"Pin Up Picks Pen Up" » Ryan Gosling

Musical Car Crashes & the Slutty Snooze Button

aliciaashcroft — Fri, 11 Oct 2013 03:19:28 +0000

I’ve gotten into the habit of getting up early and…well, mostly I’ve been going to bed around 9:00pm, and waking up at 6:00am, because we are still sleeping on the air mattress in the living room, and Benjamin likes to watch breakfast television while he has his toast and coffee. While I was sick, I would toodle off to the bedroom and flop down on the bed for another hour or so. But then I was getting pretty slutty with the snooze button.

Officially committing to physically abandoning the bed happened around 7:15am. Technically, I should be out the door around 7:45am, but I get pretty slutty with my E-T-D’s as well, so there’s a very solid chance that when the 8:00am news starts, I am still on the highway. The good news is I am very up to date on my current affairs, which is altogether enlightening and depressing. After this quick run-through of all the death, war, crime, injustice and corruption, I park the mini-van and head off to spent the day with children.

And bless all these little ones, running around like drunk little midgets, in tiny little pants, crying for their mothers and calling their yoghurt “yogies”. You gotta wonder what the government, environment, the general state of humanity will be by the time these slobbering, sticky fingered, little yogie spillers are my age. And then…there’s that crushing responsibility of having any part in molding young minds. And you really wish you had not been so slutty with the snooze button, and had started the day on a brighter note.

Lately, I’ve been up at 630am, and it’s pretty blissful to have time in the morning. After a leisurely coffee, I putter about, listen to the radio, and do a few housekeeping duties, or answer a few emails. But then I get Girls Gone Wild with my spare time, and then I have to do an Olympic speed walk through the parking lot to the minivan, and am made to face the news again. But, I’m far more relaxed, less rushed, and I can take things like, oh the collapse of the American government, with a bigger grain of salt.

Things are achieved before work, and then I get home for a half-hour around lunchtime, and I also take care of a little business then as well. So, come time when the work day is done, I can come home and have spare time on my hands. Time well spent, I think, drinking a rather large glass of red wine while Googling Ryan Gosling memes.

My husband is working late, and I am busy with “work”, which means getting increasingly drunk, while blogging and perving on Ryan Gosling photos.

Oh Ryan. It gives you a little faith in this dark world, seeing things like this.

Don’t worry Ryan, I’m not going anywhere…I’ll just bring the wine bottle into the office so I never have to leave you again. Or…about ten seconds before my bladder bursts. Finally Benjamin called. He wasn’t coming home for a while as he was going to the pub with a workmate. This is exciting news. Now was I off the hook for making dinner, and was free to cyber stalker Mr Gosling and then do some drunk blogging. It’s also nice that Benjamin is meeting people, and making friends. I do wonder how men approach one another and make friends. And I want for my husband what any woman does. I want him to meet a nice young man.

I was pleased to hear that he was going out. But I hoped it wouldn’t turn out to be one of those “Hangover” type situation, where he calls me from a drunk tank in Tijuana. He had committed to staying up until 10:00pm to watch the very special of Glee, where Cory Monteith‘s “Finn” dies.

I don’t really even watch “Glee”, this show is like that person you knew in high-school that you never talked to but always smiled at. Yet I am so curious as to how they are going to handle this situation. It will be like a train wreck of music and emotion. A musical car crash. And I am going to be there with a box of tissues and whatever is in the bottom of the wine bottle. So this can mean one of two things. That Benjamin has met a nice man and is chatting about men stuff over a few pints at the pub, or that he made the story up to avoid watching “Glee” and is sitting alone at the bar while I sob myself into a Glee-induced Coma.

He’s since come home…and wondering where that delicious stir fry I promised I’d make, while I was commending his decision to go out for a pint. When I was fresh from the grocery store and feeling like a productive wife. Before the red wine and drunk blogging. And now it’s nearly 8:00pm and I should have been to bed hours ago. Damn you Ryan Gosling, you did this to me damn you! I know I said I would stay here forever, but I’ve got a pressing stir-fry. But thanks for the dreamy eyes and positive affirmations. They need to put these on the ceiling at the dentist and gynecologist offices. Because sometimes, your spirits just need a lift.

Images Courtesy of Google

Red Beard

aliciaashcroft — Tue, 21 May 2013 03:57:13 +0000

When my mother was a young woman, she knew this super foxy guy with a super groovy beard. Total bearded bell-bottomed babe-fest until he inexplicably shaved his face, and to my mother’s chagrin she realized that he didn’t have a chin. Now I was old enough to be told this anecdote, but young enough that I really couldn’t understand how someone didn’t have a chin. “Like it’s just his lips and then nothing?” But that story really stuck with me; imagine that something as simple as a beard could totally create or destroy your appeal.

I’m going to just put this out there. I love a good beard. I enjoy neatly groomed facial hair–I preferred tousled, bearded Ryan Gosling in “The Notebook” .

Many fine men had mighty fine beards. Whatever your feelings are about Jesus, you’ve got to admit that he had a rocking look going for him.

Ernest Hemingway, Santa Claus; so similar you’d get them confused.

There is something so rugged and manly about a beard; when Clooney and Affleck got all “lets grow beards for Argo award season, I was totally supportive. And they sort of consider me their muse–so they listen to me. So you are welcome, I am responsible for this:

Courtesy of digitalspy.co.uk

And I’m not adverse to an excellent mustache; I love Tom Selleck in Magnum PI…that is actually me he is talking to on his giant phone.

“No, I’m just blogging about you right now…no I won’t make fun of your chest hair”.

But let me make this clear before we go any further into this facial hair forest. Not all you card carrying penis-slingers are eligible for beard-dom. Sporting play-off beards for such occasions as the –Stanley Bowl or Super Cup—whatever the fuck sport is ruining my life that day, is not always acceptable. I hate to say it–Movember, the growing of mustaches to raise money for prostate cancer awareness–it’s a noble cause, but it’s such a long, filthy-looking growth road. I once had a boyfriend during that month that grew the saddest, weakest little rat ‘stache. It was the ‘Rudy’ of facial hair. From a distance it looked like a dirt smear. I could have grown a better mustache. That November was, historically speaking, the longest month of my life.

My husband grows a nice beard; it’s actually quite magnificent. It’s copper in color, and with his blue eyes and tall stature, I just want to throw him in a plaid shirt and watch him chop wood. All winter long Ben’s beard grew mightily. This was his second beard, the first time he grew it out was during a long road trip up the Western Australian coastline. He looked as rugged as the territory around us. Once home, he just shaved it off without warning, just came out of the bathroom a bald faced stranger. The most recent time, Ben felt that with the impending summer heat, that it was best to lose the winter whiskers. I tried to fight for his facial hair, but to no avail. Ben was going to shave his face, and there was nothing I could do. He shaved his head and his face was hit with instant regret. A moment ago he looked like:

Courtesy of captain-redbeard@deviantart.com

…and now he looked like a really tall new born baby. He stared at his naked face in the mirror, and picked up a clump of hair from the sink and tried to stick it onto his face. “I miss my beard…I’ve made a mistake”. I’m standing in the door…laughing through my devastation. “You look like Daddy Warbucks“. He looks at me; “I don’t know who that is”.

“Yes, you do”. And then I start babbling about “Annie” and Carol Burnett, and don’t know whether I am helping anyone.

I mean, he’s got a nice face, and I’m all for clean-shaven, it’s just that you get used to a certain look. There’s a pretty crucial scene in “A Star is Born” when Kris Kristofferson tries to chop his luscious salt and pepper facial locks (intense, I know). Barbra Streisand stops him, wrenches the scissors out of his hand, and says: “I don’t even know what you’ll look like, I may not even like you without a beard”. And he doesn’t shave, they embrace passionately and it is glorious.

It’s a good thing he didn’t waste his magnificent face muzzle, but that’s the good thing about beards, they always grow back.

Images Courtesy of Google

Either/Or 2…Seriously Guys, Who Would You Rather?

aliciaashcroft — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:03:11 +0000

It’s getting a little out of hand, this Clooney-Gosling fiasco. We are like a deadlocked jury, and there is no chance of a majority rule. During a coffee break at the beginning of the work week, we are sitting around the table, poring over “People” magazines. We are once again, discussing the admirable qualities of these two men when a woman from another department, who had obviously over heard our endless deliberations, pipes up: “What about Bradley Cooper?” We all glance at each other with sour expressions. What about Bradley Cooper? I’m sure in some other circles, Bradley Cooper is attractive, but to us, he wouldn’t even make it through the first round. But it did bring up a valuable point…what about other men? Surely “Glooney” doesn’t encompass all we love in our celebrity men. And from there, a magical week of hypotheticals began, filling the kitchen like musky cologne, intoxicating us amid our daily tasks, causing fits of fantasy and uncontrollable giggles. It also lead to the rather nifty invention of “Jackman Beckham-Craig”, a hunky man-strosity which was almost as fantastic as Kathleen’s invention a few weeks back: Men made entirely out of brownie—and please, do hold the nuts.

With the help of the most recent “People’s Sexiest Man Alive” edition, we created a rather lengthy list of prospects. We spent our breaks developing a small chart with such significant mathematical possibilities that the janitor from “Good Will Hunting” would scratch his head in confusion. A round robin of sorts, meant to lead us to a sexual resolution pitted the likes of against: Ben Affleck vs. Matt Damon/ Ryan Reynolds vs. Channing Tatum/ Leonardo DiCaprio vs. Matthew McConaughey/ Gerald Butler vs. Hugh Jackman/ (and of course) Ryan vs. George. I know what you are thinking…how is a girl to choose? Looking at the list over lunch, Jessica –our resident Filipino and official young person—points out a gleaming error on this list. “Where are all the minorities? We need some colour on this list”. I flip through the weathered magazine dutifully, “Ok… lets us find some ‘bruthas’ for this round robin”. Jessica looks at me as if I just mentioned Bradley Cooper. “Don’t say ‘brothers’ like that…you can’t pull it off”. She says the same thing when I try to inspire the team by suggesting that we get this ‘par-tay’ started. “It’s not a party…it’s just not”, she shakes her head sadly. “That’s why they call it work”.

The group does briefly toy with the notion of allowing this list—an already daunting one—to include actors of all eras: “Are you suggesting a Sexiest Man Alive—living or dead edition?” you ask me. “Yes”, I would answer…”For but a moment…it was discussed”. But then we decided against it for fear it would come down to Robert Redford and Paul Newman circa “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and then nobody would get out of this work week alive. So we focus on the present, trying to add more dimensions of colour to our hunk rainbow. “What about Shemar Moore?” Kathleen pipes up. “Who?” Jessica and I respond in near-unison. “You know! That guy on Criminal Minds? He used to be on “Young and the Restless”?” her voice trails off at the sight of our blank faces. “Never mind, just Google him tonight, and he’ll find his way on the list”. Poor Kathleen often has to tell us to Google things we are generationally distanced from. Jessica especially— she only recently revealed that she while sometimes laughs with us, she does not always understand the reference. When Kathleen regales us with a tale of seeing, and nearly swooning at the sight of Richard Grieco on the streets Vancouver during his “21 Jump Street” heyday, we cackle heartily until Jessica’s laugh fades and smile droops. “Sorry…who’s Richard Grieco?”

Kathleen may never live that celebrity crush down…nor will she for occasionally dropping the term ‘bod’ in a sentence. “Are you seriously saying ‘he’s got the nicest bod’? That’s like me saying ‘par-tay’. That’s like my mother still using the term ‘jiggy’, it gets to the point that you can’t even use the word ironically anymore. It gets to a point that unless you are Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, you have to grow out of being cool. “We’re not kids anymore Kath—we can’t sling the lingo around like we used to”. Speaking of embarrassing moments, there was an unfortunate addition to the People spread, a take on the whole “Magic Mike” phenomenon. Basically anyone remotely famous, who was named Mike or Michael, had a stripper style pictorial. Oh dear, Michael Bolton needs not expose his chest hair like that, and why, on God’s green earth is Michael Buble in a cowboy get up? Still, embarrassing chaps and lassos aside, Buble is considered for the list. “Would you –Du-ble?” I ask the girls. (Holy Moses, aren’t my puns clever?) The answer, (and it had nothing to do with my awesome pun), that no…we would not ‘du-ble’. Listen—no one has a bigger soft spot for the man than me…I would go to a concert in a heartbeat, sing along to every song and sob hysterically about sixteen times, but I would not get jiggy with Mr Buble…not all whored up like a dime store cowboy…no thank you.

Eventually, we narrowed the list down—Ben Affleck defeated Matt Damon, Hugh Jackman destroyed Gerald Butler and Mario Lopez was eliminated in favour of the Old Spice Guy…ahem, “People” magazine didn’t have a terribly colourful rainbow either. From there we pitted all the winners together, (we threw in Shemar Moore in at the last minute because, though everyone forgot to include him, Kathleen refused to let him go) and narrowed it down to three: Jackman, Clooney, and Gosling. To resolve the matter once and for all, I scrunch up the little pieces of paper, mix them up and hand them out around the table. Jessica got Ryan, Kathleen got Hugh, and I got George. There, issue resolved. All was right with the world. Jessica, who had wanted Gosling all along, now has her head resting on her hand, her face forlorn. She sighs, “Now I kind of wish I had gotten Hugh Jackman”. The fact is, any one of the men would have been wonderful, but the conversations had begun to feel as though these were real possibilities. And that by blogging about it, made those possibilities all the more real. But all we had left were tiny bits of paper with names written in pencil. But this is a technological age, there are always nerdy teens who post ‘half-joking’ bits on You-Tube, asking famous women to be their prom date, and these women go! Why, just today on the CBC 2 morning show, the announcer said that model Kate Upton agreed to take a dateless boy to his upcoming dance. “It proves that sometimes all you have to do is ask”, the announcer concluded. So who knows? Maybe Hugh Jackman trolls the internet looking for women in gumboots and hair nets who smell of garlic and tomato paste? Maybe Ryan Gosling has an upcoming film role as a prolific salsa maker and wants us to show him how it’s done…and we could all take turns standing behind him at the giant Hobart food processor, guiding his hands a la Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore in “Ghost”. And maybe…just maybe, someone in Clooney’s entourage would show this to him jokingly, and without a hint of humour, he’d stand up and insist that someone fire up his chopper “This is no laughing matter…these women need to see my Italian villa”. And we would go with him, and we would not disappoint…gumboots and all.

Either / Or

aliciaashcroft — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 00:55:04 +0000

Amongst the various daily tasks in the prep kitchen, my two coworkers and I tackle some extremely serious issues. As we clean, I often like to throw out a “what if” kind of question and the answer can defy space, time and finances. “If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go and what would you do?” Lounging on a hot beach in Mexico, sipping cappuccinos in a stylish Parisian cafe, and sightseeing in Cuba, were amongst the answers. Most recently I asked: “If you could see any band (living or dead) in concert, who would it be”? The question developed into a Top Five. Kathleen, a mother in her early 50′s, mentioned The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin. I thought of Florence and the Machine, Amy Winehouse, Billie Holiday, Jeff Buckley and Joni Mitchell, and wondered aloud as to whether going to Woodstock could count. Jessica, 20, comes within earshot and I ask her the question. She pauses, scrunches her face in thought and smiles decisively, nodding her head in earnest: “Beyonce”. (Hey, why not?) It’s silly, but it lets the mind wander and adds a dash of imagination to the common, ordinary work day. But there is one topic that arises again and again, without an answer, like an ancient riddle written in a secret language, an impossible equation never to be solved.

“Who would you rather sleep with…Ryan Gosling or George Clooney“?

Its an important question, and I invite you to take a second with it, soak in the idea as if it were a piping hot bath. Jessica leaps onto Gosling “that body, those abs!” whereas Kathleen leans towards Clooney. “He’s like an Old Hollywood movie star, like Cary Grant”. For me, its akin to the conflict I suffer every time I go out for breakfast…do I want savory or sweet? Should I get the strawberry waffles or do I want the eggs Benedict? Again, there isn’t a correct answer, they are both perfectly delicious, but it’s about what you need in the moment…which is usually me getting something sweet, wishing I had chosen savory, then picking bacon off my husband’s plate, which he loves, incidentally. I totally get the Gosling appeal, his cool boyish demeanor, his heartbreaking bone structure and dreamy blue eyes. As for Clooney, I love his salt and pepper locks, his style, his manner. He would be classy, yet cheeky, look great in a tux and would always have liquor on hand. With Ryan Gosling you get Disneyland and skinny jeans, with George Clooney it’s Italy and crisp white collared shirts.

Writing about such a heated topic requires an acceptable level of internet research. What a sexy web I am weaving, my blog sandwiched in-between the Gosling and Clooney internet page tabs. I have stumbled across some breaking news though, apparently Clooney and his latest squeeze are “on the rocks”…which should be a surprise to no one. What kills me though is the report stating that Ms. Stacy Keibler ‘dislikes’ spending months hibernating with George for months on end in Lake Como, Italy. You must really question a person’s mental fitness when anything other than months on end in an Italian villa with George Clooney makes sense, especially when the option is in the bed next to you. Kathleen and I have united over the idea that his villa would be simply divine. “You just know he has a speedboat” I sigh. “Of course he does, he’s George Clooney”, Kathleen agrees. And our minds wander to late night feasts of seafood and pasta, gathering around the candlelit table with heaps of wine and celebrity friends. But just when the scale is tipping in favor of George, Jessica mentions Gosling’s beard in “The Notebook” and the indecision presses on. The conversation goes from the kitchen to the lunch room, and we weigh the pros and cons as if there is a time limit before the offer expires. As I write about this, and pore over photos of the two actors, I ask my husband his thoughts. He stared at me for a moment, and did not provide a comment, he’s mildly offended by this topic and is still getting over my once feverish appreciation for Hugh Jackman in “Australia”. As far as work goes, the discussions and comparisons will wage on, as if we three are a deadlocked jury. But I can’t help but wonder…could I choose Clooney and just pick a little Gosling off of your plate?