I'm Sold!

I am female. As such, I am a member of a group that makes up 50% of the population, and 80% of the nation’s purchasing decisions.*

I pondered these things as I watched an ad for Virgin Mobile during a break in The Simpsons last night . It seems that the fine folk at Virgin have been advised by their marketing people that showing me a pint-sized rapper surrounded by his bikini-clad ho’s rubbing their tits on the camera was inducement to purchase their latest mobile phone plan.

The Virgin Mobile ad - reach for your purses, ladies!

I don’t doubt that Virgin, being a large and successful international company, have done their research. If anyone could confidently assure you that a bunch of skinny chicks, droolingly randy, wearing slingshots and grinding their bums with the urgency of a dog with worms are going to make me their latest customer, it’s Virgin. I defer to their experience in these matters.

And while we're on the subject: it’s common knowledge that we ladies prefer West Coast Coolers to beer (…but don’t forget the straw! I won’t bag a husband with daggy lippy!). So when I saw an ad for a new beer at the bus stop telling me that It’s like finding out that Claudia Schiffer has a twin sister, I could see the wisdom in it: the only women who drink beer are nasty, hairy bull-dykes, so they had all their demographic covered with that one simple statement. Clever, huh?

But friends, I have a confession. Recently, when Heaven advertised their ice cream range with an image of a nubile miss bathing in chocolate and fellating an ice cream bar with a come-hither look, well… I dropped what I was doing and bought them in twos! Honest!

So, sisters, get with the programme. When a semi-clad woman is licking her glossy lips over the top of her pneumatic breasts on a billboard, she’s leering at YOU; not the randy-pants sixteen-year-old boy sitting next to you at the bus stop; not the frustrated and lonely middle-aged executive clawing at his bits in the car next to you at the lights. You. The advertisers know you hold the purse strings... so they must be talking to you. Mustn’t they?



* According to a Harris Interactive study, women control 75 percent of household finances and 80 percent of purchasing decisions.

Do the Op Shop Hop

As you may know, I am planning to head overseas soon *. I’ve always been a bit of an itchy-foot, and trial-and-error has settled me into a way of travel that sits very comfortably with me. Apart from all of the smaller details, such as packing a variety of comforts for the road, I find one of the most useful things to pack is a theme.

By trying to cram every must see attraction into a journey it ends up becoming an arduous checklist of obligations; somewhat less romantic than the free and joyful experience you saw when you were staring at the wall cobbling the plan together. By travelling by theme you can be more selective; you can see things that you would have missed out on had you simply taken the well-worn tourist path; understand a particular aspect of how the local people live their daily lives; taste the grassroots essence of a place. So, after some discussion with my travelling companion of this journey, Mr T, the theme is going to be op shopping**.

Now op shopping is no great leap of imagination for Mr T and I, granted; it’s been a way of life for me for twenty years or so now. Mr T and I have whiled away many a happy day fossicking about in junk shops, trying on strange garments for the other’s amusement, speculating on the actual purpose of some obscure object. A grand day’s entertainment. I take enormous satisfaction in replying to a comment on a recent purchase with the boast, Thanks, yes, I got it from the op shop for $4, and glow smugly at the astonishment and the questions and hums of approval that follow. As fabulous as that is, it’s nothing compared to the thrill of the hunt itself.

Yes, thrill, I say!

Op shopping is hunting,
Op shopping is your history,
Op shopping is voyeurism,
Op shopping is pop culture,
Op shopping is giving to charity,
Op shopping is entertaining,
Op shopping is recycling,
Op shopping is avoiding middleclass sweatshop guilt,
Op shopping is sticking it to the fashion fascists,
Op shopping gives you objects with soul,
Op shopping stimulates the imagination,
Op shopping stimulates your memory,
Op shopping is cheap,
Op shopping is always surprising.

And what better way to come to know the psyche of the countries I’ll be visiting? What on earth will they have on their jumble sale stalls in Tokyo? What bizarre delights are waiting for me in the charity shops of Prague? And Moscow...? Red Square be damned when the city’s second-hand vendors have a cornucopia of the inane and the baffling, just waiting for Mr T and I to squeal over.

I can’t wait.

* Yes, I know I’ve been leaving “in six weeks” for the past six months, but, hey, I’m getting there. I have a passport with a bad photo and a visa and everything. Really.

** Previous travel themes I could recommend include:

Big Things

Gardens

Cliffs (in Southern Victoria)

Art Deco (in Perth)

Devonshire Tea

Architecture (anywhere except Hervey Bay)

If you voted Liberal...

Good old Redfern. Thanks to Pauline from Wandering at Large for sending me this.

Mr Sheen, oh Mr Sheen!

In my salad days, fresh and crisp and dew-picked as I was, nothing made me happier than my record collection. Like a dog at a barbeque I hunted around, scavenging rarities, independent pressings, oddities, then burrowed myself away for hours, fondling them, sorting them, loving them.

Before the wriggling joy of that crackle as the stylus hit the groove I would go through the set ritual: plastic sleeve off; outer sleeve off; inner sleeve off; a polish with a soft cloth – not to be used for anything else – and, if required, a squirt of Mr Sheen.

Mr Sheen is quite the thing for records. It reduces the static on the vinyl, making it attract less dust; but best of all, it can repair small scratches that cause a track to jump. An essential piece of kit for the vinyl enthusiast.

But time moves on, a CD player has replaced my old turntable, and my little bald friend sits despondently in the laundry cupboard, dreaming of better days. On the rare occasion that I have cause to clean-wax-and-polish-as-I-dust, the scent of Mr Sheen puts me into a glassy-eyed reverie. How upsetting, then, that when I see him he brings to mind John Howard.

Damn you John Howard!

My Mr Sheen wanted nothing more than to make my work-a-day life less arduous, more fulfilling. His wholesome aim was to make my chores quicker and easier, giving me more precious time to live my life to the fullest. The very thought of border protection would have furrowed his lovely brow! At the mere mention of selling our creative intellectual property to the Yanks he would have blushed and looked politely away! And children overboard, well… a Bex and a good lie down, nothing less.

All my years of neglect have made my bespectacled friend bitter. In the dark, shoved between the Brasso and the bleach, he has been grinding his teeth, thinking on what was, what might have been, and plotting his revenge. While I was off flirting with my CD burner he crept out of the cupboard and into parliament; twisted, nasty, hate-filled and hateful, vowing to destroy everything I stood for.

People of Australia – it's all my fault. Please forgive me.

Dateline:Loungeroom

Well, after wasting many days farting about with Dreamweaver, and a supposedly easy online web builder, I've given in and gone Blogger. The Dreamweaver site was real pretty, mind you, but the logistics of maintaining it on the road, sans my own computer, would have been ridiculous. So now I have one less excuse to not do my work. Ce la vie. (There's always eBay.)

We're coming up to election time now, and to my very great shame have not followed it very closely at all this time around. My one concession to the political junky I once was is that I've been checking the odds on Centrebet on a regular basis. A couple of weeks ago they had the Coalition at $1.40 to win, and Labor $2.60. Checking in today it's now Coalition $1.20 and Labor $4.00! Good grief, what's going on? Apparently, Centrebet have been fairly accurate in predicting the outcomes of past elections, so it looks like we're in for another four years of the lying midget. Why? Why?

Ah, Centrebet, how I've grown to love you. I'm not actually a punter myself, but by golly, it's interesting looking at what's available to enliven the pulse of the fiscally adventurous. Take the Nobel Peace Prize, for example. Bono is, apparently, more likely to take it out than Tony Blair, and only the churlish amongst us would fail to see the sport in laying a dollar down on Fidel Castro, with odds of 1001:1. Same odds, incidently, as Slobodan Milosevic, and twice those of Willie Nelson (huh?) at 501:1. And I'd always scuttled past the TAB, thinking it was for dull old brylcreemed men named Reg. Goes to show.