Evidence that redheads are awesome and should be kept in the gene pool.

Exhibit 1
Florence Welch (Florence + The Machine)


Exhibit 2
Tori Amos


Exhibit 3
Kate Miller Heidke


Exhibit 4
Nicole Kidman (Before she lost her facial expressions and tried her hand at singing properly, there was Practical Magic)


Exhibit 5
Josh Homme (Queens of the Stonage) - Lets not forget the men, shall we?


Other Notables: Julianne Moore, Shirley Manson, Alyson Hannigan, Gillian Anderson,Drew Barrymore
Those that should be stricken from the record: Lindsay Lohan, Reba MacIntire, Ginger Spice, Ron Howard (although he did make some pretty good movies)

I rest my case, your honour.

To Be Young

I want to get back to that feeling I had when I was younger. Freedom. We think there are all these barriers in front of the things we want when we are children; beauty, love, fame, fortune, knowledge, independence. But when we grow up, the barriers are still there, and we have grown, so we think that we can just leap over them, but what we don’t realise is that they have grown too, or they’ve transformed into something even harder to tackle. And we are so exhausted from being knocked back all the time because we were too young or too short or too weak or too stupid that we do not have the strength to climb over them or break them down. That is why I am lying here with my bare back against the threadbare floral carpet, listening to my father’s old Cat Stevens Records and trying to conjure up some feelings that were once sparked in my little body when his voice would float through our house like watery sunshine on a winter afternoon.
“If you want to sing out sing out./If you want to be free, be free./There’s a million things to be, you know that there are.”
I want to know when this ability he is singing of was taken from me and replaced with an entrapment by waves of guilt and sense of duty. There is no such thing as freedom in an urban life like mine, only it’s potential.

Recipe File No.2: Bananna Muffins

I have one word. Yum!

Ingrediants
1 tbsp of butter
2 cups of self raising flour
1/2 teaspoon of salt
2 teaspoons of baking powder
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon of ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon mixed spice
2 eggs
155ml milk
1 tbsp lemon juice (you can put this in but i didn't bother)
2 medium ripe bannanas mashed.

Method
Preheat oven to 230 degrees and grease the muffin pan.

Sift the flour, sugar, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg and mixed spice into a large mixing bowl and set aside.

In a medium sized bowl beat the egg with a wire wisk or beater until they are pale yellow. Add the remaining butter (don't worry about the curdling it will even out later), the milk and the lemon juice and stir well.

Stir the egg mixture into the flour mixture as quickly as possible, but don't overmix. Fold in the masked bannana

Divide the batter evenly between the holes in the prepared muffin pan. Place the pan in the centre of the oven and bake for 15 to 20 mins (15 was more than enough for mine, but it all depends on your oven i guess)

Remove the muffins from the oven and cool in the pan for about 4 mins before turning out.
Makes 12.

Soundtrack to making bannana muffins:
- Noah and the Whale
- Animal Collective
- Art vs. Science
- Florence + the Machine
- Lisa Mitchell
- Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros
- Slow Club
- Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Avatar

So I finally saw Avatar a couple of weeks ago (after everyone I knew, and even people I didn't know telling me how brilliant it was). I had meant to see it ages ago, for merely superficial reasons such as the people are a beautiful blue colour and "Pandora" looked like the Amazon if it had been cross-bred with a rave party.
However, I left the movie theatre, not only having enjoyed being transported into this mythical paradise and seeing lots of sam worthington (who is exceedingly delicious to look at - all fans should see the movie version of Macbeth, where an even younger, badder and more naked worthington spouts lines of Shakespeare (nerdgasm), but also feeling exceedingly guilty for the simple fact of being a a middle class caucasion female. Why? Because this movie (and it is sad that it took a movie like this to bring these issues to the very forefront of my concious mind, which before had been dominated by problems such as me being sunburnt, hungover and hating my job) highlighted the fact the we, as a collective species, are nothing more than a group of usurpering, planet pilliging land raping racist hypocrits who can't even follow our own social constructs. I am speaking particularly on behalf of my people, as a white, middle class generation Y indigo child pompous self absorbed ex student who always uses too many adjectives in her sentences, that we, in the past, present and probably the future, have treated other groups of people who have different cultures, social heirachies and general ways of life that may not make sense to us, like trash, by deeming them to be savage, ignorant, animalistic and thus unfit to be treated with the same land rights and even general rights that should be granted to human being as us. This is of course ridiculous; coming from a scientific perspective and having studied animals for the past three years, there are many ways in which animals are a lot smarter and more evolved than we human beings, and so the comparison isn't really fiting. Extinction for all species is clearly inevitable, if we look at the evolutionary time lines of our planet. We just seem to be speeding up the process.
Urgh hang on I'm getting off track.

Ok, thoughts recollected.

This is a very difficult line to tread for me without deeming myself to be a hypocrit (one of the biggest contradictions in my life is that I am a passionate animal lover yet I eat quite a lot of meat, which i would like to change, but I can't bring myself to enjoy eating vegetables and so am faced with starvation or, well, lamb). As someone I once knew said, "Everyone is a little bit racist" which I suppose is true, as most human being are brought up with predjudices against something that is foreign to them. I am no exception. I am just acknowledging that what has been done to indigenous communities in the past as a result of European colonisation, not just in Australia but around the world was a horrible mistake, and I will try my best to dissacociate myself from this as best I can by not letting natural prejudices affect my judgement and actions towards people.

All that from a James Cameron movie. Hmmm...a lot more successful than Titanic methinks. And I only wanted to gawk at the pretty blue people. Stupid brain.

Rant Over and Out.

We Dance Like Karen O

Because We're Dead

I would like very much for my life to be a Slow Club song. They are my new music fixation.

We went to their gig at the Empress (my new favourite venue for live music, assuming it doesn't get shut down by our ridiculously out of touch government) and it was brilliant, their harmonies were flawless and they were standing so close to us I could have reached out and touched them (sadly i don't think Charles would have reciprocated my affection). Anyway i could swoon on for a number of paragraphs but i think you should just listen to them. Go on. Do it.

Oh, and im also going to learn how to play the drums. Yeaah.

Recipe File of Delicious Baked Goodness

Baking is good for the soul and it cures my boredom. When I'm older, I'm going to have a book and music shop that serves delicious baked goods that I make myself. So I'm practicing, much to the delight of friends and family. Nom Nom Nom.

Raspberry and White Chocolate Scones

Ingrediants:
4 cups (600g) self raising flour
3 Tbsp icing sugar
60g butter
3/4 cup (180ml) water
1 1/2 cups (375ml) milk
1/ 1/2 cups of frozen raspberries
1 cup of white chocolate buttons

Method:
Preheat the oven to 200 degrees C and grease the pan

In a mixing bowl, combine the flour, icing sugar and using the tips of your fingers, rub the butter into the flower mixture until it forms a breadcrub like consistancy

Make a well in the flour mixture and pour in the water and milk. Use a knife to cut the water and milk into the flour mix, so it forms a sticky dough. Add the frozen raspberries.

On a well floured surface, knead the dough until nice and smooth. Using your fingers, press the dough out to about 2 to 3 hours thickness.

Dip a scone cutter into flour, and cut out as many scones as you can until there is no dough left.

Bake the scones for approx 15 mins until they are nicely browned. Serve with double cream and Raspberry Jam.

Makes 16 to 20

Lemon Chocolate Chip Cupcakes

125g butter, at room temperature
100g (1/2 cup) caster sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla essence
2 eggs
225g (1 1/2 cups) self-raising flour, sifted
2 tbs milk
95g (1/2 cup) Lemon Chocolate Buttons

Method:

Combine the sugar, flour, milk and vanilla essence in a mixing bowl and mix with an electric mixer until smooth (or by hand if you wanna build up your arm muscles haha)

Fold in the Chocolate chips and bake in a preheated oven at 190 degrees for approx 15 - 20 mins

Note: Keep an eye on these ones, the lemon buttons can sink and burn at the bottom, and make sure you used caster sugar (I used normal sugar and they were a bit crunch and burnt -_-)