Just taking a moment to be bitter and twisted ('cos you know I'm just sweetness and light the rest of the time). Yesterday I co-ordinated our adoptive families' Christmas picnic. We've been going for years and for the last couple of years I've been the Fundraising/Activities Co-ordinator. It's a situation of not too many people putting their hands up when jobs on the committee need to be filled. Some of the people have been there for years and years and can't step down because no-one wants to step up.

Yesterday was exhausting and I'm just a little over it. I don't mind doing the work but I'm sick of the rude, stupid people. The people who don't rsvp and turn up expecting to be fed; people who stack their plates up high on the first go round the buffet table, then we clean up plates half full of uneaten food; the people who turn up after we've cleared the food and want lunch; the people who don't help in any way; the people who treat us volunteer helpers as servants. We're not running a bloody restaurant people! We're trying to organise a picnic to keep adoptive families in touch and to fundraise for the orphanages our organisation support. [Have I mentioned that I'm slightly angry at the bozos who adopt their children then conveniently forget that they have a moral and social obligation to help the orphanage where their child/ren spent the first months/years of their lives?]

Our group is not great at supporting any of the other events I try to organise through the year (most of which end up having to be cancelled due to lack of enthusiasm). So I try and make some money out of the picnic ticket price. Mainly I do this by catering economically and selling some raffle tickets.

Well, enough is enough. Next picnic I'm having it catered and those who don't pre-book will not be offered lunch. I'm not into this martyrdom shit.

Deep breath in, deep breath out...

Another season of Idol has come again... Damo won. Woo hoo. Sure I could say "I told you so"... I picked him from the start. But really, who cares? I don't. I'm over it, I always am by the end. Idol works in reverse for me. I start off super excited, those audition episodes are bloody funny (says a lot about my psychology that I love watching people make absolute fools of themselves on national tv). I maintain a reasonable level of interest during the Final 24 and the Top 12. But by the time it gets down to six or so I couldn't care less. Yeah, they're all good singers but the songs are just not my cup of tea and the BIG IDOL SINGLE they are forced to record is just rubbish, bordering on unbearable.

Damien professes to be a fan of my beloved Jeff Buckley and he certainly has a voice to do Jeff's songs justice. I was thinking I'd love to hear Damien work his way through the JB songbook but really, while his voice is technically up to it, I wonder if he has the emotional depth to give the songs what they need. In the end Damo is the first Idol contestant/winner whose eventual album I would even consider buying. Let's see what the Idol sausage machine will produce with Damien's meat (so to speak...).

Last night I learnt that I don't have enough sparkly shoes in my life. A gorgeous pair of red or gold or even black mary jane's, medium heel, covered in sequins or sparkles. Also, I don't have enough feathers, nowhere near enough... well, none really.

I learnt this at the Kylie concert. It was fantastic. A bucket full of fun.

I bet you didn't know Locomotion was a bloody sexy song. The best song of the night. Whoever did the burlesque arrangement should win a Noble prize. It was amazing. As were the dancers, the costumes, the lights.

Fabulous, darling!

Crisco. You know those thieving scum who sell the Christmas rip-off hampers to the poor white trash and other IQ challenged folk. The Christmas "hampers" which come in Winfield Blue or Benson & Hedges varieties, with optional extras such as a slab of VB or a bottle of Jim Beam.

I have been a long time fan of the tv ads where the spokeswoman, dressed as Mrs Claus, chirps on about how joyous it is to hand over your hard-earned all year with the prospect of having one of these crap hampers delivered to your door in time for the festive season. A hamper full of Spam and tinned pineapple - nothing makes me think of our lord and saviour more than Spam.

My sister and I have long discussed the reality that these people are paying much more than the market value for this shit, living with the illusion that they are saving money by being good little Crisco financial managers.

Well, I have finally got proof that this is a scam of the highest order. Last weekend I met a woman who has actually done the sums. As she said, she's a stay at home mum, she has some hours to kill. Anyway, her own mother buys these evil hampers and after trying to convince her they were a rip-off she sat down and did the figures using the Coles online shopping site. She worked out that the $1,200 hamper her mother buys could be bought at Coles for $700 - that's a full $500 less than the Crisco price!

I actually think this is quite a serious (although funny) issue. I mean the bulk of the people who buy this crappola would be the ones who can least afford it. The battlers, the working poor, the non-working poor... you get the picture. Surely those G20/Iraq war/global warming protesters would be better off spending their time picketting the Crisco offices, because that, to me, seems where the world's great injustices originate.

Almost forgot... the G20 protester fuckers! Honestly, those people (and I use the term loosely) are a total waste of oxygen.

I feel sorry for the poor coppers who have to deal with sub-human morons. Give me a water canon and/or a truncheon, I'll have a go at them. It blows my mind that my tax dollars are going to pay for police to "battle" with these feral scum. I'm willing to bet at least 9 out of 10 of these goons don't even know what they're protesting about and the odd one that has any clue wouldn't be able to string a coherent sentence together as to how throwing rubbish bins at police is going to help the poverty stricken folk of this world.

They are all just bused in wholesale from Nimbin or whereever these filthy cretins reside. Either that or their parents drop them off in the city en route from their middle class suburban homes to their middle class city jobs.

I particularly enjoyed the work of the "white brigade" this year, you know the brave fighters for truth and human rights who are so proud of themselves they cover up their faces.

I'm not sure what legal recourse society has against these vermin but I think if they were to be punished it would be much wiser to actually send them to Africa to do some REAL work in aid of the starving masses as opposed to sticking them in jail or getting them to do some piss-poor excuse for "community work". I'm fairly confident a real day's work may kill them but I'm personally willing to let them take the risk.

For those of you who don't tune in to read my intense critiques of popular culture... you know who you are... here is a quick pictorial update of the family (yes, the children and husband who I occasionally glimpse out of the corner of my eye as I loll on the sofa watching the teev and stuffing corn chips down my gob). All is well in Pomona Street, as this happy family snap reveals:

Finally getting my headspace around RHCP's Stadium Arcadium. I definitely favour the Jupiter disc. Not only does it contain my early favourite Hump de Bump but it features the third single and my head-and-shoulders-stand-out favourite Snow (Hey Oh). What a friggin' beautiful song! Really I may have nasty things to say about John but his guitar skills are never in question and they shine brightly indeed on this gorgeous song.

I've decided that knowing what the lyrics are about is optional to my enjoyment of the songs. I can be fairly confident that they are about sex and/or drugs and I can leave it at that. Anthony may have a deep and poetic soul underneath that tattooed, muscle-bound, drool-inducing exterior but he's a simple man after all.

The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. This weekend the Lord gave...

... the ultimate gift of crap tv. Drum roll please... Strange Love.

I am probably a late comer to this pinnacle of mindless reality tv but better late than never I say. For the ignorant masses this VH1 program (while we're thanking the non-denominational spiritual entity let's thank him/her for cable tv, how did we fill our days before?) brings together the non-existant talents of one Flavor Flav (aka Foofy Foofy) and one Bridgette Nielsen. The former being a past member of Public Enemy, the shortarse with the gold teeth and the giant clock around his neck (?????). The later being the ex-wife of Sylvester Stallone; an Amazonian piece of Euro trash with no discernable point for existence.

This match made in heaven apparently came about during the filming of something called The Surreal Life, a celebrity Big Brother style program which in the past has brought together big names such as MC Hammer, Corey Feldman, Vanilla Ice, the unattractive bird from Beverley Hills 90210 and, of course, the aforementioned Mr Flav and Ms Nielsen.

Really this program defies description but it is totally absorbing in a can-you-believe-they-are-showing-this-drivel-on-television?-way.

Something to keep me going until Australian Princess... and of course there's next year's Big Brother to look forward to...

Bet you wish you were me!

"He's mad, totally mad. He's madder than Mad Jack McMad, winner of last year's Mr. Madman competition."

...from Blackadder.

Just because I LOVE this quote, can relate to this quote and generally need to use it about half a dozen times a day, minimum. Have finally found it after googling unsucessfully for some time.

Enjoy!

You know I love piss poor tv entertainment, the piss-poorer the better. Big Brother, Oz Idol, Jasmin's Getting Married (RIP), New Zealand Highway Patrol... bring it on.

But Channel Nine's ABBAMania was a crime against humanity. Never mind bleating on about Iraq and global fucking warming, where are the protestors when you really need them?!

I was hoping for a bit of kitsch entertainment, something to sing along to with Will (he's a big ABBA fan). But what I got was the lamest, most embaressing (for all concerned) schlock seen on television. Bec Cartwright makes Anna Nicole Smith look highbrow. She really is cringe-making (for more evidence Google her Melbourne Cup outfit, it's a miracle they let her out of the caravan park wearing that). She's a shocker and should stick to "exclusives" in Women's Day where at least we don't actually have to hear her talk.

By far the worst aspect of the half hour I managed to sit through was the calibre of "celebrities" they dragged out for this event. Actors from McLeod's Daughters, looking like they'd rather be dragged by one foot behind a horse on the McLeod's set and wondering how they could have misread the fine print on their contracts so badly. Then there was Matthew Newton singing with David Campbell. What's that about? I mean I know they have Burt under contract but surely they couldn't have included Matthew without anyone noticing.

I didn't see her but apparently they even had one of their Melbourne Today Show reporters singing later in the show. How low can they go? Was Fatty Vautin unavailable?

The whole thing was awful and tragic and whoever is responsible should be thoroughly ashamed and hopefully unemployed as of this morning.

I'm getting excited about the upcoming Robbie Williams' concert.

Until recently I didn't think I'd be going because of a boring story involving how much Ticketek SUCK. But then my friend F came up with a single ticket and it was a question of not see Robbie at all or see Robbie sitting by myself. Gee whiz! Which one should I choose?

So on 9 December I'll be going berko at Aussie Stadium with 50,000 other RW fans. The last concert was so amazing I just can't wait to re-live that feeling.

Listening to the Intensive Care CD as I drove to WBJ on Saturday I wondered why I love him so much. About why he seems to epitomise a certain type of sexiness which rationally I despise but hormonally I covet. I mean the 38-year-old-mother-of-two side of me knows he'd be worse than Henry VIII to be in a relationship with but the deeply buried teenage part of me is terrifyingly attracted to that bad boy persona.

What is it about the words "...didn't quite catch your name..." in Sin Sin Sin which makes me go a bit light headed? Possibly the fact I've never actually had a one night stand and the idea of such an experience is both revolting and intoxicating.

Everything about him takes me back to early high school. I was rebelling, I was discovering the world of punk and I was madly in lust with Dean (aka Fang). He was a friend of a friend, freshly released from a stint in Minda (a notorious Sydney juvenille detention centre) where he had been placed by his mother for being "uncontrollable" (they didn't have ADHD medication in the early 80s). It was a brief but passionate affair, a centre-of-the-universe type of affair as only 14 year olds can participate in. He was a very bad boy, he was very bad for me but I wouldn't give up those bittersweet memories for anything... well, possibly a night with Robbie (as long as it was OK with my husband and I could get a babysitter for the kids).

Oh the joy of the Sydney Festival. Each year it brings a wonderous array of musical, stage and performance artists to our glorious city from distant parts of the world. Some are fabulous, some are interesting and most are plainly unintelligible gibberish, Emperor's new clothes style. This year's treasurers (tix booked) are:

* Lou Reed's Berlin. This is a live performance of his 1973 concept album. I'm not a huge fan of Lou's but it's the draw of Antony (of the Johnsons) on backup vocals which has me forking out $120 per ticket. I know... but I'm mad about him.

* Three tickets for Madeleine Peyroux. My dad loves her, put me onto her and my sister and I are taking him as a belated birthday present. This woman is gorgeous and her vintage jazz sound is mesmerising. Can't wait to see her live.

* I'm your man. This is the documentary of the Came So Far For Beauty tribute to Leonard Cohen concert which changed my life almost two years ago (see reference to Antony above). I'm going to drag everyone I know to this film - I went to the concert alone and had to suffer all that joy and wonder all by myself. I am dying to share the magic with the nearest and dearest.