Hunk of the Month Club: Gael Garcia Bernal

We had the hardest time settling on a hunk to celebrate this month, readers. It feels like lately, we've spent so much of our time exasperated over the lack of new hunks coming through the pipeline, and by how Big Movie expects us to believe people  like Bradley Cooper and Ryan Reynolds are hunks, that there's barely been any time for true hunk reflection. I was about to suggest to J that we revisit Jimmy Bartel, what with it being the last week in September and  the Brownlow producers' apparent inability to give the audience what it wants.

But then inspiration hit. 

Gael Garcia Bernal.

Actor. Director. Mexican. Hunk.

I emailed J straight away and she said "Yes. He is a deadset hunk and I love him!" 

It's not hard to see why, readers. But lets explore it anyway.

K: Mate, when did you first discover GGB?

J: God, I remember the first time I saw GGB like it was yesterday. I was watching Amores Perros at the Kino and there he was. Like some kind of golden god. I was watching it with David and I could tell he was hating that movie so hard. That guy sure doesn't know a hunk when he sees one. 

Snaggle toothed and hot

K: Too bad, so sad, David. I feel sorry for people who can't (or won't) see the hunk in others. For me, there is no film experience more satisfying than one that delivers a new hunk in to my consciousness when I had no expectation of it at all. It's a rare and absolute joy. 

My first GGB experience was in Y tu mama tambien. Hot.

Of course, I had heard you talk about what a hunk GGB is, so I wasn't surprised when I saw him and found him to be a total hunk. But sometimes a little anticipation is a good thing too.

Mate, what do you think is the root of GGB's hunkiness?

Brooding and hot

J:Oh a movie with a new surprise hunk is one of the all time best things! I love that. But you are right, sometimes being a little primed for a hunk doesn't hurt. Y tu mama tambien is such a special movie of hunk. I mean, it is such a great film and GGB really, shall we say, shines.

That's a great question about the root of GGB's hotness. Let's break it down. Firstly, he is so pretty. That square jaw and big smile. Plus he can look adorable and doofusy, scary, sad hot, he does it all! Plus, an accent. And finally he's a hot Mexican. And you don't get to see that in a movie every day.

What do you think it is?

K: I think GGB being as pretty as he is goes a long way. And so smiley. Miss Soft Crab has said it before and she'll say it again: A brooding hunk is great, but a smiling hunk is something else altogether. Often, hunks own one of these dimensions, and while they may dabble in the other, they tend to hold fast to their source. GGB is equal parts a brooding hunk and a smiling hunk. Equal parts! Again, it's a rare joy. 

I feel that we should note that GGB is 1.68 metres tall. This means that GGB is in fact, short. Obviously this kind of thing can be difficult for a gentleman. A real hunk-inhibitor. Not so with the GGB.

He manages to make being a short man a source of his hunkiness, not an impediment to it. He's a short, hot man.

Black and white and hot

J: It's true. It's almost as if GGB's height is an enhancement rather than inhibitor of his hunkness. To be a grade-A hunk at the height of 168cm proves how special a person is. 

Plus not only is GGB really damn pretty, but he also speaks 5 languages and has two babies with his wife. Quintlingual family man! Hot!

Shopping and hot

K: Oh man, what a guy. I'm pretty sure GGB is our first Quintlingual HotMC hunk. Lets just go through the list to be sure:

Paul Newman

Jake Gyllenhaal

Casey Affleck

Jimmy Bartel

Viggo Mortensen.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure none of those guys is a fiver.

But geez, look at that list and tell me does MSC know how to choose a hunk or does MSC know how to choose a hunk?!

Here's to you, GGB. Welcome to the HotMC family. 

Haiku Thursday (PM)

Everything it turning to scary

 The K forecast says:

Much much much much much much more

Use of taxi cabs.

I also might start

Applying butter as if

There's no tomorrow.

Haiku Thursday (AM)

Rain

Since the drought done broke

The countryside's gotten green

So soft on my eyes

Springtime

How'd you get so fine

Sweetest of seasons, springtime

Want to make you mine

Taquitos

If life was good as 

Trippy taco taquitos

Life would be so good

The Miss Soft Crab Brownlow wrap up

After the success of the 2011 Brownlow Blue Carpet Wrap Up, Miss Soft Crab could not wait to get ringside for the 2012 extravaganza on Monday night.
Would the lazy susan be back?
Would Jimmy Bartel's girlfriend finally realise what a good wicket she is on and smile for once?
Would Twigley look ridiculous? (we didn't really wonder about this)

As usual, Miss Soft Crab answers all your questions through the text messages we exchanged  during the broadcast. J's special comments in grey, mine in green.

I don't know what a Fango is, but the Tango is a dance. 

The Cooneys are lovely, but underboob really should be neither seen nor heard.

You can't really see it here, but it's there. 

As for Lady Jobe...

Zzzzzzzzzzzz.
I love you a little bit, Jobe.

More of Twigley later...
At this point, Trent and Lady Cotchin arrived, wearing something that looked inspired by a chaise lounge.

Am I right?

Baby is beautiful, he's right.

Sometimes our text messages don't make a lot of sense. Someone says something about one guy, then the other one responds with a comment about some other guy. It's a mess. But it always ends up with us wondering where Jimmy is. Anyway, here are Nick and Lady Nat:

And Toma and Ladyhawke:

Back to the broadcast...

Because they didn't show him ALL NIGHT, here is a picture of Jimmy for you, readers.

Now that's a face that has Brownlow written all over it. What? I don't know. But where the hell was Jimmy?

J said it best:

Seriously producers, what the eff. And seriously Twigley, what the eff.

Someone put a party pie in that woman's mouth, seriously.
That's basically all the red carpet had to offer and frankly, it was very disappointing. The count itself didn't really improve things. No Jimmy. Barely any Dees players got votes. No Jimmy.

J was smart and started watching the Emmys.

J meant 'love'. She can't help but love Gary.
Meanwhile, the lacklustre broadcast was made worse by the fact that they kept cutting to what looked like a fluro-lit RSL in Sydney where all the swans were. It was weird.

Does anyone know if Goodesy has a girlfriend? Because obviously the only thing standing between us is some other woman. Otherwise it would be on like Donkey Kong.

Meanwhile, J was watching the Emmys.

Aaron Paul plays Jesse Pinkman on Breaking Bad. We love Jesse Pinkman. He won an Emmy!
And Jobe Watson won the Brownlow.
For some reason, J started referring to Jobe Watson as my boyfriend. Sure, why not.

#hot

So that was it really. In summary, a very boring Brownlow with hardly any hunks and boring dresses. Just like the 2012 season.

At this point, I'm turned the tele off and probably started looking at pictures of Jimmy on the internet or something.
Then, I got this message from J:

I hope you made it out, Mate.

What just happened? (PM)

Cool story, J.

And earth to Internet: get some information on bittersōt ōrtsnaps, why don't you. People need to know what they are drinking at home on a Monday night.

Bye!

What just happened? (AM)

Last night I sat down to write about Aaron Paul and just when I started writing, an ad for Rivers came on. Of course I was watching the Emmys at the time, you know, hoping to see Aaron Paul and then this Rivers ad came on. It was an ad for clogs. The whole ad is about the fact that they are super ugly shoes but only cost $5. "They're ugly. $4.90. They're so ugly. $4.90" You know the usual Rivers style.

I'd put a picture of them here but I don't want that ugly shit on my blog. I stared at the screen for a minute trying to figure out if I'd really seen what I thought I'd seen. Then I looked at this bottle of bittersōt ōrtsnaps I'd just opened and wondered if that had anything to do with it.

Then I actually laughed out load at a joke made on the Emmys. Must be the bittersōt ōrtsnaps. But it was made by Melissa McCarthy and she is really funny so maybe the joke was funny and the Rivers ad was real. Then I googled for a translation of bittersōt ōrtsnaps turns out google has never even heard of these words!

When suddenly I remember, holy shit. J, haven't you been smoking peyote for six straight days? And couldn't some of this, maybe, be in your mind? It was. I was totally fine. I've never even been to Mount Vesuvius.

Northern (de)Lights (PM)

I can barely believe that neither Legsley nor Miguel referred to that dinner as Northern (de)Lights. Or Biz. All of them were key candidates for that kind of pun. Weird.

Don't worry guys! Here is a picture of K's pretzels plated up:

See that butter looking thing in the background? Anchovy and egg butter K made! Yum, people. Effing yum

I'm not going to take you on a step by step journey of my preparations, let me just tell you a little about the night.

We decided that in the ancient Nordic tradition we should eat smörgåsbord. Before people arrived with their food and the hot food hit the table, it looked like this.




By the time we sat down it looked like this:

From top right: pretzels (K), honey-glazed ham (K), cheese platter - jarlsberg, pickled sardines, crackers and pear (Blizzie), celeriac remoulade (K), hasselback potatoes (me), oysters (K), sides platter - egg white, egg yolk, cucumber, lemon, dill, pickles, capers (me), beetroot relish (guilty), Swedish meatballs (Miguel), gravlax and gravlax sauce (David), rye bread (Blizzie), Jansen's temptation (Russeth).

Oh, you wanna get a little up close and personal with some of that? I'm not surprised. David made TWO kinds of gravlax. One aniseedy one, the details of which I did not hear, but I know it included pernot.  The second one used the ancient tradition of pine needles from Fitzroy gardens. Needles(s) to say both were delicious!

Here are some hasselhoffback potatoes I made. Yep, as good as they look.

Everything was delicious. Personal highlights for me were (in no particular order) Jansen's temptation, hasselback potatoes, anchovy butter, gravlax - both kinds. But it was really the entire smörgåsbord that brought it all together.
Then it was time to retire to the sitting room for dessert and digestifs.

What are these you ask? Ice-cream sandwiches of gingerbread with honey and nutmeg ice-cream. Just a little something I whipped up. And yes, they are snowflake shaped. \

Oh, and there were these kanelbullar:

Swedish cinnamon buns

Just a little something Miguel whipped up. And in case you are interested, yes, you can have them with coffee in the morning and still respect yourself.

So what else happened at Northern (de)Lights? I got hysterical no less than 3 times, everyone got super full and we discovered that Ikea has an alcohol that tastes just like alcoholic Ribena. Basically it was success all round, I'd say! 

Northern (de)Lights (AM)

On Saturday night, J threw a Nordic themed dinner party. We privately referred to it as Northern (de)Lights, and looked forward to the time that someone else (Legsley) would make that pun. Unfortunately it never happened, but I'm just going to keep calling it that because it pleases me.

This post is not about Northern (de)Lights. Its about how to make pretzels, which was the thing I decided to contribute to the Northern (de)Lights table. Are you ready, readers? Well alrighty then.


First, you combine flour, yeast, sugar, milk, butter and a little chopped dill.

 You knead it...

... until it's nice and smooth.

Then you put it aside and let it prove....how much it wants to become some pretzels!
Not really. You just let it prove.

When it's double the size, you knock it back and divide it up.


Now it's ready to be turned in to pretzels, which involves a few steps.

Step 1: We can have lots of fun by rolling each bit in to long ropes

Step 2: There's so much we can do, but really we should just curve the ropey bits towards us...

...and then fold them over and get ready to tuck them under.

Step 3: It's just you and me and the need to tuck the end bits under.

Step 4: I can give you more, but I'm not going to because there isn't any.
Step 5: Don't you know that the time has arrived to bake your pretzels? It totally has.

Or has it??!!


In fact, there's one more thing to do. Like the bagel, another of life's great breads, pretzels take a little dip in a bath of bi-carbonate soda and water before they are baked.

Now in the oven they go.

OK, so that's how you make pretzels. If you've been following Miss Soft Crab for a while, you'll know that I have a tendency to forget to photograph critical parts of what I'm posting about. Today is no exception. By the time I pulled the pretzels out of the oven, I was in a bit of a rush to get to J's place, and I forgot to take a photo of them all golden brown and piping hot. I'm pretty sure J got one, so let's hope that she can pick up where I left off, and fill you in on some of the things that happened between pretzels and this:

Who's with me?! (PM)

J is talking loco and I like it.
There's few things I like more than a cockamamy plan. And few things I think more regularly than "gee, I really should exercise more".
So lets put the two together and see if we can't add a little muscle tone to these Crabby arms.
Perhaps for the duration of these trials we can write a weekly post about our experiences. And perhaps we should take photos of ourselves putting our arms in the air like John and Jane and Mr and Ms Superfirm.

Also, if I can find a way to integrate a leotard in to this without looking like a total moron, I'm doing it.

Who's with me?! (AM)

Recently I was cleaning my bathroom. Really, properly cleaning it; in the way that meant I moved the scales so I could mop under them. Of course a super clean bathroom is one of life's joys, but deciding to weigh oneself after many, many months just because you are holding some scales is, so often, not. Yeah, those scales told me straight out what my jeans had been whispering to me for some time. Now that I am off the world's easiest and bestest all-you-can-eat breastfeeding diet it's like I've got to start putting in some kind of effort. Lucky for me AND all of you, I think I have just the thing. These three books that made there way in or back into my life at the start of last summer.



Sure, late last year when I rediscovered them I had the best of intentions, but what with all the breastfeeding as if I was going to waste my time with watching what I ate and exercises. I'm not a sucker. So now the time has come. The plan is this. For one month each I am going to follow an exercises gleaned from each of these books. At the start of each month I will tell you about the book and the exercise routine and I will follow it for a month and, although I have not so much as uttered a word about this to K before writing these here words, I fully expect K to follow the routine too. Then we will decide which is the bestest! Who's with me?!

I think we should start with Jane. Now don't freak out, friends, this great new exercises routine isn't starting today. No, let's give it a couple of weeks so we can all get psyched! Now, as Jane Fonda is a woman and a feminist I think her routine will be the most beginner friendly. Plus, look at what a great time she is having!

Perhaps after Jane we will move to Travolta. His book "is designed to provide a six-day-a-week workout program"! Shit. Well, let's hope Jane gives us the goods to move onto that.

Then we will finish with Super Firm. That book has a subheading. 'Tough Workouts'! Eeek! This book contains such sections as 'Working harder', 'Advanced shaping and toning' and 'Plyometrics'! Until I looked on Wikipedia last night I didn't even know what that was. In fact, Wikipedia barely made me any wiser but Super Firm tells me that the section is about training to build power, muscle elasticity and recoil, and includes bounding and jumping routines for powerful legs! I didn't even know I needed better muscle recoil!

I CAN'T WAIT TO GET SUPER BUFF!!!! WHO'S WITH ME?!