Leaving my phone at work when I have to get up at the arse crack of dawn tomorrow for work is pretty bloody disappointing. So are the numerous calf cramps I experienced while at gym doing Body Attack tonight. Accidentally steeping on dog poop without realising it and smooshing it all through the carpet is also right up there as massively fucking disappointing. But none of these compare to how disappointed this video made me:
I can’t imagine there are too many people out there who don’t find this extremely disappointing also. It’s not just the blatant racism that pisses me off (and believe that, it really pisses me off), it’s knowing that her poor little son has no chance in life. He’s going to be surrounded by that for god knows how long and will more than likely share the same views as his fuckhead mother because that’s what he was brought up with and it’s all he’ll know. I mean, look at how calm the kid is, that’s not a child who’s never heard his mum abuse strangers on the tram before, the poor thing is used to it already. Then there’s the fact she’s clearly on drugs (check out how she’s chewing her face off) and is probably the kind of classy lady to throw her son down to engage in fisticuffs when someone dares retaliate to her horrible rants.
Thankfully there are numerous reports that she’s been arrested. I believe in free speech but inciting hatred, racism and provoking violence (because if I’d been there, it would have been ON) should not be tolerated or allowed. EVER!
About Ruby
My name is Cara (but you can call me Ruby) and I like the colour pink, swearing, fist shaking, daggy dancing and 90s RnB music. Often all at once. I live in Brisbane which is always warm and is famous for its zombies.
I've been listening to cheesy RnB jamz lately, like they're going out of fashion. HA! We all know that'll never happen!about 2 days agofrom webReplyRetweetFavorite
I am such a suburban cliché. Mowing the lawn and washing my car in a bikini. Whatever, prudes, it's bloody hot outside!about 3 days agofrom webReplyRetweetFavorite
I can hear your gasps of disbelief, and I know, I know. I can’t believe it myself. But it’s true.
But just to ease your minds, it’s not a pair of those hideous clogs that I bought. Believe me, I would never, ever admit to that to anyone (EVER). In fact I ended up buying a pair of wedge heels called Lena. They were on special and were so, so comfy that I couldn’t say no.
I think they’re really cute and it feels like you’re walking on soft foam beds (which in fact, you actually are). Their only downfall is that they don’t breathe as they don’t have holes in them like the clogs do, which made for some slippery feet after a few hours of shopping in Paddington in hot weather. But apart from that, I love them and am very excited that I was able to look past the dagginess of the Crocs brand and find something cute and unique. I’m not eyeing off a few of their flats and the adorable bags they sell.
How shit are Tuesdays? I mean really, they are just awful ALL the time. I hate Monday’s a lot, because they were clearly only invented to piss everyone off, but to me Tuesdays are just about as bad. I don’t even know why, they just are. And that’s why I hate them. So to celebrate, I am going to post a “This is why my Tuesday sucked…” entry every Tuesday evening. Enjoy!
Fucking pantry moths. Have you ever had them? They are the BANE OF MY LIFE! I have two rice loving maniacs in my house and that’s where these little turds like to hang out tom infiltrate our home. They get EVERYWHERE, including sealed, airtight containers and especially all of my favourite foods. They’ve ruined millions of almonds, multiple boxes of expensive tea, all my baking goods and so on. Tonight I gave in and cleaned the whole pantry again, knowing full well they will be back very, very soon.
Dog poop. I find it amazing how much two small puppies are able to poop out every day.
A Song of Ice & Fire. I am 2/3 of the way through the third book and am obsessed. But I am torn between loving it and hating it right now. I don’t want to give anything away so let me just say George RR Martin is a cruel man who needs to stop killing off undeserving characters! I can’t stop thinking about the characters and wanting to READ UNTIL I DIE. It’s consumed my life completely and utterly.
Lack of sleep. See above.
Christmas! It only just dawned on me this afternoon that it’s almost December. In fact, it’s 1 month and 1 day until my birthday (December 23rd, mark it in your diaries people) and then BAM Christmas all up in your faces! That means only more pays between now and then! Argh I am SCREWED!
New Years Eve. As per the above, it’s almost NYE and I still don’t have plans. The one thing I want to do is too expensive (given that I am going to a music festival on January 2nd and I forgot to budget for any bloody thing again this year) and the other option we have involves a house party and I am just too damn lazy to organise such a thing.
Migraines. I woke up with one on Monday morning and an even worse one this morning. Because that’s a great way to start the working week…
I have a turbulent relationship with Rihanna. For the most part I am not a huge fan of her music nor her voice & singing style. Some of her hit singles are some of my least favourite songs of all times. And then she goes and releases songs that are amazing and totally blow my mind.
I just listened to “We Found Love” today and my mind is BLOWN. I heard a few bits n pieces of gossip about how this new clip was bit in Ireland and that it was very controversial, but I tend to ignore the hype surrounding new music videos with pop singers as I’m usually disappointed because societies perception of “controversial” is usually tame and boring. But in is case it’s worth the hype because it is a fantastic clip that actually packs a punch.
Well done Rihanna, I like you again for the moment. I look forward to hating your next track and then loving another one in the near future.
I’ve decided to do this rant in a few parts as I have far too much to say. Please enjoy part One of how NOT to dress up.
My latest rage is about dressing up in costume. This was inspired both before, during and after the recent Supanova convention here in Brisbane. A huge part of the convention is the dressing up as a favourite fictional character, the more obscure, geeky or nostalgic the better. I’ve only started dressing up for Supanova’s kind of recently and this year was the first that I dressed up on both the Saturday and Sunday. I LOVE dressing up, I always get carried away for fancy dress parties (which I like to throw as often as possible) and I am a BIG believer in making a worthwhile effort, or else not dressing up at all.
Unfortunately a lot of people do not share this sentiment.
I feel that unless you’re going to do it properly, you shouldn’t do it at all (in everything, but particularly dressing in costume). Half arsed costumes just serve to confuse and irritate those who can’t work out what you’re dressed as and those who actually did put in a lot of effort with their costumes. Just because it’s a comic book convention (sorry, “pop culture” convention) doesn’t mean you can dig up some bits and pieces from your wardrobe and claim you dressed up. It’s not a prerequisite for people to dress up for these sorts of conventions but people do because it’s fun.
I will share with you two of the examples I found:
Steampunk
I planned to dress Steampunk on the Saturday and so Googled pictures of steampunk girls for inspiration (even though I have a kick-arse costume already). I discovered a few Tumblr’s dedicated to Steampunk girls and while some were amazing, most were atrocious. I was given a pamphlet on what Steampunk is at a gamers convention a couple of months ago and laughed at how they said that if you want to be Steampunk you can technically just paint something brown and put a cog on it but people (in-the-know) will probably laugh at you for it. But unfortunately it seems to be what a lot of people assume Steampunk is! The genre IS very broad and there’s no exact look to achieve when dressing steampunk and it can vary so, so much. But there are some basic elements, colour combinations and accessories to be aware of which can turn your brown, coggy outfit into something sublimely Steampunk.
Some of the dreadful examples I found are as follows:
Look, Steampunk is not just a Victorian style outfit with a few cogs or clocks added. Nor do you transform an outfit into Steampunk just by wearing some old-fashioned-looking goggles and carrying a lantern or holding a wrist watch. It’s kind of hard to describe, but basically it ain’t this (purple, ill-fitting corsets, brown leather straps and a black leather choker ain’t steampunk, love. Sorry).
So naturally this will be a sore spot for me since I am a massive Harry Potter geek. I just don’t see how people get this so wrong but they absolutely desecrated the basic HP school uniform costume at Supanova this year. I don’t know why so many people attempted to dress like HP character this time, hardly any did when Tom Felton (aka Draco Malfoy) was appearing earlier this year. Maybe I am missing something, but when I think of a Harry Potter school uniform I think of something like this:
Yep, they’re damn good costumes! So what the hell gave these people the idea that this was in any way WHATSOEVER event remotely Harry Potter:
Unfortunately I couldn’t find a lot of examples, only these “paparazzi” style ones since their costumes are so slack, no one would want to take proper photos of them. But this was basically it. White shirt, black skirt or pants and a red or green tie and a wand. There was the occasional striped tie but aside from that it was so completely half arsed, I was beside myself with rage. This is a perfect example of doing it properly or NOT AT ALL. If you were a genuine fan of HP, you’d probably have a red and gold striped tie, a grey skirt and an actual long-sleeved white school/business shirt. I mean, my Gryffindor tie was yellow which I painted red stripes on. It don’t get much easier than that! Back when the movies were just coming out, I couldn’t get a grey pleated skirt anywhere so I had one made. THESE are things you do to make a costume remotely half decent, guys! Look at how much better it looks with a proper tie, patch and grey vest! My god, it seems so simple!
Basically the only people who are allowed to slack off on the details are adorable little kids. And even then I wish their parents had have found a red tie at the very least…
COMING SOON: More rants about shit costumes that should never have left the house!
Considering how much planning went into my outfit/costume for this years Zombie Walk, I thought I’d do a “What I Wore” post.
As soon as I saw this dress I knew I had to have it for the walk. I mean really, zombie unicorns? Hello? Could it suit me ANY more? Oh yes, it could, because it’s PINK and BLACK! My only fault with it, is that it’s a bit too short. But I hav a very long torso and a lot of these styles of dresses sit to short on me as a result. So leggings were a definite, because I did not need to have any wiley protographers snapping any undies shots of me as I’m setting up the park.
My next decision was around the shoes. I had plans to buy the Iron Fist pink Gold Digger zombie flats but I didn’t have the time/cash to get them and I feared they’d get wrecked on a hectic 14 hour day with all my running around and climbing in gardens and later getting my drink on at the after party. So I got some cheapies that I did plan to decorate with black stitches but just plain ran out of time.
For my headwear I was going to buy this brain patch headband but my ever creative mum said she’d made her own version, but 3D! She whipped this up with Crayola molding foam with a red felt base. The blood drops were also made of the foam and then painted with red nail polish to make it shiney. She attached it to a headband which already had a fascinator base and voila, I had some adorable, exposed brains!
For my makeup, I wanted to keep it simple, cute and bloodless. I am so over blood and gore when it comes to zombies, let me tell you. I was given the tip recently that the coloured hair spray you use to make your hair “crazy” colours also works well on skin so I hunted everywhere for a can of white and then also bought a green and silver can for cheap. The white is used as a base and then green sprayed over top to give me a green tinge. I ran out of green on the legs so we used silver instead which nobody could really see anyway. But my poor face was now uncoloured! It took a lot of trickery and creative blending, but by using a pale foundation and then dusting a combination of green eyeshadows, then dabbing some white ae paint on to tone the green down, I managed to match my face to my body fairly well.
I used black and grey eyeshadows around my eyes, added eyeliner for definition and lots of mascara (I’ll be damned if I’m going to be an ugly zombie). I dusted some dark grey eyeshadow on my cheeks like blush to make my face a little bit gaunt and then drew on the scars wirth an old black eyeliner. The black lipstick finished the look and I was done!
Dress: Hell Bunny Zombie Unicorn petal dress from Sourpuss Leggings: Body Control ones from Avon Shoes: Basic pink slip-on’s from Rubi Fascinator: Made by my mum :) Eyeshadow: Various blacks and greys by BYS Lipstick: Black by Shu Uemera
Well it’s finally over. the 2011 Brisbane Zombie Walk is now behind me. And I’ve just posted the Post Walk Statement on the site which means I am finally free to discuss the events of the day here! Hurra!
Our day started pretty well, I somehow managed to get an awesome night sleep which was an total shock. I got up at about 7am and checked the zombie walk email, updated the blog and finished tidying up the house for everyone who was going to come over to get ready. By 9am everyone had arrived and were getting ready in every corner of our unit. I had a grand plan of painting myself a nice, light green with hair colour spray which had worked really well for the cover of mX but failed on me by running out 3/4 of the way through painting myself! Luckily a bit of clever makeup blending skills and I managed to make my face almost the same shade of green as the rest of my body. I went for a cute green zombie with black accents (ie. black cartoony scars, black around my eyes and black lips) to go with my adorable pink Zombie Unicorn dress. Oh and the adorable little Brain fascinator that my mum made me :)
The first incident of the day happened at about 9.30am when Anthony, who was the leader of the set up team, got stuck in our ancient lift. He’d disregarded a warning from another helper who said they’d been stuck in the lift for a good 5 minutes and found himself trapped on our level, with doors that simply refused to open. A bit of panic set in then, so I had to finish up my personal preparations and rush to Wickham Park to start setting up. This set us back a bit and one of our sponsors was already there which got me into panic mode good and proper.
Fortunately things went fairly smoothly, and we had a lot of friends helping out, as well as a number of volunteers so while we ran behind schedule most of the day, it as definitely not as bad as it could have been. Lift Boy was released after being stuck for a good 90 minutes and we got back on track. The fencing we had put up to minimise entry points into the park worked a charm with regards to getting people to donate a gold coin on entry. Sure, some cheapskates jumped them to avoid paying, but most people were quite generous. Well except for the tourists who threw in 5c pieces but I will talk about them more later.
By 2.30pm the park was absolutely packed, and because people sort of hung around the two entry points it was proving very hard for everyone to get in, and thousands were pouring in by this point. The plan was to have our speeches at 2.30pm but we held them off because some of our speakers went missing! During the speeches (which unfortunately weren’t hear by 90% of the people in the park, something we will have to rectify next year) we did the 10 minute countdown required for our Guinness World Record attempt. We had Sarah as the MC as she’s an excellent public speaker (and I am a stuttery, nervous wreck in front of big crowds), Gerald from the Brain Foundation, Erin Snape who raised over $6000 for the Brain Foundation and an officer for the QLD Police to remind everyone of the rules of the walk.
At 3pm I rushed down to the front exit point to get ready to lead the crowd on the walk, and was shocked to see THOUSANDS of people trying to get in still. We gave them another 10 minutes before deciding it was useless, and had to run out of the park and down the road for a good 200 metres before we’d passed everyone. Naturally my megaphone, which I use to yell at people and get their attention with its obnoxious siren, ran out of battery then so we had to get the police to sound sirens to get everyone’s attention, and get them to start following us down Albert Street and into the City. It was hard work, we had to shout a lot for people to follow us because they were all sort of standing around, looking a bit confused. We then opened up another exit point and people just poured out of the park. In fact a lot of people left via the top entrance point and had to walk around the block to meet us. I just can’t believe how many people there were.
My sister and I then spent the next half an hour sprinting around the City between intersections making sure the police we OK and then sprinting most of the walk route to try and get back to the lead of the procession. I literally have not run so much in my life (thank god I go to the gym so much so I was fit enough to manage it). We also spent a great deal of time trying to get tourists off the road. They were seriously only leaving about a 3m gap for the zombies to walk down, like some sort of catwalk. I had to SCREAM at some of them to get off the road and had to give up when I got them back a couple of extra metres. It was infuriating, I know most of them probably didn’t speak English but my screaming “MOVE BACK” and all but pushing them backwards with my gestures surely must have made sense to them? That’s about when my voice started to give out. Once at the front of the procession we helped Cassie and the other volunteers keep everyone in line (though barely, bloody rowdy zombies). Thanks to the delay in taking off, we arrived at the end point close to 4pm which was perfect for our plans. We then had to try and get people moving on to the after party and I then spent the next two hours running between home and the venue trying to find various things that had been packed up in various vehicles. When I finally got to relax, the after party was really good and the bands excellent. It was also so cute to see kids in the all-ages room, many of which were doing the Melbourne Shuffle extremely well (others just rolling around on the floor and jumping off seats).
So in summary, we raised over $24,000 for the Brain Foundation and attracted between 15,000 and 20,000 people. We estimate about 12,000 of those were actually zombies, but holy hell that is some turnout!!! We made some huge improvements on last years walk but we still learned a lot and have lots of exciting ideas for next year and will undoubtedly only get better and better as we become absolute pro’s at it. I will keep you posted about when we get the Guinness World Record!
