Saturday, April 12, 2008

Sontag Blogettes

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 doo
r. "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 p
ost 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 wa
s 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.




6 comments:

  1. 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.........!

    ReplyDelete
  2. adieu, 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.
    Enjoy Queensland.

    ReplyDelete
  3. silly buggers, you should have shared - much less icy. travelling Mum

    ReplyDelete
  4. Wow. 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.

    ReplyDelete
  5. As 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.

    The best thing ever.

    Do it.

    ReplyDelete

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.

Have you heard of the band Joy Division?

Chinese food, not Chinese Internet!

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