crazy

Ridley: I wouldn’t watch much television to be honest. When I say this, I do watch shows, but it would be more on netflix when I have nothing else pressing, rather than just randomly sitting down in front of the television every night. However, Sundays can often be my day to watch what I call ‘car crash television’, I get sucked into watching reality shows that teach me nothing, in fact my precious (and rapidly dwindling by the year) brain cells probably slowly decay the longer I sit there. It can’t be helped though, sometimes it’s like I can’t look away, or close my gaping mouth. I’m pretty certain I’m not the only one, as these shows are still on and seem extremely popular. So I said I’d share some of my favourites (as you do).

Deadliest Catch

Basically this show follows fishermen on the Bering Sea catching king crabs. Most of my friends and family think each episode looks identical to the next one. There’s the sea, crabs and a boat, and they keep catching the crabs or they don’t. But to be honest, I find this show quite addictive. I have favourite Captains and I love how the camera skips from boat to boat, seeing how they’re each getting on with their haul, it’s quite unpredictable (and dangerous), you never know what the sea is going to do.

Ducks Dynasty

Of all the mad shows I watch, this is my all time favourite. It’s about this Louisiana bayo family who have made it big, they’re millionaires from making duck calls for hunters. It’s the ultimate rags-to-riches story, where their business was started in the family shed. They are the most unconventional company ever, where the whole extended family, and most of their neighbourhood, has been employed by the business. The antics and the madness they get up to often have me in stitches. Uncle Si is my favourite of the family, the lines that randomly come out of him are just classic.

All the Inks, from L.A Ink, Miami Ink, London Ink, NY ink.

I watch all the ink shows, basically its a reality show where people get tattoos from absolutely epic artists. I’ve always wished I looked like Kat Von D, she’s very cool.

I love the display of artistic talent and the unusual images that people decide to get. I also come away with a massive desire to get a tattoo myself, but I can never decide on an image, that, and I usually like to avoid pain – I’m not a fan.

Ice Road Truckers

This is another show a bit like Deadliest Catch, where the job is really dangerous. I think I like these as I can’t imagine myself ever having enough courage to be able to this type of work myself, or how you’d mentally be able to go about doing it. Night time driving, blizzards, freezing temperatures and roads literally made of ice, not to mention the massive expensive tons of gear you’re huge truck is transporting from one town to the next. Anything can happen, and does!

Here Comes Honey Boo Boo (which is an off shoot of Toddlers & Tiaras)

These shows, I just watch them with my mouth hanging open and I randomly shake my head. Toddlers and Tiaras is basically all these kids who do pageants and try to win titles by dressing up to the nines with make up, glitzy dresses, swim wear and costumes.

I was originally going to say we don’t really have these sort of events in Ireland, but actually the first ever one was held last weekend. Mind, it’s not nearly as popular here as it is in the U.S.

Now, as one of the kids who was a star in T&T, Honey Boo Boo obviously caught a producers eye somewhere along the way with her sassiness, so she and her family got their own spin off show.

I think most of her relatives (and herself) are all hyped up on sugar (actually more than likely as they drink this juice, called Go Go Juice, which is made up of Mountain Dew and Red Bull! My heart is just racing thinking about it). It’s just mental to watch them.

Now you know what Ridley does when she’s feeling bored and rebelling against doing any actual work. You know you all do it! 😀 Amazing that I managed to do a blog post about the things that almost prevented me from doing the post in the first place! Teehee.

Latimer and Ridley hit the ‘beautification button’ and got dolled up for a photoshoot… no seriously… they did!

Ridley: We’ve been doing exciting things the last little while. Busy, busy! We got our structural edits back from our editor. So the last two and a half weekends, Friday night to Sunday evening, (with many cups of tea), in between colds and broken laptops, we’ve been working away through his notes. We’ve been changing, adding, rewriting and generally whimpering. The words, ‘location description’, have become despised at MLR central! Haha! It seems while we’re decent enough at the ole characters, setting them into a specific location and describing it is something we forget to do. (Sure, why do we need to do this, it’s in our heads, we see it, surely you all have telepathic powers and can see it too, no?? Haha.)

Latimer: It’s going really well. We feel pretty positive. Although writing a story is fun, it’s a lot of hard work, but every time we edit the story gets tighter. We are now nearing the ‘we are happy’ point! So onward, onward we go!

Ridley: Other than that, the second exciting thing we’ve been getting up to is we did a joint photo shoot a few weeks ago (I love saying this, we sound so professional! ‘I can’t do Saturday, I have a photo shoot to attend, shall I check my diary and I’ll get back to you?’ Ha!) Anyway, yes a photo shoot and before I run away with a massive hot air balloon sized head, it was a groupon voucher deal (a company that gives fantastic discounts on different things, from hotel breaks away, bean bags to teeth whitening!) Anyway, we jumped at the chance to do the photo shoot, not only was it something completely different, we wanted a nice author biography picture for both the Amazon author page and our blog.

Latimer: I’ve never been properly done up so this was great fun! My constant thought was, ‘well, however I look, it will be the best I can ever look, so, please God don’t let it be bad!’.

Ridley: Now, getting my picture taken is not one of my favourite past times. I think we were both worried that we’d be stiff and awkward in front of the camera. (Smile with your eyes people!) However, going in we’d decided we wanted it to be as natural as possible, no posing.

Latimer: I was worried it would take ages for us to warm up and then it would be over and we would be left with some very awkward photos!

Ridley: When we arrived at the studio (MFK on Dame Street, in Dublin), it was in an old building on the second floor. However, to get up there we had to walk through a Chinese herbal shop (I know, really weird, right?) The shop also happened to be closed. So it was dark when we walked in. Expecting to be met by glamorous studio people with flawless skin and high stilettos, we stopped and stared around at the giant jars filled with dried who knows what.

There was this little white door just in on the right with a black arrow and the words MFK studio. I reached out thinking that we had to duck in through it and maybe twist up some narrow winding stairs. I swung it open and tried to walk into an electric box. We burst out laughing. Eventually, we found the lift just around the corner.

Once upstairs, we had our makeup done and our hair styled for us. Then we were ushered up to a small room with a white backdrop (and a black one to the side) and giant spot lights (my eyes started watering at one point from them). The photographer was very welcoming. When we explained we had cups that we wanted in the photo (we wanted it to appear as if we’d been having a cup of tea and a chat).

I think she thought we were crazy, but then she said a few weeks ago, there was a woman who wanted to have tea cakes in her picture. (*Sigh* That would have been a great addition with the cup of tea! Haha.)

We had so much fun. The two of us and the photographer basically spent the whole time giggling, you should see some of the rejected photos, we’re bent over (we were telling her about how I walked into the cupboard downstairs). She let us in on the old trick of extras in the background of Fair City (Dublin based TV show) use the word, ‘rhubarb’, to appear as if they’re talking about something.

That cracked us up; the idea of all these people wandering around a television studio set mumbling rhubarb at each other while the main actors said their lines. So, of course, we started saying it. Anyway, by the end and shots later, here’s the two we picked!

Latimer: Hopefully they look like we are having a laugh and a bit of craic, Irish stylie!

Ridley: The only other time we had so much fun with a camera was when we were in Tokyo and we discovered the photo booths in their arcade centres, there’s loads of them (in the same building as the infamous pachinko parlours).

Latimer: These photos are called ‘purikura’ and are very popular with the ‘kids’.

Ridley: Each one have different effects, in the one we picked we had five seconds to copy different random J-pop poses before the camera flashed, then you can basically add loads of effects and random clip art to the resulting photos. This was the result.

Latimer: Very crazy pictures you have been warned! The people on the screen suggest the poses- we didn’t do them randomly… ah sigh well, here they are!

The eyes are just so freaking looking. 🙂

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