why I like men

I’m meant to be writing my Sunday Life column, due in two hours. But there’s a great survey published on The Punch today – blokes’ take on female body image. And it’s given me an inspired jolt.

3556385470 939dcfd0e1 why I like men

On Thursday I drank wine and ate sushi with The  Punch editor Penbo (he gave me the gig writing an indulgent column in Saturday’s Daily Telegraph a year or so ago when he was editor) and he we were talking about the survey. He was getting responses on his blackberry from male readers as we ate. He made the startlingly obvious point that everything we (women) think we know about what men think about us is wrong. We kind of know this. But it’s another one of those things about men we just refuse to accept.

I like this observation from the survey, because it opened my eyes:

Interestingly, men think women are more turned on by a good physique than they are.

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sunday life: in which I plunge into mess

Lucy-Atkins-001

This week I plunge into mess

So tell me what you make of this pop-cultural collision? Californian fashion label Ed Hardy has launched a range of hand sanitisers. The tattoo-motifed label is best known for dressing trash-tastic celebs like Tara Reid and Tommy Lee in expensive, tough-nut versions of your aunt’s experiments with a BeDazzler gun in the early 80s. So this foray into handbag-sized disinfectant is a bit off-kilter, don’t you think? A bit like Mack trucks doing a diffusion line of tampons.

Anyway, hand sanitiser happens to nick an old wound of mine. I despair when I see more evidence of our desperate attempts to control life – be it the germs, dirt, traffic or noise.

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good thing noticed #2: paper radio

This is a cute little idea from Melbourne – a podcast service that uploads aspiring writers’ works as audio. Do you write? Contact paperradio direct and see if they like your style. They’re accepting prose, poetry, political rants, profiles…most things that are about pen to paper. Sadly they don’t do Venn diagrams. Yet. The content … Read more

more (pretty) whimsy: The Middle East

Four things I like:

* songs in a minor key

* songs about life’s inevitabilites

* new Australian bands (that aren’t force-fed to me by Triple J)

* beautiful, whimsical film clip.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjB2hbMYIXo[/youtube]

The colours are so pretty. They remind me of my grandmother’s tea cups.

The Middle East is a collective of whimsical kids from Townsville who don’t seem to be trying too hard to prove themselves.

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sunday life: in which I fly naked

This week I declutter my background reading

read it now
read it now

I can get disproportionately excited about new online devices. Like, a while back, I was frothing about Instapaper, a 2.0 equivalent of the Post It note.

It works like this. You’re wasting time online and stumble upon an interesting blog post or New York Times article. You can’t read it now; you’re meant to be finalising a spreadsheet or something. Printing it out is just wrong. After all, you have one of those Please Consider the Environment email signatures. And you offset your Virgin flights.  Perhaps you could email it to yourself and flag it.  But that seems way too clunky and cluttery.

What to do? Glad you asked. Once you’ve installed Instapaper (three easy online steps, or thereabouts), you simply click a “Read Later” button on your Bookmarks menu and your article is filed in a special folder in cyberspace. For perusal at a more languid juncture.

Is it just the Capricorn in me, or is that really nifty?

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haven’t seen it yet? Bondi beach dance

200 actors pull off a cute stunt for some video camera brand. The use of Ben Lee’s Catch My Disease is nice. Ben’s a Bondi boy. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9rytUeq62k&feature=player_embedded[/youtube] And while on the subject (stunts) and in the ‘hood (Bondi beach)… pretty much spot on two years ago I hauled together 1100 women in pink bikinis on … Read more

The significance of the Ken doll

As a follow-up to the Sunday Life post below in which I ponder why I have a Ken doll displayed amongst religious iconography on an antique toy ironing board in my hallway …Liz the feng shui consultant just posted this: Hi Sarah, It was interesting as I was thinking of you yesterday and that Ken … Read more

sunday life: in which I clear flabby energy in my flat

This week I feng shui’d my flat. (And for everyone wanting to know more on this… I had Liz Wiggins of Feng Shui Living, Sydney, come in and give me the rundown. She provides a full report and sends salt cleansers to put in rooms that need some extra help.)

little corner of clutter
my little corner of clutter. NB: dried roses must go!

So there we were – it was about a year ago – Dad and I, standing by the side of the road hugging a tree. I don’t know if you’ve ever got your inherently skeptical, raised-by-Catholic-nuns father to do this. It’s some feat. Admittedly mine will give most things a shot. In a fug of boredom once I asked to shave his head and he just handed me a razor. And when we were kids he would always let me and my brothers do jumps over him on our BMXs. He loved it.

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