How to make your 1980's hair 2015 bendy

Not to brag or anything, but in the 1980s I had perfect hair.

My hair is brown and wavy/curly and thick, and it just wants to grow OUT rather than down, so in its natural state it is like a messy, bouffy oval that reaches its widest point a few centimetres out from each ear, and sits just below shoulder-length.

As a child in the 70s, I wished I could replace my Shirley Temple curls with long straight hair and a fringe, but in the 80s my hair was excellent. I cut it short a couple of times, but mostly I wore it thick and shoulder-length, brushed to make it as soft and fuzzy as possible (like the novels I remember from that time that described the heroine's hair as like a 'soft cloud around her head' - that was a good thing. No anxiety over frizzy hair back then).

The hair goal of all teenage girls back then was this:

Rachel Hunter, 1985

The epitome of female beauty to me was Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone. Who I loved because she had hair just like mine. (And also my sunburned red nose, but that's where the similarity ended).

Alas, by the late nineties the tide had turned against thick curly hair. Even Julia Roberts and Cindy Crawford started straightening their hair.

My hair has always been difficult to straighten. Even when a hairdresser straightens it, it will start to kink by the time I get home, and by the next morning it's back to its messy, wavy self.

I came late to hair-straightening and never fully committed. Unless I wanted to stand in front of the bathroom mirror for an hour and a half with aching forearms, my hair sizzling and steaming under the irons in small sections at a time, and repeat this process every single morning, I was never going to achieve straight hair. I came to a compromise of running the straightening iron through sections around the front and the top and leaving the rest as is, which worked well enough.

But once I had kids and discovered the preciousness and rarity of free time, I lost all interest in spending even twenty minutes of it straightening my hair. It was the mid-2000s and my hair was definitely not correct.

That was a difficult decade for me, obviously.


Now, in my mid-forties in the mid-2010s, I am back to (mostly) loving my hair.  The aspirational hair texture these days is "bendy".  Bendy hair is shoulder-length or longer, often brown, and is supposed to look like soft, natural kink as if your hair does this naturally (but of course it doesn't)

You are supposed to secretly spend lots of time and dollars on conditioner and bendy rollers and curling irons to create this look, but here is how you can achieve it with next to no effort if you have my hair:

How to get 2015 bendy hair when your hair is from 1985:

1. Get regular haircuts (8 weeks max) so your hairdresser will at least somewhat remember what s/he did last time. This is important for curly-haired people as our hair quickly obliterates haircut shapes.
2. Colour your hair regularly to cover grey, obvs, but with the pleasant side effect that your wiry frizzy hair is rendered softer and glossier.
3. Wash your hair every two to three days. 
4. If you want massive, curly sticky-up hair, by all means wash it the night before work. But for better results, wash it in the morning and follow the rest of the steps below.

   

   Step 6

5. Shampoo and condition in the shower as normal. 
6. Blow-dry your hair until almost dry. It should look like you're a member of an 80s stadium rock band at this point.
7. Brush your hair out to remove tangles and curls.
8. Tie your hair behind your head into a pony-tail-bun thingy. A pony-tail-bun thingy is when you pull your hair through the first and second loop of a hair elastic as if you are going to do a pony tail, but then don't pull the hair all the way through on the last loop so that it looks a bit like a bun.
9. Spray your hair with just a bit of hairspray (not too much or you'll have to wash your hair every day).
10. Leave house for work or wherever.
11. As you walk into work/reach your destination, reach back and pull out the hair tie, and casually run your hands through your smooth, bendy hair.
12. The next day, brush your hair when you get up and repeat steps 8-12.
13. Enjoy your ongoing success!

Selfie. I somewhat resemble Rose Byrne

Colour

Of all the wonders of the world, colour is one of the most perplexing and amazing. All the wonders of the world are perplexing and amazing when you look at them, of course. But colour is one of those things - like music, like beauty - that sings to our senses and affects the way we feel.

Our favourite colours may be a mystery to other people. When someone says "blue" is their favourite colour, most people will nod and many will agree. When someone chooses "red" you may instantly form an opinion of that person's personality. (Or maybe that's just me?)

I remember when I was a kid asking my dad his favourite colour and he said "orange" and I was thunderstruck. Orange? Who would choose orange? Orange was the most jarring, thirsty colour there was and I hated it. I could not fathom that someone could ever have that as their favourite colour. I told my mother and she laughed - she could not understand it either.

Nowadays, I quite like orange, and have a lot of it in clothing and accessories. But I still remember the horror I had for it as a child. I equated it with Fanta: horrible, glaring, hot, thirst-inducing.

On the other hand my sister's favourite colour as a child was yellow, and that to me was a very suitable, happy colour. I also had a bright yellow transistor radio that I loved - perhaps this was before the onslaught of little-girl pink in all things?

My favourite colours have always been some shade of blue or green.  An image like this is like heaven to me:

blue green

I remember in primary school in L.A. in 1980, all the girls were into baby blue and lilac. I loved both colours but didn't feel I was worthy to share lilac with the popular girls (with their blonde hair, lipgloss, painted nails and beautiful clothes in pastel colours), so I stuck with baby blue.

I also adored - and still adore - mint and pale greens. I had a pale green gingham dress my mum made me which made me want to twirl and sing, and that mint green that was everywhere in the early eighties was one of my favourites. Just today at K-Mart I lobbied hard and unsuccessfully for one of my daughters to choose a gorgeous mint green shirt that took me right back to that time. (It should be sold with a Walkman).

Best eighties mint green

mint gingham

The late eighties didn't leave me unscarred, so for a short time my favourite colour was electric blue.

electric blue

In high school I ventured into darker colours. I was the proud collector of cool shirts in bright colours. My favourites were hot pink, teal, tourquoise, aqua and zambezi green.

teal

Zambezi was my declared favourite colour for a few years.

zambezi green car

In the early nineties I loved lime green and spring green - and I still love them (though no longer to wear). I do love my neon green Chux Super Wipes kitchen cloths!  (I alternate between the green and the blue)

My whole life I have also loved midnight navy: the inky colour of the sky after sunset. I had a beautiful dark navy satin shirt in the eighties (with a cowl neck and massive shoulder pads, of course) that I teamed with a grey-and-navy striped yoke skirt (calf-length, of course), and navy "court shoes" when I was feeling fancy.

glorious deep midnight navy

Growing up in Auckland, there was always the bay. Often it was glittery blue in the sunshine, but just as often it was dark and overcast, and I loved it best like that. My parents briefly had a holiday house in Pauanui on the Coromandel, where most times the beach was windswept and overcast. The stormy denim of the sea and sky of those memories is etched in my head, and my favourite colour of all time is probably a version of this.

Stormy Blue

What's your favourite colour? What memories does it evoke in you?

IMDB message boards (with movie spoilers)

One of the things I like to read on the internet is the message boards on IMDB. Sometimes there are very thoughtful and informative posts by serious film afficionados (who probably call themselves afficionados) which add something to my understanding of a film or TV series. Sometimes (wait, no, actually always) there are long diatribes about why the main female character is a selfish harridan who has horribly oppressed her poor male partner (ugh). And sometimes there are good questions and entertaining conversations between people with opposing views.

Here are some things I've watched recently and my favourite comments from the IMDB message boards.

This post has SPOILERS for all the movies included here, so read on forewarned!

Drag Me To Hell

Drag Me To Hell is a great horror-comedy about a loan officer whose hard-hearted business decision at work leads an old gypsy woman to curse her with three days of torment followed by being dragged to hell. Many of the message board discussions are around whether or not Christine deserved to be dragged to hell, for what she did, or the kind of person she is. Dragged to hell. For an eternity of pain and torment. I love the fact people think they can debate whether or not a person (any person?!) would deserve this.

Fair use rationale of movie posters: ditto

[The old woman who curses Christine] is an evil b!tch, and the fact that she happens to be old, sick, and poor doesn't change that. 

Christine is a vegetarian, which in my book earns her some points as a compassionate person. She kills her cat to try to appease the demon, hoping that she will be able to avoid spending eternity in Hell. I think that's totally understandable.

Why exactly did that old woman need a third extension on her mortgage? Isn't the whole point of being a gypsy means you're constantly on the move with no permanent roots?

In reply to an argument in a thread:
You are assuming that all demons behave the same way under all circumstances. 

Also opens up a side discussion on the merits of banks and capitalism generally, and the fairness or not of loan extensions.

The Walking Dead

I'm not a huge fan of The Walking Dead. I found the first episode absolutely compelling, but it kind of seems to be the same thing over and over again, and it doesn't really seem to be going anywhere. I watched Seasons 1 and 2 and felt I had probably got the idea.  But it's an interesting take on the zombie apocalypse and it's done the visuals and tropes a bit differently, so I still watch it occasionally.

One user review opines that this show is good because of character development (hmm, arguable), which is "not usually a very big trait in the Zombie genre."  Um, yes, that is true.

There is a question about why we don't see characters using bicycles more, which opened up a whole discussion about whether bikes or cars are better transport during a zombie apocalypse, including their merits with regard to fuel use, speed, dexterity, ability to use weapons while riding, conservation of fighting energy, etc.

There is a discussion about how strong zombies are, whether newly minted ones are stronger and then decay, or whether the virus has made them strong.

Here's a very good point too:

 ...inconsistency that allows a rag tag group with no training to survive yet had the military and police be wiped out in a week.

and this one:

Where are all the fat walkers? America is full of overweight folks. Stands to reason about 50% of the walkers we see should be heavy. 

Not to mention the show takes place in the south so 70% of the walkers should be crisco filled fatties.


and:

Why aren't we seeing any child walkers?

LOL cos child actors suck at that!

127 Hours

127 Hours is the true story of Aron Ralston, who got trapped by a fallen boulder while hiking in the Utah desert, and after suffering for days without food and water, finally amputated his arm with a pocket blade, before rapelling down a cliff face and walking to find help. While it might not sound that entertaining, it's actually a pretty good movie. James Franco stars and is unbelievably good.

As you'd expect, most of the message board comments focus on the real-life story:

Be honest, could you have done what he did?
NO I would have literally $hit myself within the first 10 minutes, I would have used all the water in few hours and slit my throat by second day lol.

Why didn't he wait for like a month and get super skinny? And just pull his arm out? 
It would have rained eventually and he wouldnt have needed to cut the arm off.


In response to a serious post "don't actually drink your own urine, it's full of salt, etc":
Wow. Thanks for that great tip. I shall make sure I never drink my own p!ss. Good job I read this post. 

Who knew? 
OP - would it be OK to drink your own p!ss if you filter it first through, oh, I don't know, a sponge or a sock full of sand? You know, only if you were really really thirsty and miles from home?

How could he drink that puddle water at the end?

He had already drank his own pee at that point, I think some muddy water won't do him much harm.

am i the only one...
i guess not being familiar with mr. ralston's back story, i found the unexpected display of foolhardy stupidy.. er, bravado, totally devoid of anything i could have empathized with or relate to on a human level.. 
worse yet, after the movie was over, all i kept thinking about is that he deserved it.. 
in fact, halfway through it, i had completely lost interest and kept openly rooting for him to cut his arm off and put himself and the audience out of our collective misery.. 

Internet comment forums are well known for compassion.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Another pretty good movie. Kudos for taking a different tack to start off the franchise anew, and like all good science fiction, starting with something that is controversial now (vaccines, animal testing). Here's something in it I hadn't noticed:

I just saw this movie yesterday and there was one detail I started to notice after about an hour. None of the apes seemed to have genitals. You can clearly see that during some frontal shots. I looked it up on the internet and it seems I'm not the only one to complain about this. 

Some good responses:

Guess CGI penis is a bit too risque for a major studio like Fox.

Movies like this don't want nudity, they want to sell the tickets to the entire family if they can... it's not an art-house picture.

And an ethical discussion:

If a cure for cancer could only be found by animal testing....would you approve of it? I certainly would. I'm 110% against animal testing for cosmetics but for curing horrible illnesses and pandemics (such as AIDS), I think it's a necessary evil. 

Cancer, yes. 
HIV/AIDS, no. 

???! Let's hope this guy isn't tasked with making actual ethical decisions ever.

Romancing the Stone

My absolute favourite movie from the 80s, recently re-watched. There is some funny discussion on 1980's aesthetics, including synth pop music soundtracks, shoulder pads, curly hair and non-whitened Hollywood teeth.

But also:

A friend recommended this movie to me. Just want to check, is this movie ok for men to enjoy? Or is it more of a girls movie? (I ask because of the title)

(better not take the risk, dude!)

And a justifiable complaint here, as movies from this era had a cringingly awful habit of fetishising foreign places:

It would be nice if Hollywood people did some research about Colombia. I live in the capital city Bogota. Remember they had to take a funny bus to go to Bogota? well guess what, Bogota has an airport!   We don't have monkeys on trees even if you travel from one city to another. Bogota is not some hot tropical city as they depict, it's average 13 celsius. 

- followed by an argument between commenters over whether Colombia is tropical or not, whether it's dangerous or not, and finally one exhorting a commenter to get a Colombian girlfriend to do some research because American girls are all fat and awful.

This movie contains a visual trope I have since seen in many, many movies set in far-off places, which I've mentioned before: bus passengers carrying live chickens.   It seems to be a Hollywood shorthand for 'poor country'.

Big Eyes

Big Eyes is Tim Burton's latest film, the true story of artist Margaret Keane whose husband falsely took credit for her work and gained it international fame/notoriety (not everyone was a fan) in the 1950s-60s. I'm not a big Tim Burton fan but thankfully this film was Bonham-Carter/Depp free and I loved it.  However the message boards asked two questions I had wondered myself:

How did Margaret get the money to fly to Hawaii and buy a house?
(not really explained... commenters assume they had cash stashed in the house but still doesn't really explain it... But apparently the real Margaret Keane left Walter for another man, which is not as cinematically dramatic as running for her life out of a burning studio, but would explain the cash question a bit better). But, you know, in movies women can't leave husbands for other men as it makes them unsympathetic.


Why does Margaret's daughter sit in the back seat of the car?
I mean this was the 1950s! Safety-conscious parents just made sure their kids weren't riding on the hood or the roof of the car, right? But following a long string between commenters back and forth about whether 1950s parents made kids sit in the back seat or not, and whether throwing your arm in front of your kid's chest will stop them flying through the windscreen in the event of a crash (it will not), the consensus is reached that it was done mainly for visual effect, which is fine by me.

The final post in the thread is by "tomisinthehouse" who says simply:
What a dumb question.

Well no it isn't, tomisinthehouse, because I had the same question and I am not dumb! So there.

What's your favourite internet comment forum?

How things have changed

I tell you it's uncanny. A couple of months ago I was thinking about music over the years and about how songs have changed since the 80s. I mused on two things: one is how no one does the "fade out" anymore. Until quite recently all pop songs always ended in a fade out, to the point where it was just the standard way to end a song. That no longer is the case. The second thing was how singers used to do their own "special effects" such as repeats and echos - e.g, Rod Stewart in Young Turks towards the end going "ti-ti-time is on your side, side side side" (etc). It's pretty funny when you hear it in an old song now, but back then it was, again, just standard.

Then a few weeks ago I noticed Slate did a whole article on the demise of the fade-out in pop music, and BAM, I can't talk about this now.

Slate has a way of capturing what we used to call the zeitgeist: things you were thinking or almost thinking yourself which means probably everyone was thinking them. Right there now are articles about how the internet has made us constantly "obsessed" with things ("cultural manias"), how popular Taylor Swift is, and how we should not attempt to bring back extinct species (in case you missed it, some guy wants to bring back dinosaurs, as if Jurassic Park never happened).

Anyhoo, then in the last few days I've been playing with a post in my head about listing all the ways that life is different now compared to when I was a child... Well, I know that's not hugely original. But still, now I see Neil deGrasse Tyson has just done the same thing. What's more, the first thing in his list is about toothpaste tubes, which was one of mine.  So therefore, before I have to delete all my draft posts and come up with something new (of which I have nothing), I'm just going to NOT read any more of Neil's list and I'm going to go ahead with my list as it is.

Things that have changed since I was a child

H is for Home/Flickr CC

Toothpaste tubes were made of metal, and would develop very sharp points where you squeezed them, which could give you a nasty scratch. They were also messy, because they had screw-cap lids which also tended to roll lazily off the benchtop and onto the floor while you cleaned your teeth.

Telephones had three sounds that don't exist anymore. The lovely soft brrrrr made by the rotary dial, which I loved, the lovely soft brrrr-brrrr made by the telephone ringing at the other end while you waited for the other side to pick up, and the horrible, jangly, nerve-wrackingly loud ring at your end when someone called. From the time I was little until the fairly recent advent of soft-tone phones, I HATED the sound of the telephone ringing. Remember that tiny little sound it made right before it started ringing, almost as if it was taking a breath before screeching? Like nails on a blackboard.

Blackboards.

Classroom work-sheets from mimeograph machines (mmm, that lovely purple smell...) *

Teachers thought schoolyard bullying was an inevitable part of childhood and didn't do much about it.

Corporal punishment in schools - remember that? We didn't have "the strap" from my parents' days, but boys got a slap with a wooden ruler on the back of the legs, and girls on their open palm. Or girls were told to "touch your toes" and then a slap was delivered to the bottom. Creepy.  I still remember a teacher on the first day of class showing us a wooden ruler with black marks on the back which she said were made by "boys' legs".

More things were made of wood. Rulers, strawberry crates, even some kids' pencil cases (thanks Mum for reminding me of that one). Strawberries were only available once a year.

Our parents and teachers sharpened our pencils with a knife.

We ate less. I'm pretty sure I passed most of my childhood in a state of mild hunger, being fed only with three square meals and two small snacks daily; my poor deprived childhood....

Takeout every Saturday. Fish and chips, occasionally hamburgers, Chinese dim sims with rice and soy sauce, or my favourite, Kentucky Fried Chicken (that's KFC to you, kids).  We rarely ate McDonald's, but when we did, I always had the box of fried chicken. No nuggets in those days.

In school I learned that brontosauruses were real, dinosaurs were covered in scales, and there was this ridiculous new theory that a meteor might have wiped them out. As if!  We also learned that the global temperature was cooling and we were headed for another ice age.

Expensive, special-treat colouring books made of white paper instead of the normal scratchy brown paper. Expensive, special-treat comic books made of white paper with the occasional coloured page in them, when Dad shelled out for the 75c one.

Two-colour printing. Common in children's books, flyers, and posters. This was still a thing, just, into the early nineties, when in my early twenties I worked briefly for a university printing and publishing office.  People would bring in their floppy discs, let us know if the work was formatted or not, and we would book in some desktop publishing followed by some thrifty two-colour printing.

Book pages that had visible wood shavings in them.

I remember when toast-slice bread became available. It was so decadent! A sensible friend eschewed toast-slice bread on the basis that you will always eat two slices of bread so with toast-slice bread you are eating too much bread - thus giving me a lesson in moderation which I remembered but alas, have rarely practiced.

No one I knew got up before 7.00 am. That left ample time for breakfast and the work commute.

If you were lucky enough to have a trampoline or a friend with a trampoline, then you were unlucky enough to pinch the skin of your palm in between the springs around the edge. OUCH!

There was hardly any air-conditioning. Summers were spent sweltering in unbearable heat and bathed in a constant film of sweat. Car rides were torture. School days spent in boiling hot portable class rooms, where the only air came from louvered windows right up near the ceiling that the teacher had to open with a two-metre pole.

We drank less water I suppose, because we didn't carry water bottles around. Or we drank hot water out of drinking taps. Make no mistake, I don't miss this. When I was a kid I used to wish you could buy water in a can (soft drinks were my only reference for purchased drinks).

Homemade clothes. My mother made many of our clothes, even doing a Knitwit course and making us t-shirts and sweatshirts.  So when I grew up I made myself skirts, dresses and once even a pair of cuffed trousers. Then suddenly, at some point in the 1990s, it became more expensive to make clothes than buy them.

What else has changed in your lifetime?

* As Andrew points out in the comments, I might be thinking of a roneo/spirit duplicator (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_duplicator) which I have for years thought of as a mimeograph (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimeograph) - similar, but different.

Tomorrowland

When I was a kid my favorite ride at Disneyland was It's a Small World, but my favorite of the four lands was Tomorrowland.

Tomorrowland entrance 1967
Tom Simpson/Flickr CC

Tom Simpson/Flickr CC

ATIS547/Flickr CC

Loren Javler/Flickr CC

Loren Javler/Flickr CC

Space Mountain was awesome - and the first proper roller coaster I liked.

The Monorail was kind of cool, though I never really understood the grown-ups' enthusiasm for it.

The People Mover was fun, because it took you past (or through) all the other good stuff.

But my favourite ride in Tomorrowland was the Adventure Thru Inner Space.


I loved every minute of it - from sitting enveloped in the blue, egg-shaped chairs, to entering the dark tunnel and being "miniaturised", even the huge creepy eye "looking" at us through the telescope. For a kid steeped in afternoon reruns of The Twilight Zone, and who loved science and daydreaming, it was perfect.

ATIS547/Flickr CC

I loved waiting in line and seeing the riders go into the telescope and then come out tiny at the other end:

ATIS547/FlickrCC

Yes, on our first time there I asked my parents if those were the real people...

ATIS547/Flickr CC

Recently all this came back to me, suddenly, when I read an article about retrofuturism (you know the sort of thing: The Jetsons, houses under glass domes, meals in pill form, flying cars, etc). That shiny, happy, optimistic vision of the future reminded me of Tomorrowland.

My kids and I often talk about the future, as I started a kind of game with them about a year ago, where we imagine what cool things will exist in the future, and what their lives will be like. We talk about driver-less cars, working whatever hours you want, making meals at the touch of a button, flying to work with a jet-pack, things like that.  It's a lot of fun, and I do think kids should always be excited and optimistic about the future.  Kids these days can sometimes seem cynical and somewhat pessimistic, which may be a function of the times they're living through, or perhaps they always were. We do underestimate how canny kids are after all.

"The Future" by A 

I showed the kids the Corning video A Day Made of Glass on YouTube and they (and I) were in awe. We talked about how their houses in future would be like this, or at least partly like this, and I made no mention of the fact they'd probably have to be rich to have it, or that they might not ever be able to buy a house at all, or that even at best this vision of the future, like all others have ever been, is likely completely wrong.  We do also discuss whether some of these things - like flying cars - will ever really happen, or it they are too impractical, and to what degree we can or cannot imagine the future.

But mostly we just let our imaginations go and talk about what cool, awesome, labour saving inventions they will have when they are grown up.

Kids should see the future as a world of awesome and enriching possibility.

Old Slang

I recently picked up the Back To The Future trilogy for eight bucks so the kids and I watched all three movies in a weekend. (The kids loved them - it was fun).  The first movie was made in 1985 and there were a couple of slang phrases in it that were ubiquitous at the time, but have since disappeared from use.  It got me thinking about other slang that has fallen from use.

There are a bunch of US, Australian, English and New Zealand slang terms that were all pretty big when I was a kid and teenager. (That's mid-seventies to late eighties).  Hardly any of them have survived, though a few have. Some have morphed into shortened versions ("veg out" became "veg"). Some have evolved into updated versions ("Get serious!" was replaced by "Get real!" which is now used slightly differently as "Let's get real"). Some have survived, like linguistic artefacts, as ancestors of former phrases (we no longer say "kick the bucket" but we do have a "bucket list").

Some fell out of favor and then came back. The best example I can think of is "Far out!", which was a quaint, funny seventies slang term not used in the eighties, but is now back in use. I think maybe it's because it's a handy stand-in for "F- - -!" to use in polite society or in front of children.

There were some that seemed funny and totally fine at the time but seem a bit offensive in retrospect - "ghetto blaster" comes to mind, along with "spazz" and other playground insults best left in the past.

Slang is funny. The ones that stick are easy and clever, and there are others that try too hard, take too long to say (e.g., "technicolour yawn") or just won't work. ("Gretchen, stop trying to make 'fetch' happen").

Some are resisted, uselessly. In New Zealand in the eighties I remember an Anglophile newspaper columnist bemoaning the use of the American "slang" term (keep in mind New Zealand was a pretty old-fashioned place back then) "hired and fired" and wondered why we couldn't use the "better" British English version "backed and sacked". As we say these days: good luck with that.

But even slang terms that are not resisted, are really popular and seem destined to stick around, seem to mostly eventually fall away. Just ask your parents what terms they used to use as teenagers. Or watch a movie from your own youth, and be reminded of all the things you thought you'd be saying forever.


Do you remember these?

• That's heavy     (serious or profound)
• Cosmic!
• No shit, Sherlock           
• Get serious!        
• What a whacker     (Australian - was eventually replaced here by the English 'wanker')
• It's a joke, Joyce    
• Der, Fred
• Choice!       (chiefly New Zealand)
• Couch potato
• Veg out           
• Radical!     
• Cool bananas      (still in use - supposedly ironically - by people my age; also 'Coolio')
• Brill         (brilliant)
• Brillo pad      (inevitable evolution of "brill")
• Ace!    
• Mondo                        
• No way, Jose
• "So funny I forgot to laugh"   (Sarcastic. I think it was a thing only kids said, but we said it a lot)
• space cadet
• yuppie
• propeller head   (nerd)
• Poindexter   (nerd)
• spazz attack    (go crazy/freak out)
• technicolour yawn   (vomit)
• chuck a party
• metal mouth / brace face    (someone wearing orthodontic braces)
• Cowabunga!
• As if!
• Like, oh my god!   (ermahgerd!)
• Go jump in the lake  /  Go take a long walk off a short pier    
• Sit and spin
• dirtbag
• scumbag
• (Something) City   - as in, if there were a lot of bad people somewhere, it was "Scumbag City"
• pash   (kiss)
• suck face   (kiss)
• kicked the bucket  /  bought the farm     (died)
• porchlight on dim   (one card short of a full deck; not all dogs barking; cuckoo)

How about these once popular sayings and quotes:

• Whatchu talkin' bout Willis?                           (from the TV show Diff'rent Strokes)
• Hang in there!                                                (poster - branch - kitten. Remember?)
• It's hard to fly like an eagle when you're surrounded by turkeys    (also a popular poster)
• Happiness is a warm puppy                           (from Snoopy)
• You wouldn't like me when I'm angry.            (from the TV show The Incredible Hulk)
• Let's be careful out there                                (from the TV show Hill Street Blues)
• "Holy (something), Batman!"                          (from the TV show Batman and Robin)
• Good thinking, Ninety-Nine                           (from the TV show Get Smart)

Have you got any more?

Alex/Flickr Creative Commons

Kevin Bacon reprises Footloose? Jump back!!

I'm a bit late to this, but OMG it is fantastic.

Remember Footloose?

Enjoy:

Photos From the Olden Days

My mum recently gave my sister and me each a big envelope full of our old school photos and school reports. It's funny looking at photos of your child self that you haven't seen in years. Memories come flooding back; sometimes things (or you) look different to how you remember them; sometimes even the photo is different to how you remember it.

This is me in Grade 5 or 6 when we lived in LA. I loved this lavender t-shirt. I was never a cool kid, and my clothes were pretty non-cool with the occasional exception, and this shirt was one of them. It was the perfect shape, colour and fit, and was so in. Likewise my Ocean Pacific-inspired shirt with the flowers and sunset, which unfortunately does not survive in photos.

The pendant around my neck is from Mexico, and I still wear it.

This is my class photo from Grade 1, 1976.
I am in the second row from the top, and I have very curly hair.

Here I am in Grade 5 in the US. No school uniforms over there!
I'm in the top right corner, behind the teacher.

High school, in Auckland New Zealand, 1985. As if you can't tell.
I'm at the bottom, third from the right. I remember I was quite proud of how my hair looked at that period in my life. Oddly enough.

My kids found these photos a lot of fun. I asked if they could pick me in each one, and to my surprise, they picked me right nearly every time.

I guess I haven't changed as much as I would have liked. :-)

The End of the Ford Falcon

Big companies have responsibilities to their communities, especially when they have provided jobs for thousands and custom for other businesses for so long that families and towns identify with them.

Ford is meeting those responsibilities, from what we know so far.

Ford Australia has been operating in Geelong since 1926. Ford cars have been a huge part of the Australian landscape since then.

by Hugo90 via Flickr

by racin jason via Flickr

by Highway Patrol Images via Flickr

Every big corporation makes bad decisions. Every US head office of every multinational has misjudged  their overseas markets and kept business going when they shouldn't have or pulled the plug at the wrong time or failed to take the local conditions and culture into account. That's global capitalism, and it's part of the pay-off we accept in return for jobs, markets, economies of scale, choice and convenience.

Ford has given its workers three years' notice and will I am sure provide good redundancies and assistance with training or job search.

Not that that doesn't mean that the next few years won't be awful for Ford workers. They will.

But the news of Ford's closure here has been greeted by most with a sort of sad inevitability. Even its workers were "shocked but not surprised".

Most people understand that manufacturing is increasingly difficult here. Few of those who commented agreed with this angry rant in The Age, for example. We all see what has happened over the years to manufacturing - and to cars. The days of the big corporate fleets and the big family sedan are over. Most people accept Ford's statement that manufacturing their cars in Australia is no longer affordable.

So what of the government's propping up of the car industry here with stimulus and assistance packages?

Well, there were reasons for those.

Firstly, while it's logically a waste of money to prop up losing industries, in practice it's not that simple. Whole industries can't just be cut off and left to fail without causing massive upheaval economically and socially. It's not just politically unsound to let that happen, it is wrong.  So all reasonable governments end up spending too much on losing deals propping up failing industries, and are no doubt as irked at having to do so as the public are at having to bear the cost. (Though of course, the actual cost to any non-involved individual is close to nil, while the benefits of not having a huge industry suddenly fail are real).

Secondly, post-GFC, all governments in a position to do so threw money at stimulus programs to keep the economy moving, and that included much dubious spending, because the spending was more important than the product, at that time. No one was especially happy at propping up car manufacturers during this period, especially in the US where the government had already suffered the political fallout from propping up banks, and where the car company reps flew to Washington for their bailouts in their private jets.

But that's how it all works.  Otherwise we'd be Greece.


Until 2011, I too worked for a US multinational, and I was made redundant after long months of uncertainty, stress and misery. The packages were good (not as generous as they had been in the past, but times had definitely changed), and the company provided a career counselling service which gave employees resume help and access to office space for a month.

I was not in the same industry as the workers facing redundancy at Ford. I was lucky to get another job in the same industry working with people and a company I knew well. So I don't pretend to be in the same boat. But say what you will about multinationals (and most of what you say is justified) - at least they are big enough to provide entitlements and protection to workers. Unlike small businesses, which tend to leave workers stranded when they go under.



I have quite fond childhood memories of being driven around in Ford sedans. My dad and grandfather loved Ford cars, and in the seventies my parents drove a Cortina, a Falcon, a Fairlane, and memorably in America, a huge Lincoln Continental.

The family sedan was good for Sunday drives to the Dandenongs and for family holidays. We drove to the Central Coast in New South Wales or the Gold Coast in Queensland, epic two or three-day family journeys involving car sickness, counting games, roadhouse stops, seat belts chafing against childhood necks, sweaty backs sticking to vinyl seats, and my sister and me sleeping with pillows propped against the armrest while we sped through the night.

My dream car when I was a kid was the red and white Ford Gran Torino in Starsky and Hutch.


But those days are long gone. No one wants a sedan any more, and no one can afford to make them in this country.

by aidenjewell via Flickr

Listography: Top 5 Songs I Grew Up To

I've missed the last couple, but it's Listography time again - yay!

Listography is run by Kate Takes 5. This time the theme is songs we grew up with.

Here are mine - but man, it's impossible to stop at five...

Abba, Hasta Manana

It wasn't their best, but it was very popular in Australia in the 70s, and was often heard in the background during musical chairs games at kids' parties, or on TV sung by an earnest child in a dinner jacket on Young Talent Time. It was also the first words of a foreign language I learned. My dad had travelled South America on business and told me Hasta Manana meant 'Until tomorrow' - he was so learned and sophisticated...
MEMORY BONUS: the video has the cat dresses!!

Rod Stewart, Do You Think I'm Sexy?

Massively popular song in the mid-to-late 70s, and I still like it.
Was not keen on mullet-headed Rod dancing around the stage in tights during this period, but my older cousin was in love with him.
MEMORY BONUS: like most videos of the time, contains a soft-focus image of a blonde lady with very glossy red lips

Michael Jackson, Thriller

The mini-movie video; the scary special effects; the dancing; Vincent Price and the way he pronounced "eeeeviiilll".... It was revolutionary! It is also entwined forever in my memory with my cousin's jealousy-inducing new "ghetto blaster" which had TWO tape decks and the impressive new "soft eject" feature. Technology overload!
MEMORY BONUS: the girl in the video is wearing stretch chambray pedal pushers!

The Knack, My Sharona

This has very specific memories for me. When I was 10 and 11 we lived in Los Angeles and I went to Jean Thorman elementary school in Tustin. The school was connected to a junior high school campus, and on some mornings before school my best friend Teresa and I would go and sit there and listen to the songs the high school kids played on the jukebox. (Yes, they had a jukebox). As it was 1980, the songs were always either Devo, Whip It, or The Knack, My Sharona. Still love them both.

 

Olivia Newton John, Physical

Olivia Newton John had been trying for some time to shake off her "good girl" image, but it was this that finally did it. 1981 - we were all in shock. SHOCK I tell you! The suggestive body language (for then, and for her, it was), and those SHOCKING lyrics: "you know what I mean", and even worse, "horizontally" - oh my gosh.
Watching it now it is funny how completely UNsexy the video is.
MEMORY BONUS: sweatbands!

Honorable mentions - another 5, ok 6:

Johnnie Wakelin and the Kinshasa Band, Black Superman (Muhammad Ali). MOHAMMAD ALI. He was huge. He had a song about him!

Jim Croce, You Don't Mess Around With Jim. Family drives in the Ford sedan. Silver seat belt buckles burning hot from the sun. 8-track. Whole family singing.

Phil Collins, In The Air Tonight. 1985: Live Aid!

Sting, Russians . Cold War memories.

Men At Work, Downunder. 1983. Australia winning the America's Cup. Vegemite earrings. Australian flag tote bags. And this song everywhere.

Split Enz, Six Months In A Leaky Boat - I was 12, living in New Zealand, and this was banned on the radio during the Falkland Wars. Oh, such different times...

And the rest:

Abba, When I Kissed the Teacher, Voulez Vous, Money Money Money...
Joe Dolci, Shaddap You Face
Leo Sayer, You Make Me Feel Like Dancing
Adam Ant, Goody Two Shoes
Shakin Stevens, Behind the Green Door
David Bowie, Putting Out Fire With Gasoline
Tears for Fears, Shout
Real Life, Send Me An Angel
Kate Bush, Wuthering Heights
Tim Finn, There's a Fraction Too Much Friction (shut up, I liked it)
Stevie Wonder, I Just Called To Say I Love You
John Denver, Country Roads
Neil Diamond, Holly Holy, I Am I Said
Air Supply, Making Love Out of Nothing At All
Carly Simon, You're So Vain
Helen Reddy, I Am Woman
Johnny Mathis, Chances Are
Elton John, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
Simon and Garfunkel,The Boxer, Bridge Over Troubled Water, Cecilia, El Condor Pasa
Fleetwood Mac, Dreams, Second Hand News, Rhiannon
Peaches and Herb, Shake Your Groove Thing
Chic, Le Freak
Gloria Gaynor, I Will Survive
Dave Dobbyn, Slice of Heaven
Billy Idol, Rebel Yell
Billy Joel, Piano Man, Allentown
James Taylor, Witchita Lineman
Elvis Presley, In the Ghetto
Suzie Quattro, Devilgate Drive
Queen, Another One Bites The Dust
Blondie, Call Me
Madonna, Into The Groove
Sheena Easton, Morning Train
Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton, Islands In the Stream
Prince, When Doves Cry, Let's Go Crazy, Sign O' The Times
Gordon Lightfoot, Sundown
America, Horse With No Name
Little River Band, Lonesome Loser
Juice Newton, Queen of Hearts
Kim Carnes, Bette Davis Eyes
Bonnie Tyler, Total Eclipse of the Heart
Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, I Love Rock and Roll
The Go-Gos, Our Lips Are Sealed
Aha, Take On Me
Wham, Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go (shut up, you know you did too)
Duran Duran, Hungry Like the Wolf
Coconut Rough, Sierra Leone
The Police, Every Breath You Take
Toto, Africa
Laura Branigan, Gloria
Dire Straits, I Want My MTV

... I think I now need to load up my iTunes with some of these.

Your turn! What are your top 5?

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