Created by deviant artist Begemott.

Isn’t it lovely? If I play it back to him during a shouting spell he calms right down instantly, but only for the duration of the track. I may have to record an album and turn him into a gazillionnaire.

I created the file using the ‘LaDiDa’ app(lication) for the iPhone. Sorry. I’m aware that last sentence made me sound like a tosser, but technology does have its perks.

-The Labyrinth of Genre

-Floaty-mouse images of Dublin City in June 1961 and June 2011, a then-and-now sort of collection. Look at all the dinky cars! (Stolen from Jo :)

This is what real love looks like.

-US Actress Tina Fey’s ‘A Mother’s Prayer for Her Child’; it’s as though she’s inside my head.

-10 Words You Need To Stop Misspelling Read these, and write them out twenty times, you naughty children!

-How to make a gift box out of a bank note. For when you couldn’t be arsed buying that voucher.

-Arty Bollocks Generator because everybody needs an artist statement!

Oh, and a creepy picture by Lori Nix. Click the image to magnifify it.

Melissa Hayward, a model with an eye for funk recently adopted a Basset Hound from this crowd and was so impressed, she took it upon herself to create a charity calendar to raise funds for the rescue centre.

And create one she did! It’s so stylish… flourishes of retro flood the pages in high intensity colours that demand a first glance, then a second as the quirky sense of humour sneaked into the pictures hits you.

I would personally love to hang this calendar in my livingroom, but if I did, I have a feeling that my husband might object despite all the scantily clad women knocking about.

“Why on earth would he object to scantily clad women?!?” I hear you ask? Well, he’s not the only one. Pet shops have refused to stock it, and twelve of its backers have pulled out of the project in disgust. Even local TV vet Pete Wedderburn appeared to have difficulty holding his cereal down, labelling the calendar ‘distasteful’ and ‘entirely wrong’.

March. Marching orders, more like…:

There. You’ve seen it. Are you all okay? Anyone in need of defibrillators out there? Jeez. Yes, the puppy is apparently suckling the model’s boob. But isn’t it cute and yet confusingly sexy?!? Doesn’t that show overtones of nurturing associated with the rescue centre, or is this just plain old animal torture? The model doesn’t think so, Agata’s a follower of PETA and is well used to their extreme advertising… apparently the Irish just aren’t ready for it yet though. (Down with this sort of thing!!!) The Daily Mail had a field-day with it, but still published all the pictures, hey.

Co-creator Adelheid Walsh is quoted as saying: ‘We were left really frustrated and in floods of tears because we had all worked for hundreds of hours on this and for free because we wanted to help an animal charity. Then we have people dropping off from the campaign and feminists telling us we are degrading women – we are not.’

Ash themselves refuse to apologise, their spokeswoman Helena Le Mahieu states: ‘The cause is more important. It’s a beautiful calendar and the picture is very tasteful. People should get over the minor details like this and get behind this calendar.’

It leads me to wonder… is it animal cruelty that’s taboo here, or breastfeeding? Either way I find it pretty fascinating and encourage all animal-loving, quirk-searching charity enthusiasts out there to buy a copy. It’s such an excellent cause, not to mention a pretty excellent conversation starter. What do you think?

Click here to buy :)

I thought about making something chocolaty but given that I’m pregnant, it turns out there isn’t an ounce of the stuff left in the whole house.  I thought about glueing eggshells back together but eggshells are flaky things and refuse to stay in tact under the pressure of a five-year-old’s grasp.  I’d hard-boil them, but hey, we’re in a recession.

It was Puppychild who suggested an Art Attack.  It’s one of her most favourite TV shows, bar Supernanny and Spongebob Squarepants.  I showed her the website and guided her through its archives, asking her to pick an art project to do.  I expected her to choose something involving fairies or fashion or something pink at least, but no.

She chose the severed hand.

How to make a severed hand that can be brought to school and cause teacher to question whether social services needs to be called or not.

I’m so delighted she’s inherited my sense of the macabre.  TAT objected that this art project isn’t exactly Easter related but I disagreed… it does have loose connections to the theme of resurrection, if you think about it.

Then I had a brain fart, inspired by a coffee shop I used to visit a lot in Blackrock shopping center which was plastered floor to ceiling with old musical manuscripts.

Ok so I probably should have screwed the doors back on before showing it off, but you get the idea.

This is how I did it:

- First I downloaded some free piano sheet music here, and printed it off onto extremely cheap printer paper (the more absorbent the better)

- Then I found a large tray and added two kettles-full of boiling water to about six teabags (including raspberry tea for interesting colour).  The printed manuscripts went into this massive brew to soak overnight; I sprinkled a few teaspoons of instant coffee between layers to add interesting speckling.

- The next morning I heated the oven to its max, and began to dry each sheet individually for about a minute per sheet (this part requires intense babysitting obviously) until I was left with a stack of crispy, slightly burnt paper that looked like it had just been rescued from a 200 year old vault.

- I then mixed some PVA glue with a little water, and plastered it to the surface with a wide paintbrush.  The bonus here is that PVA glue is waterproof, meaning that the finished plastered surface is washable and permanent, provided that an extra coat of PVA is applied to finish the effect.  Happily this doesn’t mean that the surface ends up glossy, but with a pretty nice textured matt effect instead.

While this whole ordeal is slightly labour intensive, it’s a heck of a lot cheaper than buying paint or wallpaper, and a lot less messy than applying same.

Thanks to Chaplin’s (ex) coffee shop for the inspiration, and to Art Attack for glue enlightenment.

]]> http://www.cackaloo.com/2009/08/14/how-k8-got-her-groove-bach/feed/ 16 http://www.cackaloo.com/2009/03/15/revenge-of-the-mutated-gunge/ http://www.cackaloo.com/2009/03/15/revenge-of-the-mutated-gunge/#comments Sun, 15 Mar 2009 22:25:31 +0000 K8 http://www.cackaloo.com/?p=1174 Being a mother is not a glamorous thing by a long shot.

Laughingboy has issues with his lungs but he rarely complains about it.  Instead, from time to time he’ll develop a nasty pool of mucus in there and will begin to choke on it in a pretty alarming way.  Most of the time he can handle it himself and will evict the gunge nicely onto his shirt-front, but occasionally he needs help.  That’s where the suction machine comes into play.

This is basically a pump which sucks mucous out of my son via a long tube, and deposits it into an airtight bucket.  It’s very loud and very scary to people who aren’t used to this sort of thing so it’s great for freaking out unwanted visitors and the like.  The problem is that because it’s generally used in panicked situations involving a choking child, I keep forgetting to empty it.

I used it today and noticed that the bucket was almost full to capacity and hadn’t been emptied in quite a few months.  It was sort of pulsating, much like the psycho-reactive goo as seen on Ghostbusters II, only it wasn’t pink, more of a brownish green sort of shade.  I’m picturing germs in there all swimming around smoking doobies and shagging like crazy and producing genetically superior germ children who in turn have done the same.  Generations of mutated gunge waiting for that special day when the bucket gets opened.  That day was today.

I popped the bucket open but the lid got stuck and the green and brown gunge sort of splattered on my hands and around the sink a little bit.  I emptied the rest down the toilet, and remembered with dismay as I flushed, that I probably should have put the toilet seat down.  Millions of teensy super-germs all over the place, floating around like all their Christmases have come at once.  I swear I heard them cheer as I inhaled them.

I washed the bathroom.  I showered.  I bathed the kids and bagged my clothes and then went to make dinner.

The reason I know that this bacteria is genetically superior, is that normal bacteria takes roughly twenty-four hours to incubate in the human body before first symptoms of illness begin to show but today, today they appeared within two hours.  I sneezed eight times in a row (all over the oven chips) and came damn close to Nirvana.  My throat closed and seems to have pulled the back of my eyeballs with it for they look like two piss-holes in the snow and are streaming uncontrollably.   My head hurts.  Oh how my head hurts.

I think I may have Bubonic Plague, but it could be my imagination playing tricks.  Either way, lesson learned.

Hypochondria by MichaelO

I don’t remember how I became so lucid!  There was nothing in between, no tunnels or white lights and definitely no Grandmother welcoming me into her open arms as I expected.  Those people must be starved of answers for that is not what death is like.  Unless… am I dead?  Maybe I’m not.  I feel a sudden want to be a wet dog at the beach, to send a flurry of shakes throughout my body and furiously flick away whatever is causing this fuzzy strangeness but I can’t, and instead it clogs my mind so that I can’t think straight.

Slap slap slap… my bare feet on linoleum… I’m walking through a corridor that smells of uric acid and tumble-dried cotton, a corridor that could use an open window to breeze away the heavy stuffy fug that amplifies the muffled sounds of swishing ventilators.  It’s oppressive.  The fact that I can feel that is good, right?  I’m so confused.  A nurse passes me and shivers.  She won’t look at me and I don’t want to talk to her, she has work to do and I seem to have no urgent agenda right now, anyway.  A buzzing exit sign that I have no interest in whatsoever passes me by.

A baby screams.

“200.  CLEAR!”

Where is that child?  It’s urgent cries tear through me.  It  makes me flinch and I yearn to pick it up and have it feel the warmth of my neck, I need to stop it from herniating itself, such violent cries should not be left untended… what the hell is wrong with that infant?   I pass doorways, dark rooms that seem like capsules of immune silence.  Sleeping souls oblivious to the suffering outside their rooms snore gently and beep contentedly.  The screaming gets louder as I find the room I’m searching for.

“300.  CLEAR!”

It’s empty.  I can’t believe this room is empty save for this poor child.  His blanket has tied itself in knots around his kicking ankles, his pillow sodden, its whiteness paling so bleakly against the furious redness of the small child’s cheeks.  As I reach toward him, I feel the change.  I feel the needle entering my arm and it’s so wonderfully exhilarating.  Beautiful and uncontrollable ecstasy rules my functions and I collapse into a nearby chair and my stomach distends but I care not a jot for the unborn child.  I feel like I’m dying all over again, but this is a living death, a torture of unheardof proportions.

“500.  CLEAR!”

A jolt of clarity awakens me and I sit up, the child is still there in front of me and still crying and I am infuriated with my lack of willpower to stay with it and so I stand with sudden urgency.  I reach out and touch the child whose skin is burning and itching from a rash of foreign cause and I feel its deep loneliness and needing.  I know now that there’s no mommy, that mommy has gone away, mommy was never there in the first place.  The baby’s need is so urgent that I can feel it too, tears trickle down my cheeks as I grab the child with sudden urgency and squeeze it tight to my breast.  It’s ok now.  Every little thing’s gonna be alright.  Shush now.  Shushhh.

“700.  CLEAR!”

I feel the end.  My feet no longer touch the linoleum beneath as my weight shifts and a great racking breath leaves my soul, I’m plunged into newness and I care no longer for my car.

“Let it go… she’s gone.  Time of death, three fourteen a.m.”

The baby’s cries stop in a sudden vaccuum of inevitability and a peace falls upon its tortured soul, the heroin addiction no longer there.  It relaxes its clenched wrists and notices the lights above the door to its room and it gurgles with pleasure.  The baby sleeps, and wakes to a whole new dawn.

(Image from Glasseyalley.com – best Photo Blog, Irish Blog Awards ’09)

It’s a recognition I devised that’s different from the other awards fellow bloggers spin around, in that it’s not a meme.  It’s a button that you get just for you, just because you’re you.  You don’t get to pass it on and, (I’m looking at you, Maxi) you most definately cannot sell it.

This month’s winner of Dog’s bollocks of the month goes to:

Sam, Problemchildbride!

This is not just because of the quality of her content (which I’ll go into in a minute), but a lot of it has something to do with the new design… a combination of the colour and the desolate but slightly cheeky banner has me feeling like I’m under a duvet with a torch reading on the sly.

As for the content… well, you most likely all know her by now.  I’m a huge fan of the unusual, and you can’t get much more unusual than this- her fiction lures you into a false sense of security and then slaps you with a wet fish across the face periodically.  It’s strange, it’s weird, it always has a moral in it somewhere, and I love it.

I offer for your reading amoozment:

The Gloomsome Tale Of Jed, Goat Of The Night ; a random work of fiction (it’s hard to choose just one) that seems to be an allegory of something else entirely, so much so that you might wish that all News items could be described like this. 

Short One Act Play Followed By In-Depth Analysis And Commentary ; This post makes me realize that I’m being a big fat whingeing cow when I’m thinking I’ve got nothing to write about… talk about conjuring up a mind bending post out of thin air?  Genius!

Telly ; A post about how Sam has forsaken Telly for the new media… pretty much like meself.  I commend you Sam on your resolution and clean break from the time-wasting slave box that is TV and your efforts to wean the ickle ones from its grasp.  That’s not easy.  I sympathise a lot.

Good on yeh, PCB!  There’s a pair of Dog’s bollocks winging their way to you by email so lettuce know if you got them safely!  Misdirected bollocks are a painful thing.