Zorb Houses

To comply with recent changes in NZ privacy law, and due to the reluctance of insurance-firms to insure any new houses that aren’t made of of the sames stuff that Zorbs are made out of, all new houses built in New Zealand are to be designed as follows:

The design comes from France, and they seem to cost about 8000 eu, which is too much, but still about 250,000 less than an actual house, which is also too much, but which makes the first price seem like a bargain but you still can’t afford it. They have auxiliary benefits of a) being able to float when the floods come and b) the roof acts like a giant magnifying glass allowing you to light cigarettes simply by holding them aloft.

There are loads of videos on youtube – but almost all of them seem to feature people talking cobblers for ages at the start. This is the most straight-to-the-point one.

They look amazing actually

Proper space-ship like… although to be 100% pedantic about it, they do also look a lot like the thing that the Tralfamadorians made Kurt Vonnegut live in, when they kidnapped him and took him to Tralfamadore. No photographs of this place exist on the entire internet, but I managed to snag this from a youtube video…

… a process made all the more tricky because hundreds of films students have made “interpretations” of their own, which have fuck-all to do with the original. This is crossing a line in my opinion.

So anyway – for some reason the Tralfamadorians gave him Valerie Perrine – which is an odd choice… even back then. Personally I would have gone for Tanya Roberts on account of her being the greatest 1970s Barbarianess of all time… starring in such classics as The Beast Master

And she was also in I Paladini – storia d’armi e d’amori… which is probably the greatest barbarian movie from the early 80s, of all time… a sort of Barbarian Spaghetti Western. Tanya gets her dress trashed by bandits in the opening scene.

Although obviously if I got trapped on Tralfamadore, and got another chance at choosing etc, I’d probably go for the blonde one…

But anyway, Tanya Roberts was also one of Charlies Angels,

and possibly the worst bond-girl ever, apart from Grace Jones which was obviously preposterous. That video above appears to be some sort of fan video. I don’t know what’s happening to the world… I mean we gen-Xers exist in this atemporal plastic bubble of trash culture, but making iffy fan videos seems to me to be crossing a line somehow.

Like… Clarence off True Romance might have theorised about having sex with Elvis to random women in bars, and later had visions of him in the bathroom just before a massive gun fight etc… Clarence was Gen-X… and if he had to have sex with a guy… if he absolutely had to… he’d choose Elvis. But he wouldn’t make dodgy fan-vids of him. Crossing a line.

Anyway, Alabama off True Romance is probably my most ideal woman for getting trapped in a massive Zorb on another planet with and being peered at by aliens etc, from any movie from the 90s ever.

I’ve seen that movie about 30 times. Usually in a similar state to Floyd.

That’s all I’ve got to say on the matter.