Every morning before work, I check out the latest news headlines on a few different sites and this morning an interesting story on Ninemsn caught my eye: ‘”Porn” lolly wrappers leave sour taste‘. Apparently there’s a European lolly company whose wrappers portray a supposedly male lime having wild gorilla sex with two cherries on one packet and a lemon on another.

Can’t picture it? Let me help you:

Photos from ninemsn

So what do you think about it all? Do you see wild gorilla sex? Food porn? I must admit, it does look like the lime is having a good time and the lemon and cherries also seem to be enjoying themselves, so at least it’s consensual. There’s movement lines in there and the lime appears to be salivating, so it’s pretty obvious what the designers were going for., and they’ve gone all out on detail. I agree that it portrays some sort of sexual act … so the question is, is it appropriate for a lolly wrapper?

These lollies are intended for adults and children and I’d agree that the picture is a little too much for kids, but really, it’s cartoon fruit. I’ve never heard of the brand – it’s a European thing – and if this is the first time we’re hearing about a complaint even though the packaging has been public since 2002, then it’s obvious that there aren’t too many people concerned about it. Who really looks at the wrappers anyway?

So what do you think?

Should the kinky fruit packaging be changed or is it harmless fun?

It’s that time again – I have nothing to blog about so instead I’ve decided to rifle through my blog stats and share some of them with you, since I always love a link-fest and I’m waaay overdue for one. I have a love/hate relationship with blog stats – on one hand I like seeing how many views I get, what the most popular posts were, how you ended up on my blog … but on the other hand, I hate seeing a shitty traffic day, even though I keep telling myself I don’t really care.

So, anyway, I’d like to give a shout-out to some bloggers who have sent traffic my way via click-overs from their blogs in the past month: The Food Pornographer, A Houseful of Rabbits, A Taste of Home Cooking, Chocolatesuze, Mooiness, Kate in the Kitchen, Mach Cats, The Cat Blogosphere, Kitikata-San, Kittens on the Keyboard, When Cats Attack, Lightening Online, Christina YY’s PinkyLand, Practically Perfect, Our Family Cat-a-Blog, Meezer Tails, The Cupcake Queen Brunei, Buddha on the Road, Cat with a Garden, The Adventures of Freckles & Deb, Cherry Blossom Adventures, Life from a Cat’s Perspective, Koffiekitten, Chow Times, Luna Cafe, Fidgeting About, The Life and Times of Bunnies, The Junk Drawer, Avitable, The Purple Foodie, A Whiff of Lemongrass, Blue Lotus, Cooking During Stolen Moments, Dinner Diary,  CatSynth, Mind of Mog, Last Night’s Dinner, Lady Iron Chef and Camemberu. They are all fabulous blogs and I highly recommend you put aside a few minutes and check them out – you might just find a new favourite!

My search term stats haven’t been too freaky recently, which means I need to write some freakier posts (haha) but I picked out my favourites to share. Funnily enough, I haven’t had that person visit who is always searching how to piss off their neighbours … oh wait, maybe mentioning that will entice them back!

Is it possible to get sunburned in England?
Why yes, yes it is! Phill proved this when he returned from Wimbledon bright red. It was the worst sunburn I’ve ever seen – he literally looked like a beetroot! So yes it is possible to get sunburned in England!

Japanese boys dressed as girls
Hmm, I am assuming this landed you on my Harajuku post? I’m pretty sure the girls were dressed as girls and the boys were dressed as boys though!

How do I stop biting my fingernails?
I don’t have a $50 e-book to pimp you but I do have a post I wrote that might help you if you’re looking to quit biting your fingernails. It is possible but it takes time and a helluva lot of determination.

Obesity in New Zealand 2008
Yeah … I don’t really know how you ended up here. Oh wait … I did mention obese animals I saw on a New Zealand television program in this post – that must be it.

Can you eat garden snails?
Omg – that is gross, but apparently possible! You just have to put them in quarantine for a while before you cook ‘em, but I think I would feel happier knowing any snails I ate were prepared by a chef somewhere, like … Paris.

I still get a lot of traffic from Stumbleupon linking to a few posts I had written before my blog died, so of course, those posts don’t exist anymore. There’s one post more popular than the others and it’s disappointing that the Stumbleupon people end up on a broken 404 page looking for it. So, just because I can, I am going to share with you a blast from the past – I am going to repost it right here for anyone who might have missed it. If you’ve already read it, just skip it. If you haven’t … enjoy!

My Brother, Gay Porn Distributor

My brother is in his early twenties and while we don’t live at home anymore, our bedrooms are pretty much the same for if we return home in the holidays to visit. My brother does return home a fair bit whereas I work and therefore don’t have the same freedom to leave for a few weeks. My Mum likes to keep our rooms clean for us, and recently my mother was tidying up my brother’s room and lifted up the mattress to clean underneath and discovered a pile of DVD’s. These DVD’s were blank, with titles written on them, so they had obviously been burned, not bought.

Mum inspected them.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Bad Boys and Bad Boys II.

Her eyes grew wide.

My mum thought my brother was downloading and distributing gay pornography.

Yes, it’s true.

She immediately phoned him, crying and absolutely distraught. My brother was confused and apologised for downloading them, thinking she was over-reacting a lot about him downloading some movies. After a very confusing and emotional phone call, they hung up.

Minutes later, my Mum phoned him back, this time to apologise. She told him that she accepts his decision, that she’s there for him and that she loves him regardless of his life choices. My brother, still thoroughly confused, thanked her for this and the conversation ended.

A couple of hours later, my Dad got home and Mum showed him the DVD’s she had found.

“Look at what your son is watching!” she said, eyes filling once more with tears.

My Dad looked at them, confused, and said, “I’ve seen The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. It’s quite good.”

My Mother almost had a heart attack!

Dad explained to her that they were movies. Not porn. Not gay porn. Movies.

My Mother was so embarrassed.

She phoned my brother back and apologised for freaking out. She explained she had found the DVD’s stashed under his mattress and thought they weren’t innocent movies. My brother finally understood what had just happened, and now they can laugh about it. But he did comment that if he was gay, he would have preferred a more supportive reaction from his Mum (and I totally agree!) rather than the freaked out psycho reaction he received.

…and you thought your family is dysfunctional!

It’s a true story guys, cross my heart! Well I am off to the city to meet with Mum and Dad – last chance before Mum heads off to England for five weeks on Saturday. Even though I pretty much just got back from England, I’m actually jeaous! Let’s see if I can smuggle myself into one of her suitcases…

No, Phill and I didn’t get another cat. We’d like to, but we think Puddy would attempt to eat it, so it’s a no-no. We’re not even getting a dog while we’ve got Puddy because honestly? I can’t deal with the stress that would be involved in getting them to tolerate each other. Or rather, getting Puddy to tolerate the dog. Don’t get me wrong – Puddy is adorable when she’s around us, but she has huge abandonment issues and is very over-protective of us. Sharing us would be the ultimate horror to her. Yeah, if she was a human she’d be in therapy.

So anyway – who is Isha? Isha, pronounced “Eee-sha”, is a gorgeous white fluffy cat belonging to Phill’s Dad and his family. I met Isha on Saturday when we went to a BBQ at their house. She’s an indoor cat because she’s white and the Aussie sun is harsh, but she’s got enough toys and cat trees to sink a battleship, so I’m pretty sure she doesn’t get bored. She’s also got two rather hyperactive teenagers to keep her entertained and yes, she does still play like a kitten … when she feels like it!

Isha’s nose is pink and cute, and her tail is very fluffy – two things that are completely different from Puddy. She’s very independent and hates pats, which is why we were very surprised when she came over to the couch and propped her front paws up on my leg and allowed me to give her a pat. We were even more surprised when Isha jumped onto my lap, but then she quickly took off to her bed and started cleaning herself. Perhaps she’d realised I wasn’t going to let her outside and that’s the only reason she’d been sucking up to me.

I wondered if I’d brought Puddy along, how they would have interacted. They both had very similar personalities and that made me think they might clash – but I’d love to see them together as polar opposites!

I kept looking at that cute little pink nose! Photographing Puddy is fun, but I really enjoyed meeting and photographing another cat, just for something different! No doubt we’ll be seeing Isha again and hopefully next time I will remember to take my camera and won’t have to rely on Phill’s iPhone (hence the photo quality).

So I finally got around to seeing Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince a while back and it was fine. Nothing too special – I wasn’t completely thrilled by it, but I think I’ve come to expect that from the Harry Potter film series. After all, the movies can never live up to the expectations of the “book readers”, can they? If you haven’t seen the movie yet, stop reading now because no doubt there will be a few spoilers in the next bit.

I liked the romance within the movie, the fact that it didn’t completely dominate and the fact that Hermione and Ron’s “thing” wasn’t shoved down our throats. After all, that does take a while to grow, but I thought, for Hollywood’s sake, they might try to make it a big thing. I thought they did a good job with casting, especially Lavender Brown, Professor Slughorn and young Voldemort, except I wasn’t impressed with the casting of Narcissa Malfoy. I pictured her as much younger, thinner and quite prissy. Almost model-like, with beautiful long, white-blonde hair, essentially a complete opposite of her sister Bellatrix. I loved the scene where Katie got cursed – it was freaky!

I didn’t like that the romance between Tonks and Lupin took a back seat and that Luna found Harry on the train, not Tonks. It would have been the perfect chance for them to explain or hint at Tonks’ state of mind as they walked back to the castle, just like in the book. I’m not sure why they took that out (because it sort of becomes important in the last book!), but I do love Luna so more screen time for her was okay by me. I found Dumbledore extremely monotone in this movie and not in a “I know I’m going to die soon” way, just in a boring “I’m reading off a teleprompter” way. I was very surprised because I’ve loved him in previous movies – perhaps it was so long since the last one that I talked him up in my head?

All in all, the movie was fine, not amazing.

Now, the other night I was reading New Moon in preparation for the upcoming movie (in the Twilight series) and it made me wonder about which was bigger – Harry Potter or Twilight? They are very different, but still similar. I think the Harry Potter books are better written, but Twilight is enticing because the heroine could be you, a normal girl from a tiny town who just happens to come face to face with vampires, but vampires that could actually exist and could actually be your neighbour.

But the thing that Harry Potter did wrong? Or rather, the Harry Potter movies? They took too darn long to make the movies! True, there will be eight Harry Potter movies and only four Twilight movies, but Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was released on 16 November, 2001 and the final movie is slated to be released on 15 July 2011 – that’s 10 years! Twilight, on the other hand was released 21 November 2008, New Moon will be released 20 November 2009 and, even though New Moon hasn’t even been released yet, they’ve started filming the third film, Eclipse, which is set to be released 30 June 2010 – that’s only 7 months after New Moon.

The Twilight people no doubt looked at the fan reception and figured they’ve got a good thing happening and, in order to capitalise on this, they are whipping the movies out as soon as they can, knowing that really, no matter how good or bad the movies are, they’re still going to get the millions of fans going to see it. Harry Potter, on the other hand, has been so slow at getting (the rather mediocre) movies out, that the fan energy faded … and then the Twilight series came along and grabbed everyone’s attention.

Anyway, that’s my thoughts on it all – what are yours? And for those of you who have seen Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, how did you like it?