We Recommend: Your Friday Freebies

Featuring shit brick fences of Melbourne, tips on how to survive in the country and a wombat doing the laundry.

by Junkee 11 July 2014

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Each Friday, our contributors send in a bunch of (legally) free stuff they’ve come across this week to help you waste your weekend. You’re welcome.

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Pics: The Most Repeated Motifs Designers Use in Movie Posters

Recommended by: Emily Tatti (“What To Expect From The Final Season Of True Blood”)

If you’ve ever looked at the Forrest Gump poster and felt a strong sense of déjà vu, there’s a reason for that, and it’s not just because Channel 9 replays it every second Saturday.

French film analyst Christophe Courtois has compiled this excellent list of the most overused movie poster aesthetics, from people sitting thoughtfully on public benches to female protagonists holding impossible angles (see Chicago, Underworld, countless Resident Evil movies), proving Hollywood poster artists are all just giant rip-off merchants.

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YouTube: ‘How To Country’ By Jess Kidding

Recommended by: Alex McKinnon (“Penny Wong Blew Up And Tore The Government A New One In The Senate Yesterday”)

Living in the country is fraught — wild animals, wild weather and wild Holden drivers are all out to do you no good. Thankfully, an amateur film-maker with the YouTube moniker of ‘Jess Kidding’ is here to help, with excellent advice like “wear a fluorescent rain jacket for no apparent reason”, “teach yourself how to crayfish” and “get yourself a pair of gumboots and fill them with poisonous arachnids! Don’t bother testing if they’re there; you’ll just look weak.”

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GIF: Just Look At This Wombat Doing Laundry

Recommended by: Amy Gray

As advertised, here is a wombat doing the laundry and ready to reach deep into your fractured heart to not only make everything whole again but also make you realise your life sucks because it lacks marsupial domestic help. I sent it to a French deathcore musician I’ve been sexting but apparently wombats doesn’t translate into French but Jerry Lewis does. Fuck the French, man.

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Web: Cooking With Kettle

Recommended by: Koren Helbig (“Young Australian Poetry Is Incredible, And It’s Making A Comeback”)

The other day I found grains of white rice lurking in the bottom of my sharehouse kettle. It was weird and confusing and gross, so naturally I turned to Twitter to express my bewildering medley of feelings. Only to be pointed in the direction of Cooking With Kettle, which is exactly what it sounds like: the recipe blog of a broke Indian engineering student who discovers the “limitless capabilities of an electric kettle”.

Thing is, the recipes actually look kinda … good. It’s unsettling. Although, wouldn’t scrambled eggs cooked up inside your kettle leave subsequent cups of tea with a distinct eggy flavour? I’m scared to find out. For those who like to live on the edge, each recipe also has a risk level. (Hat tip to @Qldaah for unearthing this amazing awfulness.)

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Read: ‘Bicycle Face’

Recommended by: Elizabeth Flux

When I started cycling again earlier this year I was concerned about things like “getting lost”, “injuring self” or “holding up a vast trail of fitter people in the bike lane”. Turns out that’s nothing compared to what 19th-century female cyclists had to deal with. In between hoping your extensive skirts didn’t get devoured by whirring spokes you also had to worry about “bicycle face”, a potentially permanent condition which, though not exclusive to women, was apparently of major concern to doctors at the time.

Sufferers were described as “usually flushed, but sometimes pale, often with lips more or less drawn, and the beginning of dark shadows under the eyes, and always with an expression of weariness.”

I read about how bullshit this obviously is with an expression of weariness, and the article goes on to explain the social context of “bicycle face” being used as a technique to quash early feminism.

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Facebook: Shit Brick Fences of Melbourne

Recommended by: Mel Campbell (“Eleven International Sporting Team Uniforms That Should Be Burned In A Pit”)

The ornamental brick wall – of the sort used in leafy suburbia to demarcate a house’s front fence – is a style of vernacular architecture found everywhere in Melbourne, and further afield. But this Facebook page is dedicated to walls that are, in the words of the moderators, “a dog’s brickfast”.

Ugly, incompetently built, falling down and never repaired — these are the kinds of walls Humpty Dumpty would just waddle straight past. You have probably walked past heaps of really annoyingly shit brick fences in your life and never had a specific place to whinge about them. Well now, you do.

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Podcast: ‘9-Volt Nirvana’ by Radiolab

Can a battery administering an electrical current to your brain speed up the learning process? In the latest episode of brilliant science-leaning podcast Radiolab, New Scientist editor Sally Adee recalls how this method of ‘cranial direct current stimulation’ turned her into a super sniper, despite no prior M4 assault rifle experience – and the Radiolab team explore the ramifications of this controversial method of sped-up learning.