Posted by Bel. The time is 2.34pm here in Wellington NZ

The Hollywood Reporter, um, reports that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has spent a "frantic" 24 hours searching for iconic French director, Jean-Luc Godard.

They have not yet been able to notify him that he has been awarded an honorary Oscar and I'm sure you all noticed, on account of how the world stopped turning and all.

MISSING! Merde.

They have apparently tried to contact Godard via phone and fax and emails to one and all. He hasn't got back to them!!

I don't know about you, but generally after I send the second unanswered text message to a person about something, I take the hint and assume they ain't in the mood to party. Instead, people are pointing out that the only other person to miss out on picking up their honorary Oscar was Audrey Hepburn... because she WAS DEAD.

Godard's disdain for Hollywood is as integral to his work as jump cuts and pretty women. From 1960's Breathless (probably the best known and most 'accessible' of his films) to Socialisme, which screened at Cannes this year, he has never had much nice to say about the USA.

This belated tip of the hat, coming in his 80th year, may not mean as much to him as it does to the agitated administrators in downtown LA.

Extra for experts: Jean-Paul Belmondo bonaza. Ooh la la!

Posted by Bel. The time is 12.07pm here in Wellington NZ

A joyously profane new song from Cee Lo (also known as half of Gnarls Barkley).



The other half of Gnarls Barkley has been doing some good stuff too - check out Broken Bells.

Posted by Bel. The time is 5.01pm here in Wellington NZ

1. Get a punchbowl. We use our glass mixing bowl.
2. Buy 2 litres of rum. Go hard and get something actually from Cuba, like Havana Club.
3. Don't bother with sugar syrup, just use lemonade. Nothing too sweet though, the old classic Schweppes Dry is good, and I really like their Soda with a Twist of Lemon too. You need a couple of bottles of mixer for each bottle of spirits, depending on how bad you hate your own liver.
4. Fresh ingredients are important! Lots of lovely slices of lemon and muddle a big pile of mint leaves, Sally Draper style. Lime is great too, but can be outrageously expensive. Non-concentrate lime juice can be an effective alternative if you go to a snazzy supermarket.
5. Put it all in the bowl.
6. Enjoy!
7. Extra for experts: keep a teatowel nearby because there is no way to pour punch without the glasses getting all drippy and sticky, especially as the night goes on.

Posted by Bel. The time is 3.49pm here in Wellington NZ

I'll follow Lou and Lotte's lead and not spell out the whole recipe here. It comes from the Edmond's Illustrated Cookbook, a big pictorial version of the NZ institutional tome. The illustrations are mostly full page, full colour, food porn type photos, rather than being useful pictograms of exactly the meaning of those oh-so-confusing instructions.

The recipe is very easy and you only need two mixing bowls to pull it off. (The thing I hate most about cooking, other than how pointlessly time consuming it is, and the overwhelming feelings of anxiety it produces, is the vast amount of dirty dishes the process involves each and every time.) The book says 15 minutes to cook but it took a little longer in our decrepit gas oven.

Iit appears as a "Blueberry Muffin" recipe on page 16 or 19 but I have moved on from the 90s and am flinging other delicious things in with my flour and milk. (And eggs. And sugar. But that's pretty much it, right? Sweet!)

Current favourite is boysenberry and white chocolate. This batch was done with frozen boysenberries and white chocolate buttons (any brand of either - but if you were going for real chocolate, then choose carefully!).

The standard trick with making muffins is to not over mix your mixture. As few good stirs as you can get away with to get your flour and stuff combined in with your wet ingredients and then LET IT BE. You're not friggin Jamie Oliver with your whizz stick pureeing the fuck out of some poor soup.

The real trick is to not throw in your berries/choc chunks/walnuts/whatever until the very last minute. With those frozen berries, you can even place them individually in the muffin tray holes AFTER having filled them with the mixture, as they are very easy to handle if you've just pulled them outta the deep freeze.

Canned berries are a whooooole different story. This is a sample from my second batch (yes, I was struck by the domesticity virus two weekends in a row!!) which was made with a can's full I drained out and then had to add to the muffin mixture before dolloping into the tray.

As you can see, 1) my cellphone takes exceptionally shitty photos, and 2) the smooshing and swirling causes the whole muffin to go very purpley in comparison to the isolated taste explosions of the earlier muffins.

Going on comments from my guinea pigs - I MEAN TASTE TESTERS - both styles were much enjoyed and it was the caramelly goodness of embedded chocolate swirls that was the real highlight anyway!

Posted by Bel. The time is 9.15am here in Wellington NZ

Et voila, here is the photographic evidence, as requested!


Before:

Unfortunate lighting makes it look as if my hair was two-tone, or a botched home dye job or something, WHICH IT WAS NOT sheesh.

I usually dye my hair myself with ammonia-free organic based dyes, which you can get from health food stores. The amazing thing about these is that a) they don't stink to high hell and b) they don't burn the crap out of your scalp. This actually makes it a bit hard to tell if they are even dying your hair! But the product is lovely and they fade out very naturally, rather than a harsh regrowth line.


Way before:

(Hehehehehehee)

After:

JOKES!!

After: (Fo reals)

I call this "Messy Bun, After the Rain (August, 2010)".

This one evokes all the horror and versimilitude of a passport photo. Fun.

Close up shot. As if we were standing awkwardly on a bus together.

I got my hair did by Dom at Wildilocks on Cuba St. Highly recommended! Ignore the scary mannequins in the store window and check them out.

They have lots of organic products in stock and use ammonia-free dyes which are better for your head and for the environment. (A chemical is still used to activate the dye, but it is a fruit acid, rather than a chemical chemical.) I like the idea of going somewhere where their main focus is outside of the mainstream - my do was tame by their standards; the woman next to me was getting her hair bleached out in preparation for white dreads being put in - and she was a pagan witch/legal administrator.

Dom also did my hair all fancy for my birthday a few months back. I don't really have any good photos of that either - none that do it justice - but to give you an idea, here is the crappy PhotoBooth photo I took to show Lou after having texted her incessantly about it:

Aah PhotoBooth. Causing people to have dodgy eye levels since ages ago.

It was a bit bouffant and a bit curly-loopy and a bit Joan so all in all quite lovely. No matter that I took in this photo as my reference, I was still very pleased with the glamorous final result.

PS please also note my Frida Kahlo cushion covers that were a gift from Lou! Awwhh... Lou.