Things I love about being a meat eater: I arrived home after hockey this week to a house gushing with the taste-bud aching smells of Mele's family pasta sauce recipe. I can reveal for purposes of this story that she puts osso bucco and pork spare ribs in there. I can also reveal for the purposes of this story that Mele had a face like a kid with a mouthful of Brussels sprouts.
"Come with me!" she cried, the moment I stepped through the door. "I've got something I have to show you!"
She dragged me into the kitchen and pointed to the chopping board. On it was a small piece of white gristle. "What do you think that is?" she asked. The gristle was a piece of skin carved from the edge of one of the pork spare ribs. On the piece of skin was a small raised nodule.
"A wart?" I guessed.
"It's a nipple!" she moaned. "I want to die!"
I tried to talk her into the fact that nipples tend to have boobs under them, but she insisted that it was neither wart nor beauty spot. It probably was a nipple. I love eating meat. I've reached a stage in my life where I'll eat or at least try anything that's put in front of me and the thought of seared, dripping blue-cooked steak reclining on a plate in front of me fills me with the animal hungers.
At least it wasn't a tattoo.
***
A blog ye muste alle reade: I've only just discovered Myninjacockle's The Loaded Blog and it's the only non-comic site that I've felt compelled to go back and trawl through every single post because each one is an excellent little vignette. The author has either had a lot of practise blogging and discovering what works and what doesn't and what holds an audience, or is one of those talented arseholes who gets it right without even trying. Sceptical? I present for your delectation Exhibit A and, if that's too highbrow, Exhibit B.
***
Blurry photos: I've tried to defend my penchant for blurry photos in the past, but I'm beginning to accept that it's probably one of those things that will be appreciated only when I'm dust in the dirt. Or never. People love dat focus stuff yes suh.
However, being how this is my blog and they're my photos, I can do whatever the hell I like. Moify and Ms Moify-To-Be's engagement party was last night and I took a whole bunch of real blurry ones - YEAH!
I hope it is many years before they get around to drinking the wine we gave them because I wrote on the label "All best for your beautiful journey together". Hopefully they decide to drink all their engagement wine in one hit and get to ours last so they don't have wonder too much about why a man who claims to be a writer thought that omitting a "the" would be poetic.
***
A photo from the archives: For reasons that will become clear in a future blog, I was digging around some old travel photos from a ski-trip to New Zealand. The following photo was taken after probably the worst night's sleep that either Triton or I have ever had. We got a cabin in the woods somewhere and rugged up for cold night. We weren't too worried because we had a double-barrelled bar heater. At two am, the bar heater died. At 2:15am we both woke up with the feeling that we were both going to die. We considered writing a last will and testament but movement was mostly out of the question. Let the record also show that even with the spectre of death from hypothermia looming large we did not declare prison rules and share a sleeping bag.
The next morning we shouted at the manager and were given no refund for our Night of Icy Doom. There was nothing left to do but go to Glenorchy and sit in the sunlight while drinking pitchers of coffee and dining on a cubic foot of baked beans, nine-egg omelettes and half a pig each, nipples and all.
This is the photo I took of the frost shadows outside the Glenorchy Bar and Restaurant.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
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An explanation of The Joy Division Litmus Test
Although it may now be lost in the mysts of thyme, the poll below is still relevant to this blog. In the winter of 2008, Mele and I went to live in Queensland. In order to survive, I bluffed my way into a job at a Coffee Club.
It was quite a reasonable place to work: the hours were regular, the staff were quite nice, it wasn't particularly taxing on my brain.
There were a few downsides: In the six weeks or so that I worked there, there was about a 90% staff turnover (contributed to by my leaving). This wasn't seen as a result of the low pay, the laughability of staff prices or the practice of not distributing tips to staff, rather it was blamed on the lack of work ethic among Bribie Island's youth.
However, one of the stranger aspects of the cultural isolation that touched our lives during our time "up there" was the fact that nobody at my work had heard of the band Joy Division.
The full explanation is available here.
But please, interact a little further and vote in my ongoing poll. The results are slowly mounting up, proving one thing: people read this blog are more well-informed about Joy Division than anyone who works at the Coffee Club on Bribie Island.
It was quite a reasonable place to work: the hours were regular, the staff were quite nice, it wasn't particularly taxing on my brain.
There were a few downsides: In the six weeks or so that I worked there, there was about a 90% staff turnover (contributed to by my leaving). This wasn't seen as a result of the low pay, the laughability of staff prices or the practice of not distributing tips to staff, rather it was blamed on the lack of work ethic among Bribie Island's youth.
However, one of the stranger aspects of the cultural isolation that touched our lives during our time "up there" was the fact that nobody at my work had heard of the band Joy Division.
The full explanation is available here.
But please, interact a little further and vote in my ongoing poll. The results are slowly mounting up, proving one thing: people read this blog are more well-informed about Joy Division than anyone who works at the Coffee Club on Bribie Island.
Have you heard of the band Joy Division?
Champions of Guess The Header
- What is Guess The Header about? Let’s ask regular “Writing” reader, Shippy: "Anyway, after Franzy's stunning September, and having a crack at 'Guess The Header' for the first time - without truly knowing what I was doing mind you - I think I finally understand what 'GTH' is all about. At first I thought you needed to actually know what it was. Don't get me wrong — if you know what it is, it may help you. I now realise that it's more Franzy's way of invoking thought around an image or, more often than not, part of an image. If you dissect slightly the GTH explanatory sentence at the bottom of his blog you come up with this: “The photo is always taken by me and always connects in some way to the topic of the blog entry it heads up.” When the header is put up, the blog below it will in some obscure way have something to do with it. “Interesting comments are judged and scored arbitrarily and the process is open to corruption and bribery with all correspondence being entered into after the fact and on into eternity, ad infinitum amen.” Franzy judges it, but it's not always the GTH that describes the place perfectly that gets it. “The frequent commenters, the wits, the wags and the outright smartarses who, each entry, engage to both guess the origin and relevance of the strip of photo at the top (or “head”) of each new blog and also who leave what I deem the most interesting comment.” It generally helps if you're a complete smartarse and can twist things to mean whatever you feel they should mean - exactly the way Franzy would like things to be twisted." - Shippy Blogger and GTH point scorer.
- Nai - 1
- Lion Kinsman - 2
- Will - 2
- Brocky - 2
- Andy Pants - 2
- The 327th Male - 3
- Mad Cat Lady - 3
- Miles McClagen - 4
- Myninjacockle - 4
- Asheligh - 5
- Neil - 5
- Third Cat - 5
- Adam Y - 6
- Squib - 6
- Mele - 6
- Moifey - 7
- Jono - 8
- The Other, other Sam - 14
- Kath Lockett - 15
- Shippy - 19
- River - 32
The Beauty of History
- 2007 June - The Wedding and Gun Club
- 2007 May - Urban Myths and Grandpa
- 2007 April - Moving stuff
- 2007 March - Shower Porn, Comics & Videos
- 2007 February - Spare Tyres, Eating Poo & Australia Day
- 2007 January - Peaches, Revenge Pt 2 & Hot Summer Media Crotch
- 2006 December - Rib Recipe, Pinching Pyne and Recycling a Review
- 2006 November - Internet Love and "1980s Movies Weren't That Great, Get Over It"
- 2006 October - Jeff Buckley did it right the fifth time
- 2006 September - The Heady Days of Guns, Books and Travel Withdrawal
- 2006 August - Prague, Germany, Italy, Interlaken and Spain
- 2006 July - Spanish foie gras, British warm wave, New York Hawt Dawgs and Tall Yosemite Sisco
- 2006 June - Los Angeles, Melbourne and Werld Carp SOKKA
- 2006 May - Mouse Killer applies for entry-level publishing job, bids father farewell
- 2006 April - Teen Sex, Alexander Downer & a new Liberal Ad Campaign
- 2006 March - 100 Posts old and Industrial Relations Looms
- 2006 February - Revenge Pt 1, Fringe Parade Fotos and A Big Squid
- 2006 January - The Knee
- 2005 December - Running of the Bogans
- 2005 November - Man with Mo steps out, almost loses girlfriend (pictures included)
- 2005 October - Rejection and Masturbation
- 2005 September - Engaged and sticking it to first-time young adult novelists
- 2005 August - First Cut
- 2005 July - Nerves of noodle & Bongs to Die For
- 2005 June - "I’ve come down with a pinched meniscus from almost scoring a cracker of a goal on Saturday"
- 2005 May - Tony Smith and some actual creativity
- 2005 April - Pulteney Grammar Sex Scandal Crusader
- 2005 March - Harold Bishop in drag
- 2005 February - End of a Sumo Dynasty
- 2005 January - RealTime Sumo Gig, Last Edition of the Serial and Vale Martin Pudney
- 2004 December - The Serial gears up and Beat the Chef fires its first presenter
- 2004 November - Franzy's First Fans Fink Fiction Flat
- 2004 October - Blurry Photos, the Serial kicks it up 0.4 of a notch and some good ol' fashioned racism
- 2004 September - Nothing but serial
- 2004 August - What an ending! ... I mean, Beginning.
- 2004 July - Sumo, Serial and Tennis-Playing Perverts
- 2004 June, the days of politics, polemics, mp3s and sumo
The pic - alpine vegetation (its edible, you may be interested to know) - possibly NZ in origin. Kiwi sheep often eat it as an aphrodisiac as shearing time approaches. The rest is history.........!
ReplyDeleteadieu, adios, au revoir, sayonara, shalom, farvel, auf wiedersehen, arrivederci, ciao, addio, adeus, hasta la vista, totsiens, selamat jalan, vale, do widenzia, vaya con dios, farewell, etc.
ReplyDeleteEnjoy Queensland.
Merci!
ReplyDeletesilly buggers, you should have shared - much less icy. travelling Mum
ReplyDeleteWow. thanks for the wrap...and enormous pressure to make next several posts breathtaking incisive, refreshingly honest, witty etc. rather then an apparently plagiarised rant about car keys.
ReplyDeleteAs you are a meat lover, and as you are moving to Brisbane, you MUST visit a restaurant called Asian House in Fortitude Valley. It looks the same as the other good value, bustling, busy asian restaurants around there. However, it has one important difference. It sells Imperial Fillet Steak. Delicious long crispy deep fried morsels of steak.
ReplyDeleteThe best thing ever.
Do it.