I’m not really sure what to make of this phenomenon.  Sure, we expect celebrities to be super fine and better looking than the rest of us mere mortals, but what does it mean if none of them are natural?  What is this saying to women and girls the world over? Does this not set impossible standards that people will try to reach thinking they are achievable just by buying some celebrity endorsed products?  And more importantly, will they be paying for their kids to have nose jobs when they grow up so they look more like their parents?

So here’s a list of celebrity nose jobs that you probably didn’t even know had had nose jobs*.  The scary thing is they almost all have the same nose.

Kate Winslet

Homely to beautiful in just one quick and easy step.

Scarlett Johansson

It could be she grew into her nose, but shit, that’s a whole lot of growing she must have done.

Giselle

Even the world’s most beautiful woman needs a bit o’ refining.

Angelina Jolie

No wonder she’s so beautiful, she’s carved out by an artist!

Jennifer Connelly

She was so awesome in Labyrinth.  Now she just has a sharper nose.

Gwen Stefani

This makes sense.  I never remembered Gwen Stefani being that attractive, but now she is.  New nose.

Jennifer Aniston

Even though everyone knows Ms Aniston had a nose job, I had to include this purely as an example as the best and most subtle celebrity nose job ever.

Megan Fox

You can’t have a slight bump!  IT MUST BE PERFECT.

Halle Berry

If she wasn’t famous I’m sure no one from her high school would recognise her if they passed her in the street.

Winona Ryder

Oh yeah, she’s heaps hotter.

Jennifer Lopez

Once Jenny from the block, now she’s Jenny with a better nose.

Salma Hayek

There was nothing wrong with it in the first place.  It made her distinctive.  Now she looks like at least 10 other girls.

Keira Knightley

WTF happened here?!  Half her nose has disappeared.

Natalie Portman

And the finale, every man’s favourite natural-looking fakey, Natalie Portman.

* Allegedly. I take no responsibility for celebrities who use contouring like there’s not goddamn tomorrow.

Over the past two years, I have been trying to sort out my phone and internet problems. I’ve always had a crackle on the line and after calling pretty regularly it had still never been solved. I would call, stuff would happen, it would seem to fix itself for a week, then I’d have to reboot constantly for a couple of months until I got so annoyed again I would call, when it wouldn’t get fixed again. It has been a very frustrating 2 years. The problem, however, is that if I change to another company my lines are still maintained by the same company – Chorus, who are a subsidiary of Telecom New Zealand. So I am basically held to ransom, as it doesn’t really matter who you go with – firstly you will also have your lines serviced by the same company no matter what, and seeing how they are all about as bad as each other it feels like you have no choice.

I wrote the below letter to Orcon two weeks ago, and today got a voicemail saying they had decided to give me “a nice wee credit” of $45. Considering I pay about $110 per month, that is not even a 2% credit. I also work my time out to be worth at least $50 an hour, and if you add up all the hours I have wasted that I will never get back, it is hardly “a nice wee credit”. It’s an insult. When I called back to say I was unhappy with how small the credit was, I was informed in not so many words that it was my fault for not calling as often as I should have. (Apparently I let the problem go uncomplained about for 8-months the last time, which is also untrue. Therefore the fact that I had basically resigned the fact that they were never going to fix it meant the line fault was entirely my own.)

So now I am left feeling very angry, and defeated at the same time. I would suggest boycotting Orcon, but who else is there to go with?

RE: Call FNH452*** and all other calls related to account “******” (probably about 3,000)

Yours sincerely,
Ani Moller
Sounding like a cracked record since 2008

I suppose at least after two years the issue finally appears to be resolved. However, that doesn’t really feel like much of a success.

How is it that anyone is still on dial-up?  What is the point of the internet without broadband?  Why even own a computer?

So many questions…

Yeah, well?!

“Yeah, well, that would have sucked. The nightmares and demerit points would have sucked too!”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t and even though I am a stupid driver I’m okay until the next time! Praise the Lord!”
“Yeah, well, did you hear that joke about the pope and the donkey? Hi-larious!”

Yeah, well, you are a retard.

After finding My First Grey Hair, the first thing I did was ask my boyfriend if he would still love me if I had grey hairs. He said yes, but of course he isn’t going to say no. There is a chance that on the inside he is thinking, “Oh shit, my girlfriend is getting old, I really hope she starts dying her hair soon.” The only problem with that is I really like the colour of my hair. The brilliant beauty of my brown hair that sometimes shines blonde and sometimes shines red and seems to have natural highlights and lowlights can not be reproduced in a bottle. Nor will it be able to be reproduced by paying someone I can’t see with my glasses off many, many dollars many, many times a year. Just thinking about the cost and time it would take to start dying my hair to cover grey makes me immediately think of all the shiny, new things I could buy instead – like one-third of a Nikon D300. Once I start dying my hair, what comes next? Botox? Chemical peels? Expensive shoes to draw attention away from my hair?

So here I am, nine days before my 28th birthday, with a grey hair on the top of my head. I have not pulled it out, and I have not decided if I am going to dye my hair. Instead, I am going to reflect upon this glorious aging process for a little while longer, and thank Christ my boobs are still pert.

For a bit longer at least.

As a rule, all workmates tend to be retarded. But my god, I have one in particular who manages to rub me so far up the wrong way my hair stands on end just at the thought of him.

Now, I have a thing with personal space. As a general rule, unless I know you well it makes me very uncomfortable when people come into my personal space. My lovely workmate, lets call him Bob, seems to be the complete opposite in regard to this. I kid you not, he will come up to your desk and stand less than 30cm away and then bend down so that his face is within centimeters of yours and will proceed to breathe his rotten coffee breath all over you whilst asking you questions that someone who gets paid twice as much as you should not need to ask.

As if his bad breath isn’t enough to make you recoil in disgust when you are near him, I used to be lucky enough to sit next to him and at frequent intervals throughout the day my nostrils would be invaded with his farts wafting by my desk. These farts are a result of him drinking at least 5 cups of instant coffee, a can of coke plus some sort of lovely unhealthy concoction for lunch per day.

He’s one of those people that looks like he never spends any time outside, instead I am 99% sure he spends all his time at home in front of his computer looking up dirty internet sites. My conclusion of him looking at dirty sites is by no means unfounded as a.) every time “Boobs on Bikes” are in town, he mysteriously disappears for a few hours and then comes back and tries to do a very poor cover up by complaining of all the “silly people watching the parade blocking his walk to the shops” and b.) I was fortunate enough to mistakenly found smutty photos on his c drive while doing a search for work related files (what kind of person has porn on their work computer?!).

For someone who gets paid as well as he does you would expect that he was enthusiastic about his job and really put in the hard yards to earn his salary. Not Bob, he skives off work at any chance he can get. For example, if everyone senior to him has left for the afternoon he will sneak off and get the early bus home. He also keeps his own tally of his sick days taken to ensure every sick day he is allowed is used up before his year anniversary rolls over. God forbid he would actually miss out on using every last one of them up. I think in the first six months that he has been at my work, he had taken more sick days than I have taken in my 3 years that I’d been there. He actually averages about one sick day a month. That is one sickly guy right there.

A few more lovely habits of his are; standing at your desk tapping his pen constantly while he talks to you, going and gazing out the window for minutes on end in order to have less work time, saying he is going out for a “quick sandwich” and not returning until hours later and leaving between 15 and 20 minutes early most days. Anyway, you get the general idea.

And just to prove that I’m not a completely irrational person who judges people unfairly, I asked another workmate (a non retarded one) to describe in one sentence what they truly thought of Bob. This is what they said: “Bob is a sly, weird behaving and looking creature with disgusting eating habits, weird sense of humor and the smelliest breath I have ever smelt.”

A few weeks ago, the landlord changed their bathroom products supplier. Where once we had plush 2-ply toilet paper, we now have 1-ply see-through newsprint-esque sandpaper to wipe our asses with. It really hurts my fanny. I discussed it with the girl I sit next to and she said her fanny hurts too. We would really appreciate it if you could ask them supply us with something that doesn’t cause obvious health and safety issues.

Kind regards,
Ani Moller

Back last year, I posted this article with prices for broadband internet plans. It got a fair amount of notice from my New Zealand readers, most who were pretty pissed off about the prices and speeds.

In the past few weeks, Telecom has been advertising about how they are now providing “faster, cheaper” broadband. While they have introduced a plan with 10GB of bandwidth at a speed of 3.5Mbps downstream (which isn’t really that bad, considering it’s almost twice as fast and $10 cheaper than before, however it still slows down to dial-up once you reach your bandwidth limit and you seemingly can’t buy blocks of more bandwidth) they are toting them as starting at $29.95 per month. Sounds great! Or is it?

In small print the advertisement says that the plan they are talking about gives you only 200MB per month, and each megabyte thereafter is 2¢. That means that 1GB is more than $20. That is crazy! I fear that someone will get caught out like the person who this Telecom bill from 2003 belongs to:

That is tragic.