Sadhbh Warren

Consider, if you will, the advert for Yves Saint Laurent’s new men’s fragrance, La Nuit de L'Homme . As befits a perfume advert, it is filmed in black and white and contains no actual information nor footage of the perfume. A mysterious man, well dressed, descends a staircase in opulent surroundings. Despite having a face that only a mother could love, and even then only if she was drunk and myopic, he turns heads. Young ladies of a groomed but conservative appearance stop dead and paw at him. They are slack-eyed and vacant, like zombies who have forgotten where the brains are. The man looks smug. The end. There are several obvious interpretations, to whit: this man deals drugs and the vacant-eyed ladies want them; this man has paid these beautiful women large quantities of cash in the past for sex, and they desperately need a new outfit. I’m going with option b – the young women last shopped in the eighties and wear satin polo necks, hair in a bun and pearls. Clearly in need of a ...

This writing lark is, quite frankly, not all it is cracked up to be. I am sadly lacking in freezing garret or a beret or any of the various French things ending in “et” I have been told go with the trade. I have been doing some research on what I can claim on my tax for 2009, being in the rather annoying situation of having outlaid more cash in the last tax year (some) than I earned (none). This means I am unlikely to be able to afford a garret or a beret in the near future, unless I can work out a way to claim deductions for writing that no one is willing to pay for. The Australian Tax Office is website is not being as helpful as one would expect. For a start, a search for publications on tax for unpaid writers is, ironically, unwritten. The words “freelance”, “writer” or “artiste, dammit” bring up no results. It appears that the Australian tax office only wishes to clarify matters for either that rarest of beasties, the employed writer. That and performance artists, presumably on the...

The real estate agent’s property pitch assures me, with the myopically deranged semi-perjurous optimism of someone who only gets paid if they sell this place, that Redfern is the new Surry Hills. No. No, it’s not. Redfern is an inner-city suburb of Sydney, just south of the city centre. It’s an inexpensive suburb, with local shops and small family restaurants that sell to people who usually don’t have much money to buy. It’s not full of students on the parents’ payroll. It’s Redfern. Redfern is also not, as I have seen claimed, the new Newtown or the new Erskineville. It is certainly not Strawberry Hills, despite frequent attempts to shove the boundaries on a map a few small, but extremely profitable, inches over. It is definitely not East Redfern, which does not have a postcode or appear on ANY maps but frequently does on property ads. Watching someone try to call their home address East Redfern is like watching Keeping Up Appearances’ social snob and secret ex-lowlife Hyacinth Bucke...

This article has been published on Homepage Daily, please view it there. If there is one good thing coming out of the Global Financial Crisis, the media agrees, it is that those cocky Gen Y bastards are getting the reality shock they deserve. The wheel has turned, and the first thing to get crushed beneath it will be their delusions of grandeur. Incoming Gen Z, born in the late 90’s, are already being touted as society’s saviors with more fiscal responsibility and a better work ethic - despite that fact that none of them have hit their teens. By contrast, Gen Y are “impatient, disloyal and demanding“ and have recently been exhorted to not be picky ”job snobs” in the new recession world order. Follow the minimum wage pay packet, not your overblown dreams, is the stern message. But what have Gen Y done other than be young and optimistic in a time of optimism? Being a snarky cocky know-it-all with little respect for authority and a desire to make your mark on the world is not new. An A...

This article has been published on Homepage Daily, please view it there. It was an interesting experiment, but Twitter has been spammed out before it even got mainstream. Twitter, a micro-blogging service where users send and read posts of up to 140 characters called tweets, is aptly and deliberately named for its very low ratio of signal to noise. We’d don’t know, as Twitter won’t release hard facts, how many users it has and how it plans to make money. But in early 2009, Twitter had a monthly growth of 1,382% and total users were estimated at just under 20 million. That’s a lot of user data, and the only real asset Twitter has right now. Sounds good? In fact, the hype may have been Achilles’ hell. Once word got out it was a great way to reach a large audience for free, it was hi-jacked by salespeople long before the customers arrived. Pollies, porn sites, police and spammers – meet your new Twitter friends. Trends, topics that are mentioned the most in tweets, are mainly propagated a...

This article has been published on Homepage Daily, please view it there. Two weeks have passed since the news broke, but you still can’t avoid seeing Michael Jackson wherever you look. The King of Pop. MJ, the Moonwalker. On Twitter on the day of his funeral, messages about him could be found under 4 trending names, or hash tags. Every magazine cover that could be cranked out had his photo, his name, on the cover. But nowhere can you find the nickname that, up until a week ago when he dropped dead of and the world suddenly developed a conscience, most of the world knew him as for years. Wacko Jacko. This article has been published on Homepage Daily, please view it there.

If you want to be an Astronaut when you grow up, you have seven days left. Want to travel somewhere off the beaten path? Sick of hearing your holiday hotspots declared “passé”? For once you can go somewhere without some world weary backpacker telling you they visited it five years ago, before it was spoiled by tourism. Virgin Blue, the Australian branch of the Virgin airline group, have put together a competition that is, quite literally, out of this world. Every time you earn frequent flyers points, you enter a competition. The prize? A trip to space. Or to be precise, enough reward points for a sub-orbital space flight with Virgin Galactic, the first airline that plans to actually send its customers into orbit. You don’t have to pick space flight. Your reward could also be a pair of Alfa Romeo cars, a shopping spree worth $170,000, or a luxury holiday worth $150,000. Velocity Rewards, the reward program of Virgin Blue, will give you twenty five million reward points to spend. It’s p...