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World Youth “Day” is about to begin, and the pilgrims are everywhere. There are currently at least 100 people milling about at the end of our street, waiting to pick up their baseball caps, lanyards, and windbreakers from the Uniform Center. It looks like the crowd outside a Christian rock concert. I have seen more nuns in full nunly dress in the past two days than I did at four years of Catholic university. I saw an actual Franciscan friar walking down the street yesterday. It just… irrationally irritates me. I’m glad they’re all having a good time, but sometimes I just want to get my groceries home without being forced off the footpath by do-gooders playing hymns on a guitar. (That actually just happened.) I feel compelled to somehow redress the cosmic balance of our neighborhood. I’ve already hugged a lesbian, and I’ll be getting my Depo-Provera shot later this week. Hm, maybe I’ll donate some money to a pro-choice organisation. Any other ideas, short of hosting an actual Roman orgy in our living room?

Okay, so I’m looking forward to the vampire smut movie as much as anybody, but I gotta agree with the Fug Girls on this one: Cedric Diggory looks like zombie ass in that picture.

Woohoo! I just had my three-month performance review at work, and I rocked it. I felt like things were going really well, but you know me: I stress. It’s good to get some positive feedback and know that my efforts have been appreciated. There may be some big things in the pipeline too… but I don’t want to jinx anything.

Doughnuts on Coffee-Flavored Cupcakes. BRILLIANT.

Holy crap. Somebody is selling a complete Rock-afire Explosion in working order over on Ebay! I had my 8th birthday at Showbiz Pizza, and it was so awesome. If I had this, I could relive it in my basement EVERY SINGLE NIGHT!

(Except I don’t have a basement. And I don’t have $14,000. And I live in Australia.)

Survival of the Sudsiest. Apparently modern society owes a lot of its existence to beer drinkers. The aside about alcoholism in Native American and Aboriginal communities is pretty fascinating. I have to wonder, though, how Johnson’s book accounts for the inability of many Asians to digest alcohol. Wouldn’t that have been selected against? I guess I’ll have to look out for the book. (Link courtesy of Daring Fireball.)

I was just reading this AskMetaFilter question, in which a non-American asks whether “hillbillies” really do still exist. In the course of the comments, someone points to this story of a trailer-dwelling woman in Georgia who spoke at a recent Obama event. It nearly made me cry. These are good, hard-working folks, and they’re doing it really tough right now. And I really wish that those of you forwarding racist jokes about Obama (yeah, I still receive them occasionally) would READ IT. Things are broken right now, and they need to be fixed.

Schrödinger’s cat was probably nicer than mine. I do love a good cat comic! Especially one with five randomly chosen endings.

Me: “Nicole Kidman had her baby and they named it Sunday Rose.”
Snook: “Sunday ROAST?!”

Poor kid’s going to get that reaction her whole life.

Plumber Recommendations? Can any of you Sydneysiders recommend a good plumber? We’re probably getting gas installed at the house and we need a plumber to run all the connections. I’ve got one recommended to us by the Strata Manager but I’d like to get a couple quotes first.