Miss Saigon

I find that when I am feeling like crap with the flu, there are two things that give me back a bit of bounce:

1. swimming in the ocean, particularly if it is cold
2. Thai food

I have never tried the two together - ie, having a swim and then some Thai food, mainly because I like to swim before breakfast (when not many Thai places are open) and because there are not many Thai places near where I like to swim (Bondi). Lots of cafes and the odd sushi joint, but not much Thai. Well, okay there is one near the north end of Bondi, but it is crap.

The cold surf is marvelous for getting all the green gunk out of the lungs, nose and throat. Swimming in a pool is no substitute. Good, hot Thai food does much the same.

The last few days have been nasty. Yesterday was spent mostly in bed - 8 Nurofen only sufficed to take the edge off my headache (that included 4 of the Plus variety), and today was looking much the same. The only answer was to either swim, or have something spicy for lunch.

J suggested that we try a Vietnamese place in Balmain. Normally, I hate Vietnamese food. I have always considered it a poor cousin of Thai. A sort of slightly spicy Chinese, or a bland version of Thai. I've never liked it, except for the rice paper rolls - they can be excellent.

So I kind of went along expecting the worst.

We had two types of rolls for entree - a vegetarian batch with tofu and a non-vegetarian batch with prawns. They were good. Not great, but good. Good enough to go back, given that it is the only place for about 10 miles around that makes them. I think the disappointing bit was the peanut dipping sauce. Just not enough bite.

For main, we both had a salad. I had a salad with lots of prawns and chook, and J had a similar salad with roasted chook. Both were very good. I have had better at a Thai restaurant in Mosman, but the Mosman place costs nearly double what Miss Saigon charges, and it is too far away for a casual meal. And the Mosman place is damned near impossible to get into.

I felt much better after lunch - the salad was crisp and spicy and hot enough to really get the glands working again. I felt vaguely human. Only needed two Nurofen and a sleep to make it through the afternoon.

So Miss Saigon gets a thumbs up. I'll be back. However, I'll be careful what I order. Half the menu looks like slightly souped up Chinese (yuk) or bland Thai. I'll stick to the entrees and the salads, which all looked very good.

Laywers

Got a christmas card from my lawyer today.

Wonder if he will bill me for it....

Sunday

I curse this bloody head cold. The guts have cleared up but now my nose is blocked solid and my eyes are puffy and I feel like a different kind of crap.

I would love to jump on the bike and go for a spin somewhere - anywhere would do, but at the moment, I couldn't make it to the end of the street.

So I am standing there in the kitchen this fine Sunday morning, feeling like two kinds of crap when I notice lots of rapidly walking people going by. I am used to seeing people wandering by leading dogs, pushing prams, carrying remote control cars, footballs and cricket bats, but I have never seen people tearing by. Yes, there was some sort of walking race going on, and an official of some sort was stationed just up the road to look for lifting and that sort of thing. I sniffed, and went and took some photos. I like to walk, and walk quickly, but competitive walking to me looks about as much fun as enema races.

To cap of my lack of exercise misery, lots of cyclists started going by. It was a perfect day for it - hardly any wind, temperature not too high, sun poking out from behind the clouds.

I went inside and buried myself in a book. My eyes are so puffy at the moment, I can hardly see what I am typing.

Boohban

Lying on the couch this week in a position designed to minimise the chance of vomiting has introduced me to a whole new world of TV for kids. It's called the ABC and ABC2, and for once, I reckon I got my 8 cents worth.

I always thought that kids TV consisted of Sesame Street, Play School and a whole pile of ads for McDonalds and sugary cereals and plastic toys that choke half a billion kids a year. However, my eyes have been opened.

Some of the shows are dead boring (like "Titch"), but a few are very well made and some are truly whacky. I was quite taken with Boohbah, (more good info via this link) which is a freaky offshoot of the Teletubbies. I have never watched the Teletubbies until this week, and I liked them too. There's something about being sick and watching entertainment designed for tiny little minds.

Boohbah really got me from a technical perspective though as you've got 5 people dressed up in these enormously fat, furry suits. Apart from the fact that their head-disappearing trick reminds me of something that you can do with a foreskin, I was amazed at the stamina of the Boohbahs. I had to wear a Care Bear suit once for a store promotion, and it just about killed me to just stand around in an air conditioned shop for a few hours. Sweat was bucketting off me. These Boohbah guys are doing star jumps, leaping around and generally doing stuff that would turn the inside of the suit into a wet sponge. Considering the suits are wired with little flashing lights, I'd be a bit worried about sweating in one too much.

So I lay there on the couch feeling like crap and admiring these guys as they did starjumps in the equivalent of a furry NBC suit for a few minutes. They must be ex-Marines. If you don't know what I am talking about, watch Jarhead for the scene where they play American football in NBC suits.

I liked the kids stuff so much, I have taped about 10 hours of it. Certainly beats watching the news.

Going, going, gone....

For those of you that have seen our shoebox, you'll know that we currently live in a house the size of a...... shoebox. I think it is the classic definition of "cottage", which is Gaelic for "unable to swing a cat in any room in the house". I know people that having lounge rooms larger than our entire "cottage". The youngster will be able to say, "When I was young, we lived in nowt but a shoebox lad, collecting dried seagull dung for fuel and cooking rats over a backyard fire" etc etc etc.

A similar house just up the road just sold at auction for a tad over $700,000. We dropped in on the auction, which was about as boring as watching an OH&S subcommittee debate ammendments to committee procedures. 59 people stood around (I counted them) variously hugging each other tightly (the winning bidders), picking their fingernails, picking their nose, parking in the middle of the street or watching the birds crapping on the cars parked on the side of the road. The auctioneer tried to inject a little life and humour into the occasion, but he was an utter dud. Some people can front a crowd and be funny or moving or engaging, and others think they are all that and more but are just plain embarrassing. This guy needs to get another job.

When we arrived, bidding had slunk up to $695,000, and seemed to be stuck there. The auctioneer did his "going once, going twice" thing about 10 times as the price inched up $1,000 at a time. Each bid was a few minutes apart, and required much arm twisting from various real estate agents and other sharks that were circling the bidders. I gave up and went home.

The thing is, the block is not that big, there is no garage, it has three small bedrooms and clearly the only medium term proposition is to go up another floor. The poor owners have just spent a million bucks in reality - a bit over $700k for the property, plus stamp duty and all the other transaction costs, then the bucket of money to add the extra floor.

Good luck to them.

Edumacation

Got a bit of a shock last night. The end of the school year is nigh, so the 10 year old came home yesterday from the hell hole up the road with a box of stuff that had been collecting throughout the year. As the stuff came out of the box, I noticed a test paper where the score was 20 out of 41.

Egads, I thought, I'd better have a look at that one to see why he did so badly.

It was an English test. I worked my way through it and discovered that I would have been lucky to get 10 out of 41.

There were questions on synonyms, antonyms and hymonyms. The first two I vaguely understand, but the last one was beyond me. I thought he had been unfairly marked on an antonym where the question was "healthy" and the answer he gave was "overweight". Gods, that was a classic tug of war between the perils of kids being obese and prone to dying young (thus clearly unhealthy) and the idea of being politically correct and not stigmatising the "big boned" kids. Bloody rough of the teacher to come down on the side of the politically correct. I must send a copy of the test to Tony Abbot to let him know that the message about fat kids is sinking in.

Then there were questions on conjugating verbs (I couldn't answer any of them) and doing things to nouns and pronouns and adjectives that were just beyond me. Like I said, if I had scored 10 out of 41, I would have been chuffed.

So it got me thinking - if they are teaching this stuff to 10 year olds these days, why can none of the 20-something contractors that I have working for me write anything worth a damn? Has verb conjugating and all that only recently re-appeared in the curriculum, so that an entire generation missed out, or does knowing what an antonym is really make no difference to how well one can read, write, comprehend, reason and argue?

Perhaps a bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. It could be that some people run around going, "I must be good at English because I know an adverb from a verb", but that's like knowing a few words of Italian but being unable to comprehend whole sentences.

We found out about that last night. J decided to make tiramasu for dessert, and was reading the recipe (in Italian) from the back of the savioardi packet. I was able to translate "sugar" for her, and that was about it.

After it was made, we were discussing how to make it and I discovered that she had not separated the eggs and whipped the whites - the whole eggs had simply been mixed into the marscapone and sugar. We were a bit sceptical for a while as to how it was going to turn out, given that the whole 'separate the eggs' bit is fairly fundamental to the recipe.

So given our comprehension of Italian, we were able to understand the words "biscuit", "cocoa", "coffee", "sugar", "marscapone" and "eggs", but made a bit of a hash of putting all that together.
Be that as it may, it still turned out pretty good. Maybe a touch heavy on the whisky for my liking, but the egg issue was not a problem in the end. For sure, it was different, but it went down well.

I can influence the media

I got really dark at the Sunrise program the other week over their "Cool the globe" stunt. I blasted off an email to them suggesting that they were an intensely hypocritical bunch of pricks as producing the show must produce more greenhouse gas than a small African country. I also suggested that Channel 7 could cut its emmissions by 25% by not broadcasting between midnight and 8am, which of course would get rid of 2/3 of the Sunrise show.

I spotted this article on their website today which proclaims that they are going to be the first gas friendly TV show in Australia.

I am so glad they took my suggestion to heart.

Now I am going to have to write to the CEO, posing as a concerned shareholder, asking what the purchase of all these carbon credits is going to do to the bottom line.

McDonalds followup

Got this in the inbox today:

"Your comments have been received by McDonald's Australia Customer Service Department. A member of our team will contact you if you requested this option. Please do not respond to this email as it was generated automatically. Once again, we thank you for taking the time to contact McDonald's with your comments."

Well, I can't wait to see their response.

(I jumped onto their website after my Quarterpounder/Big Mac debacle and let them know that I was less than impressed. I was even less impressed with their comments page - it took about 10 minutes to type in 100 words as it let you type one letter every 2 or 3 seconds. Most annoying. Like using Compuserve on a 2400baud modem in 1992).

Yellow coconut

Did you know that if you leave desicated coconut in the cupboard for long enough, it goes a pale shade of yellow?

I had no idea until tonight. I knew we were running low, so I bought a new bag today. I measured out what was in the jar, then topped it up with fresh stuff from the new bag, and hey, the two were totally different colours. Like pissing in the snow after having a Berroca.

The things you learn.......

Cheese

I had my first "real" meal for a week this morning - breakfast at Circle. I had to eat out because there was no food left in the house. Since we have all been so crook this week, no one had been able to go shopping, and no one had an appetite anyway so food was off the agenda. However, I woke up feeling marginally hungry, and decided to test whether I was on the upswing or not.

I survived the meal, but started feeling like crap again mid-afternoon (nothing to do with the food I might add). The thing I noticed is how pungent the cheese was in my omelette. Either my sense of smell is enormously improved (probably through vomit clearing the nasal passages), or the lack of coffee had something to do with it (am off milk at the moment), or they have found a purveyor of suprisingly aromatic and flavoursome gruyere. At least I am assuming it is gruyere. It smells that way, but about 10 times more potently than the stuff I get at the local supermarket.

I have this feeling that I am about to embark on a great gruyere hunt. This hunt will take me all over Sydney as I visit cheese shops far and wide in my quest to track down the ultimate gruyere.

By the end of it, I will probably never want to eat an omelette ever again.

The thousand dollar pizza

Why did I get so crook?

Because of Pizza Hut.

Because we were going away for a week, we decided to clean out the fridge by eating everything perishable and not restocking. By Monday night, we were out of food, so we decided on home delivery - two Pizza Hut pizzas. They cost $11.90.

I had half a pizza. Two hours later, I was flat on my back feeling quite horrible. An hour later, I was driving the porcelain bus. An hour after that, I was wee-ing out of my bum and wanting to vomit again.

We were supposed to fly at 10am on Tuesday, with a 7.30am taxi pickup. At 7am, I knew I could never survive 2.5 hours faffing around getting to the airport and then getting on a plane, followed by a 5 hour flight and then an hour messing around at the other end collecting a hire car and getting to the nearest bed. I doubted my guts would even hold together long enough for the drive to the airport. I could think of nothing worse than needing to stop a taxi in the cross city tunnel so that I could have a chuck. Taxi was cancelled, tickets were a write-off. No travel insurance.

Because we booked with those nice people from Virgin, we were screwed on the tickets. You can only change them up to 24 hours before your flight, so there went $820 worth of one way tickets. To change the return tickets is $40 a pop, and then we might have to pay extra if an equivalent price seat is not available on the flight we want. So that takes it to $940.

Then add in all the pills I have popped this week - half a box of Nurofen for the excrutiating headaches, the bum stopping pills that prevent the runs, the anti-nausea pills that stop me wanting to throw up and the rehydration thingys that I've been sucking on in order to keep the fluids up. The bill must surely top $1000 when you throw in the $11.90 for the pizza as well.

So I have gone from being a complete non-fan of Pizza Hut to quite detesting it.

A disorderly stomach

My guts went guts-up in a bad way this week. After a few days in bed, contemplating whether to visit the bathroom to either sit on the toilet or stick my head in it, I have now recovered to the point where I can walk around and eat. Odd thing is, I am eating like a pregnant woman.

To start with, I wanted Thai. I had some of that. Then I wanted White Christmas (the stuff made with Rice Bubbles), so I looked up the recipe on the Kelloggs web site and then did a spot of shopping. When I went to make it, I discovered that I was short a cup of powdered milk. We have baby formula, but I am buggered if I am making a sweet out of baby milk. Bleah.

My fallback position was chocolate crackles. I have inserted a photo here of my half made crackles. The big bowl contains all the dry ingredients - the 4 cups of rice bubbles, the dried coconut and the cup and a half of icing sugar. (Is icing sugar explosive when released into the atmosphere? If so, it is a good thing I didn't light the stove after making this).

The big white block on the chopping board is copha. 250gms of it. I knew I needed some, so I bought a block thinking I'd need about half for the recipe. Uh uh. I read the recipe and find that I need the lot. I was so dumbfounded, I had to take a photo to show you what goes into 24 chocolate crackles. A big block of vegetable shortening. Is this stuff palm oil? Whatever. A total artery hardener. I was just looking at it, thinking about all the chocolate crackles that I ate as a kid. I must have consumed a wheelbarrow full of this stuff by the time I was 10. If that was the case, why was I a whippet-thin kid when todays youngsters appear to be walking beachballs?

I then found that we didn't have the little paper cups that you put crackles into - only big paper ones that you use for muffins. So we now have 10 muffin sized chocolate crackles in the fridge rather than 24 little bite sized ones.

I am going to try them out on some friends this week. I reckon they will last in the fridge for about a year if no one likes them. I have also packed them fairly tightly, so they are going to be solid little suckers. No light and fluffy Aero-bar style chocolate crackles for this family.

The other really wierd thing that I craved was sausages and beans. Don't ask me why. So tonight I had a couple of big kransky sausages and half a can of beans. My stomach has gone very strange this week. What on earth can there be in kransky's that one might crave, apart from half a pound of nitrates?

Get my bloody order right

From a young age, all children in the western world are taught that McDonalds is a paragon of operations management. It is the best run fast food chain in the world. It is the company that invented big fat procedures manuals, training regimes, quality programs and all that hooey. They serve up a perfect meal every time.

Then why is it that on my last two visits to my local McDonalds, they have given me a Big Mac when I have asked for a Quarter Pounder? Both stuff ups happened when going through the drive-thru, and just in case you think I didn't put in the order correctly, on the second attempt, my lovely partner did the ordering.

I could understand a mix-up if they had a meal called a "half a flounder" and served me a fish on bread instead, but they don't. Say "Big Mac" and "Quarter Pounder" and see if they sound similar in any way.

Thankfully, when they did it the second time, I checked the docket before we drove off the lot, and we simply went around again and swapped it over. I hate Big Macs with a passion - I really can't bear them. I could have handled being given anything else on the menu except a Big Mac.

At least I can now write a letter of complaint to Macca's and see how they respond.

More stupid places to ride a bike

My ride home takes me through Pyrmont and over the ANZAC Bridge. For some reason last week, I decided to look for a different route through Pyrmont. Not that there are many - the Star City casino is in Pyrmont and it takes up a big slab of land, and the Pyrmont peninsular is not that big.

I wanted to try a different route as there is one corner that I just hate crossing on the way home. It's an odd corner - on the way to work, it is fine. But on the way home, it is a nightmare. It's hard to explain without sitting you on a bike and getting you to do it yourself, but it is a spot that shows up the oddities of cycling. The problem is that you come off the Darling Harbour footbridge, which is designed for pedestrian traffic, and have to cross at a set of lights that have been setup for pedestrians and cars, but not cyclists.

I guess when they set this thing up, not many people were riding that way. However, I think the last census showed that cycling has grown by something like 600% or something silly on my route, and now the chickens are coming home to roost.

I really don't want to get knocked down on this particular corner, so I have been deviating down around Star City and checking out the alternative streets. They aren't much better, partly because of the idiot taxi drivers that hang around the casino. Them aside, I found a doozie last week - there is a bike path that takes you to the ANZAC Bridge, but it traverses a fairly steep hill. In their wisdom, the engineers who designed it have put in steps for pedestrians, and a path for cyclists. The two are intertwined, and the path is not wide enough for a pedestrian and cyclsts to get past each other. I doubt two pedestrians could pass without them turning sideways.

That's just part of the run. The path twists and turns and actually has two U-turns in it, and the turns are so tight, you have to unclip from the pedals to get around them.

Once again, some dopey council can say that they have invested in a bike path, but it is a big waste of money. I just wish these idiots would build things properly instead of coming up with a half baked design that satisfies no one.

Water restrictions - piffle

I tried a small experiment with grey water recently. Instead of putting the water from our washing machine down the drain, I stuck the hose out the window and let all the suds and rinsing water go onto a small patch of lawn. I figured if it killed that bit of lawn, we wouldn't care.

Instead, we now have a small jungle outside the laundry window, and the rest of the lawn is looking rather threadbare. I give the lawn a bit of a drink twice a week - not a soaking, just a drizzle. The blasted thing refuses to grow, there are bare patches everywhere and prickles have started to make an appearance.

So this week, I dumped the washing machine water into the trough and then bucketed it out onto other bits of the lawn.

Well bugger me - doing the laundry uses a lot of water! I lugged out bucket after bucket after bucket. One load of laundry produced more water than I put on the lawn in a week.

So from now on, so long as we are not using bleach or hot water, that water is going on the lawn. Yes, it's a bugger having to cart it out the back door, leaving a trail of slippery drips, but if it produces a decent lawn, I am all for it.

What I really need is a 15 metre hose that I can attach to the washing machine and just dump somewhere on the lawn - the water can just run out anywhere and seep around the place. I don't need to be too artful about it.

Letting rip

No, I am not talking about farting, or having a go at something stupid. I am talking about that feeling when I am on the home stretch, a clear, straight path in front of me and no breeze or even a slight tail wind. That's when I chunk-chunk-chunk up through the gears until I am close to top gear and the legs are really grinding out the revolutions. Head down, bum up and seeing how fast I can sustain a good speed.

On a normal day, I can sit on around 45 km/h and that is it. Professional cyclists would laugh at me - they maintain that kind of pace for hundreds of kilometres in the Tour, but then they train all year, weigh at least 20 kilos less and have a peleton to drag them along. The difference between riding on your own and riding in a group is amazing - it's no use trying to describe it to someone that hasn't done it. It's not like jogging in a pack - you aren't going fast enough to benefit from the reduction in wind resistance.

Anyway, on a good day, I can crack 50 km/h on the flat and hold it for a few minutes. Then I get home and watch the individual time trials from the last Tour and note that all of the cyclists went faster than that over a 40 km course. Ah well, we does the best we can.

And it doesn't matter if I am not that quick - I still come out at the end feeling very good about it all.

Good blogs

I have been reading a few good blogs lately. One is Flight Level 390, which is written by a US airline pilot. He has a nice take on life in the skies. I'm not sure why I like it - I just do. I used to go up the front of the plane when I was a kid and see what the pilots were doing, and I think he gives me an understanding of what I was seeing when I was 10 years old.

Another is The Magistrate's Blog, which is written by a pommy magistrate. His descriptions of the underclass that front him on a weekly basis are very good, as well as the deliberations that he goes through when sentencing them. The workings of our courts are a mystery these days as all the major newspapers seem to have given up on covering trials. The media seems to only cover the crime, not the aftermath. You hear about this murder or that rape, but rarely do you find out what happened next - unless some judge imposed what the media thinks is a light sentence, and then all hell breaks loose.

Random Acts of Reality is by a London ambulance bloke. He has just published a book about the blog, and I think his blog has gone downhill a bit since then. His early stuff, describing what it is like to work a nightshift dealing with domestics, fights, stupidity and mayhem, is very good.

I have also been looking at a few UK police blogs, namely Inspector Gadget and Copper's Blog. Both offer an interesting view on what the police have to put up with, and it's not pretty. I am not talking about criminals - I am talking about the mindless management wank that comes down from head office.

The last one is about teaching in the UK, by Frank Chalk. Frank has also put out a book as well, and sales seem to be going quite well. Now that I have some skin in the game (two kids to edumacate), I'm interested in reading what teachers think of their little dears. It's not pretty either.

Why the predominance of UK blogs? I have no idea. There are plenty of US blogs about police, ambulances and teaching, but maybe I just prefer the English style of english. There also seems to be a dearth of good Australian blogs on these topics. However, a good Sydney blog about taxi driving is written by my favourite man of lettuce.

They all put my feeble efforts to shame.

Bad Juju

Is there such a thing as juju? There must be. I had to hurry home from work the other day and the ride was ferociously bad - one of the worst I have ever had. Not tough or hot or windy - just a ride where I encountered more fool, dickheads and knaves on the road in one 30 minute session than ever before.

Most days, the ride in and out is pretty cruisy. I have selected a route that avoids riding on major roads, or crossing major roads at hairy spots. The thing about cycling is that it is not just riding on a road that can be risky - just crossing them can be pretty foul at times, even using traffic lights or a roundabout or a pedestrian crossing. Some intersections are clearly better than others, and my route is partly based around using the least risky crossing points. The other factors are hills (the fewer or gentler the better) and using bike paths. I don't mind doing nasty hills, but I like to warm up first, so my morning route takes a bit of a meander throught the flat bits of my suburb in order to warm the old legs and lungs up before tackling some nasty bits of geography.

Anyway, it didn't seem to matter where I rode - I ran into bad juju. The bikepath should be pretty safe, but I just about had a head-on with another cyclist who decided to take a notorious bend way too fast - luckily I had slowed right down and managed to avoid him. A bit further on, a woman let her dogs go just as I reached her, and they almost bolted under my wheels. Whilst in town, a bloke in a Range Rover cranked up his car just as I reached him and pulled out without looking - but I had spotted what he was doing and was well away from him when he made his move. A courier pulled up in a no stopping zone outside a pub, banking the traffic up behind him. Furious drivers then started pulling idiotic manouveres to get around him, and all of them would have ended up on top of me if I hadn't seen it coming and gone another way. Pedestrians ran out in front of me without looking.

That's just a small sample. All the way home, I was thinking, "Take it easy, keep your eyes open and don't push your luck", which was very annoying as I like to pedal close to flat out. Taking it easy is not part of my mantra.

But I made it home in one piece, and shook my head in amazement at what I had just seen. Is it the proximity of Christmas that makes people act so stupid? Is it the weather? What the hell is going on?

It's days like those that make you want to own a tank instead of a bike.

The Lynwood Cafe

The Lynwood Cafe is situated in a little village about 60 kilometres from Canberra. Blowed if I can remember the name of the place at the moment - I just know that you drive down the Federal Highway and turn right and there you are.

It's a nice place to stop for tea and cake if you are driving down to Canberra on a weekend afternoon. It makes a very nice change from the Macca's at Marulan. It's a whitewashed old cottage with a good sized bit of lawn out the back, and people come from far and wide for the food. It's one of those marvelous places where you can roll up for lunch at not depart until about 6 hours later. I like it. Only problem is, I have to drive 250 kms to get there.

Ah well, we dropped in the other day for a refereshing coffee and cake. I had a lemon curd thing, which surprised me by coming in a water glass. It was really strong curd at the bottom, with mild creamy curd in the middle and proper double cream on top. It was great, and about 4 times what I needed. It was possibly the best curd thing I have ever had, but I left feeling like I had pigged out on way, way too much creamy stuff.

The coffee was good too - I needed it to cut through all the cream I was ingesting.

J had a macadamia tart of some sort, which was also very good, but a bit sweet for my liking. Again, a portion half the size of what we got would have been better. Still, can't complain about being stuffed full of good food.

There was only one downer about the place - there was a table of a dozen or so ladies from Canberra doing lunch near us, and some of them had those amazing penetrating voices that you can hear in the next paddock. They all struck me as public servants of one type or another, and one of them in particular just went on and on and on about some drunken night, and unfortunately she had the voice that would penetrate cement. I had to listen to her dribble away as I spooned my way through the delicious curd. Some people need to be denied eating rights at certain establishments. Why can't we bring back some sort of class system? Not one where you have to be upper class, but one where you have to show that you have some sort of class. She was just a silly piece of work.

Lynwood is not for the faint of wallet either - two cakes and two coffees set me back $31.50. The cakes were $12.50 each.

Ouch.

Weather

I have had a series of very indoors jobs for the last decade. I rarely find myself outside these days during work hours, so the weather for me has not been that important for a long time. About the only thing that I used to concentrate on during the weather report was the surf conditions, but frankly I can't work out the difference between "seas" and "swell" - I just go to the beach and hope for some waves to bodysurf on. I don't care whether it is hot or cold, fine or raining when I go swimming - after all, you're going to get wet, so what does it matter?

Cycling has changed all of that. Now I study the weather with the same intensity of farmers and ice cream marketing departments. Do I need to pack my spray jacket this morning? Is it a day for gloves with or without fingers? Should I take the clear lenses for my sunglasses? Will I have a headwind going in, and if so, how strong? Depending on the wind, which route should I take? Will I get hit by lightning? Should I pack spare socks (in case it buckets down and my socks get wet - putting on wet socks at the end of the day is not a good start to the ride home).

These are all considerations for the cyclist. Looking out the window helps, but I am now a student of the longer range forecast, because it also determines what time I get out of bed. If it is going to be stinking hot, I get up soon after dawn and ride in before the road starts to melt. If it is going to be freezing, I go in late after the sun has been up for a few hours and the mist has lifted.

It's all part of the subtle differences between motorists and cyclists. Motorists don't need to give a bugger about what is going on outside - you just set the climate control to 20 degrees and go wherever you are going.

"Chai" for chunder

We recently acquired a packet of Chai tea. I am not a big fan of funny teas. As far as I am concerned, tea is made from tea leaves, and that is about it. No cinammon and vanilla and cardamon pods and all that muck. However, since I am not much of a tea drinker (maybe 5 cups a year), I don't have much say in what tea goes into our kitchen cupboards.

What amazed me about this packet of Chai tea is how much it stinks. The coffee shop that I visit once each morning sells bucketloads of the stuff, and it has never offended my nostrils. J makes a cup of it regularly, and it doesn't bother me when it is steeping in the cup. I can even make a cup for her.

What I can't stand is the smell of the box of teabags in the cupboard. For some reason, concentrated unused Chai teabags smell like vomit to me. Don't ask me why - they just do. We've had to seal them in a plastic tub in an effort to stop me from hurling everytime I open the drinks cupboard.

Wierd.

Stupid councils get up my nose

I've had to visit a physio once a week or so for the last few weeks, so I have been cycling to the physio from work and hoping that my bike doesn't get nicked whilst I am getting kneaded. After the physio, I take the long way home, since my physio tells me that part of my recovery regime is riding. Unless you know the area, describing my route home is a waste of time, but one highlight is that it takes me under the Gladesville Bridge. The bridge was built in the 1950's, and is a typical concrete monstrosity of its era. I still like going under it, as even concrete monsters have a certain beauty about them.

In all honesty, I just want to climb up the support works. It's a big concrete arch, and it looks shallow enough to be able to climb up it with a good pair of grippy shoes. Doing that kind of stuff these days is enough to get you shot as a potential terrorist, so I doubt many people do it anymore. But it's nice to dream.

The only nasty thing about the ride is the bit that takes me to the bridge, plus a bit of stupidity on the other side.

The Council in their wisdom has decided to mark out a bike lane along a street that runs parallel with Victoria Road. Victoria Road is an immensely busy arterial - one of the main roads in Sydney. I hope I never end up on it on my bike. I much prefer the back street.

There is just one problem - the back street has a road surface that would put the Paris to Dakar rally conditions to shame. And of course the worst bits of surface are right where they have marked the bike lane, so I never ride in it. It's a bit bloody stupid really. The council can say that they have created another 500 metres of bike path for the cost of a few tins of paint, but the whole thing is just a lie.

Fucking local government. What more can I say?

Once I get under the bridge, I meander around the water for a bit before rejoining the road. Once again, the council has built a path that for cyclists, is a path to nowhere.

There is a bit of an artform to building cycle paths. With pedestrians, it's easy. You can build a totally shoddy goat track and people can still walk on it. It doesn't matter if bits are missing - pedestrians will find their way around any obstacles.

Now that I own a pram, I know that it is not so easy when pushing a pram. Suddenly those rocks and stairs and lumpy bits and missing wheelchair ramps become big obstacles. A pedestrian with a pram is nowhere as manouverable as one without. Sounds obvious, but it doesn't stop stupid bloody council planners and council workers from building paths that could only have been laid by complete dickheads.

With a bike, you take it up a notch as you are travelling a lot faster. My top speed pushing a pram is 6 km/h, and that is fast for most pram walkers. Yes, some people run with prams, but they are a minority.

On the flat, I rarely drop below 25 km/h unless there is a really nasty headwind. Cruising speed is around 30 km/h. Fast cruise is 35 km/h. Really hiking along is 45 km/h, and flat out with tailwind is 50 km/h.

Suddenly stairs and potholes and rocks and low hanging branches and other obstacles become enormous problems. A pedestrian going 6 km/h can come to a complete stop in one step. A cyclist at 35 km/h on skinny tyres takes.... I have no idea how long to pull up. Too bloody long is the simple answer, and at that speed, any obstacle is likely to result in a crash.

A cyclist is also as likely to get off their bike and push it as a motorist is as likely to get out of their car and push it. I know that sounds silly, but it is part of the psychology of riding a road bike. Mountain bikers might be used to dismounting, but the only time I dismount is at the end of the ride, or when I have to carry my bike up a set of stairs. Apart from that, I dismount for no one or nothing.

Which leads me to stupid councils. Once I get past the Gladesville Bridge, I am on a path that was not designed with bikes in mind. For starters, there is no way to get onto it from the road - no wheelchair ramp. The only way onto it is to either jump the kerb and cross some grass, or to go into a driveway and cross a nature strip, hoping that no punctures occur on the way across. At the far end, there is a wheelchair ramp, but it is not designed for a speedy exit onto the road. I think the safest way to get onto a road is to do so as quickly as possible, like merging lanes when you join a freeway. Slow traffic is a menace, and so are slow bikes. Of course the ramp has been located in such a way to slow you to an utter crawl.

I wish I could control a concrete truck and crew for a few weeks. The fun I'd have.

How to cut the road toll

Once again, the SMH is up in arms about P-platers running into things and killing themselves. Everyday, there is another front page article on some 18 year old that has managed to kill themself, and often a few friends. There is the usual hue and cry to "do something about it".

I don't know about you, but I think the principal cause is that young people are idiots. I was young once, and I was an idiot. I did stupid things with guns, flamable liquids, explosives, cars, heights, fire, water, tools, alcohol, bicycles, motorbikes, trucks, cats and just about anything that came to hand. That's part of being young. I was lucky - I got away with it.

The usual cure for all of this is simple - growing up.

One difference these days is that the youngsters are driving much better cars than we had to put up with. One of the things that comes with a "better" car is that it is faster. We had underpowered slugheaps that were lucky to get up to 110 going downhill with a tailwind. Every picture of a totalled car that I have seen included what seemed to be a fairly late model car that had either a reasonably powerful 4 cylinder motor or a fairly pokey 6. Commodores these days can get up to a ludicrously scarey speed in very little time at all. Cars have gotten safer, faster, more economical and less polluting, and along the way, they have created a false sense of security. I live on a corner, and the window that I am sitting in front of now looks onto that corner. I see youngsters lose it on this corner all the time - they try and take it too fast and they end up all out of shape. So far, none of them has met a car coming the other way, but that day will come, and I will be looking out the window at a head-on.

The cars that I drove as a youngster all got out of shape so quickly that one didn't have a chance to have a deadly high speed crash - one had metal bending low speed crashes that rarely resulted even in bruising.

I think the answer is to start importing Russian cars again and making them compulsory for those under 25. No more BMW's for the 19 year olds.

I must be a sucker for Ikea

For some years now, I have been working off a big desk at home that is totally bereft of drawers or filing. It's great - I just dump everything on top and when the mess gets too much, I throw out all the rubbish, stack up the things I want to keep and move on.

Due to space restrictions though, I now have to share the desk. Boo hoo. I am now down to about 1/3 of the area that I am used to, since a fax and another PC now occupy the other 2/3 of the desk. That meant I finally had to relent and buy a 3 drawer thingy to stash all my loose junk in. Ikea seemed to offer the best bargain with the 3 drawer thingys costing only $49.

I think. I'm sure I only paid $49. Maybe it was $59? Who knows. It was less than you'd probably pay for a half decent unit second hand.

The only problem with buying a GOLIAT from Ikea is putting the blasted thing together. They always fool you in the shops by presenting fully built models. That to me is false advertising - they should instead display what the thing looks like when you pull the 74 bits out of the box and have them spread around you on the floor. Then throw in a couple of toddlers to smash the foam packing into 63,000 little white bits and to jump up and down on the cardboard box until it is mush.

It shouldn't have been that hard. After all, the little Dalek of a thing barely reaches my knee, has no moving parts and consists largely of a base, two sides, a back and a top.

Well, it wasn't that hard really, except that my legs ached from bending over for an hour or so whilst screwing it together.

What I did work out is that this self-assembley idea is a crock. I have just bought something for $49 that has numerous metal and plastic fasteners, umpteen bits of wood, plastic runners and door handles and was all cut and packed in China and shipped to Australia and it still only cost $49.

Which means if you take out the profit and the shipping costs and the handling and transport and storage and the general overhead of running a 2 acre shop, means it probably cost about $10 to make in China. Which also means some rice eating bloke was probably paid about 20 cents an hour to cut it and pack it.

If it took me an hour to put it together, why not give the guy another bowl of rice and get him to put it together? After all, it would increase the price from $49.00 to $49.20.

Dining at the Welcome Hotel

Had dinner at the Welcome last week - hadn't been there for some time, and we felt like a night out.

The Welcome has a proper dining room, unlike some pubs where you just eat in the bar area. Not many people were having a feed - the dining room had maybe a dozen tables and we were the only ones there until near the end of the meal.

We don't have the luxury of eating long, lazy meals anymore. Little Monkey will sit around reasonably quietly for about 10 minutes and that's it. As soon as we got there, we let him go and he wandered around the restaurant until the food arrived re-arranging chairs, playing with the power points and generally trying to pull glasses, plates and cuttlery onto the floor.

The Welcome has quite a good menu, with just enough dishes to choose from. They'd don't smother you with choice. I didn't bother looking at the wine list as we were both off the juice. What I should have done was eat 2 or 3 entrees instead of just having a main. The entrees looked really good on paper, and my main turned out to be annoying.

One bad thing was that our food seemed to take forever to arrive. I went for a veal cutlet, which was a good sized, done rare but served on a bed of awful vegies. I think it was a bed of celery and leek, and I just hate celery. I don't mind leek, but it was undercooked and tough and stringy. The meat was good though. I asked for a side order of chips, and they were the crappiest chips that I have had in a while. No salt, not fried - I think they were oven baked, and they were both soggy and flavourless. Don't go the chips.

J had a chicken ballantyne, which is some sort of boned out piece of chook that has been stuffed with something. I'm not sure what it was stuffed with, but I didn't particularly like it. It was served with some sort of gnocchi, which I tried and almost spat out. It was dreadful. I think it was stuffed with sage, which I love with pork, but it seemed to be about 70% sage and 30% gnocchi and you have to tread lightly with sage.

Big thumbs down.

To cap it off, the chook did not agree with J, and we had to pay and bolt and then pray that she didn't have a chuck in the car on the way home. It was that bad.

Which is a shame, as J knows the owner and the Welcome is normally very good. It hasn't put me off the place, as it has so much potential. Next time we go there, I am just going to order entrees until I have had enough.

As far as price goes, it is a bit expensive. Our mains were $27 each, and the totally crap chips were $7.50, which is one of the most awful rip-offs that I have ever seen. For $7.50, we could have gone to Lashings and got a great big burger with everything and chips on the side, and Lashings makes great chips, smothered in chicken salt.

So that was the Welcome. I wonder how long it will be before I can face it again?

Flipping foul French food

Well, I finally made it to our local French restaurant for a feed other than breakfast. I was working from home last week and feeling a bit peckish and we were monkey free, so we decided to have lunch as a couple.

Le Grande Bouffe is a lovely place to sit in - the decor is good and the layout is interesting. The staff are also not too bad. Pity about the food.

To start with, it's a very difficult place to take a vegetarian for lunch, even one that eats chicken (a chookatarian?). Apart from a salad and a soup, everything on the menu had lots of meat in it. Or fish. Vegetarians could starve in places like this. I guess there aren't many vegos in Frogland.

I was not that hungry, so I went for two entrees - the soup and a terrine. The soup was a consome of tomato with a few parcels of pasta like stuff in it, sprinkled with truffle oil and shredded basil. It was nice, but not to my taste. It was also a silly thing to eat when the temperature was around 38 degrees.

The terrine was not bad either, but not good. It was just plain boring. I doubt there was any herbs or seasoning in the meat mixture, and if there were, they were very subtle. Too subtle for my worn out tongue. It was served with a small pot of onion relish, which was quite tasteless as far as relishes go, and the relish was garnished with two small cornichons, which were also pretty tasteless.

In short, it was like working your way through a plate of cardboard. Not bad cardboard, but cardboard none the less.

J had a salad of walnut, blue cheese, pear and rocket-type greenery, and it looked alright. It was the only thing she could eat on the menu. There seemed to be a lot of it, and she didn't complain, but we aren't going back.

It's put me off French food a bit. We have another frog place nearby called Vatel, and we have never eaten there, although everytime we drive past we say, "We should eat there". Now I am not so sure.

Ah, what the hell, we'll give it a go.

PS - lunch at Le Grande Bouffe set us back quite a lot when you consider that we had 3 entrees and tap water. It was an expensive failure.

Yes, I have changed the blog template

I must be getting old, because I was finding the blog hard to read with the previous template. I have been reading a few blogs lately, and found that the "minima" template is one of the easiest to read - big letters, few distractions.

I hope it helps your eyes too.

Lazy good for nothing shoppers

I hate lazy people. People who are too lazy to push their shopping trolley into a trolley bay in the car park once they have finished loading their car. People who just leave their trolley next to their car, blocking two car spaces, and drive off.

I hope they are all fat bastards with sore knees.

Why is it that people think it is fine to abandon trolleys in car parks? Where I shop, there are multiple spots set aside for used trolleys, and no car space is more than a 20 second walk from a trolley bay. Yet the car park is generally spattered with trolleys, and one bloke is employed full time to go round and round the car park sweeping them up.

I parked there the other day, spotted an unused trolley and pushed it to a bay, which wasn't that hard as the trolley was right next to my car and the trolley bay was in a direct line to the escalator which takes you up to the shops. I didn't have to deviate more than a few feet to collect it.

I got some stares of wonder and astonishment from some of my fellow shoppers. The thought of cleaning up after themselves had obviously never crossed their tiny little minds.

I can't wait for my local supermarket to start charging a $2 deposit for trolleys. That'll stuff 'em.

I finally make an edible breakfast

I eat breakfast out a lot. There are several reasons for this, but the main one is that I am not that fond of cereal. The ones that are good for you taste like cardboard and I just don't like the ones that are bad for you - way too sweet. I can't handle sweet stuff early in the morning. Croissants and bagels and all that are not for me - I need something savoury.

The second reason is that I can't make coffee, or at least good coffee. I have tried my hand at several expensive coffee machines owned by other people and it is an art that I haven't mastered. I can make something drinkable, but not something good.

The third reason is that I am really quite crap at cooking breakfast. So are a lot of cafes. But that's beside the point. Someone that cooks 50 breakfasts per day is likely to be much better at it than me, so I bow to the experts.

The last few weeks though have seen me doing a bit of work from home. The option is there to go out for a feed, but some morning I don't have time and I have to feed myself.

Bugger.

I have been in omelette mode lately, so that is what I have been making. Today, I finally managed to make one that would be passable at my favourite local cafe. Not great, but passable. It has only taken about 50 dozen eggs to get to this point.

There were three things that I did differently today - I added a lot more salt than normal, I ground a huge amount of pepper into it, and I whacked in a stack of ....aaargh, can't remember the name of the cheese. It's French, and it smells a bit, and it is great with eggs. It will come to me eventually. Anyway, I put in about 3 times my local dose. I need to remember the name as we are almost out and I will have to go shopping for more tomorrow.

I thought I was going to have a cheesy disaster, but it was fantastic. I was pretty impressed with myself. I have also been shopping around for bread to put it on, and have settled on a very good sourdough loaf that has only one drawback - it is $5.50 a loaf, and I have to drive miles to buy it.

But it is worth it.

In case you are wondering, the eggs come from cage chickens. To hell with free range - the cage chooks lay eggs that are just as good and are half the price. My only exception to that is when I get eggs from Ann, as her chooks run around all over the farm and get fed heaps of expensive grain, and the yolks are so yellow, they look like blood oranges.

So I can now feed myself at home. I am so happy, I think I will have to eat out tomorrow to celebrate.

I finally make an edible breakfast

I eat breakfast out a lot. There are several reasons for this, but the main one is that I am not that fond of cereal. The ones that are good for you taste like cardboard and I just don't like the ones that are bad for you - way too sweet. I can't handle sweet stuff early in the morning. Croissants and bagels and all that are not for me - I need something savoury.

The second reason is that I can't make coffee, or at least good coffee. I have tried my hand at several expensive coffee machines owned by other people and it is an art that I haven't mastered. I can make something drinkable, but not something good.

The third reason is that I am really quite crap at cooking breakfast. So are a lot of cafes. But that's beside the point. Someone that cooks 50 breakfasts per day is likely to be much better at it than me, so I bow to the experts.

The last few weeks though have seen me doing a bit of work from home. The option is there to go out for a feed, but some morning I don't have time and I have to feed myself.

Bugger.

I have been in omelette mode lately, so that is what I have been making. Today, I finally managed to make one that would be passable at my favourite local cafe. Not great, but passable. It has only taken about 50 dozen eggs to get to this point.

There were three things that I did differently today - I added a lot more salt than normal, I ground a huge amount of pepper into it, and I whacked in a stack of ....aaargh, can't remember the name of the cheese. It's French, and it smells a bit, and it is great with eggs. It will come to me eventually. Anyway, I put in about 3 times my local dose. I need to remember the name as we are almost out and I will have to go shopping for more tomorrow.

I thought I was going to have a cheesy disaster, but it was fantastic. I was pretty impressed with myself. I have also been shopping around for bread to put it on, and have settled on a very good sourdough loaf that has only one drawback - it is $5.50 a loaf, and I have to drive miles to buy it.

But it is worth it.

In case you are wondering, the eggs come from cage chickens. To hell with free range - the cage chooks lay eggs that are just as good and are half the price. My only exception to that is when I get eggs from Ann, as her chooks run around all over the farm and get fed heaps of expensive grain, and the yolks are so yellow, they look like blood oranges.

So I can now feed myself at home. I am so happy, I think I will have to eat out tomorrow to celebrate.

It's getting warmer

I am still hovering around the 75 to 100 kms per week mark, struggling to push right up to 160 kms per week. I was hoping that the warmer weather would help - I can get out of bed earlier and take a longer route into work, since the danger of getting frostbite on the way is no more. However, everything is conspiring against me and I am sleeping in instead, thus cutting down the morning riding time. If I can do 14 kms each way, cracking 100 kms a week should be a doddle - ride 4 times and it's done.

Apart from sleeping in though, I've been working from home a bit, and it's a bit hard to ride in those circumstances. Once I start working, it's hard to break out of it and take an hour off for a pedal. I know I should, but working from home seems to mean putting in a 14 hour day.

Hmm, must set alarm clock for 4pm and ride, regardless of what is going on.

Exercise cockroaches

I was having a bite to eat with a few co-workers recently and we were talking about the hazards of mixing cyclists and pedestrians. One bloke goes for a ride before work some mornings (on a mountain bike I presume) and he also complains about pedestrians straddling the entire available footpath - and he lives in south Sydney. So it doesn't seem to matter which suburb you live in - some pedestrians are just plain fools.

Why is the ABC so stupid?

I was watching the news on the night that the Blackhawk clipped Kanimbla and went into the water. Some idiotic journo was prattling on about how the Army had sent out a purchase order for replacements for the Blackhawk and "those that fly in them must be nervously awaiting the arrival of the new helicopters", implying that the existing choppers are crap units that are just waiting to fall out of the sky!

Amazing. Where do they get these drongos?

Who knows what happened to the Blackhawk. Until the investigation is complete, it's a bit early to start blaming the helicopter. For all we know, the pilot might have stuffed the approach or the landing and it is all down to pilot error. Hell, after reading a few books on flying, everything is down to pilot error, even if the rotor falls off in mid-air (pilot blamed for not properly checking the aircraft before taking off).

I can't understand why more journalists aren't punched in the face each year - the excuse being that the puncher was trying to knock some common sense into the punchee.

Breaking a few eggs

If there is one thing that I am happy with, it is the omelettes made at Circle, a Godly little cafe in Balmain. I thought Balmain would be socialist aethiests from one end of the peninsular to the other, but tucked away in the middle is a cafe that is also a church on Sundays. Can't remember which mob - presbyterians or whatever. It's not overtly churchy at all - there is just a plaque near the door that says it is run by the Unity church or whoever they are, which of course means that they aren't open on Sundays.

That annoys me. Their food is so good, I want to eat it 7 days a week. The council should never have allowed them to run it as a church on Sundays - I am sure the hymn singing must annoy the neighbours. Surely someone can shut them down so that the cafe can open on Sundays?

I thought the least they could do would be to open up for a feed after all the praying and so on is over - surely the congregation must be hungry after a morning of kneeling and standing and clapping and whatever?

The other thing that annoys me is that I have been trying without success to replicate their omelettes at home. My favourite at the moment is ham, tomato and goats curd, which is mushy goats cheese. Without fail, my omelette always breaks into at least 2 pieces when I go to fold it over, and it never tastes quite right. I have tried adding fresh herbs - too overpowering. I have tried three eggs - one too many, doesn't cook through. I have tried deseeding the tomato in order to reduce the water content. I got rid of the spinach, which seemed to help (too much water). I tried thinly sliced wog ham - still no difference. I have also tried two types of goats cheese - a soft one and a hard one.

I finally got close yesterday - 2 big eggs, mushrooms, deseeded tomatoes and gruyere cheese. The gruyere seemed to do the trick, as it bound the whole lot together once it had melted. For the first time, I got an omelette out in one piece.

But I think I need a bigger frying pan - the egg mixture is just too thick in the small pan that I am currently using. If the egg stuff spreads out thinly, it cooks faster, so the bottom does not burn.

I also have to find out where they buy their bread - it is marvelous stuff. I have tried all the bakeries in the area, but none seem to have the particular type of sourdough looking stuff that Circle uses. I am of course not game to ask where they get it.

Anyway, to celebrate the great home cooked omelette from yesterday, we just had to dine there this morning. Didn't want to tempt fate by trying to make two good omelettes in a row.

Who is stupid enough to put solar panels up?

With all the guff about solar being thrown around at the moment, I was intrigued to notice an ad in our local rag that offered solar panels for your house, with it only costing about $9,000 to put up enough panels to light your average home.

I thought that was pretty good, but then I remembered reading an article the other day that mentioned that some guys had costed solar power and the total cost to make their home self sufficient in electricity was something like $90,000, with a payback period of 64 years.

Aha.

It might only cost $9,000 to provide enough power for lighting, but how much power do our lights actually draw in comparison to all the other energy sapping devices like the fridge, freezer, washing machine, dryer, TV, PC etc? Maybe 10%? I don't know. It might be less, given that almost every globe in our place is now a fancy energy saving fluoro globe.

So I wonder how many people they suck in using that $9,000 advertisement who then freak when they find out that all that allows them to do is run half a dozen lights, and not the fridge and freezer and washer etc.

I know they can't be done for false advertising as they said "Light your home", not "power your home", but it's nice to see that the scammers are getting into the environmental game.

Crunchy munchies

I discovered tonight that fly traps can serve more than one purpose. Assuming that they actually attract flies, they can be useful for attracting stick insects that feed on flies.

I put this trap up on the weekend, and after a spot of hot weather today (39 in the backyard, 34 in the office), the trap gunk finally brewed up enough to start attracting flies. The trap had about two flies in it this morning, and about 100 by the time the sun went down.

At about 5pm, I noticed that a stick insect had taken up residence near the entrance, and was snaring the odd fly that approached the trap. Here he/she is having a munch on a freshly caught fly. Marvelous. If the trap doesn't get them, sticky will. I wandered out for a look every 15 minutes or so and sticky was still grabbing flies and chomping away. Last I saw, sticky had nabbed a really big fat sucker that had the added bonus of carrying maggots. Munch, munch, munch and out pop a few maggots. Great, just before dinner too.

The most frustrating thing was trying to take close-up images of sticky with the fancy digital camera. I couldn't get the blasted thing to focus on sticky - it kept on focusing on the lid of the fly trap or on the tomato plants behind, but not on sticky. How I wished for a manual focusy thing like a good old fashioned SLR camera. I was frustrated enough to pull out the instruction book in order to find out how to do manual focusing, but haven't had the chance to read that chapter yet. Knowing modern gadgets, it won't have any "manual" options anymore. The computer knows best.

Like hell.

So I was unable to post any nice close up photos of sticky chewing on a fly. You'll just have to trust me when I say that sticky is chewing on a fly in these two photos.

Assuming sticky is half smart, I might be able to get some more snaps tomorrow in manual mode - if I can find the manual mode.

Somehow I don't think the flies are going away.

Whatever happened to Sunday night movies?

Sunday nights used to be all about flopping on the couch at 8.30pm to watch a 2 hour feature presentation - usually some blockbuster that the network had been saving up for months. You could count on a few good movies being shown on Sunday night, and the biggest problem was deciding which one to watch.

Now, you're lucky to get one movie and that's it. One movie is not ok, given that if it's complete garbage, one is left with little to watch. OK, maybe the networks are telling me that it is time to subscrive to Foxtel, or I need to spend more time and money renting DVD's. I just figured out that I have not been a member of a DVD rental store for nearly 10 years. I just couldn't be stuffed anymore going through the whole rigmarol of dragging myself to the store, prowling down the aisles looking for something and then shelling out a fistful of cash for something that might be beyond lame.

Where would we be without computer games?

Path upgrades - where did my onramp go to?

Our local council has been splurging more money on widening the foot/bike path around The Bay, which is a nice way to spend my rates. I won't be objecting to that, since it helps to keep me away from cars, and anything that keeps me away from cars is nice.

It would be good if it also kept me away from dogs not on leashes, prams not in their lane and family groups of 10 or more that take up the entire path from edge to edge, and are oblivious to anyone else that wants to use the path. Family groups also seem to walk at the speed of crawling babies, even if there are no crawling babies in the group, so even people that are walking find them to be a complete pain in the arse.

But enough of that. For the last few months, one lane of the roadway has been blocked off for a few hundred yards whilst the path is widened a few metres. There's been big chainlink fences and road barriers and all sorts of stuff erected to keep cars and people off the new path and separated from each other. Whilst that was going on, a bit of tar was laid as a ramp from the road to the existing path so that cyclists like me could get over the curb without putting an enormous ding in our front wheel.

Not long ago, the concrete trucks turned up and a hundred metres or so of new path was laid. For some reason they didn't finish the job, so there are a hundred metres or more of beautiful new path, and a few hundred metres of blue metal which is impossible to ride over with a road bike. Mountain bikes are ok, but I am not.

This means I have to stay on the road to skirt the pathworks, which I don't mind, except that someone has taken away the little tar-ramp at the end, so instead of just skirting a hundred or so metres of pathworks, I have to stay on the road for about a kilometre before another ramp appears and I can zip back onto the bike path. And of course there is no longer a bike lane, so you are stuck on the road with all the other numbnuts. The speed limit around the Bay is 50, but that doesn't stop young fools in a bright yellow WRX with an exhaust the size of a bin lid from trying to do 100. And although there are double white lines all the way around, and I ride very aggressively well out from the kerb, it doesn't stop them from trying to overtake on blind corners. One had a near head-on just as he overtook me last week - dickhead. The thing I worry about is that I will pile into the crash from behind, or the dickhead will swerve hard left to avoid the oncoming car and squish me into the cars parked on my left.

So good on you Council - another good effort marred by a brain dead engineer who failed to think about who is using the path. The trouble with most of them seems to be that they are all trained in road works - ie, how to deal with cars, and they have no idea about how to deal with non-vehicular flows; dogs, prams, pedestrians, bikes. They're just so one eyed.

Juxtaposition

I took this photo when I was doing the Spring Cycle a few weeks ago. That big pointy thing in the middle is the ANZAC bridge, which I normally ride over every day on the way to and from work. It is a fairly tall bridge, so I struggled in the early days to get over it without much huffing and puffing. It is one of those climbs that separates the fit from the goats.


The Spring Cycle route didn't go over the ANZAC Bridge - instead, it went over an old "turntable" bridge almost directly below it - and of course you can't see it in this photo as the photo is too small.

I actually wasn't trying to take a photo of the bridge - I was trying to photograph people on bicycles and the great yard of freshly imported cars on the other side of the bay. You can just see a blob of white on the far right of the photo - they are part of a shipload that has just been unloaded.

I often think how quaint it is that I ride over a bridge that is three lanes of traffic in each direction (often bumper to bumper) and pass over the loading dock where a huge number of cars come in each week. There is a different car carrier tied up at this dock almost every day. I think, "Me on bicycle, surrounded by lots of cars". It's an odd kind of feeling - like being a carnivor at a vegetarian convention.

I tried to take a photo of the car dock with bikes going by, but I wasted a lot of battery power trying to photograph bikes that zipped through my frame before it would snap the shot. Blasted digital camera and it's delays. So what you get are cyclists heading for the bridge, with cars almost out of shot.

La Grande Bouffe

There is a cafe/restaurant in Rozelle that I have driven past many times called "La Grande Bouffe". It looks very French, with people sitting at nice tables out the front and waiters with little black aprons running around with coffees on trays etc. I have never had a feed there because it always seems so hard to find a parking spot.

However, I was heading towards breakfast in Balmain recently when I got stuck in traffic nearby and I thought, "Bugger it, might as well park now and eat there instead of sitting in traffic for another half an hour", so I did.

The place was way less than half full. It was also bucketing down with rain, so no one was game to sit outside. I made the mistake of sitting near the coffee machine - the barista had this bad habit of absolutely pounding his coffee thingy on something every time he needed to empty it, and although the place was fairly empty, he was still making lots of coffee. I was trying to have a quiet read of the paper and he kept smashing this thing down every few minutes. It meant that I only read the first section of the paper, and not all the other bits that you get on a Saturday.

My spot however did allow me to observe all the staff, and I was amazed to find that half of them were French. At least they babbled to each other in French. Those staff knew what they were doing - the locals were a bit of a shower. I never through I'd say it, but perhaps we need to import more French waiters.

For breakfast, I had a salmon hollandaise, and it was the smallest feed that I have had in a while. I know that the French like to have say half a croissant and a cup of short black for breakfast and not much else, but I need to be fed. I would have ordered seconds, except that a coffee and two small eggs with a bit of sauce set me back close to $20. I could not afford to eat an extra slice of toast, let alone another breakfast.

Apart from that, the coffee was not the greatest either - it tasted a bit overcooked. It was alright, but not great. I want to go back there for dinner, as it looks like a good little Frog bistro, but I am in no hurry to have breakfast there again. Even if the traffic is complete crap.

And what does "La Grande Boueffe" stand for? I know it doesn't mean "The big cow", and although boueffe is close to oeffe, I don't think it means "the big egg". Is it "big hair", as in big boofy hairdo?

Stupid frogs.

The Last Samurai

Or should I title it, "The Last Tom Cruise movie I want to see".

I saw a post yesterday we R Lee Emery (the drill instructor from Full Metal Jacket) who recounted a conversation with Stanley Kubrick just before he died. Kubrick said that "Eyes wide shut" was a piece of shit, thanks to the interference of Tom and Nichole. Well how about that?

Anyway, I watched the Samurai movie and have a simple description for it - "Dances with wolves set with Japs rather than Indians". And without the wolf. Well, maybe the wolf has been replaced by two young Japanese kids.

I watched it because I just love watching good Japanese actors in western movies. One of my favourites are the guys in "Black Rain" - they are just superb. The cast of Samurai are marvelous - stony faced, serious, 'full on' people.

One thing niggled me though - in one scene, the soldiers are muzzle loading their muskets. They attach the bayonet, then use the rammer etc, and then they fire, there is a lot of gunpowder smoke etc.

Then in another scene, it shows that their guns actually have bolts, so are they a single shot, bolt action rifle, or a muzzle loading musket? I never figured it out. The director seemed to be in love with smoke, so whenever anything fired, it shot out a lot of smoke. Yes, I know that gunpowder produces hideous amounts of smoke, but would bolt action rifles also produce great puffs of smoke, or had they moved on to a less smokey propellant by then?

One thing that irked me is that it showed the Samurai doing a mounted charge against infantry, and the Samurai chopping the infantry to bits. Had these guys never heard of "Waterloo" and "form square"? The French tried lots of cavalry charges against infrantry during the Napoleonic wars around 70 years before this movie was set, and the British generally shot them to bits with muzzle loading Brown Bess muskets. Why in 1877 should infantry in formation be overrun by cavalry?

Unless they were hopelessly trained, which is what they were.

I watched it and deleted it. It is not a movie worth saving.

Should I pick up other peoples fags?

No, I am not talking about stealing queers.

I was waiting at a set of lights a while back next to a very flash, very shiny, very new and very expensive looking BMW. I was not really looking at it, but I am dead sure that the driver flicked a cigarette out onto the road. As in right next to me. There I am, looking at the lights, and the next thing you know, there is a burning butt next to my foot. The drivers window on the BMW is down, and it is the only place it could have come from.

My first thought was that I should just pick it up and flick it into her lap. Except I could see her taking her foot off the brake and ramming the car in front, and me getting blamed. Then I thought about flicking it into the backseat, where the worst it could do is burn a hole in the leather upholstery. I guess I also could have stubbed it out on the windscreen, and then tossed it into the car.

However, all those thoughts were tempered by the nagging feeling that if I did any of that, the driver would hunt me down and try to run me over. OK, I am reasonably fast through city traffic, but I doubt I can outrun a 7 series BMW driver by an enraged lunatic.

The other thing that made me hesitate was that I didn't actually see her toss the butt out. I am pretty sure, but I have a bit of reasonable doubt that it might not have been.

So these days, when I see a window down and smoke wafting out, I watch for the flicked butt. I just think it will be fun to really piss one of these wallys off.

Mileage

I'm slowly cranking my weekly mileage up, but am still way short of where I want to be. I would love to be doing 200 kilometres per week - that's 40 k's per week day, then the weekends off. So far, the closest I have come in the last few months is about 130, and I only did that by doing a 75k ride on the weekend. This week I am up around 110, which is from 4 days riding. If I can keep that up, I might at least hit the ton - the hundred mile mark. Now that summer is here, and the days are longer, I can ride further without having to worry about turning the headlight on. That does mean more time in the sun though, and I already have the typical cyclists "white and chocolate" tan - my chest is lily white, and my arms and legs are going a walnut colour.

The only way I will probably ever get my miles up is to move further away from the CBD, and that just doesn't bear thinking about. I am already way to close to the GAFA for comfort (the Great Australian Fuck-All, also known as outer suburbia).

Markets - the food that John West rejects

Most Saturday mornings, you can find me out at the Flemington Markets. The Flemington Markets are a big wholesale fruit and vegie market that does "retail" trade on Saturday - ie, you don't have to buy your grapefruit by the container. It used to be that you could only buy stuff by the crate or box, but now they are selling by the kilo - just like your local greengrocer, except a bucketload cheaper.

There is one thing that you don't get at the markets, and that is the really bright, shiny, unblemished, one-size-fits-all stuff that you get in say Coles or Woolies. You get the food that John West rejects (or in this case, the big supermarkets). It comes in odd sizes and shapes. There are blemishes. Food has lumps. To me, that's perfect - I couldn't care less if my food is not perfect. I don't go in for fresh food porn.

I wonder how it came to this - our supermarkets only accepting stuff that is A+ grade. Are we that fussy? God, how far we have come from our rural origins.....

Strength and fitness

Funnily enough, I reckon an enforced two month lay off from the bike has done a few good things for my strength and fitness. Whilst I don't approve of the way my lay off was caused, I have been pleasantly surprised in the last week or so at how my fitness is coming along.

OK, I don't look like Lance Armstrong yet, or Stuart McGrady, but I think I have finally made it to the "next level", that level being one from the bottom. There are some hills that when I got to the top in the old days, I would be puffing and panting and lacking in leg power or lung power to push on for the next stretch. Now, I get to the top and I am not breathing that hard. I'm a bit puffed, but my recovery is rapid. I'm starting to tackle hills in the next gear up. On some slopes, I am a few gears up on where I started.

The Clucker has a month off from drinking every year - I think from now on, I will give up riding for a month and see what happens. Two months is too long - one month should be right. I will try to ski instead.

Spring Cycle

I managed to wheel my carcase out the door a few weekends ago and participate in the Spring Cycle. It's a 50k ride from North Sydney to Homebush which usually attracts 8000 - 10000 cyclists. It's a very family friendly kind of ride - fairly flat, through the back streets of the suburbs and none too fast.

Which was a bit annoying. I managed to crank it up to 50km/h on the flat the other day (with a good tailwind) and I am used to a fast cruise of about 35km/h (with no wind on the flat). Riding at sub-20km/h speeds is so slow, I just about tip over.

The ride was supposed to kick off around 9am, so I cycled over to North Sydney from our place, picked up my number and headed off. Of course I registered at the last minute, meaning that the organisers did not have time to post me my number. Me and about 4000 other cyclists, judging by the number I was given. People are just so last-minute these days. A lot didn't even manage to register on line before the event - they just rocked up on the day and paid and got a number.

One reason I wanted to do the ride is because it went over the Harbour Bridge - in the eastern most lanes. It's not often that you get to ride where the cars normally go. I have done it once before on a Critical Mass "take over the streets" type ride, and wanted to do it again.

I hope I never have to do it again, as I almost ripped my tyres apart on the expansion joints. The joints are fine if you have big fat moutain bike tyres, but are hell on skinny little road bike tyres like mine. I almost stopped at each joint, dismounted and then carried the bike across. Thanks RTA, you really are a pack of pricks.

After the bridge, the ride meandered around The Rocks and then Pyrmont and then over the old Glebe Island Bridge - this is a swing bridge that sits just below the ANZAC bridge. I had never ridden over it before, so it was nice to take the low road rather than my normal high road. It all turned pear shaped shortly after - the RTA had blocked off half a lane of Victoria Road for the cyclists to use, and about 1,000 cyclists in my group all tried to get through a set of lights and then squeeze into this half a lane, which was blocked off with those big red and white portable barriers. It was mayhem. I guess no one computer modelled that intersection before the ride. Well, I guess they couldn't as the RTA doesn't seem to want to acknowledge that bicycles exist, so they are probably banned by CEO fiat from all models and computer systems.

From there, we wandered through our suburb and then out towards Homebush. I say "towards" as the organisers made full use of all the newly built bike and walking tracks along the Parramatta River. I have no idea where we went - I was lost after the first river crossing. We seemed to go back and forth across the river a few times and then around and around in some big circles. After a few kilometres, I was wishing for a handlebar mounted GPS. It was like one of those games where someone sticks a bag over your head and then spins you around a few times. When we finally stopped, all I knew is that I was somewhere within the Homebush Olympic Precinct, and I had no idea how to get home. The big circuits meant that we probably cycled 15 kms to advance 2 kms westward.

Anyway, after a short break at the finish, I simply got on the bike and rode around until I found the train station and got my bearings. Hooray - no longer lost - just confused.

By the time I got home, I had racked up 75km in the saddle in about 3.5 hours. I was thankful for all the grannies that slowed me down because if I had gone at my usual pace, I would have burnt out after about 4okm.

Cats piss

Today was a pretty ordinary day for riding to work - blustery and a bit wet in places. Not bucketing down - just enough of a sprinkle to get some spray going straight up my bum.

I got a shock when I went to put my gear back on before coming home - my top smelt just like cats piss. Maybe it has been a long time between rain showers and all sorts of yucky stuff has built up on the roads, which of course sprayed all over me this morning. Or I am eating a wierd diet and my sweat evolves into cats piss after a few hours.

Whatever - it stunk.

The loonies have taken over the supermarket

There are quiet checkout chicks in supermarkets, and there are chatty ones. Tonight, I got a chatty one - until I mentioned the "L" word.

She asked me what I had done, and I said that I had been to the markets. She then asked why I bothered, as they were crap. I told her that I had been to the Flemington markets, not one of the local markets that have sprouted in every public school in the area.

We both knew which markets we were talking about, but could not remember the name of the school. I simply blurted out, "The school opposite the loonie bin". At that, she went a bit red, clenched her mouth and started to tell me off, saying that it was downright rude to use the "L" word etc etc etc. She was all of about 18, and she gave me a 10 second tirade.

I was too gobsmacked to say much after that. For starters, I am not used to staff badmouthing the customers, no matter what they say. After all, she started the conversation. I was quite happy to browse the checkout magazines until she opened her gob. Second, I am not used to be upbraided by some youngster. Talk about fucking precocious, precious and disrespectful. Old people like me should be listened to - we hav much wisdom to depart. I should have told her I was Aboriginal, an elder of my tribe, and the featherfeet would be coming to visit her if she continued to scorn the knowledge of her betters.

I think her problem is that she had been there for a visit that lasted for more than half an hour. Frankly, if I had ever been to a loonie bin for a holiday, I'd be saying "I just had a vacation in the loonie bin. If you continue to write out that parking ticket, I will be forced to bite your nose off. I've just been to the chemist to get my prescription filled and the lithium hasn't kicked in yet".

What should we call former-residents-of-loonie-bins? "Special People Who Are Misunderstood"? How about, "Nutjobs who are fucked in the head".

Next time I am there, I'll have to go through her checkout and make funny faces.

Letterboxes

There is a big ride on through Sydney next weekend - about 10,000 cyclists expected - and it pretty much goes past our front door. With that many bikes wandering around, the event organisers need to drop a flyer in every letterbox en route in order to let the occupiers know that they might not be able to get out of their driveway for an hour or two. Since I am a member of our local cycling group, I put my hand up to hand a few of these things out.

I didn't have a lot to do - my stretch was only a kilometre or two and it included no apartments. However, I decided to do it after dark as it was about 38 degrees out there today.

My first comment is that people should be given no say when it comes to choosing either their letterbox or the location of their letterbox. Little neighbourhood Stalins should be sent around to smash up all non-compliant letterboxes and install a standardised Chairman Mao version. Give people a choice, and a certain number will make some very bizarre and stupid choices. I should have carried a second bag of flyers that read, "You have a stupid mailbox, which makes you too stupid for words". However, I had no idea how bad letterboxes could be until I actually attempted to stuff a very simple, folded, one page flyer into a few hundred of them.

One stupid design is the dwarf letterbox. Obviously, the owners are about two feet high, because the opening is down below the level of my knee. I know that people were shorter in the old days when a lot of the low lying letter boxes were installed, but they weren't fucking hobbits. Besides, if you think about it, the postal service would probably favour tall Posties as they have longer legs so they should be able to cover ground faster than an animated garden gnome. If I was a postie, I'd carry a bag of cat turds and stuff them into anything below knee height and insert a flyer saying that a local group had trained cats to back up to kitty toilets and crap in them so that the parks would not be covered in cat turds, and that cats would probably be unable to distinguish between the new cat dunnies and their letterbox, so they should raise it in order to stop attracting cat crap.

The second stupid design was the camouflaged mailbox. I know that many people are sick of junk mail, but hiding the letter box behind a shrub, creeper or bush is a good way to avoid getting any mail. I should have taken a bottle of RoundUp with a squirter on the top and written "knob head" on their lawns.

The third stupid design was the mailbox like a steel trap. Yes, I know that there is a saying about people having minds like a steel trap, but I bet you never knew that you could also buy a letterbox like a steel trap. They have a vertical flap intead of a horizinotal one, and the flap is held shut by a very strong spring. Instead of slipping a neatly folded flyer into those letterboxes, I ended up stuffing in a crumpled ball of paper. I was taking any chances with them after the first one nearly cost me a couple of fingers. If I had a portable arc welder, I'd weld the damned things shut. It would probably take the stupid owners a few weeks to work out that it was not the extra strong spring that was stopping the flap from opening and the mail from appearing.

The last stupid design is the narrow mouthed letterbox. These things are typically found on older houses with a brick front wall. The slot is just wide enough for an old fashioned aerogram, which were pretty thin and flexy, but not quite wide enough for a modern, stiff envelope with a bill in it, or one of my flyers. Jamming a flyer in was like trying to grate cheese by using the wrong side of the grater - annoying and non-productive.

I can see now why people drive around at night smashing up letterboxes. Personally, I reckon the culprits are enraged posties.

Shopping centres are not pedestrian free zones

Some architects or urban planners or whatever the hell you call people that design concrete monstrosities known as shopping centre car parks must imagine that all cars are fitted with short range teleporters. I have just been to the Lane Cove shops. You park, and then find that there are no footpaths through the carpark to the shops. You just have to walk on the road through the car park and hope that you don't get cleaned up by a granny looking for a parking spot. It's insane - no thought has been given to how a shopper gets from their car door to the shop door - unless they park and then teleport from their car seat to the shop.

I can understand why you don't see a lot of footpaths alongside freeways for instance - pedestrians and fast moving traffic do not mix - but shopping centres? I thought the whole idea of shopping centres was to lure people out of their cars in order to spend money.

You might need brains to get into an architecture course at Uni, but you certainly don't need common sense.

Back on the bike

After two months of no riding, I climbed back into the saddle fulltime this week - four days of commuting to work on two wheels. I took it easy each day, not wanting to push it and burn out. On the first day, I rode like a girl - literally. I simply caught up to one as I rode around The Bay and then stuck on her tail all the way into town. Women only make up about 10% or less of the commuters on my route, and I generally find myself blasting past them. They ride like grannies most of the time, so following one into town was a great way to keep my speed down to a sedate pace.

The non-commuting women however tend to blast past me like I am standing still. Tri-athletes and the like are just at a fitness level that is way out of my league.

Anyway, by Friday, the pace was picking up a bit and I was extending the ride a little bit by taking detours to add a bit more distance. Even that was probably too much - by Saturday, my lungs felt like they were being pulled out through my armpits. It is going to take a while to get back to my old form. Instead of pulling my belt in another notch every few months, that has gone into reverse of late and I have just gone out a belt notch. Must ride more. I want to buy some new pants and I want them to be smaller than the last lot.

I blog therefor I ham

I decided to break the great pizza drought of 2006 the other night by whipping up 5 home made pizzas - enough to stuff to bursting all the family members on this side of the continent. The ratio was 4 adult pizzas to 1 kids pizza, and I needed ham for the kiddy number.

I eschewed the trip to my favourite wog deli for double smoked ham sliced into paper thin morsels, and instead decided (due to time constraints) to simply buy it from the deli located within our local supermarket.

God, was that foolish. I requested 10 slices of the double smoked stuff, which is about double what I need for a pizza, but I like to scoff it on its own as I make the pizza, so I always need extra. It's that tasty, it is hard to resist.

Stupidly, I didn't watch the deli-chick making up my order - I was browsing through an enormous basked of cheese trying to find an acceptable wedge of parmesan. It wasn't until I got home that I discovered that instead of 10 super thin slices - slices so thin that you can almost see through them - slices so thin that if you hold them up by one edge, they tear under their own weight - I had in fact purchased 10 slabs of ham, each about the thickness of a fence post. Even I, a totally hamfisted slicer of ham, could have shaved it more thinly than that. The slabs could have doubled as tarpaulins for patching holes in the roof next time a storm comes through and rips off a few tiles. You could take that ham on an outback roadtrip and use it to plug tyre punctures. It was almost solid enough to use as a frisbee, and if you played dog-fetch frisbee, it was so tough, your average dog would catch the frisbee about 100 times before putting a dent in the ham with his teeth.

I guess the biggest single difference between the people that work in a supermarket deli and those that work in a family deli are that for the supermarket folk, the deli is just a position that you work in. You might be on checkout one day, packing shelves the next and serving ham the day after. It's a low paid job that pays your way through Uni.

A family run deli on the other hand is presumably full of people that are selling food because they like that food. I would hope that the wogs flogging expensive olive oil at my local wogarama have tasted all the oils on the shelf and probably only stocked them after a taste test - not because some buyer in a distant head office decide to stock brands A, B and C because they were cheap.

Hence my totally crap ham.

Aeon flumoxed

I recently laid eyeballs on Aeon Flux, and boy, was I disappointed. I love a well done sci-fi movie. Bladerunner has always been a favourite. Firefly was a total loss. What I like to see is intelligent use of future technologies. Amazing technology is not good enough - it needs to be used in a way that is interesting or makes sense. Simply serving up woopie-doo special effects is not enough. That's what always annoyed me about the Star Wars movies - you had all this fancy technical gimmickery used in the most ridiculous fashion. Hover cars towed around by six legged bullocks. Balls!

Anyway, movies that did it well in the past have included Bladerunner, Gattaca and Minority Report. I liked Minority Report - not enough to watch it a second time, but it was contentedly adequate. I liked the eyeball recognition stuff with the personalised ads - which is just cookies taken a step beyond the internet. I liked the way Tom Cruise used gloves as an interface to the computer - like a mouse in the air. I liked the little heat seeking robot things. To me, they all made sense, in a horrible kind of way. Total Recall was also based on an interesting premise - memory implants, and they were done well for a good reason - taking holidays! I could relate to that.

Anyway, Aeon Flux had some groovy little technical things, like a strap on transporter thingy and some interesting implants, but the rest was garbage from go to woe. I'll tell you a major plot element right now, because the movie is not worth watching, so I can give a big part of the game away without spoiling it for everyone. It's set 400 years in the future, and most of the population has been wiped out by a virus. Only 5 million survive in one big city.

I'll digress for a second. At the start, it says the virus killed 99% of the population. If we currently have a world population of - what - 5 billion say, then a 1% survival rate is 50 million people. As usual, Hollywood is no good at maths. The should have said that 99.9% died out.

By the way, 5 million people is a city bigger than Sydney. The city that they show looks like a town of about 25,000 - more of a University campus than anything else. And it is not crowded. If you ask me, 99.995% died out and the remaining handful lived in a place the size of downtown Tamworth.

With a wall around the edge to keep nature out.

Anyway, the big deal is that the cure for the virus left everyone sterile, so instead of women getting pregnant, the government has been secretly cloning everyone and impregnating the women for 7 generations. The same 5 million people just keep going around and around and around again. It's a really good plot idea - I loved it. It was simply executed like crap. The director or the screenwriter started with a great idea and then decided to add lots of Matrix style action and shoot-em-ups and some lifestyle fashion technology. By that, I mean they let some fashion designer go nuts on all the apartment interiors to give us an idea of what Ikea will be selling 400 years in the future.

The shooting and stuff was just a total waste of space. Aeon is a super-assasin, which means she can pick up a pistol and kill about 100 cops in head to toe body armour. The fight scenes are just daft. I much preferred the action in Bladerunner, where you have one guy with a mega-pistol chasing some mean replicants through a futuristic version of Kings Cross on a rainy Saturday night. And doing it badly. I can relate to that.

I liked about 3/4 of the movie, and just hated the last 1/4. They should just cut and reshoot the last 25 minutes.