Writing

Whitney looked so happy ... and rakishly handsome

2012-02-13T00:27:00.000-08:00

It seems like the good people at People went with her seldom-seen "front view". It's such a shame they buggered up the headline though, since it's so obvious from these photos that LL Cool J is the closest thing we have to Whitney Houston.

In other news, LL Cool J can rock him some perl earrings! Go dude! Go!

Ah, summer

2012-01-24T16:53:00.000-08:00

Did I mention that I've got a new camera and that I'm in love with it? The thing just does not take a bad photo. Have a little trip to Looki's site and the kind of nice things this camera can do.

"Have you ever been mistaken for a man?" "No. Have you?"

2012-01-16T17:24:00.000-08:00

There's this terrifying bit in Roald Dahl's Going Solo where he describes working in the desert and being taught to shake his boots for scorpions before putting them on.

I read this at age ten and it has always stayed with me. So much so that for years I have been shaking out my shoes, just in case there were any multipedes in there, ready to destroy my life. I've never shaken out anything more terrifying than a grass seed.

Until yesterday.

I performed my usual shoe-shake ritual: pick up the shoe, shake, bang on ground, visual inspection, shake, bang on ground again (to dislodge anything with grappling hooks), quick poke with hand (why this less dangerous than with a foot is not clear to me), second visual, shake, bang on ground a third time, then put shoe on. (Repeat with second shoe. Mow lawn. But we're not up to that yet.)

I noticed on the sometimes-used third visual inspection, a particularly stubborn grass seed drop back into the toe of the shoe. A quick hand poke dislodged nothing. On the fourth visual inspection, I saw it, nestled up under the tongue.

A true-blue redback spider.

Yes, after all the hand-poking and shaking and banging and visualising. That thing was probably chasing my big, soft, pink hand out of its huge comfy nest after each poke. It was probably planning an Aliens-style den of terror and venom. I half expected to see Hudson tumbling out of my old sneaker tossing grenades over Ripley's head and squealing 'Game over, man! Game over!'

I squished that fucker dead. Then I nuked it from orbit. It was the only way to be sure.

Then I went around the entire house and lacquered every single spider-sized hidey hole with very toxic bug spray. I would prefer my family died of poisoning than redback spider attack.

Now my feet smell permanently of insect repellent and my years-long shoe ritual just got longer.

Thanks, Roald Dahl. You saved my feet (and possibly my life - it was a pretty big spider).

Reasons smart phones suck and my old flip phone still rules - Part 2

2012-01-09T15:22:00.000-08:00

Oo! I just thought of more!

#178: You hung up with your cheek? What a great modern age we live in.

#24: Internet browsing cost how much?

Reasons smart phones suck and my old flip phone still rules

2012-01-08T21:48:00.000-08:00

#468: You are just reading this sentence, instead of contemplating a high-definition image of Charlie's first successful number two. Happy New Year!

#241:
Step 1: "What's your number?"
Step 2: "And ... that's saved in my phone."
Step 3: "Sure, I'll wait five minutes while you do the same thing. And then make me pose for a photo which I will change later to a shot of me gurning anyway."

#34: What bill?

New toys are nice

2011-12-30T04:41:00.001-08:00

And some of these people probably drive cars

2011-12-06T21:26:00.001-08:00

Falafel Stop

2011-12-02T21:32:00.000-08:00

For all those who say that we definitely missed a dinner spot on Gouger Street:

It was Triton's fault.

That dude was, like, heavily starving by the time we picked him up. Tess had to restrain him from consuming someone's leather handbag.

I can haz invisibl hand bag!!

So we did make it to Falafel Stop for dinner.
Eventually.
However, we were first forced (by Triton) to stop at the very next place that served food for a small snack.


Triton: Small snack. Everyone else: Competitive Eating Rounds 1 to 5

The Crown & Sceptre were most accommodating and they even had boobs on the wall to divert attention from Triton's gulping and swallowing.


AAA-OOO-GAH!!! Dinner time!!

When we made it to Falafal Stop for dinner, we found the selection be broad and delicious and Mele needed much time to weigh our post-pre-dinner "snack" menu options.

While Triton appears to be sedated, seconds later he launched himself at glass and the treats beyond like rabid eagle.

The menu essentially boiled down to different combinations of filo, nuts and honey. All of which were delicious. None of which we (excluding Triton) were able to finish.

"Then Ah'm onna eat dat purty liddl camera too ..."

Falfel Stop was a highly impressive place to eat with friendly staff and many things on the menu which we were too scared to try in case Triton ate them from our fingers.

Bring on Concubine!

Your mission ...

2011-11-22T15:37:00.001-08:00

Faithful followers of The Epic!

Your time has come.

If you read and enjoy this blog of Gouger and food, and have always wanted to join in, now is your moment.

On Friday, December the 2nd at 7pm, we will be visiting a very secret location.
And you, dear reader, are invited.

I'll be Frank, if you'll be Earnest: we need the numbers. Not enough numbers, no secret location, sad faces at Xmas.

Drop me a line in the comments if you are excited about secret food locations.
I need to know by Friday the 25th of November.
THIS FRIDAY.

NOW is your chance.

CARPE DINNER.

2011-11-17T18:29:00.001-08:00

I'm the king of eBay again!

If you want to donate to the little Franzy Xmas fund and receive a rare item in return for your cash, please consider the original Dark Horse issue of the complete collection of Akira! Current price, $53.65!

Or, if your tastes are a little specialised and you have a nose for a bargain, the eMagin z800 HM is for you! What is it? Um ... it's just a little 3D virtual reality headset ... you know, it's just The Future Here And Now.

A steal at the current price of $152.50.

Seems a little pricey?
Not when you try to shop around.
An Amazon third party seller has one, and it is new, but how would you feel coughing up $1699 for it???

Bid! Bid! Biiiiiid!!!
BARGAINS BARGAINS BAAAARRRGGGAAAIIINNNNNSSS!!!!!

Life's pretty nice

2011-11-15T03:28:00.001-08:00

Hiiiiiiii-YA!!!

2011-10-29T20:26:00.000-07:00

Miss Piggy once said: "Never eat more than you can lift."

She may have been right.

Eating is one pleasure, and we've pushed the boundaries in the Gouger Street Epic(ure). Reading is another pleasure and I have recently embarked upon my own epic: I'm on the judging panel for a book prize. You get a little money and you get to keep all the books. Sounds great, right?

Pictured here is me with two piles of books. One is the pile I've read, the other is the pile I am yet to read.

Can you guess which is which?

Something like, "Never try to read more than you fly over"

Cafe Kowloon

2011-10-27T17:10:00.000-07:00

Attendant: Olivia, Michael, Tallora, Cristi, Mele, Sam

Let's do a comparison, shall we?
Cafe Kowloon and Ying Chow live side by side. Always have.
Ying Chow was traditionally jumping the pig party twenny-fo' SEVEN.
Cafe Kowloon merely looked on. It had customers. But not ones banging down the door and fighting over tables. Usually the Gareth Keenan-style sloppy seconds from Yingers.


I see fish. I will eat fish.

Now we have sampled both, and are ready to compare. Let's see how they do ...

Booking a table
Ying Chow: Table for 6:30? Just twenty more minutes, just twenty more minutes, just twenty more minutes, just twenty more minutes ....
Cafe Kowloon: Come in! Sit down! Wherever you want! Drinks? Look at fish tank? Have a bowl of prawn crackers!

Kowloon: 1
Chow: 0

Ordering food
Ying Chow: We're not taking your order. I don't give a shit if you're ready. Put this on and do the dance. Stop crying and do the dance.
Cafe Kowloon: Are you ready? No? I'll come back! How about now? No? No problem! How about a hug while you are deciding?

Kowloon:2
Chow:-1

Dealing with customers who sit at a table for four and have unexpected guests arrive
Ying Chow: You are dirt! You are NOTHING! GET OOOUTTTT!!!!
Cafe Kowloon: Hello! Hello! Welcome, paying customers! Crowd around! Let us get you a chair!

Hunching, scoffing and frowning? An excellent choice of eating method!

The Actual Quality of the food

Ying Chow: Legendary. Fondly and obsessively remembered. One of the Gouger Street Greats. But, oh, how the mighty have fallen and they have fallen far indeed. Seeing your favourite band do a Telstra commercial - that's how badly they've let go.
Cafe Kowloon: Workman like. Nothing to get excited about, but it all came out at pretty much the same time (the novelty!) and was edible, if not memorable.

It's edible ... and I like it!

Kowloon: 3
Chow: -10 (Definitely the worst service ever)

So, if our report on our final trip to Yingers left you bereft of suitable Chinese restaurants on Gouger Street, then you could do worse than Kowloon.
You could do better, but what the hey, it's a crowded market.

It's suitable ... and we like it!

Ying Chow

2011-09-29T18:33:00.000-07:00

Ying Chow, we need to talk.
Put down that lazy Susan and listen.

We've been drifting apart for years. We coasted on the good times, and we had some good times, didn't we?
Remember when I could just turn up on your doorstep at midnight and you would let me in without question?
I won't deny it, even when I was with others, thousands of kilometres away, I was thinking of you. They fed me, but I tasted you.
You used to be The One.
But ... well ... this is where it gets difficult. I'm just going to come out and say it:
You've changed. And not in a good way.

It took that bullshit you pulled last Friday night to make me realise how bad you really are.

I know you didn't notice when we stopped being together as regularly as we used to. I know because every time I came crawling back, you treated me like nothing.
"Just twenty more minutes" my arse.
I used to listen to that lie all night, and I'd just be so happy when you let me in, that I forgave you.
Well, no more.
A man can only put up with so much.

I thought booking a table would change all that, help us move past this rough patch together. But what did I get on Friday night? The same old cock'n'bull: "Just twenty more minutes"
And when you finally did seat us, you couldn't even give a shit whether we ordered or not!

No I will NOT keep my voice down!
AND, when we finally did order, do you know what we got?
THIS:

Don't bother me, puny customer. I work at Ying Chow. I don't need your business.

You used to be so attentive. You used to remember what everyone ordered without having to write it down. You used to care.
Now, well, now, it's like you're showing off what a cad you can be and still get customers.
Well let me tell you something Ying So Called Excellent Restaurant Award So Called Chow: your food used to be the talk of the town. You had "It", The X Factor, The Mystical Taste, Flavorama, but now, now you are the culinary equivalent of the fading rockstar. I like your old stuff better than your new stuff.
Trouble is, you don't have any new stuff, and here's what your old stuff has turned into.

(Bear in mind, I know people who have come back from overseas and demanded to be fed at least two of the following dishes. That's how good they used to be.)

Shallot Panckes

These used to be the rousing overture to a sensational evening.

Everyone agreed that they were like toasted pockets of onion.

BBC and Greens

The Broad Beans and Bean Curd and Chilli used to solve every problem. They were grey, undercooked and depressing.

The greens had to be asked for. They were not offered.

Red Vinegar Ribs

This used to come out as a sizzling mountain of ribs.

Now they're just dry. Dry and sad.

Aniseed Tea Duck

This actually wasn't too bad. But if you could get this right, then what was the story with the rest of the food?

E-Shand Eggplant

Too little, too late.

The eggplant came at the end of the meal, right before you asked us to move tables. The least popular table in Ying Chow is the one by the door where people waiting for their table stand over you and glower. That's where we were asked to move to.

Mid-meal.

Then, the second that most of the eggplant was eaten you offered us a table outside! In the cold!

Perhaps we wouldn't have taken so long over our meal if you hadn't

brought

out

each

dish

one

time.

We declined your polite offer to freeze our arses off while we worked out whether to do a runner or not ...

... and ordered another drink!

I'm gonna sip and sip and sip and sip and sip and sip!

And then I'm gonna play with the ice cubes!

Goodbye, forever, Ying Chow.

So long, and thanks for teaching us all the meaning of really bad service.

How long has this been going on?

2011-09-22T21:17:00.000-07:00

I only realised this about one week ago:

Did you know these two men ... ... are different people?

Apparently everyone else knew this but me.

Business idea - investors wanted

2011-09-13T19:41:00.000-07:00

I am going to start up a tech company which redesigns and rebrands existing technology for old people. Remote controls, USB sticks, microwaves, all with big buttons and minimal functionality for people who are either nervous about technology or routinely puzzled by it.

My company will be called 'FANDANGLED'.

I called it first.

I'm going to need money and staff to redesign cheap techie stuff so that your Gran will be able to use it and and confidently say "I've got one of those new Fandangled microwaves!"

Now hiring.

The Talbot Hotel

2011-09-05T17:10:00.000-07:00

SCANDAL

Attendant: Dougie, Trits, Mele, Sam

This place was one of those eating establishments that we ‘just had to do because it’s on Gouger’. The Talbot is, for all intents and purposes, a feral bogan bar. Having been dropped off by Franzway, I took some time to survey the scene:

Bogan to BarWench: (slurs) You want some help putting up the poster?
Bar Wench: No, and I don’t feel like talking SHIT with you, either.
Bogan looks mollified and shuts up.

I took a wander through the hotel, to check out the place: huge pokies room, a keno room, a bar room full of booths but was plainly empty, a front room with bogans, a few large plates of cheap cheese and the always vile kabana, but no kitchen. That’s right: no kitchen and no dining tables.

The Talbot makes its money from gambling, no doubt about it. With only two bar maids in sight, it’s not exactly overstaffed. It’s a skeleton of a business that caters to those drinking and betting their pensions.
‘So, do you serve any food here?’ I asked the bar maid.
‘Yeah, take a look at this.’
First alarm bell: the menu was on the back of a wine list, never a good sign.
Second alarm bell: the entire menu was Chinese food. Dougie, who had been hoping for an old school, disgusting schnittie parmie (or whatever) was in for a great disappointment.
Clanger number three: the suspicious prices: $18.80 for satay chicken, or pork with fried rice?

'People! This menu is not legit,’ I declared when the others arrived. ‘It appears we have already eaten here.’

In Triton's words: "This be wiggedy whack."

The Tartufo, seen previously on the menu of another recent chinese restaurant, was also available at the Talbot. What the hell? An over-processed, factory-made icecream dessert has been discovered ten years after Italians stopped having it at their weddings by one Chinese chef.

Dougie and Triton were game enough to ask at the bar about the food.
The bar maid caved under questioning. ‘Yeah, it comes from next door,’
I knew it! I knew my research skills would be useful someday!

The clamouring hoards howl for food,settle for beer.

So, people, we decided that we were not going to eat last Friday’s night’s food at twice the price and half the sophistication (boganed up for the Talbot clientele?) and went elsewhere. Since Ying Chow is next, we didn’t want to line up for two hours with no booking. We are going to hit up The Ying in the coming weeks, and if y’all want to come along you will have to let us know so we can make a booking and spend half an hour waiting for a table to be available.

The fermented yeast palate-cleanser was inspiring ....
.... us to find some decent food!
ZING!

Ba Guo Bu Yi

2011-08-18T22:58:00.000-07:00

Attended: Michael, Lisa, Dougie, Mele and Sam

Mele

I can no longer objectively review Chinese food.
I ate one bite of the weird dish-the noodle thing.

Tastes even saltier than it looks.

I had a few bites of the house special fish in chilli, until a cut in my lip put an end to it.
The pork dish tasted too piggy.
Even the chicken tasted too much like chicken.
I ate quite a lot of the chocolate tartufo, an item I last saw on the menu of an Italian wedding in the 1980s . It tasted good because it wasn’t Chinese.

No doubt made by an ethnically stereotypical chef.

I am suffering what our friend Michael has termed ‘The Supersize Me’ effect.
I now have a psychological ‘revulsion’ response to Chinese food. After the jellyfish with raw chicken, congee with kidneys and liver, vegemite noodles and countless other weird dishes, I cannot face any further inedible parts of animals, which included Ba Guo Bu Yi's DUCK TONGUE dish and the broiled pig’s ears.
Come on, people, I was a vegetarian for eight years.

The worst sign of my malaise is the fact that I am actually relieved we are eating at the Talbot Hotel next week. No food reviewer in their right mind would think such a thing. The ‘Animal Graveyard’ culinary tour of Gouger Street needs to end for me.

I think I will be choosing weird vegetarian things from now on.

Sam

We expected bits of animals fried in flavoured sauces.
We did not expect a revelation.
We arrived early at Ba Guo Bu Yi and set about examining the menu of Sechuan Chinese dishes.

And some not so traditional ones.

One thing became abundantly clear: we both dread going to these restaurants.
Not the charming ennui-laden dread of the fabulously well-heeled: "Oh I'm just dreading another weekend in St Moritz. Yacht parties are so boring."

Instead, we are possessed of the very real and creeping dread you had when you were a kid getting an injection. The needle. The adults holding you down. You gotta get stuck. You gotta.
WE DON'T WANNA.
Each restaurant visit has been tainted by the knowledge that at some point, we're going to have to eat something that we'll probably find repulsive.

Maybe this was on the menu, maybe not. We don't even know any more.

We've had enough. We started this Epic Adventure to discover new dishes, new places and to open up the entirety of Gouger beyond the same two restaurants we always go to. Part of that means trying new things, things we wouldn't normally order. This, as you have seen, has devolved fairly briskly into an extended game of Truth or Dare.

So we're declaring an end to disgusting. Scoff if you must, but we have dined upon dread and found it not to our tastes. The '"weirdest thing on the menu" rule was invented to force us to order something we wouldn't normally try. Okay - fine - I'll be honest: it was basically a ploy to get me to stop ordering pork every single time.
That has worked.

But replacing it with something I'm going to try, dislike and pay for isn't really a very helpful or useful food review. Hilarious, I'll admit, but we're bored with it. We've done 'yuck'. We're bored with 'gross'. We are through with the 'every part of the animal' philosophy of urban dining. We ain't starving in the Yukon no more. We don't have to eat things that people only started eating in the first place because food was a privilege and flavour secondary.

Goodbye, jellyfish.
Goodbye, offal.
Goodbye, anything clipped off an animal and cooked in flavour sauce.
Helloooo new horizons.

And now to my review:

An utterly impressive restaurant. This is the reason we started this journey in the first place: to discover new things.

Deep Fried Pork Ribs with Salt and Sugar

Delicious! Tender, yet deep-fried and the salt/sugar combination is really the end of war and the beginning of peace on earth and love between all beings (except for pigs).

Chilli Fish Soup

We ordered this oily soup "mild" so that Mele could actually eat it. The bowl arrived teeming with fresh chopped chillis. The "mild" part happens when the waitress gets a slotted spoon and removes about half of the chillis. They really do cater for all pallets.

So, my friends, onlookers and double-darers. Go to Ba Guo Bu Yi. But don't order anything you really don't want, because you will end up sad and ridiculed for not eating badger's noses and jaguar's ear lobes or whatever it is they're serving.

Next stop: The Talbot Hotel

BBQ City

2011-07-27T06:31:00.000-07:00

Yes, they gave us orange slices.

Attendant: Marc, Dan (all the way from Melbourne), Mele, Em, Trent, Dougie, Leah, Ben, Shaun, Rosie, Krista (all the way from London) and Sam

Special mention: Cristi - Double parked on Gouger Street on a funky-ass Friday freak-out to get some takeaway.

Mele

Dear Readers,
I think this photo says it all:

My Soul is Crying

The look on my face was in no way exaggerated for this blog.
What’s worse than eating offal?
Eating it with Congee! 'Congee' is apparently the Chinese word for ‘porridge’ and translates to GRUEL in Mandarin! I am feeling like this blog is rapidly turning into ‘Stupid Westerner eats poor Chinese people’s food’. This is an extension of my wog food philosophy ‘Anglos making hick Italian food hip’. My Nonno refused to eat pizza because it is ‘poor people’s food’. My grandmother comes from Naples, the home of pizza. In this region, pizza is mostly bread with one or two meagre toppings. PIZZA IS THE RICE OF ITALY. Polenta is not something cool you get in a restaurant. It is CORN GRUEL that my Nonna serves covered in tasty napolitana sauce, to HIDE the gruel-like gruelness of the damn stuff. Olive oil dipped in bread is not a novelty, it is something that all my Anglo friends laughed at until they saw it in restaurants.
However, congee is so bad it can never be hip. I felt so sick I could hardly eat anything else at BBQ City. The Steamed Chicken Empress and Tea Duck are second to none, but BBQ City doesn’t have much else to offer other than barbeque, and if you order anything else, you are probably drunk or doing it as an experiment.
In which case, I award BBQ city 70/100 and blame myself for having to eat liver porridge. Thumbs up for the record 12 diners at the city! We love you all!

Sam

I, like Mele, also suspect that with our 'weirdest thing on the menu' rule, this blog may descend into the restaurant reviewing equivalent of "Dare/Double Dare/Physical Challenge!!!". But I'm sure that there will come a time when we have eaten everything.
Jellyfish is no longer weird. Fish'n'bacon is no longer weird.
Salty porridge with fresh pork liver and kidneys is now no longer weird.
Correction: it's still weird. But we're not eating it again.
If you think it's not weird, then you eat it.

AND THEY DID.
Brave, brave fools.

But I am being unkind in my appraisal of what is actually one of the tastiest restaurants we've been to yet.
It's cheap and the barbeque is spectacular. Ribs, duck and chicken served with a little minced spring onion sauce really is my favourite dish on The Epic so far.

Everybody scream YUM YUM

Everything else was fairly standard Chinese restaurant fare and nothing you wouldn't find in any crowded Chinese eatery. Observe:

The Hastily Ordered Fish and MSG

Still better than congee

The Chicken You Definitely Don't Remember Ordering With Yogurt Sauce

That congee is starting to look pretty good

The Vagina Dumplings

Traditional and erotic

Also excellent was the deep-fried eggplant which was so good it could almost have been meat. So that's your BBQ City menu: Triple Crown BBQ Plate, Deep-Fried Eggplant and no congee, ever. A quick word of advice: the BBQ City wait-staff have a reputation for vagueness which ranges from forgetful to outright surly. Our waitress this evening was quick and polite and even attempted steer me away from the offal porridge (and towards the preserved egg porridge). They were even discreet about asking us to leave so they could let other patrons have our huge corner of the City.

But we finally got the hint when they threw a teapot full of piss on the Lazy Susan.

Next stop: Ba Guo Bu Yi (I got it wrong last time - but we may have to hurry, as we left BBQ City the place was plastered with poster proclaiming "All Food 10% Off - The More You Eat, The More You Save!" I'm not worried.)

Stanley’s Fish Café

2011-06-27T03:39:00.000-07:00

Present: Sam, Mele, Tallora and Cristi.

Mele

I’ve got to admit, Sam and I have been avoiding Stanley’s for a few weeks. Here are just a few of the reasons:

a) It's expensive
b) It's the unofficial quarters of the South Australian branch of ‘Grey Power’
c) It exists in a time warp (circa 1985) in which deep frying and heavily crumbling delicate, juicy fresh fish fillets is still in vogue (the words ‘tempura’ or ‘fritto misto’ are not on the menu)
d) Grilling your fish costs an extra two dollars!

As complaining is my forte (yes, I do enjoy it), I will say that the sign of a bad restaurant can be found in the house salad. The salad was iceberg. It came with a light vinegar dressing one could barely taste. All that was missing was the sprig of parsley to garnish.
As for the fish part, one can only puzzle over the specials board which had “Greek Prawns” listed, a dish which included sherry, cream and capsicum.
What the bejeezus is Greek about that?
Or good, one might add?

One might ask the same thing about Greg Norman.
Wait a minute ... oh, I get it: "The Shark". In a place that serves fish. Very nice. Put that gag on the specials board, it's about to go off!
Further thought: a large portrait of a sportman known for choking hanging in a restaurant ... excellent.

Tallora took one for the team and ordered the ultimate in 1950s dining, the ‘Seafood mornay’. I’ve got to say that the words “DISGUSTING” flashed across my drunken mind like the tiny lights in the Rio Di Janeiro picture, but it was actually pretty good.

Unlike the picture of Rio

Probably the best I’ve ever had, but I prefer to think of Tuna Mornay as an abomination that belongs to the past, like Apricot Chicken or sausages in Keen’s curry powder.

Dear friends, do not go to Stanley’s. It’s an expensive RSL.

However, the fish was extremely well cooked, for which I award Stanley’s 45/100.

Sam

Mele's not wrong. When we conceived of the Gouger Street Epic, we imagined ourselves unearthing gem after undiscovered gem of Asian cuisine. Not, as it has turned out so far, chicken sandwiches, meatball-and-seafood subs and sneakily-disguised chops.

But nothing, nothing could have prepared us (more specifically: me) for ... BARRA GRENADA. Take a tender, delicate piece of fried barramundi ...

AND SMOTHER IT IN BACON BITS.

This isn't even some gag photo we made up by sneaking some bacon sprinklin's from someone else's plate. I paid 29.9 of my excellent dollars for salty bacon and fresh-water fish. I'm obviously the dope in this situation – the buffoon, the fall guy - but I still feel like someone should get a wet fish in the moosh.
I can't even complain about it! It was the nicest fish'n'bacon dish I've ever eaten. And it's going straight into the Weirdest of the Weird Hall of Fame over there on your right, because: pesce e porco, Sam says NO.

Honorable mention: Tallora didn't only take one for the team, coming out a winner with the seafood mornay, but she was also broad-minded enough to try the luminous dipping sauce.

And after I eat this, you will give me the five bucks, right?

We only found out later from the forgetful waitress that it was mustard and lemon salad dressing she was spreading on her bread.

But, as always with these things, the important thing is that it's now behind us and we never have to go back.
What?
You think we're doing this to broaden our horizons?
Expand our minds to new definitions of flavour?
Screw that! The motto of the Epic may well turn out to be "We Ate There So You Don't Have To"

Subtitle: "Iceberg and all, motherfucker"

We can now move on to cities of barbeque and great rivers of *ahem* barbeque and other things which may or may not have barbeque.

Next stop: Ba Guo Bu Yi

On the upside, the technician said it was the cleanest motherboard he'd ever seen.

2011-06-22T18:48:00.000-07:00

No, we're not starving to death.

We are, however, on a slight hiatus because the millions, one could even stretch so far as to say billions, or even trillions of dollars spent on developing the microprocessor and all its attendant uses and attachments were still not nearly enough to solve the problem of water-proofing.

A lovely little water-bottle with Charlie's name joyously stamped on the side obviously was not the beneficiary of the millennia-old global research cloud which has developed and made available the knowledge which allows us to contain water over a period of time. Instead, this poor third-cousin, this unlicensed knock-off, this pretender vessel only revealed the depth of its true deficiency when it was provided with the opportunity to snuggle up with my computer in the seclusion of my backpack.

I can't recall another occasion when a single drip of moisture has caused me such anguish, falling as it did from the cooling vent in the side of my laptop.

The PhD is safe. The photos have been salvaged and recovered. The music is safe, the playcounts are not.

The Epic shall continue, but you may have to be a little patient.

He likes to move it

2011-05-26T20:58:00.000-07:00

NOT T-Bar! T-Chow!

2011-05-23T05:27:00.001-07:00

Scandal!
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s love child does NOT serve dinner at the T-Bar!

Nor does anyone else for that matter. We four arrived, starving, to find empty fridges and to match our empty stomachs. It turns out all our snobbish friends (you know who you are) were *ahem* right. T-Bar is not a dinner venue and is thusly STRUCK OFF the Gouger Street Epic(urean) Adventure.

However, let it not be said that we are planless gimps for we are not. We carried the T-theme through and ended up at T-Chow. All right – fine, we bloody know it’s not a Gouger Street restaurant as per The Rules, but the next stop is Stanley’s Fish Café and we’ll be dining on the forty-buck fish alone.This time, we’re reviewing T-Chow, not as part of the Epic, but as a service to food lovers.

You've seen T-Chow, you've walked past it. You've even been inside and eaten there. 'Classy place' you thought. You were right. It's the kind of classy which has the word 'Classy' Bedazzled on its pleather jacket. From the glitter fish tanks to the white table-cloths covered in butcher's paper, T-Chow isn't just a place, it's a venue. Things happen here.

Food also happens here. Unfortunately, this is not the Austin Powers kind of 'happens', this is the other kind of happens. The kind referred to on Holden bumper-stickers Australia-wide.

Shallot pancakes.

All our sloth turds are served with soy vinegar and parsley!

These could have been the best things I've ever eaten. They could have been mislaid sloth turds. I wouldn't have known because by the time they turned up, I was so hungry, it's a miracle I stopped at the plate.
Mele: They were actually really undercooked.

Green peppercorn chicken.

Supposedly the flagship. If so, the T-Chow armada would have trouble taking over Marion Swimming Pool. Their A-game was C+. It had flavour, but so does lots of Chicken Tonight. But, in keeping with the flagship concept, that is deep-fried seaweed around the edges.
Mele: The chicken was beautifully tender. Alas, nothing else was.

Salt'n'Pepper Squid.

Now with lettuce!

Should probably just be called 'Squid'. Or I didn't get any bits with the world's most common seasoning.
Mele: It was overcooked. If salt and pepper squid can be viewed as the barometer of a good restaurant, a death knell is ringing in my ears.

T-chow is behind the times. This restaurant is coasting on an old, undeserved reputation. If you thought sweet'n'sour chicken was the height of Chinese cuisine in the 1980s, and still believe it is, you are a bogan or the owner of this joint. STRAIGHT UP.

Good good, there were so many relics from the past here it was like going back to highschool. Even Axl Rose turned up.

Nothing lasts forever, man. Even cold November Rain.
*sniff*
*Cue rain-soaked coffin*

Peking Ribs.

Even slanty photography can't save it.

Should probably just be called 'Peking', because I was hard pressed to find any actual evidence that I was eating intercostals.
Big call? Maybe. That photo doesn't really do it justice. I'm also not a butcher, but I like to think I understand what I'm pointing at when I go to the local meat vendor and say:

'OI. THOSE RIBS ARE FUCKING CHUMP CHOPS.'

Guest reviewer: Charlie.

"The milk was INTENSE."

Bean Bar

2011-05-18T06:08:00.000-07:00

In order to make this stop on our Epicurean Adventure more palatable and less mind-fuckingly tedious, we have replaced our regular food and venue photos with portraits of one another appearing as simpletons.
Bon appetit!

The Bean Bar
Attendance: Mele, Sam

Sam

“It wasn’t as bad as you would probably imagine”

Not the exact phrase an eatery wants to begin its one chance at review-based fame. The Bean Bar found us quite alone on Friday night. The enthusiastic crowds who had mobbed us at The Sushi Train (I’m sure they were there for us), were suddenly quite absent among the small tables and modest selection of decidedly not-that-out-there sandwiches.

My word! What big sangers you 'ave, Guvna!

The sandwiches were pretty good. I’ve had to choke down worse chicken.

BookAAK!!

It was probably accidental, but The Bean Bar does have a certain low-key “vibe” to it. You imagine the franchise owner is convinced that having a selection of toasted sandwiches is probably about as icy cool as a coffee shop can get. Sort of like your mum steadfastly refusing to throw out those high-waisted cream slacks because you can’t improve on perfection. And, like I respect your mum for rocking those acres of waistband year after perfect year, I respect The Bean Bar for sticking with the doorstops and toasted rolls, flying in the face of fashion and popular favour. The rest of the café+food joints are probably branching out past sushi and on into … I dunno … goulash or haggis or something equally fashionable, but The Bean Bar is still there in the early-to-mid nineties, gloating over its sandwich press and its milkshakes in glasses. Charming.

Mele

Okay kids, it’s time for Mel’s rant:

T-bean is a perplexing little place that is next to the T-bar (a much more established venue that no doubt gets the lion’s share of business).
Whooops.
It’s actually ‘Bean Bar’, but this place was so forgettable….
The sandwiches were very, very average. I’m not keen on toasted avocado and chicken sandwiches that have huge pieces of baby spinach and basil wilted in them. One should, never, never cook lettuce. For god’s sake, even the Americans are suspicious of this practice.
Seriously, dudes, not a good idea. Even hot avocado is a no go.

Obviously hot spinach is fine.

The ‘hot snow chocolate’ is the closest thing to breast milk I’ve ever tasted (other than breast milk). It sounded like the weirdest thing on the menu, ‘hot’ and ‘snow’ being opposing signifiers and all.

Magic beans, you say? Sounds lovely!

The drink they served was simple enough, a combination of milk, water and white chocolate that tasted like –you guessed it—watery milk and sugar. The drink had no flair at all. A dash of vanilla bean, nutmeg, cinnamon, strawberry Quik, anything was desperately needed.
I can’t imagine anyone but a lactose tolerant infant enjoying this drink (or maybe our friend Dordy, whose health fanatic mother once caught her stirring spoons of sugar into milk, a desperate act of a sugar-deprived childhood).
This place was so boring and dull that only the décor pleased me. Skip it. If you’re going to run a coffee or tea place in Adelaide, that place needs to be tied to a nationality where the product can be identified from.

I am a food racist. So are you. When was the last time you went to a place called Spinelli’s Authentic Chinese Cuisine? Or Wang Pham Pizza and Pasta? Never. That’s when. It’s for the same reason you would avoid espresso from Boring Old Mr Smith’s Boring Coffee Shop For Safe Boring People Who Don’t Like Flavour.

Yeeargh! Caffeine!

It makes sense to steer away from coffee and tea places that aren’t run by people from Devonshire, Sri Lankans, and/or various Middle-Eastern and European countries. These places have a history of brewing brown drinks that actually began more than 20 years ago. There’s a reason Starbucks doesn’t sell in Australia, and that’s because the wogs and the Asians got here first. Franchises are shit. Chances are you will get a cup of hot milk.

Score: ZERO out of 100. Good God—even Subway got 0.5/100.

Tune in next time when we take Charlie to T-Bar!

Sushi Train

2011-05-09T04:20:00.000-07:00

Attendees: Mele, Sam, Triton, Tess, Dougie, Cristi

Mele - The Gouger Street Sushi Train takes no bookings and no prisoners. It does give numbers, though. Our quick-thinking, clever friend Tess took one (number 96!) and we popped around the corner to a bar instead of waiting it out with the 20 (yes, twenty) people in front of The Train. Sam and I joined our fellow diners Dougie, Triton and Tess at the Hilton lounge, a venue that provided much entertainment:

The Hilltop Hoods being incredibly un-Hilltop and being at the Hilton. I stared at them for ages, thinking they were the Beastie Boys. I mean, come on, there’s only so many ‘Old white rappers’ I can remember. Sam and Triton papped them for the blog.

They were so upset when we asked them for a chorus of 'Sabotage'.

A school formal with hordes of teenage girls posing endlessly for photos. Dougie and Tess did a Statler and Waldorf with a running commentary from the balcony seats.

The Hilton is supposed to be fancy, but it is daggy and outdated; a little like Adelaide itself. The foyer is a time-capsule from the mid-eighties. Most of the clientele are the flotsam and jetsam of the night, stragglers whiling away the time (like us). There’s no old money in the bar; it’s even a bit of stretch to say that the clientele are new money (come on, it’s The Hoods).

Right, back to the business of Sushi Train, which is so rock star popular that The Hoods don’t even know about it. An hour after being issued a ticket, Tess hustled her way in and we crammed into a small booth. It was so small that I was literally forced to hug Dougie to stay in it.

Stupid hordes.

Dearest blog readers, l pose a controversial question: is the Sushi Train a novelty restaurant? Should it go (excellent food notwithstanding) the daggy way of apricot chicken and the Hilton? While I loved the food, I didn’t feel comfortable or relaxed in its claustrophobic environment; it was like eating in a mosh pit, with everyone trying to push closer to the stage.

Is Sushi Train worth waiting hours for?
I’d say yes, but just barely. I know that Sam’s review will be much more glowing, but when he hears the word ‘sushi’ he throws the ‘critique’ part of reviewing out the window, much like David Stratton reviewing animation. I can’t be a saucy-minx like Margaret Pomerantz on this one and chuckle huskily that it was ‘a bit of fun’. I’m going to be David savaging a Kate Hudson rom-com and mark the place down on atmosphere.

Sam

Say it with me now: Su-shi! Su-shi! Su-shi! You’re a great crowd. Thanks for coming out.

Mele is right. There is nothing bad I can say about sushi.
When it’s slowly coasting past me on enticing little platters, there’s nothing I can do to resist. I’ll even go so far as to say that I’ve actually had better sushi, but not so far as to claim that I know what makes good sushi good and so-so sushi so so-so.
Still with me? No? Maybe I’m a little high on iodine.

Or tentacles.

I’ll carry on the Movie Show vibe and put my best Margaret growl for the rest of this review:

Oh David! Atmosphere is what The Train is all about! You’re supposed to stand at the door with an elbow ready for queue-jumper’s ribcage*! The bright lights and fire and Engrish is why people go to sushi restaurants! Nobody expects to go to an eatery with the words ‘sushi’ and ‘train’ in the title to experience something quiet and intimate**!
*Cue equine cackle*

But enough of Margaret.

Sushi Train is, however, mostly atmosphere. Once the last slice of swordfish had been devoured (by me) and the waitress was tallying up our plates, there were no lasting loves. Everything was good, nothing was great. Nothing induced fugu poisoning either, so the place was a resounding success measured on those levels.

The Sushi Train is a great place to go if you want a cheery night, good times and questionable photos of your friends.

On another site, this photo would pay for our meal.

Good god, the photos of the bar we went to afterwards is another thing altogether. In Tess’s words, this monostrosity was so uncool it was ‘the pure opposite of Melbourne’.

I'd want to choke a Treasurer here too.

* This was one of the available dishes.
** Except for Dougie and Mele.

Subway

2011-04-30T19:57:00.000-07:00

Subway - 29th April, 2011

Attendance: Mele, Sam, Trent, Em

Sam - I think the stripper getting a pre-dance tuna melt summed it up best: ‘Are you going to eat that?’

I had made it through the first and second courses and was working on dessert, while getting another sandwich to take away for our kind chauffeur. I put the half-eaten raspberry cheesecake cookie on the counter to get my wallet out. The upside to Subway is that you can front up with nothing more than a twenty and leave with a full stomach, but you do end up with a lot of spare change and I needed two hands.
My first reaction was instinctively protective. This was a lady who looked as though she just might grab half a cookie at the first sign of ambivalence.
‘I sure am,’ I answered confidently, ready to shield it like a non-answer-sharing nerd.

Mine!

‘You know people put their hands on this counter?’
‘Yes.’
‘I just went to the toilet, and didn’t wash my hands! Raaarrgh!’ went the stripper, shaking her hair extensions at me. ‘Just kidding.’
‘Oh good,’ I said, paying for my take away and returning to our primo table.
‘He’s actually going to eat it!’ cried the stripper to her stripper friend. I’ve never been watched so intently while eating. I ate the cookie.
‘Aaww!’ they both cried. ‘He ate it!’
They laughed, pointed and left.

This can probably encompass the complete experience of eating at the Gouger Street branch of Subway: were we really really going to eat that?
Yes. Yes, we were.
‘What’s the weirdest thing on the menu?’ asked Mele, executing our casual sting of the Sandwich Artiste on duty with classic elegance. I will leave it to Mele to talk you through the visceral, emotional, physical experience of eating the food. Suffice it to say that, after questioning us (‘Are you doing this for a bet or something?’) and having the Gouger Street Epic(cure) explained to him, our Artiste took on board the concept of necessary weirdness in our menu choices and offered this little tip: leaning in close as he handed me my change (which I would later use on cookies) he said sotto voce ‘You know, it’s the Asians who have the really weird sandwiches.’
‘Ah.’ I nodded encouragingly.
‘Yes. This salad with that, all sorts of stuff!’
‘Amazing.’
The sharp-minded among you may have already deduced that, since he was telling me this while I was paying, we may not have actually received the most unusual menu item or combination of items available that evening.
Wrong.
What we were handed was a protein-packed combo dreamt up by some free-thinking gourmand and assembled by Dr Moreau – the Meatball Seafood Sensation Deluxe. With Bacon. The first thing that struck me about the Seafood Sensation (an independent menu item, complete with salad and an Artiste-recommend mayonnaise) was the fact that ‘Sensation’ is less often a happy superlative than a worrisome pejorative. For every time it is prefaced by ‘Dancing’, ‘Singing’ or even ‘Banjo Playing’ there is the other kind of sensation. Three examples which spring readily to mind are ‘sinking’, ‘gurgling’ and ‘burning’. These are not the sensations which sell sandwiches. These are the sensations which sell pharmaceuticals. Opening the wrapper on our Meatball Seafood Sensation Deluxe (With Bacon) I definitely experienced more of the latter kinds of sensations, rather than the former. It looked like a shotgun wound to the butt hole. With Bacon.

KA-BLAMMO! DINNER!

At this point, you're probably picturing Barnacle Bill-style crumbed butterfish or even the odd bit of prawn cocktail. Nuh-uh. The Looming Seafood Sensation of Dread was made entirely of seafood extender. This is a mock-fish substance composed of chicken offcuts, rodents which are no longer classed as vermin and some kelp (which is technically seafood). The meatballs are indeed that: balls of meat, slathered in a thick, read sauce and composed of the same ingredients as the seafood extender, but in different ratios. The Bacon? Well, they can’t mess around with that too much, can they? Nope, the Bacon was good old, vat-grown, sterilised, homogenised, freeze-dried, re-constituted Bacon-brand meat with Bacon flavouring. I hear it’s the first mass-produced vegan bacon on the market. This was a sandwich for the ages, it’s Surf’n’Turf’n’Laboratory and it is definitely edible.

As long as you clamp your lips shut.

Mele

When people ask me ‘where were you when William married Kate?', I will, without hesitation, declare that I was in a Subway with some random degenerates calling for a republic.

Subway customer holds ciggie for his son.

The monarchy is all well and good for those who are born into it. Those of us languishing in the backwater colony of Australia must celebrate our criminality, drink beer and eat at Subway, a franchise I’m sure no royal has ever set foot in.

They shall never take ... our cookies!

Subway is a mystery to me. The bread isn’t quite real: it smells bad, it’s pumped out of a tube and when heated, the chemical sludge converts to something like a rehydrated biscuit (like spacefood for astronauts, or an army ration perhaps). The fillings are benign (lettuce, beetroot) or weirdly American and out of context (some jalapeno pickle thing, tuna melt mix, meatball).Where are the sundried tomatoes, fetta cheese, artichokes, and tomato chutney?

Where was anything?

The Earl of Sandwich would not approve of Subway’s ‘sandwich artist’ claims, but to be fair, the kids working there were very nice. They were polite, cleaned constantly, engaged us in conversation, gave us informed food choices and manned the front with neither a manager nor an adult in sight. I’d hire them in a minute. The best service on Gouger Street I’ve ever had.

They were also kids who had been drummed with Australia’s food hygiene standards, something possibly at conflict with the ‘Subway Seafood Sensation’ crossed with meatball and bacon. In the words of Subway Artiste number one, ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you. That’s mixing cold food with hot food’. Like, WTF.

In the left hand, surf; in the right, turf; in the middle ... Bacon.

Our companions, Trent and Em, stuck to the cookies; Em wisely decided not to risk the future of her unborn child by eating any of the cold sandwich fillings. I took a bite from the triple meat monstrosity with great reluctance: eating here for our epicurean adventure was bad enough, food poisoning would be taking things too far.

Pictured: too far.

The surprise of the night was that the meat sanger was actually more edible than Subway’s most popular sandwich, the chicken parmie. There were so many chemicals floating about in the strange seafood and tomato meatball sauces that it tasted flavoursome and much more palatable than the combination of items suggest. The chicken parmie was dry, processed and tasted like a manky biscuit.

Subway had neither the lows of Ding Hao (chicken and jellyfish) nor the highs (the ribs). It was just crap in general. I don’t really get the point. McDonalds may destroy rainforests and exploit fourteen-year-olds but the French fries are awesome. I could make a sandwich at home that would out do Subway in a minute. The
strange, slightly astringent but sugary bread can be outdone by a slice of bleached white Tip Top.

Yes, I am a fancy bread person. I eat bread that comes from an Italian bakery and often has no English name. I eat Ciabattini. I have pane burro. Last week I read an article on The Age about the classification of wholegrain bread in Australia. Yes, because I was actually interested in our food labelling laws (I realise someone interested in fibre content is showing their age). I’ll eat rye, sourdough, pumpkins seeds, whatever’s actually made with some knowledge of what bread is.

What am I really saying? Well, just in case you missed it, don’t go to Subway, the bread sucks. In Em’s words, the presentation of it was no better:

‘Looks like a dirty nappy’.

I was interrupted about five times while posting this, for example

2011-04-20T21:49:00.001-07:00

I am one of the few lucky people who "need access to Youtube at work".
It's "for work purposes".

But it allows me to perform wonderful feats of magic. Yes, the italics mean that you should read that word to yourself in awed whisper. Let's do it again: MAGIC (oohh aaahhh).

Every time I "need to" watch a Youtube video for "work related purposes", I can make the phone ring. I can have the video there, all queued up, ready to roll for some "work-related" yucks and have it sit there for an hour, while nothing happens. I can be motionless; still, like a heavy rock in a mountain stream. But the moment I click that little triangle, BBBRRRING!! BBBRRIINNGGG!!

'Hi, I'm just ringing up. I've got a question? I don't know if I've called the right place ...'

Ding Hao

2011-04-15T07:29:00.000-07:00

Every couple must go through the good times and the bad before they can truly say that they have passed every test given unto them and are ready for whatever may come. For testing times prepare two people for the long, exciting journey of their lives together, safe in the knowledge that they are an inseparable one of mind, yet two of strength. Some couples go overseas together before getting married, some get a dog before trying out those nurturing skills on a child.

We have travelled around the world, gotten married, worked together and had a baby.

These were but tests of our mettle. We are now ready for The Real World and its challenges.

We are ready for:

The Gouger Street Restaurant Epic(urean) Adventure.

The rules are thus (so far)(they may be added to):

1. Every food-serving establishment must be visited for dinner.

2. The restaurant must have its door on the Gouger Street footpath. No laneways, side alleys, upstairs, downstairs or Central Market food stalls. That’s just getting ridiculous.

3. Each restaurant must be sampled in order. No skipping. Nothing is too boring or too zany. We can eat at other places during that time, but that dinner will not be included in The Epicurean Adventure.

4. If a restaurant is open at dinner time and serves something that can be considered dinner, we must attend. Subway is on the list. Gellatisimo is not. Dessert-for-Dinner advocates can complain in the comments. If Coffee Bean can raise a filling club sandwich, they will get a guernsey.

5. We must order a) what the restaurant considers to be its “best” dish and b) what appears to be the wackiest, weirdest most entertaining thing on the menu.

6. If the recommended dish is too bloody expensive for it to be fun, we reserve the right to veto said dish and bitch about how bloody stingy the place is. Not us. Them.

7. Everyone is invited. Everyone else does not have to eat the wacky stuff.

8. We pay for our own meals, therefore, we write our own reviews.

9. We are not obliged to do research, be well-informed or have balanced opinions.

10. We will each write a review and you can read them RIGHT HERE!

Ding Hao - 15th July, 2011

Attendance: Sam, Mel, Triton, Tess, Dougie, Cristi.

Sam - I’ll cut right to the chase. It’s a traditional Chinese restaurant, you want to know how we dealt with rule 5b. The weirdest thing on the menu was … Chicken and Jellyfish. And there were some strong contenders, which eventually got voted down by our supporters for this first restaurant of many. Kangaroo is not traditional Chinese, but was too sane as a stir-fry. Crocodile had a look-in, but I remembered that it is basically chicken. Braised trotter also got itself a support-base, but I had to be honest and confess that I would be gleefully face-first in little piggy’s tootsies before it hit the lazy susan and this didn’t really qualify it for weird, nor wacky. I did try to wriggle out of Chicken and Jellyfish for a few rounds, but there was enthusiastic nodding and so I wasn’t getting out of it without looking like a total wimp.

It arrived first.

Holy yum yum!

It was cold. The jellyfish took up most of the plate and, if you closed your eyes, had the texture of firm sauerkraut. I hate to disappoint, but … it wasn’t half bad. I’ve had worse. I can tell there’s some tendons and chitlins a’waitin’ for me up G-Street, but this was like mildly salty cabbage. The undercooked chicken strips took a little bit of mental stomach tightening, but the jellyfish was, in semi-cured death, much as it was in floaty, stingy life: salty, a little flaccid, terrifying at first aspect and then disregarded in favour of larger flavours. It struck me as one of the things that really, really starving people took up with so many years ago because it was literally that or rocks. But in the interceding years, everyone’s grandparents have forgotten to say ‘Hey kids, we used to eat this crazy shit when it was a mouthful of wobbly, sea slime or starving to death, but now that we have industrialisation and farming and stuff, we don’t have to eat flavourless cartilage treated with salt! We can have ribs!’

Weirdo dish number two was Steamed, Salted Anchovies With Minced Pork and Prawn.

What the hell is that shit.

It looked like it had been served through a sphincter and sprinkled with lawn. I’ve seen better presentation in my grille after a country drive through a locust plague. But really, with the holy trinity of pork, prawns and anchovies, even the three-year-old they’ve got knocking this one together in the bathroom could do an all right job. We have a contender for ugliest meal.

Their claimed flagship dish was the Tea Duck, but I would have filed that one under ‘best kept secret’ Nothing to blog about.

Whoops.

I’m used to Chinese restaurants bringing all the food at once so you can have to gorge yourself pantless and then leave, but the Ding Hao staff brought one little plate at a time. Maybe this was the tip of a new wave in the Chinese dining experience. Maybe they were just confused.

Mele - An informal vote was taken on weirdest dish by our fellow diners. Early contenders were ‘Pork Ribs with strawberry sauce’, ‘crocodile with snow peas’ and ‘chicken and jellyfish salad’.

The chicken and jellyfish salad was not a ‘wonder from the Sea Gods’. If tofu turns your stomach (in-the-what-the-hell -this texture- seems-to-be- dishwashing-sponges-soaked-in-Asian spices-kind-of-way) jellyfish is not for you.

Jellyfish has the texture of slowly decomposing rubber bands and cartilage. It has an impressive way of tasting like almost nothing but repeating on you constantly. Served with this was pink, raw chicken; this dish was a bath of cold, potentially lethal salmonella. Worst thing I’ve eaten in my life, and my nonna made me eat an entire boiled rooster crest once. Lost my appetite but was forced to eat at least one bowl. Reeeeeeeetch. Put me off for the rest of the night.

Sam said it was okay. Monkey’s nuts it was okay! It’s okay if you think Sellotape is a bitchin’ meal. I am wondering if jellyfish is digestible. I’m pretty convinced I’ve eaten ribbons that will line my colon like a tapeworm, undigested for all time.

Jellyfish was a shit idea.

Aniseed Tea Duck, which was the waiter’s best suggestion, was pretty standard. The surprise of the night was the Dry Roasted Pork Ribs, which came out wet, sticky and tasty (as Manuel from Fawlty Towers would say, Che?). It got five out of five votes for being better than the Red Vinegar Ribs at Ying Chow, always held as the gold standard of ribs on Gouger Street for the last five years. So head down to Ding Haio if you love ribs. Don’t order anything else, they were amazing.

Table service was slow and inconsistent. But who cares about the banal details; I wasn’t hungry after the jellyfish. I felt nauseous and only ate the other dishes I had to. So an excellent appetite suppressant; perhaps I should set up a shonky diet and make a million bucks before people realise that it doesn’t work.

On the way home we stopped off at Cibo’s for larks. Here’ s a photo of a fire hydrant that I managed to rip from the earth with my little lady hands. Franzway was disappointed at the lack of water blasting into the air. Can’t make miracles happen, wasn’t lifting the fire hydrant from the earth enough?

True love and jellyfish gave her the strength.

Stay tuned next time for: Subway.

Scape is great. Long live Scape.

2011-04-14T19:31:00.000-07:00

"Red Riding Hood by Sarah Blakely-Cartwright and David Lesley Johnson has all the appearance of a book for teenagers. However, it is no such thing. It is an AU$18.99 McHappy Meal Toy with an ISBN and nothing more. "

My review has been published online and is now on the wonderful new YA speculative fiction e-zine, Scape, for you to gasp at in wonder at how I could so bravely make such powerful enemies in an industry that I actually want to make cash from.

I suppose I will just have to wait out the vampire zeitgeist until class novels are all the YA rage. If that ever happens. The next big thing will probably be time ghosts.

Actually ... that sounds kind of cool.

I CALLED IT FIRST!

Anybody here like cats? Fuck YOU!!! Ha!

2011-04-05T05:46:00.000-07:00

Most situational comedians I've ever seen:

Hey, you know that thing that we all do every day? You know how it seems quite trivial, right? But let me tell you, that I've just noticed that quite a few people do it. What's with that? Isn't that annoying? There's also a funny noise and face associated with it that I'll demonstrate now.

And have you noticed how children sometimes behave in ways that aren't the same as how adults do? But sometimes they do? I'd like to suggest an overreaction to their behaviour because a non-politically correct reaction to children is quite unusual in a public forum.

Also, I have a crazy friend who's not here tonight because they're doing something crazy. It's actually related in a whimsical way to that first trivial thing I mentioned? Remember that thing? Crazy, right?

Does anyone here take part in a popular but not universal activity? I can tell you that I have a surprisingly incongruous reaction to it!

I watch TV. I've certainly seen some shows and advertisements on TV that are worthy of imitation and comment and I will do that now. I even have an idea for my own version of a popular show on TV at the moment which could be construed as ridiculous. I’ve learned three chords on a guitar and I’ll play the slightly altered version of the theme song for you now.

Heckling, eh? I’ve got a number of rehearsed responses that I’ve practised enough to sound spontaneous, so you are just going to get me slightly more laughs than if you’d said nothing. So there.

Anyway, I have time for one more anecdote which I will relate to that trivial thing I mentioned at the beginning of the show so that I can recycle some of the laughter I got then, without having to think of another pithy insight into the audience’s everyday lives.

Please tell any journalists with cameras how funny and cute you thought I was.

Probably neither

2011-03-28T02:59:00.000-07:00

Darn it.

My beloved cracked.com stole my idea.

And expanded on it.
And made it funnier.

I don't know whether to applaud or sue.

It's probably Wednesday night

2011-03-24T05:53:00.001-07:00

I've just received a new comment on my Tony Smith series (the comments page of which has become quite lively). I don't have the information to hand, so I'll throw it open to you, oh valuable, intelligent readers. Can you help anonymous?

"my partner is in yatala labour prison and i believe he has become a better person in the last few months. anyways, my question is, does yatala still allow conjugal visits? if so what nights and for how long??"

Any ideas or advice would be most helpful.

Admittedly, one of them is called The Bogan

2011-03-22T04:02:00.000-07:00

Because I'm sort* of a wanker, I was just perusing my wine collection and noticing that quite a few recommend the type of food the wine should accompany. This seems fair enough, maybe one's sommelier is having the evening off. But quite a few again actually recommend the situation and even the company one should keep when drinking a particular vintage. The situation is invariably 'good times' and the company less-than-daringly 'family and friends'.

This has me worried.

I'm not always having 'good times' and while, most of the time, I'm with either family or friends or both, sometimes I'm not.

Where are the wines for 'stressful Tuesdays'? Or 'the final hours of a long weekend just before you realise that you don't have any clean dacks'?
Those would be easy for any vigneron worth his or her grapes. I would like to see something challenging being produced by our world-class wineries.
How about a wine for 'the first time you lose a digit'?
'For the discerning 42, 3 months and 15 day-old' - one that was piss vinegar on any other day.
'A vintage created for anyone thinking of purchasing a donkey.'

The suggested company would be even more of a challenge:
'Drink among second cousins'
'Enjoy with people you've only just met, but whose faces seem eerily familiar'
'Perfect for imbibing among those who have tree-loppers in their immediate family.'

Actually, writing this out now, I'm realising that pretty much any occasion and company other than 'good times' with 'family and friends' will almost certainly require wine by default and it is therefore unnecessary to suggest it on the bottle.

* I have two wine racks and real wine in them, not just bottles of cheap spirits left over from cocktail parties or stolen bottles Caterer's Blend Chardonnay. I used to. But I drank them all.

It may actually be filled with some kind of beer

2011-03-17T17:49:00.000-07:00

I passed it in. All 23,000 words.*

And the most exciting thing I could think about for the whole process was flicking through it before I let it go and noticing that I had actually gotten up to 8 footnotes and there it was, sitting down the bottom of page more-than-4, intelligently informing the reader that if they wanted more information, they could squint down at the helpful little 10 point font.

Yes, it was a reference to my new favourite long-term study/internet whimsy site, but, darn it all, it was useful:

8 This tendency for middle-class Australians to align themselves with images of hardship often followed by deserved success has been noted and documented in great detail for comic effect in Things Bogans Like (McSween, Hubbard et al., 2010).

In semi-related news: someone rear-ended me yesterday and, as well as paying for everything, bought me this delicious bottle of wine.

*Calm down. It was just the literature review. I've still got the rest of the actual thesis to go. You know: the part with my ideas instead of someone else's.

I've been wondering this for some years now

2011-02-22T17:29:00.000-08:00

Did they pick the word 'innuendo' because it was so loaded with itself?

Lipid II

2011-02-10T17:29:00.000-08:00

I seem to be surrounded suddenly by obesity discussion. I posted on it two nights ago, and suddenly a report comes out which shows an increase in obesity and unhealthy eating, particularly in young people. Hack did a show on it (which I missed, but plan to catch up on).

Spilt Milk very kindly dropped by from her blog to take me to task and pose some interesting questions about my own perceptions of obesity, body image, diet and weight. As usual I began in the comments box, hit Chapter 4 of my response and admitted that this was an issue which required its own blog.

You can read Spilt Milk’s entire response to my previous post in its comments section, but I was most interested in the questions she posed to me and I’ll answer them in sequence here.

Can the majority of people achieve long term weight loss?
This is a yes/no question in which both answers can be successfully argued as incorrect because its parameters are unclear enough to leave open debate. What is meant by “majority”, “long term” and “weight loss”? In fact, given that there is no perfect weight, why focus on loss?

Does attempting to lose weight (dieting) carry health risks?
Yes. Again, if the focus is on losing weight, instead of living healthily, then absolutely yes. But the word ‘dieting’ here needs qualification because it is an extremely loaded term. Technically, we are all ‘dieting’, we all have ‘diets’. However, the word ‘diet’ has come to mean ‘eating less’ or ‘eating plan focused on simply weight reduction as opposed to long term health’. The factor at variance is the quality and balanced of the food consumed.

Is dieting in one's lifetime associated with higher weight?
Again, this question is too broad to successfully give a yes/no answer without qualifying one's response, or clarifying the terms used.
I'm of the opinion that 'dieting' is an old-fashioned, unhelpful word for 'eating' - as old-fashioned and unhelpful as 'fat'. Taken literally, this question asks 'Is eating associated with higher weight?' to which of course the answer is 'yes', even if only because the converse is also true - 'Is not eating associated with lower weight?'
I'm going to assume that the underlying meaning of this question is more specifically:

'Is attempting to modify one's diet purely with the goal of losing weight (as opposed to overall health) associated with long-term, low health patterns; one of the indicators of which can be higher weight, particularly if an individual is already pre-disposed to higher weight?'

To which of course the answer is yes. But the implication of this question is a moral one, pointing towards a negative attitude towards impelling people to change their diets with the singular goal of losing weight. This is a straw man - no one seriously involved in this discussion would agree with telling an unhealthy person to reduce their eating or change their diet purely for a change in body shape.

Is correlation (obesity with diabetes) causation?
No. But correlation can be indication. An indicator (obesity) is more useful than a cause in this discussion because it is given equal relevance to a discussion on health to other indicators (of diabetes, for example) and can also be addressed as part of a health plan, rather the focus of it. The removal of cause also removes blame, which I believe is one of the primary reasons for FA or HAES activism.

Does social isolation cause health problems?
This is another straw man, the implication being that without a FA or HAES societal attitude, people are given the unwelcome choice between the documented health problems caused by unhealthy attempts at weight loss and the documented health problems caused by the social isolation currently visited upon fat people.

Is a 'personal responsibility' approach the best to take towards public health problems?
This is one I can't answer. Public health is a really broad area, and by definition, not personal. Hand washing is a public health issue, but requires personal responsibility for its function to succeed. Ditto immunisation.
I'm not sure obesity is a public health problem, but it can have public policy implications (increased need for treatment for ailments indicated by obesity, etc), but this is a democracy and that's what we pay our taxes for: to help each other.

What percentage of obese people are the obviously fat, 'morbidly obese' size?
(I'll answer that one - it's about 6%. The vast majority of people counted in obesity statistics are not considered very fat by societal standards.

Check out the BMI gallery at Shapely Prose to see what I mean).

I guess what I'm saying is that many assumptions underpinning 'mainstream' beliefs about fat and health can be proven wrong or at least a little wobbly. Always great to have people join in the conversation :)

I guess what I'm saying is this that in order for the whiff of denial to be eradicated from this discussion on bodies, these types of questions and implications need to be respectively answered and avoided.

More to the point: medical discourse surrounding weight is results-focused. It simply does not have the complexity or depth to take into account the lived experience of existing in a body which it has termed to be insufficient. Medicine is purely a science. Science is based on quantifiable results, not the external realities of how those results are interpreted and utilised. Science cannot predict, explain or treat some dickbrain screaming 'You ate all the pies!' from their car window at a diabetic.

But I’m still wondering: in a Fat Acceptance or Health At Every Size disourse, can obesity or even body size can be discussed at all? Is discussing ours and each other’s bodies out completely?

Elephant In The Room: This is the one I'm not qualified to discuss, but cannot move forward without addressing. Fat is a Feminist Issue. I'm a man. The experience is and will always be different. This doesn't mean I should bow out of the discussion but it needs to be acknowledged that most of the discourse surrounding health and weight is carried by women. Before we start making rules about how obesity and weight should be discussed, it needs to be acknowledged that men's bodies and women's bodies are treated differently in our culture and so the solutions and strategies for Fat Acceptance and Healthy At Every Size activism need to take that into account - something which I'm yet to see happen.

Lipid

2011-02-09T03:15:00.000-08:00

Got a real hit spike from blue milk for my sleepovers post. I went back to leave a responce and noticed the metric-shitload of feminist motherhood/parenting/but mostly motherhood blogs she has in her linkage. So I hit up Spilt Milk and found a post about something called Fat Acceptance or Health At Every Size. It was crafted as a responce to a blog of John Birmingham's.

Instead of blogging on someone else's comments page, I decided to put off the PhD for (yet another) night and think this one out right here. I would welcome any thoughts on this issue.

I'm having a bit of trouble getting my head around this concept of Fat Acceptance. I'm not going to read JB's blog because I like him as a gonzo journo, but as a blogger it's obvious the pressure to push instead of polish is getting to him.

I'll roll with Fat Acceptance and Health At Any Size. I'm completely in agreeance with a philosophy of body autonomy and I realise that divorcing external moral pressure from health care is of primary concern if we're all to move forward to the spaceships (Bill Hicks - not me - not crazy!).

But I'm still curious. Is there a line? I'm assuming that FA/HAES is about having each person draw a personal line between 'Screw everyone, I'm just fine actually' and 'My chances of heart disease could be lowered if I changed'.
I also assume that it's at the other end too - skinny people cop the inverse kind of hatred. Instead of you succumbing to self-loathing when someone makes a salad comment, skinny people (I've known, loved, etc) are equally as alone when someone makes an envious comment about their figure. Any body image problems are automatically negated and silenced because 'You're skinny'. This is body hate lingua for 'Shut up you cow stop saying I'm fat'. Skinny people are not killing anyone with their bodies any more than fat people are.

The most reasonable argument for losing weight that I can think of is the one which puts the body in the national perspective. An increase in the national rate of obesity equals greater pressure on health care resources in the future. Call it a 'Lose Kilos For Your Country' platform. This increase will occur in much the same way that the Baby Boomer population will be draining resources when they hit retirement en masse from now and for the next 30 years or so. Perhaps the losing weight argument could be put as a warning, not about heart disease, but about competition: 'You'd better lose weight or else you'll be fighting a bunch of geriatrics for a dwindling number of heart surgeons who will have more insurance than you.'

However, this denies body autonomy and is an exercise in exerting possibly the largest (per capita) amount of external moral pressure possible (ie. the entire country doesn't really want you to get thinner so you'll feel better, they want you to do it in case their future taxes go up).

I am still wondering whether there is a line, a personal, subjective line between feeing okay in your body, whatever you name it's shape, and flat-out obesity.
The kind of obesity in which blame is not important.
The kind of obesity which is as unhealthy as consistent sunburn.
The kind of obesity which sits at the upper reaches of thousands of statistics which all begin with the words 'Increased risk of ...'
Nothing is guaranteed. You could eat healthy, exercise regularly, but still have to buy two plane tickets and you could live to ninety-eight.
But where does Fat Acceptance and Healthy At Every Size draw its line and say 'You are probably going to die sooner and suffer longer because of the size of your body'?

Pomo

2011-02-07T23:08:00.000-08:00

Mele's mum dropped around a bucket of home-grown tomatoes last week. On the weekend we discovered that a few had gone rotten and the rest would probably follow if something wasn't done about the bucket of tomatoes.

A bucket of tomatoes is a weird kind of gift at this stage of our lives, when everything is measured by minutes and worried about for the lack of time.
I'll steal someone else's story to illustrate.

Sheila (not her real name) has a two year old daughter who loves The Wiggles. For Xmas, Sheila's sister wraps up two tickets to The Wiggly Ones and gives them to Sheila.
"Oh wow!" says Sheila. "Thank you! Wiggle-loving daughter will love this!"
"My pleasure!" replies Sheila's sister. "You two will have the best time!"
"Us two?"
Sheila's sister had never for a moment considered that the present would be about taking a Wiggle-loving two-year-old off her hands for the afternoon. She thought she was giving an experience, a memory, a genuine moment to bond between mother and daughter.
Sheila inspected the tickets. "Public transport is advised as Entertainment Centre parking is limited".
Sheila had instead been given about five hours of negotiating Adelaide public transport with an excitable two-year-old to and from a venue whose main feature by volume would be around ten thousand happy, screaming children.
Sheila was not excited.

Back to the bucket of tomatoes. A handful of garden-fresh tomatoes can be stored in the fridge and eaten slowly on bread or in salads. An entire bucket needs to have something done to it - most productively, sauce. This involves a serious time commitment: you can't just chop them up and throw them in with some herbs. They have been grown with love and care and must be treated as such. The skins need to be removed. This is laborious but worth it. Other ingrediants need to be sourced, chopped, diced and monitored. Cooking time, stirring, tasting, seasoning, cooling and freezing. Making a bucket of tomatoes into an admittedly smaller bucket of sauce takes time. The bucket of tomatoes is no longer a gift. Like the Wiggles tickets, it is the removal of time from something else: housework, homework, sleeping, sitting on the couch, playing with Charlie, laundry, gardening. Pick your chore/entertainment, now postpone or cancel it.
Not such a great gift now, eh? It's like when the tomatoes arrived, out went two hours of study, a mown lawn or chasing Charlie around growling "Oi!".

Or is it?

Because the bucket of tomatoes takes you away from all of that. The bucket of tomatoes is a job to do, but not just for yourself, for your family, for that sense of culture and heritage that it brings. Peeling each tomato, you're a tomato closer to feeding the family in the future and even honouring the work in the past. On a cold winter's night, Mele will come home tired and have that momentary 'starving family' panic alleviated when she pulls out the tub of frozen sauce from the freezer.
'These are from Nonna's garden.' She will remember and it will be better than just the plain old 'Tom sauce 7/2/11' label.
These tomatoes are sweet. These tomatoes mean something a bit more than food. They're not a drain on time, but a historical use of it. They are a reminder that your hands work along with your heart and your stomach and all together they produce something which combines and affects all three.

And they smell great too.

Thanks, Nonna.

Bobo sad

2011-02-06T20:52:00.001-08:00

I'm sick today.
I hate being sick because it's like a weekend, but you're not allowed to do anything fun and you have to wait in bed until Monday when work starts again. Except that when work starts it just starts for you and everyone else has already had the 'boring shit I did on the weekend' conversation. All they are left with is the 'what was wrong with you' (emphasis on the 'you' part) conversation at which you just have to go 'I was sick', which is a code phrase for 'I couldn't think of anything more boring than discussing past ailments can we stop now please'.

Also, I have a new laptop with a web-cam that does facial recognition:

I'll teach them to disable the comments page ...

2011-01-29T20:24:00.001-08:00

Dear Leslie,

I imagine you've probably received a fair bit of email about your article, so I'll try to keep this brief and let you know from the outset that this one falls into the "appreciative but critical" camp.

I applaud the thought that you put into this matter and I agree with your friend about the positives of having any sexual activity conducted in a friendly environment, rather than a dangerous one (I'm not really entering into the complimentary stage yet, am I?). I don't envy the conundrum set you, as a mother of boys, who knows what it's like to grow up as a girl with boys around.

But (there it is!) I think your friend is right. I think that in wanting to protect these girls from their own indecision or loss of control, you're also protecting them from their own decisions and any semblance of mature control they might finally have wrestled back from society. It might have taken a great moving of internal mountains for these girls to finally be able to make the decision to accept an invitation to stay over at a boy friend's (note the space) house. Just walking through your front door (rather than clambering through your son's darkened bedroom window) might be the finishing line for them. They are probably prepared to walk through the front door in the first place because your sons are the kinds of young men they are (young men who know that "no" means "no", but who also understand that lots of other things also mean "No", like "I don't know", "Um", "" and complete silence), raised by the kind of mother you are (the woman who would be Switzerland).

Enough about these girls. Onto the boys.

"There is a relatively straightforward relationship for boys between what they want, what they say they want and what they pursue – with sex, and everything else."

I think you're wrong about this. I've been a boy. I've been excellent friends with boys. It is not straight forward. Relative to girls, relative to anything. I'm not going to start asking where you get your ideas about this, but here are mine:

For teenaged boys there is almost nothing scarier than a teenage girl. Nothing. This does not get better with age. Look at the way women are treated by men, by society. Have you read Stieg Larsson? Apparently the working title for the first novel was Men Who Hate Women. This was not a new concept. But I digress - you know what I'm talking about.

The fact that your sons have girls who are friends puts them years ahead of their peers, I can guaranteee it. When they grow into young men, they will have left a large section of the male population behind forever when it comes to possessing the gifts that women can bestow upon others with their friendship: things like understanding, emotional intelligence and strength. They are already protected from the kinds of relationships which use up their joy and dignity. They will never be cowardly enough to use the words "slut" or "bitch".

I'll wrap up this "brief" (sorry about that) email with something reassuring: these sleepovers aren't about sex. They may be and eventually, they probably will be. But right now, despite the formal conversations between parents and the attempts at casual reassurance by partners, sex is not the only thing that two teenagers of the opposite sex can think of to do alone in a room together. Before the not-inevitable move to the least-squeaky trundle bed, there's probably a lot of learning going on.

Sincerely

franzy

Swans, maybe. But where was the water?

2011-01-22T19:07:00.000-08:00

Thanks for your opinion, Dan.

Next time you're putting on a performance of Swan Lake, we'll send our best movie critic along to complain about the tedious love-triangle cliches and lack of meaningful dialogue. Or, better yet, we will dispatch an ornithologist to make sure you get all the bird bits just right.

Harsh language?

2011-01-21T20:50:00.001-08:00

Bumper sticker:

"IF IT WASN'T FOR GUNS
You'd be speaking Japanese right now"

I do realise the value of bumper stickers as political statements, but this one seems to transcend politics and challenge the very tennets of logic itself. The primary argument, that we, Australia, were able to defend ourselves from the Japanese during WWII using guns has the usual, run-of-the-mill, redneck fantasy about it and the traditional arguments apply:

Guns were only used by the military.
No hand to hand combat was used in the campaign (was it? I dunno).
The Japanese would have been fucked anyway, trying to conquer a landmass that's mostly desert with bullets.
Etc.

No, I'm interested in the premise explored in the sticker which posits that guns existing in the first place is a innate positive. Japan had guns, therefore, Australia has guns. However, if no guns exist at all, Australia has no guns with which to defend itself but neither does Japan. The portable projectile delivery system does not exist. This begs the beautifully creative question: if no such invention existed, what does Japan use instead?

Ponderous, man.

Even blurry Ray Romano earned $33,000,000

2011-01-16T19:55:00.001-08:00

Dear Channel 11,

No one is fooled. Just because 'Zoom and Enhance' works on the TV shows from the 1990s you keep airing, doesn't mean that your grainy widescreen is fooling anyone in real life.

Chortlingly yours,

franzy

Maybe next year ...

2011-01-06T19:37:00.000-08:00

Fuck.

Reading through previous blog entries I just realised that I forgot to hold my yearly guilt trip event in which all acquaintances must pretend that the Xmas season isn't an inconvenient time to do non-Xmas things. You know: a birthday party.

Pictures are still words.

2011-01-04T16:46:00.000-08:00

Jono did this, so I'm doing it too. Take the first sentence of the first blog of each month for 2010:

January: With cancer, it's like we're all standing in a hallway while a madman fires a gun in our direction.

February: In fact, we're all so busy that I've discovered a new measure of 'busy-ness': pee smell.

March: And now he is one.

April: Then there was the time when I was working on my PhD's literature review, gathering all these sources and awesome quotes, and I was pretty tired and not really thinking clearly, so I decided to do something non-brain-heavy, like putting all my hand-typed references with page numbers into properly-linked citations using EndNote.

May:

June: "Do you think the reason we've been having so many earthquakes recently is because we've taken so much oil out of the earth's crust? You know, because oil is a natural lubricant?"

July: Although sometimes you can just wake up in the morning and sunlight shines a little brighter.

August: I saw this somewhere and thought "That looks easy!"

September: Silly me.

October: I've been utterly silent lately because I'm writing a lecture and a literature review and editing someone's Masters thesis.

November: Here is what I set out to make:(Follow in my greasy footsteps!)

December: Take two people who are intelligent, witty and outgoing.

Give it a crack!

Woodchip Gully

2011-01-04T05:05:00.000-08:00

Dear Melbourne,

Thank you for the wonderful time. Your drivers were (mostly) courteous and your coffee ever-flawless. Your piles of things on expensive breads served as breakfast were both challenging and delicious.

Melbourne fellas, a word: you are, individually and collectively, a handsome lot, but you have too many tattoos. Individually and collectively. Most of you look as though you are wearing faded Ken Done lycra. I am glad to see that you are championing the mutton chop and the undercut, but these only made this poor Adelaide man think of Deliverance, rather than whatever it was that you wanted me to think about.
Your sense of fashion and style is without reproach and you are, to a man, bold, brave and beautiful in your finery. You exude grace and delicacy without sacrificing masculinity. I would never have the confidence and panache to wear it as you so confidently do, but I am just not the type to suit the style of a wife-beating dandy (pink-striped, low-slung tank-tops! A triumph!).

Melbourne shop-owners, an additional word: your business names are hilarious. "You Are Hair" Ha ha! Excellent. But, be aware that there are those among you who Do Not Get It. They are usurpers and must be stopped. These people are just adding two random words together and calling it cool. "Donkey and Onion", "Rust Chowder", "Scally and Trombone", "Sass and Bide". The very idea. Root them out and make them re-name their businesses exactly what they are until they can come up with a suitable alternative. Names like "T-shirts with unacknowledged Simpsons slogans at high prices" or "Useless handmade dog dolls".

And you, Roccoco. We waited for almost two hours after bed time with a hungry, tired baby. Fortunately, it was delicious enough to excuse this tardiness. Even with the bad mussel.
Well done. Nice save.

Everyone else: stop smoking and get some bloody exercise. You're all starting to look a bit prematurely haggard. And holding your ciggies under the table at an outdoor cafe does not make the smoke disappear. At all. In any way. You're like a 2-year-old kid hiding a beach-ball behind its back. We can still see it.

Until next time, I shall dream of the delicious pile of food that Dordy showed us the way to at St Ali.

Respectfully,
Franzy and Pickles.

Yes it takes that long. No we can't do it ourselves.

2010-12-15T03:40:00.000-08:00

My personal hero Kath quit her job this week.

In an unrelated story, at my own workplace, I was arranging to send some students some important letters. Instead of using modern technology to print the letters and send them, we are now required to send them to another department whose responsibility it is to change the font and re-format the letters before they are sent out so that the letters have a different font and are reformatted. No other changes are made, nor required.

Please refrain at this point from pointing out any inefficiencies in this process.

Three days later, I received the letters back before they were sent to the in-house printers instead of being printed by the printer next to my desk.

When I sent the letters, the first line read

"This is to certify that John Smith of 10 Jones St, Smythtown has done a course ..."

When I received the letters back, the first line read

"This is to certify that John Smith, 10 Jones St, Smythtown has done a course ..."

Did you spot the difference?
I did.
I wrote back:

"Looks like somehow the font-changing process has removed a word, changing the meaning of the letter from a statement confirming that a person residing at an address has done a course into a statement meaning that somehow a person, a street address and a suburb have all somehow done a course.
Obviously a grievous error has occurred.
Please change it back as these letters are only for specific people and not entire streets or suburbs for that matter."

The reply came within the minute:

"I made the decision to remove the “of” as it does not not read correctly. "

See what you're missing, Kath?

I feel sorry for the leprechaun peddling

2010-12-13T03:58:00.000-08:00

Last Xmas I got a remote controlled helicopter. I was the king of the world because I could fly it around the pole in the kitchen (mostly) without hitting Mele and making her angry.

This Xmas, Charlie has learnt a new word 'eeCop', which is a Germanically efficient way of saying "Show me some helicopter videos or a real helicopter or I'm going to scream until I get a collapsed lung"

So I got on uuChuuB.

Turns out I'm not practising enough.

Seeing as I'm breaking my oft-held rule about not just re-posting videos I find, I may as well also report the best comment from that site: "He's a Witch i tell ya! WITCH!"

Combine the two and "Jingle Bells" takes on new meaning

2010-12-11T18:20:00.000-08:00

The League has new staff cars!

They're like those car testicles, yet somehow even more brainless. Although maybe not in the country where "Red Hot Summer Deals" are advertised on deep orange backgrounds with un-melted snowflakes drifting around.

"And then I dropped a stitch!"

2010-12-10T18:22:00.000-08:00

Take two people who are intelligent, witty and outgoing. Both can tell an amusing story to a crowd with ease and have everyone laughing. Both can conjure up quips and one-liners on the run in a conversation by reading the situation and understanding the rules of humour and good timing.
One is male and one is female.

Why is the male then referred to, and remembered as, "a funny guy", and the female is always "Crazy!"?

I know the answer, it's a rhetorical question: it's because we still, as a society, fear and mistrust intelligent, outgoing females. Look at the etymology of the word "hysterical". Essentially, having a womb was thought to make you insane. This meant that hysterectomies were originally performed to treat female insanity - which itself was a very wide umbrella.

By the early 20th Century, women were allowed to use this word for "crazy" for occasions which were "funny". This was becoming necessary because as (white) women were slowly being allowed to vote and drive, this put them within earshot and they would, inevitably, do this "laughing" thing.
So "hysterical" needed to remain in broad use because it was difficult to tell whether a woman was laughing because she had heard a joke about about washing or embroidery or some such or if it was because she was just crazy as clown-shit and needed her womb removed.
Obviously, being too simple to actually be involved in the sophisticated world of adult male humour, women were not performing the same action as men when something was amusing. The very thought! Thus was the modern usage of "hysterical" born (there's some of that sophisticated male humour we were just discussing).

So remember girls, next time you're laughing at something, be careful, or you'll find yourself straight-jacketed and organ-robbed quicker than you can say 'bum-trumpet'.

And remember, everyone else: next time you think fondly about a female who you find witty and outgoing, are you thinking of her as "funny" or "just so crazy!"

At least none were stuck together

2010-11-30T04:08:00.001-08:00

You know those delightful little urban myths that occasionally happen in real life? The hope for little miracles upon which Antiques Roadshow is based, where some innocent is happily browsing a bookstore or Seconde Hande Shoppe and comes across a quaint little trinket which just happens to be worth millions.

[Actually, I take that back about Antiques Roadshow. Its success is based on the audience's hope that Old Lord and Lady Picklenose will present their supposedly priceless Faberge eggs only to be told that these particular examples were a popular prize at fairgrounds during the 1970s. "Probably worth between 5 and 10 pound - to a collector" the expert will explain cheerfully while Sir Chumpbottom's greasy smile droops down around his tweed lapels.
Don't even try to deny that you've secretly shouted 'Sucked in, you greedy twerp!' when that happens. But I digress.]

My thing is old books. I love the way they smell, the cool old tooling covers, the quaint little drawings and poems inside along with the copperplate inscriptions and the exciting dates - if they have any. I know nothing about it, but I still love the feeling of treasure hunting when I go into second hand book stores, looking for either comics or a bargain.

So there I am, in Port Elliot, about twenty minutes away from raiding the famous bakery and scouring the shelves for something cool.

I come across this:

It really is a beautiful little item, about 8 by 10 inches. 1865. Unfortunately, it appears that most of the pages have long ago fallen out - it's just cover boards and title pages. Fortunately, it's full of old drawings and lithographs. Like this one:

And this one:

Nice, eh? Then there's a few different ones like this:

and, erm, this:

Now I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking "What marvellous drawings! What fine detail! I must see more!"
You're thinking that because that's what I was thinking too. Then I turned that drawing over and found, well, this:

No problem. Very artistic, right? Right. Artistic. Great composition, a wonderful example of early photography in the naturalistic form which ....

... ah, yes, see, this is also a fine example of, um, what's obviously a collection of artistic interpretations of the early twentieth century appreciation of femininity as exemplified by the emphasis on .....

R ... right.
Hrmm ... well that still doesn't mean that I haven't stumbled upon a grouping of art works which can be recognised as representative of an era famous for its lithography and the skill of its craftsmen and artists, many of whom were ...

Okay then. Maybe it's just a coincidence. Maybe the collector just happened to have put all the racy ones at the front and kept the real groundbreaking artistic work at the ...

Nope. More naughties.
Okay, if the next one isn't sexy, then I definitely haven't stumbled upon some stone-aged secret spank book from a deceased estate.
Closing eyes, crossing fingers, turning page ... and it's ....

Oh.
Fucking great. Here I was, hoping to find a bargain first edition and here am, potentially handling the dried remains of millions of little 'first editions'. Gross.
Surely that's it.

Oh man. What is this stuff?
It looks like nuns were really the thing back then. I suppose they had to work out some way to spice things up - what with everything being taboo'n'shit. It's not like today with the internet and everything imaginable at the touch of a button. They probably didn't have a whole lot of weird fetishes or anything because it's not like ...

Does this book come with hand sanitiser?

Ferris! It's not working!

2010-11-24T03:07:00.000-08:00

I'm angry at a book. You need to help me.

Go and find any teenagers you can and ask them:

1) Have you ever heard of 'clocking' a game?
and
2) What does 'clocking a game' mean?

I know. I'm 30. I've played games you could actually clock. Kids these days need to tell me if some author knows what she's talking about.

Ladies, turn away now

2010-11-17T16:57:00.000-08:00

Figure this out:

Background: 23 months ago I started my first full-time job. Ongoing, secure future, benefits, super, the lot.
Downside?
It's an office job. I spend 8 hours a day sitting on my arse. When I get home I spend most of that time sitting down, studying.
Then Charlie turned up.
No time for the gym, no time for extended jogs - exercise is a very low priority, because now I think in terms of time. Constantly balancing the hours I spend away from Charlie and Mele with the hours I can possibly spend with them.
Summed up: I would rather spend the two hours after work before Charlie goes to bed with him than pounding the streets in search of fitness. And that's exactly what I do.
I haven't exercised regularly for two years. Hockey sort of counts, but it was once or twice a week and it's over now.

Problem: Just before I started the job I was riding 10kms a day or jogging. I weighed 82 kgs. Fast forward through 23 exercise-free months and how much do you think I weigh now?

Have a guess.

Go on.

Got your number?

Wrong.

I now weigh 72kgs.

How the fuck does that happen?

I think I know, but I will reveal the answers in the next post after we've had a few guesses from the floor...

***
UPDATE: Or maybe I'll just save my breath.

Duck garnish with long pig

2010-11-10T19:57:00.000-08:00

Here is what I set out to make:
(Follow in my greasy footsteps!)

Here is my mis en place en progresso:
(Note the sunflower oil - this becomes important later)

Here is what happens when you have neither a deep fryer basket nor sufficiently long tongs with which to fry your duck portions:

Please let all take note that I did not flinch
when yon arc of oil did splash 'cross my wrist.

2010-10-31T18:37:00.000-07:00

Being a gravedigger is tough.
Always physically - ‘specially into rock.
Sometimes emotionally - ‘specially for family.
An’ sometimes it’s just fun - ‘specially when they ain’t dead.

2010-10-28T22:11:00.000-07:00

We didn't have time to collect all the blood we had come for, but the leader will be happy, even if the police aren't.

(link)

Two questions which may reveal much

2010-10-24T04:30:00.000-07:00

1) Why have I just spent an hour reading a year-old, statistics-heavy article in The New Yorker about the state of health care in McAllen, Texas, which I'm pretty sure I've read before?

2) Why can I never get more than three of five toes through the leg-hole in my jocks on any given morning?

There simply aren't enough Xmas present gags

2010-10-18T03:16:00.000-07:00

Dear everyone,

I'm waiting for a Powerpoint to load and send so I can practise my first ever lecture to students, but that's not important right now. I was Googling for old school photos to use in the presentation and came across this little gem:

It was on a page where they'd gotten all these old scholars to write in their memories and that kind of thing. Like going to your granny's, but online.
Anyway, one of the oldies sent in a photo of their brother, reproduced below.

I'm sure the Feds will be raiding my blog any day now ...

I've obviously got the first search in mind ...

2010-10-12T18:01:00.000-07:00

327, you've let me down in the past. I've set you small tasks, challenges, if you want to call them that. And you've come up with a range of excuses and let the whole thing slide. What's the point in knowing someone who knows about computer programming if they can't whip something up for you now and again? I mean, it's not like you're doing it for free - all the profits will be split, 50/50. I bring the inspiration, you bringing the typing.
This is one you can do. And it's going to make a bucketload of cash.
It's called Tyoodle.
It's basically Google, but instead of finding amusing cat pictures, it finds that tune that's been stuck in your head for 5 days straight and tells you.

WHO originally sang it!
WHERE the fuck it's from!
WHAT other bands have used the bloody thing as a sample to trick you into thinking that the original artist isn't the original artist!
ALL of the movies and TV shows it's been used in!

It will have a REVOLUTIONARY selection of inputs ranging from simply typing the tune into the search box:
"Da na na nuh nuh, naa na na na na"

Tyoodle result:
The Entertainer
Scott Joplin

Brilliant!

To a microphone-based query where you can simply sing the tune straight at your computer and Tyoodle will analyse your tune and find your mystery song!

[sings into licensed Tyoodle mic]: Den den den-nah nah nah nah nana/Den na na na naahh

Tyoodle result:
Money for Nothing
Dire Straits

This is also especially helpful for instrumentals. Observe:

[sings into licensed Tyoodle mic]: "bip bop bip bop bip bop bip/bip bop bip bop bip bop bip/bip bop bipa bipa bop bipa bipa bop bipa bipa bop bip"

Tyoodle result:
Popcorn
Gershon Kingsley

Incredible!

Then you just have the link to iTunes or Amazon or both and Cha-CHING! (Tyoodle result: Money - Pink Floyd).

So 327, stop messing around with whatever it is you're doing and spend a weekend getting this thing off the ground. I've already done all the heavy mental lifting, you can just get coding and next winter we'll be warming ourselves with flaming $100 notes.

I heard someone lost an arm once ... oh wait ... that was ... that never happened.

2010-10-08T23:28:00.000-07:00

Memo to everyone at the Central Markets: can you all please just calm the fuck down? You're not going to miss the damn lift if you don't form a tight wall around the people trying to get out. Just take deep breath, step back and let everyone get out. Then you may resume your panicked shoving. When I'm well clear.

They will still have room tidying as a chore then, I'm sure

2010-10-07T17:32:00.000-07:00

Here's one of those little moments that make you stop and reflect about the turning of ages blah yak etc.

You know how there's that thing about not sitting so close to the TV because it'll make you blind? It was basically one of those parental things that was a mish-mash of boogyman threat and hidden practicality. The boogyman bit was sort of based on the principle that those old TVs came out at around the time that the nuclear age was really taking off and anything that made light was RADIOACTIVE. The grain of truth came from the fact that staring into a flickering lightbulb hurts your eyes (strains corneas, rods, cones, etc).

The moment came when I realised that I'll never be able to tell Charlie not to sit so close to the damn TV or he'll fry his eyeballs.
Why?
What's your TV made out of? LCD flat screen?
What are reading this off of right now?
How am I going to explain the difference there?

He has never been exposed to a CRT TV.

You know what else he's never seen, and will probably never use?
A pulse phone.
One day he's going to ask why we call it "dialling" when we're clearly "pressing".

But the question I'm waiting for with keen interest is:

I'll probably explain it and get a slackjawed stare.

"You mean you carried around your work on little pieces of plastic? That you could just lose?"

You forgot 'panopticon'

2010-10-07T04:32:00.000-07:00

I've been utterly silent lately because I'm writing a lecture and a literature review and editing someone's Masters thesis. But all this homework reminded me suddenly of my undergrad days ... (man, I wish I had a pipe to smoke while I reminisced) ... basically, it reminded how I pretty much three rules for writing a successful (read: passing) essay

Start with a funny story. Always gets the fingers moving, the brain lubricated. Make it funny, wake the tutor up. Throw in a swear or two.
Crack the half-way mark and you're pretty much there. This is where the story comes in. Nothing eats up word limits like a nice long story about some shit you did when you were ten. This 'half-way' mark also works progressively. If you're half-way to half-way, hey! You're practically half-way there! You've broken the back, now you just gotta tear that sucka home. Refer back to that story you started out with you're pretty much almost a third done.
Use the word 'juxtaposed'. This should have been at number one. Once you've managed to slip that baby in, you're reeling in the distinctions and hitting the pub. This also works for 'conflate', 'hegemony', 'ideology' (of course), 'stereotype' (that was in the title of half of the courses I did) and my personal favourite: 'palimpsest'. Always had to look that one up, but it was worth the extra 5% that I normally needed for pulling an all-nighter, sleeping in and missing the 9am hand-in time.

Doesn't even taste like soap

2010-09-26T01:04:00.000-07:00

Dear everyone,

You know how you love Thai food and then you decide to try cooking it and it doesn't turn out too bad so you reckon you could get down with nature and grow some of that coriander in a pot and so you buy some and it immediately dies and so you buy some more and plant it in the dirt and it goes to seed more quickly than the stuff you bought in pots carked it and you swear off trying to grow it ever again and go back to paying two bucks a bunch from the supermarket and it's always slimy and you end up associating Thai cooking with slight failure even before you start?

I used to be like that.

Used to.

But it turns out nature works.

That bit where it goes to seed? Apparently those seeds contain some of free-love, hippie-huggin' magic because now I ain't growing bunches of coriander, I'm growing trees.

Check out my forest.

Yeah.
King Coriander swingin' through tha treez
(of coriander).

How could I forget?

2010-09-14T06:21:00.001-07:00

Silly me. I completely forgot to mention what I did on the weekend.
It was this:

I play hockey. That's me receiving a gold medal for winning the grand final with my fine team of scholars, maniacs and roustabouts. By jingo it was exciting. More exciting for the fact that we beat the team of dolts and drongos who I was playing last year when a particularly doltish drongo swung through and dislocated my thumb. I know he couldn't have purposely aimed to dislocate my thumb and leave me unable to care for my infant son properly for a good few months (try changing a nappy one-handed), but he certainly is the kind of stubby-fingered arsehole who makes it his business to slip in as much dirty and dangerous play as he can get away with.
How do I know this?
I spent the entire game marking him.
Yes, the same guy.
The same guy who cost me two days in hospital, a week off work, months of therapy and a career loosening jars for Mele.
I know he's the same guy because he deliberately stuck his stick between my legs to trip me over.
And I had to follow him around for 70 minutes and stop him ever touching the ball or coming near our goal.
Did I do this?
Did I ever.
And I marked him off the field.
He had nothin'. Slow, grumpy, unfit and, at the end of the game, medal-less.
My one regret is that I didn't get to shake his hand and show him mine.

Thoughts

2010-08-25T17:57:00.000-07:00

1. If I had to choose between scrabbling around with my fingers, trying to extract the tissue that had dropped flat to the bottom of the box and killing a puppy, there'd be a lot less dog poo in the world.

2. No food could ever taste as good as freshly-cooked chips and gravy smell on a cold winter morning spent doing errands at uni.

3. Katter has exactly what Abbott and Gillard (sorry, Julia) don't: personality and passion. I'm not sure he isn't a dangerous lunatic, but at least he gets excited. I'm fairly convinced that Rudd and Gillard use the same teleprompter
that
only
shows
one
word
at
a
time.

Your dipstick's showing

2010-08-16T05:09:00.000-07:00

Here's a little family secret. Not my family, specifically, but most families who I am familiar with tend to keep this one under the spare bed when polite company calls. If you're reading this, then this is probably your family secret too. It's a secret because we're all educated people (well - we can all at least read) and there's something a weeny bit trash about This Big Secret That I Keep Hinting At But Will Not Divulge Yet For Some Reason.
The clue was in the previous sentence: trash.
Got it yet?
Need more word association?
Tabloid. Celeb. Goss. The Stories. Brangelina. Bennifer. Perry. Brand. Nicole. Paris. Lipo. R-Patz. Kristen. Tailor. The twins.TMZ, Perez Hilton, Who Magazine and The Vine. I just typed all those out without even having to go a'googlin'. They were right there, front lobe, centre.

Celebrity gossip.
Without generalising too much, almost every woman I know would have hit the green buzzer at least twice during the above list. But no one talks about it. Not to me, anyway. And why would they? Oh high and mighty I, with my books, my extensive mental Wikipedia of factoids and Simpsons trivia and my snide indifference towards all tales of professional entertainers and the trust-fund elite.
"Jannisten is still single?" I scoff. "Are you aware that I've recently finished reading On The Road and Raymond Chandler is among my favourite authors? Did you know that Stanley Kubrick used a camera lens originally built for NASA in order to film interior scenes in Barry Lyndon?"

No. Celebrity gossip journalism is to mixed conversation what the bucket bong is to high tea; one simply does not bring it along in the first place. Nor does one mention it, nor admit any kind of knowledge other than that which can be gleaned from public news stand posters which are briefly glanced towards (never studied) en route to the library.

Behind closed doors, I'm assuming it is a different matter. Someone is keeping Perez Hilton in pink hair-dye, but I wouldn't know.

But I am not here to (further) point out the vapidity of following celebrity gossip, because this blog entry is about to become the site of a further secret unleashed, and I would hate to get any mud upon myself.
I shall illustrate this with a quick story. A few days ago, Mele found an article on the internet which she knew I would find interesting and stimulating. She immediately unplugged her laptop and skipped into the kitchen where I was preparing my famous poulet provençale. No, dear friends, it wasn't news of an upcoming Jackson Pollock exhibit. But it was accompanied by this picture:

"Look!" she said. "The world's most expensive car!"
"Oh yeah," I replied, before she could further furnish me with the factoids and details which she had earnestly and lovingly learned from the article. "The Bugatti Type 57SC Atlantic."
"It's ..."
"One of three ever made. Recently sold for between $30 and $40 million. Looks vaguely like a phallus."

For I too, am a gossip fiend. But I don't care about people gossip. I care about car gossip. There is such a thing. I know it because I've been in conversations with men (for some reason it's mostly men) who have recently watched a Top Gear episode. They'll start talking about it, because that show is a great font of what lad mags refer to as 'pub ammo'; factoids and stories with which to dazzle your fellow drinkers at the boozer.
"Saw the new Nissan on Top Gear," they'll say. "Looks pretty hot. Apparently they build 'em on a special pressure rig to get all the tensions and stuff right."
"Cool." That's about all I can offer, because I don't want to come out with the fact that I've watched that particular episode about 5 times since it originally aired in the UK two years ago and was made available for download over at finalgear.com. Nor do I want to start that conversation either, because car gossip isn't like celebrity gossip. Celebrity gossip is finite. Brangelina can only adopt so many handbagsshitfuckimeantosaybabies per week. Tayluh can only procure so many new mates while making a new album/movie. S/he is only human.

Car gossip is based on car facts and goes on forever. Especially if you throw Top Gear into the mix. Most people claim that Top Gear makes a boring topic (cars) not only interesting, but massively entertaining. This is true. Not for me. For me Top Gear takes a fascinating topic (cars) and turns it into pornography. I am riveted, but slightly ashamed of myself, yet I cannot, will not, turn away. My wife is comfortable with this lifestyle. She has even enabled it at times, going so far as to buy me magazines and toys. I haunt car-related internet sites and pore over delicious pictures and numbers. So help me, I've even been caught watching grainy videos at work.

Which brings me, or should I say us (you can see where I'm heading gentlemen), to the Bugatti Veyron. This is every car gossip's starting point. This thing may well exist, but even in the metal, its whole could never be as great or as real and supernatural as the sum of numbers and facts which exist in the minds of everyone who's ever watched a Top Gear episode in which it stars, read a magazine article about it, looked it up on Wikipedia, typed it into Uchoob or all of the above.
Like me.
Like YOU.
If you know the word 'Veyron', you know facts about it, mate. And don't deny it. This is your secret just as much as it is mine. We don't discuss it with our mothers, we don't dissect it over beers with our friends, we don't try to get our ladies enthusiastic about it. But we all have our dirty little stash of Veyron numbers somewhere in the back of our brains. Behind the '80s music trivia which only comes out at quiz nights; behind the fashion knowledge which you don't remember collecting and behind the stuff from old Cosmo's you hoovered up in some bone-headed teenage quest for learning about girls. Behind all that is the dark, greasy little cardboard box marked "Veyron facts".
I'm not about start spraying Veyron facts all over this blog like a boring uncle after too many homebrews, but to bring this little analogy to a close, I'd like to illustrate the difference between celebrity gossip and car gossip.
I will now relay two conversations held between imaginary people. The facts are real, the people are not.

Celebrity Gossip Fan #1: Oh my god, have you seen how skinny Angelina is?
Celebrity Gossip Fan #2: I know. Look at that, it's just not healthy. And how many kids does she have?
CGF#1: Like, twelve now? I don't know. How does she look after them all?
CGF#2: She has a nanny. She's got to.

This goes back and forth a few times until the latest topic wears thin and CGFs move onto to other topics and become normal people again.
Observe now the Car Gossip Fan ...

Car Gossip Fan#1 (I should have chosen a better acronym): Bugatti Veyron? That's the one with a 16-cylinder engine.
Car Gossip Fan#2: And 4 turbos. It puts out 1000 horsepower.
Car Fan #1: And ten radiators. Did you see on Top Gear how it's got an air-brake?
Car Fan #2: Yeah, it gives as much braking power as a Ford Fiesta.
Car Fan #1: 0 to 100 in 2.5 seconds.

[Let us move away for a moment, and imagine these two conversations were taking place at the same time and continuing to their logical conclusion. Now let us move back and listen in once more ...]

Celebrity Gossip Fan#1: I really don't like what Labour's done since the last election, but honestly if Tony Abbott gets in, I really will have to kill myself. And a Liberal voter.
Celebrity Gossip Fan#2: Yeah, I want to say 'Don't worry, no one would vote for that maniac', but the latest polls are so close. I mean, I can't believe there are actual women who are prepared to vote for a man who ...

[You get the picture. Celebrity gossip has long ago fulfilled its function as a conversational tidbit and the two people have moved on towards relevancy. Let's see what's happening at table number two ...]

Car Fan #1: ... and if the Veyron started as the McLaren went by, it would still catch it to 200 miles per hour.
Car Fan #2: But in that drag race over a mile, it was still so close because the Veyron's a heavy car, no matter how you look at it.

You'll notice our Car Fans haven't moved much beyond the Veyron in the ensuing half hour.

This is why celebrity gossip is a secret: it's private and fun to share.

But car gossip is still a taboo: it's embarrassing to bring out in the open, and once you do, there's no putting it back in the tube.

Broom broom!

Sensitive, educated, obsmervant

2010-08-12T19:53:00.000-07:00

Franzy (to student hired to do envelope stuffing): Okay, so, if you want a coffee or anything, the kitchen is just there.
Student: Thank you.
Franzy: No problem. I'm about to make a pot of coffee, would you like some?
Student: No, thank you.
Franzy: Tea? We have tea too.
Student: No, no thank you.
Franzy: Water? Milk? Anything you like. Please help yourself.
Student: Thank you, I'm fine.
Franzy: Okay - let me know if you need anything.

Fifteen seconds later.

Helpful colleague: Did you know that Ramadan started yesterday?
Franzy: Sure thing.
Helpful colleague: Did you notice that student's hijab?
Franzy: Huh.

They could thank me with cash

2010-08-10T22:24:00.000-07:00

And while I was ferreting out the links for the previous riveting Re-Hash Of Stuff I Saw In The Main Stream Media (Blog Sin #5!), guess who I found out like totally by accident is getting hauled before the UN on human rights violations?
North Korea?
Libya?
Nope!
It's us!

You'd think the Liberals would be all over that one in this election environment.

(Oops! Wrong link! Yuk yuk yuk!)

If an Adelaidian wants to shake your hand ...

2010-08-10T20:37:00.000-07:00

Listening to the one o'clock ABC news:

Penny Wong promises water.
Tony Abbott promises about the same.
An Adelaide bishop weighs in on politics (Since when was this okay?!?) (Obviously no link = no relevance)
An Adelaide school student found with wondering the corridors with a samurai sword ...
... after being suspended for threatening to shoot people.
A(nother) house shot at this morning.
A woman faces court for breaking into her ex-boyfriend's house with cable ties, a knife and syringe of insulin. (I wish I could find a link for this one)

Me: That's the news around here these days: national story, national story, fifteen minutes of the Hourly Psycho Roundup!
Mele: They're not psychos. They just don't get along in a very Adelaide way.

Well said, my darling.

I'll let NGA have it for half price

2010-08-07T21:34:00.000-07:00

I found out this weekend that I have two more readers than I thought I did. Hello! It was lovely to see you both!
Everyone else ... hello!
That's right! I am procrastinating! The reason being that I had one of those really enthusiastic email meetings with both supervisors, in which I imagine them both nodding slowly, saying 'Hmm' and swivelling their leather chairs towards the arched windows of their sanctum. They observe the slick hill mists slouching 'cross the campus before turning back to me and saying simply: 'More reading'.

Inspirational.

My head really shines like that

2010-08-02T07:28:00.000-07:00

I saw this somewhere and thought "That looks easy!"
I'm pretty sure it's what Charlie goes through when he looks at pencils.
Or me driving the car ...

I won't even get started on the poo

2010-07-29T05:44:00.000-07:00

I was asked recently what having a kid was like.
'Best thing you've ever done?'
'Absolutely,' I replied. No pause. No thought. No question. 'But,' I went on 'This is my line on it: having Charlie was the best thing that's ever happened to me, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.'
Why not?
It's best to get the heavy stuff out of the way first. (Parents, skip on over to essentialbaby and play a few rounds of 'Find the Commenter with the Oldest Breastfed Child'). Everyone else thinking about parenthood, sit down and listen up, because, like that amusing jihad instructor said:

Parenthood doesn't just change your life, because change implies some sense of reflexivity. Like you could change back or change to something else. There is no going back. Childless You is gone for good. So long. All that remains are memories, photos and subpoenas.
Childless You and You-With-A-Kid would barely recognise each other, let alone get along.

CY: Hey, Franzy! Coming out drinking? The earlier we start, the longer we can go for, the more money we can spend! Right on! High five!
YWAK: Sorry, Franzy. Gotta leave you hangin', clone. The baby gets up at 7:30 and I'm about ready for bed.
CY: Drag, man. Anyway, have fun changing nappies! I'll text you from wherever I end up at midnight!
YWAK: Right. Actually, don't send a text because I leave the phone on because ...
CY: Bye!
[Sound of Harley roaring off into the sparkling sunset]

Just like that.

My advice to the couple of people who have asked me if having kids is a good idea has literally been: don't have children. Forget about it. Leave it alone. Find something more constructive to do with your time and energy. And when the awkwardness has just about reached its peak, I tell them that, even if after hearing a new parent tell them categorically not to have children, they still want to do it, because it feels right, then that's probably the answer. I don't think that having a kid is like choosing a new TV. Parenthood isn't a product you can get consumer advice on, you have to decide for yourself.

We did. We decided.
And look what happened:

Probably the worst argument against having kids ever produced.

Along with "Cool Guys Don't Look at Explosions"

2010-07-13T22:04:00.000-07:00

Far be it from me to simply re-blog a good line, but this one from an opinion piece (which The Age has apparently re-blogged from The Guardian anway) requires dissemination, praise and envy. Here, the writer is thinking about remakes and shark movies and comparing the near-perfect Jaws with Open Water, which I didn't see because I thought it was about Moses:

"The long and the short of it is: you don't send a bunch of five-metre, slightly-out-of-focus great white sharks to do a humongous eight-metre mechanical shark's job. It's a basic rule of cinema."

Rule #75

2010-07-12T23:18:00.000-07:00

If you are not sure if you've called the right number, then you haven't.

Rule #75.b
If the reason for your call takes longer than 10 second to explain, you are a wombat-faced buffoon with no cognitive filter between brain-stem and mouth.
Remember to water yourself periodically.

Haven't I said it all these years?! NAKED, I TELL YOU. (And a tool)

2010-07-01T07:24:00.000-07:00

Although sometimes you can just wake up in the morning and sunlight shines a little brighter. With headlines like this, who needs breakfast?

"Cricket world rejects former PM Howard for top job"

Nothing fills the tummy like huge warm lumps of schadenfreude. Unless you sprinkle them with quotes from the article like this:

"Australia's bid to install John Howard as world cricket chief has ended in humiliation for the former prime minister"

and

"Opposition to Mr Howard was so strong among the nations from the subcontinent and Africa that the move to make him president of the International Cricket Council did not even go to a vote."

AHA! No! Enough! Enough already! I couldn't have another bite! Please! I will relax with the sports sections now ... eh?

Seconds?

Okay.

"Federer sulked. He sneered. He was ungracious, sarcastic. He made surly excuses when credit to Tomas Berdych was all that even his most ardent admirers wanted to hear. It may be going too far to suggest he soiled his legacy as the sport's greatest champion but this was excruciating to watch and hear."

Have you ever borrowed someone's time? How do you give it back?

2010-06-30T06:16:00.001-07:00

I've got to admit that, while it would be incredibly frustrating to have happen to you, and while it's spiritually demoralising to watch happen to your own country's team (or the team of a country you believe should win), I love bad refereeing decisions. Livens the game up. Makes me laugh. Laugh at the impossible! Ha! Ha ha!

Which brings me to Franzy's blogging rule No. 39: You know you're scraping when you blog about television. I've always maintained that this blog wouldn't be a diary or a scrap book or a bitch-about-work journal. It's been all three over the years and there's been ups and downs, periods of rain and drought. Lately, however, I am (like I imagine the much-missed, but always just around the corner Ninjacockle) finding myself not only time-poor, but brain-poor as well. We only have so much luv to guv, as our trans-Tasman neighbours would put it (ut). So, to turn this briefly into a journal: I work 9 to 5. I get home. I do family stuff. I put the boy to bed. Three nights a working week, I sit down in front of the computer and try to read and write PhD stuff. It's tough. Lots of the time I don't make it. Saying 'No' to close friends who just want to come over for dinner and a baby-viewing is much, much harder than saying 'Nah, tomorrow night' to studying from 8pm until 10pm or whenever the words begin to go double on the screen.

I am writing this at 11pm. Screw what time-posted thing says. That's Yankee time. 11pm it is. And the worst bit about that is that I'm trying to line myself up with the little picture in my head of the masterful genius writer, slaving away while the rest of the world (time zone) withers and slumbers. But the fact is that my brain is a little tired. I'm not cracking code for living, but I'm not digging ditches, either. My brain's default setting after about 8pm is: "Whiskey/TV". Turning that into "PhD then flighty, creative book ideas" requires a little more flick of the switch. Even churning out a blog entry which doesn't rely on my son's radiant beauty for value is usually beyond me.

You'll notice in the graphic to my left, that my main activities, work and sleep, are the only ones I can prove that I do on a regular basis.
Sleep because I am still sane(ish)(or am I?)(Who said that?)(etc) and work because I'm able to pay for this internet and the food that keeps me from falling over.

The only non-accounted-for activity is 'Time I should spend being creative'. I say this because it's normally time that ends up being TV or Brainless Internet surfing.

But tonight, it's blogging.

Where the hell did all this energy come from?

I yam goen to bed

Hákarl for Pim!

2010-06-23T17:45:00.000-07:00

Congratulations, Julia Gillard!
But, more relevantly, congratulations Pim Verbeek, you've timed your exit so as to illicit the least media coverage possible of the Socceroos not making the final 16. Somewhere, in a plane over Africa, Pim is chewing on a rollmop, watching Australian news coverage, steepling his fingers and muttering "Eeexchellent." (This is how one sounds while masticating the vinegary fish of defeat).

And with a special appearance by Pete Best on vuvuzela ...

2010-06-17T19:37:00.001-07:00

So I'm watching the World Cup, because it turns out not to be on between 1am and 8am, but starting at the grown up time of 9:30pm every night, and I'm wondering ...

A) Beatles fan?

B) BEST PLAYER IN THE WERLD?!?

I'm going to do some work this afternoon though!

2010-06-15T19:28:00.001-07:00

Today, I am home sick from work. It's the kind of sick where you're not really that sick but your immune system is a bit depressed and since everyone around you seems to be dying of advanced zombiism, it only figures that a bit of bed-rest is a good thing.

It is taking a super-human effort not to:
a) Do housework
b) Cookc) 'Just' finish off a bit of Phd work
d) Sit down with a blank sheet of paper and plan a movie script
e) Do anything outside in the garden

Instead, I have been devotedly watching cartoons and drinking hot coffee.

And trying not to think about what happened when I dropped Charlie off at childcare.
Take a knee, team. This was tough:

Normally, when I drop him off, I'm on the morning sprin
t. Every detail of the morning routine is precisely timed and any deviations cost precious seconds and result in being late(r) for work. That boy is fed, changed, packed and in the car with black-ops efficiency. Any extra nappy change only speeds up the rest of the process. I am David Copperfield and Enrico Rastelli, only faster and better-looking.
I swish into childcare in my finery, keeping a friendly banter while I sign Charlie in, then I put him on the floor, facing away, ask him what on earth that thing is, then I am Elvis, baby. By the time he remembers I was there, I am cutting off fools on South Road and getting my fix of baby-boomer radio on my way to the Bacon Factory.

This morning was different. I wasn't in a rush. We ate breakfast together, played blocks, talked of old times. We even read stories and brushed our teeth with real toothpaste. Oh! How we laughed. Instead of the whirlwind drop-off, I strolled in, bade a good-morning to his fan-club and signed him in. But when the time came to sit on the floor, he went full attack barnacle koala. Buried his face in my jumper. I had to sit down with him and play with the toys enough so that only about fifteen other babies swarmed around (I'm kind of the Pied Piper that way) and he felt okay enough to sit in front of me. And not on me.
I stood up quietly.
I left the room.
I shut the door.
Then, I made the crucial, fatal error. Every parent does it and it never, ever helps:
I looked back.
He was looking for me through the window. I waved and left with my hands covering my ears.

I've mostly convinced myself that he is actually going to have a much better time playing with the other kids, rather than wailing and being bored with a sick dad, but ...

***

Anyway, here's me on my sick day:

Question of the weeeeeeeeeeeek!

2010-06-09T22:35:00.000-07:00

"Do you think the reason we've been having so many earthquakes recently is because we've
taken so much oil out of the earth's crust? You know, because oil is a natural lubricant?"

I'm not kidding about this. I tried a few half-hearted rationals, but they're not worth even recording. I mean, where do you start?

With two sugars

2010-05-30T18:35:00.000-07:00

And in the black fountain of hot, fresh coffee, I saw the scalded, drowning souls of my enemies.

Kath, get ya lippy out

2010-05-23T23:46:00.000-07:00

It's becoming more and more difficult to resist just posting photo after photo of young Charlie. I realise that the writing blogging is fairly non-existant these days and the things I do write are almost like shouting into a ravine. The only blog-worthy thoughts I've had recently are to do with the over-all foolishness of making cigarette manufacturors re-package their product in plain brown boxes, as though this will stop people from buying them.

Idiots! These are drugs. The bestest things about all drugs aren't the pretty boxes they come in. Ask anyone who has ever tried any kind of drug why they wanted to and I can guarantee their first answer won't be "The enticing packaging".

(Nb. As I have never knowingly met any drug users myself, I am only alleging this based upon a movie I saw once in which several background characters appeared to have been drug users in the past)

Okay, fine then. I'll stop blog-whinging about what a blog is or isn't lately and just make with the baby photos.

Kath, you were warned.

I'll be reminded of you on pay slips for many a year

2010-05-18T21:34:00.000-07:00

Today I used the word 'lupine' in a review.

Thank you, 25 years of education.

Burqas, priest's collars, skull caps and digger's hats

2010-05-13T22:42:00.001-07:00

I've been thinking about this issue for a while now.
I think I might have boiled it down to something equating to ideology vs culture.
Yes, burqas oppress these women and are a symbol of that oppression.
No, I don't have to understand it to accept. I understand the cultural significance of the burqa (and dozens of other religious/cultural symbols), but that doesn't mean that it doesn't offend my own cultural sensibilities.
Burqas are bullshit. I say so. I hate what they stand for and the fact that they symbolise ownership and control of women.
I can feel like that and say it because that's the cultural attitude I was brought up with and I've considered my membership to my own culture and accepted it. If I was convinced that the culture which supports the burqa is the right way to go, then I would pop over and join in. That's Australia - I can pretty much do what I like and wear what I like. Like people who wear burqas.
If we start banning burqas, don't let's kid ourselves that it's about safety or any of that other propgandist garbage. Unless we ban all cultural and religious symbols, no matter how benign or offensive to our own sensibilities (think priest's collars, skull caps and digger's hats), then a burqa ban is pure xenophobia. And that's not the Australia I want.
We're not going to effect a cultural change in the people who expect women to wear burqas (wearers included) by banning one expression of that culture.

Glenfiddick, in case you were wondering

2010-05-13T04:48:00.000-07:00

Help! I'm trapped in an exegetical treadmill!

I know they all this the Golden Hour, when everyone has gone away and the door is closed and the internet is quieted and the work flows, but it's cold and my neck is sore and my brain keeps tugging at my trouser-leg like a little boy I know and whispering "Hey. There's a nice warm tumbler of whisky in the next room. That would help you define why the critical concern among children's literature scholars is in fact limiting their discursive scope!"

You ever get that?

Got any good sarsaparilla?

2010-05-04T05:31:00.000-07:00

Hoooooo-ee.
Sometimes (most of the time) sitting down at 8:30pm after dinner to work on the PhD is like pulling teeth. Not my teeth - somebody else's. But somebody unrestrained by leather straps or high-dose chemicals. Somebody who can have a real swing at you if you loosen that headlock.
All you come out with at the end of the nightly ordeal is a few teeth and sore eyes.

I did actually have a meeting with both supervisors last week and, unlike the black days of The Proposal, neither of them used the phrase "read the riot act". They liked some bits I'd written. They gave me the "Keep it up, sonny" usually reserved for the newest coal miner who learned how to heft a pick in a tight space.

Unfortunately, I'm back at the beginning. And all my enthusiasm got me a deadline. Not some vague "let's meet when you've got something to say" type deal. June 2nd. 2pm. Have something readable. I feel as though I should be muttering this into a shallow dish of whisky while some slab-faced bartender pretends to listen. That would be pretty darn sweet. The Great American ideal of alcoholism is an alarmingly attractive one. Ask any non-American bloke who's ever read a detective novel or heard of Moe's Tavern.

Problem is that my head is cold. And I've got a great idea for a new book growing like a face-hugger implant and the only time I'll ever get to start squeezing out the ideas is between now and when I'm genuinely overcome by the need watch the latest Boondocks.

Wish me luck.

I hope you all enjoyed the photos.

Look

2010-05-03T07:20:00.000-07:00

Pleasure

2010-05-02T07:19:00.000-07:00

30 years

2010-05-01T07:18:00.000-07:00

Surrounded by mirrors

2010-04-30T07:15:00.000-07:00

Look out for the next picture in the series: "Charlie reading this blog post"

Ponderous, man.

2010-04-29T07:14:00.000-07:00

This is my friend's daughter.

Maybe not 1000 words, but some ...

2010-04-28T07:09:00.000-07:00

Charlie observes ...

It's not a hiatus, I'm just bizEH

2010-04-27T06:45:00.000-07:00

Which means photo posts!

This is a tree and a sky. It symbolises colour and loneliness simultaneously.

It's nice to be important ...

2010-04-15T19:14:00.000-07:00

... enough to be quoted on a real published author's website!
It was more fun to write scathing reviews of books whose authors I would never meet in a dark alley, but it also gives a little flush when someone likes a review.
You too can gaze at my words of wonder here.

Quick review of Where The Wild Things Are movie

2010-04-07T07:15:00.001-07:00

BOW-WOW.
What a complete dog of a film. And not those dogs which stay with you forever, even though they only live for fifteen years and the last two or three are a bit iffy because of canine dementia. I'm talking about the kind of dog that has fleas which live in warrens of mange on its bum. The kind of dog that chews its genitals, loudly, for hours, next to the dinner table, while slowly releasing something liquid onto the carpet.

It was that bad. Don't see it. They managed to turn a delightful children's book into a story about a bunch of whinging Gen-Xers who are over-sized muppets. The monsters literally spend the entire movie talking about what a bummer their lives are. Or something. We fast-forwarded most of it. There was no story, no drive, no interest and the magical land that appears as a forest in Max's bedroom is replaced by "and then he gets in a boat for some reason and travels to an island with various bleak landscapes." It was as magical as an IGA car-park at 6pm on a Sunday.

Pop quiz:

2010-04-05T18:57:00.000-07:00

It's night. You're about to go to bed with your copy of Freakonomics. But you're thirsty. Real thirsty. Parched. You don't want tap water, you want rainwater tank water and the jug is empty.
You go outside to the tank.
It's a cool night, and quiet. Easter holiday madness is over and at 10pm it even smells like everyone is returning to work; there's a definite whiff of washed work shirts and pre-made cheese, tomato and depression sandwiches cooling in the fridges of the neighbourhood.
You're about to fill the jug, but you hear something. Like someone coughing ... or are they lifting something?
Nope.
Your next door neighbour is a single guy, about 50, lives alone. Plays guitar and is very involved with naturopathic healing and stuff. He's also six foot three and lifts weights. A lot of weights. When he says he'll watch your house while you're away, you don't even worry about shutting the front door.
And he is getting laid.
Right in his laundry, by the sounds of it. It also sounds like, even though it's a wildly-abandoned/laundry-based bonk, the sound of a thirsty, slumber-bound neighbour filling up a water jug bare metres away will kill off most of the eroticism built up by the close proximity of all those detergents and bleaching agents.

What do you do?

A) Go to bed thirsty, but happy that your neighbour has found Love in the Laundry.
B) Fill the jug. Stuff it. If they can fuck next to the mops and buckets, they can probably focus their attention elsewhere while I'm getting a drink.
C) Fill the jug very quietly. Which, of course, will get you a drink without interrupting the mood, but the prolonged exposure to The Sounds of Intimacy will result in you having the image of a body-building naturopath shagging on his washing machine floating through your mind while you're trying to enjoy Stephen Levitt discussing the parallels between the rising instance of abortion and the decline in crime rate in American citites.

2010-04-02T07:43:00.000-07:00

Happy I-Though-We-Lived-In-A-Secular-Society-But-I-Guess-Not Day!

Seriously, why the fuck have we not stormed parliament regarding the fact that because this is a Christian holiday the rest of us (and there are a lot) aren't allowed to buy alcohol?
Yes, it's true, last year I pretty much ruined day one of a family holiday because I bitched and moaned and whined about the same situation.
'It's okay,' I reassured the Yorke Peninsula general store/bottle-shop owner 'I'm not a Christian.'
'Sorry, mate. It's the law.'
'But ... but ...'
I wish I had said more. Or broken something. But it wasn't his fault. He should have just turned the other way while I left twenty bucks on the counter until the next day though.

No, I don't actually want to go out and buy beer on Good Friday especially. I just don't want to have to live in such a back-wood, no-string-banjo kind of country where religious freedom is a right, as long as you observe just one group's one kookie rule. Which you don't have a choice about anyway, because it's the law, just like not molesting children.

Topical Humour Man, awaaaaaay!!

Seriously though: Rove did free tomato sauce day. Why can't we have Ring It Through On Easter Saturday Day?

Maybe I should have just gone to bed

2010-04-01T01:53:00.000-07:00

Then there was the time when I was working on my PhD's literature review, gathering all these sources and awesome quotes, and I was pretty tired and not really thinking clearly, so I decided to do something non-brain-heavy, like putting all my hand-typed references with page numbers into properly-linked citations using EndNote. So at about 11pm on Tuesday night I carefully and slowly went through my Word document, replacing the typed out references with ones linked to my bibliography. Then when I open it up the next day, it had kept all the citations (author, date), but not the page numbers I'd added in and assumed would stay there.
So I still know what book the quotes come from, but no longer which page of that book.
It's okay, I'll just have to read them all again and remember where they're from. There's only twenty-five or so - books, that is.
How hard can it be to find sixty or seventy specific quotes?

No, it's not a euphemism for number threes.

2010-03-29T17:25:00.000-07:00

Did y'all even realise that the boy tweets?

No one reads this either

2010-03-29T05:35:00.000-07:00

Major scandal: At last week's state election, a Labor politician got in trouble because some volunteers were handing out How To Vote cards at polling booths upon which were written something like:

Put Your
FAMILY FIRST

Blah
Blah
Blah

Authorised by Labor party candidate, Michael Blogs.

And everyone is up in arms and legs. Can I get this straight, please?
Yes, they didn't have red t-shirts on, like Labor party commies, but light blue ones like Straighty One-Eighty Family First bible-bashers.
Yes, the card did say 'Family First' on it, quite prominently. But who are we protecting here?
People who can't read?
In that case, how could our disenfranchised and duped illiterate brothers and sisters read anything on the card? Let alone the crucial words "Family First"?
So the people who are getting duped by these dodgy How To Votes, can read? Is that right? What's the problem then?
Oh. They don't want to read. Not too much anyway. Just enough to get that time-wasting, three-yearly chore out of the way without feeling like someone's going to force them to hold hands with a homosexual person.
Democracy: in, out, back to three more years of reading the sports section first and recycling everything else (you know, the sections where the people in ties don't have backdrops stippled in sponsors' logos). Let me put it another way: did you know that literally millions of people get killed fighting for dreaming about the possibility of having the opportunity to get handed a How To Vote card?

One that doesn't look like this.

And you're moaning because some prankster handed you a fakey and you didn't read it properly and wasted your vote? If you care enough to complain about voting for the wrong guy and looking stupid, then it follows that you would probably care enough about the whole process to take more of an interest and actually read what's put under your nose to, you know, avoid looking stupid.
But I'm obviously wrong there.