queue at a quiet polling station, I can well imagine people having been waiting for hours to no avail. But remember - I said that people are given very specific polling stations at which they have to vote. So why the fuck were those polling stations not set up to handle the number of voters allotted to them? This is an absolute undemocratic disgrace. To the Hackney voters who staged a sit-in, to the Sheffield voters who blocked the ballot papers from being able to leave: I salute you. Stand up (or sit-in) for your rights and loudly fight this for as long and as high as it takes to have this righted. Not to mention...
• some polling stations ran out of ballot papers. Despite having a fixed number of voters allotted to their polling stations. Apparently photocopying is so extravagantly expensive/ difficult these days that they couldn't even fucking get enough ballot papers handed out. In fact they had so few they had run out by 6pm, a full four hours before the close of voting. I just can't even comprehend this.
• postal ballot papers went missing. So even when people had registered to vote elsewhere than their specific allotted polling station, they were unable to do that when ballot papers didn't arrive. In areas where there are very close seats. Which is especially what the fuck for me having - with ease - cast my New Zealand general election vote from the UK (let alone from down the street and round the corner) by downloading my papers from the NZ election hub and faxing them (which in itself seemed antiquated at the time). This system is so very backward and very dysfunctional. *Update: Problems with Overseas ballot papers also not turning up
• "non-resident" students were being de-prioritised. This link contains student accounts of being put into different lines as "non-residents", as if it was their fault that the voting mechanism is so antiquated and inadequate. They were also blamed by the Electoral Commission during last night's BBC broadcast.

WTF #5 - Oh God the Exit Polls are Right

How could the advance polling have been so wrong? Lib-Dems were showing an unprecedented and magnificent surge with polling putting them on a par with/ ahead of/ just behind at various times both the Tories and Labour, and by polling day about even with Labour. And now here they are with - at 11.32am - only 52 seats to Tories' 291 and Labour's 251. But...

WTF #6 - FPP is so Backward!

...Lib-Dem have 22.9% of the vote, but only 8.4% of the seats. This is fundamentally wrong. Which leads me perfectly into my conclusion from all this what the fuckness...

Britain needs - desperately - widespread electoral reform. Of how the voting works both in terms of how seats are decided (bring in proportional representation!), and how votes are made and counted (for the love of god, modernise!). And for fuck's sake - keep that bastard Murdoch in check with rules to govern election day campaigning by the fucking newspapers!

Posted by Bel. The time is 3:50pm here in Wellington, NZ.

So. The List. I have vowed to read every book upon it. I have hit trouble before, but I told myself that "Middlemarch" just wasn't good 'summer reading' material, and that I would come back to it. (I will!)

But now, for the first time, I have actually admitted defeat. Last week I got out "A Vindication of the Rights of Women" by Mary Wollstonecraft and - and I just couldn't finish it. I couldn't. Imagine... an academic text... All those fancy words, those convoluted sentences, those references to things that only make sense to other academics... Right, now imagine something like that that has been written 200 years ago. Yah huh.

Lordy me, Mary Dubyah, I'm am totes on your side, and I am glad you were repping it for us sisters back in the day - but oooeee that was some complex shit to be trawling though. Especially as I am someone who reads late at night or snuggled up on the couch, and the chances of me dropping off to sleep mid-sentence are HIGH.

The basic gist was that women should have the same chances in life that men get, particularly in the field of education (Mary was a prototype feminist, not that she knew it at the time). She felt that if all women were trained up for was marriage and to be feeble, gentle wee girl-brides dependent on their menfolk, that actually did more damage than good - and was deterimental to the male poplace as well.

The strange thing was that her diatribe was addressed solely to men, not to her fellow womenkind, and is so heavily framed within the patiarchy of the time. Wollenstoncraft refers to her own gender as 'the sex' throughout "A Vindication of the Rights of Women" (okay okay, throughout the bits I read, and I assume the rest), which may be in part an idiosyncracy of the time, but is also indicative of the male-centric society in which she had to operate.

I think I am going to make up for this by reading a biography about this trailblazer - maybe I can find one that encompasses her daughter's life also? Betweeen the two of them there are a few tales to tell! (Hopefully in a slightly more comprehensible English for my lazy brain.)

PS The image supplied is not of the exact same edition that I read (ATTEMPTED TO READ) as I usually strive for, but I thought this one, where she appears to be peering out judgementally was a good approximation.