My favourite musical artist is releasing a single tomorrow and it’s all I can think about right now. Not in a weird stan way (I SWEAR) but just in a oh hey, new music way. Que fuerte.
The theory of pastry-based travel
It goes like this. When you’re travelling, go in search of a pastry for breakfast. My go-to is pain au chocolat, but you could pick anything.
Pastries aren’t as super accessible as say, a pie. So it gets you away from the lazy routes to Egg McMuffins or heat-lamp scrambled eggs. Maybe you’ll see a bit of the place you wouldn’t normally go to, getting some walking in there as well.
So on my recent North Island road trip, I had a really disappointing one in Taupo (it had sugar sprinkled on top?) and a decent enough homemade one from the Hawke’s Bay Farmers market.
I couldn’t find anything in Napier, but I did get a quality almond croissant from a café on Hastings Street.
(I don’t want to talk about the Sunday morning when most place were closed and I ended up going to the Starbucks and getting a “scone” which was hard and angry. And the staffer wrote my name on the cup based on the name on my vaccine pass, which felt a bit.. intrusive albeit correctly spelt.)
But in Mount Maunganui I found a bakery a short walk from the motel. It was in a light industrial area, down by the port and they had really good pains aux chocolats or however that is pluralised.
Like, you get one of those and a big-arse latte and pretend you’re in Europe and loitering down by the docks like a rogue. Better than a McMuffin any time.
Now is not the time to celebrate the 19th anniversary of the time I opened a LiveJournal account
Last month I received a message from LiveJournal celebrating the 19th anniversary of the time I created my LiveJournal account. Arrrrgh!
This is the first time LiveJournal has ever sent me a reminder like this. Why not 18? Or wait until 20 or 21? (If my LJ account was a person, it would be old enough to vote, and I am now wondering what my LJ account’s political affiliation would be. Probably ACT.)
While I did have a LiveJournal deep in the heart of the ‘00s, I transferred all the posts over to my blog and deleted all everything on LJ well over a decade ago. Except the account itself remains because… nostalgia?
It’s weird to think what I was up to in December 2002, when I created the account. I was living in Mount Eden, trying to be a modern girl living my best live and I’m pretty sure I still had dial-up internet because there was a big old blue ethernet cable snaking from the phone plug in the kitchen to the couch in the lounge room.
LiveJournal was fun. It was where everyone ended up, after the personal website of the ‘90s started to be too hard to update. LJ had an easy interface and you could leave comments on your friends’ posts.
But there was definitely a time in the early 2010s when LJ started to lose its mojo and there just wasn’t any good reason to stick with it.
And yet here I am, nineteen years on, and LiveJournal is showing up like a long-forgotten ex, trying to remind me of the good times, baby plz.
What I do on Wednesday evenings
Let me tell you about an interesting thing I currently do on Wednesday evenings. Just before 10pm, in my pyjamas and from the comfort of my bed, I connect to a video call organised by Sweden’s national broadcaster and attended mostly by Swedish entertainment journalists. There, we listening to audio of the seven songs that are competing in this week’s heat of Melodifestivalen (or “the melody festival”), Sweden’s competition to select its entry for Eurovision 2022.
Most of the songs are in English, but most of the video call is in Swedish. I know a bit of Swedish. I understand it better than I speak it. But a lot of the time I’ll pick up a few nouns, verbs and adjectives and figure out the rough meaning. Other times, it’s like ok, “hej alla” mean “hello everyone” and that’s not hard to figure out.
Then I have to digest the tracks and form opinions and summarise them for eager Eurovision fans. Last year I described one song as something like “dark and edgy” which was apparently WRONG because when it was performed live it all felt different.
Then I usually go to sleep, with visions of Scandipop haunting my dreams.
I would link to a Melfest performance, but the good ones aren’t online yet. Instead here’s the one I wanted to include to last week but it was geoblocked. This is from Italy, “Brividi” (or “Shivers”) from Mahmood and Blanco.
It won the iconic Sanremo Music Festival and now it’s going to Eurovision which is hosted in Italy this year, conveniently enough.
Next week, maybe I’ll tell you about my favourite new song (if it’s not bad).