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I guess clowning is pretty stressful.

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My name is Clare. You can see they knew that but at the last moment took things off-road and invented Klye, a sleep-deprived, even grumpier version of myself.

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Call me dead, call me dummy Head over heels for you I've lost my head, honey I face my sole, my head rolls It's not funny.

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Berlin School of Hard Knocks

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Nail art has literally gotten out of hand.

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Bookshelf in Berlin sums up the international perspective on Australasia.

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All hail the musical male!

Despite what you might think, there have been literally dozens of highly influential male musicians throughout history. 

When popular music began, some male performers not only sang and looked great on stage, often sporting outrageous and sexy clothing; they also played their own instruments and even wrote their own material (respect, gents!).

As home computers became more and more ubiquitous, many male musicians also learned how to use electronic equipment to write, record and produce their own music, proving that they’re just as proficient, driven and intelligent as any other musician.

Bet you're dying to know who some of these lads are, right?

Well, here’s a top 5 list of some of my favourite classic albums made by men. 

Enjoy!

The White Album, by The Beatles (these boys were hot stuff in the day!)

Thriller, by Michael Jackson (with help from fellow fella, Quincy Jones)

The Dark Side of the Moon, by Pink Floyd (we all know Money from this album, but your mum will also remember a shirtless male-musician David Gilmour in the Live at Pompeii vid which came out around the same time!)

So, by Peter Gabriel (including the smash hit Don’t Give Up, which catapulted male-musician Peter to even greater universal success thanks to his duet with the fabulous Kate Bush)

The Bombastic Collection, by Shaggy (including the chart-topper It Wasn’t Me, where male-musician Shaggy playfully rebuts allegations of cheating on his girlfriend -- lovable rogue!) 

Next time: A look at the hot new trend of male comedians. They’ve got the looks and the witty ripostes!

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Trim Shady

M And M has said some not very nice things in his songs about some people like Moby (in 2002, M And M strongly advised Moby to stop working because of his physical appearance, his age, and because nobody was listening to techno,* which is the kind of music Moby was making at the time), but he also taught me that if you vomit on your clothes, it makes you a 100% strong person with sick** rhymes at every single rap battle and you won’t even need to do stain removal on your clothes because you can just buy new clothes and pay Dr. Dre back later.

*turns out the joke was on M And M, because techno got really popular and now everyone wants to go to Berlin for the weekend, put on their best clothes and get rejected at Berghain

**this is a pun because “sick” can mean vomit and “sick” can also mean “very cool”

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6 Easy Tips for Lasting Happiness

1. Watch Dunston Checks In again.

2. Bake two delicious cakes for yourself. Eat one, and hide the other somewhere in your apartment. One day soon, you’ll find it and it will be a tasty surprise cake just for you.

3. Be famous.

4. Take one long, deep breath -- wow, all your worries have instantly faded away.

5. Send yourself a bunch of flowers and maybe even some nice underwear to your office every day for a week and act bashful and delighted when you excuse yourself each morning in the middle of a meeting to collect them from reception. It will look like you have a secret admirer, making you lovable and popular and it’ll be worth the monetary investment*.

6. Move to a tropical paradise. You know you’ll be happier there, so just pack your bags and go tomorrow.

*trust me.

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Substandard Cooking with Clare Wieck #4: Texas Bean Bowl with Vegan Honey Mustard Surprise.

1. Cooking is tiresome and lame. Decide to not turn on the stove tonight and have a cold dinner instead. Not turning on the stove will reduce the amount of times needed to check it before leaving the house tomorrow morning. Note to self that your OCD isn’t even that bad and it doesn’t matter anyway because it’s fine, so shut up.

2. Enter kitchen -- locate can of mixed “Texas beans” (some white bean things, kidney beans, some sauce and sweet corn, I guess. Very likely to not actually be a traditional Texan delicacy, but it triumphs in terms of convenience, plus it has your essential bean food group in there and it sounds exotic because it has “Texas” on the label, which is ages away).

3. Find mushrooms in fridge. Take out three (treat yourself).

4. Make the mushrooms smaller so that they fit into a bowl.

5. Deftly open can of Texas beans and empty into bowl. This is going solidly.

6. Recall with delight that you purchased some vegan honey mustard the other day. This is going to make a wonderful addition to the Texas bean bowl!

7. Remember the last time you used the vegan honey mustard dressing, the surprisingly thick viscosity of it, and that it needs a bit of oomph to encourage it out of the bottle.

8. In a cheerful, enthusiastic motion, shake the vegan honey mustard into the bowl.

9. Recoil with indignation as no less than a third of the vegan honey mustard evacuates itself into the Texas bean bowl.

10. Trounced by the vegan honey mustard, and glaring into the repository of saturated Texas beans, note that all hope of scraping the dressing off the surface of the bean heap has been dashed because it’s trickled down too far into the bowl for god’ssake i just wanted to have a healthymeal you know and likeim justtirying to have a nitce afternoon aand oh forget it1 whatevre justputthe bottle backinthefridsge.

11. Bravely consume wildly inappropriate amount of vegan honey mustard with single serving of Texas beans and three raw mushrooms.

12. Turn on the stove later and make some Korean dumplings as a way of apologizing to your stomach.

13. Check stove five times the next morning before leaving the house.

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My back hurts

Back pain track list:

Massages - OMD

A Massage To You, Rudy - The Specials

Massage In A Bottle - The Police

The Massage - Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five

I’ve Gotta Get A Massage To You - The Bee Gees

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Blinded by the light...

...reined up another moose/and ran her over in the night, rang up like a douche/another loner in the night, rugged up like a papoose/another mother says goodnight, dressed up like a duke/another ruler and a knight.

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Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk, I'm a woman's man, no time to talk.

One day, inexplicably struck by the terror of being forced to scavenge around on a vast, uninhabited island and whittle a raft out of sodden branches and wild hog carcasses in order to take my chances out on the open sea, I decided I should skim-read* The SAS Survival Handbook. It’s supposed to be *the* guide to staying alive in any situation where you totally screwed up and got yourself lost in the wilderness (idiot).

Basically, it’s a bunch of plant drawings and a couple of sketches about how to build an igloo. Idk, it might have some other stuff in there later on but what I’m saying is - full disclosure - I didn’t finish it.

I did learn the following, however:

There are thousands of animals and plants that will kill you.

There are thousands of animals and plants that will save you.

Unless you hold a double doctorate in zoology and botany, you will never be able to distinguish between 1 and 2, especially under duress, which is the entire time you’re trying to survive.

It’s probably best to make peace with the fact that once you’re stranded on an iceberg licking the salty frozen tears off your face in a desperate attempt to keep your fluids up, slapping that polar bear mother you just upset in the face with a dandelion might not do much for your cause. And good luck even finding dandelions on an iceberg because I did a quick internet search and I reckon they don’t even grow there.

*it’s a 576-page leviathan, I don’t have the time to read the whole thing, I have GIFS to watch

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Book of the Month

Cent and Cent’s Ability by 50 Cent.

50 Cent details all the cool stuff he can do, like running confectionery stores, taking bullets, and probably sex stuff in his new autobiography.