Just what we need - artists defined as "key workers"

The story - there were 15 or so "artists" living in a run down house in a very posh suburb in the eastern suburbs, until the owners finally got around to doing the place up and kicked them out. The house was so decrepit, they were paying $500 per week.

That warmed the cockles of my heart. In my younger days, I too spent years crammed into low rent flea pits with all manner of neer-do-wells. It took me back to a time when I was carefree and had enough cash in my pocket for at least two raucous nights out per week. At one point in the late 1990s, I spotted an ad in the paper for a very large, relatively cheap house at Bondi. It was obviously a dump, and it would have required 7 or 8 people to live in it to afford the rent of about $100 a week each. I was sorely tempted to take the lease and then fish around and collect a gaggle of bums to share the place.

It's a problem faced by aspiring young creative people across the city: how to afford to pursue an artistic career in Sydney, rated this year by The Economist as the world's third-most expensive city after Tokyo and Osaka?
The City of Sydney is proposing one answer. The council is pushing to have artists included in the definition of ''key workers'' - a category traditionally limited to low-income public sector workers who provide essential city services such as police, nurses, teachers and paramedics. The change would make artists eligible to apply for the limited supply of affordable housing set aside for key workers.
''There's all kinds of workers that a city needs, and not all of them will earn $100,000 a year but they are still crucial to city infrastructure and city liveability,'' Rachel Healy, who runs the council's cultural policy, says. Even established artists often earn well below the average wage, and ''there's a strong view that artists should be recognised as key workers''.
While all young people are hit by the high cost of housing in Sydney, there are strong economic and cultural arguments to help early-career creative artists to stay in the city, Healy says.
The creative industries contribute $8.2 billion to the city economy, and the sector is growing faster than all other industries, according to a recent state government draft report.
Creative people contribute much to the liveability of a city, and that cultural overlay helps attract mobile, educated graduates from all industries, Healy says. If creatives are priced out of the city, ''the overall experience of Sydney is profoundly compromised,'' she says. ''It's a very different kind of problem than, 'Oh well, it's just a bit sad that it's only the lawyers and accountants live here'.''

Ah, those were the days.

Anyway, how is a struggling artist supposed to make do in an expensive place like Sydney?

Simple - do what we did. Grow up and get a fucking job.

When did young drivers become so pathetic?

When I was young, I drove like my nuts were on fire and I needed to get somewhere very fast in order to put them out. A slew of accidents testified to the fact that I thought I was a much better driver than I really was, coupled with excess speed and a fairly reckless attitude around getting from A to B.

Whilst there are still plenty of young drivers wrapping themselves around power poles at 0300hrs, I've noticed an increase in totally pathetic P-platers. My weekend road trip took me through a number of fixed speed cameras. They were advertised well in advance, so there was no hope of anyone actually getting booked for speeding. However, instead of slowing down to say 89km/h to go through a 90km/h camera, I was stuck behind a series of young numpties who insisted on slowing down to 60km/h in a 90 zone.

60!! If the kids weren't in the car, I would have been turning the air blue with expletives. What's gotten into the little buggers?

More adventures in Gongolia

Spent the weekend at a friend's place down the coast, just past Gongolia. I've come back without the major symptoms of Gongoloidioness, which generally involve writing long rants about random stuff.

I took the bike. I'm trying to decide whether that was a mistake or not. The land around our place is relatively flat. The land where we stayed was anything but, and I failed to consult a topographic map before going on my ride. Hills. More hills. Huge freaking hills - one after the other. Good for your fitness, but insanely hard work. I thought I was going to die.

But dying of heart failure on the outer Gongolian hills was the least of my worries. Getting mangled on the drive back was a greater risk - because some of the morons driving home on Sunday night were either driving with two blown headlights, or they couldn't work out why they had a hard time seeing where they were going on a pitch black freeway at 9pm. Don't ask me what it is about Gongolia that does this to people, but it's pretty frightening.

Death to flappy straps

I hadn't thought about this in years, but it was forced into my consciousness recently.

I have a thing about flappy straps on back packs. Those of you who have lugged the green variety around should understand my lunatic obsession. When I get a new back pack, the first thing I do is set the straps to the correct length, then either cut off the excess strap or roll it up and bind it with insulation tape (black only). Or I cut a fair bit of strap off, leave a bit in case I need to loosen it later and then bind up the excess straps with tape.

There can be no flappy straps. All loose straps must be neatly tidied away.

I hadn't even realised I was doing this until Junior borrowed a back pack recently. When it was returned, all the straps were flapping loose - he'd pulled off the tape to adjust the straps, but then hadn't tidied them up again before returning it. (Actually, I found it on the floor in his bedroom under a pile of rubbish, socks and noodle packets when I had to go looking for it).

I was about to launch into a loud rant when I caught myself and stopped. How on earth was I going to explain the whys and wherefores of this non-flappy strap requirement? It was better to just shut up, find the insulation tape and tidy them up again.

How crap was your car?

Fascinating look at how the cars of the past have faded away. Here and here.

I love these videos

I love these videos that show how quickly new inventions have been adopted over the last century.

Overdrive

Overdrive - a word I suddenly thought about when I was considering taking the teenagers for a practice drive around the block. It's presumably meaningless to most of the teenagers of today - I'll have to ask them if they really understand what it means. Having grown up in the days of the three on the tree, and considering a 4 speed floor shifter to be the height of automotive sophistication, it's amazing to consider the advances that have now given us 7 and 9 speed automatic transmissions, flappy paddles and all that sort of stuff.

Back in the 1980s, I was lent for about a year a small sporty car that had overdrive. I think that was the only car I've ever driven for an extended period that was fitted with it. It was operated electrically by a button on the gear knob. Being an English car, it amazed us by working - most of the time. Whether it produced better fuel economy on the long country drives was another matter - I didn't notice any improvement. However, I'm sure it allowed car salesmen to shift a few more units of product.

I'll have to think of some more words that no longer really have a contemporary meaning. Whilst people still talk about shifting into overdrive, the overdrive itself is long gone as a useful product.

Why can't the public sector develop good services?

Catching a bus isn't that painful these days thanks to a great app called TripView. After trying the free version, I was more than happy to spend a huge $2.99 on the full version. Anyone paying a visit to Sydney with the intention of catching a train, ferry or bus should buy it before they get here. It's brilliant.

It doesn't eliminate the smelly, fat people that you have to deal with on the bus occasionally, but it takes the hassle out of catching public transport at the right time.

The software was developed by a private company. When they started, they didn't have real time information on the location of the bus or train that you wanted to catch - that was introduced this year. In fact, the public monopolies were so manic about keeping their timetabling information to themselves, that the company had to develop a way to scrape the timetables from their websites. It just goes to show how individual persistence and ingenuity can overcome bureaucratic stupidity and inertia.

Many years ago, I used to drink with a bloke who was a software developer for the railways. This was back in the days of the Nokia banana phone - the one used by Nemo in The Matrix. That's how long ago this was. He managed to convince his boss to buy something more advanced than the Nokia 3210, which was the most popular phone at the time. He got one that came with a very basic data service, and in his spare time on weekends, he developed an app that could push timetable information to the phone.

It was pretty hopeless, but it demonstrated what could be done with a very clunky phone and a data service that ran at no more than 9kb/s. It was also expensive to run as data services were in their infancy.

So it ended up being a total failure, but it was an interesting experiment. He tried to get some internal support to take it further - to turn it into a customer facing app - but management couldn't be less interested. Making life easier for the customer was not in their remit. They didn't think anyone would want to use it. In the end, he moved on, and I haven't had a beer with him in quite a while.

When the conservatives got into power, one of the things that they did was to force the public transport operators to open up their timetables and real time information feeds to private software developers. I imagine the Transport Minister had to beat the bureaucrats over the head with a baseball bat for months to make that happen. Resistance would have been intense, and I bet one of the reasons for resisting would be the idea that they suddenly wanted to develop an app like this, and allowing private competition would put that project at risk.

I saw things like that happen a few times when I was in the public sector. The bureaucrats would have less than zero interest in doing something until someone from outside popped up and said that they could do it. With great rapidity, the bureaucrats would circle the wagons and mount a spirited defense to ensure that the interloper didn't trespass on their turf. Once the interloper was beaten back, they went back to doing nothing about that particular issue. Protection of their turf was key. Delivering a service to the public was barely even considered.

So if you ever get to use TripView, you can thank the current Minister and her staff for belting the bloody bureaucrats until they relented and made the timetabling and real time information public. Or at least partly public. Whenever I have to catch a bus or train, I say a silent thanks to Gladys.

And people wonder why I always get my iced coffee from the same place

I have often been accused of being a man of rigid habits - for not trying new things on a whim - and instead sticking to the tried and tested. I won't argue with that too much - I have my moments where I throw caution to the wind and give something new a go, but generally, I go with what I know.

I had an early morning meeting at the other end of town this week, so I breakfasted at Vivo Cafe. After scanning the menu, I discovered that they sold an iced latte that looked awfully like what I always want - just coffee, milk and ice. However, there was a wrinkle, as the menu explained:

Cold Brew Coffee 
All our cold coffee drinks start with this base. This method of cold extraction gives a sweet, full bodied flavour without any bitterness. It takes over 8 hours to extract 3 litres of coffee!

This I was not so sure of. I always ask the barrista to pull me a fresh shot of coffee straight from the machine, and to add extra ice if necessary to cool down the drink. If the coffee and barrista are any good, this pretty much guarantees a good iced coffee. However, I decided I'd give this "cold brew" method a crack.

And the results?

For $5.80, it was almost the most expensive, disgusting iced coffee I've ever sampled. It wasn't the most expensive, or the most disgusting - but it was up there (or down there) with the worst. The coffee was insipid and sickly sweet - almost undrinkable. It's what you get when your palate has been fouled by the commercial "iced coffees" that pollute the supermarkets across the eastern seaboard - products that have 10 times too much sugar in them and nowhere near enough coffee. It's what you get when you believe the market is crying out for yet another sweet, sugary concoction. As if we don't have enough of those already!

The breakfast itself wasn't bad. Can't complain about the service. Price was what you'd expect in the middle of the CBD (ie, expensive). But the iced latte was the pits.

There goes another suit

Every now and then, I have to don black tie for an event. It's been quite a while since I've had to do this - having kids precluded us from attending these sorts of things for some years, but the kids are now at an age where such things are possible again. It was just too expensive to hire a nanny etc on a regular basis - cheaper to stay at home and be unsociable. With an event coming up, I decided tonight I should pull the suit and shirt out of the wardrobe and check that they still fit.

Just one small problem - all the cycling since our last social outing has caused my thighs to swell somewhat. Actually, more than somewhat. "Enormously" would be more accurate. I can't fit into my bloody trousers anymore! With a lot of tugging and squeezing, I managed to get them on and found to my amazement that I could do them up - the waist was fine - but sitting down or moving was out of the question. Bending over would surely result in a great deal of seam splitting in the worst possible place.

So there's an unexpected cost of cycling. New suits.

The wretchedness of trying to build a cheap PVR

My old PVR is dead. To give you an idea of how old it is, it contains a 40GB hard drive. It's ancient - not even worth trying to salvage any bits out of it.

Since Le Tour is approaching, I need to get something up and running to record SBS. I've been looking at a variety of PVRs that range from very cheap to around 500 bucks, and I'm yet to find one that really stands out and says "buy me". I want something that will record TV and allow me to copy existing movies onto it over the network - I've ripped most of our DVDs, and I don't like the idea of using attached external storage.

I was having a hard time deciding what to do, when I had a brain wave. I bought a new PC recently, so why not rebuild the old one as a PVR? How hard could it be?

Well, for something that seemed so straightforward at first, it's turned into a nightmare thanks to Bill Gates and his crew of useless programmers. I thought about building it with Linux for about 5 seconds, and then gave that idea away. I rebuilt an old laptop last year with Linux, and whilst it worked and ran well, I never gelled with the software. I'm starting to have second thoughts about using Linux.

The only OS I had for the old PC was Vista, so I plonked it on - dead easy. Then I tried to apply service pack 1. I must have tried it 20 times over the last 4 days, and spent hours looking at workarounds on various forums. I've even rebuilt the PC 5 times - no dice. It just refuses to accept SP1.

Which is bonkers, since I rebuilt it and installed SP1 and SP2 just last year. Maybe it hates me for relegating it to the lounge room. I don't know.

Anyway, my advice after dicking around with it for the better part of an entire weekend is just go out and buy a proper PVR that someone else has built.

This is good

I picked this ad up over at Samizdata, where they are arguing about whether this ad will annoy the living daylights out of you, or make you want to drink gin.



Right now, I feel like a G&T. I guess it comes down to your personality.

How do you feel about it?

The bloody weather, amongst other things

One thing you develop as a cyclists is a reasonably keen interest in the weather. There's no climate control button on the handlebars that will keep you at a constant 21 degrees, and of course there's no protection from any of the elements. Or insects. Birds. And dogs.

A few short months ago, I was complaining about the heat. Now, I'm worrying about how cold it will be tomorrow morning, and looking forward to when it starts warming up again. We're never satisfied. It's almost always too hot, too cold, too windy, too wet or too dry.

We've managed to get out of town for a few weekends so far this year, travelling down beyond where the Gongoloids live. Or the Gongolians. Either term fits (that's how I describe the denizens of Wollongong and its  environs). On our first visit, I packed the bike and went for an early morning ride around the local area of the beachside town that we were staying in. Bloody hell - I almost died of heart failure on the umpteenth hill. I have never been so knackered and ready to quit on a ride. Ever.

I can do big hills, and I can do a fair few hills, but I can't do lots of big hills with very little spacing between them where you can recover. It was like riding a rollercoaster. I met a few middle aged blokes cycling the other way - they looked as drained and haggard as I. I wonder if they were also asking themselves why on earth they were suffering so on a beautiful Saturday morning.

I missed that Saturday afternoon as I got home, showered and promptly slept for 5 hours.

We have since been back again. For various reasons (cowardice not included), the bike stayed at home. However, we did a family outing and I had the opportunity to drive the same route that I had previously cycled.

Our car, and lots of other cars, struggled to make it up the hills that almost killed me - they were deceptively steep and horribly long. It was no wonder I'd suffered so much.

Next time, I'll have a look at a map before heading out, and take note of the topography.

Phew

I think posting has been so light of late because the new template was annoying me no end. It made Blogger as slow as a wet week, and it always screwed up the layout of most posts. So it's back to the future for me.

We eat a lot of icecream

I bought this book on ice cream manufacturing many years ago - don't ask why. Back then, it cost me over a hundred bucks.

The current edition has a table showing per capita consumption for different countries. Australia leads the pack at 17.9 somethings - the table is not clear what it is measuring. Volume? Value? Waffle cones?

That's my factoid for the day. And now, I feel like some gellato.

And now for the best ribs that I have had in decades

You wonder why I blog about food and cycling a lot? Simples - I like to eat (I am  not some svelte skinny super model as a result), so I need a means to burn off the intake. I'm not big on vomiting after a meal to keep the calorie intake down.

After trashing a joint in my last post, let me introduce you to some good tucker - a place calls Ribs & Burger. They were so good, I'm thinking about going there for lunch. Right now. Even though it isn't even 11am yet.

Yes, they're in a food court, and the ribs can be a bit expensive - but bloody hell - they're good. I don't mind forking out the cash if the food is worth it, and these are worth every cent.

If you can get over the bit about it being in a food court, then it's heaven on a stick. I just wish my local pub served ribs this good - can't think of anything better than spending an evening with a fine platter of ribs and a few cold beers in a place with a bit of ambiance. (Did I mention they're in a food court, which has the ambiance of, well, a food court?)

The worst ribs ever - in the entire universe even

My food intake spans the entire spectrum from bad to good. After spending years surviving on boarding school food, uni college food and army ration packs, I'm really not that fussy about what I'm eating when I need to eat. If I'm hungry, I'll shovel down whatever is on offer. Except maybe the sheep's eyeball. Unless it comes with a tasty sauce on the side.

On the other hand, when I have a bit of time and money to spare, I like to eat as well as I possibly can. That's when the food snob side takes over. I don't see the point in eating a bad meal if you have the means to eat a good meal.

Which brings me to Pancake Parlor. We've eaten there twice in the last 6 months - mainly because the kids needed feeding when we were on an outing and it was there. And OK, I needed feeding too. It serves up the sort of bland, sweet, filling food that will tempt kids in the 4-18 age bracket to actually eat when you want them to eat.

I'm not going to fault the pancakes - they are "pan cakes". If you like that sort of thing (and clearly the Japanese students living within walking distance of Darling Harbour really like that sort of thing), then they do it quite well. Big, fat bland cakes that have been cooked in a pan and then smothered with cheap cream, icecream or syrup. Or all three. They are definitely not my thing - I prefer a thin crepe that can be rolled up and shoveled down like a cheap, fat cigar.

That's not a very good analogy, but it's early on Sunday morning, so it will have to do.

As an aside, Mum bought a crepe pan back in the late 1970s. It was electric, and it had a convex non stick surface that was perfect for making crepes. You made a bowl of crepe mix (which is thinner than pancake mix) and then dipped  the upside down crepe maker into the mix. It was the height of sophistication back then. It's pretty clear where my food snobbery comes from. It was fun as a young kid to make the crepes, and then flame them in a good glug of brandy. My parents have always enjoyed sloshing alcohol onto things and then letting the kids set it on fire. So long as the kids didn't get splashed with brandy and also get set on fire, everything was fine. My parents still do it whenever kids and dessert are in the same room. Dad would set fire to apple pie if you let him.

So I'm a crepe guy, not a big fat pancake guy. But the kids don't mind the pancakes, so we've eaten there twice.

On both occasions, I've had the ribs. The ribs are expensive at $26, and for that price, I expect pretty good ribs. I also can't take pancakes for lunch. It's just wrong.

Pretty good ribs are exactly what I didn't get. I tried the beef ribs the first time round - they were adequately cooked, but not falling off the bone, and the sauce appeared to have been painted on at the last minute. They were edible, but overpriced and underspiced. I can understand the lack of kick - the demographic they are serving are probably not interested in a really spicy set of ribs.

Second time around, I went for pig. I had much the same experience, expect the ribs were served cold. Not frozen. Not fridge temperature. Just "I've been sitting on the bench for 3 hours" cold. There was not a hint of warmth in a single rib of that pig.

Under normal circumstances, I would have sent them back for a bit of nuking. However, I gave the staff one look (The fish that John West rejected was the first thing that came to mind) and decided I'd just grin and bear it. After all, they weren't that good to start with, so eating them cold wasn't going to make them much worse.

And you know what? That was pretty much correct. The youngest has just walked over with a toy bucket and told me that it's his chum bucket. Thanks to that happening, the Pancake Parlor and the Chum Bucket are now firmly fixed in my mind as twins. By the way, read down at the link to see what chum is made of.

The sad thing is that we will inevitably eat there again, and I'll eat the ribs - again. I'm a sucker for punishment.

My guts know if I'm going to ride or not

Do you ever promise yourself you'll get up early and do something the following morning, and then you wake up at 0-dark-hundred and start shilly-shallying about doing it? You lie there and your brain starts processing the pros and cons of doing whatever it is you were going to do, and half the time, you don't end up getting out of bed.

Now that the weather is getting wetter and colder, I'm experiencing more of those moments. It's OK during the week - I  have to get to work, and the later I leave, the worse the traffic will be. Is there really much difference between leaving at 0600 when it's 12 degrees and raining or at 0700 when it's 13 degrees and raining and the roads are full of half asleep drivers who are more dangerous than a Nigerian with your bank account details.

The weekends are something altogether different. I don't have to do anything, but I like to get up early and get some exercise and preferably a bit of social interaction with some other cyclists.

The clearest indicator of whether I will ride or not is my guts. I have some sort of subconscious connection between the lizard component of my brain and my bowels. If the primeval part of my brain knows I am going to ride, then the bowels start moving and it's game over - I have to get up, crap and then go do a few miles. 

I think this is because I went for an early morning swim many years ago, and found that as I was walking towards the beach just before sunrise, I had an absolutely overwhelming need to do an enormous crap. It's a good thing the public toilets at North Bondi were open at that hour - otherwise, I would have crapped on the grass out of sheer necessity. There was no holding it back.

Since then, my guts have never let me leave the house for any form of exercise without voiding themselves first. It doesn't matter what I'm doing - swimming, skiing, running, cycling or just going for a long stroll - the guts are taking no chances. They're never getting caught short again.

So for me, I don't have to stuff around trying to decide whether to ride or not. If the guts say "go", I go. And frankly, they usually make better decisions than my brain.

More great cullinary disasters

Made chocolate mousse tonight. You know how it is supposed to be soft and fluffy and light?

Mine is like aerated concrete.

However, it's pretty potent. More than a few spoonfuls supplies a rush like 6 cups of coffee and a tab of speed.

Something from a seat of learning

I give you - the Bristol stool scale. Developed at the University of Bristol. This has nothing to do with home furnishings.

See? Not everything that comes out of modern unis is complete crap.

Stupid decisions = bad outcomes

Friday was one of those days when I must have taken some stupid pills after lunch. I couldn't believe how idiotic I was when I rode home. For starters, I misjudged how fast a car was coming towards me at an intersection, and I rode right out in front of it. Thankfully, the driver was smarter and faster reacting than me, and they braked and avoided running me down.

Not 2 minutes later, I made a silly overtaking decision and narrowly avoided a head on prang with another cyclist.

After that, I took it really, really easy. I'm convinced things like this happen in threes, and I didn't want number 3 to end up with me getting carted off in the back of an ambulance.

Here's my gripe for the day - people make stupid decisions all the time, but there are some that are adamant that the bad outcome they just suffered was a result of a stupid decision they made earlier. Blame always has to be sheeted home somewhere else. I know that if I'd ended up under that car yesterday, it would have been my own damned fault for being a bonehead - and I'd learn my lesson and not do it again. What is it with some people that refuse to admit they were stupid, and continue to make the same stupid  mistakes again and again?

Cream snobs

I've done something right.

I've raised my kids to be cream snobs.

I whipped up a self saucing chocolate pud tonight. In anticipation, I put "double cream" on the shopping list - that's the best stuff to have with a rich chocolate pudding.

The missus obliged and duly brought home a tub of double cream. However, I forgot to mention that some of the local supermarkets are no longer stocking proper double cream - they only carry cream that has been thickened with gelatin. I've found that out from reading the ingredients of every tub of cream in the supermarket fridge.

So we ended up with gelatin infused cream in the fridge - an abomination in my books - but I was none the wiser.

The kids got a bowl of pudding each. The cream was put on the dining table for them to serve themselves.

Both tried the cream and said, "I'm not eating that". I was told in no uncertain terms to return to the kitchen, find some proper cream and whip it up. Which I did. Bless their little cotton socks. They might be unable to read the ingredients on a tub of cream, but they can tell crap when they see it.

You want sauce with that?

I've discovered an excellent burger place in the city - the wagyu steakburger is a killer. The steak is literally melt in the mouth - I can't ever remember biting into a "minute steak" and not finding myself chomping and gnashing at it in an effort to bite off a chunk, and ending up with a slice of tomato sliding out and landing on my shirt.

The burgers are good.

The chips are pretty good too - big, fat chunky things. The perfect antidote to skinny little french fries.

The sauces that you can have with your chips are bloody good - especially the aioli.

Just one issue.

The burgers cost around 10 bucks. That much is made clear from the big board behind the counter.

I figured out the chips cost $3.50 a serve by ordering some with a burger and then subtracting $9.90 from the total price. I've been there 4 times, and am yet to find a menu that lists the chips and their cost.

The killer is the cost of the sauce - 2 bucks for a little tub of sauce. Yes, the sauce is fantastic, and I love dipping my chips into it, but I hate the fact that I only worked out the cost by ordering a burger, chips and sauce and then subtracting the cost of the first two items from the total cost. Two bucks is a lot to pay, which is probably why they do their best to shield you from the cost. By the time you've handed over more than 15 bucks, it's too late to retract the sauce. You're hooked. You're suckered.

And you're very well fed. I like the food. It's the transparency that sucks.

That said, if I had known the first time how expensive the sauce was, I never would have ordered it, and I never would have found out how good it was. Colour me torn......

Since when did breakfast cost 25 bucks?

I took advantage of the Easter break to put some extra miles on the bike. Saturday's foray took me to a stamping ground that is becoming familiar - Danks St in Waterloo. There are a number of fine looking cafes along a strip about 100 metres long, and I've decided to work my way through them as time permits.

As most of the cafes were closed that morning when I got there, the choice came to the Sonoma Bakery or Societe wine bar.

I chose Societe. I wish I'd read the reviews on Urbanspoon first - most were pretty unhappy with the place.

Let me add my unhappiness to the list.

Coffee - not too bad. No complaints.

Service - fine, but there were only 2 of us in the whole place.

Decor/atmosphere/seats - no complaints

Food - when I pay $21.50 for an omelet, I expect a world class experience. Instead, I got something that was so dry, I was sure the chef had simply dropped a few yellow kitchen sponges into the frying pan and then tossed a few other ingredients on top. It took me a while to chew through it, and it wasn't that tasty. I like my omelets to ooze, and to be bursting with squishy flavour. I got anything but that.

I forgot to mention what toast I wanted, so I didn't get any at all. 1 out of 10 if you're lucky for both quality and value.

The pricing might have been Easter pricing with lots of loadings, but it was still a freakingly expensive meal for one. And given how poor it was, I might as well have given 25 bucks to a wino and watched him spend it on cheap port.

I didn't even consider ordering an iced coffee - they wanted 7 bucks (yes, seven bucks!!!!) for an iced coffee, and I couldn't be bothered trying to haggle them down given that I don't want any cream, ice cream of chocolate sprinkles or syrup polluting my coffee. When I saw what they wanted to charge for something so simple, I knew I was in trouble. So actually the completely rooted omelet was not that much of a surprise when it arrived.

The upside is that there are at least half a dozen more places to try along Danks St, and even more along Bourke St, so one failure isn't anything to worry about.

Hard work (for someone else)

When the kids were younger, I thought about getting one of these kid-bike things that you bolt onto the back of your bike in order to tow the youngster around.

Glad I didn't - watching this bloke struggle up this ramp put me right off it. His kid was just lying back, feet off the pedals, not doing a thing to help. Then again, the excess baggage around my guts probably weighs about as much as his kid plus the bike, so who am I to talk?

I just realised my headmaster must have read Xenophon

I stumbled upon "Spartan Society" by Xenophon today, and his description below bears some eerie similarities to my boarding school experiences...... The whole thing is worth a read.


4. Now that I have explained about procreation I want to give a precise account of education. Elsewhere in Greece those who claim to give their sons the finest education put their children under the care of servants as tutors and dispatch them to schools to learn reading and writing and music and the art of wrestling. They make their children’s feet soft with shoes and their bodies delicate with many clothes. As for food, they let them eat as much as their stomachs can hold. But Lycurgus, in place of the private assignment of slave tutors to each boy, stipulated that a man should take charge of them as Train-in-Chief. Lycurgus gave this man authority both to assemble the boys and to punish them severely. He also gave him a squad of young adults equipped with whips to administer punishment when necessary. The result has been that respect and obedience in combination are found to a high degree at Sparta.

5. Rather than letting boys’ feet grow soft in shoes, he told them emphatically to make them strong by not wearing shoes, in the belief that this practice should enable them to walk uphill with greater ease, jump better, and run faster than the one with shoes. And instead of their clothes serving to make them delicate, he required them to become used to a single garment all year round, the idea being that thereby they would be better prepared for cold and heat. As for food, he instructed the eiren to furnish for the common meal just the right amount for them never to become sluggish through being too full, while also giving them a taste of what it is not to have enough. His view was that boys under this kind of regimen would be better able, when required, to work hard without eating, as well as to make the same rations last longer; they would be satisfied with a plain diet, would adapt better to accepting any type of food, and would be in a healthier condition. He also considered that a diet which produced slim bodies would also make them grow tall.

6. On the other hand, while he did not allow them to take what they required effortlessly, to prevent them suffering from hunger he did permit them to steal in order to ward off starvation. Clearly a prospective thief must keep awake at night, and by day must practice deception and lie in wait, as well as have spies ready if he is going to seize anything. So clearly it was Lycurgus’ wish that by training the boys in all these ways he would make them more resourceful at feeding themselves and better fighters. Someone might ask then, if he considered theft a good thing, why on earth did he inflict many lashes on a boy who was caught stealing? My answer is, because people chastise anyone who does not perform satisfactorily. After making it an honor for them to snatch as many cheeses as possible from the Temple of Artemis Orthia, he commanded others to whip them, thereby demonstrating that a short period of pain may be compensated by the enjoyment of long-lasting prestige. With the intention that even in the absence of the Trainer-in-Chief the boys should always have someone ein charge of them, he authorized any citizen who happened to be present at the time to give the boys whatever instruction he thought proper, and to punish any slip they might make. By this measure he gave the boys a greater sense of respect. To ensure that someone should be in control of the boys even when no adult happened to be on the spot, he deputed the smartest of the eirens to take command of each squadron. As a result the boys of Sparta are never without someone in charge of them.

7. The time when boys reach their teens is the very moment when others remove them from tutors, remove them from schools and have nobody in charge of them any longer, but rather leave them independent. Here, too, Lycurgus took the opposite view. Because he appreciated that at this age boys become self-willed and are particularly liable to cockiness — both of which produce powerful cravings for pleasure — this was the age at which he loaded them with the greatest amount of work and contrived that they should be kept occupied most of the time. In his wish to see a sense of respect strongly implanted in them, he have orders that even in the streets they should keep both hands inside their cloaks, should proceed in silence, and should not let their gaze wander in any direction, but fix their eyes on the ground in front of them. Certainly, you would sooner hear a cry from a stone statue or succeed in catching the eye of a bronze one than a Spartan boy. And whenever they attended the mess, they were only allowed to respond to questions the men put to them. Such, then, was the attention he devoted to youths.

8. However, he displayed the greatest concern by far for the young adults, in the conviction that they had the most influence for the good of the state if they were of the right character. From his observation that when people have the strong innate spirit of competition their choruses are the ones most worth watching, he came to think that if he could also urge the young adults to compete in excellence, then they would attain the height of manly gallantry. Let me explain how he used to urge them.

9. From among them the ephors select three of those in their prime. Each of these picks 100 men with a clear explanation of why he approves some and rejects others. As a result those who do not achieve the honor are at war with both those who have dismissed them and those chosen instead of them, and the two groups are on the lookout for any negligent act which may go against the accepted standards of honor. This is also the type of competition most highly favored by the gods and best suited to a citizen community — in which the conduct demanded of brave men is spelled out and each of the two groups independently strives to ensure that it will always prove superior. But should any need arise they would as one protect the city with all their might. They must keep themselves physically fit too, since their rivalry brings on fights whenever they meet. However, all passers-by have the right to separate the combatants. Anyone who defies the man attempting to separate them is brought before the ephors; they levy a stiff fine in their desire to establish the principle that anger must never prevail over respect for the law.

10. As for those who have passed beyond the youngest grade of adulthood, other Greeks, after removing their obligation to keep up their physical strength, nonetheless require them to go on serving in the army when necessary. Lycurgus by contrast made hunting the noblest of pastime for men of this age, so that they could stand up to the exertions of campaigning just as well as the youngest men. This then completes my account of the training Lycurgus prescribed by law.

11. When Lycurgus too the Spartans in hand they were living in separate households like Greeks elsewhere. He concluded that this was the cause of a great amount of misbehavior and so devised his scheme for common messes, thinking gthat these would reduce disobedience. The rations he fixed in such a way that they should have neither too much nor too little food. There is never a shortage of food on the table, yet neither is there a lavish spread. When it came to wine he stopped excessive drinking — which causes both physical and mental degeneration — and just let each man drink whenever he felt thirsty. In his view this is the least harmful and most enjoyable way of drinking. With common messes of this type how would anyone ruin either himself or his household by greediness or alcoholism?

12. In other cities men of the same age generally congregate together and respect only their own social group. But at Sparta Lycurgus mixed ages together in the belief that it is beneficial for the younger men to learn from the older ones. Indeed, it was the custom that any noble act on the part of any citizen was discussed in the messes, so that there was limited opportunity for drunken behavior. Eating out certainly brings out more benefits. To get home the Spartans have to walk, taking care not to trip and fall under the influence of wine. They also have to do in the dark what they do by daylight; men still liable for military service are not even allowed a torch. Lycurgus further noted that the same rations improve the complexion, physique, and strength of hard workers, whereas they give lazy people a bloated, ugly, and feeble appearance. It would certainly not be easy for anyone to find men healthier or more physically adept than Spartiates.

13. Lycurgus definitely held the opposite view to the majority of Greeks in the following ways too. In other cities each man is master of his own children, slaves, and property.. But Lycurgus, in his wish to arrange that citizens might enjoy a mutual benefit without injury to anyone, caused each man to be master of other people’s children just as much as his own. Should any boy ever tell his father that he was beaten by another, then it is a disgrace if the father does not give his son another beating. To such a degree do Spartans trust each other not to discipline children carelessly or dishonor good order. He even authorized them to use other people’s household servants too if anybody needed them. He also authorized the sharing of hunting dogs. They have the same arrangement with horses, so that if someone needs to go somewhere fast and happens to spot a horse anywhere, he just takes it, and then duly returns it after use. He also arranged to have food caches stocked throughout Sparta so that those in need could break the seals and take what they needed. By sharing with each other in this way, even those who possess little can benefit from everything in the polis whenever they are in need.

14.  There are also the following practices instituted by Lycurgus which are quite the opposite from those elsewhere in Greece. In the other poleis everyone naturally makes as much money as possible; some are farmers, others ship owners or traders, while crafts support others. But at Sparta Lycurgus banned all free men from the pursuit of wealth and prescribed that their sole concern should be with things that make cities free. Lycurgus demanded that provisions should be contributed on an equal basis and the way of life be uniform, thus doing away with self-indulgent passion for wealth. There is no point in making money even for the sake of clothes, since it is physical vitality which gives men a distinctive appearance not lavish dress. There is no point in amassing money to spend on fellow members of the mess either, since Lycurgus instilled the idea that the person who helps his companions by undertaking physical labor is more reputable than the one who spends money — the former service comes from the heart, whereas the latter is a function of being rich.

Great cake disasters

Cakes - I really know how to make a mess of making them. My baking experiences are a litany of blunders and mishaps.

I made one last weekend, and didn't cook it for long enough. The middle bit was just a tiny bit squishy - but the rest was edible. Problem is, we had a hot week, the cake didn't go in the fridge and it started rotting from the squishy middle bits after 2 days. Blunder one.

I whipped up a chocolate cake this morning - not very Eastery of me, but I don't have a recipe for chocolate hot cross buns. I was a bit cavalier when I took it out of the oven - instead of sliding it carefully onto the bench, I dropped it.

The cake collapsed faster than a Cypriot bank. It now resembles a swimming pool or a deep fish pond. The icing in the middle must be at least an inch thick.

Too many ambulances

It's been a long time since I've seen a crashed rider requiring an ambulance - and then along come two such crashes this week.

Both happened in Pyrmont before I got there. I was riding into work and a pack went past going in the other direction. The last rider called out "Watch out - there's a rider clown up ahead". "Rider clown?", I thought. WTF?

When I got to the next intersection, there was a rider down. He already had his helmet off and was just lying there with a few other people around him, obviously waiting for an ambulance. No point in me stopping, so I pushed on. No idea what caused him to crash. He wasn't bleeding, but he was obviously in a lot of pain.

Coming home that night, and just a bit further up the road, I spied an ambulance and police car on the side of the road. When I got up to them, the ambos were treating a rider. Again, no idea what brought him down.

I reckon these things come in threes, so I spent the rest of the ride home trying not to become casualty number three.

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

Postscript.

On the way into town that morning, a taxi pulled up next to me at the lights and the passenger would down his window and asked me about my ride to work. It turned out he had just started riding to work, and I told him that it was great and safe and he should do it more often.

10 minutes later, I passed the downed rider.......

Freedom conference

Unfortunately, as per the last post, I'll be too busy to make this conference on 6-7 April. But you should get along.

Too busy to scratch myself

Blogging has indeed been slow - got lots to do. Work has been insane lately, and the home life didn't get any better when the kids went back to school. Just too much to do and not enough time to blog. It comes down to a choice between blogging and sleeping - and I choose sleep.

How to eat Vegemite

This guy gets through it almost as fast as the kids.

It's March, and I still haven't watched live TV this year

I was flopped on the couch, reading a book, when I looked at the TV and realised I have not watched anything live on it so far this year that grown up in nature. I think I've watched one recorded movie, and that's it. The kids get to watch ABC2 (the kids channel), but if I happen to be in the room when they're watching it, I'm either reading or snoozing on the couch.

No news. No current affairs. No cooking shows or reality stuff. No historical series or movies or comedies. No sport. Not even NCIS, which had me hooked for 6 seasons. I just haven't found a reason to turn it on and channel surf.

In fact I probably haven't really watched anything on it since November.

Of course come June 21, this will all come to an end. For three weeks. I'll definitely have to invest in a new DVR before then so I can stop falling asleep on the couch an hour into each stage of Le Tour.

Riding bikes is so much comfier....

From here - http://www.explosm.net/comics/3098/

Thanks for the tip, Agro.

The incredible weirdness of the internet

http://www.breadedcats.com/

Breaded cats. Need I say more?

Cav - this is something to look at, not something for you to do with your damned cat.

Who the hell smokes dope at quarter to seven in the morning?

One of the oddest things about my commute up and down Lilyfield Rd is the frequency with which I smell someone smoking dope. In the afternoons, it tends to waft from the windows of utes driving by - hopefully, only the passenger is partaking, and not the driver. But what stuns me is when I smell it first thing in the morning. The earliest time so far was last week at 0645hrs. It didn't seem to be coming from a parked or moving car, so I presume it was emanating from the Housing Commission apartments that line that section of road. What sort of dope smoker has the inner fortitude to wake up at that hour of the day and light the first cone?

And yes, I know what the stuff smells like. I haven't inhaled in a long time - at least a decade or more. I even partook in trying to grow it when I was at uni - each attempt was a fiasco. Although our group included numerous farm boys who have since gone on to grow enough grain to feed large sections of the third world, we were woefully inadequate at coaxing a weed to flourish. Perhaps it was because they were much better at killing weeds than growing and smoking them.

Only two crops showed any signs of producing a reasonable crop. The first disappeared when some thieving bastards came over the back fence and made off with the whole lot. The second disappeared when the mother of one of the farmers turned up one weekend to tidy the garden in the share house. Whilst we were all recovering somewhere else from a party and a hangover, she removed a trailer load of weeds (good and bad) to the tip. None of us felt like driving out to the tip to fossick through a mountain of garden and vegetable scraps to find them.

After that, we tended to stick to brewing our own beer. That was generally more successful - except when we added too much sugar to one batch and the bottles exploded one by one in our holding area under the stairs. We weren't game to go near them in case one exploded in our faces, so we waited until all 30 bottles had exploded before cleaning up the mess. That took about a week. By the time we moved in with shovels and a rubbish bin, the under stairs area had turned into an interesting mix of broken glass, the remains of dried beer and mold.

I don't think we brewed any beer after that experience either.

Kid friendly cafes - are they worth it?

If you'd suggested to me 10 years ago that I even set foot in the door of a "kid friendly" cafe, I would have run screaming for the horizon. Nowadays, I'm more likely to be standing at the door at 0759hrs with my kids waiting for the place to open.

Some time last year, a very kid-oriented cafe opened up in Wareemba called Hopscotch. I noticed it one day as I was riding down to the end of the Abbotsford peninsular, and then filed it away and forgot about it. You're probably wondering, "Where the hell is Wareemba"? The only reason I know how to find it is because I was riding through one day and saw these big blue signs that said, "Welcome to Wareemba". I think the whole suburb is about 4 streets by 4 streets - a 'pocket' suburb so to speak.

http://www.hopscotchcafe.com.au/

Today was the day when I got to give it a go. I've tried every cafe in Five Dock and the two other cafes in Wareemba. Frankly, none of them do anything for me. There's something about each and every one of them that gives me the shits. Mostly, it is the requirement that you have to be an Italian or Greek insider in order to get decent service in any of them. If you're not part of the local wog mafia, forget it. The food that a lot of them serve is pretty rubbish too. You might think that an area stuffed full of Italians would produce good food - and you'd be wrong.

Thankfully, Hopscotch is the odd one out. From what I can gather, the owners are from Chile, so they are definitely not part of the wog establishment. The place is very kid friendly - there are two primary schools within walking distance, so they definitely have the local mums lined up as their target market. As far as being kid friendly goes, I reckon they've hit the spot. However, it's not an overwhelmingly kid cafe - the food is very grown up, and you can safely eat there without sprogs.

First thing - I would definitely go back again. It has two big common tables - I like these, because when the place is half empty, they give me plenty of room to spread the newspapers out and eat in style. The food is also tasty and the omelette I had today would have stopped an elephant. It certainly stuffed a wet and hungry cyclist who needed stuffing.

Amazingly, the coffee is also first grade. When I got home, I googled some reviews and found that all the coffee snobs gave it very good marks. They use Paul Bassett beans - whatever they are.

http://www.beanhunter.com/cafes/review/hopscotch-cafe/34828

If you're the sort of person that makes a fuss about organic this and home made that, then it ticks all the right boxes. I don't really care for any of that - I just care whether the end product is any good. Doesn't matter if you start with organic eggs from home raised chickens fed on organic corn - if you can't cook an egg for nuts, the ingredients are immaterial.

There were a few kids eating with mum and/or dad when I was there. Every now and then, something would go crashing to the floor - but the place was not overwhelmed with the noise of screaming, uncontrolled children. It struck me that the clientele of this place actually know how to discipline and manage their kids, which is something of a first.

The only downer was the price - it was nearly $20 for an omelette and a coffee. Sure, it was first grade stuff, and the service was good, but that's still a big hit for breakfast. Then again, it seems to be pretty hard to avoid having the wallet pounded anywhere these days.

Insert rant here:

Kid friendly cafes - a sure sign that society is on the decline. One of the primary functions of parents is to socialise their offspring - to teach the little buggers how to behave in private and in public. Kid friendly cafes are a cop out - they allow useless, degenerate, hopeless parents to inflict their undisciplined little brats on an unsuspecting public. Kids should be taught to sit down, shut up and quietly amuse themselves without interfering with any grown ups in the vicinity who are trying to concentrate on a newspaper and a good coffee. There is a place for hyperactive little monsters who need to be fed - it's called McDonalds.

End rant:

3am kebab guts

Had a bad case of 3am kebab guts today, and unfortunately, it had nothing to do with having a kebab at 3am.

What are 3am kebab guts?

The only reason why anyone has a kebab at 3am is if they have been drinking solidly since about 5pm. The impact on the guts the following morning of too many beers topped off with an early morning kebab is usually catastrophic. The kebab of course is not the cause of the problem - it is the maraschino cherry of stupidity plopped atop a massive banana split of overindulgence.

3am kebab guts are a bloody awful thing to have on a bike. Apart from the embarrassment of possibly letting rip in the face of the person riding closely behind you, there is always the chance you might draw a bit of mud. I don't fret about the embarrassment when commuting, as I don't know any of the other cyclists around me. However, it's a different story when I do a weekend ride.

Enough of that. Possibly too much information. The result was the slowest ride home in a long time - I just couldn't risk pushing it overly hard and thereby putting any excess pressure on the guts. Got no idea what I ate to induce this intestinal horror, but it was nasty.

Putting condoms on light bulbs

Geez, I must be getting past it. Until this week, I had no idea that you could buy condoms for light bulbs.

I'm talking about fiddly little bulbs that light up your car dashboard and things like that. The last bulb in my instrument panel gave up the ghost recently, so it was time to replace the little suckers.

I did a bit of reading on line and figured that the best thing to do was to replace the old bulbs with LEDs - they supposedly last for much longer. Although given the way I am falling apart, a new set of old fashioned bulbs might well outlast me.

I bought a set of LEDs online, and they arrived from the UK within a few days. Hoorah - I could rip the dash out and once again see how fast I was going at night.

Just one small problem - in "modern" cars, the bulbs sit in a socket, and the socket screws into the instrument panel. It's been a long time since I pulled a car to bits, so this was all new to me. In the old days, you just screwed the bulb in and that was it. However, it looks like bulbs have shrunk quite a bit during the intervening years, so you need the socket to avoid smashing the tiny little bulb when installing it.

And guess what? The LED lights need a different socket to the old style bulbs - aaaarrrrrggghhh! That's an LED socket below by the way - it has a big fat dish in it to accept an LED.

Since I couldn't afford to wait for a set of sockets to arrive from overseas, I popped down to my nearest auto store and bought some bulbs. I made sure I pulled a socket out (and the bulb) before turning up with it, as I've discovered that manuals no longer tell you what part number to ask for. That really annoys me. When I had lights blow on older cars, I could front up at the parts shop and ask for a WY8904C-8 and they'd go and find some for me - and I knew what to ask for as the manual had a table of parts in there for these sorts of things. The bloke in the parts shop said it's a way of forcing you to get all your stuff via a dealer.

So I got my bulbs. But the old bulbs were green and the new ones were clear - what to make of that?

Thankfully, the old bloke in the shop didn't laugh out loud at my stupidity - he carefully lifted a bit of the green covering to show that it was a clear bulb covered in a green condom. Like the ones above.

Of course I should have bought some condoms as well, because when I pulled the blown lights out, I found that bits of the old condoms had welded to the lights over the years. I managed to refit two complete condoms and one partly torn one. I'm afraid some of the lighty bits are going to leak out and my speedo will get pregnant.

And how do you fit a bulb condom?

Funnily enough, exactly the same as a normal franger. Whilst I stuffed up getting them off, I managed to roll them on in a few seconds flat. And the bloody things are a damned sight smaller than the old fella. I've lost none of my touch.

All of this took a fair bit of stuffing around. The dash has been off and on four times this week. The first effort took me 90 minutes. The last effort took a bit over 15 - see, I can learn. I even remembered to test that the lights worked before screwing everything back together.

I now also have a packet of LEDs - unused. When these globes blow in 10 years time, I'll never be able to find them, and I'll have to go through all this crap again.

More pain for Bruce

Where was I? Ah yes, devouring the delicious tea cake that I made for dessert tonight.

And so begins another cooking rant.

I have grown fonder of cakes as I have gotten older. I think I was put off them by some pretty dry and ordinary specimens that I was presented with at smoko when working in shearing sheds in my school and uni days. I know the CWA has created a reputational idea of farmer's wives being great cooks - but sadly, it wasn't always so. Some were fantastic cooks - they would have put many a chef to shame - but others made boarding school food look good.

If my kids had their way, all we'd eat around here would be chocolate cake. I don't mind a good chocky cake, but I do need some variety from time to time - hence the desire to make the odd tea cake every now and then.

The first thing you need to know about tea cake is that it does not contain tea. I presume it's meant to be eaten with a cup of tea, or for morning or afternoon tea. I am yet to read a recipe that explains the meaning behind the name. So stop worrying if you don't have any tea in the cupboard.

Every cake recipe requires you to cream butter and sugar together. Some even mention that the butter needs to be softened. Now here is my gripe - how soft is "soft"? For those of us that didn't go to catering school where chefs yelled at us all day about the different stages of butter softness, stating that it needs to be "soft" is a bit useless. Does it mean you can cut it with something slightly blunter than a cleaver, or does it mean that it's about to collapse into a puddle under its own weight?

Here's what I'd like to see. It's easy to buy thermometers with probes these days. How about writing a recipe that says, "Allow the butter to soften to a point where the internal temperature of the slab is 12 degrees" - or whatever the appropriate temperature is. Alternatively, give us a table of softening times for a range of ambient temperatures. That is, if the temperature in your kitchen is 25 degrees, you need to take the butter out of the fridge 22 minutes before using it.

You know it makes sense. If recipes were written by blokes, they'd include useful technical information like this.

This cake is really bloody simple.

125gm butter - chopped
1/2 cup firmly packed sugar (don't ask me how much that weighs)
1 teaspoon vanilla essence

Throw the butter, vanilla and sugar in your mixer and mix it for 6-10 minutes on high speed. I find that is what it takes for it to become "light and fluffy". Again - a gripe. What the fripping heck is "light and fluffy"? It's ok if you've spent 4 years with a chef yelling at you that your mix is not yet "light and fluffy", but the rest of us need a bit more to go on. Hence my advice is to beat the living daylights out of it for at least 6 minutes. I set the timer on the microwave to make sure it gets beaten for long enough.

You've now got 6-10 minutes to do the following:

Hunt around in the cupboard and find a 20cm springform tin. I broke my 20cm tin, so I use a smaller one - it makes no difference. Grease the inside with margarine, slap a circle of baking paper on the bottom and strips of baking paper to the sides and put it down somewhere where you won't trip over it. It helps if you only grease the inside of the tin - it gets a bit slippery if you do the outside as well.

Turn the oven to 180 degrees and get your shelves in the right places. Nothing worse than having to rearrange stinking hot shelves when you need to toss the cake into the oven.

Find two apples and peel them. Quarter them, chop out the cores and then thinly slice the quarters. Remember - you'll be eating this cake with a spoon. You don't want slices so thick that you need a serrated knife to cut through them. Make the slices thin. Not paper thin - just thin. If you can't cut them with a spoon when cooked, they're too bloody thick - is that clear enough for you?

What sort of apples? The recipe says royal gala, but I love pink ladies. So I used pink ladies (that's all we had in the house). Does it matter what sort of apple you use? Dunno. I suspect the only reason some recipes tell you to use a certain apple is that is all the cook had to use when they first made the cake - and they stuck with that variety. If the recipe said that the acid content, sugar balance, cell structure and fruit density of a particular variety made it the best type for certain recipes, then I'd give it some credence. But I hate using one apple over another without an explanation why.

Hell, you're running out of time here. Grab your sliced apple, find the cake tin and either gently lay the apples slices in the bottom in a beautiful pattern, or toss the whole lot in and give it a shake until the bottom is evenly coated in two layers of apple slices. Whatever works for you. I am not the neat kind. I don't "do" decorating. I do cooking and eating.

Pour a few teaspoons of golden syrup over the apples. I used 3 generous teaspoons tonight. I could have used more. But 3 was a good start.

Find 2 eggs. If your sugar and butter have been beating for at least 6 minutes and now look "light and fluffy", crack an egg and toss it in to the mixer. Remember to take it out of the shell first. Let it beat for another minute or so, then chuck in the other egg. Give it at least another minute - it has to incorporate properly.

Last bits.

Turn off the mixer, remove the bowl and tip in the following through a sieve:

- 1 cup self raising flour
- 1/2 cup plain flour

Pour in 3/4 cup of milk.

Mix the whole lot up with a spatula or spoon until it's the consistency of wet cement. Don't over mix it and for heaven's sake, don't use the bloody mixmaster - that will kill it.

Tip the batter over the apples and bake for 35-40 minutes. It took closer to 55 in my crap oven. Stick a skewer in the middle to see if its cooked - if any cake sticks to the skewer, give it another 5 minutes.

When it's done, pull the tin out of the oven and let it stand for 10 minutes. Then remove the spring form side and baking paper and invert it onto a plate. Invert means "tip upside down". Remember to put the plate on top of the cake before you tip it upside down. The apple bits will then be on top. You can eat it once you've remembered to remove the last bit of baking paper.

Eat with whipped cream or ice cream. And a pot of tea, if that takes your fancy. Or even coffee. See if I care.

My first pavlova

What can I say? Sorry Bruce - you'll just have to suck it up.

Pavlova is something that I ate a lot of as a kid, but it fell off the menu about 20 years ago and I've probably had one about every 3 years since. I had an auntie that was a wiz at making them - she lived on a small farm just outside the town I lived in as a little kid, and she kept chooks. And ducks. And geese. However, only the chook eggs went into the pavlova. I'm now wondering whether you can make pavlova from duck eggs? And no, I'm not going to try. That was just my brain meandering across the lupin paddocks of my childhood.

The chooks were certainly under pressure to produce eggs - as soon as they started faltering, I would be dispatched to the chook shed with an axe and we'd have chicken casserole for dinner. That made a change from rabbit casserole - although my uncle could never tell the difference if he'd spent a few too many hours at the pub. I was hopeless at beheading the chooks - I was paranoid about losing a few fingers in the process, so more than one half-headless chook had to be chased around by a 12 year old with an axe. And my bloody uncle was too lazy to sharpen his axes. I much preferred being sent to the office to collect the 10-.22 from the gun cupboard or to the barn to collect the rabbit traps and then being told to thin the rabbit population.

Why cook the rabbits and chooks in a casserole?

One - they were pretty tough and stringy when they went into the pot, so they really needed slow cooking. The "tough" cuts of meat that we get at the supermarket these days are nothing like the dry, stringy inedible cuts we had to put up with 35 years ago. It was genuine peasant food - bloody awful bits of meat cooked long and slow to make it palatable.

Two - the bits of lead that I didn't extract from the rabbit before it went into the pot would fall out and end up in the bottom of the casserole where they were easy to find.

Three - my uncle and auntie were pretty bloody lazy. They took the easiest option with everything in life, and one pot casseroles are wonderfully easy to do if you cooked them 5 times a week.

There's a thought - I had a great childhood because I spent a lot of time with my lazy relatives. Most branches of the family tree got the hard working genetics. One branch got stuff all. That meant I got to do lots of fun stuff that they couldn't be bothered doing. Paddock needs plowing? Send the kid out on the tractor. Dinner needs to be put on the table? Send the kid out with the rifle/fishing rod/yabby traps. Uncle needs collecting from the pub? Send the kid out in the ute. Trees need trimming? Find the kid the chainsaw. Blackberries need pruning? Send the kid out with a 5 litre drum of petrol, a pile of newspapers and a box of matches. I'd be running (or driving) around the farm at 14 years old shooting or setting fire to things whilst auntie would be napping on the couch in front of the cricket. With a glass of sherry or three. And then I'd have to drive to the pub to get uncle home for dinner. That would take a while as I'd have to stick around in the pub for a few beers as uncle liked a chat and was very hard to extract from the front bar.

Another good point about casseroles is that they are very forgiving of being overcooked. It didn't matter if it took me two beers or 6 to extract uncle from the pub - the casserole wasn't going to be burnt by the time we got home.

In case you are wondering about the dangers of drink driving as a kid, just remember that the current population of the "town" I am talking about is less than 60. Not 60,000. 60. I think it's grown a bit since I was last there.

Anyway - pavlova. Needless to say, I was also the one sent out to the chook shed to collect the eggs and to sort the rotten ones from the fresh. I should mention that uncle was pretty blase about collecting the eggs, so screening them was absolutely essential.

If there was a surfeit of eggs, auntie would whip up some enormous pavlovas. She had a huge oven, and for the time, a top of the line mixmaster. Looking back, I think she specialised in pavlova because it was so easy - separate eggs, whip whites with sugar for 10 minutes and then bake at 150 degrees. Any kids in the vicinity would then be given the job of whipping the cream, slicing the fruit and decorating it. At that point, auntie would retire to her favourite chair for another glass of sherry.

Which gets me to Bruce. I whipped up some chocolate pots the other day that required more egg yolks than whites, so I made some mini-pavlovas with the left over egg whites. My first ever. Piece of cake. Baked them for 30 minutes at 150 degrees and they turned out beautifully. So beautifully, that most were gone soon after one of the kids opened the oven and discovered them cooling off. You should try it some time.

Another stupid recipe

I got a craving earlier this week for jelly cakes - something I haven't had since I was a kid. I remembered them as a cube of sponge cake dipped in red jelly and then rolled in shredded coconut. Sort of like a lamington, but with a jelly coating instead of chocolate.

I dug up a recipe and bought the ingredients to make some mango jelly cakes.

The recipe was a disaster as far as being easy to follow went. There are three parts to it:

- making the cakes
- making the jelly
- making mango cream to go into the finished product

I like to prioritise my cooking so that things are done in the most sensible order. To me, that order is:

- make the jelly (because it takes time to cool down enough before you can dip the cakes into it)
- make the cakes
- make the mango cream

It got the whole thing arse about, and instead of separating the ingredients for each step, it mashed them altogether into a confusing jumble.

Here's my easy way of doing it.

The jelly

But a tin of mango and a packet of mango jelly.

When you open the tin, it should contain 4 mango cheeks. Drain them and throw all four cheeks lot into a blender or food processor. You can keep the syrup if you like.

Boil 1.25 cups of water, pour it into a bowl and throw the mango jelly into it. Stir to dissolve the jelly. Put a sieve over the bowl and force HALF your blended mango through it. This will ensure you don't have any lumpy or stingy bits in the jelly. If you like sweet jelly, pour in some syrup. You will have left over jelly afterwards that you can set in the fridge. Mix your sieved mango and jelly together and stick it in the fridge.

You don't want the jelly to set hard - you want it to set slightly so that it's not all runny and liquidy, but just a bit thickened.

The cakes.

Turn your oven on and set to 180 degrees.

Go find a friand tray and grease the holes with butter. Don't use margarine - this batter sticks with margarine.

Stick 10gm of butter into a small bowl and pour 2 tablespoons of hot water in as well.

You can do this next part with an electric hand mixer or a food processor with beaters. I used a hand mixer.

Crack two eggs into a bowl. Beat them for 10 minutes with the hand mixer. Yes, that's a long time to stand around beating eggs - this is why you could use a food processor instead. I let one of the kids take over at the 5 minute mark and ended up with egg sprayed over half the kitchen.

After 10 minutes, slowly tip 1/3 cup of sugar into the eggs as you are beating them. Don't bung it all in at once - do it slowly. Continue beating until the sugar has dissolved.

Remove the beaters. Get a sifter and sift 1/2 cup of self raising flour and 2 teaspoons of cornflour into your egg/sugar mix. Fold that into the egg/sugar without beating the living daylights out of it.

Fold in the butter/water mix I told you about earlier. Don't beat the crap out of the batter! Be gentle and don't over mix.

Put a spoonful of the mix into each friand hole. The mix will rise, so don't fill the holes level with the tray or it will overflow a lot. Fill to below the lip.

Bake for 12 minutes. Or if you have a crap oven like me, back for 16 minutes.

When you put them in the oven, find a wire rack. Put a sheet of baking paper on top of it. Leave it on the benchtop.

After 12 or 16 minutes, pull your cakes out of the oven and immediately tip them onto the baking paper on the wire rack. Or, if you used margarine to grease the tray, use a knife to lever them out.

Dipping the cakes

If your fridge is like mine, and you were pretty quick at making the cakes, your jelly won't be quite ready yet. Check it anyway. Bugger off for a while and mow the lawn or something. Let the cakes cool and the jelly set. Just don't fall asleep on the couch. If the jelly sets, you're stuffed.

When you are ready, grab a flat bowl and put lots of shredded coconut in it. Give the cakes a good dipping in the jelly - if you let the jelly set too much like I did, they won't absorb enough jelly. But not too much dipping, or they will disintegrate.

Roll them in the coconut. I use my right hand to dip and put them in the bowl, and my left hand (which is dry and clean of jelly) to get more coconut out of the coconut container and sprinkle on the top side of the cakes - because you never put enough coconut in first time.

Put the finished cakes on a tray and put them in the fridge for half an hour. DON'T START EATING THEM NOW. They'll be better in half an hour. Be patient. Stick the left over mango jelly in the fridge to set properly.

The cream

Clean your beaters, find another bowl and whip 300ml of cream. Find the other half of the mango you pulverised and stir it through the cream. You can also finely chop half the mango instead of blending it if you want a chunkier cream. The mango cream is delicious. DO NOT EAT ALL THE CREAM BEFORE THE CAKES ARE READY.

Finishing them off

Chop the cakes in half, bung some mango cream in the middle and put the two halves back together. Then scoff.  I find chopping them in half to be really difficult - mine just don't want to cut cleanly. You can always just spread a dollop of cream on top and eat them that way. When you run out of cakes, eat the left over mango jelly. With mango cream on top if you like.

Afterwards

Ride 132 miles to work all that off.

Green fatcats want to grind the faces of the Spanish poor

Thanks to Bishop Hill for the link:

Foreign investors in renewable energy projects in Spain have hired lawyers to prepare potential international legal action against the Spanish government over new rules they say break their contracts.
It is unclear how much claims might be worth, but international funds have more than 13 billion euros ($17 billion) of renewable energy assets in Spain and say that the government has reneged on the terms of their investment.
The Spanish Parliament approved a law on Thursday that cuts subsidies for alternative energy technologies, backtracking on its push for green power.

The clanger for me in the source article is this:

The problem was that the cost of the subsidies were not passed on fully to consumers because that would have pushed prices to unprecedented highs.

Imagine that - solar and wind subsidies push up electricity prices to unaffordable levels.

Great literature hits the shelves

Che! The Lost Diaries is now available in a dead tree edition.

As I have given up buying dead tree books for Lent, I'll have to wait for the Kindle edition to hit the intertubes. But if you are still buying bits of paper glued together, get your hands on a copy now.

Another day, another trio of retards

Being an equal opportunity kind of guy, I'm happy to heap abuse on stupid people no matter where they are or what they are doing.

Stupid person 1 - the cyclist who blasted through all the red traffic lights in Pyrmont this morning. I watched him do 1-2-3-4 in succession, amazed that he wasn't collected by a car as he shot through each intersection without so much as a sideways glance. When he reached the Pyrmont Bridge, he proceeded to fang it across the bridge, ducking and weaving through the small number of pedestrians on the bridge at that time of day.

You might be wondering how I saw all this. Simple. The lights went green not long after he shot through the first three, and because I am reasonably quick, I managed to keep him in sight all the way to the bridge. If someone had taken him out, I would have ridden over to him lying on the ground and given him a mouthful.

Stupid person 2 - I'm riding along and I notice that there's a big tailback of cars from an intersection where I've never seen more than 5 or 6 cars queued at peak hour. The lights go green way up ahead and the traffic hardly moves. I've got no idea what's going on, so when the lights go red and the traffic stops moving, I filter up to the front.

There's a broken down car in the left hand lane, right on the stop line. A sorry looking teenage girl is behind the wheel. She's done the right thing - hazards are on and she's calling a tow truck. The lights go green and off I go - and the moron behind her starts honking at her. Talk about clueless and stupid.

Captain moron of the week - I'm blasting down a hill at 60km/h. At the bottom, there's a big lane of green paint to show motorists bikes are coming through, and a stop sign to prevent cars from taking out high speed cyclists.

Ute approaches the stop sign, and just rolls right through it right in front of 4 of us. Brake levers are grabbed, tyres start smoking and we manage to slip and slide around the ute. The ute pulls over. I do a U turn and go back and give the driver a VERY LOUD assessment of her driving ability (using lots of words I never use in front of the kids).

She's on the phone. She doesn't remove the phone from her ear during my diatribe. She cares not a whit that she just put the lives of others in danger - she's on a very important call to someone or other. She doesn't care that she drove through a stop sign, or that she was driving whilst yapping on her mobile. As a final insult, she winds up her window on me.

It's at times like these, I wish I was carrying a pair of sidecutters with me. I'd simply walk around the car and snip the valve off all four tyres - that would make her day.

I curse myself for not grabbing her phone or car keys and hurling them into the bay.

About an hour later, I started to wonder if she was very pissed or totally stoned - she was way too calm and out of it. Definitely should have tossed her keys into six feet of murky water.

The inaccuracy - it burns

"Standing stock still, her finger suspended over the trigger, she stares through the sight of her Dragunov rifle". So says the SMH today.

Let's have a closer look at the "Dragunov".

Hmm. Looks awfully like the FN L1A1 SLR that I carried many years ago.

Here's a Dragunov by comparison.

This simple inaccuracy makes me question the whole story.

By the way, sticking a scope on an SLR no more makes it a sniper rifle than sticking fat tyres on a taxi makes it a race car.

Mise en place - more

Since the body is not up to riding this morning, there is only one solution - bake a chocolate cake!

I'm not going to provide the recipe. Instead, I'm going to write about prep.

Junior keeps talking about moving out of home at the end of the year. Before he goes, I'm trying to show him a few things so that his new flatmates won't boot him out after two months. One of those is keeping the kitchen in a usable state.

See, he has this habit of getting hungry around midnight, and his favourite stomach filling night time snack is mee-goreng with bacon and fried egg on top. Whatever. For all I know, that could be a culinary masterpiece that's about to sweep the planet.

I can deal with his weird selection of food. What I can't deal with is walking into the kitchen at 0600hrs to find grease encrusted frying pans and plates and pots filling the sink. It drives me nuts, because I discovered long ago that cooking a meal is so much easier if you've cleaned up the kitchen before you start. I can't get over how many people try and cook something without first clearing away any mess in the sink and on the bench tops. Failing to do so is just a recipe for frustration, chaos and disaster. He still hasn't worked out the connection between him making a mess at midnight and me kicking him out of bed 6 hours later to clean it up. He thinks it's very unfair.

So before I do anything these days, I do a quick clean up first.

- empty the worm bin into the worm farm. No point in trying to stuff more food scraps into an already full worm bin. Start with an empty bin, not a full one.
- empty the kitchen bin into the big outside bin. Nothing worse than trying to cram a few empty foam meat trays into an overflowing kitchen bin - and then watching the compacted rubbish slowly expand and the meat trays popping out to land on the floor. Start with an empty rubbish bin
- wash, dry and put away anything left around the kitchen. When I finish prep, I don't want to be looking at a stack of dirty dishes and wondering where I'm going to put my dirty prep stuff. Start with clean bench tops and an empty sink

The cake is now in the oven. As soon as it went in, I cleaned everything up. So now the next person to go into the kitchen will be able to make a meal using a clean slate.

He's a teenager, so of course it will take him 20 years to learn these things for himself.

Knackered

When I went to bed last night, I was thinking hard about riding this morning.

The body told me otherwise this morning. I couldn't even lift my legs up to get my feet into a pair of shorts. I had to sit on the edge of the bed to get dressed.

Me thinks I pushed it a little too hard a few times this week.

What apps do the fast guys use?

I finally relented last week and installed an app on my phone which tracks me when I go for a ride. The only reason I did it was to get some data on how much climbing I am doing (it's cheaper than buying a GPS) - but after a week of data collecting, I found that it can't tell that the Anzac Bridge goes up and over a body of water. Instead, it thinks I ride on water.

Ah well.

The day after I started using it, emails started appearing from the software maker telling me how good I went the day before. Nifty. It's a daily encouragement to exercise more - the same as having a personal trainer nag you each day to get out and do some sit ups (now there's a thought).

The email also tells you how you did in comparison to everyone else that has recorded their times along particular sections of the route you took. I was stunned when it told me I was in the top 1% on a number of sections, including the hilly bits. When you're as old and big as me, you don't climb anywhere near as well as the skinny young blokes. However, there was the email telling me otherwise.

What gives?

I can think of a few reasons.

First, people aren't riding flat out on my route - it's not a race (even though when you pass a lot of blokes, they turn it into a race). I ride hard - but not "race" hard, which is where you get to the end and fall sideways off your bike because you don't have the energy left to unclip your legs. I don't feel like arriving at the car park at work and then collapsing on the concrete in a gibbering mess. I'm giving it up to 90% rather than 100%, and I reckon a lot of cyclists are content to commute at no more than 70-80% of their potential - it means less sweat to wash off when you get to work.

Second, the really fit and serious guys probably don't bother recording their commutes as they aren't "proper" training rides.

Third, who can be bothered recording their commute every day? Are people that anal about it that they record even the boring and mundane rides?

Fourth, I don't think the pros are using this particular app. Strava seems to be the favourite app for the really serious cyclist.

In other words, it's telling me that I'm a really fast hubbard. Which is like saying you own the best looking Ford.

Mise en place

Mise en place - frog for "everything in its place" - a particularly important concept when working in the kitchen.

It's always used in terms of prepping to cook. However, it struck me the other day that whilst lots of emphasis is put on getting ready to cook, no effort appears to be put into minimising the amount of washing up that any given meal produces.

The catalyst was getting up at 0600 and finding that Junior had cooked himself a midnight snack of bacon and mee goreng. The evidence was all over the kitchen - splattered fat on the cook tops, dirty dishes, pots and pans in the sink and a slab of uncooked bacon left sitting on the bench top. He'd managed to feed himself, but the effort of putting away the unused food and cleaning up was clearly beyond him. Poor petal. I was so caring and considerate of his weakened physical state that I waited until 0700 before booting him out of bed and putting him to work at the sink.

I'm not a big fan of washing up, so I do my best to generate the minimum amount when producing anything to eat. When I cook something, after I've done it the first time, I think about how I can do it then next time with less washing up. Can I order the way I prepare and cook the dish to ensure there isn't a sink full of muck at the end?

This stuff is never covered in any cookery books that I've ever read. It's like the people writing recipes have never done any time and motion studies into how to make them more effectively. I need to minimise the amount of dirty stuff I produce because we've got a small kitchen - we simply don't have space to pile up masses of used pots. It's a bit like cooking in a submarine galley.

Here's a simple example. I made semi-fredo not long ago. The recipe tells you to separate eggs, whip the yolks with sugar over a double boiler then whip the cream, then whip the whites and then fold the whole lot in together. It such a simple thing, but if you whip the whites first, you don't have to wash the beaters before moving onto the next items. The whites won't whip as well if the beaters and contaminated with egg yolk or cream, so if you do them last, you have to wash them. If you do the whites first, it doesn't matter if a bit of egg white ends up in the cream etc etc. That simple change in steps saves a bit of time and means you don't have to stick your hands in the sink during preparation.

I do this with all my recipes, trying to save a dirty bowl or two for each dish in a meal. If you're putting something together that involves multiple dishes, it can save a lot of washing up. I think some people say they dislike cooking not because they dislike the cooking part, but because they dislike the cleaning up afterwards part. To me, it makes a lot of sense for recipe book writers to reconstruct their recipes in a way that creates less muck and havoc.

Cold

It's summer down here. And it's cold. How cold?

I downloaded the Bureau of Meteorology stats for daily max and min temps for Sydney.

Today is the 4th coldest 2nd of Feb on record - since 1859. Here's the other stats:

1899 - 13.7 degrees
1919 - 13.9 degrees
1933 - 13.9 degrees
2013 - 14.1 degrees

These stats were taken from the Observatory Hill station, which these days is surrounded by concreted and tarmac roads - which is only of interest if you think the urban heat island effect has any impact on recorded temperatures.

The max temp for today was 21.3 degrees - the 14th lowest on record since 1859. The lowest maximum for Feb 2 was 17.5 degrees in 1909.

It was the 4th wettest Feb 2nd also with 48.6mm so far - and the day still has 4 hours to run.

1868 - 83.8mm
1934 - 54.9mm
1980 - 54.8mm
2013 - 48.6mm

Interestingly, the BOM says we got 0mm of rainfall yesterday, even though I almost drowned on the way home it was raining so hard.

Gold

Thanks Minicapt, this is gold.

http://assets.amuniversal.com/d2c73fc02b5f01300649001dd8b71c47