The Smurfs and Their Victimisation of Gargamel

With the new Smurfs movie out in cinemas I had to watch the old cartoons

again. Simply because I wanted to see how much Hollywood ruined the old cartoons.

Turns out that Hollywood can't ruin the old cartoons in any way.

And also, those smurfs aren't quite as innocent and pure and all things good as they'd have you believe. Yeah, they are actually nasty little blue demons whose only purpose in life seems to be to torment Gargamel.

It's not just Gargamel being the nasty evil wizard who just wants to cause trouble and mayhem just because he feels like. He is actually defending himself agains the smurfs, who are more than happy to make him suffer. Even when he's defenseless. Yes, that's right, I'm referring to the incident in the forest where the smurfs have just soundly beaten Gargamel and his cat and trapped him in the tree. Papa smurf then steps forward saying something along the lines how Gargamel isn't sorry yet.

I simply assumed that Gargamel didn't stand a chance against the smurfs because he was fighting them on their home turf in the forest, and that taking the smurfs out of the forest would only help improve Gargamel's chances against them. At the very least, it might take away some of the magic and strength that the smurfs seems to draw from the forest.

But after seeing some clips of the smurfs movie, I very much doubt that Gargamel will at last be vindicated and defeated them. It still looks as though they're still drawing strength from somewhere. Possibly leeching it from all of the unwary people of New York.

Or maybe Papa Smurf has cast some voodoo witch craft spell that manipulates steals all of Gargamel's good luck and/or fortune and Gargamel himself gets stuck with all of the bad luck/fortune.

Whatever those smurfs are doing, it's clearly evil nasty shenaningans that they want to keep secret so that the world hates Gargamel, and won't think anything of it when his body washes up on some remate river bank.

$#@!%$ #@!$%#@$ $%%$#@ That Hurt!

You know what they need to invent?

Super sticky band aids that don't move specifically to protect against blisters.

I have never experienced worse pain than peeling the sticky part of the band aid off my very worn and burst blister.

Well, I guess breaking my bone hurt more ... oh wait. That's right! I'm amazing and have never broken any of my bones!

But now that I think about it, I have experienced worse pain than peeling the sticky part of the band aid off raw, sensitive skin;

There was the time on Res when I tripped and fell and banged my knee against a rock. While my tights were all super hero (I was dressed up as a super hero at the time of the fall) and didn't rip, my knee wasn't quite so super hero, and I only realised just how bad it was the next morning when I woke myself up by kneeing the brick wall next to my bed. Actually, that's when I first realised that I had, indeed, ripped open my knee. I had simply assumed that because my tights hadn't torn, my knee hadn't either.

How wrong I was.

Then there was also the time when, as a small child, I burnt my bare buttocks on one of those wood heaters. I was fresh out of the bath too, which made the whole thing a hell of a lot worse. That was a very painful experience, and I still can't watch The Little Mermaid without memories of that horrible night (I was allowed to stay up and watch The Little Mermaid because of my injury ... actually I think that night's dinner plans were scrapped because of that incident.

All the same, peeling the sticky part of band aids off raw, sensitive skin hurts! Like, really hurts. They really do need to make specially blisters on your feet band aids that don't get moved around by shoes during the day.

I'd put my hand up to create such an amazing thing. But, well, that requires a grasp of science that I quite frankly do not possess.

My Day 21/09/11

I must admit that last night things weren't boding well for me; I was facing a day of limping around, trying not to make my blisters worse and the fact that I ate under cooked chicken for dinner (and I still resisted the urge to throw up when I realised this. Apparently risking food poisoning during a job interview is more preferable). Plus the fact that the job I was going for required me to have a passport.

But it turns out that all that worrying last night was pointless; I got band aides and wore thick socks, and eating the under cooked chicken didn't have any ill effects on me. I didn't magically get a passport over night. The power of wishful thinking really isn't that great. Wish it was, though.

Not that it matters now.

I didn't get the job with MAM/Qantas.

I don't actually know what they were looking for. I was bright and bubbly and put myself out of my comfort zone ... actually not really. For that to be really true I would've been a conversation starter. Not a conversation joiner, which is super eay to do in the group interview setting. Although, I did volunteer to be the group speaker for one of the activities. I never do that. I sit back and let someone else volunteer. So I did put myself out of my comfort zone!

The only thing that really could've brought me down was my humour. I think it may have been a little too dark (and possibly sadistic) for what they were looking for in potential cabin crew members.

But the people I was having lunch with when I got the "Go home. We don't want you message" all got the same message and a couple of them were in one of my groups at one time or another, and they all showed bright, bubbly, outgoing personalities that all good cabin crew members should have without any signs of dark humour.

I'd say our written responses let us down. But we all got the messages too soon after being let out to lunch for the written responses to have been read.

So that meant I got to head home a few hours earlier than planned (no walking home from the station in the dark for me!). That meant that Vline disrupted my musings as I tried to figure out where I went wrong in the interview.

Honestly I don't know what the Vline employees were seeing! Whatever they were seeing wasn't visible to us lowly, unSighted passengers, which made their constant nagging announcements about not boarding the train until instructed when no one could be seen trying to do just that annoying and confusing.

I can only conclude that part of the job requirement for Vline is to have the Sight so that those sneaky ghosts and apparitions can't sneak on board and avoid paying for a ticket.

I guess that's why there's a gnome who drank too much Skele-Gro has a child working for Vline.

Bad Weather

My walk today led me past the skate park. Actually I usually walk past the skate park. It's a rare walk that doesn't go past the skate park. The point is that the skate park usually has people skating on it. Unless it's very early in the morning, it usually doesn't matter what time it is, there'll inevitably be at least one skater.

Unless, of course, the weather is bad. Apparently skaters are like tradies; they don't come out and do their thing if there's the slightest hint of bad weather.

I guess when they weather is bad, the skaters prefer to do things like work or go to school or simply just stay at home and play skate video games.

Interview in the Morning

Tomorrow I have an interview for a job. The interview is all the way in Melbourne, which means that I have to get up nice and early to be there at 8:30am.

That's going to be a nasty shock to my system, seeing how I'm so not a morning person and probably won't be able to get to sleep until a couple of hours before I'm supposed to be at the train station.

But nonetheless, this isn't causing me any undue concern.

I function pretty well on no sleep ... and I usually function a hell of a lot better on no sleep than I do with little sleep. So I'm seriously considering just staying up all night and when it gets close to getting ready time, I'll just pep myself up on coffee.

I'd take sleeping pills, but I'm pretty sure they're placebos; they don't actually do anything to help me get to sleep.

But anyways, considering the ungodliness of the hour that I have to leave for the train station, I decided to show some forethought and look up the venue today so I know how far away it is from Spencer St (turns out two blocks).

Naturally I used Google Maps for this so that it could clearly highlight my destination on the map for me. It left me wondering why does Google Maps always insist on giving you directions for the most convoluted way there? Why can't it just give you directions for the most direct route?

I know this is a bad example, considering how short my trip is, but ...

When I could easily walk up Colins St!

How much easier is that?

So now that I have simplified my walk to the interview, I'm basically all set for the interview tomorrow, sleep or no sleep!

Hooray!

The Dangers of Living in Suburbia

If rewatching season one of Desperate Housewives has taught me anything (besides I watched a lot more of it on TV than I thought) is that suburbia seems to be one of the most dangerous places to live.

Ok, well, that may be a slight exaggeration. It's not like people were breaking into their houses every other week and murdering the inhabitants of Wisteria Lane ... hmmm.

So there were break ins every other week. And there were even a couple of attacks as well. But this was mostly done by the lovely, righteous people of Wisteria Lane.

Suburbia isn't as safe as people like to believe it is!

It seems that people in suburbia have to lock all of their doors and windows, and even that's not quite enough to prevent nosey neighbours breaking in and snooping around. It's a good thing that most of the time they intruders are only after some juicy piece of gossip to share with their neighbours.

Now I don't exactly live in a fantastic part of town (I'm pretty sure there's a gang hq nearby). And yet, I don't really feel the need to tightly lock up the house with motion activated laser guns all over the house. And yet, there has been no break in ... as far as I know. Maybe there was a break in by a nosey neighbour who wanted something to gossip about.

Maybe it's Hollywood exaggerating the rate of break ins in suburbia. Or maybe Hollywood isn't. All I know is that suburbia is a dangerous place to live, which Desperate Housewives clearly shows.

Last Night's Dream

Donna, Eric, Jackie and Fez were at a theme park, arguing about what ride they should go on next. They couldn't decide, so they decided to go to the beach and sit in the waves.

The surf was actually really strong, and required a lot of attention to avoid being knocked over and swept away.

Some celebrity chef and I joined them and looked out across the coast line. The celebrity chef kept suggesting how perfect all of the waves were. He clearly didn't know how to spot a rip. He kept on yammering about the whole thing and refused to listen to us when we kept trying to point out one of the multiple rips that were easily visible.

Just to get away from him I suggested that we go on the roller coaster, which, for some reason, required us to wade through the surf and around the bluff to get to the line for the roller coaster.

The roller coaster ride took us out to an island. Halfway there, we got thrown out of the roller coaster when it hit a sandbar and broke.

We swam the rest of the way to the island and found ourselves at Hogwarts. Naturally this meant that we had to explore the castle, which we did.

At some point we heard some loud bangs and the castle walls started to shake a bit. But we just ignored it and continued exploring. I ended up on the athletics field, checking out some of the old tin sheds. It was the smoke that alerted me to the danger.

I raced back to the castle to find the others and warn them. I found Fez lying on the floor of a room filled with mechanical gears and clogs.

We couldn't find the others, or a way out of the castle for that matter. We were starting to get really worried when we heard Eric shouting at us. He, Donna and Jackie had made a hole in the wall for us to wriggle through.

From then on it became a race against the lava to get off the island. It wasn't easy. Most of the castle was crumbling down around us. But somehow we managed to get out off the island and float safely back to the mainland where we had a prefect view of the island quickly disappear in a hot red, steamy lava-ee mess.

From the mainland the island didn't look big enough to have a house on it, let alone Hogwarts castle with a couple of massive athletic fields.