Bumbags and Bowler Hats

zoefoster: Dear Gifs of Ellie and Carl from Up, Ohhhh… I never...

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 10:00:16 -0400

Dear Gifs of Ellie and Carl from Up,

Ohhhh… I never noticed it was the same church.

And how come you’ve made me tear up when you’re just a couple of stupid Gifs? Cut it out.

From your friend,

Zoe

Oh …. oh the tears.

Photo

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 07:43:01 -0400

So this is a young Colin Firth. HOLY ACTUAL GOD.

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 06:09:28 -0500

So this is a young Colin Firth.

HOLY ACTUAL GOD.

theambiguityreport: sans-pants: sans-pants: HOLY FUCKING...

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 16:38:00 -0500

theambiguityreport:

sans-pants:

sans-pants:

HOLY FUCKING GOAT’S PISS

(I’ve watched this seven times in a row - still laughing)

Look I posted this late last night and I really wish you’d all watch it and comment on how hilarious it is for crying out loud hurry up.

This might be everything it is to be Australian in one video.

Thank you new go-to phrase for when everything’s going to shit. Thank you.

thefrogman: I don’t know how to goat. But I’m...

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 20:07:03 -0500

thefrogman:

I don’t know how to goat. But I’m learning.

[video]

One does not simply walk into Morderp.

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 23:24:00 -0500

One does not simply walk into Morderp.

Photo

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 19:50:29 -0500

buzzfeed: This is the most important thing that’s ever happened...

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 22:06:48 -0500

buzzfeed:

This is the most important thing that’s ever happened in history.

Why yes this has made my life, thank you for asking.

bgospelm: Excuse me, Miss. My eyes are up here. By far the...

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 01:29:02 -0500

bgospelm:

Excuse me, Miss. My eyes are up here.

By far the best visual representation of my past four months in Melbourne. God bless you beardy menfolk.

thefrogman: [video] This is as close as I’ll ever get...

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 19:50:00 -0500

thefrogman:

[video]

This is as close as I’ll ever get to a perfect representation of me, day two of Meredith Music Festival.

I heard this at 2am New Year’s Day and I’m already...

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 01:18:00 -0500

I heard this at 2am New Year’s Day and I’m already up to 18 listens.

I can also smell burning.

I don’t know if the two are related.

Ways I Can Tell You're A Fuckwit:

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 22:32:14 -0500

clambistro:

You’ve made “jokes” about Sarah Jessica Parker looking like “a horse”, or,

You’ve speculated about Hugh Jackman’s sexuality because he’s married to Deborrah Lee Furness

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

I heart Melbourne Music Week.

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 01:49:24 -0500

I heart Melbourne Music Week.

Thom Yorke dancing is best dancing of all

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 01:31:49 -0500

jodymacgregor:

Well done, internet. You can rest now, your work’s complete.

I want to live inside this gif.

Whatever has become of the Melbourne Cup?

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 23:13:47 -0500

Cup Day was mostly a strange time in my former workplace. Just me and the boss. Neither of us doing anything for the race itself. Not much point holding a sweep when there were only two people. It was actually a pleasant day to be in the office. No one called. No one bothered to email. The roads and cafes downstairs were quiet. Usually at around one o’clock each year the boss said the obligatory yet half-hearted “you know you can go to the pub or lunch if you want?” It was less of a question, more of a confused offering. I would decline. Sometimes we’d switch on the television because we felt that we should. We would pick a horse halfway through the race, argue the merits of foreign imports, watch them finish, sigh and then turn the box off and go back to the day’s offerings. It wasn’t always like this. I so used to enjoy my race days.

I still have a photo of the first day I went to the track at Clifford Park in my home town of Toowoomba. Three years old, wearing a red jumper, denim tunic and a jaunty, knitted red beret. This was a change from my usual “dressed-up” attire of underpants and a sheet. My grandmother took photos and joked with little me to “be a model”. I didn’t actually know what a model was. Looking at the pictures, with my chubby little hands on pale cheeks sporting an expression best described as amusingly bewildered, I’m not entirely sure Grandma knew what one was either. My child modeling career it seemed, was not due to take off anytime soon. My fashion sense though, well damn that was impeccable.

My father had a love for the races and would often tell me stories of the great rides and the even greater horses. He took us to the big city of Brisbane one year to see Kingston Town race. I was so excited. I mean I didn’t have a clue which horse it was but by god I was excited. I wore a little tartan kilt. I don’t know why I remember the tartan kilt and not the horse. Most visits to the track saw us walk around the stables between races – you were allowed to do that then. I would wave like demented little thing at the stable hands and trainers, and dream that once, just once, they’d see me staring adoringly at the horses and pluck me out from the wandering punters to come and help them out. It appears that even then my hopes were endearingly unrealistic.

We’d study the form guide together, Dad and I. I learnt what all the little numbers at the side meant. I remembered jockeys’ names and trainers’ wins. We’d pick the winners and work out the configurations of the trifectas and trebles … and then inevitably just put the same bet on every week. 2-1-4 and 6-1-5. My birth date and my birth weight. From memory, the only time the numbers came up was when we didn’t put any money down. It became somewhat of a family tradition. Not winning money that is.

In primary school we were mustered into the library to watch the race on the shitty paleolithic television. Disguised as a “treat” for the students, I’m fairly certain it was just so the teachers could watch both the race and, ultimately, their money disappear. We’d sometimes have little pretend sweepstakes which I guess for a bunch of idiotic eight year olds was equal parts impossibly cute and a totally shambolic attempt at gambling. My dad would usually put a bet on for me - my whopping $2 very well spent on a horse I’d spent hours picking. Meanwhile watching it later that night on the news my paternal Grandmother would yell “hit him, hit him, go on! Hit him you cruel bastard!” and then mutter about it being a terrible sport. Even at that age I marvelled at the fact that all three of us could possibly be related.

In 1983 Kiwi, a majestic horse from New Zealand, won in what many consider to be the finest finish in cup history. Ridden by the great Jim Cassidy, he was second last coming into the straight. An outsider. A horse bought originally for $1000 to round up sheep on a farm. No one, I mean no one saw him coming, not even the race caller. I still remember the roar as the stunned caller bellowed “and here comes Kiwi out of the blue!”. A library room full of eight to ten year olds went utterly berserk and it was the first time I shed real joy-tears watching a horserace, or any sport for that matter.

For days, weeks, months afterwards I would make my Grandfather re-enact the race, with him pretending to be the ever-forgotten horse in front while I was, of course, Kiwi. This is a man who came from a large, poor Irish family. Fought in the war. Worked in factories. Had large hands and larger ears. The least likely person you’d ever find playing “pretends” with a deluded nine year old granddaughter who thought she was a horse and/or a jockey. But if Pa and I had one thing in common it was an equally prolific, equally vivid imagination. Again and again in the dry Toowoomba heat he’d run around the side of little weatherboard Queenslander while I’d come tearing around behind him yelling “HERE COMES KIWI! HERE COMES KIWI!” and run as fast as my scrawny, disproportionately long yet highly ineffectual legs would carry me - which wasn’t very fast - always but always pipping him at the post. The post being the garishly painted-concrete and wrought iron front patio. Christ knows what the neighbours thought we were doing, but I guess it made a change from when we tried to make home brew and all the bottles exploded in the shed.

At ten years old I made the bold decision that I too was going to be a Melbourne Cup winning jockey. Bless my family for never pointing out that even at that age I was already too tall to be a jockey … and also the small, marginally significant fact that I’d never touched, much less sat on an actual horse.

My parents finally caved to my begging and allowed me do horse-riding lessons and even went so far as to join me. Pony club this was not. Waddling through lantana strewn trails in old clothes it most definitely was. My first lesson saw my cry. Not a little bit, oh no. Hysterically. Wholly. Vomitously wailing from total and utter fear. Horses move. Did you know that? They’re big and they move and they run up hills and they don’t really listen to distraught, shrieking ten year olds. This was nothing like the Melbourne goddam Cup, this was paralysingly terrifying.

But eventually I stopped screaming and started enjoying myself. I even tried jumping once. I tried. The horse went hell for leather at the fence, then baulked in front and casually bent down to eat some grass. I kept going right over the top of that damn animal and landed like a lost soccer ball right smack in the middle of a lantana bush. Now I don’t actually know what a horse’s laugh sounds like but I’m pretty sure I heard it that day.

When I was 11 I finally got my first pony. His name was Pee Wee and, like all the Ryan family pets, he was completely, utterly, gloriously insane. Pee Wee was 12 years old, about 4 foot high and had two speeds: Not going anywhere, at all, ever, or flat out, ears pinned back and bucking the rider at the first chance. God I loved him. He hated everyone but he seemed to have a slightly less intense hate for me. He only threw me twice and then gave up (the latter nearly ending in a near broken tailbone but after a chat and some shared arrowroot biscuits we moved past that).

By this stage we had moved to a little farm and I would often pretend Pee Wee and I were winning the Cup. I didn’t have any brothers or sisters and lived a forty minute drive from my nearest friend, so other participants in the imaginary race were usually the dog, Goatee the overly aggressive goat that despised me in a way that no goat should, and the gay, special needs rooster. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way. Rambo was gay - his fascination for Handsome, the other rooster went beyond normal rooster hang outs while he looked at the chickens with barely-hidden contempt - and his comb hung over one of his eyes so he ran around everywhere with his head sideways. He’d often escape from the chookpen in the top paddock, and yet always run directly into our garden where he’d get chased by the dalmation, Willie - yes, I had naming rights to all of our pets - usually with Mum and I running after both of them screaming. At least once a week Rambo would get his head stuck in a margarine container that held the chook food and spent twenty to thirty minutes running around frantically squawking with a little Meadow Lea helmet. We also inherited two other horses called Chub and Drum. Their names were fitting. So they were our imaginary Melbourne Cup competitors.

They weren’t much competition.

Eventually I grew out of my pony phase as young girls do. For one thing, I’d seen Top Gun and decided it was my destiny to become a fighter pilot. Then at sixteen, we moved back into town, away from the animals, my Melbourne Cup dreams all but hazy memory.

Look, I’m sure things weren’t as innocuously sweet as they seemed back way back when. But there seemed to be a bit more class, a bit more decorum, a heady excitement when people went to the races to … actually watch the races. Or maybe spray tans just hadn’t been invented. We weren’t looking at everything through violently orange tinted glasses.

Now I walk around my neighbourhood on Cup day and by 6pm there are already women stumbling down the street with stilettos in hand. Men, scoffing kebabs and spewing vitriol about the lack of “fuckin hot chicks aroun’ here ay”. Sir, your face is the garish shade of an organic tomato and you smell of four-days-in-the-sun portaloo. You’ve lost your tie, if you ever started with one at all. Your suit is so cheap as to have its own glaring sheen and you’re wearing sunglasses that should not be seen unless big game fishing - I assume you probably like big game fishing. AND you’re wearing them on the back of your redder than red neck. I cannot begin to fathom what use sunglasses could be to you back there. Sir, if you haven’t pulled “a hot chick” by now, then I have serious doubts your luck today will change.

The news stories are no longer those of trainers and jockeys, but of imported actors and hot-by-god-knows-what celebrities flown in to stand in various sponsor’s marquees and have photos taken with someone who was once on a show about a thing. Television personalities the shade of radiation attach menageries to their scalps and do their darndest to make best-dressed lists. I get the feeling if someone told them there was a horserace on they’d presumably right up and shit their hyper-coiffed selves.

The romanticism, if there ever was such a thing, has waned. No longer does the race evoke tears as the outsider comes from second to last to win. No longer does the old hatted bookie in the betting ring scribble unintelligible babble onto a scrap of paper as you hand over your scraps of money. Cheap champagne and even cheaper shoes seem but a world away from a grandfather tenderly showing his wide-eyed little girl around a stable yard.

The Sport of Kings? Perhaps not. But I know that for but a few moments in 1985, Peewee, our veritable zoo of stupidity and I were champions.

Photo

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 00:59:25 -0500

becks28nz: Doctor Who: P.S. (The Finale of The Ponds!) Find out...

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 21:50:01 -0400

becks28nz:

Doctor Who: P.S.

(The Finale of The Ponds!)

Find out what happened to Rory’s dad and the Ponds in this unshot scene by Chris Chibnall.

Oh the tears, the wailing, howling tears.

clambistro: Thank you to all the young people making “jokes” about Neil Armstrong, you have...

Sat, 25 Aug 2012 20:44:15 -0400

clambistro:

Thank you to all the young people making “jokes” about Neil Armstrong, you have confirmed your generation is doomed.

Summing up my feelings quite nicely.

They should give out medals for spectating. This guy should get...

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 02:29:12 -0400

They should give out medals for spectating.

This guy should get them all.

WHEN I START DRINKING TO WATCH THE OLYMPICS.

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 02:55:00 -0400

wheninmelb:

AND THEN I REALISE THE TIME DIFFERENCE FOR THE EXCITING MEDAL EVEVTS:

This neatly sums up the past four weeks of my life.