Author: Joey deVilla

I’ve spent the day making visits to clients’ offices, installing the software I wrote for them and doing the general hand-holding/business relationship-maintaining. More actual “life” stuff is forthcoming.

(First it was breast scarves, now this. You probably think I’m some kind of Russ Meyer type.)

Vivenne Westwood had some good fashion ideas a while ago. In the 1970’s, she teamed up with Macolm McLaren to open SEX, their BDSM clothing boutique, which paved the way towards punk fashion. In the 1980’s, she was one of the people behind the New Romantic look — think early Depeche Mode and Duran Duran (the New Romantic predilection for frilly shirts and synths ended up being part of the Goth cultural DNA).

But now she’s just gone batty. Here’s her latest creation: breasts for men.

According to an article in The Daily Telegraph:

And while the effect may look outrageous today, fashion commentators reckon Sydney men may just end up adopting it – in a few years’ time.

Sydney men? As in Sydney, Australia? These had better be Sydney men who can take on an entire bar in a fight.

[Thanks to the mysterious vinyl_demon for the heads-up!]

…appears in Sunday’s edition of the online comic Something Positive.

HGTV did air my Love By Design episode…in the States. HGTV Canada shows Love By Design on Fridays, and on a different rotation. I’ve just been informed by a couple of friends that they saw my episode a couple of weeks ago, which means that I won’t be seeing mine anytime soon…

…unless someone in the States managed to tape the episode for me! I’d like to finally see this episode, so if any of you have a tape or recorded it on your TiVO, could you please drop me a line?

My American friends who caught the show say that she said my place was “too neat”. Listen, Missy: in civilised countries, we clean up before company comes over. Especially if company comes in the form of tens of thousands of television viewers.

That’s right — tonight, HGTV is broadcasting my Love By Design episode, Modern Classics in a Brick-Walled Loft:

Cabaret singers have ignited the hearts of many a lonely guy over the centuries, and we’re guessing that our guest Linda is no different. She’ll get to sing the blues, though, if she doesn’t pick her musical soul mate out of these three melodic fellows. The first is a witty squeezebox player with more than his fair share of designer furniture, the second is a guy whose space is filled with great finds from his antique hunter mom and the third is a serious composer and arranger who has a beautiful meditative space.

It’s been aired three or four times last year, but I’ve never actually seen my episode. Let’s all watch it for the first time tonight!

If you’ve never heard of the show, here’s its premise: it’s like The Dating Game, except instead of a bachelorette interviewing three bachelors, she looks at where they live. Based on that, she chooses one guy, she and the interior decorator host re-make the place, and then they meet! As with dating shows, where the best ones are where they go terribly, terribly wrong, Love by Design is probably banking on the fact that single men often live like pigs and hoping that hilarity will ensue.

I got on the show because I knew one of the people on the production crew (my friend Krista, whose alter-ego is Montreal’s uber-cute keyboard ska queen Lederhosen Lucil). She told them that I was a computer programmer by profession, which no doubt brought to mind visions of decor like this:

Oh, were they in for a surprise!

What does my place look like? Am I just as goofy on TV as I am on my blog? Did I get picked? You’ll have to tune in to find out. It’s on HGTV tonight at 10:30 p.m. EST and again at 1:30 a.m. EST.

…to everyone who nominated me for the Weblog Awards. We’ll hear if I made the nominations on the 21st.

Crazy but true fact number one: There are a couple of Catholic prayers with a stanza that goes “…and protect us from the evils of communism”. I know, not from research, but because I’ve read them at memorial prayer services for my grandmothers.

It sounds sort of quaint in these post-Berlin Wall days: “Lord, protect us from a bunch of cruddy pasted-together countries who couldn’t get their act together enough to put together a half-decent garage punk band, never mind stuff like concrete, a menu that wasn’t three-quarters cabbage, decent infrastructure or an economy. The only good things that came out of communism were getting some people to think about societal inequities (which could’ve been done without communism), some amusing graphic art, the early James Bond flicks and the fact that Yakov Smirnoff (“Eeen Soviet Russia, TV watches you!”) amused both George’s parents and mine.

(The rest of it was pure, unadulterated crap: ridiculous five-year plans which led to industries fudging numbers just they could look as though they were performing, assaults on freedom of speech, assembly and religion, military buildup at the expense of the people and worst of all, snotty liberal arts students during my time at Queen’s, breathing my oxygen and having to analyse every damned thing through a Marxist lens messin’ with my Zen — half of whom I’m sure are now paid to dream up new Tide-delivery systems for Procter and Gamble.)

Crazy but true fact number two: A number of people whom I consider good friends — and at least one “um friend” — were raised by communists. Poor sods. Raised on the Red Book, the Internationale and probably enough cabbage to keep a medium-sized city’s bowel movements regular, all of them have switched to materialism, becoming early adopters of high-tech gadgets and other de riguer “little luxuries”. All of them — save Cory, who had a “Road to Damascus” kind of experience at Disneyworld and has his head screwed on better than most people — are complete misery-seeking missiles. These are people that you couldn’t imagine inviting to a party — at least not one where you wanted people to have a good time — never mind actually throwing one.

Crazy but true fact number three: The American Communist Party expected its members to do just that back in the 1930’s, according to a party-throwing guide recently unearthed by a history prof at Brandeis University who was riffling through the campus’s collection of radical pamphlets.

Some excerpts from the New York Times piece on the pamphlet:

Among the suggested high jinks: cutting editorials from The Daily Worker into little pieces and having guests compete to see who can put them back together fastest; passing around pictures of party leaders and having guests try to name them correctly; holding a mock convention on, say, nonintervention in Spain. “One guest is made chairman. Another is Chamberlain, another Leon Blum, a third Mussolini,” the pamphlet cheerfully explains, adding, “A clever gathering can do wonders in political satire. It’s grand fun.”

Or why not try a round of anti-Fascist darts? “Buy darts from your stationer’s, sporting goods or department store,” the pamphlet instructs. “Draw a picture of Hitler, Mussolini, Hague or another Girdleresque pest. Put it on a piece of soft board with thumbtacks. Six throws for a nickel, and a prize if you paste Hague in the pants, or Trotsky in the eye.” (Mind you, all this doctrinaire diversion is to be had on the cheap: the pamphlet recommends conserving beer by pouring into the middle of the glass, a method that “gives more foam and less liquid — stretches each barrel further.”)

In other words: Heavy-handed didactic, da! Actual fun, nyet!