Hey hey, it's Saturday. Which is the title of a long-running TV variety/comedy show in Australia. In the classic Australian comedy 'The Castle,' Dale Kerrigan says his beloved father reckons the only show better than 'Hey Hey It's Saturday' is 'The Best of Hey Hey It's Saturday.'

Now, when 'The Castle' was released in the US by Miramax, one short scene was cut, different soundtrack music was added to others and some snips of dialogue were redubbed by the cast because you can't expect Americans EVER to absorb any of the vocabulary of other English-speaking cultures. I may know that the same type of footwear are called flip-flops in the US, jandals in New Zealand and thongs in Australia (which makes you wonder how that Sisqo song went down over there; in Australia, Durex is also a brand of adhesive tape rather than of condoms, which is just one good example of why it is helpful to be conversant with other dialects of English, also evidence that Australia is quite weird), but Americans are inherently incapable of comprehending or retaining such information. The wise American media know this and protect the people from such traumatic and confusing experiences in their entertainment.

Now, I understand changing the reference to 'Sunshine TAFE' to 'Sunshine Tech,' because TAFE is an acronym, not a real word, and unexplained acronyms are unnecessarily confusing to *anyone*. But why did 'rissoles' have to become 'meatloaf'? These are not cultural equivalents. They're both made with ground beef, yes, but a rissole is much more like a meatball than a meatloaf, and besides that, it's an Anglo adaptation of, if memory serves, a Greek dish. Okay, I admit I don't know exactly where rissoles are from, but they're Mediterranean, and they're ball-shaped. In fact, 'See you round like a rissole' is an expression equivalent to 'see you round like a record,' in other words no-one really uses it unless they are trying to be facetious.

And they changed the reference to 'Hey Hey It's Saturday' to 'Funniest Home Videos.' Which is also not an equivalent. It does not feature a large pink emu ventriloquist's puppet called Ossie, for one thing. I am sure Ossie is integral to Daryl Kerrigan's enjoyment of 'Hey Hey.' I would just like the viewers outside Australia and New Zealand to know this. Thank you for your attention.

I slept in today until exactly noon - not by design, but that's what the clock said when I turned back the covers. I had nothing better to do. I miss my family and my cat. Moo.

Also, nudie Orlando Bloom dreams. This is what you get for watching the extended DVD of 'Fellowship of the Ring' twice through in a week.

Today I want to tell you about something interesting: the struggle to remain blonde.

All right, you don't think that's interesting. So go. Who the hell wants you? Ooh, look at me, I'm Uncle Junior in a bad mood with Bobby Baccala'. I love Bobby. He's the closest thing in existence to a bipedal whale.

Anyway, if you've been a non-blond all your life, you may not be aware that many people who are born blond do not get to remain that way. (Language nitpicky note: 'Blonde' is feminine. 'Blond' is masculine/neutral in English use. I always think it's ridiculous when people describe a fair-haired man, in writing, as 'blonde.' Unless of course he's a bit girly in which case it's perfectly appropriate. You could call Allen Schezar blonde with justice.) The amount of melatonin (the human colour pigment) in their hair increases as they grow older, and usually somewhere in latter childhood or adolescence their hair dulls to brown. You can track this process through my sister's childhood photo albums - at the age of three, she has honey-blonde hair. At the age of five, it's caramel brown. At seven or eight, it's mid-brown and remains so until she discovers the wonder of hair dye (currently, it's striped).

In my case, this process didn't seem to happen - while my hair was almost white when I was tiny and it gradually became more a golden blonde with threads of copper (which always drew admiring comment from hairdressers, and let's face it, that's a nice feeling), it never dulled or browned. I loved my strawberry blonde hair. I felt it was my best physical feature, aesthetically speaking. Sometimes I would flirt with semi-permanent red dye, but it always returned to its pretty ground state, and I felt good about that.

However, the blonde fairy seems to be deserting me. This past American summer, I semi-permanent-ed my hair auburn, for the sake of an anime character costume at a convention. And it never *did* seem to come right out, and after a while it came home to me - the dye was gone, but the ginger wasn't. And it was (ominous chords) dulling to brown.

I really, really don't want it to be true that my hair is turning brown of its own accord. I'd be losing a bit of myself that I really liked. I value being the blonde sheep of my brunette family.

So last night I tried to dye it back to its proper colour, in the hope that it would kind of get the message and continue in that style. I chose the Garnier Lumia shade called 'dark coppery golden blonde.' The photo on the box showed a girl with hair very much my original colour. Well, it's come out red, true red, Gillian Anderson as Dana Scully red. It's still a pretty colour and it suits me, but it's not My Blondeness! I want that BACK!

Oh the angst.

I have taken to eating steamed new potatoes as a snack.

You know what I bet it is? The English climate. I've always been conscious of my hair having a certain response to increased sunlight - in summer it would become more reddish. Here I am in the Northern Hemisphere, under cloudy skies and an ozone layer. (We don't have one of those over New Zealand. In summer you can sometimes feel your skin burn.) A lack of exposure to sunlight is causing the dulling, and as we enter winter, there's not a darn thing I can do about it.

I wish I was allowed to keep a cat at our house. A cat would help.

Questions: In The Lord of the Rings when anyone puts on the One Ring they turn invisible. Why wasn't Sauron invisible when Isildur smote him? Why does the Ring make people turn invisible anyway? Is it a glitch that happens because other people are not Sauron and it's programmed to let only him do magic with it?

So apparently this is me, whodathunk?

Anime Quiz - Which Escaflowne Character Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Gee, has it been long enough since I wrote anything here? I don't get a lot of opportunities these days. But here's a general update for my friends and well-wishers.

I now live in Cambridge, England, home of one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in the world. Here Sir Isaac Newton jotted down some little ideas that occurred to him after getting hit in the head by a falling apple; here Lord Rutherford of Nelson (a New Zealander I'll have you know) figured out how to split the atom, but didn't think it would result in anything of general interest; here Stephen Hawking does some little university job when he's not recording badass gangsta rap (see MC Hawking's Crib), and here I have a job at Cambridge Newspapers Ltd.

It is not a very exciting job but it pays the rent. I work in the Property section of the Prepress department as an Apple Macintosh operator, and I set up real-estate ads for the company's various newspapers and weekly Property News supplement. I'm learning to do some design and desktop publishing stuff in Quark Xpress as a result, which was the main reason I took the job apart from getting paid and working with Macs in publishing (the field into which I wish to break) - it struck me as a useful skill-set to gain. Once I've learned everything I can in this job I'm going to look for a better one.

I work with pretty decent people. The hours are funny, due to the deadline-dependent nature of the beast - 10:30 am to 11:30 pm, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, and the rest of the week is my own. That counts as a full-time working week, all in three days. Needless to say I make frequent trips to the water cooler and coffee machine. I also thoroughly enjoy my four-day weekends!

I also live with pretty decent people, particularly Katie who rents the room next to mine in a slightly down-at-heel end of terrace house, 'Broadeaves,' just outside the city centre (north of the river). She's a gem and we have fun together. I have the smallest room in the house (after the toilet) and my stuff and I are pretty jam-packed in there, but it's cosy and I can afford it - which, given the property prices in Cambridge, which I'm in a position to know a bit about, is saying something. There's a TV, VCR and DVD player downstairs in the conservatory/living room, and cable, so the only thing I'm really missing is a home computer with Internet accesss (now the lack of blog updates starts to make sense, doesn't it?). I'm able to make some updates to my webpages by going to the house of my friend Anne in Cherry Hinton and using her setup, and I do that from time to time - I also patronise a nice Italian-run web cafe in the city called La Pronto (Italian for 'there, quickly'), and two of the girls who work here just handed out plastic party cups of champagne to all the customers, because it's the cafe's first birthday! I approve very strongly!

One of the Italian cafe girls is cute and has learned that when I come I always have a carton of Twining's Iced Tea, green tea elderflower and ginseng flavour, and that I like a glass to pour it into. She always remembers me when I come in. Gyeehee! *^.^*

And they gave us birthday sponge cake, too - I had a piece with an orange marzipan star on top.

This weekend I'm going on the train to Ipswich, to be a minder for three kids who are family friends of mine. The deal is, my mother's best friend is Dr Diana Downey (a doctor of English literature, not medicine), and Diana has a daughter named Amy and a son called Sam, who have been close friends with me and my sister Kate since we were babies. Sam now lives in Sydney, Australia, where he's a surf lifesaver and a bartender, and absolutely sweet and very funny. Someone nice should marry him. He's a little bit asthmatic but has a lovely deep voice and is kind to everyone. Kate would if she could but it would seem semi-incestuous because Amy and Sam, like Matthew and David Withington, are more like cousins to us than our real cousins are (conversely, I would marry David like a shot, but not Matthew, who has gotten a bit big for his boots since realising he looks like Robbie Williams). Kate is at university in Auckland, New Zealand, getting her Bachelor of Visual Arts degree, Amy is working in London, England and I'm working in Cambridge. So we're a bit scattered, but we all still love each other and stay in touch when we can. Now, Diana (remember her?) has a sister called Jenny who married an Englishman named Andrew Derrick who works for the National Trust, preserving interesting old places and things and keeping them nice, and they live in Ipswich with their three kids William, Florence (named after the Italian city where they think she was conceived) and Beatrice. William is fifteen now and Beatrice must be, um, seven? All the kids are sweet, bright and talented, particularly in music. William was in the Westminster Cathedral (not Abbey, that's Anglican and the Cathedral is Catholic, however backwards that may sound) boys' choir, for instance. Jenny and Andrew are going to Paris this weekend to celebrate Jenny's birthday, so Amy and I are both going to Ipswich to have a little reunion and keep an eye on the kids - William, of course, is too old to need a babysitter and Florence is borderline, but Beatrice should have one and it can't hurt to have some semi-grown-ups in the house for guidance and support. I'm really looking forward to it!

I'm also very happy that my family - mother father and sister - are coming to England to visit me for Christmas/New Year. I've missed them a lot and it'll be wonderful to celebrate with them. I just wish they could bring my cat along!

The night before last I had a weird dream about Hannibal 'The Cannibal' Lecter, and woke up wondering what the novelist would have named his anti-hero if there hadn't, conveniently, been a name that rhymed with Cannibal. Would he have had to call him Dieter the People-Eater? Or Hippopotamus the Anthropophagus?

So, new home, new job, same old Sarah.

And for Hallowe'en I'm going to be Hitomi from the Escaflowne movie, with little white feather wings from Claire's pinned to the back of my sailor uniform.

Peace out!

Ur, that Déesse, she never writes in her blog, ur urrur. I've been very busy. I now live in Cambridge, England. I work in the prepress department of a newspaper. And I'm checking in briefly with three disturbing thoughts, the first two in the form of punning riddles.

What do you call the modern British soldier of the information age?
tommy@kins

(If you are American and don't get this, don't feel bad, because it's culturally obscure. A familiarity with the soldier poems of Rudyard Kipling would help. Failing that it's explained in the children's novel Johnny and the Dead by Terry Pratchett.)

You know that Disney movie about the Chinese girl who goes to war disguised as a boy? Well, they're doing a sequel about her distant descendant who does the same in the Cultural Revolution. What's it called?
Mulan Rouge.

'Snot' would be a plausible Vulcan name. Especially given the attitudes some of them are copping in Enterprise.

That's me outta here for a while. Remember to drink plenty of water, and don't be upset if you have fat thighs, you'll last longer when lost in the desert than Britney Spears would.

Hey, speaking of the bottom item on this current page, there actually is a charitable organisation that allows you to sponsor a poor child in the United States of America. It's called Children, Inc. and I saw an ad for it in the National Geographic with a photo of a sad little girl in Appalachia. 'Children, Inc.' does sound rather as though they manufacture children rather than providing humanitarian aid for them and their communities, but I think it's a wonderful idea. I couldn't find any web presence for them, although I did come across the tragically-named National Organisation of Parents of Murdered Children, Inc. I hope I never ever am in a position to join that.

Random Lou Bega-related thought:
'This is Mambo #5.' What about Mambos #1-4? We never hear of them. Did they meet with disastrous or mysterious fates, like the four 'Babylon' space stations preceding the '5' of the TV show? Is Mambo #5 our last, best hope for a little bit of Monica in our lives?

I'd rather have a little bit of Ivanova. Rrowr.

More random Macross thoughts:
The superweapon developed by ground-based UN forces in the war with the Zentradi is an enormous zapping thing set deep into the bedrock of Alaska called the Grand Cannon. What I want to know is, did the guys who worked on it refer to it affectionately as the Pun Gun?

It was also interesting to see a big ol' bang-bang take-that-aliens weapon that was not phallic in design. Indeed the Grand Cannon is the opposite of phallic. It looks like something you could stick a big phallic weapon into, were you so inclined (like if you'd had a few drinks and it looked keen). And it's a big mistake, a failure. Hmm. What might Freud get out of that?

I sometimes think that if aliens are really monitoring the radio and TV transmissions of Earth, as surmised by oodles of SF tales, it might actually make them rather hesitant to attack our little blue planet. 'Dude, I don't think we wanna do that. They might deploy Will Smith.'

Having watched all that Macross, I feel like an entire change of pace. Today I intend to crack into Card Captor Sakura. Cuteness and magic and frilly dresses! Hurrah! I need something to get 'Ma-ku-ross! Ma-ku-ross!' and 'Kyuun kyuun' out of my head. Incidentally, how many people have noticed the snatches of American porn-video dialogue in Sharon Apple's 'kalla kalla' song? Only one can be distinctly heard in the OAV, that I noticed - 'Can you feel my juices around your warm, hard cock?' - but when you listen to the full track, there are quite a few of them. What was Yoko Kanno thinking?

Personally, I like to believe she was thinking, 'Dude, I am so stoned. Whoa! My hands are huuuge!'

Sometimes it's just... comforting to believe drugs are the explanation for human weirdness. But the fact is, we don't really need drugs to make us very weird indeed. Most people who are not familiar with Frank Zappa's biography but have heard some of his music assume that he was another 70s musician who drew inspiration from the kooky things he saw and thought of while tripping somewhere out around Jupiter. In fact, Zappa conscientiously eschewed recreational drugs with the exceptions of caffeine and nicotine (which he did consume in vast quantities). When he was a young man, he tried pot a couple of times, to see what it was like; it made him feel ill and dopey, so he abstained while his friends indulged, and became deeply irritated by how dumb they acted when they were high. The complete opposite of the generation of musicians and artists who believed stuff like LSD opened the doors of perception and expanded their minds. The various, ever-changing lineups of the Mothers of Invention were most vexed by the fact that Frank insisted they could not be under the influence at rehearsals or performances, and would rather they had not used drugs at all. They thought he was an asshole. But let's face it! He didn't need the drugs to be weird and outstandingly inventive!

Man, I don't know what I'm on about this morning. I need my shower.

Okay, so I'm watching Super Dimension Fortress Macross, the remastered subtitled version on DVD from AnimEigo. I've actually met the young man who did all the remastering work on it, and he was very nice and gave me a backrub (I'm a little bit of a slut at anime conventions), but GOD he must have gotten tired of hearing 'Kyuun kyuun, kyuun kyuun.'

Random thoughts, Macross-inspired:
The gist of Captain Global's speech at Max and Milia's wedding in 'Virgin Road' is remarkably close in parallel to that of Daryl Kerrigan's speech at his daughter's wedding to Con the Greek kickboxing accountant in The Castle. Correlations between The Castle and anime are getting quite alarming.

Say, speaking of 'Virgin Road,' was the animation on that a piece of shit or what? Whoever was in charge drew Milia so hastily that at no stage in the episode does she have visible eyelashes, or a fold in her eyelids, which she does in every other ep. Her lipstick is also omitted, and also omnipresent elsewhere. My theory is that it is shitty because all the good animators were working on the next two eps, which have a lot of dramatic content (plus the ugly Zentradi archivist singing 'My Boyfriend's A Pilot') and look a hell of a lot better. But you'd think they'd make the wedding episode a pretty one! Milia must've been so pissed off. It's her wedding day and she gets totally upstaged TWICE, first when Minmay arrives to sing at the reception, then when the Zentradi attack. And she didn't even get to wear lipstick or look pretty. That woman has a lot to be aggrieved about.

Ummmm... I've had a drink.

True Tests of Courage
- Giving a kitten a flea bath. You would think this was easier than bathing a fully-grown cat, but kittens' claws are much thinner and sharper. Would you rather be cut with a table knife, or a razor blade? Especially when there's soap about.

- Going downstairs in the dark in a house where you are a newly-arrived visitor and they keep a big dog.

- Going into an Italian public toilet.

Political shit-stirring idea number thirty-eight: (which other people have probably thought of before) Charitable organisations that let private individuals sponsor a child in a Third World country should start extending this service to children in American ghettos (ghetti?) and slums. Why not? What is it about the Third World kids that makes them more deserving of this charity? It can't just be that they're poor or tinted or dirty, that's not Third-World exclusive. And the things that the beardy man in the CCF ads says the poor kids need, like being able to attend a decent school and receive medical care and live somewhere un-squalid - well, that's true of a lot of ghetto children too. If this scheme got going, certain people might be embarrassed enough to do something serious about the problem.

I love being righteous. *sparkle*