Kevin McCloud’s Man made home. Put your feet up and watch this antidote to consumerism.

I have been lax in my posting today, the kids and I went out to the movies yesterday (as you do when it is school holidays) and, frankly, after the drive there and back and braving the traffic and people I was too blah to do any thinking at all. 🙂

Anyway, after spending the day in crowds of people groaning under their loads of shopping bags and junk food I am taking the opportunity to share the antidote to that with you through the medium of Kevin McCloud’s Man Made Home.

I loved this series when it was on telly recently and will be attempting to convince the family to supply the DVD for my Mother’s Day present.*

In Man Made Home Kevin shared his efforts at building an off the grid cabin in the woods. Everything used during the construction was recycled or repurposed, including the toilet and the fantastic jet engine cowl bath.

Watching this made me want to build a shed of my own! I am not sure how happy the neighbours would be with me tanning my own hides and an outdoor toilet (generating methane for the stove) right outside their window though. 😉

*And Kevin, if you’re out there, why is it that you didn’t do a book about all of the off the grid stuff? Yeah, I know you can find out about that stuff from every strange hippie on the net but still….. There’s time to get one out before my birthday!

Back to reality. So annoying…..

Today (Wednesday) the kids are going back to school. Blah. I enjoy their holidays as much as they do, so sending them back is just as annoying for me as it is for them.

Going back to real life means getting up early instead of sleeping in, making nutritious school lunches myself instead of leaving the kids to feed themselves, and being organized instead of spending the day in our pj’s. Being organized is going to come as something as a shock for us I can tell you….

It also means that there won’t be the kids tv channel ABC3 running in the background so I won’t keep getting called in to watch something funny we have all watched a thousand times before, and that gives me no excuse to let the housework go. Aaarrggh!

I spent Tuesday trying to get organized for school tomorrow (doing the washing, naming books and stationery, trying to find the floor in one boy’s bedroom which appears to have had a toy shop explode inside it) so I can all stroll in the school gate tomorrow looking like I have been a mum for more than five minutes and actually know what I am doing.

All that effort means I have nothing to share with you that involved research or deep thought, instead I will share one of the cartoons that I am regularly called in to watch.

The show is called Larva and is about the adventures of two larva who live in a drain and never fails to make us laugh.

Horrible Histories. They sing, they dance, they are hilarious.

I am doing a different post today, I am confessing a guilty pleasure. I have young kids so there are times I have to watch kids TV shows. Some of them I hate but there are other ones I love. The one I love the most is Horrible Histories.

Horrible Histories are a series of books that have been developed into a television series by the BBC. The show teaches history to kids using singing, dancing and funny skits. Yes, it is taught very simplistically, but what better way to foster their interest than with sillyness?

The skits are done in a few different styles. They might be computer games, done in on-the-spot news reporter style or even as take-offs of television shows. It is a clever concept and it really works. We all know kids (and adults) are far more likely to retain information when they have been amused, but history is not something usually taught in a comic way, mores the pity. The songs are the favourites in our house, always catchy and completely silly.

Since it is school holidays we have been overloaded with 6 episode marathons of the most popular shows from ABC3. Today it is Horrible Histories so we will have it running in the background all afternoon, which means we will be humming the songs all day. No matter how many times we have seen them we still get a laugh out of them.

A quick  poll of the attendant children tells me their favourite songs are…. all of them. Hmmm, no help.

Well, the ones that are my favourite are;

Boudicca (whacked ’em smacked ’em, boy how we attacked ’em) http://youtu.be/1LhT7rCC6O8 ,

Dick Turpin (done in the style of Adam Ant) http://youtu.be/6KbXyALq7uA ,

Charles II: King of Bling (the king who bought back par-ty-ing) http://youtu.be/P2kyNbZc7oc

And the rapping Celtic Boast Battle (look at me I’m tough, I fight in the buff)

….hmmmm… OK, I love all of them too.

There are heaps on YouTube, go and have a look.

   

The Gruen Transfer and Gruen Salts. 1929.

Cairns Post 31 Jan 1929 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article40657403

There is a great TV show on ABC1 in Australia, hosted by the very funny Will Anderson, called The Gruen Transfer. This is how their website describes the naming of the show; ‘The Gruen Transfer is named after Victor Gruen, the guy who designed the very first shopping mall. The term describes that split second when the mall’s intentionally confusing layout makes our eyes glaze and our jaws slacken… the moment when we forget what we came for and become impulse buyers.’

The show is all about advertising around the world and its tricks to influence the masses, including a segment where two real advertising agencies compete to ‘sell the unsellable’ (whale meat, euthanasia, Australia invading NZ….) It is hilarious and I am happy to hear that the next season starts this week.

In that vein, I was happy to find this ad from 1929 selling us the amazing product that is, the aptly named, Gruen Health Salts. I found a lot of articles advertising Gruen Salts under a variety of headlines, claiming to cure almost everything. Backache and Rheumatism, Deadly Constipation, and that it could ‘Get rid of or prevent colds’. One ad told me I would have ‘healthful cleanness inside’. I am a little afraid of what that might involve. It appears that it is able to remove all the bad things in your body leaving you ‘sparking in all cylinders’.

I use fuel additives when my car fails to spark in all cylinders. I am really hoping that these wonder salts don’t contain any of the same chemicals but, after the posts I have done in the past detailing the things historically used to ‘cure’ people, I am not too sure about that….

The Gruen Salts people were even tricky enough to have their name in bold lettering above an ad for something else they were marketing, subconsciously reinforcing the fact that it could do anything. The one above the ad for hair color could have been a bit more clearly thought out though.

I now realize Gruen Health Salts are a wonder drug and its production has clearly been suppressed by the big pharmaceutical companies. Such an amazing product would negate the need for any others. I want to run out right now and buy a bottle of Gruen as it will clearly make my life better. Quite frankly, after reading the ads for it for the last half an hour I am surprised the lack of it has not already caused my death.

Rolling coverage.

     Today we heard the terrible news of the earthquake in Christchurch in New Zealand. Awful stuff. I had been listening to the news on the radio and later turned on the telly to get an update. I didn’t have to look far to find some news as every channel was running whatever they could get. That is something I hate about the coverage of a natural disaster. It is everywhere on every channel and you can’t get away from it. I know that it is important to get out information and that in this day and age people expect to know everything RIGHT NOW! The problem with this is that you never get to turn off. I think that this kind of thing began in Australia with Stuart Diver and his rescue from a landslide at Thredbo in 1997. We all watched with bated breath as he was slowly extricated from a collapsed ski lodge. We didn’t know that this sort of coverage would become a tool used during every disaster from then on. 

     The Black Saturday fires and aftermath here in Victoria in 2009 was on TV for weeks as was the flooding in Queensland recently. The problem with this is that the more you are told of how terrible it is the more it gets in your head. I choose to turn it off but it doesn’t take much viewing  for kids to be affected. During the fires in 2009 we evacuated as it was a little too close for comfort. I kept the TV off as the kids were already worried enough as they were aware of how close it was and every time they saw a TV they were told to be even more worried. We have been through a time of fires in this area years ago, before rolling coverage and mobile phones. Then the attitude was less of panic and more of ‘how can we sort this out?’ Now any perilous situation is constantly reinforced with the tragedies and worst case scenarios of the day updated hourly.

     I really noticed how TV coverage affected the kids during the QLD floods when we were caught in a huge downpour one night on the way home from a friends house. There were swathes of water across the roads and branches down everywhere. I was driving throught the water slowly (as my Ford can stall at the sight of a wet tissue and I didn’t want us to have to walk home) and the kids were freaking out. Normally they would have been shrieking with laughter at floods and mud as they do when we are out in the bush in the 4WD but this time they were truly afraid. You can blame the images of cars being swept away and smashed into trees seen on TV in previous days. A few weeks later we were driving in even worse conditions and they were delighted. It was just because the TV had told them to be afraid that they had such a reaction at the time.

     If these things were only aired on one channel it would be easier to avoid but every channel runs constantly, vying for the most graphic footage. When the vision of an injured and unconcious (I hope) child being pulled from under fallen blocks was aired without warning today I wasn’t the only one upset by it. The desk announcer was clearly affected too. How many small kids were at home and seeing this unexpected and distressing sight? Tonight I will be keeping the TV off and keeping the little lives in my house free of the fear of an earthquake that they can do nothing about and just be thankful that it is not our town on the TV. This time.