This is a hilarious and intriguing book, painstakingly written by assembling thousands of fragments from several decade’s worth of women’s magazines. The tone of the sentences is unmistakable.

I love the way that some of the word combinations lead to odd turns of phrase and overextended metaphors that you wouldn’t see in any normal book, such as
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This book is not really about being right. It’s about winning arguments, even when you’re wrong. The 38 tactics include such classics as “Use your opponent’s views”, “Beg the question” and the ultimate: “Become personal, insulting, rude”. You’ll recognise these from many annoying and unsatisfying arguments you’ve had. This book helps you avoid them, and if necessary, use them yourself. Very useful, and all based on “the natural baseness of human nature”. Perhaps it’s best not to dwell on that.

Thanks to Wikisource and the wonders of copyright law, you can read The Art of Always Being Right online for free.

The increasing amount of choice we have now allows us to lead lives that are objectively better, but subjectively worse than before. This thought-provoking book by Barry Schwartz tries to show why the increasing amount of choice in our lives isn’t making us happier — in fact, it’s making us less happy. Fortunately, he also describes solutions to allow us to manage the negative effects of choice.

I tend to agree with him in general. Here’s a rather trivial example of a way I have tried to avoid the problem. When confronted with a restaurant menu, I try to read down the menu until I find something that sounds good to me. Then I stop, and order that thing. There are some restaurants I have been to several times where I have never read to the end of the menu, because I know that I will end up agonising over my choice and thinking I should have chosen something else anyway.

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(500) Days of Summer (don’t forget the parentheses!) is a conventional boy-meets-girl story dressed up with a bundle of enjoyable and inventive extras. It’s a lot of fun.

The film-makers dug deep into their box of tricks for this film. The timeline zooms back and forth across the 500 days. A voiceover occasionally offers explanations. There’s a surreal moment when the thunderstruck protagonist turns into a drawing and gets erased, and an even more surreal song-and-dance number during an earlier happy moment.

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Any time the thunder starts to rumble down
Don’t let hope tumble down
Or castles crumble down
If the blues appear just make the best of them
Just make a jest of them
Don’t be possessed of them

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That guy from The Office (who despite many other noteworthy roles including this one is destined always to be known only as “That guy from The Office“) really is pretty funny. He’s much more likeable in this film than the painful idiots he plays in The Office and Extras.

(OK, his real name is Ricky Gervais. But I had to look it up.)

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Headless Chickens played their first gig in almost a decade last Friday. The setlist was packed with great songs, the crowd was into it, the sound was excellent. They rocked.

Headless Chickens have been one of my favourite bands since the early ’90s, even though they pretty much called it a day in about 2000. I remember listening to their first recordings on BFM in New Zealand 20 years ago, and then the splash they made in Australia a few years later with their Body Blow album. I still listen to their music now, so imagine my surprise when the Fiona McDonald we met when we moved back to Auckland turned out to be Fiona Headless Chicken, whose sweet yet gutsy voice helped make the Chooks such a unique band. And imagine my even more surprised surprise when I found out that the band were going to re-form for a tour of Australia and New Zealand.

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Mellow mellifluous melodies. The Bads are a girl/boy duo from New Zealand; you could call them a guitar-based pop/rock group, or even a “popular beat combo” (as John Peel used to say). But that would just be lazy pigeonholing, so if you pretend you didn’t read that then I will pretend I didn’t write it. Anyway, it seems that of the two Bads, Diane does most of the singing, with Brett singing backup and breaking into the lead occasionally. I can’t find any information on what they each play, so I suppose they are both prodigious multi-instrumentalist polymaths.

Song titles such as Feels Like Rain, Trouble Rides A Fast Horse and Bush Fire Sunset make this sound like good ol’ country music. The first of these songs does sound pretty much like that, with its lazy drawl and twangin’ guitar, but the rest of the album shows some nice variation. The opening song Off The Rails has just the most irresistible chorus — I find it tremendously uplifting, in a minor-key sort of way. The driving Carry The Weight is another of my favourites, with powerful guitar and nice male/female harmonies.

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Here’s a set of simple, affecting songs, beautifully sung and sympathetically arranged. The overall theme is Love Gone Wrong, the traditional singer-songwriter preoccupation. But Anna Coddington turns it into something that sounds great — “beauty exploding from despair”, to use one of her own lines.

I was looking forward to buying this CD, since I enjoyed Anna Coddington’s performance a few months ago. Even though it’s been quite a long time since then, I still remember quite a few of the songs. The songs worked really well live, with Anna accompanying herself on guitar; the fuller production on the album adds another dimension without ever overwhelming the basic voice and guitar structure.

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I had a great time at this big, fun and loud film about a big, fun and loud elephant. The story of Horton and the Whos is one of my 2-year-old son’s favourite stories, so this was a good choice as his first ever cinema experience. He enjoyed it, and so did we. In the manner of kids’ films these days, there were lots of jokes for the adults. During the anime sequence I was crying tears of laughter. That doesn’t happen to me that often — maybe because I don’t go to very many films.

Anyway, this is definitely worth seeing. And it confirmed to me that any film is improved by watching it with a 2-year-old.