Bits and Pieces

On a food theme - apparently (in the US anyway) the tomato is officially and legally a vegetable.

Going more academically - seeing that I need to write my paper on Lord of the Rings video games and masculinity over summer, I was rather intrigued by this account of the conditions such games are produced under. [Via Torill]

And because it is heading towards summer in Perth (even if the weather doesn't realise it yet) - some cultural stuff:

A blatant plug for Dust, a play by Looking Glass Productions. It sounds like a great play, and having gone to the quiz night and bought fundraising chocolate in support of it, there is no way I'm missing it.

The Opening Night for the Somerville Film Festival was last night. It began with pre-drink drinks on the Mathilda Bay foreshore, with dolphins cruising in the river only a few metres away. The weather drove us to a second picnic spot undercover at the music building, before heading over to the Friends of the Festival pre-film drinks in the Tropical Grove. The traditional overindulgence in champagne and chicken sandwiches was complicated this year by food alternatives - samosas, dips, olives and other nibbly things. We heard that this change from the way things have always been done has caused consternation within the committee ranks. I'm ambivalent about the change, myself.

Anyway, the opening film was Ae Fond Kiss. The story was about a romance between an Irish Catholic woman and Muslim man in Glasgow, but what I found most enjoyable was the way that the story was told - understated, naturalistic, definitely 'show not tell' that left the viewer to make sense of the characters and events in their own way. A huge contrast to Saturday night's film, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, where there was no escaping the narratorial voice.

Secret Identities

For the past week Blogger has been telling me that I am someone else. Every time I logged I had a new identity. Obviously the universe is trying to tell me to accept my fragmented, multiple postmodern subjectivity, but I think I'll ignore that for now while I try to remember what I wanted to blog about over the last week.

Yummy?

The Gallery of Regrettable Food - if you want to go retro in bad way... [via Maud]

Your Train Will Be Arriving...

Full service has resumed.
Your train will be arriving in five minutes.

In other words, normal (or as normal as it gets) broadcasting has resumed on this blog. From now on, the plan is to blog indiscrimatorily about sewing and other hobbies, study and life in general.

Results

Kinda says it all...
Back to silence.

Cyborg Citizens Hit the Nineteenth Century

I wasn't planning to post for a while, but I'm having a surreally interesting experience this afternoon. I'm alternating between checking CNN's predictions of the US elections and reading Geoge Eliot's Felix Holt. Apart from the usual dire 'nothing really changes in politics - it is all too depressing' kinds of response, it has also set me thinking (as other people are) about the contradictions between democracy, citizenship, suffrage, and effects. Us non-US people can jump up and down all we like, obsessively check the results as they come in with the gut level impact of 'this means something to us' but ultimately for all the cyborg citizen rhetoric we are like Eliot's miners in the pub - materially, we don't count.

I apologise if this doesn't make much sense. A few days of bad sleep and eating patterns and political nausea does that.

Public Service Announcement

This blog is temporarily closed for personal reasons.
Normal service should resume in a few weeks.