How to make a pizza locally

Thanks to Paco, who has done some detective work, I now know what Obama's continent-crossing pizza looked like. OK, the photo in question at that last link is from a different pizza parlour, but it shows the sort of deep pan pizza that the migrating chef in question was asked to make.

I took one look at that deep dish pizza and went "bleah". I now understand why the yanks refer to these things as "pizza pies". I'd simply remove the first word and call it a pie. And a yucky looking one at that.

I made pizza last night. It was a spur of the moment thing, so the dough did not have all day to rise, as it should. However, here is how I do it:

• 15 grams of yeast
• 10 grams salt
• 500 grams flour
• 320 grams warm water
• 50 grams olive oil

Question - Why have I done all these measurements in grams, rather than mls for the water and oil?

Answer - That's because weighing them is much more accurate than measuring in a jug. You are much more likely to get a dough of the perfect consistency if you weight rather than measure. This recipe is from the book Dough - do yourself a favour and buy it.

Question - Does that mean I need some electric scales?

Answer - Yes. Go spend 70 bucks, or whatever they cost, on electric scales. They are vital to getting it right.

Question - do the scales come with batteries?

Answer - how should I know?

I use a Kitchenaid mixer with a dough hook to make the dough.

Question - what if I can't afford $600 for a Kitchenaid mixer?

Answer - get ready to have forearms like Charles Atlas, because you will have to knead the dough by hand.

Question - can I use a breadmaker to do the mixing?

Answer - I've never had a breadmaker - that is what the Kitchenaid is for. I'm not going to stop you trying.

You can get all fancy if you like a rub the yeast into the flour in advance and all that sort of thing, but I just tip all the ingredients into the bowl and let it knead for 10 minutes. When the dough comes away from the sides of the bowl, it is getting there.

Question - should I knead at high speed or low speed?

Answer - how fast can you knead by hand? Not very fast. The mixer does not need to be set to 11 to knead it properly. You will know the dough is done when you can stretch it and it bounces back to its original shape like elastic. If you have never seen this before, trust me - it does happen. It should be like Mr Fantastic in the Fantastic Four.

Question - what if my dough is not elastic?

Answer - frankly, it will be easier to roll out into a circle, because the bloody stuff won't keep contracting each time you roll it out. Don't sweat it - it's only a pizza, and you are not cooking for the President. But if you are cooking for Kevin Rudd, maybe you should sweat it. He's sure to notice, and will yell loudly and swear if the dough is not just right.

This is enough to make 3 thin crust pizzas, assuming you have large pizza stones upon which to cook the pizza.

Question - can I use this dough to make just one thick crust pizza?

Answer - yes. But if you want a thick crust pizza, I suggest you give up now and call Pizza Hut, or one of those other companies that specialises in making awful pizza.

Here comes the fun part.

I told you to use 500 grams of flour. I didn't tell you what sort of flour to use though.

The Italian shops around here sell Tipoo 00 flour, which is supposed to be the best thing for pizza dough. It also costs 3 times as much as normal flour. I don't bother with it, because we like a completely different type of crust in this household.

My mix is usually 50% white flour, 40% wholemeal flour and 10% semolina. The semolina gives it crunchiness, and the wholemeal gives it body. So if you want a fat, soft, doughy pizza base, go away now, pick up your phone and call Dominos. You are wasting your time reading any further.

I have experimented with this mix quite a bit. The pizzas last night had more wholemeal than usual simply because I ran out of white flour.

Question - can I use 100% wholemeal?

Answer - yes, but it tastes like cardboard. Man invented white flour for a reason. Don't be afraid of it, you luddite.

Question - should I used coarse or fine semolina?

Answer - use whatever your shop sells you. I have used both. I use what I can get.

Question - can I add more semolina?

Answer - no. For this mix, use no more than 1/4 cup of semolina. The dough becomes "sandy" if you add too much.

Question - can I use something other than olive oil?

Answer - what am I? Jamie Oliver? We are making Italian pizza. Do you think the Italians would use something else, like fish oil? Use your noggin. No, scrap that. Go ring Eagle Boys Pizza and have them deliver something. Get your eyeballs off my recipe.

15 grams of yeast by the way works out to 1.5 tablespoons - I measured that last night.

Question - should I use fresh or packet yeast?

Answer - use whatever your shop will sell you. I have hunted high and low for fresh yeast, and have been unable to find it anywhere locally. I keep a 280gm tin of instant yeast in the freezer - that works well enough most of the time. I also keep all my flour in the freezer.

Question - why do you keep your flour in the freezer?

Answer - because I like to sprinkle frozen flour on my ice cream. No, you knucklehead - it's because we are plagued by moths that eat flour and leave eggs and webby nests in our flour. Neither moth eggs or moths can survive in our freezer.

Once the dough has kneaded sufficiently, turn it out and divide it into three blobs. I have a big sheet of fancy plastic of some sort that is great for rolling out pastry - I flour the sheet lightly, then put the blobs on that, because they don't stick much. Spread the blobs of dough out, because they will expand. Cover and allow to rise.

Question - what should I cover them with?

Answer - a tea towel will do.

Question - how long should they rise for?

Answer - in summer, that's been as short as 20 minutes. Yesterday, it was cool, so I sat them on the stove top and turned the oven on to 100 degrees. That warmed up the vicinity a bit, but it still took them over an hour to reach a decent size. Time is a factor of temperature. Make the dough, go blog or something, then pop in and have a look every now and then.

Question - I'm hungry. Do they really need to rise for that long?

Answer - no. I have gone straight from making the dough to cooking it when famished. You won't get the full flavour and texture of great dough, but you will get food in your stomach. What is more important - avoiding starvation or having some extra bubbles in your dough?

Question - what do I put on top?

Answer - less is more. I like a thin smear of tomato sauce, some bits of torn up mozzarella and basil and nothing more. A pizza in my opinion should not drip. Bits of it should not fall off the sides of the crust. Great trails of molten cheese should not be draped over every bit of furniture. But that is a personal thing. If you want to ladle the contents of your fridge on top, go for it - but just remember this. The more you add to the top, the soggier your base will be. If you want a crunchy base with bite, keep the topping thin.

This is probably not the way the Italians would favour it. I have eaten a lot of "street pizza" in Italy, where they sell rectangular slabs of pizza from shop fronts. They fold it over and serve it in a sheet of paper, so you can eat it without it dripping everywhere. The base, by necessity, needs to be flexible enough to bend without tearing, so it has to be a bit soggy. I just don't like it that way. I like to be able to hold it by the edge and the point does not droop.

A tasty pizza, I have found, does not rely on lashings of ingredients. You reach a point where more ingredients fail to add any more flavour - an economist would describe this as the "marginal propensity to tickle your tastebuds". You can still have lots of different toppings - just use them sparsely. Don't mound them up. As a rule of thumb, you should always be able to see the red tomato sauce under your ingredients. If you have dumped them on an inch thick, scrap off 3/4 of an inch of topping. If you are feeling hungry for meat, go eat a thick steak. This is a pizza, not a steak with dough under it.

Now, for the tomato sauce.

You can buy a jar of this stuff in the supermarket if you want. That's cheap and easy, but if you are going to the trouble of making your own dough (instead of grabbing a pizza base from the freezer at the supermarket, or just picking up the phone and ordering one), then you might as well go to the trouble of making your own sauce.

The next step from buying a jar of sauce is to buy two tins of tomatoes and make sauce from them.

Buy whole tomatoes, not chopped ones. The beauty of using tinned tomatoes is that you can keep a few tins in the cupboard and always have the ingredients on hand for pizza. They last a long time - if you are like my mother, and ignore use-by dates, they will last until the next ice age.

Open the tin and drain the tomatoes. Let all the water go down the plug - it's just water, sugar and red colouring. Ignore it. Let it go. You are not wasting anything.

Get a strainer. Put on an old shirt. You might also want to stand on the lawn to do this. Put a tomato in your hand and squeeze it, squeezing out all the excess water. Sure as eggs, some of the water and seeds will squirt out and land on your shirt, so put on an old shirt. Some will also end up spraying all over the kitchen, which is why it is a good idea to go outside and do it.

Do that for two tins of about 440gm.

You will now be lefty with a sorry amount of tomato. You started with two big tins of tomato, and now you have barely any left. That sounds wasteful, but that's just the way it is. Tomatoes contain a lot of water. That water has to go.

Question - how much should I squeeze?

Answer - the more water you leave in the tomato, the greater the risk you run of soggy pizza. Don't worry - you do not need masses of tomato to make a tasty pizza. Regardless of how much water you squeeze out, you are not removing flavour from the tomato. You might lose a small amount of flavour with the water, but the bulk is in the flesh.

Throw the tomato into a blender along with a good pinch of salt, a dash of sugar, a small glug of good balsamic vinegar, a dash of olive oil, a handful of oregano and as much garlic as you can handle - I will happily throw in 4 to 6 cloves of garlic - it is up to you. Do not blend it too much - it does not matter if it is chunky. This is home made pizza, not factory made pizza. Blobs of tomato add to the rustic aura.

Question - you talk about "glugs" and "dashes". How much is that exactly?

Answer - here, you have to trust your taste buds. It is your pizza after all. You may think you have screwed it up entirely, but I wouldn't bother too much. The tomato flavour is only one amongst many on the pizza, so even if it tastes a bit odd on its own, it may turn out to be magnificent when combined with other ingredients on the pizza. If it is a total disaster when cooked, throw the pizza out and order one from Pizza Hut.

I once had dinner in a very good restaurant where we ordered a bottle of sticky to go with dessert. The wine came first, it was opened and we tried it. None of us liked it. The sommelier came over and tried it and said, "Yes, it tastes odd, but wait until you have tried it with food". So we sat on it until the cheese and desserts arrived.

With food, it was magnificent. On its own, it was terrible. Think about that when you are tasting your sauce. Do not bother about making something that tastes perfect on its own.

That was an important lesson to me. In the beginning, I spent a lot of time trying to get the tomato base to taste how I thought it should taste - but I was tasting it in isolation. I found that later on, when combined with cheese and ham and other ingredients, the whole did not taste as I thought it should. For that reason, do not add too much sugar. A dash - like half a teaspoon - may be more than enough. You just need a hint of sweetness, not an overpowering amount.

The thing I hate about the jars of sauce that you can buy is that they are full of sugar. If you open a jar and taste it, you think "yum, nice and tasty", but they bugger a pizza completely if you ask me - they just have too much sugar for a good pizza. You are eating it as a main course, not a dessert.

That's why I also like a dash of good balsamic vinegar - I like the tartness. But each to their own.

As for oregano, I have a mat of it growing in the garden - it's grown to about 1 metre by 1 metre. I cut of 3 or 4 stalks, strip the leaves and throw them in the blender. Oregano is a personal taste thing - I think it is one of the key ingredients to a pizza, so I recommend throwing in heaps. However, you can throw in too much. You will simply have to make a few dozen pizzas to find out the right amount for you.

Don't forget the salt. Forget this nonsense about heart disease. A store bought pizza is loaded with salt, because it provides flavour. Ever wondered why you need to drink a lot of fluid when eating at a pizza parlour? You are eating a salt lick with toppings.

Then there is the ultimate way to make tomato sauce.

We've recently found that we can buy packets of vine ripened small tomatoes - they are bigger than a grape tomato, but smaller than a golf ball. You need 20-24 of them for 3 pizzas. This method produces expensive tomato sauce - it will cost three or four times that of tinned tomatoes.

Turn the over to 100 degrees.

Find an oven tray - for me, that means getting down on my knees and searching through a badly organised cupboard full of pots and pans.

Cut the tomatoes in half and plonk them on the tray, skin side down (ie, cut side up - the flat side should be pointing up).

Sprinkle them with salt and castor sugar. Yes, you need a reasonable amount of sugar. Not too much, but a good sprinkle. Don't you hate recipes like this? How much is a "good sprinkle"? I have no idea.

If you want to get very fancy, top each tomato with a bit of sliced garlic and torn basil. You can even scoop out the seeds if you are being super fancy and put garlic and basil into the scooped out shell. I don't bother usually, but I am going to try that next time. You can thank Heston Blumenthal for that.

Let them slowly dry for a few hours. You really want to remove most of that water. I didn't remove enough water the other night, and after I smushed them, I had to put them on the stove top to boil more water away.

It's a good idea to start this a few hours before the dough. Then, when you make the dough, you can let it rest and rise on top of a nice warm stove.

Mush the tomatoes in a blender with garlic, oregano etc. Because they still have skins, they will not mush to a smooth sauce - if you care about these things, remove the skins before putting the tomatoes in the oven. Personally, I like the skins. They give it a rustic, non-store bought look.

The rest is up to you and your oven.

Here is a tip about ovens. If your oven is useless and pathetic like mine, and will not heat beyond 200 degrees, then you need to be really meagre with your toppings. Your oven will not get hot enough to cook the pizza properly, and the more you load it up with, the harder it will be to cook.

Question - should I buy a proper pizza oven?

Answer - in this economic climate? Are you mad? If your name is Woin Swan and you are trying to stimulate things, go right ahead.

And that is it. How to make pizza without flying someone 860 miles to your house.

I am thinking about trying a different way of cooking them next time - this is another Heston Blumenthal idea. I am going to put an upside down cast iron frying pan under the grill and let it heat for 20 minutes. I'll then make the pizza on a flat board and slide it onto the bottom of the super hot frying pan and slide it back under the grill for 3 minutes. According to Heston, that is the best way to get the required heat in a domestic kitchen - a pizza should ideally cook in 3 minutes, which requires heat of supa nova proportions. This pizza will be smaller than my usual creations, since the bottom of my only cast iron pan is smaller than the pizza stones that I normally use - but does it really matter if I am making small pizzas rather than large?

Now it's time to think about lunch.

Nice work, if you can get it

Has anyone else noticed that Craig Thompson was on a pretty good wicket when he was running the Health Services Union, existing frugally on a meagre salary of $154,000 a year - which was presumably topped up with other entitlements like a car, laptop, mobile phone, ADSL connection at home and so on. His payout on leaving was calculated at $190,000.

That's not a bad salary for a union that didn't "have a lot of money sitting around".

At what point does an executive become a "fat cat", regardless of the type of enterprise they are running? In the NSW state sector, a manager on that sort of money would definitely be regarded as an oversized puss.

Am I the only one to think that it stinks to see those that are supposedly protecting the workers engineering enormous pay packets for themselves, which all have to be paid for by the membership.

What shall we do with our $43 internets?

Let's say we do end up with fibre to 90% of the homes in this country. What next?

It's like buying a Ferrari and then saying, "What now? What do we do with this expensive beast?"

Well, we could use it to improve our health industry by doing remote diagnosis.

Oops, already doing that. A friend of mine runs a medical imaging company that is largely based in the bush, and several years ago they were sending CAT scans to Israel and India for diagnosis - until the government said that they would not pay for overseas doctors to diagnose Australian patients. So remote imaging and diagnostics is old news.

How about remote schooling with video conferencing and lots of other high-tech gizmos?

Hmm, already doing that too. I am thinking of doing a course next month where us students will be here in Sydney and the trainer will be in Perth, and all the training will be conducted remotely using computer based educational material piped in from the US.

Then of course you have the small issue of how you provide every school with a local area network capable of supporting real time video, and the video conferencing and electronic whiteboarding and other gizmos that you need to run this sort of operation. Plus the cameras at the other end and so forth. Do we have any money for that?

Ha ha ha ha ha. I visited a school last month, and whilst I was whiling away a few minutes, I visited the library. That's where the kids do computer studies and so on.

Some of the PCs had 5 1/4 inch floppy drives. The monitors were smaller than those you get on the latest iPods, and they were utterly incapable of supporting any form of multimedia. They could run a text editor and not much else.

You might even ask what purpose schools would serve in such a situation, because you no longer need to bring teachers and pupils face to face to inpart knowledge - the little dears might as well stay at home and be educated over the internet. Christ, what a debacle that would be for many families. Who is going to stay at home and ensure they actually do their work?

The entertainment industry seems to have managed to produce special effects or animated movies here without needing fibre to every home.

So it really does come down to pushing movies on demand to the home. Given the cable that Foxtel has already laid, and the advances in entertainment technology that emerge every few years, I'd say by the time Kevin sticks his shovel in the ground to turn the first sod on this cable laying project, we'll already have a means to get movies on demand over the current infrastructure.

The car market speaks

From the SMH today, lamenting the death of that evil, globalised, gaia-raping entity known as the car industry:

The statistics tell a grim story. Commodore sales have almost halved in the past decade. Sales of the Ford Falcon have faltered more dramatically. For decades it was either No.1 or 2 in the country. Last month it was outsold by the four-wheel-drive version of the Toyota HiLux, the Toyota Corolla and the Mazda3

I had a look at the Green Star rating of a basic Commodore versus a 4WD Hilux. The Commodore rates 3.5 stars vs 2.5 for the 4WD Hilux. In the petrol variants, the Hilux is 25-30% thirstier than the Commodore.

We are told that consumers are choosing more fuel efficient vehicles, yet the statistics appear to be saying something else. Yes, the diesel version of the Hilux is more efficient than a petrol Commodore, but with the usual disparity in petrol vs diesel prices in this country, they would probably cost the same to run as far as fuel is concerned.

Buyers are not necessarily thinking green. Of course the Corolla and Mazda3 are more fuel efficient than a Commodore - but why are buyers stampeding to the Hilux?

Personally, I hate the Hilux with a passion. It has the ride qualities of an ox cart, the brakes of a Model T with wooden brake blocks, the steering of a supertanker and the internal ambience of a KGB prison cell. Whilst quite a few are used by tradesmen, more and more are being bought by males barely out of puberty who add a whole series of wanker accessories and then tear around with the same level of arrogance as BMW or Mercedes drivers - but without the road handling qualities of an M3, of the driving skills and situational awareness that comes with age.

I like the Top Gear test where they hoist a Hilux up with a crane and then drop it to the ground. That should be done more often, preferably with the cab stuffed full of Hilux owners, all sitting on seats made out of broken glass, freshly collected syringes from Kings Cross and a few lites of liquid nitro glycerine.

The Hilux though is possibly the closest thing we have in Australia to the US love affair with the "truck", which I always think of as a Ford F series, or a Dodge Ram type vehicle. Yes, we've long bought lots of Land Cruisers and Pajeros and things like that, but the Hilux and F series are a different kettle of fish. Are the young car buyers of today following the same trail that the yanks blazed over the last two decades, with a long term movement into a tall, aggressive vehicle with a tray?

If so, what does that say about the environmental commitment of our youth? Especially when one glance at these toggler-mobiles tells you that they are built for dominating and driving over the environment, rather than communing with it.

Say no to flu

I wish I could say "no" to the flu, but it is too late now. I've been thoroughly bushwhacked by it the past week. I know that things are on the improve when I start coughing up green goo - the worst is over, it's just a matter of clearing the muck out of the system.

The morning starts with hacking up a wad of yuk the size and consistency of chewing gum, and bright green to boot. Several more may follow during the day. My throat is thoroughly coated in ick that just refuses to budge without an episode of chest-bursting coughing. Occasionally, it feels like a small flap of goo will lift - perhaps after a sneeze - and that will lead to a whole section unrolling and lifting and next thing you know, I am choking on a wad of slimy green throat oyster.

This video is an apt metaphor for how my throat feels, except that white goo should be fluorescent green.

Lolz attempt

Thanks to IMAO for the idea:


moar funny pictures

Fine sounding words

I have been boring myself senseless since 5am reading the policies of the Parents and Citizens Federation. Bleah. I was hoping that would help me get back to sleep. No such luck.

I didn't actually want to read those policies at all. Originally, I was looking for the quarterly newsletter that the Federation publishes - it turns out it is only available in hard copy. I wanted to link to it because I flicked through it recently, and found that it was the greatest grab-bag of leftist pap that I have seen in a long time.

By the way, I ended up looking for that this morning because of escorts and union funds. I'm not kidding. I started with the story on Craig Thomson and his alleged misuse of union credit cards to fund his election campaign. What can I say - if the card is issued in your name, you are responsible for every transaction made with that card. You have to provide documentary evidence of how you spent that money, via receipts and so on. That's par for the course when an organisation issues you with a card.

From that story, I went fishing for information on Thomson's pet group, Dads in Education. Apparently he set this group up to raise his profile, and used his union credit card to donate $10,000 to the group.

Health Services Union members might be asking why they are having their pay packets docked with union fees when the money is being spent on things that has nothing to do with the direct welfare of the HSU members. I looked up Dads in Education on ASIC and a NSW register of charities, and found that it is listed as a company but not a charity. So at least it is not a fake charity.

I noticed that one of the Board members of Dads in Education is Vicki Scott, and she is a member of the P&C Federation. She is also a Labor Councillor in Gosford. When I saw the P&C bit, I went trawling through the P&C site looking for that newsletter.

Anyhoo, some of the policies are absolute crackers - the right to this, the right to that, blah blah blah. Given that sacking useless teachers is a pet cause of mine, I was taken by this policy clause:

The key to the continuing development of our public system of education is well educated, highly motivated, professional teaching staff, supported by a sympathetic education authority and working in close co-operation with the community. Teachers should be endowed with the following personal attributes: the ability to communicate a high level of knowledge and skill; imagination, enthusiasm, tolerance, judgment, sensitivity, perception and individuality; and an awareness of people, of nature and of the dignity of those whom they teach. It is self-evident, therefore, that teachers should be qualified for the work they do and sufficient in number to allow for effective school organisation, including remedial teaching, student welfare programs, career advice and appropriate programs for students with special needs. The selection of potential teachers and their training and development are of the utmost importance since the quality of schools is positively and significantly related to the quality of their teachers.

Yes, all good motherhood statements. A teacher should be this and that and something else. I agree with most of it.

But what do you do if a teacher fails to meet these lofty expectations? What do you do with someone that commences well, and then starts sliding downhill after a few years? You counsel them, you retrain them, you give them some opportunities to develop, and they continue the downward trend into sloth, indiscipline, and unprofessionalism?

I wish groups like the P&C Federation would have the balls to confront issues like this. Clearly, in any given group of people, whether they be doctors, lawyers, police, nurses, teachers, what have you, there are going to be stars and there are going to be utter duds. In some organisations, you can shuffle the duds off to some insignificant backwater where they can do no harm, and you leave them there, gathering dust until they leave.

However, I don't think the education system has the resources to do that, so dud teachers end up standing at the front of classrooms, where they help to destroy a generation of kids.

Can I pick a dud? No, not with enough certainty to have them fired. But I expect that Principals would have been around long enough to be able to pick them, and we all know from our own experiences in many different walks of life that duds exist everywhere. I can't weed them out, but I expect Principals to be doing it as part of their job.

Why isn't the P&C Federation standing up and saying, "These are our kids that you are teaching. We will support the good teachers to the best of our ability, but the flipside is that if someone is not suited to teaching, they should be booted at the earliest opportunity and told to try their luck in another field of endeavour. We will not accept run-down, poorly maintained buildings and schools, and we will not accept run-down, unmotivated teachers either".

Rant over.

Who will build and run Kevin's new network?

For starters, we can assume the network will be built with Chinese hardware. There goes any hope of keeping any commercial information that flows across that network secret.

We know Kevin wants to import a few hundred thousand coolies - they will be coming to a street near you before long, armed with picks and shovels and digging up your street to lay a Chinese made fibre. Prepare for your footpath to look like the trench system of a North Korean hillside.

Who is going to design and run the network? I can tell you right now, there is a big shortage of competent network engineers in Australia. All the carriers are suffering from a lack of people with smarts and experience. This new network, which will presumably have the same recruitment, payroll and HR policies of the old Postmaster General's department, will be lucky to pick up the cast offs and dead wood from the existing carriers. This network will be built by the losers, deadbeats, sickie-merchants, pilferers and ex-public sector workshy boneheads that Telstra has spent the last decade getting rid of.

Yes, it will be Telstra Mark II - except it will provide the service levels of Telecom, circa 1974.

Great find

200 Weeks as usual comes up with a great video clip, and some good advice for motorists.

Where will the electricity come from for Kevin's new network

Networks consume a lot of power. I don't know how much power Telstra uses each year, but it must be an enormous amount.

And now we are going to duplicate an existing network, which will also require an enormous amount of power to run.

Assuming they are rolling out a 100MB Ethernet network, as opposed to a cable network, each house will need a device like a Cisco ME 3400-2CS to be installed. I'm sure they'll use a Chinese device instead, given that they are cheaper than Cisco, but some sort of fibre or copper Ethernet termination device will be required.

The ME 3400-2CS typically draws 15 watts. 8 million homes times 15 watts equals a lot of power in the aggregate.

The equipment at the other end will draw - I have no idea actually. There's lots of other bits of networking equipment in exchanges and data centres everywhere to provide the backbone. Those will draw masses of power. They also need huge air conditioners to cool them.

In short, Kevin is building an enormous greenhouse gas generating system at a time when we are not building any more generating capacity.

How is that going to work? What is the point of having a carbon reduction scheme on the one hand, and then a massive new energy consuming system on the other? Do these guys have a clue?

According to page 7 of Telstra's corporate responsibility report for 2008, they consumed 6,064,687 gigajoules, which works out at 1,684,635,277 kilowatt hours. This is the equivalent of 1,500,803 tonnes of CO2 emissions.

Will the new network draw more power or less? My guess is more, because of the higher bandwidth on offer.

So let's add another 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 emissions to our annual output, at a time when the government is trying to cut them back by a substantial amount.

Roll on more hot summers and melting polar bears! All for the sake of faster porn downloads and pirate movies.

100MB white elephant

Kevin Rudd has committed to a project of the utmost stupidity - a government owned, $43 billion network to the home.

I've left this comment over at Bolt's place:

According to the ABS Yearbook, there were 7.4 million households in Australia in 2001. Let's say there are 8 million today. This means it will cost over $5,000 to wire up each household, assuming it is provided to 90% of them.

Assuming 1 million are rolled out per year, by the time they complete the 3 millionth household, the technology that they started the project with will be obsolete. By the time the 8 millionth is completed, the first batch of equipment to be rolled out will be replaced with 3rd generation equipment.

Assuming no running costs, no interest costs and no requirement to make a profit (all utterly unrealistic), each household will have to pay at least $110 (+gst) per month in order to pay back the upfront cost of $5,000 over a 4 year period. That's assuming a 100% takeup of the new network.

Given that many Luddites like me will happily stay on the existing commercial networks, if they only get 30% of the market, then they'll have to charge over $400 per month for each connection. Do we expect Telstra and Optus and iinet and all the rest to sit around and do nothing whilst we wait for this bloated, government behemoth to get off the ground?

Faced with paying say $90 per month for a 24mb connection (which I can get now), or over $400 per month for a 100mb connection (which I can have in 3-4 years time), I know which service I will choose - stuff 100mb!

This thing is a disaster from hell. Are these people incapable of crunching some simple numbers in a spreadsheet?

Let's have a quick look at the announcement as it appeared in the SMH:

The Federal Government and private sector will invest up to $43 billion over eight years in a super-fast national broadband network, in the ''single biggest infrastructure decision in Australia's history''.

Under the new plans, the funding for the network offering speeds of up to 100 megabits per second will be provided by a national broadband network corporation in which the Government will be the majority shareholder. The network will be operated separately from retail telcos such as Telstra and Optus.

Notice those two cop-out words are used twice - "up to". What this means is that Rudd gets to announce a massive sounding project - $43 billion - yet they may end up spending only $3 billion, because the remaining $40 billion worth of options are judged as being totally uneconomic.

Also, speeds will be "up to" 100mb. That allows them to offer say 24mb where it is not technically or economically feasible to offer the full 100mb.

Personally, I can't see the point in 100mb to the home. We are on a 1.5mb plan here, with a 12gb monthly cap. At present, that is quite sufficient for our needs. If we wanted to upgrade, the fastest we can go right now is 8mb, because we have an old router that can't go any faster than that. If I wanted to go ADSL2 with someone like iinet, which offers 24mb in our area, I'd need a new router.

We happily run 4 computers over that link, and that includes J running an internet dependent business from home and me using it for remote access to work and so on. It does the trick. Yes, one day we will upgrade to say 8mb, but that won't be this year. There is simply nothing that we are doing on the internet that requires faster speeds. If J was processing video at home and needed to upload lots of video to her business website, I could see the point in a faster link - but we're not.

We use it for the normal bog-standard things I guess most people use it for - emailing photos to family, uploading stuff to Blogger and Faceplant, downloading podcasts, skyping and web browsing.

We're not online gameheads, but I believe the main thing you need for gaming is low latency, not high bandwidth - those are two separate things.

The fibre-to-the-premise network will run to 90% of homes and businesses. The Government will make an initial investment of $4.7 billion in the company but intends to sell its interest within five years after the network is fully operational. The network will be funded from Aussie Infrastructure Bonds while private sector investment in the new company will be capped at 49%.

Let me get this right - they are going to spend "up to" $43 billion, yet start with an initial invest of "only" $4.7 billion. Where will the remaining $38.3 billion come from?

Aussie Bonds. Assuming they have capital of $4.7 billion and debt of $38.3 billion, they will have a debt to equity ratio of 8:1.

If I remember correctly, Rudd was complaining about "extreme capitalism" recently. In my opinion, a facet of "extreme capitalism" (if you happen to believe in that term) is over leveraging companies with masses of debt. If that is the case, why is he advocating loading a company up with debt at an 8:1 ratio? Is that prudent?

And last of all, do we really trust that a government agency will wisely spend $43 billion, given the temptation to throw pork at marginal seats and pet projects? Has any government department since the time of King Solomon ever spent our money wisely?

In a major blow to Telstra, Mr Rudd said it was time ''to bite the bullet'' after years of neglect of the telecommunications sector.

''Years of failed policy have left Australia as a broadband backwater,'' he said.

"Neglect"? We have a fancy 3G network available in most locations. Many Australians can get 24mb at home right now, if they are prepared to pay for it. How do you define that as neglect?

As for a "broadband backwater", just because places like South Korea and Hong Kong have higher broadband speeds, it doesn't mean we have to have them as well. Remember, both those places feature high density apartments, which are really easy to wire up with fibre. But we don't have 90% of the population living in skyscrapers - we have urban sprawl. We get more living space, but slower internet access. That is a trade off I am prepared to live with.

The Government plans to start construction in Tasmania around the middle of the year.

What on earth is the point of wiring up Tasmania with a 100MB network? What use are they going to make of it? The only I can think of is uploading home made porn featuring members of the same family. Gee Kevin, like the world really needs more of that.

The real reason they are starting in Tasmania is because if it turns out to be a complete disaster and enormous waste of money, they can quietly close it down and hope that we forget about it. If they made a complete balls-up of it in Sydney or Melbourne, everyone would know about it. If they utterly screw the pooch in Tasmania, no one will ever be the wiser. They'll just quietly tip-toe away and announce something else.

This whole things just stinks.

Convoluted technical hoo-ha

Here is a post about a big waste of time.

We have two nifty devices for managing our TV viewing habits. My first purchase was a Topfield PVR some years ago - it was so long ago, it only has an 80GB drive. I am sure there are people out there with wristwatches that have more storage than that.

To begin with, that was more than sufficient for our needs. It records at about 2GB per hour, and 40 hours of saved TV is more than enough viewing for us. We record a show, generally watch it within 2-3 weeks, then delete it. However, Monkey has different viewing habits to us. If he likes something, like Bing and Bong's Tiny Planets, he wants to watch it several hundred times. There went the idea of using the "delete" button, and slowly but surely, all the room on the hard drive has been colonised by Monkey shows. We do a spring clean every now and then as he gets older and becomes sick of certain shows, but it's funny how 80GB just ain't enough for a 3 year old.

The other device we have is a Mediagate media player. It can't record anything, but it is good for playing back stuff from its hard drive. I spent a few weeks ripping most of our DVD collection to .avi format and uploading them to the Mediagate, so we now have a library of dozens of movies and kids shows at hand.

I bought a bit of software called isofter to do the ripping - it does a pretty good job, although it bombs out if any other processes are running. Everything else has to be shutdown in order for it to work properly, including screen savers. What I like about it is that it has allowed me to eliminate all the useless puke at the start of each DVD - the crap that various marketing and legal branches of each media conglomerate force you to sit through.

I thought everyone these days was supposed to be time poor, which is why people are predicting the death of DVD rental and a move to movies on demand - impatient slobs just won't sit around and wait for anything anymore, and a 10 minute walk to and from the video rental shop is just too much to bear.

If that's the case, why does every DVD have 5 minutes of useless, time wasting crap at the start of it? How can the time poor afford to waste time sitting through that garbage?

Yesterday, I decided to experiment with moving recorded stuff from the Topfield to the Mediagate. They can't be linked directly, so I have to download to a laptop from the Topfield using a bit of software called Altair - it's slow as a wet week, since the Topfield only runs USB 1. A 2 hour recording of a movie can take most of the night to transfer to the laptop.

Once on the laptop, I run another bit of software to convert the .rec formatted recording into a .mp4 file. The laptop is not the fastest beast on the planet - converting 2 hours of stuff takes about 5 hours, or so it seems (I have not sat around to time it exactly). It would be faster to use a steam powered overhead projector to do the job than our old laptop - assuming it doesn't bomb out partway through.

That doesn't bother me in the slightest, since the laptop is not being used for anything else. If I needed it to read email or surf the intranets, I'd be annoyed, but I just sit the old thing in the corner and let it do its stuff.

It took me half a dozen attempts before I finally found a set of conversion options that would work with the Mediagate. It claims to play lots of formats, but when I first opened my conversion software, I found that it provided a list of conversion options that scrolled off the bottom of the screen. It took quite a bit of trial and error before I found a set of options that the Mediagate will live with.

Once the conversion is complete, I then have to run a different USB cable to the Mediagate (they have different connections, believe it or not) and upload the file using a bit of software called NDAS. Half the time, the software fails to work, and the laptop doesn't recognise the Mediagate, so I have to reboot both and then start playing a movie on the Mediagate. For some odd reason, if you just power it up, the NDAS software won't see it. If you actually get the Mediagate to do something, like play a movie, it suddenly sparks up and sees it. However, you have to start the movie playing before you plug the USB cable in.

All these things have to be done in the right order, and as you'd expect, none of this is mentioned in the user manual.

I thought technology was supposed to make our lives easier.

At least the Mediagate has USB2, so I can get a file onto it in a minute or two, rather than an hour or two like the Topfield.

You might think that the simple answer would be to buy a 500GB drive for the Topfield, which is an option. Yes, I could, but I won't. I don't need that change. I prefer to think of the devices as performing separate functions - one provides short term storage for "watch once" entertainment, and the other provides long term storage for "watch many" entertainment. For short term storage, we don't need acres of storage, so long as we manage it properly. The longer term storage will eventually fill up - the Mediagate has a 350GB drive in it, which is a bit over half full, but it will eventually fill up.

Some housecleaning is already required, but wouldn't you know it, you can't delete files from it using the remote control. You have to connect a PC or laptop to it via this stupid flaky NDAS software, go into Windows Explorer and delete them that way.

When I think about this kerfuffle, walking down to the video rental shop starts to sound like an attractive option.

Obama - an intellectual?

I like listening to Counterpoint - I really do. Listening to it as a podcast in the car almost makes the drive to and from work half pleasurable. But in a recent episode on intellectuals, the person they were interviewing described Obama as an intellectual.

I swear, I almost drove off the road at that point - whether from shock of hysterical laughter I am not sure which.

Here is a definition from Wikipedia, which is probably as good as any:

"Intellectual" can be used to mean, broadly, one of three classifications of human beings:

1. An individual who is deeply involved in abstract erudite ideas and theories.
2. An individual whose profession solely involves the dissemination and/or production of ideas, as opposed to producing products (e.g. a steel worker) or services (e.g. an electrician). For example, lawyers, professors, politicians, and scientists.^[1]
3. An individual of notable expertise in culture and the arts, expertise which allows them some cultural authority, which they then use to speak in public on other matters.

So what does this say about Obama?

1 - deeply involved in abstract erudite ideas and theories.

Erudite means he has read a lot of books. I've read a lot of books. Paco has read lots of books. George W actually read a lot of books too. Are we also intellectuals. Hmm, just checked the top of my head, and it does not end in a point.

Then we have "abstract ideas and theories", which to me means "utterly divorced from reality". If you really want to screw something up, get a pointy headed professor who has never had a job in the real world to devise a solution for you. Yes, Obama is heavy on the theory, but it all seems to be Marxist theory 101. I'm not sure that is a good grounding for the top job.

2 - an individual whose profession solely involves the dissemination and production of ideas, as opposed to producing products.

In the good old days of the Labor Party, the comrades who served as office holders and MPs at least came from backgrounds where they produced things - boilermakers and steelworkers and bricklayers and shipbuilders; and if they did not produce things, they moved things - wharfies and engine drivers and crane drivers. They were deeply attached to the real world, to tangible things, and they knew how the world worked.

My grandfather was a founding member of a union and of the Labor Party - he drove a train, and he figured the railways did not pay enough for a working man to support a family. The only way to change that was to form a union and agitate for higher wages, which is what they did. They took action because of their circumstances, not because of some abstract ideas generated in the ivory towers of a distant university. And note that he was almost solely interested in the welfare of the working man, as opposed to those that choose not to labour for their daily bread.

If you suggested to him that the government should give money to unmarried teenage girls who became pregnant, and furthermore gave them free housing and sustenance for every further bastard they produced, he'd have chased you off his verandah with a shotgun before you could say "human rights" (and yes, he owned plenty of firearms, and used them to shoot anything that moved).

What can we say about people that have never had a real job in their life, yet profess to know everything about how the world works for those that do have "real" jobs, and seek to raise their families in a semblance of normality? I think we used to call them "Poindexters".

3 - An individual of notable expertise in culture and the arts, expertise which allows them some cultural authority, which they then use to speak in public on other matters.

I don't think Obama qualifies on this point, unless you count looking sharp in a good suit and being good at reading lines from an adding machine with a transparent screen.

Should we trust someone with a deep knowledge of Mesopotamian art, who has cultural authority, with devising a new tax system? Or tinkering with our health system? What qualifies an intellectual to tinker with the machinery of government?

Pretty much nothing if you ask me.

Oh, by the way, Obama qualifies as an intellectual apparently because he has written two books.

I have some hefty books on my bookshelf that tackle some pretty meaty subjects. I've got Kissinger and Chomsky and I had that pillock Pilger until I couldn't bear the site of him anymore, and into the trash he went. Those guys might have moronic ideas, but they are my idea of intellectuals. But do we really want a Chomsky or a Pilger in the White House?

The guy can write a book, so he is the smartest guy on the planet. Wilbur Smith and Clive Cussler have written entire bookshelves - what does that make them?

More thoughts on Kevin's dummy spit

From time to time, I have been dudded in cafes and restaurants by being served something that I did not ask for. Just last month, I had a snack on the homeward leg of a ride out west, and I specifically asked for my meal not to include chips.

My meal came with chips. I ate a few of them (just to see if they were any good or not), and left the rest on the plate (they really weren't that good, and I didn't want a stuffed gut for the remaining 10km cycle leg). When I went to pay, the cashier noticed that I had not ordered chips, and deleted them from the bill.

Did I throw a tanty?

No.

Did I abuse the waitress who delivered them?

No.

Did I go back there for a feed on another day?

Yes. And it still wasn't that good. But that is another problem.

The thing is, I was paying for the meal myself - and yet I didn't get mad about it. These things happen. Besides, you've got to have a really thick hide to make an issue of something as trivial as that in public. How many people have the gall to stand up and start yelling at a waiter in a restaurant because they didn't get what they ordered?

And that should be the measure of this event - would he have done the same thing in public? If not, then it's inexcusable behaviour to treat someone this way out of the gaze of the public.

To cap it off, we, the taxpayers, were paying for the food and service. If he took his wife out for dinner and was dudded, and he was paying for it, then I could understand him being less than impressed. But he wasn't even paying for it - you and I paid for it. I find that to be the final insult.

One thing Kevin forgot to mention

The latest news on our Dear Leader is that he relishes dumping on powerless underlings who can't fight back, such as Air Force stewards. What a big man he is!

To date, the press has focused on this idea that the RAAF has screwed up on a number of occasions by failing to provide the vitils that Dear Leader demands. However, this assumes that someone in the Dear Leader's office bothered to tell the RAAF of his demands. What do you call that list of demands that rock groups have when they play at a gig? You know, where they ask for a bowl of M&M's that are only blue? Ah yes, a rider.

Now, one thing we know about the Dear Leader is that he flogs his staff mercilessly, working them around the clock with endless demands. 16 of them have burned out so far and quit. In those circumstances, where you have people that are fatigued, overloaded and subject to frequently changing demands, and where key people are quitting on a regular basis, don't you think it just might be possible for someone to forget to tell the RAAF that the Dear Leader wants something done a particular way?

So far, it has been assumed that the RAAF stuffed up the catering arrangements. But what if the stuff up was in fact in Krudd's office instead? How stupid would he look then, taking out his anger on a defenceless underling when the screwup was on his side of the fence instead, and all of his own making. If he didn't work his staff into the ground, they'd be less prone to making mistakes like this.

Just a thought.

Hello dick knob with rego ASN 22H

I just want to say a big "Hello, and fuck you" to the fuck-headed driver of this silver car, registration ASN 22H.


I was riding down Crane St in Concord, which leads into a sharp left hander at the bottom of the hill. The road is two marked lanes at the top of the hill, but it turns into a single lane as soon as you start down the hill - albeit a very wide lane (like in this photo). It's not uncommon for impatient and stupid drivers to ignore the fact that the road has become a single lane, and to try and undertake on the left.

I've had a few close calls on the corner in question when cars have tried to overtake me on the corner itself, which is dangerous as hell, so I normally push out into any traffic as I go down the hill and try to "dominate" my bit of road space so that no one can overtake when it gets hairy. The problem with overtaking on the corner is that cars tend to cut the corner, so if I am in the corner as they try to overtake, I get squeezed into the kerb.

It's not like I am crawling down the hill slowing down traffic either - I can happily hike down this hill at 50km/h and take the corner at 40 - and if a car tries to go around this corner at 40, they have to get in really tight, which is a problem for me if they are alongside me.

So in short, due to idiot drivers not knowing how to corner safely, I have to stick myself right out into the traffic to stay safe.

Which is what I did this morning, and the fuckface in this car still went around me, barely missing the concrete wall on her right and me on her left- and as soon as she got around the corner, she tried to overtake the car in front on a double white line! When she couldn't do that, she tailgated that car for the next mile.

So to the driver of ASN 22H, I shall re-arrange the letters of your numberplate to read "ANuS".

Burwood crash scene

Since even Andrew Bolt has seen fit to comment on this crash and the horrible aftermath, I thought I'd arise from my sick bed and go and have a look. For starters, here is Burwood Rd. The woman in question left the park behind me and tore down this road, apparently reaching 150km/h before hitting a tree (although how anyone came up with that 150km/h statement is anyone's guess). That wouldn't be easy, given the number of roundabouts and chicanes on this stretch which are designed to stop you reaching 100km/h, let alone 150km/h. But judging by the utterly mangled wreck she left behind, she was certainly travelling way above the posted 50km/h limit.


I searched this section of road several times before finding what I believe to be the tree in question. Normally after a prang of any sort, there's bits and pieces left behind on the road - paint flakes, smashed plastic from bumpers, broken glass, even bits of metal. In this case, there was nothing - the scene had been swept totally clean. There was a bit of broken glass on the other side of the road (where I am standing in the next photo), but nothing around this tree.

The thing that gave it away in the end was the brand new sign, looking very shiny in this photo. A lot of the trees along here were missing bark, so it was not totally obvious at first glance that a car had in fact hit this tree. There are no gouge marks or broken branches - just a big patch of missing bark.


The amazing thing is the lack of skid marks. There are scuffs on the kerb where the car went over it, and a tyre track across the grass, but nothing on the road. The grass isn't even torn up, meaning that I doubt she braked at all. And this tree is well before the corner, which you can see up ahead. One of the comments at Bolt's said it was suicide, and I can't argue with that.


That must have been one hell of an argument to cause someone to want to run into this tree. The other thing that I was looking for when trying to find this spot was flowers.

There weren't any. That's pretty sad.

To ride! To ride!

I'm sitting here just before 6am, having been up for nearly an hour, waiting for the sun to make an appearance over the horizon. I am stiff as a board, and need to ride to loosen up. Almost all yesterday was spent in bed with a stinking flu-induced headache, and all my muscles have locked up due to inactivity. My lower back is as unyielding as a plank of hardwood. I think the headache might have more to do with tight muscles in my neck and shoulders than the flu, which is why I need a bit of physical activity to take the strain out of them.

However, I clearly still have the flu (rough throat and an unpleasant feeling in the bowels), so going for a long ride is out of the question. I'm talking more about a quick lap around some of the local sights and a studious avoidance of anything that looks like a hill.

The bike is ready for this. I needed to do something yesterday - anything - and washing the bike seemed like as good a task as any other. It now sits outside, gleaming in the last traces of moonlight, waiting for me to do a final check on the air pressure before putting a few miles on the clock.

Ah, I can now clearly see the house next door. That means it's time to get dressed and fill the drink bottles.

What is it with modern fly sprays?

Jeez, using fly spray used to be fun as a kid. You'd give the fly a short, sharp dose of Mortein and it would literally explode in mid air, scattering wings and legs and body parts in all directions. But one knew never to leave the finger on the button for too long, because the stuff coming out of the can was nasty. Best to spray the little bastard and then leave the room. Or the house. Or even take a short holiday overseas whilst the fumes dissipated.

Using modern fly sprays, which generally don't sear the nasal passages and lungs like the old ones, is much more of a chore.

You spray the fly.

It keeps flying. You might detect a small wiggle as it gets hit by a few droplets, but they generally don't impede his progress much.

You spray again. Fly keeps going.

You spray again. Fly keeps going around and around.

You search the kitchen for a cigarette lighter, return to the room and use the can of fly spray as a flame thrower. Ah, that does the trick. Burning fly with no wings or legs is heading for the carpet.

Oops, the walls are on fire though.

What is the point of selling fly spray that refuses to kill flies? Have we gone so eco-friendly that the makers of Mortein and other noxious chemicals can't bring themselves to kill annoying insects anymore? Do we just waft essence of lavender at them and hope that they leave?

I can see a return to fly swats coming on.

Is this progress? Why invent an enormous chemical industry if we can't use it to produce fly spray in Bophal strength?

The world is going to hell in a hand basket.

Can anyone translate this?

Via darkroastedblend

Paco House

Paco House has to be seen to be believed.

And unfortunately with this one, not a good book to be seen.

Cooking for blokes

Tonight, I am making quick apple tart. To make this, you need an oven (pre-heated to 200, or whatever), a sheet of puff pastry, a jar of apricot jam, a tin of cooking apples and some margarine or whatnot. Plus some caster sugar and a can opener that takes the tops of cans faster than Jihadi's can behead juice.


I love this new can opener. It actually open cans, which is a major point of difference between it and the one in the rubbish bin.

Now, start by turning on your oven. If it is a pathetic oven like ours, go do something else for 10-15 minutes, because you need it to be hot when the pastry goes in. This thing is so quick to make, unless you give the oven a good head start, the oven will still be warming up when you're ready to pop it in.

Grease your oven tray with something. Like margarine or butter. Not axle grease or sump oil.

Question - can I use that spray stuff in a can?

Answer - what do I care? Just grease the tray! Use your fingers! Work that stuff all over the tray!

Question - can I use baking paper?

Answer - baking what?

Let the pastry thaw for a few minutes - essentially until you can cut it without it cracking. Slice it into 4 or 6 slices. Even 8 if you like. Depends on how fiddly you want to get. I advise at least 4 slices - otherwise, the middle doesn't cook and you end up with a huge tart that is crispy around the edges and soggy in the middle.


Rip the head off that can, like biting the head off a chicken. Take the apricot jam and smear a bit on each bit of pastry. Not too much - just a bit to provide flavour. I used more than normal here because we were at the bottom of the jar, and I didn't want to put a jar back in the fridge with a teaspoon of jam in it. Make sure you get it right to the edges! Nice and consistent now.

Question - can I use another jam?

Answer - what should I know? If you want to use quince jam, go for it.

Question - can I use vegemite or peanut paste?

Answer - get out of here!

Question - can I use egg wash instead of jam?

Answer - yes, that's what we did until I got sick of tossing out leftover yucky egg wash that had been in the fridge for a week, and found that jam tastes much better.


Take your 375gm tin of beheaded apple (or apricots of peaches or cherries - all work well) and spread them over each slice. Leave a bit of room around the edge so that the pastry has a chance to go crispy in that area. One small tin is just a wee bit too much for this recipe, but who wants to put 1/4 of a tin or apple in the fridge? Not me. Use the whole tin.


Sprinkle some sugar over the top. I use vanilla sugar, from the Essential Ingredient. You only need a small amount. Or you can use plain sugar and sprinkle on some cinnamon or nutmeg.

Question - can I pour vanilla essence over it instead?

Answer - I think that would seriously fuck it up, but I'm not going to stop you.

Question - how much sugar should I use?

Answer - how sweet is your tooth? If you can see sugar piled up on the fruit, book a dental appointment.

Bake for 10 minutes, then rotate each pastry so that the corner in the middle of the tray ends up on the outside. That way, each pastry will cook evenly through. Or, don't bother with that if you have a really good oven and don't have this problem.

I sometimes cook these for up to 20 minutes - it depends on how pathetic and useless our oven is feeling on any given night. Give it 10 minutes in yours then see what they look like underneath. If they are soggy, give them another 5 minutes and then test again. Don't worry if the edges are looking a bit burned - the underside has to be cooked.

Serves two hungry people. Goes well with cream or ice cream.

The joy of children

Given that I have a medium-grade lurgy, the only thing I wanted to do today was to stay in bed and sleep.

Ha. Fat chance. I was having a nice nap when I was woken by that dreaded sound of, "Look, daddy is sleep", followed by Monkey landing on the bed. I tried to bluff my way through it, but he was relentless. He finished off any hope of sleep by prying one eyelid open and going "Hello daddy".

Ugh. Time for a visit to the wear-out-a-Monkey factory.

Thankfully for us, an excellent new place called Corner Cubbyhouse has opened up not far from here. They've taken the top floor of a new office block and fitted it out as 50% cafe for mums, 50% fun stuff for kids. It includes a fairly large climbing frame thing where the kids can climb up about two storeys above the floor and then come down a terrifically fast slide. Even I like doing that.

We paid it a visit about a week after it opened. There were only about a dozen adults and a dozen kids there (all under the age of 4) in a place supposedly able to take 260. We had the place to ourselves, and Monkey thoroughly wore himself out playing with the other kids. He was so exhausted from climbing, he couldn't walk straight. The only way I could get him to stop and take a break was to bribe him with ice cream - which is when I discovered that they stock our favourite top-quality gellato in six flavours, and don't charge an arm and a leg for it.

It was so good, we had to go back again.

I took him again last weekend, and the place was a madhouse. Several different birthday parties were underway, the place was full and there were kids running everywhere. We still had a great time, and more ice cream (that is now a standard part of our visit - Monkey likes his routines, and this is now routine. Not that I am complaining). I also discovered on that visit that the adult food is top notch - I had by far the best quiche and salad that I have had in at least a decade, and it didn't cost a bomb either.

The coffee was rough as guts though, but still better than the mud they serve at our local cafes here in Five Dock. I hope they will improve the standard as they go along.

Since I was feeling pretty cactus today, and Monkey clearly needed a runaround, we really had no other option but to go back to the Cubbyhouse. I figured I could simply flop at a table with a magazine and he could run riot.

No such luck.

As soon as we walked in the door, we discovered that they had setup a large train track with two pedal train engines - big enough for two kids to sit in each, and another on the bonnet. Monkey is nuts about trains, so I spent the next hour trying to control 15 kids as they squabbled and fought over who go to drive each lap and occasionally ran each other over. The trains also derailed every time they crashed into each other, so I spent a lot of time lying on the carpet re-railing them. Bloody impossible to get the bogeys lined up with the tracks properly. There were a couple of brothers who did not get on, and they had a fist fight every few minutes with mum standing by going, "Joel, be nice to Harrison" as he socked him in the nose. After she toddled off somewhere, I had to break up a 3-way fight between 3 three year old's who all wanted the next turn.

Funnily enough, when I bark at my kids, they pay no attention. When I bark at the kids of complete strangers, they nearly jump out of their skins. I gave the three of them one gruff "Cut it out", and the next thought that crossed my mind was, "Oops, three nappy changes required".

Next came the climbing frame thing. Monkey balked at coming down a spiral slide, so guess who had to climb up inside it to encourage him to come down? Not once, not twice, but four times.

Given the slight fever I was running, I was sweating like a maniac by this stage. Clambering around inside gym equipment built for little people is hard work. Especially going up something that is designed for people coming down..

Then I witnessed the aftermath of two kids colliding head-on. Their respective mums had them in the kitchen and were trying to stem the flow of blood from split lips and conked noses. Seriously, there was blood everywhere, but they were completely unperturbed.

Just after that, Monkey was emerging from part of the climbing gym when a girl tore down a slide, spun around and punched him fair in the face with a lot of power (without meaning to). She took off as soon as he started howling, and that could only be stopped by treating it with ice cream.

Not long after that, some kids managed to run over the foot of another kid with the trains. Nothing broken or anything like that, but it certainly looked painful. They also ran over the feet or bashed the ankles of several dopey mums who were stupid enough to park their prams right next to the train tracks, and then stand with their foot a few millimetres from the rails. Idiots. Got what they deserved. Those three year olds can build up a lot of momentum and get a toy train really moving when they want to. I watched as one dozey mum landed on her arse after being collected by a kiddy driven train.

You know, those kids made better drivers than their mums. They paid more attention to what they were doing, and were focused on the task at hand.

The nice thing was that with all the minor scrapes and fights and accidental whacks, no one got upset. The odd kid would have a good cry when something particularly painful happened, but no one batted an eyelid. If this place was on the North Shore, it would have lasted a week before being closed by lawsuits.

The cars in the car park, and the quality of prams in attendance, tell me that the clientele of this establishment are well off. They're probably as wealthy as the North Shore princesses, but they are less precious. I was one of three men in the place, in amongst 50 or 60 inner west mums. If this was the north shore, their hubbies would be unemployed bankers and financiers.

Here, their hubbies are probably builders, the owners of car parts businesses and seafood vendors - but successful and wealthy builders and fish sellers. They all drive a big Mercedes, have a name like "Maria", are dripping with gold, have no taste or style - but sheesh, they are pleasant and easy to get on with and a joy to spend the morning with.

And afterwards, we went home and I went to bed and Monkey spent the whole afternoon running around and playing with other stuff. Living with an energizer bunny is not easy.

Negative role models revisited

Winston Smith is a legend.

Don't they know the US has a black president?

What are all those anarchists and other assorted rent-a-protest protesters at the G-20 thinking? Don't they know that the election of Obama cleansed the world and will he will heal global warming and remake America and so on? The election of Obama starts a new era of caring and sharing (especially of wealth) and the introduction of the insane socialists agenda that most of these fuckwits are mouthing. Even if they don't understand what they are talking about.

What have they got to protest about? Bush is gone. Blair is gone. Howard is gone.

After all, Obama is really just one of them. Except he wears a better suit, and his teleprompter isn't telling him to scream "Fuck the police" at each press conference. He was "fortunate" enough that someone showed him early on that instead of smashing windows and chanting slogans, you could get rich and powerful by putting on a suit and robbing banks legally, rather than tossing things through their front windows.

Whoops

We got a letter from some health mob a few weeks ago telling us that there had been a number of cases of whooping cough in our area. We already knew about that, as it had been covered in the papers, but it was interesting to see how the authorities reacted nonetheless.

By writing a letter.

Funnily enough, it was vaguely useful, so I will not bag them out for it.

All our kids have been jabbed for every infection known to man. I hold no truck with this anti-vaccination crowd. If you don't want to jab your kids, I don't mind. I don't believe in sticking needles into other people's children against their will. I think they are idiots, but that is not sufficient cause to trample all over their parenting rights.

If I were to be utterly harsh about it, I'd say that if stupid people breed and then make a conscious decision not to vaccinate against diseases that used to kill 1 in 3 children not 100 years ago, then if the kids die of a preventable disease, that is simply the gene pool taking care of itself. I've walked around plenty of country cemeteries and seen the age at which kids used to die, so I don't need an prodding when it comes to getting our kids poked and jabbed.

That said, I was shopping the other night, and as I walked through the fruit section, I could hear a very distinctive cough coming from down the aisle that screamed "whooping cough". Not only had this boneheaded parent decided to give their kid a great chance of getting a nasty disease, they were also stupid enough to take the little germ factory to the supermarket, thus increasing the chances of spreading the infection around.

If I had my way, we'd board them up in their houses and not let them out until all signs of infection had passed - much like the peasants did with the Black Death. By all means, don't vaccinate. But if you do happen to catch something, don't come out in public. We don't want to share in your stupid misery.

---------------

I am of course miserable at the moment because we all have a mild does of the flu. I started coming down with it this morning, just as I was getting ready to go for a ride. Thankfully I didn't. Nothing worse than being miles from home and feeling a fever coming on. Struggling home against the onset of the flu is the pits. I guess this will be a low mileage week.

Shameless plug

Righto, we now travel from one end of the BOAB spectrum of interests to the other.

Did you know that I am interested in crochet?

Yes, that might come as a surprise to many, but I am hot for crochet. Totally hot.

Which is why I am directing you to follow this link to an opportunity to win a beautiful hand crafted scarf that was made by a friend of mine. And although she has young kids, I am sure that no children were exploited in the making of this object d'art, unless you count torturing them with embarrassment whilst doing a bit of crocheting in public at their sports events.

Letters to Kevin

I'm not going to actually put pen to paper, because I don't want to waste the time of some poor, overworked underling in the Office of Prime Muncher. However, here is the gist of what I would say:

Dear Kev and Woin

I am writing to you to tell you how I am spending your cash giveaways.

Or not, as the case may be.

You see, our family has received $3,000 in cash handouts to date. That's nice. We've added that lot to the other pile that we already have in the bank. For we are savers, rather than debt-strapped got-to-have-the-latest-toy-now consumers. We have no intention of spending the money that you loaned us, or blowing the rest of our savings in an orgy of Chinese-made tat and Italian loafers.

For you did not really "give" us any money at all. In effect, it is a loan. You have handed out more money than you collected from us last year, and the difference had to be made up by borrowing it on the open market. You took that borrowed money and then loaned it to us - although you happened to call it a gift. I call it a loan.

Because the day will come when it has to be paid back. With interest.

And since you have handed that money over to both those that pay tax and those that don't, you have in fact saddled us taxpayers with a requirement to pay back much more in the future than we have received.

Let me explain.

Assume a country with 100 residents, of whom 50 pay tax, and the other 50 live off the sweat of the former. You give all 100 residents a $100 gift, regardless of whether they have contributed to the government's coffers in their lives or not.

In order to hand out that money, you had to borrow $10,000.

A few years later, the bank comes calling, and you have to pay it back. After say 5 years with interest rates running at 5%, you now have to pay back $12,763.

How do you raise that money?

By taxing the taxpayers even harder of course, since they are the only ones with any income or assets. But you only have 50 taxpayers, so their share of the repayments comes to $255 each.

So you can see what I am saving the money you "gave" us. In the example above, you would have given us $100, and then expected us to pay back $255 further down the road. Some "gift".

We are not stupid. We can work out what is going to happen.

Not only do I have to save the $3,000 that you have given us, but I know that I need to put away at least that amount again in order to meet my future increased tax obligations. In other words, all you have stimulated me to do is to cut my consumption and save even more, because you are going to screw me over in the future. With interest. I will not only have to pay my share back, but I will also have to pay for the bludgers that contribute nothing to your coffers. And to cap it off, with the next round of handouts to drunks, gamblers and the indolent, you are going to give those that earn nothing a wad of $900 and those that earn a decent living only $250.

And who do you think will be paying that lot back? The high earners of course. In the case of the next "stimulus package", if you "give" me only $250, I know that I will have to put away at least $2,000 in order to meet the future obligations that you have lumped us with.

If you ask me, that is a pretty funny way to stimulate the economy. Funny as in ha-ha, I just cut my leg off.

Yours with no sincerity at all

BOAB

The only time Obama will ever tilt to the right

"For goodness sakes, will you lot please stop Keith from trying to suck the wax out of my ear".

Who wants whom to fail?

Crap, it's been raining hard for days, and I have been cooped up indoors unable to ride. I've had to do other horrible things, like go to work.

If I can't write about riding, I'll have to write about politics.

I was listening to one of my favourite podcasts this morning (I'm 1-2 weeks behind, as usual) and there was a story on how Rush Limbaugh said he wants Obama to fail. Yes, yes - that's old news. I also heard the whole clip, so I know the context.

Big deal.

Ponder this. If you think Limbaugh was out of line, go and find me one raving lefty pinko who didn't spend the entire Bush presidency wanting him to fall flat on his face. Or for Howard to uterlly fail. Not only did they want Bush to fail, they wanted him to fail so badly, they were prepared to undermine the efforts of the US military to win in Iraq and Afghanistan (which is now a "good war" according to Obama). Go and interview 50 morons from Code Pink and see if any of them will admit to not trying to undermine and destroy Bush, Cheney and all that mob.

And so what if they were? It's a free country, and the US (thankfully) still has freedom of speech. Those stupid, deluded, lying, fuck-faced pigs can say what they like about their government, and that is all right with me (and as you can see, I'll toss it right back at them).

In that case, why is it so horrid for Limbaugh and his ilk to not want Obama's policies to succeed? I think his policies suck big time. Krudd's policies suck as well. Gordon Brown's are even worse. Apart from hoping that Krudd chokes on a ball of earwax, I don't personally wish him any harm - but I hope his policies fail to gain any traction, that they are so badly implemented that they don't destroy our economy and society, and that he leads the Labor party to utter political oblivion at the next election. I hope he goes down harder than Gough.

For fuck's sake, how did it suddenly become racist to denounce the useless policies of a white marxist with an Africa father? Are we now banned from hoping that any lefty "leader of colour" will fail? Does this mean it is now racist to hope that Bob Mugabe's fails in his latest attempts to utterly bum-fuck Zimbabwe?

Seriously, the sooner we find ourselves a lenth of railway track, a bucket of hot tar and a feather pillow for these clowns, the better off we'll all be.

Should we shield kids from car crashes?

On the one hand, we have the NRMA sponsoring a travelling troupe that visits schools and puts on very realistic plays about teenagers, speed and the aftermath of serious crashes. That program has won many plaudits, and is seen as effective. Kids, particularly teenagers, need to be confronted with the horror that stupid driving can bring.

On the other hand, we have this:

Sick Sydney entertained by violent crash deaths When a young mother crashed into a tree at Burwood, in Sydney's west, on Monday night her male loved-one ran to the car, pulling at the door in a desperate attempt to try to free her while her head slumped over.

The woman, thought to be in her 30s, died instantly.

Still he pulled at the door as the car started to smoke. He was screaming for help but some of the residents just walked out of their homes and stared. They died as mothers in pyjamas and dressing gowns watched on with dozy toddlers. As teenagers strutted around the crime scene, exhilarated, to see tragedy unfold.

Sirens and flashing blue-red lights of emergency cars or as one youth says, "the party vans" lured them to the scene. They jostled to find a clearer view. They laughed, maybe at a private joke, and took photographs. The bodies were still in view. Gore porn.

Maybe not - but one could give the crash victims the dignity of dying without spectators, their children in tow, treating crime scenes as movie theatres with snacks and drinks. Because the last thing that the dying victims saw was just that.

Vikki Campion, who wrote that story, has clearly never spent any time in Burwood - parts of it are a wog paradise, and the young wogs carry on in strange and utterly baffling ways. Wog boys between the ages of about 15 and 30 appear to have never been introduced to any of the social niceties that you and I may take for granted. The behaviour described above is no surprise to me. If you don't believe me, go to Burwood Westfield, which contains one of the most toxic concentrations of young wogs known to man.

The reporter, Vikki Campion, seems to have forgotten that she wrote this story just a day before:

It is believed the woman was travelling at about 150km/h along a straight stretch of Burwood Rd, Concord, a 50km/h zone, shortly after 11pm. Thought to be in her mid30s, she initially struck two street signs, dragging them 20m before she hit the tree and the car spun out of control.

Here is what the section of Burwood Rd in question looks like. I cycle up and down this road several times a month - a bike path that I use pops out in Bayview Park at the far end, and I then ride down Burwood Rd a while before turning north or south. It's a nice, flat, long straight stretch of road. Half the time, as I am cycling peacefully down the street, I'll hear the "zeeeep-whoosh" of a turbo-assisted wog chariot coming up behind me, as the stupid bogan driver powers up to 100 miles an hour in a 50 zone. Down near the park, the speed limit is 10km/h. Yes, 10. I'll be tonking through it at 45 on my bike, and cars will go past me like I am standing still. The crash happened down near where the red marker is located.


It must have happened on or near this corner. The council or RTA has poured lots of concrete over the years at this intersection to narrow it in order to slow cars down. There is an island down the middle, plus "pinching" islands both sides. They've almost made it too narrow for buses to get through, but I guess they had to get serious in order to slow cars down. They've also put in roundabouts and other islands up the road to mellow the traffic.


None of those engineering works succeeded in slowing this fool down. I have zero sympathy.

If the rain lets up, I'll think about riding past here and finding exactly where she left the road. I guess she was flying along, then realised there was a corner coming up, braked heavily and lost it. Should have paid for the ABS option. Ah well.

Funnily enough, I was talking to a female friend who was caught in the CBD by the power blackout earlier this week. She said that there were some drivers who were just pigs - traffic had been brought to an utter standstill, but they still tried to aggressively barge in front of other cars in order to get one or two spots ahead, or they drove into intersections when they knew there was no hope of getting across, and stopped in the middle of them, blocking traffic from getting past them from either side.

Speaking of which, I couldn't get across an intersection on the way to work yesterday - traffic was tailed up ahead of me - so I stopped before going across. A bloke came up the parking bays on my left, went around me, and then stopped in the middle of the intersection as the light went red. The annoyed drivers to his left beeped and tooted, and he just sat there like he had done nothing wrong. What a prick.

Anyway, my friend stuck in town said young female drivers were by far the worst.

Her comment: "We never should have given them the vote, or the right to drive".

Actions have consequences

Stop the violence, begs bikie mother

THE distraught mother of Anthony and Peter Zervas has pleaded for an end to the bikie war in which one of her sons was killed and another seriously injured.

Efie Zervas, speaking to channels Nine and Seven, said: "Just tell them to stop … Violence is not the answer," repeating her plea like a mantra.

Um, lady - your kids joined a bikie gang. You are aware of what some bikies get up to, aren't you? You are aware that some participate in all sorts of illegal activities that are highly likely to attract or involve violence?

They chose their path. You failed to stop them. No use complaining now. Actions have consequences. Live with it.