Well what is all that about I hear you say, and yes for the uninitiated it does sound quite weird and have gotten many people in trouble and I have to point out, even me now as recently as Saturday night, lol. You know how you wake up the following morning and think oh boy I shouldn’t have said that!  This acrylic on board painting is of a similar night that I am going to tell you about, and now I will just have to get started on another artwork and capture this recent event!

You see we were at a very swanky “do” indeed for the Women’s and Children’s Hospital Foundation raising money for a very good cause.  Adelaide’s Glitterati were there in all their finery, Simon Bryant the renowned chef provided the meals Brenton Ragless was the MC and the girls in charge; Marta Harbuzinska and Christina Angus could not have done a better job.  It was indeed a successful night raising some $130.000 for the babies in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

THE ART OF EAGLE ROCK

So what about the Pants Down reference about the Eagle Rock song and Ross Wilson who sings it, well here is the history about that from Hobsons bay weekly;

Since the 1980s, it’s been a regular sight at gigs for patrons to unbuckle belts and hobble around with their pants around their ankles when the song is played.

“I didn’t invent it, Australians invented it as a response to Eagle Rock,” says Wilson, who turns 65 next month.

“But in certain parts of the country, whenever Eagle Rock’s played —in bars, or uni, and it’s big in the military — they’ve got their pants around their ankles and sort of do this dance.

Wilson, whose last visit to Williamstown was about five years ago, has warned the custom may reveal itself at the RSL.

“The word’s getting out there; it’s happening a little bit more at my shows and also women are starting to do it,” he said.

“Up in Queensland, the University of Queensland, they lay claim, whether it’s true or not — I don’t think it is true but they claim that they invented it.

“So, you’ve got this thing in the student bar that one of the rules in the bar is that patrons are not to be ejected if they drop their pants to this song, Eagle Rock, but they must replace them at the finish of the song.”

Well now you know the tradition of this song and it has as I said gotten quite a few people in trouble over the years and some have even gotten arrested over it.

At our daughters 21^st birthday party for instance the song came on and all the boys got into a big circle and dropped their pants (undies are left on of course LOL) and shuffled to the music.  At the time we had a lovely couple from England staying with us and although he was not familiar with the custom he got into the spirit of it and followed suit, much to the ire of his girlfriend who was not amused.  She had never heard of this tradition and thought it very uncouth to have her fiancé dancing without pants all of a sudden.

THE ART OF NOT KEEPING YOUR MOUTH SHUT

Which brings me to Saturday night at this fine event; we were all up dancing with a bunch of fairly new friends all having fun when local band Acoustic Juice plays Daddy Cool’s Eagle Rock.  I get into the spirit of things and tongue in cheek I say (obviously as this is not the venue for it) to a couple of the guys; Pants down!  Lol, well you should have seen the looks on their faces – they clearly had not heard of this custom and to make things worse I know some of them had read my recent blog on“Fifty shades of grey”and now thought this woman is clearly sex mad and crazy as a cut snake!

So here is a quote by Don Herold, which we should all keep in mind when it comes to things we should and shouldn’t have done and worry about;

“If I had my life to live over, I would perhaps have more actual troubles but I’d have fewer imaginary ones”

Till next time happy painting and sculpting and dancing to you all!

Love Marie xxxx

Why not come and have a look at Marie Jonsson-Harrison’s PAINTINGS FOR SALE, GICLEE PRINTS FOR SALE and SCULPTURES for sale or WALLBASED SCULPTURES.  Enjoy an original artwork on your walls or perhaps one on your bed ARTnBED.

The day before Australia day, hubby comes in from the backyard and says “I think I just got bitten by a Redback, something crawled up my shorts and a minute later I saw the spider crawl away” With hubbys track record lately I was starting to fear for the “Family Jewels” lol.  For you familiar with my art blogs there has been a myriad of mishaps culminating in the heart attack scare, however in this case it was just a false alarm!

PAINTING REDBACKS AND SNAKES

Redbacks and other creepy crawlies is something we have an abundance of here in Australia, although on this acrylic on board painting “The Snake Pit” snakes are shown in the zoo, in the everyday backyard there also lurks many dangers.  Something we take great delight with in scaring the wits out of any tourists that comes to stay, lol, well just a bit of teasing really.

Lets start with the Redback which is considered one of the most dangerous spiders in Australia and has a neurotoxin venom that causes severe pain.  There have been only 14 deaths recorded from the Redback spider bite which is quite low compared to the numbers of people that get bitten by them each year thought to be in the thousands.  Only about 20 percent of people bitten require hospital treatment and get the antivenin, after experiencing severe pain and swelling spreading from the site.  This can then lead to nausea, vomiting, abdominal and chest pain, headache, fever, tremors, coma, and of course death.

SEX AND ART

However spare a thought for the male spider as he is the one who almost never comes out of the sexual encounter alive!  The female who is much bigger than the male spider consumes the male spider in 2 out of 3 cases while the mating continues.  He is one of only 2 species of animals who actively assist the female in sexual cannibalism.  The advantage for the male spider is that he is able to copulate for a longer time whilst he is being eaten!!!  You men just don’t know when to stop!! LOL

THE ART OF THE ITCH

“Stop” being the operative word here as it brings me to my daughter’s boyfriend Brett and his itching, lol which I will tell you about in a minute.   We had actually decided in having a quite Australia day as we had done such a lot of partying in the weeks and days leading up to it.  However we quickly got into gear after Hillivi called to say she wanted to celebrate with us, much the same as Tim Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis from Christmas with the Kransks.

So they arrived fresh from the Chemist with a bag full of potions and lotions to try to sooth Brett’s feet.  He had managed to get a thousand little bites all over his feet which were suspected ant or sandflies bites and they were driving him crazy.  The poor boy could hardly concentrate on anything other than the itching and tried to discreetly itch them with anything he could find all the while being told off by Hillivi.  The conversation over the dinner table pretty much became a 3 way deal whilst Brett was alternating his attention between the itching or Googleing cures for his ailment on the Iphone.

Every now and then he would pipe up and say “Did you know they suggest smearing vegemite on the bites or maybe marmite” or “They say here I should pop them with a needle and put on some alcohol”.   So watch out all of you planning a trip down under and come prepared.

Here is a quote I think fits well here by Bill Vaughan;

“We hope that, when the insects take over the world, they will remember with gratitude how we took them along on all our picnics.”

Till next time happy painting and sculpting or perhaps itching?

Love Marie xxx  (c)

If you enjoyed this art blog you may also enjoy this one also featuring my daughter and her boyfriend Brett also featuring more artworks of course ; 100 Some like it hot in Art

Why not come and have a look at Marie Jonsson-Harrison’s PAINTINGS FOR SALE, GICLEE PRINTS FOR SALE and SCULPTURES for sale or WALLBASED SCULPTURES.  Enjoy an original artwork on your walls or perhaps one on your bed ARTnBED.

So here it comes again, New Years Eve 2011, seems only yesterday that we were ushering in 2000 never mind the 10 in between.  How does that happen?  Where did all that time go, you tell me because I haven’t got a clue!

This acrylic on board painting “Happy New Year, New York” (which sold in America) was such a lot of fun to do and it was painted in the time of innocents before 9/11 when the Twin Towers were still standing proud.  At the time I had not yet been to the USA so it was great fun to do the research on all the buildings and images of New York.  Then finally we did go to New York and here is a link to some of those adventures;  I MISS NEW YORK, sadly by the time we got there the Twin Towers were reduced to Ground Zero but we did see all the rest of the things I had painted.

THE ART OF THE YK2 BUG

You know it’s funny to think about the turn of the last century when we thought the whole world may stop and planes would fall out of the sky due to the Millennium Bug, remember that one?  The YK2 problem or YK2 bug, that whole problem stemmed from the programming of computers.  When the computer programmers were trying to save space in the computer files they abbreviated the year to just the two last digits as in 91,92,93, but as the turn of the century grew closer they realized that the clocks of the digital age would turn from 99 into 00 which may make the computers of the world fail.

THE ART OF AVOIDING MAYHEM

Hence we may have all sorts of mayhem arising, from planes dropping out of the sky to hospital life support equipment failing, trains stopping, phone lines & mobile phones dropping out, electricity and water getting turned off and supermarkets and businesses in general not being able to serve their customers. The experts on TV and Radios around the Globe were discussing the various scenarios whilst us the public were in two camps on the issue – the “believers” and the “not”.

We lived on a farm at the time and fell into the middle ground on the subject and decided that we better stock up on some food and drinks just in case, lol.  So we had a few boxes in the shed with the necessities, should the worst happen.  Canned food, long life milk, potatoes and onions and candles and batteries, oh and plenty of alcohol, we figured we may as well be a little inebriated if we were going to live on the crap we had stored in the emergency boxes, lol.

MY BROTHER THE ARTIST

My brother was totally fascinated by the subject and read every book there was and preached doom and gloom, his artist brain ticking over.  To his credit he really was on the right track because if the “IT” world had not gotten their act together in the mid nineties and started to seriously work on the problem we really would have been in dire straits.  There was one person though who had spotted the mistake as far back as 1958 whilst working on genealogical software.  His name was Bob Bemer and he had then tried for the next twenty years to make the programmers, IBM and the U.S. government aware of the problem.  But as usual the whistle blower was ignored and it took nearly 40 years before they took him seriously!

THE ART OF WHAT DID HAPPEN

For most of us midnight 1999 past without too much trouble however there were a few glitches around the world and these statistics are from the Wikipedia site;

UK – incorrect Down’s syndrome test results were sent out and two abortions were carried out and four babies were born with Down’s syndrome even though the mothers had been told they were in the low-risk category.

Japan- had radiation-monitoring equipment at a nuclear power plant fail at midnight and at another nuclear site an alarm sounded at two minutes after midnight, both with no risk to the public they stated.  Also in Japan their largest mobile phone company found their phones were deleting new messages instead of old ones but that was also fixed within a short time.

Australia- had problems with their ticket validation system on the buses in two states.

US- had 150 slot machines stop working at some race tracks in Delaware and the U.S Naval Observatory with runs the master clock that keeps official time for the whole country showed the date on its website as Jan. 1, 19100.

France- had the same problem on the weather forecast website Metro France which showed Saturday’s weather and the date as 1/01/19100.

No doubt there were some other minor problems across the world but all in all we were pretty lucky really that for the most part all was good!

So that brings me to this year and the first New Years Eve in our newly renovated house, the weather forecast is for a hot 37 degrees and we are planning a pool party in our Bali hut with good friends and too much food and drinks no doubt.  The only thing I wish for is relative quite in the morning lol, and not like one New Years Day morning many years ago when we lived in an apartment.  Apart from the annoying dog next door that would bark loudly at his own shadow we had a water pipe burst under the road opposite where we lived and the “Government emergency water brigade” thought they would find the problem at 7am with a jackhammer going at full speed! Normally when you call and tell them about a water leak they take six weeks to come out, what the??

If you enjoyed this art blog you may also enjoy this one; 2. SWEDISH EASTER & Art

So here is a thought for the New Year by Edith Lovejoy Pierce,

“We will open the book.  Its pages are blank.  We are going to put words on them ourselves.  The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day.”

From me to you – I wish you the best New Years ever and hope it will bring love, joy, health, wealth and happiness to you all.

Till next time happy painting and sculpting and partying to you all,

Love Marie xxxx  (c)

Why not come and have a look at Marie Jonsson-Harrison’s PAINTINGS FOR SALE, GICLEE PRINTS FOR SALE and SCULPTURES for sale or WALLBASED SCULPTURES.  Enjoy an original artwork on your walls or perhaps one on your bed ARTnBED.

Life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans, is what John Lennon said and he was so right.

This acrylic on board painting is one I did for the son of Jim from Elders Fine Art Gallery when he was recuperating after a car accident called Bandaid for Matthew, but I will have to borrow it now for my own husband!

LIFE AND ART

There we were hubby and me” happy and gay the laxet way” (borrowed from an old advertisement) going about our business as usual.  Well usual for us is that I do the art thing and hubby is the manager and runs the household.  Ever since he had a back injury some 20 years ago we have been used to take each day as it comes to some degree.  For the most part he manages very well and does a little bit of this and a little bit of that with a rest here and there.  Hubby is not one to wallow is self pity, the pain is always with him but it is not something that he talks about or dwells on.

HEART ATTACK NOT ART ATTACK

However a couple of weeks ago it got really bad as it does from time to time and he had a few days in bed, but seemed to be on the mend.  So this particular night we went to bed as usual and the next thing I know I am being woken up by hubby standing next to the bed saying “I think I’m having a heart attack, you better drive me to the hospital”.

Now I was in a very deep sleep and suddenly didn’t know if I was Arthur or Marthur, but I shot up out of bed in a jiffy and ran for the phone in the office to call an ambulance.  Hubby thought I should drive him in, “no way” I said as I know from the First Aid training that is a big mistake.  If the patient suddenly looses consciousness or stops breathing there would be no one to do the CPR.

Anyway when I got to the phone I realized I couldn’t see to dial and had to run to find the glasses, felt like I was running around like a chook with my head cut off, lol finally got through and the ambulance was on their way.  Patient was resting on the bed with severe chest pain, but otherwise his color was good and he wasn’t clammy or had any other symptoms.

I called our son Kai who occupies the “man-cave” downstairs so he could keep an eye on his dad whilst I at least got some clothes on, and asked Kai for a running commentary of how the patient was looking.

THE ART OF THE HEART

The ambulance was there within 10 minutes and then off to hospital we go.  After a long night hooked up to “machines that go beep” (as Monty Python would say) blood tests, and ECG and finally an Angiogram the diagnosis was in.  Not a heart attack luckily, however what ailed him was Pericarditis.  What’s that I hear you say, well that’s an inflammation of the heart sac.  From what I understand most commonly comes from a respiratory infection, but it can also come from a mouth or skin infection.  So in this case we think it may have stemmed from a cut/infected finger a few weeks ago – remember when he fell like a timber in the woods, in the LITTLE MISS WEE WEE art blog.

So all is well that ends well, after a few days in hospital hubby is home resting now and for the next 10 days and driving me nuts with the orders of scrambled eggs on toast and other requests, which for someone who normally burns toast and only excels at the boiling of water and possibly an egg is no mean feat.  So it’s quite obvious we all look forward until the 10 days are up! LOL

So life happens to you whilst you are busy making other plans and here is another quote I like on the subject this time by Robert A Heinlein (writer).

“Don’t ever become a pessimist…a pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun – and neither can stop the march of events.

Till next time happy painting and sculpting to you and stay healthy,

Love Marie xxx  (c)

Why not come and have a look at Marie Jonsson-Harrison’s PAINTINGS FOR SALE, GICLEE PRINTS FOR SALE and SCULPTURES for sale or WALLBASED SCULPTURES.  Enjoy an original artwork on your walls or perhaps one on your bed ARTnBED.