The death of Zark has put the usual collection of suspect moonbats into orbit. I had thought up a wonderful line to annoy the hell out of them, but this guy beat me to it.
That's part of the function that the Tower of London used to perform - displaying heads on pikes for all to see.
Friday, 9 June 2006
Thursday, 8 June 2006
Since when did mousse get so expensive?
Had a cracking feed tonight - went to our local wood fired pizza place - a joint called Toto's. It's close enough to walk, it's BYO, it's not very flash, it's not very big and it seems to be presided over by a wonderful old coot by the name of Vito.
I will not dis Vito or Toto in case I end up sleeping with the fishes. Nor is there any need to. The business looks like it is in the family way - Vito doing the waiting, his brother making the pizza, his wife in the kitchen and a few daughters running around doing restaurant stuff. Only two other couples turned up during our stay, and they appeared to be regulars. Just the place for a nice pizza on a Thursday night. However, I curse our decision to not take a fat bottle of red. How in blazes can you eat Italian without a bottle of plonk?
So we will back to visit Vito, next time with booze under the arm.
The only drawback with Toto's is the very limited dessert menu. They have tiramasu (which I just love) and gellato and that is it. We didn't feel like paying $7.00 for a tiramasu each, so we zipped around the corner to another Italian joint called L'Angelo. L'Angelo had a face lift last year and it is now very flash and modern Italian. They do a rip roaring pizza, but my favourite is their chocolate mousse. I have only had one chocolate dessert in recent years that was better, but that was at a restaurant at Thredbo, and I have no plans to drive 500kms tonight just to get fricking dessert. That's 500km one way by the way.
So I run in the door and grab two mousses out of the fridge and saunter up to the counter to pay. The lady looks at me and says, deadpan, "Fifteen dollars".
Fuck me, I just about fell over. However, this was no time to lose face. I just had to give her the deadpan back and pull two notes out of the wallet with the nonchalant look of "I pay $15 for two tubs of mousse every day - I spit on your deadpan face and raise you my nonchalance." It was that, or put a tub back in the fridge, or do a runner and hope that I was fleeter of foot than the fat pizza cook. Given that I had just stuffed in a medium pizza and garlic bread at Toto's, I figured a footrace was out of the question.
Clearly, L'Angelo must be thinking of opening a franchise at Sydney airport. Their prices would fit right in out there.
I'll have to put this in perspective. Imagine you have just ordered Thai takeaway for one and you want rice. Your rice arrives in a circular tub about yay big. Well, that is how mousse is sold, except that unlike the Thai restaurant, where they stuff rice in right to the top, L'Angelo fill the tub somewhere between 1/2 and 2/3 of the way up. Given that mousse is largely air, it feels like you are carrying an empty tub. That is a risk, as you might bin a full tub thinking it was empty.
Anyway, we have just polished off the two tubs and I feel like I have eaten about 1/2 a tub too much. The stuff is so rich, I can feel every fat cell in my body expanding.
And you know why I only bought two tubs? Because they only had two tubs in the fridge. If they'd had three, that is how many I would have bought.
Then I really would have freaked when they asked for $22.50 at the till.
I will not dis Vito or Toto in case I end up sleeping with the fishes. Nor is there any need to. The business looks like it is in the family way - Vito doing the waiting, his brother making the pizza, his wife in the kitchen and a few daughters running around doing restaurant stuff. Only two other couples turned up during our stay, and they appeared to be regulars. Just the place for a nice pizza on a Thursday night. However, I curse our decision to not take a fat bottle of red. How in blazes can you eat Italian without a bottle of plonk?
So we will back to visit Vito, next time with booze under the arm.
The only drawback with Toto's is the very limited dessert menu. They have tiramasu (which I just love) and gellato and that is it. We didn't feel like paying $7.00 for a tiramasu each, so we zipped around the corner to another Italian joint called L'Angelo. L'Angelo had a face lift last year and it is now very flash and modern Italian. They do a rip roaring pizza, but my favourite is their chocolate mousse. I have only had one chocolate dessert in recent years that was better, but that was at a restaurant at Thredbo, and I have no plans to drive 500kms tonight just to get fricking dessert. That's 500km one way by the way.
So I run in the door and grab two mousses out of the fridge and saunter up to the counter to pay. The lady looks at me and says, deadpan, "Fifteen dollars".
Fuck me, I just about fell over. However, this was no time to lose face. I just had to give her the deadpan back and pull two notes out of the wallet with the nonchalant look of "I pay $15 for two tubs of mousse every day - I spit on your deadpan face and raise you my nonchalance." It was that, or put a tub back in the fridge, or do a runner and hope that I was fleeter of foot than the fat pizza cook. Given that I had just stuffed in a medium pizza and garlic bread at Toto's, I figured a footrace was out of the question.
Clearly, L'Angelo must be thinking of opening a franchise at Sydney airport. Their prices would fit right in out there.
I'll have to put this in perspective. Imagine you have just ordered Thai takeaway for one and you want rice. Your rice arrives in a circular tub about yay big. Well, that is how mousse is sold, except that unlike the Thai restaurant, where they stuff rice in right to the top, L'Angelo fill the tub somewhere between 1/2 and 2/3 of the way up. Given that mousse is largely air, it feels like you are carrying an empty tub. That is a risk, as you might bin a full tub thinking it was empty.
Anyway, we have just polished off the two tubs and I feel like I have eaten about 1/2 a tub too much. The stuff is so rich, I can feel every fat cell in my body expanding.
And you know why I only bought two tubs? Because they only had two tubs in the fridge. If they'd had three, that is how many I would have bought.
Then I really would have freaked when they asked for $22.50 at the till.
Tuesday, 6 June 2006
I am a fool
The forecast for the entire week is rain. Rain, rain, rain. It is a good week to be swimming, as getting extra wet won't matter much. The weather is so wet and depressing, even the ducks can't be bothered taking off. They just mooch around in the puddles in the park across the road, casting an eye at the leaden sky every now and then before going back to splashing in the mud.
I was sensible on Monday - I got a lift to work in a nice, warm, dry car. My car. A big, fat, fuck-off 4WD. Something that is perfect for fording the potholed streets that pass for main roads in this part of the country. I can see the city skyline out my office window. I am right next to the beating heart of this great metropolis, and driving to work is like negotiating Kakadu in the wet season. Modern cars must have good electrics as I have yet to see someone stalled on the side of the road with a can of WD40 in one hand and their sparkplug leads in the other.
So what do I do this morning? I pull on my brand new leg warmers ($99 thank you very much), pile on a couple of layers (including a new long sleeved thermal skivvy) and pedal into work. At least there is enough daylight at 8am for me to wear my wrap around sunnies, which keep the worst of the rain out of my eyes. The problem with the new house is that it is on the flat - at the old place, I'd ride about 800m and then hit my first hill - not a very steep hill, but enough to have a sweat breaking out by the crest. From there, it was up and down a few more hills that got the blood pumping and raised the core temp. Now, it is flat, flat, flat and I am barely warmed up by the time I hit the Lilyfield Rd hill, which is a right bastard. I'm warm by the time I crest that hill - in fact my glasses are usually fogged from the sweat that starts pissing out of every pore. However, I am usually half frozen when I get to the bottom of the hill - this part of the suburb is too bloody flat. I need to detour to find some hills.
Anyway, I could have gotten a lift, but I decided to ride. What kind of fuckwit deliberately decides to cycle on a cold, pissing wet day when there is a comfy car as an option? Meatheads like me I guess. One good thing with the weather is that it keeps all the bloody prams and pedestrians indoors, which theoretically means I could let rip and belt around The Bay at top speed without fear of hitting anyone ("Constable, a cyclist hit my baby" - with a Lindy Chamberlain accent). Except for a few small problems - namely a road surface that is slick with oil and grease that has decided to rise to the surface after months of no rain, and the fact that I can't see more than about 20 yards with the rain pelting in my face.
That doesn't stop the local wogs from flying up and down the road outside my office window. Every now and then, one will come around the corner near our place, plant it, break out and go sideways a bit. I make sure I park the car away from the corner where they like to slide. God, souped up four cylinder rice burners sound pathetic when doing a wheel spin in the wet. I'm waiting for one to zoom down our road too fast, fail to stop at the T intersection at the end of the street and end up with their car parked in 6 feet of water in The Bay. That will be worth a few photos. I should take a fold up chair and a brolly and a bucket of oil and walk down to the end of the street and throw the oil in front of the first speeding rice burner that I see. Or, I could be really lazy and take one of those pump water pistols and see how much oil one can throw onto the road in 5 seconds. I should be able to do that sitting down in my comfy chair.
By the way, the leg warmers were a revelation. I have always dreaded them, thinking that I'd look totally queer in a pair. Well, maybe I do, but I was so amazed at how warm I was, all thoughts of queerdom were banished. Face it, by the time you've pulled on the dicky looking helmet (not many people look cool in a bike helmet), the tight knicks, the tight shirt etc, you look pretty wierd already. Adding a set of tight black tights is not going to change the picture much. It would be like pushing Humpty Dumpty off the wall and then treading on what's left. He's already fucked - treading on him is not going to fuck him up much more.
The good thing about them is I did not have to repeat my "I am not a fairy" mantra when riding home tonight. I was so toasty and warm, I simply had to think, "I am not gay" a few times and that was it.
I was sensible on Monday - I got a lift to work in a nice, warm, dry car. My car. A big, fat, fuck-off 4WD. Something that is perfect for fording the potholed streets that pass for main roads in this part of the country. I can see the city skyline out my office window. I am right next to the beating heart of this great metropolis, and driving to work is like negotiating Kakadu in the wet season. Modern cars must have good electrics as I have yet to see someone stalled on the side of the road with a can of WD40 in one hand and their sparkplug leads in the other.
So what do I do this morning? I pull on my brand new leg warmers ($99 thank you very much), pile on a couple of layers (including a new long sleeved thermal skivvy) and pedal into work. At least there is enough daylight at 8am for me to wear my wrap around sunnies, which keep the worst of the rain out of my eyes. The problem with the new house is that it is on the flat - at the old place, I'd ride about 800m and then hit my first hill - not a very steep hill, but enough to have a sweat breaking out by the crest. From there, it was up and down a few more hills that got the blood pumping and raised the core temp. Now, it is flat, flat, flat and I am barely warmed up by the time I hit the Lilyfield Rd hill, which is a right bastard. I'm warm by the time I crest that hill - in fact my glasses are usually fogged from the sweat that starts pissing out of every pore. However, I am usually half frozen when I get to the bottom of the hill - this part of the suburb is too bloody flat. I need to detour to find some hills.
Anyway, I could have gotten a lift, but I decided to ride. What kind of fuckwit deliberately decides to cycle on a cold, pissing wet day when there is a comfy car as an option? Meatheads like me I guess. One good thing with the weather is that it keeps all the bloody prams and pedestrians indoors, which theoretically means I could let rip and belt around The Bay at top speed without fear of hitting anyone ("Constable, a cyclist hit my baby" - with a Lindy Chamberlain accent). Except for a few small problems - namely a road surface that is slick with oil and grease that has decided to rise to the surface after months of no rain, and the fact that I can't see more than about 20 yards with the rain pelting in my face.
That doesn't stop the local wogs from flying up and down the road outside my office window. Every now and then, one will come around the corner near our place, plant it, break out and go sideways a bit. I make sure I park the car away from the corner where they like to slide. God, souped up four cylinder rice burners sound pathetic when doing a wheel spin in the wet. I'm waiting for one to zoom down our road too fast, fail to stop at the T intersection at the end of the street and end up with their car parked in 6 feet of water in The Bay. That will be worth a few photos. I should take a fold up chair and a brolly and a bucket of oil and walk down to the end of the street and throw the oil in front of the first speeding rice burner that I see. Or, I could be really lazy and take one of those pump water pistols and see how much oil one can throw onto the road in 5 seconds. I should be able to do that sitting down in my comfy chair.
By the way, the leg warmers were a revelation. I have always dreaded them, thinking that I'd look totally queer in a pair. Well, maybe I do, but I was so amazed at how warm I was, all thoughts of queerdom were banished. Face it, by the time you've pulled on the dicky looking helmet (not many people look cool in a bike helmet), the tight knicks, the tight shirt etc, you look pretty wierd already. Adding a set of tight black tights is not going to change the picture much. It would be like pushing Humpty Dumpty off the wall and then treading on what's left. He's already fucked - treading on him is not going to fuck him up much more.
The good thing about them is I did not have to repeat my "I am not a fairy" mantra when riding home tonight. I was so toasty and warm, I simply had to think, "I am not gay" a few times and that was it.
Monday, 5 June 2006
Boston Legal - camerawork from hell
Try this as an experiment - turn on your TV around 10.30pm on a Monday night and watch Boston Legal - with the sound muted. With no sound, you will be forced to watch what is going on. Apart from the totally hammy acting, the amazing thing is the camera work. It is a non-stop pastiche of zooms, pans and zooms with pans. The camera never sits still. The 10 year old has been fiddling with our digital camera recently, and his efforts at home video are about on par with Boston Legal. The zooming and panning and cutting to and from almost made me sick. You only need to watch about 1 minute of it to see what I mean, which is about 50 seconds too long in my opinion. What happened to the big black guy with the lips like truck inner tubes? What happened to the fat chick that never got laid? What happened to the skinny chick that was such a babe on Twin Peaks?
Now we have a bunch of has-been hams. James Spaader - fresh out of re-hab. His acting might improve after a few lines of coke. William Shatner - bless his cotton socks - he hasn't improved since the days of TJ Hooker. Michael J Fox - shown from the neck up only so that you don't see that the lower part of his body is shaking like a demented monkey.
Someone should tell the camera man to stop snorting speed before a shoot.
Boston Legal tonight was washed down with some apricots out of a tin. SPC should stop canning fruit and start boiling their heads in light syrup. I took a close look at the apricots and most of them were half green. My view is that an apricot is tasty when it is just about, but not quite ready to fall off the tree. These apricots must have been removed with chain saws. They were so green, it can't have been that long since the tree was pollinated. It was like eating a bowl of canned lemons. Pouring half a bag of sugar into the tin won't fix the problem. If the lepers that they employ as pickers are so colour blind that they can't tell orange (or apricot) from green, then they should send them back to Afghanistan.
More on the Bunnings saga with the pitchfork. The bastards are obviously on to me - they must have been reading my blog. I took the owner of the now 75% effective cheap arsed Chinese claptrap pitchfork to Bunnings on Sunday to purchase a replacement and the pricks had removed all the brittle, cheap and nasty, crap cast iron $7.99 models from the shelves and replaced them with locally made, tempered steel, properly welded $79 models. Thankfully Ian is a gentleman and a cheapskate and he let me delay my purchase of a no-good, easily breakable, two bit shoddy tool until the next container arrives from the Shanghai delta.
Now we have a bunch of has-been hams. James Spaader - fresh out of re-hab. His acting might improve after a few lines of coke. William Shatner - bless his cotton socks - he hasn't improved since the days of TJ Hooker. Michael J Fox - shown from the neck up only so that you don't see that the lower part of his body is shaking like a demented monkey.
Someone should tell the camera man to stop snorting speed before a shoot.
Boston Legal tonight was washed down with some apricots out of a tin. SPC should stop canning fruit and start boiling their heads in light syrup. I took a close look at the apricots and most of them were half green. My view is that an apricot is tasty when it is just about, but not quite ready to fall off the tree. These apricots must have been removed with chain saws. They were so green, it can't have been that long since the tree was pollinated. It was like eating a bowl of canned lemons. Pouring half a bag of sugar into the tin won't fix the problem. If the lepers that they employ as pickers are so colour blind that they can't tell orange (or apricot) from green, then they should send them back to Afghanistan.
More on the Bunnings saga with the pitchfork. The bastards are obviously on to me - they must have been reading my blog. I took the owner of the now 75% effective cheap arsed Chinese claptrap pitchfork to Bunnings on Sunday to purchase a replacement and the pricks had removed all the brittle, cheap and nasty, crap cast iron $7.99 models from the shelves and replaced them with locally made, tempered steel, properly welded $79 models. Thankfully Ian is a gentleman and a cheapskate and he let me delay my purchase of a no-good, easily breakable, two bit shoddy tool until the next container arrives from the Shanghai delta.
Sunday, 4 June 2006
Boy, am I glad I don't live on the North Shore anymore
From the SMH:
A couple have had their car stolen at gunpoint on a busy Sydney road.
They were stopped at traffic lights at the intersection of Spit Road and Awaba Street, Mosman, at 5.50pm last night when their late-model Audi sedan was nudged from behind by a green Subaru Outback 4WD.
When the 45-year-old male driver got out to inspect his car he was dragged away by a man. A second man, armed with a handgun, pulled the 45-year-old woman in the passenger seat from the vehicle. Both men then got into the Audi, which was last seen being driven into Awaba Street with the green Subaru following.
The couple, from Balgowlah Heights, were shaken but unhurt.
The stolen vehicle is a silver 2005 Audi S4 sedan with the registration number ATE-05R.
------------------------------------
Awaba Street is where Chook used to live. He now lives one street away. We cross the road at that intersection when we walk from his place down to Balmoral for a coffee (I think).
We watched "Patriot Games" last night. There is a scene towards the end where Harrison Ford's wife gets out the shotgun to defend the family against some home invaders (IRA) and she can't find the shells to go with it. They've been put away somewhere safe. At that point, I was thinking that we need a nice semi-auto rifle around the house - something like an M-14 or an SLR. Something with a good punch. Only problem with one of them is that if you blast some home invader at the front door, the slug will go through him, the neighbours house and probably the next house again. Perhaps a pump action shotgun would be a better idea.
If someone bumps me from behind whilst on the north shore, I must remember to stick the Disco into reverse and slam the tow ball through their radiator, then drive off after writing down their number plate. Much safer to drive to a cop shop to lodge a report than to stop and exchange details.
Friday, 2 June 2006
I am not a fairy.....
I had to undergo two trials by fire this week. The first was a visit to the dentist for a really nasty scale and clean. Think of your average 6 monthly trip to the dentist for a bit of a scrape and multiply it by 10. I need to have super-duper scraping done down under the gum line, and the tartar is stuck on with superglue down there. The only way to do it and survive is to have 1/4 of the mouth done at a time, to undergo the treatments a few weeks apart, and to have a bunch of injections into the gum to numb the pain.
It was all done by a lovely lady, who ripped and tore and crunched away at my teeth - she would have made a good hard rock miner. The end result was a bib covered in bits of tartar and big blobs of blood, and a nose so numb I couldn't feel half of it. I was also a bit freaked out and white as a sheet - I am not big on needles, especially needles into the gum. I think the only thing that would be freakier would be a needle into the eyeball, and I am not lining up for one of them every two weeks.
The procedure only lasted 45 minutes, but it set me back $230, and I finished with a nice case of the shakes and a pallor that was as white as the Adams Family. I asked them to crank up the air con, as dentistry gives me the sweats, but I still left a huge wet patch on the dentists couch. It ran from my neck to my knees - I was glued to the couch with sweat.
It's just one of those bloody things that one has to put up with - it's either that, or end up with false teeth in 30 years time, and I am less keen on that idea than a needle in the gums every few weeks. It wouldn't be too bad if it was just one needle, but there are multiple nerves in the gum, so you need to get prodded half a dozen times with the needle. Once is bad - six times is torture. I just lay there thinking of the book, "Marathon Man", which was turned into a movie starring Dustin Hoffman. If you don't know the plot, then you are lucky. It added to peoples fear of dentistry the same way that Jaws did it for swimming and sharks.
The lesson is - floss every day.
The second trial was riding home tonight. The weather set in around 2pm - rain, cold and biting wind. When I made it home, I flicked on the ABC news and found that the temp was 9 degrees, but the wind chill made it seem like half that - 4.5 degrees! Thankfully, there is a Kathmandu shop in our building, so I was able to duck in at the end of the day and pick up a $20 fleecy shirt thing to wear under my cycling shirt. It's one of those fancy things that keep you dry and warm etc. Only problem was it was on special because they were getting rid of all the stock that was Tony size, so it hangs on me like a chaff bag. If it wasn't for that, I would have arrived home as a frozen popsicle.
I was not the only idiot cycling home - I came up behind a bunch in Pyrmont, but they were all dawdling like pansies in the rain, and I left them in a rooster tail of spray from my back tyre. Not that I was going that fast - the roads were as slippery as a wet pussy and the rain was punching hard into my eyelids like demented bees. I have these wonderful wrap around ballistic type sunnies that are perfect for this type of weather, but I couldn't wear the bloody things as it was too dark. I had to wear my normal glasses, which fogged up faster than a bathroom mirror, so I had the choice of getting my eyeballs poked by raindrops, or riding with zero visibility.
I think the first horrid moment was that trickle of cold water that gets into your shoes after negotiating the first reasonable sized puddle. The impact of cold water on feet is never a fun thing. Then you get the flush of cold water right up the date from the spray coming off the rear tyre. Add to that is the impact of freezing rain on your forehead just between the bottom of the helmet and the top of your glasses.
I was about 30 seconds out of the office carpark when I started reciting, "I am not a fairy, I am not a fairy", and I kept that up until I got home half an hour later. I think I recited it at least 360 times. I didn't stop and phone home for a pickup, so I am not a fairy. I am not a fag. I passed the test, whatever the hell it was. I think my gums also started bleeding from the effort.
Cycling is one of those things that is 50% physical stamina and 50% willpower. I think I wanted to prove that I had the willpower to push it through some truly miserable conditions. I made it, but now I feel totally fucked. I'm getting too old for this crap.
It was all done by a lovely lady, who ripped and tore and crunched away at my teeth - she would have made a good hard rock miner. The end result was a bib covered in bits of tartar and big blobs of blood, and a nose so numb I couldn't feel half of it. I was also a bit freaked out and white as a sheet - I am not big on needles, especially needles into the gum. I think the only thing that would be freakier would be a needle into the eyeball, and I am not lining up for one of them every two weeks.
The procedure only lasted 45 minutes, but it set me back $230, and I finished with a nice case of the shakes and a pallor that was as white as the Adams Family. I asked them to crank up the air con, as dentistry gives me the sweats, but I still left a huge wet patch on the dentists couch. It ran from my neck to my knees - I was glued to the couch with sweat.
It's just one of those bloody things that one has to put up with - it's either that, or end up with false teeth in 30 years time, and I am less keen on that idea than a needle in the gums every few weeks. It wouldn't be too bad if it was just one needle, but there are multiple nerves in the gum, so you need to get prodded half a dozen times with the needle. Once is bad - six times is torture. I just lay there thinking of the book, "Marathon Man", which was turned into a movie starring Dustin Hoffman. If you don't know the plot, then you are lucky. It added to peoples fear of dentistry the same way that Jaws did it for swimming and sharks.
The lesson is - floss every day.
The second trial was riding home tonight. The weather set in around 2pm - rain, cold and biting wind. When I made it home, I flicked on the ABC news and found that the temp was 9 degrees, but the wind chill made it seem like half that - 4.5 degrees! Thankfully, there is a Kathmandu shop in our building, so I was able to duck in at the end of the day and pick up a $20 fleecy shirt thing to wear under my cycling shirt. It's one of those fancy things that keep you dry and warm etc. Only problem was it was on special because they were getting rid of all the stock that was Tony size, so it hangs on me like a chaff bag. If it wasn't for that, I would have arrived home as a frozen popsicle.
I was not the only idiot cycling home - I came up behind a bunch in Pyrmont, but they were all dawdling like pansies in the rain, and I left them in a rooster tail of spray from my back tyre. Not that I was going that fast - the roads were as slippery as a wet pussy and the rain was punching hard into my eyelids like demented bees. I have these wonderful wrap around ballistic type sunnies that are perfect for this type of weather, but I couldn't wear the bloody things as it was too dark. I had to wear my normal glasses, which fogged up faster than a bathroom mirror, so I had the choice of getting my eyeballs poked by raindrops, or riding with zero visibility.
I think the first horrid moment was that trickle of cold water that gets into your shoes after negotiating the first reasonable sized puddle. The impact of cold water on feet is never a fun thing. Then you get the flush of cold water right up the date from the spray coming off the rear tyre. Add to that is the impact of freezing rain on your forehead just between the bottom of the helmet and the top of your glasses.
I was about 30 seconds out of the office carpark when I started reciting, "I am not a fairy, I am not a fairy", and I kept that up until I got home half an hour later. I think I recited it at least 360 times. I didn't stop and phone home for a pickup, so I am not a fairy. I am not a fag. I passed the test, whatever the hell it was. I think my gums also started bleeding from the effort.
Cycling is one of those things that is 50% physical stamina and 50% willpower. I think I wanted to prove that I had the willpower to push it through some truly miserable conditions. I made it, but now I feel totally fucked. I'm getting too old for this crap.
How low can yogo?
We had the most amazing thing for dessert the other night - home made Yogo. The last time I had a chocolate Yogo, I was about 14 years old. Well, maybe 34 - I am sure I bought one for old times sake once when passing through the dairy section of the supermarket. God, it was yuck.
For some reason, we went on a custard frenzy last week. It was home made custard every night of the week. Yes, that does start to become a bit boring after a while, so cocoa powder was added to make chocolate custard. I completely and utterly rooted it the first time I made it - I added the powder at the end, and it didn't melt into the custard. Instead, we had yellowish-brownish custard with gritty lumps of dried chocolate powder mixed through it.
I then handed over the chocolate custard making reins to the expert, and lo and behold, we had smoothe, velvety chocolate custard in our bowls.
The revelation was the next day after the leftovers had spent a night in the fridge. The custard had set with a nice thick skin and I couldn't resist dipping in for a bit around lunchtime. Once cold, it tasted and felt just like Yogo, except it tasted about 100 times better.
Once again, I am flabbergasted at how a food company can take a simple ancient foodstuff like chocolate custard and make it completely inedible. All we used was packet custard, sugar, milk and cocoa powder - it wasn't even real custard made with eggs and that sort of thing.
Hell, I would like the meet the marketing person that thought up the idea of putting small amounts of cheap chocolate custard into tubs and selling it for a 1000% markup. If I had been CEO of that company, I would have laughed the idiot out the door. Shows how much I understand about marketing and retailing and how much shit the average 10 year old will eat if given free rein.
Yogo? Oh no!
For some reason, we went on a custard frenzy last week. It was home made custard every night of the week. Yes, that does start to become a bit boring after a while, so cocoa powder was added to make chocolate custard. I completely and utterly rooted it the first time I made it - I added the powder at the end, and it didn't melt into the custard. Instead, we had yellowish-brownish custard with gritty lumps of dried chocolate powder mixed through it.
I then handed over the chocolate custard making reins to the expert, and lo and behold, we had smoothe, velvety chocolate custard in our bowls.
The revelation was the next day after the leftovers had spent a night in the fridge. The custard had set with a nice thick skin and I couldn't resist dipping in for a bit around lunchtime. Once cold, it tasted and felt just like Yogo, except it tasted about 100 times better.
Once again, I am flabbergasted at how a food company can take a simple ancient foodstuff like chocolate custard and make it completely inedible. All we used was packet custard, sugar, milk and cocoa powder - it wasn't even real custard made with eggs and that sort of thing.
Hell, I would like the meet the marketing person that thought up the idea of putting small amounts of cheap chocolate custard into tubs and selling it for a 1000% markup. If I had been CEO of that company, I would have laughed the idiot out the door. Shows how much I understand about marketing and retailing and how much shit the average 10 year old will eat if given free rein.
Yogo? Oh no!
Sunday, 28 May 2006
Bastard water restrictions are helping my weeds
One thing that I have done a lot of over the last 2 weeks is walk back and forth across the back lawn. Partly that's because the bike has been banished to the garage, so I have to trek out each morning shortly after sunup to collect it for the ride to work, and partly because a huge stack of shit has been boxed or crated up and stored in the garage. And guess who had to lug all that stuff out of the house and into the garage?
My many treks have allowed me to inspect the lawn - when I'm not trying to avoid braining myself on the Hills Hoist - and I have found that parts of it are about 80% broadleaf weeds. The rest is the kind of detritus that you have after a dog has lived in the yard for a few years. ie, large patches of very dead grass and garden beds that look like the aftermath of a B-52 strike. Bits of it look very much like a dump site for industrial waste.
Weed killing seemed like the easiest place to start, since it just involves spraying the little suckers with some chemical death. That's easier said than done in our current "drought". Water restrictions mean that you can't hose the lawn before 4pm, the penalty being something to do with being strung up by your thumbs and lashed with garden hoses. It gets dark not long after that, so by the time I work out that I can water the lawn without a $220 fine, the sun has gone down and I have to do it via braille or a guide dog.
I had half a jug of Weed'n'feed leftover from the old place, so I decided to give the lawn a squirt last Sunday. It's pretty easy stuff to use - you connect a hose to it, crank up the hose and then put your finger over a nozzle. That causes a drop in pressure and nasty chemicals are sucked up out of the bottle and sprayed all over the lawn. Nifty. Simple. Easy to use in daylight.
So I gave the whole lawn a spray, and waited a week for the weeds to drop dead so that I could mow the little suckers into oblivion. However, an inspection this weekend showed that rather than curling up and dying as required, the little bastards had vigorously expanded to cover 85% of the surface area of the backyard. Clearly, there was something wrong with my weeding technique.
I decided to chance my arm and do a bit of watering in daylight, and I quickly discovered that I had my finger nowhere near the correct nozzle for initiating chemical warfare. I had simply watered the weeds in the dark instead of exterminating them. Now I know when things are going right - you get that lovely chemical smell of glysophate wafting up into your nostrils when the finger is in the right place. On top of that, the chemical bottle gets lighter as it gets emptier. If I had been half awake last week, I would have noticed that the 4 litre bottle that I put back on the shelf weighed about the same as when I took it down. On the other hand, I could have been practicing homeopathic weed killing, where you dilute the chemicals about a million times and they become more effective.
Ha ha. If diluted weed killer won't kill weeds, how will diluted medicine cure people?
Anyway, I blame the stupid water company for their stupid water restrictions. Evaporation at the moment is not much of an issue - the mercury topped out at 19 degrees today, and it was a brave man that wore shorts. Restrictions like this might have made sense 2 months ago during summer, but now they are just a bloody nuisance.
Typical bloody beauracrats - they make a regulation, and then are too scared to change it when common sense says it should be changed. As Cold Chisel used to sing, "You go on and on and on and you don't make no sense".
To cap it off, I borrowed a pitchfork to clean up the industrial waste dump in the vain hope of planting a few herbs and things. I forked my way through about 3 metres of garden bed, and then one of the bloody tines snapped off the fork! It's not like I was jumping up and down on the handle or anything - it just busted off on a rock about the size of a tennis ball. I then noticed that the tines were made of very crappy mild steel - almost iron rather than steel. More fucking useless pissweak Chinese crap from Bunnings. Gees that store is beginning to shit me. The whole thing is stuffed from top to bottom with goods that have a shorter half life than a beer in a blackfellas camp. Now I have to go back there this weekend to buy a replacement. The bloody thing will probably only cost $9, but the biggest problem I have is in disposing of the busted one. The council gives us weeny little bins these days, and the flipping thing won't fit.
I might have to take it down to the harbour for a bit of "spear fishing" and leave it embedded in the mud.
My many treks have allowed me to inspect the lawn - when I'm not trying to avoid braining myself on the Hills Hoist - and I have found that parts of it are about 80% broadleaf weeds. The rest is the kind of detritus that you have after a dog has lived in the yard for a few years. ie, large patches of very dead grass and garden beds that look like the aftermath of a B-52 strike. Bits of it look very much like a dump site for industrial waste.
Weed killing seemed like the easiest place to start, since it just involves spraying the little suckers with some chemical death. That's easier said than done in our current "drought". Water restrictions mean that you can't hose the lawn before 4pm, the penalty being something to do with being strung up by your thumbs and lashed with garden hoses. It gets dark not long after that, so by the time I work out that I can water the lawn without a $220 fine, the sun has gone down and I have to do it via braille or a guide dog.
I had half a jug of Weed'n'feed leftover from the old place, so I decided to give the lawn a squirt last Sunday. It's pretty easy stuff to use - you connect a hose to it, crank up the hose and then put your finger over a nozzle. That causes a drop in pressure and nasty chemicals are sucked up out of the bottle and sprayed all over the lawn. Nifty. Simple. Easy to use in daylight.
So I gave the whole lawn a spray, and waited a week for the weeds to drop dead so that I could mow the little suckers into oblivion. However, an inspection this weekend showed that rather than curling up and dying as required, the little bastards had vigorously expanded to cover 85% of the surface area of the backyard. Clearly, there was something wrong with my weeding technique.
I decided to chance my arm and do a bit of watering in daylight, and I quickly discovered that I had my finger nowhere near the correct nozzle for initiating chemical warfare. I had simply watered the weeds in the dark instead of exterminating them. Now I know when things are going right - you get that lovely chemical smell of glysophate wafting up into your nostrils when the finger is in the right place. On top of that, the chemical bottle gets lighter as it gets emptier. If I had been half awake last week, I would have noticed that the 4 litre bottle that I put back on the shelf weighed about the same as when I took it down. On the other hand, I could have been practicing homeopathic weed killing, where you dilute the chemicals about a million times and they become more effective.
Ha ha. If diluted weed killer won't kill weeds, how will diluted medicine cure people?
Anyway, I blame the stupid water company for their stupid water restrictions. Evaporation at the moment is not much of an issue - the mercury topped out at 19 degrees today, and it was a brave man that wore shorts. Restrictions like this might have made sense 2 months ago during summer, but now they are just a bloody nuisance.
Typical bloody beauracrats - they make a regulation, and then are too scared to change it when common sense says it should be changed. As Cold Chisel used to sing, "You go on and on and on and you don't make no sense".
To cap it off, I borrowed a pitchfork to clean up the industrial waste dump in the vain hope of planting a few herbs and things. I forked my way through about 3 metres of garden bed, and then one of the bloody tines snapped off the fork! It's not like I was jumping up and down on the handle or anything - it just busted off on a rock about the size of a tennis ball. I then noticed that the tines were made of very crappy mild steel - almost iron rather than steel. More fucking useless pissweak Chinese crap from Bunnings. Gees that store is beginning to shit me. The whole thing is stuffed from top to bottom with goods that have a shorter half life than a beer in a blackfellas camp. Now I have to go back there this weekend to buy a replacement. The bloody thing will probably only cost $9, but the biggest problem I have is in disposing of the busted one. The council gives us weeny little bins these days, and the flipping thing won't fit.
I might have to take it down to the harbour for a bit of "spear fishing" and leave it embedded in the mud.
At last - tomato chutney!
Little sister was up from Canberra for the weekend, so after a nasty night on the turps, we headed for a recovery breakfast in Balmain. The choice once again was "our place".
First thing to note - they now serve coffee in bowls ala French style. Personally, I think it is a big wank, but what the hell, if it sells more coffee, good luck to them. I would have given him the eye of death if he had dared to suggest that my latte be served up in a bowl rather than a glass (as pictured), but he took one look at my rather seedy visage and thought better of it. The girls both went bowls. It put them in the mood to go shopping afterwards - very chic and Parisian. Maybe the local boutique owners put them up to it?
This is my feed - a big breakfast poached. Note the small white container of chutney at the top. I spotted chutney as an fixture on another meal on the menu, and requested it as an extra on mine. I was half expecting a little tub of tabasco to arrive, but proper chutney in a proper little serving dish turned up. It was good. It helped jog my memory of Griffith - the stuff out there was called "Five cup chutney". I don't know what the five cups refers to. However, it does not taste like crap that you get at a supermarket.
One problem - not enough of it. This chutney rationing business has gone far enough. It's not like we are having to import chutney from the US in Liberty ships across an Atlantic swimming with U-boats. This is not 1942. The Blitz is not in operation. Last time I looked, buying foodstuffs did not require the presentation of ration tickets and the checkout. Then why the bloody scrimping on the chutney? If they are going to hit me over the head for about $14 for the meal, and then another $3 for coffee, the least they can do is cough up a smidgen more chutney. It's not like it is the difference between mammoth profit and stupendous losses.
This is what little sister had for breakfast - salmon, poached eggs, home made hash browns, spinach and lots of hollandaise. Note the smoothe texture of the hollandaise. Also note that the meal is not that big. It is not that long since my "big" breakfast, and I am getting hungry just looking at this photo. I might have to pop back for a second, late breakfast. She wolfed it down though, and praised the hash browns and things. Given the size of the meal, I bet she stops at McDonalds on the way back to Canberra for a top up.
First thing to note - they now serve coffee in bowls ala French style. Personally, I think it is a big wank, but what the hell, if it sells more coffee, good luck to them. I would have given him the eye of death if he had dared to suggest that my latte be served up in a bowl rather than a glass (as pictured), but he took one look at my rather seedy visage and thought better of it. The girls both went bowls. It put them in the mood to go shopping afterwards - very chic and Parisian. Maybe the local boutique owners put them up to it?
This is my feed - a big breakfast poached. Note the small white container of chutney at the top. I spotted chutney as an fixture on another meal on the menu, and requested it as an extra on mine. I was half expecting a little tub of tabasco to arrive, but proper chutney in a proper little serving dish turned up. It was good. It helped jog my memory of Griffith - the stuff out there was called "Five cup chutney". I don't know what the five cups refers to. However, it does not taste like crap that you get at a supermarket.
One problem - not enough of it. This chutney rationing business has gone far enough. It's not like we are having to import chutney from the US in Liberty ships across an Atlantic swimming with U-boats. This is not 1942. The Blitz is not in operation. Last time I looked, buying foodstuffs did not require the presentation of ration tickets and the checkout. Then why the bloody scrimping on the chutney? If they are going to hit me over the head for about $14 for the meal, and then another $3 for coffee, the least they can do is cough up a smidgen more chutney. It's not like it is the difference between mammoth profit and stupendous losses.
This is what little sister had for breakfast - salmon, poached eggs, home made hash browns, spinach and lots of hollandaise. Note the smoothe texture of the hollandaise. Also note that the meal is not that big. It is not that long since my "big" breakfast, and I am getting hungry just looking at this photo. I might have to pop back for a second, late breakfast. She wolfed it down though, and praised the hash browns and things. Given the size of the meal, I bet she stops at McDonalds on the way back to Canberra for a top up.
Saturday, 27 May 2006
Has Rage turned to shit?
Since booze filled Friday nights are now a thing of the past, it has been a while since I have seen a bit of late night Rage. All that I get is the soft-core version from around 8am to 11am on Saturday morning. I can hear it playing on the TV in the room behind me. It's been on for 2 hours so far, and there is not one thing that I could be bothered to turn around and look at.
It's turned into fucking Video Hits. Or Dildo Shits. Music for 9 year old girls. I thought the ABC charter was about being different, not being a "me-too" with commercial 2Day-FM type soft cock pap. I doubt Henry Rollins will be appearing.
If I could work out how to program the video recorder, I'd get it to tape from say 3am to 6am to see if the late night version is watchable, but I can't, so I am stuck with the teeny-bopper version. This is the prime driver behind me going out and buying a digital recorder. All I want to do is timeslip Rage. I want to watch the late night version without being so pissed that I pass out on the couch with a half eaten kebab in my lap.
On the other hand, was that why Rage seemed so good? If you've crawled in the door at 2am with a hot dog or a McDonalds meal or a kebab and you just want enough stimulation to keep you awake while you eat and try to drink 2 litres of water before sleep, then Rage was the thing. But is it any good sober? Is Rage like cigarettes? Only enjoyable after about the 6th beer? Is the late night version something that has to be earned through excessive drinking, and it should not be consumed over breakfast?
Time slipping it might spoil something special. It would be like drinking port before a meal, rather than after. Port is great with cheese, and it is a lovely thing to drink after you've been drinking red wine all night, but it would be a travesty to drink it with say canapes. It's just not the done thing.
ie, it would be a fake experience. It would be like going to a wave pool for a surf, or to one of those indoor ski things. Yes, you might get to slide downhill on fake snow, but that is only 10% of the experience. Why bother?
Yes, I think I will dump the digital recorder idea and just stay up late tonight and get drunk.
It's turned into fucking Video Hits. Or Dildo Shits. Music for 9 year old girls. I thought the ABC charter was about being different, not being a "me-too" with commercial 2Day-FM type soft cock pap. I doubt Henry Rollins will be appearing.
If I could work out how to program the video recorder, I'd get it to tape from say 3am to 6am to see if the late night version is watchable, but I can't, so I am stuck with the teeny-bopper version. This is the prime driver behind me going out and buying a digital recorder. All I want to do is timeslip Rage. I want to watch the late night version without being so pissed that I pass out on the couch with a half eaten kebab in my lap.
On the other hand, was that why Rage seemed so good? If you've crawled in the door at 2am with a hot dog or a McDonalds meal or a kebab and you just want enough stimulation to keep you awake while you eat and try to drink 2 litres of water before sleep, then Rage was the thing. But is it any good sober? Is Rage like cigarettes? Only enjoyable after about the 6th beer? Is the late night version something that has to be earned through excessive drinking, and it should not be consumed over breakfast?
Time slipping it might spoil something special. It would be like drinking port before a meal, rather than after. Port is great with cheese, and it is a lovely thing to drink after you've been drinking red wine all night, but it would be a travesty to drink it with say canapes. It's just not the done thing.
ie, it would be a fake experience. It would be like going to a wave pool for a surf, or to one of those indoor ski things. Yes, you might get to slide downhill on fake snow, but that is only 10% of the experience. Why bother?
Yes, I think I will dump the digital recorder idea and just stay up late tonight and get drunk.
Salsa bastard, you are too far away
Earlier this year, we did a road trip to Griffith. That's about seven hours solid driving without breaks from the chair that I am sitting in right now, or two days if you have a noise making monkey in the back seat that wants to be fed and changed and played with at regular intervals.
Before I went to Griffith, the thought of going had always been filed away with "dumps I would prefer to avoid if possible", places like sewerage plants, nuclear waste facilities and Delta Goodrem concerts. An actual visit changed my mind.
The things that changed my mind were food, grog, the Yarts and a really good chutney.
As far as the Yarts go, there was an art gallery on the edge of town that we dropped in to - more for a leg stretch than anything else. The result of that visit was the purchase of the candle holder shown here. The reason I bought it is that the smiling fish on the bottom reminds me of my brother. He didn't smile that much when I sent him a photo of a pottery fish and said that it was a good likeness - particularly as the one above him is his wife, and I don't think he appreciates being at the bottom of the fish pecking order.
The wineries were good as well, particularly De Bortoli. I wanted to visit them to buy some more dessert wine, which I did. As they were packing my bottles into a box, they asked if I wanted any of their el-cheapo white plonk - basically a white for chicks to drink on the weekend which won't break the bank. I consider it cask wine in a bottle. I relented and allowed them to put a few bottles of some $6 chick piss in my case of lovely, aged dessert wines.
When we got home, a mate came over and a bottle of this cask-like el-cheapo chick swill was opened and I reluctantly allowed a glass to be poured for me. Before the girls could refill, my mate and I had polished off two bottles of the stuff. It turned out to be rather excellent (as far as cheap, drinkable white goes). It took only a few weeks for the rest of the case to go.
So I checked out the De Bortoli website in the hope of restocking with 6 cases or so, and found that not only could I not find this chick plonk on their wine listings, but you can't order over the web! Spewing! They must be the only winery in the country that doesn't do sales over the web. Useless wogs. One day, I might work out how to use the phone again and ring them up and place an order "off line". Until then, we are drinking 2002 Hunter Valley Chardonnay that came to light during the recent move. At 4 years old, it has mellowed to the colour of really old cats piss, but it tastes somewhat better. As it should, at about 5 times the price of the Griffith cask-in-a-bottle. Bloody wogs should learn to embrace the web. Yes, I know that most of it is in English rather than eye-tie, but that is no excuse for not developing an online shopping presence.
After sampling a few wineries, we got lost in the backblocks of the Murrumbidgee irrigation district. I need to put a compass or a GPS into the car. It's flat as fuck out there (hence the irrigation) but the roads are not laid out on a perfect grid. Instead, there is a kind of a grid, but not a proper grid. We turned left and right and left and left and got thoroughly confused as to which way we were pointing. That however put us right outside some kind of fruit and nut farm, which we popped in to visit.
The shop turned out to be the pantry off the kitchen, with bottles of stuff stacked up in a mayhem-ish fashion. It reminded me a lot of Rivendell - 10 different chutneys, jams made from all sorts of stuff, pickles etc. It was great. I bought a jar or two of some kind of chutney or salsa that contained a good dose of chilli. It was almost like a chilli jam. I think he called it a 5 fruit salsa, or something like that. Put it this way - whatever the hell it was, it was excellent with bacon and eggs. So excellent that it lasted about 3 weeks and then it was empty.
And the bastard stuff can only be bought out of a pantry on the outskirts of Griffith - 7 hours each way - and I doubt I could find it again as I'd probably get lost on the looney grid road system.
Bastards! Why are they conspiring to keep me and my tasty chutney separated? It's a pain that in this age of instant gratification, I can't just pop down to the local deli to get a jar. I actually need to wait. Wait until we do our next road trip down that way. I feel like an early settler waiting for mail, or a jar of marmite, to be shipped out from England on a sailing ship. It takes 3 months for your order to get there by ship (if the ship doesn't sink) and then 3 months to come back. No wonder people got so excited by the arrival of airmail.
It doesn't help me though, as I have no idea what the nutter's business was called, and I doubt he will consent to shipping one or two jars through the mail - not worth the candle. The kitchen isn't big enough to store an entire case either. Fuck. I'm stuck.
Before I went to Griffith, the thought of going had always been filed away with "dumps I would prefer to avoid if possible", places like sewerage plants, nuclear waste facilities and Delta Goodrem concerts. An actual visit changed my mind.
The things that changed my mind were food, grog, the Yarts and a really good chutney.As far as the Yarts go, there was an art gallery on the edge of town that we dropped in to - more for a leg stretch than anything else. The result of that visit was the purchase of the candle holder shown here. The reason I bought it is that the smiling fish on the bottom reminds me of my brother. He didn't smile that much when I sent him a photo of a pottery fish and said that it was a good likeness - particularly as the one above him is his wife, and I don't think he appreciates being at the bottom of the fish pecking order.
The wineries were good as well, particularly De Bortoli. I wanted to visit them to buy some more dessert wine, which I did. As they were packing my bottles into a box, they asked if I wanted any of their el-cheapo white plonk - basically a white for chicks to drink on the weekend which won't break the bank. I consider it cask wine in a bottle. I relented and allowed them to put a few bottles of some $6 chick piss in my case of lovely, aged dessert wines.
When we got home, a mate came over and a bottle of this cask-like el-cheapo chick swill was opened and I reluctantly allowed a glass to be poured for me. Before the girls could refill, my mate and I had polished off two bottles of the stuff. It turned out to be rather excellent (as far as cheap, drinkable white goes). It took only a few weeks for the rest of the case to go.
So I checked out the De Bortoli website in the hope of restocking with 6 cases or so, and found that not only could I not find this chick plonk on their wine listings, but you can't order over the web! Spewing! They must be the only winery in the country that doesn't do sales over the web. Useless wogs. One day, I might work out how to use the phone again and ring them up and place an order "off line". Until then, we are drinking 2002 Hunter Valley Chardonnay that came to light during the recent move. At 4 years old, it has mellowed to the colour of really old cats piss, but it tastes somewhat better. As it should, at about 5 times the price of the Griffith cask-in-a-bottle. Bloody wogs should learn to embrace the web. Yes, I know that most of it is in English rather than eye-tie, but that is no excuse for not developing an online shopping presence.
After sampling a few wineries, we got lost in the backblocks of the Murrumbidgee irrigation district. I need to put a compass or a GPS into the car. It's flat as fuck out there (hence the irrigation) but the roads are not laid out on a perfect grid. Instead, there is a kind of a grid, but not a proper grid. We turned left and right and left and left and got thoroughly confused as to which way we were pointing. That however put us right outside some kind of fruit and nut farm, which we popped in to visit.
The shop turned out to be the pantry off the kitchen, with bottles of stuff stacked up in a mayhem-ish fashion. It reminded me a lot of Rivendell - 10 different chutneys, jams made from all sorts of stuff, pickles etc. It was great. I bought a jar or two of some kind of chutney or salsa that contained a good dose of chilli. It was almost like a chilli jam. I think he called it a 5 fruit salsa, or something like that. Put it this way - whatever the hell it was, it was excellent with bacon and eggs. So excellent that it lasted about 3 weeks and then it was empty.
And the bastard stuff can only be bought out of a pantry on the outskirts of Griffith - 7 hours each way - and I doubt I could find it again as I'd probably get lost on the looney grid road system.
Bastards! Why are they conspiring to keep me and my tasty chutney separated? It's a pain that in this age of instant gratification, I can't just pop down to the local deli to get a jar. I actually need to wait. Wait until we do our next road trip down that way. I feel like an early settler waiting for mail, or a jar of marmite, to be shipped out from England on a sailing ship. It takes 3 months for your order to get there by ship (if the ship doesn't sink) and then 3 months to come back. No wonder people got so excited by the arrival of airmail.
It doesn't help me though, as I have no idea what the nutter's business was called, and I doubt he will consent to shipping one or two jars through the mail - not worth the candle. The kitchen isn't big enough to store an entire case either. Fuck. I'm stuck.
Optus, thy Helpdesk is crap
Our tiny office at home has two PC's - one for me and one for Her Ladyship. Mine is on BigPond ADSL, and hers is on Optus dialup.
We finally bit the bullet last week and decided to wire up a home network and put both on my ADSL.
The actual connecting of the PC's etc was a doddle. I have a firewall/router now with 4 switch ports in the back, so that made it a breeze. No fiddling around with network bridge settings and the like on the PC.
Things were going well until Her Ladyship tried to send an email from Outlook. No dice - wouldn't go. Email was coming in, but nothing was going out. She fiddled with various Outlook settings, but nothing helped.
So she rang Optus to ask them to help (I was at work and could offer not assistance). When I got home, I got an earful about how stupid and useless and braindead the Optus helpdesk staff are. I didn't bother calling them - instead, I got onto their website and looked in the support area. There were some documents telling you how to configure Outlook, but none of the settings worked.
I spent about half an hour dicking around on the Optus site, then went over to net-registry, which hosts the domain name for her business. They were no help either.
Thankfully, I have a bookmark to Ozcableguy on myPC. About 2 minutes of browsing through his FAQ's solved the problem. All that I had to do was change the outgoing SMTP server from optus to bigpond, and we could send email.
Fuck, what a waste of a day. I presume that the BigPond site will offer no help either if you want to setup your BigPond email account on a PC connected to Optus cable. Pricks. Turds. Wankers. Why can't they be civil and provide a bit of advice in this area?
We finally bit the bullet last week and decided to wire up a home network and put both on my ADSL.
The actual connecting of the PC's etc was a doddle. I have a firewall/router now with 4 switch ports in the back, so that made it a breeze. No fiddling around with network bridge settings and the like on the PC.
Things were going well until Her Ladyship tried to send an email from Outlook. No dice - wouldn't go. Email was coming in, but nothing was going out. She fiddled with various Outlook settings, but nothing helped.
So she rang Optus to ask them to help (I was at work and could offer not assistance). When I got home, I got an earful about how stupid and useless and braindead the Optus helpdesk staff are. I didn't bother calling them - instead, I got onto their website and looked in the support area. There were some documents telling you how to configure Outlook, but none of the settings worked.
I spent about half an hour dicking around on the Optus site, then went over to net-registry, which hosts the domain name for her business. They were no help either.
Thankfully, I have a bookmark to Ozcableguy on myPC. About 2 minutes of browsing through his FAQ's solved the problem. All that I had to do was change the outgoing SMTP server from optus to bigpond, and we could send email.
Fuck, what a waste of a day. I presume that the BigPond site will offer no help either if you want to setup your BigPond email account on a PC connected to Optus cable. Pricks. Turds. Wankers. Why can't they be civil and provide a bit of advice in this area?
Monday, 22 May 2006
Cows heads and kebabs
Hell, I knew there was something that I forgot when it came to describing Greek kebabs. It was the meat markets that I wandered through by accident one day in Athens.
Ok, let's imagine that you are wandering through your typical weekend market at say Fremantle or Bondi or St Kilda or Glebe where hippies are selling handmade lavender and rosemary soap, necklaces, second hand watches, second hand books, hemp shirt, paintings, knick nacks, tofu burgers, CD's, furniture, photo frames and all the rest of it and you came upon the meat stand.
Instead of the meat being lovingly cut and cryopacked into dripless plastic bags, and those bags sitting in lovely temperature controlled fridges etc, you found that the butcher has a large wooden block, and on that block sat a half skinned cows head. Buzzing with flies. And hanging from hooks around it where all sorts of unidentifiable bits of cow. Also buzzing with flies. I've seen a bit of bush butchering being done, but at least the half inept bush butchers that I know can knock up an animal into some partly recognisable cuts. These Greek guys just went at the cow with an axe and knocked off bits any old how. It was the butchering equivalent of a mad womans breakfast.
The whole lot was enlivened with flies and slowly congealing pools of blood here, there and everywhere. Clearly, being a health inspector or meat inspector is not a recognised occupation in Greece. If you know where the term "bloody shambles" comes from, you might be able to picture the scene.
In fact the first thing that comes to mind these days is the scene in "Three Kings" where the guys meet a cow in the desert, and the cow walks towards them and steps on a land mine or a cluster bomb and explodes and covers them in blood and bits of cow. That to me is a good way to start the kebab making process. If they had scraped the bits of cow off their MOPP suits, stuck it on sticks and grilled it over hot coals, they would be most of the way towards having a kebab the proper way.
Anyway, I had a kebab in this meat market. There was one bloke with a wooden block and a cleaver and he was hacking up bits of meat and threading them onto skewers, and another bloke was cooking them. I'm sure they swapped roles from time to time (without washing their hands), but what the hell, if you haven't had a case of the runs when back packing, then you haven't been trying enough of the local produce.
They cooked a pretty mean kebab. I stood there and ate it whilst looking at the half skinned cows head. I am pretty damned sure I had half an ear, or even a bit of cheek, but with a kebab, it doesn't really matter what bit of the animal you are eating. I'm pretty sure you are safe as long as it bleeds and it is chewy.
Which was the nice thing about the meat market kebab - essentially they fed you badly chopped up lumps of steak, and a nice lump of steak is often rare in the middle, and that is the tasty, juicy part. A great big lump of industrially processed meat on a six foot long skewer does not produce tasty, juicy bits of beef for your kebab. It produces the kebab equivalent of a Big Mac. A bland piece of shit. A fucked fast food farce.
And what is it with the bloody yoghurt sauce that we get in this country? Who the fuck thinks that you are going to have a good yoghurt sauce if it is runny enough to be squeezed out of the nozzle of a squeezy bottle? You should have to ladle the damned stuff onto the kebab with a big spoon. The weak, watery bloody yoghurt that we get dished up is as bad as say Heinz tomato sauce. The stuff is red, it says "tomato sauce" on the bottle, but it is a long way from the sort of tomato sauce that you can mix up on your stove top. Bloody running yucky pathetic cows piss yoghurt sauce is as far from real yoghurt as "ketchup" is from real sauce.
So our local kebab makers can take their big skewers and their watery yoghurt sauce and their watery hummous and fuck off. However, they might have to take a few council food inspectors with them. I don't think the locals of Balmain would appreciate the sight of a cow being chopped into itty little bits for kebabs on the petrol station forecourt in front of the kebab caravan.
It's like the recent decision by the NSW government to ban some kind of fishing in Sydney harbour because (I think) of dioxin levels. Weak bastards. After going through Greece, I crossed the border into Turkey and spent a week in Istanbul. One memorable lunch was had on the banks of the Bosphorus (is the Bosphorus? My geography is getting hazy) and I had the local version of a Fillet of Fish straight off a fishermans boat.
The local fishermen puttered out into the straits in little dinghys - maybe 12 footers - and came back and cooked the catch in the boat over something like half a 44 gallon drum BBQ. They just chucked the whole fish onto the hotplate, grilled it and then handed it over to you in a bun. They might have gutted it, but they certainly didn't take the head off. The locals just scoffed them down heads and all. I started at the tail but had to give up at the gills. Munching fish heads is a bit too multicultural for my liking.
Anyway, there I am, standing on a stone sea wall above a little fishing boat, watching a parade of filthy oil tankers going back and forth through the straits in front of me. Half of them seemed to be leaking oil into the water. The water right in front of where I was standing for instance had that lovely multicoloured spectrum scattering effect that you get when there is a nice scummy oil slick on the surface. Most of the Turks seemed to have only one head and 10 fingers, so the Fillet of Fish couldn't have been too bad for them. However, I am sure those hard working fishermen have been chased into retirement by now by some bloody nosy do-gooding EU inspectors of some sort. If the Turks had any sense, they'd fling the inspectors into the sea and then toss in a match. That would sort them out. And it would be a quick way to cook some fish.
Ok, let's imagine that you are wandering through your typical weekend market at say Fremantle or Bondi or St Kilda or Glebe where hippies are selling handmade lavender and rosemary soap, necklaces, second hand watches, second hand books, hemp shirt, paintings, knick nacks, tofu burgers, CD's, furniture, photo frames and all the rest of it and you came upon the meat stand.
Instead of the meat being lovingly cut and cryopacked into dripless plastic bags, and those bags sitting in lovely temperature controlled fridges etc, you found that the butcher has a large wooden block, and on that block sat a half skinned cows head. Buzzing with flies. And hanging from hooks around it where all sorts of unidentifiable bits of cow. Also buzzing with flies. I've seen a bit of bush butchering being done, but at least the half inept bush butchers that I know can knock up an animal into some partly recognisable cuts. These Greek guys just went at the cow with an axe and knocked off bits any old how. It was the butchering equivalent of a mad womans breakfast.
The whole lot was enlivened with flies and slowly congealing pools of blood here, there and everywhere. Clearly, being a health inspector or meat inspector is not a recognised occupation in Greece. If you know where the term "bloody shambles" comes from, you might be able to picture the scene.
In fact the first thing that comes to mind these days is the scene in "Three Kings" where the guys meet a cow in the desert, and the cow walks towards them and steps on a land mine or a cluster bomb and explodes and covers them in blood and bits of cow. That to me is a good way to start the kebab making process. If they had scraped the bits of cow off their MOPP suits, stuck it on sticks and grilled it over hot coals, they would be most of the way towards having a kebab the proper way.
Anyway, I had a kebab in this meat market. There was one bloke with a wooden block and a cleaver and he was hacking up bits of meat and threading them onto skewers, and another bloke was cooking them. I'm sure they swapped roles from time to time (without washing their hands), but what the hell, if you haven't had a case of the runs when back packing, then you haven't been trying enough of the local produce.
They cooked a pretty mean kebab. I stood there and ate it whilst looking at the half skinned cows head. I am pretty damned sure I had half an ear, or even a bit of cheek, but with a kebab, it doesn't really matter what bit of the animal you are eating. I'm pretty sure you are safe as long as it bleeds and it is chewy.
Which was the nice thing about the meat market kebab - essentially they fed you badly chopped up lumps of steak, and a nice lump of steak is often rare in the middle, and that is the tasty, juicy part. A great big lump of industrially processed meat on a six foot long skewer does not produce tasty, juicy bits of beef for your kebab. It produces the kebab equivalent of a Big Mac. A bland piece of shit. A fucked fast food farce.
And what is it with the bloody yoghurt sauce that we get in this country? Who the fuck thinks that you are going to have a good yoghurt sauce if it is runny enough to be squeezed out of the nozzle of a squeezy bottle? You should have to ladle the damned stuff onto the kebab with a big spoon. The weak, watery bloody yoghurt that we get dished up is as bad as say Heinz tomato sauce. The stuff is red, it says "tomato sauce" on the bottle, but it is a long way from the sort of tomato sauce that you can mix up on your stove top. Bloody running yucky pathetic cows piss yoghurt sauce is as far from real yoghurt as "ketchup" is from real sauce.
So our local kebab makers can take their big skewers and their watery yoghurt sauce and their watery hummous and fuck off. However, they might have to take a few council food inspectors with them. I don't think the locals of Balmain would appreciate the sight of a cow being chopped into itty little bits for kebabs on the petrol station forecourt in front of the kebab caravan.
It's like the recent decision by the NSW government to ban some kind of fishing in Sydney harbour because (I think) of dioxin levels. Weak bastards. After going through Greece, I crossed the border into Turkey and spent a week in Istanbul. One memorable lunch was had on the banks of the Bosphorus (is the Bosphorus? My geography is getting hazy) and I had the local version of a Fillet of Fish straight off a fishermans boat.
The local fishermen puttered out into the straits in little dinghys - maybe 12 footers - and came back and cooked the catch in the boat over something like half a 44 gallon drum BBQ. They just chucked the whole fish onto the hotplate, grilled it and then handed it over to you in a bun. They might have gutted it, but they certainly didn't take the head off. The locals just scoffed them down heads and all. I started at the tail but had to give up at the gills. Munching fish heads is a bit too multicultural for my liking.
Anyway, there I am, standing on a stone sea wall above a little fishing boat, watching a parade of filthy oil tankers going back and forth through the straits in front of me. Half of them seemed to be leaking oil into the water. The water right in front of where I was standing for instance had that lovely multicoloured spectrum scattering effect that you get when there is a nice scummy oil slick on the surface. Most of the Turks seemed to have only one head and 10 fingers, so the Fillet of Fish couldn't have been too bad for them. However, I am sure those hard working fishermen have been chased into retirement by now by some bloody nosy do-gooding EU inspectors of some sort. If the Turks had any sense, they'd fling the inspectors into the sea and then toss in a match. That would sort them out. And it would be a quick way to cook some fish.
Sunday, 21 May 2006
What makes a good kebab?
There is a kebab caravan at a petrol station on Victoria Rd not far from the Bridge Hotel that does quite superb kebabs. I think it is strategically placed near the Bridge Hotel to snare late night drunken patrons either coming out of the Bridge, which is a 24 hour pub. I have only been to the caravan a few times, but all the patrons are either taxi drivers or drunks. That is a good sign.
We got kebabs for dinner the other night, and I decided to inspect the kebab to try and work out why it was so good. The answer was simple - after polishing it off, I looked into the kebab packet and there was not a spot of juice or lettuce or other kebab detritus lurking in the bottom of the bag. It was a dry, well wrapped kebab.
Now I know some people will find that offensive, and they believe that a kebab should drip and leak and shed bits of contents all over your pants, shirt, shoes and the floor. That's fine if you are plastered and it is 3am and you are walking home with no chance of catching a cab. However, if you are sober, hungry and it is only 8pm, then a drip free kebab is preferable - especially if you are driving your own car home.
I never believed that a kebab could be made drip free, but I think his secret is to cook the living be-jesus out of it on the toaster thingy, and to allow his lettuce and tomato to drain properly. I think most of the drippy stuff that you normally get is a result of watered down hummus or badly dried salad stuff. When I make a salad, I dice the tomatoes and squeeze out the seeds and water because I don't like a watery salad. I wonder if he does the same for his kebabs?
That being said, there is not a single decent kebab shop in the country. They also use that bloody meat on a stick concept which might make cooking easier, but it does not make for a great kebab. A beef kebab is always a bit foul as you end up with shavings of beef, and they always remind me of soggy wood shavings.
When I went through Greece about 15 years ago, I found myself in a market one day in a town somewhere in the middle of nowhere. I was well off the tourist trail. The buckets of EU money that have since flowed into the country were nowhere to be seen back then. The backcountry Greeks lived like, well, poor backcountry people anywhere. Donkeycarts were the order of the day, plus women in black with big bundles of firewood on their head.
A kebab in Greece is a much simpler affair than one over here. For starters, their idea of meat on a stick is actually to stick small lumps of meat onto sticks and cook them over a BBQ or grill - proper little kebabs. Yes, it takes a lot longer to cook than slicing pre-cooked meat off half a cow on a stick, but the wait is worth it. The condiments are simple - spiced yoghurt if I remember, and maybe a bit of tomato. Possibly big chunks of iceberg lettuce. They didn't have daytime cooking TV shows selling them lettuce shredders and the like, so they just tore up big chunks of lettuce by hand. A kebab was a pretty brutal affair - simple, but tasty. I ate a lot of them. They were good. As good as our local non-drip guy is, he is still essentially selling shit. It's a fib of a kebab. A lie. Think of what McDonalds has done to hamburgers, and then think about what the half a cow on a stick has done to the kebab industry. Ok, the kebab is now fast food, but it's not good food.
I want a proper fucking kebab, not the ersatz version that we are stuck with these days. And I won't mind if it drips.
We got kebabs for dinner the other night, and I decided to inspect the kebab to try and work out why it was so good. The answer was simple - after polishing it off, I looked into the kebab packet and there was not a spot of juice or lettuce or other kebab detritus lurking in the bottom of the bag. It was a dry, well wrapped kebab.
Now I know some people will find that offensive, and they believe that a kebab should drip and leak and shed bits of contents all over your pants, shirt, shoes and the floor. That's fine if you are plastered and it is 3am and you are walking home with no chance of catching a cab. However, if you are sober, hungry and it is only 8pm, then a drip free kebab is preferable - especially if you are driving your own car home.
I never believed that a kebab could be made drip free, but I think his secret is to cook the living be-jesus out of it on the toaster thingy, and to allow his lettuce and tomato to drain properly. I think most of the drippy stuff that you normally get is a result of watered down hummus or badly dried salad stuff. When I make a salad, I dice the tomatoes and squeeze out the seeds and water because I don't like a watery salad. I wonder if he does the same for his kebabs?
That being said, there is not a single decent kebab shop in the country. They also use that bloody meat on a stick concept which might make cooking easier, but it does not make for a great kebab. A beef kebab is always a bit foul as you end up with shavings of beef, and they always remind me of soggy wood shavings.
When I went through Greece about 15 years ago, I found myself in a market one day in a town somewhere in the middle of nowhere. I was well off the tourist trail. The buckets of EU money that have since flowed into the country were nowhere to be seen back then. The backcountry Greeks lived like, well, poor backcountry people anywhere. Donkeycarts were the order of the day, plus women in black with big bundles of firewood on their head.
A kebab in Greece is a much simpler affair than one over here. For starters, their idea of meat on a stick is actually to stick small lumps of meat onto sticks and cook them over a BBQ or grill - proper little kebabs. Yes, it takes a lot longer to cook than slicing pre-cooked meat off half a cow on a stick, but the wait is worth it. The condiments are simple - spiced yoghurt if I remember, and maybe a bit of tomato. Possibly big chunks of iceberg lettuce. They didn't have daytime cooking TV shows selling them lettuce shredders and the like, so they just tore up big chunks of lettuce by hand. A kebab was a pretty brutal affair - simple, but tasty. I ate a lot of them. They were good. As good as our local non-drip guy is, he is still essentially selling shit. It's a fib of a kebab. A lie. Think of what McDonalds has done to hamburgers, and then think about what the half a cow on a stick has done to the kebab industry. Ok, the kebab is now fast food, but it's not good food.
I want a proper fucking kebab, not the ersatz version that we are stuck with these days. And I won't mind if it drips.
Saturday, 20 May 2006
Mr Whippy - crap in a cone
Well bugger me, if I wasn't cleaning out the garage when a Mr Whippy truck pulled up right outside the kitchen window. I heard the Mr Whippy tune of "greensleeves" playing before I saw the truck, and my initial thought was that some wog had a really gay horn in his car. I couldn't believe it when the pink truck pulled in.
So I popped down and ordered 3 cones. The guy running the van was an old wog of about 80, missing half his teeth and a bit hard of hearing. However, the van came with all the old standards - single cones, double cones, chocolate sauce, crushed nuts and sprinkles. I was always a sucker for things like a banana split or a chocolate sundae as a kid, looking back mainly because of the crushed nuts. So I ordered a chocolate dipped thing for me with crushed nuts.
I got about 2/3 of the way through it and worked out that it really was quite dreadful. Sorry Mr Whippy, but I have been spoilt by living close to Balmain and the rather excellent gellato shop called something like Gellatisimo. I'll have to pick up a business card next time I pop in for a tub of hideously expensive frozen stuff.
What went wrong with Mr Whippy? Well, mainly it's because they are still serving the same soft serve mush that was a hit back in 1977 when there was only one type of icecream on the market (lite shit did not exist back in those halcyon days) and about 4 flavours - vanilla, chocolate, strawberry and neopolitan. Icecream makers like Ben & Jerry's etc did not exist. You had a choice between icecream from the supermarket and soft serve stuff from the likes of Mr Whippy. Or, for those who did not fancy icecream, the only alternative was something like a Paddle Pop.
Nowadays we are of course spoilt for choice as far as frozen desserts go, and poor old Mr Whippy is a bit of an anachronism. He's kind of like the god-awful hotdogs that you get at the footy or the Royal Show. For some reason, people keep on buying them (possibly out of habit) and the companies survive. Frankly, all that soft serve stuff is just shit. It's goo. It's yuck. Coating it with chocolate and crushed nuts hides a bit of the hideous flavour and mouth feel, but it doesn't turn it into a lovely icecream.
The worst bit is the really, really cheap and shitty waffle cones. I can get a gellato in a cone up at the Balmain shop, and they use really good cones. Mr Whippy cones always taste or feel like slightly soggy cardboard. I got the feeling that the cone I just ate had sat in the back of that truck for 6 months. Ok, maybe it hadn't, but it crunched that way. Hang on, it didn't crunch at all - it just kind of folded up and goo'd in my mouth. Why, oh why, are these old codgers still driving around our streets dispensing this poop to unsuspecting customers?
Next time I hear that gay tune playing, I will stay in the garage. Or, hop in the car and drive up to Balmain.
Wrapido - Japanese for dyslexic
I had a really fun start to the weekend this morning - an 8am appointment with the dentist to get the fangs cleaned. The tooth scraper tapped away on a few teeth, ordered up some x-rays, removed a tonne of tartar and presented me with a bill for $350. And an appointment to come back in a month to get the rest of the tartar removed. And an appointment to come back in July to get a crown installed.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
I hate going to the dentist. I didn't mind it in the old days when they just pulled out some wierdly shaped tool like something out of Scary Movie 9 and dug into your gums and scraped gunk off and you ended up with a mouth full of blood and tartar chips. These days, they want to use some new-fangled sonic gizmo, and it sets my teeth on edge. I always end up with a stinking headache afterwards because my neck has locked up from the tension. I must remember to ask for a bit of laughing gas - not for the pain of the gum prodding, but to reduce the tension in my neck.
That said, my dentist has some nice features. For starters, they have a big fuck-off fish tank in the reception area. It must be 5ft by 5ft, with glass an inch thick. I just love looking at fish in a tank like that. I don't like catching them though - I love to eat them, and I love to swim around looking at them, but the catching and filleting bit is just not my scene. Why anyone would want to spend their free time fiddling around with fish guts is beyond me.
Secondly, my hygenist (who does all the work) is a member of a running club that runs around the Bay at least once a week - they run pretty much past our front door. The spin out is that they do 2-3 laps of the Bay, and it is 7km a lap. That's not bad going. She told me that they never run in the cycle lane (very bad form) and that she hates packs of women who wander around yapping to each other and filling the path from side to side and they never, ever get out of your way. Ha! Nice to see a bit of solidarity between the runners and the wheelies.
All the staff at my dentist also speak English, and they speak it really well. That is a huge bonus.
However, those good points don't make up for the fact that she spent the first 10 minutes poking a bit of metal right into my gums and making me leap around in the chair as blood spurted hither and thither. She had read my records before I showed up, and noted that I never asked for an injection when they did that. I never knew you could get an injection! Fuck, what kind of wimps need an injection for a simple scale and clean? Lots obviously. I might try it next time....
After a good fang cleaning, I needed a feed to take my mind off the horror ......the blood, the calculus, the drool....... That involved dropping into Crows Nest to a place called Wrapido. As the name suggestes, they specialise in "wraps", ie wrapping stuff up in pita bread. They do a basic bacon and eggs for breakfast during the week, but on weekends they go all out with lots of very special specials.
The menu has changed since my last visit, so I had a ricotta hotcake with poached eggs, smoked salmon and - yes, you guessed it - hollandaise sauce. However, the hollandaise was made with dill and lime, and it was a stunner. Smooth, lots of it and very tasty. It also came with a few spears of asparagus, and no fucking roast tomato or mushrooms. It was good - really good. The salmon was almost red. I don't know what they are feeding those little fuckers in their pens down in Tasmania, but they must be producing fish that glow in the dark. It was so red, I could have been forgiven for thinking that I was eating thinly sliced, raw steak.
Just one problem - breakfast was about half the size of what I needed for breakfast, and it cost $15.50. I was not about to order another one, but I was famished afterwards. I tried to dampen my hunger with a chocolate brownie, but it was nowhere near as good as the Lashings brownie, and somehow a brownie is just not the right thing to have after breakfast. I go their famished, and I left hungry. Not the way a visit to a cafe is supposed to work.
My tall buddy Ian joined me for a feed, as he was in the area, and he struck two problems. The first was the ordering system - it is one of those establishments where you order at the counter, pay and get given a number. There were only 3 or 4 people in front of him at the counter, but they were the indecisive type - the kind that you just want to kill if you are stuck behind them. Instead of reading the menu and then deciding what they wanted and then going up to the counter to order, they stood in line holding menus yapping to each other, then got to the counter and decided to read the menu and work out what to eat. That then involved a long and tedious discussion about what they felt like that day, whether they were doing a yoga class later on, whether Jupiter was occluding Venus, whether they were on a soy protein only diet that week etc etc. Indecisive menu pondering shits me to tears. I can look at a menu and work out within 10 seconds what I want. Something always stands out and says, "eat me". I might spend another minute reading the menu in detail to see if something else trumps my first choice, but it is a rare feed when I change my mind. You look, you decide, you eat. If you can't figure out whether you want your eggs scrambled or fried, then you really have some serious problems with your decision making abilities.
Ian eventually emerged and joined me at our table, only to watch what he thought was his breakfast getting carried from table to table by the waiters. He managed to flag one down and enquired as to whether the wrap he was carrying was his, and the waiter figured out that although Ian had been given number 16, the dopey cross eyed idiot at the counter had written number 19 on the docket. The poor old waiters were running around looking for a non-existent customer. He got a luke-warm coffee and a luke-warm breakfast, but he was very happy with the taste.
So apart from the dyslexic, cross eyed idiot running the place, and the stingey chef out the back, it was good. In some ways, it would have been good to have eaten two breakfasts, as the other specials looked pretty tasty. I'm not sure the budget will stretch that far though.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
I hate going to the dentist. I didn't mind it in the old days when they just pulled out some wierdly shaped tool like something out of Scary Movie 9 and dug into your gums and scraped gunk off and you ended up with a mouth full of blood and tartar chips. These days, they want to use some new-fangled sonic gizmo, and it sets my teeth on edge. I always end up with a stinking headache afterwards because my neck has locked up from the tension. I must remember to ask for a bit of laughing gas - not for the pain of the gum prodding, but to reduce the tension in my neck.
That said, my dentist has some nice features. For starters, they have a big fuck-off fish tank in the reception area. It must be 5ft by 5ft, with glass an inch thick. I just love looking at fish in a tank like that. I don't like catching them though - I love to eat them, and I love to swim around looking at them, but the catching and filleting bit is just not my scene. Why anyone would want to spend their free time fiddling around with fish guts is beyond me.
Secondly, my hygenist (who does all the work) is a member of a running club that runs around the Bay at least once a week - they run pretty much past our front door. The spin out is that they do 2-3 laps of the Bay, and it is 7km a lap. That's not bad going. She told me that they never run in the cycle lane (very bad form) and that she hates packs of women who wander around yapping to each other and filling the path from side to side and they never, ever get out of your way. Ha! Nice to see a bit of solidarity between the runners and the wheelies.
All the staff at my dentist also speak English, and they speak it really well. That is a huge bonus.
However, those good points don't make up for the fact that she spent the first 10 minutes poking a bit of metal right into my gums and making me leap around in the chair as blood spurted hither and thither. She had read my records before I showed up, and noted that I never asked for an injection when they did that. I never knew you could get an injection! Fuck, what kind of wimps need an injection for a simple scale and clean? Lots obviously. I might try it next time....
After a good fang cleaning, I needed a feed to take my mind off the horror ......the blood, the calculus, the drool....... That involved dropping into Crows Nest to a place called Wrapido. As the name suggestes, they specialise in "wraps", ie wrapping stuff up in pita bread. They do a basic bacon and eggs for breakfast during the week, but on weekends they go all out with lots of very special specials.
The menu has changed since my last visit, so I had a ricotta hotcake with poached eggs, smoked salmon and - yes, you guessed it - hollandaise sauce. However, the hollandaise was made with dill and lime, and it was a stunner. Smooth, lots of it and very tasty. It also came with a few spears of asparagus, and no fucking roast tomato or mushrooms. It was good - really good. The salmon was almost red. I don't know what they are feeding those little fuckers in their pens down in Tasmania, but they must be producing fish that glow in the dark. It was so red, I could have been forgiven for thinking that I was eating thinly sliced, raw steak.
Just one problem - breakfast was about half the size of what I needed for breakfast, and it cost $15.50. I was not about to order another one, but I was famished afterwards. I tried to dampen my hunger with a chocolate brownie, but it was nowhere near as good as the Lashings brownie, and somehow a brownie is just not the right thing to have after breakfast. I go their famished, and I left hungry. Not the way a visit to a cafe is supposed to work.
My tall buddy Ian joined me for a feed, as he was in the area, and he struck two problems. The first was the ordering system - it is one of those establishments where you order at the counter, pay and get given a number. There were only 3 or 4 people in front of him at the counter, but they were the indecisive type - the kind that you just want to kill if you are stuck behind them. Instead of reading the menu and then deciding what they wanted and then going up to the counter to order, they stood in line holding menus yapping to each other, then got to the counter and decided to read the menu and work out what to eat. That then involved a long and tedious discussion about what they felt like that day, whether they were doing a yoga class later on, whether Jupiter was occluding Venus, whether they were on a soy protein only diet that week etc etc. Indecisive menu pondering shits me to tears. I can look at a menu and work out within 10 seconds what I want. Something always stands out and says, "eat me". I might spend another minute reading the menu in detail to see if something else trumps my first choice, but it is a rare feed when I change my mind. You look, you decide, you eat. If you can't figure out whether you want your eggs scrambled or fried, then you really have some serious problems with your decision making abilities.
Ian eventually emerged and joined me at our table, only to watch what he thought was his breakfast getting carried from table to table by the waiters. He managed to flag one down and enquired as to whether the wrap he was carrying was his, and the waiter figured out that although Ian had been given number 16, the dopey cross eyed idiot at the counter had written number 19 on the docket. The poor old waiters were running around looking for a non-existent customer. He got a luke-warm coffee and a luke-warm breakfast, but he was very happy with the taste.
So apart from the dyslexic, cross eyed idiot running the place, and the stingey chef out the back, it was good. In some ways, it would have been good to have eaten two breakfasts, as the other specials looked pretty tasty. I'm not sure the budget will stretch that far though.
Blondes vs eldsters
The Shitty Moaning Harlot has been bleating recently about the tendency of older drivers to run over and seriously injure or kill people. They seem to be trying to get all oldies out of their cars and into ..... what? Motorised wheel chairs? Non-existent buses? Hell, I don't want to be sitting next to a bunch of oldies on the train. What if they have dementia and have forgotten to wear their nappy and they wet themselves? What if they decide to take their dentures out and rub them on their sleeve halfway across the Harbour Bridge? No thanks. I'd rather they drive and keep their disgusting eldster habits to themselves. Besides, most of them are deaf and have no sense of smell, so they fart away blissfully unaware that they have just let rip a booming stinker. Keep on driving till you drop I say.
Some might complain that they doodle along at 30km/h when the speed limit is 90, but hey, this is Sydney, and most of the time the traffic is doing somewhere between 0 and 20. Eldsters puttering along on their way to the bowling club present no threat as far as holding up traffic goes. What worries me is that if they start pottering around in motorised wheelchairs, the buggers will end up on the cycle paths, and most of those chairs are as wide across the bum as Kim Beasley. Passing will be impossible. They'll just have to stick to driving their Toyota Crowns around town.
Anyway, eldsters are not the only ones suffering from dementia and slow reactions and general dopeyness. I was waiting at a set of lights near Darling Harbour last week when a blonde chick pulled up in the left hand turn lane (on my left) in a little beep-beep car. She sat their twirling her hair, completely oblivious to the fact that her left turn arrow had gone green. I almost lent over to say, "Lady, you've got a green arrow", but she probably would have freaked and maced me. Instead, I waited patiently for the impatient truck driver behind her to give her a blast on his air horn. However, the dopy sod just sat there quietly fuming.
Her light went orange, and I started to chuckle at her dopeyness, when she went and put the car into gear and drove through it after it went red! A few pedestrians had started to cross (when they got the green man) and they had to jump out of the way to avoid being skittled - she didn't appear to see any of them!
Sheesh, talk about being a complete and utter fucking idiot. I just sat there on my saddle with my mouth open staring at her tail lights as she meandered down the road in a complete daze.
I reckon she was in her mid 20's. Given that youngsters are over-represented in the car fatality stakes, we're probably better off not handing out licenses until people reach 30, and then letting them keep them until they drop dead behind the wheel.
Some might complain that they doodle along at 30km/h when the speed limit is 90, but hey, this is Sydney, and most of the time the traffic is doing somewhere between 0 and 20. Eldsters puttering along on their way to the bowling club present no threat as far as holding up traffic goes. What worries me is that if they start pottering around in motorised wheelchairs, the buggers will end up on the cycle paths, and most of those chairs are as wide across the bum as Kim Beasley. Passing will be impossible. They'll just have to stick to driving their Toyota Crowns around town.
Anyway, eldsters are not the only ones suffering from dementia and slow reactions and general dopeyness. I was waiting at a set of lights near Darling Harbour last week when a blonde chick pulled up in the left hand turn lane (on my left) in a little beep-beep car. She sat their twirling her hair, completely oblivious to the fact that her left turn arrow had gone green. I almost lent over to say, "Lady, you've got a green arrow", but she probably would have freaked and maced me. Instead, I waited patiently for the impatient truck driver behind her to give her a blast on his air horn. However, the dopy sod just sat there quietly fuming.
Her light went orange, and I started to chuckle at her dopeyness, when she went and put the car into gear and drove through it after it went red! A few pedestrians had started to cross (when they got the green man) and they had to jump out of the way to avoid being skittled - she didn't appear to see any of them!
Sheesh, talk about being a complete and utter fucking idiot. I just sat there on my saddle with my mouth open staring at her tail lights as she meandered down the road in a complete daze.
I reckon she was in her mid 20's. Given that youngsters are over-represented in the car fatality stakes, we're probably better off not handing out licenses until people reach 30, and then letting them keep them until they drop dead behind the wheel.
Firing up the fire Brigade
I got a reply from the Fire Brigade today - from a Superintendent who is the "Professional Standards and Conduct Officer". My letter has been forwarded to the Zone Commander South 1 (whatever that is) and he is supposed to investigate my complaint.
I look forward to hearing from him, and finding out whether the Brigade is stuffed full of short sighted, colour blind dwarves. They've promised to write back with their findings at a later date. Hopefully, a pogrom against dwarves in the Fire Brigade will soon commence and they'll all be tarred and feathered and run out of the Darling Harbour on a rail.
I look forward to hearing from him, and finding out whether the Brigade is stuffed full of short sighted, colour blind dwarves. They've promised to write back with their findings at a later date. Hopefully, a pogrom against dwarves in the Fire Brigade will soon commence and they'll all be tarred and feathered and run out of the Darling Harbour on a rail.
Thursday, 18 May 2006
You call that salsa, you pillock?
Another day, another breakfast in Balmain. Yes, it's tough being between houses and having all your frying pans tucked away in boxes. I forget which day it was, but we had a feed at a place called "our place". It must have been the weekend, as it doesn't open for breakfast before 10am or 11am on weekdays - whatever time it opens, it is way too late for me. I arise, I feed. Or more succinctly, the sun rises, I arise, I feed. I'll leave the sleeping in business to the teenagers.
Every now and then I like to tuck into a stack of corn fritters, preferably with some very crispy bacon stacked on top, something green like avocado or spinach, and something moist and tasty to go with it like sour cream or sweet chilli sauce or a home made salsa.
"our place" did something along these lines, although they fiddled with the fritter recipe by adding sweet potato or pumpkin - something orange anyway. I'm not sure whether it came with bacon, but the menu definitely said "salsa". I am a fan of all things chutney like and salsa-ish. Something chunky and tasty and preferably made according to momma's recipe in the kitchen out the back, or even better, made by momma at home and shipped over to the cafe once a week in big fuck-off jars.
So there I am, nursing my coffee and anticipating my salsa, when my plate arrives with a stack of fritters, some chunks of avocado circled around the fritters and some splashes of red stuff spread around the edge of the plate. I look around expecting the waiter to plonk down a little pot or saucer of salsa, but he fucks off back to the kitchen and shows no signs of returning with something chunky. Apparently the thin smear of red stuff around the edge of the plate is "salsa". Sorry, pardon me for breathing, but isn't salsa supposed to be chunky? Yes, for all I know it might mean 'sauce' in some wog language, but back then, sauce was not made with electric blenders. Blenders make a puree. Throwing tomatoes into a pot with other chopped up stuff and herbs and spices and vinegar ans sugar etc makes a lumpy sauce. At least it is lumpy when I try to make it at home. Besides, I have never seen a salsa that I can actually see through. A salsa should be thick enough that you can stack it up into a pyramid a few inches tall and all that runs out of it is a bit of fluid - but the chunks should hold their shape.
The chunks should hold their shape - sounds like a really wierd type of vomit.
So what the hell, I collect my wits, pick up the knife and fork and attack the fritter, after vigorously rubbing it around in the 'salsa'.
Fuck me! It's not home made salsa - it's Tabasco! Nearly tore my head off! I had the equivalent of about 9 bloody marys in one mouth full.
Lying pricks. Why couldn't they say, "Fritters, served with Tabasco, thoughtfully purchased from our local Woolies". I can put up with over the top advertisements for cars and things, but I think that a menu should be a bit closer to the truth.
That aside, it was a good feed. I've also had the big breakfast there and that is also a good feed. The big breakfast looked pretty dodgy when it came out - there was a certain look to it that screamed carelessness at me. I can tell when a cook has carefully put together a plate of food - someone who cares about the aesthetics - and someone who just slaps it down and hooks it out. The big breakfast looked like it had been plated by a prison chef who was more accustomed to heaving out grits, but it tasted bloody good. I was very pleasantly surprised. It is the first place that I have been to in a long time that served breakfast sausages that I actually wanted to eat. Most of the time, I have a bit of one and ignore the rest. Cafe cooks are trying too hard with the sausages, or not hard enough.
There's something about a breakfast sausage that makes it a very peculiar animal. It's quite different to a lunch time sausage or a dinner sausage. I like something that is not too spicy - I don't need a rush of chilli or pepper first thing in the morning (but bring it on at lunch), but not too bland. It shouldn't be too thick and heavy, as you don't want to start the day feeling like a bloated hippo. It should go well with egg. It should taste nice with coffee. Those are hard parameters to work with. If you are having a BBQ and everyone is drinking beer, you can server just about anything wrapped in bread and covered in sauce (or salsa) and it will be scoffed. In triplicate. However, breakfast is another matter entirely. Many tastes just do not go down well with coffee. Or egg. Our Place seemed to get it right. Just about every other place I have been lately has fucked it up beyond belief.
The search for the perfect sausage. Is it a lifelong quest, or is it the title of a porno film?
Every now and then I like to tuck into a stack of corn fritters, preferably with some very crispy bacon stacked on top, something green like avocado or spinach, and something moist and tasty to go with it like sour cream or sweet chilli sauce or a home made salsa.
"our place" did something along these lines, although they fiddled with the fritter recipe by adding sweet potato or pumpkin - something orange anyway. I'm not sure whether it came with bacon, but the menu definitely said "salsa". I am a fan of all things chutney like and salsa-ish. Something chunky and tasty and preferably made according to momma's recipe in the kitchen out the back, or even better, made by momma at home and shipped over to the cafe once a week in big fuck-off jars.
So there I am, nursing my coffee and anticipating my salsa, when my plate arrives with a stack of fritters, some chunks of avocado circled around the fritters and some splashes of red stuff spread around the edge of the plate. I look around expecting the waiter to plonk down a little pot or saucer of salsa, but he fucks off back to the kitchen and shows no signs of returning with something chunky. Apparently the thin smear of red stuff around the edge of the plate is "salsa". Sorry, pardon me for breathing, but isn't salsa supposed to be chunky? Yes, for all I know it might mean 'sauce' in some wog language, but back then, sauce was not made with electric blenders. Blenders make a puree. Throwing tomatoes into a pot with other chopped up stuff and herbs and spices and vinegar ans sugar etc makes a lumpy sauce. At least it is lumpy when I try to make it at home. Besides, I have never seen a salsa that I can actually see through. A salsa should be thick enough that you can stack it up into a pyramid a few inches tall and all that runs out of it is a bit of fluid - but the chunks should hold their shape.
The chunks should hold their shape - sounds like a really wierd type of vomit.
So what the hell, I collect my wits, pick up the knife and fork and attack the fritter, after vigorously rubbing it around in the 'salsa'.
Fuck me! It's not home made salsa - it's Tabasco! Nearly tore my head off! I had the equivalent of about 9 bloody marys in one mouth full.
Lying pricks. Why couldn't they say, "Fritters, served with Tabasco, thoughtfully purchased from our local Woolies". I can put up with over the top advertisements for cars and things, but I think that a menu should be a bit closer to the truth.
That aside, it was a good feed. I've also had the big breakfast there and that is also a good feed. The big breakfast looked pretty dodgy when it came out - there was a certain look to it that screamed carelessness at me. I can tell when a cook has carefully put together a plate of food - someone who cares about the aesthetics - and someone who just slaps it down and hooks it out. The big breakfast looked like it had been plated by a prison chef who was more accustomed to heaving out grits, but it tasted bloody good. I was very pleasantly surprised. It is the first place that I have been to in a long time that served breakfast sausages that I actually wanted to eat. Most of the time, I have a bit of one and ignore the rest. Cafe cooks are trying too hard with the sausages, or not hard enough.
There's something about a breakfast sausage that makes it a very peculiar animal. It's quite different to a lunch time sausage or a dinner sausage. I like something that is not too spicy - I don't need a rush of chilli or pepper first thing in the morning (but bring it on at lunch), but not too bland. It shouldn't be too thick and heavy, as you don't want to start the day feeling like a bloated hippo. It should go well with egg. It should taste nice with coffee. Those are hard parameters to work with. If you are having a BBQ and everyone is drinking beer, you can server just about anything wrapped in bread and covered in sauce (or salsa) and it will be scoffed. In triplicate. However, breakfast is another matter entirely. Many tastes just do not go down well with coffee. Or egg. Our Place seemed to get it right. Just about every other place I have been lately has fucked it up beyond belief.
The search for the perfect sausage. Is it a lifelong quest, or is it the title of a porno film?
Lashings Mk II
Ok, after bashing Lashings last week I went back for seconds a few days back. After lugging boxes of books around all day, I felt the need for feed. This time, I went for a modern poncy burger called "The Moroccan". To me, that sounds a bit like a character in a 1970's police show on TV - "This week, the boys in Division 5 battle an evil gang of bank robbers, headed up by the arch bandit known as 'The Moroccan'".
The Moroccan is a simple chicken fillet burger where the fillet has been rolled in Moroccan spices. Lightly rolled. The burger flipper has clearly never eaten at Kazbah in Balmain, where the chicken is not lightly dusted with spices. It is not rolled in spices. It has spice packed and stuffed into it until it is 50% chicken and 50% spice. It is a bit over the top. I like a bit of tasty stuff, but I also like to eat chicken. If I wanted a spice burger instead of a chicken burger, I'd order a spice burger.
Thankfully, Lashings does the chicken burger with a hint of spice. It's not boosted up with pepper or chilli or anything like that - it's just a nice mix of Moroccan spices. Not the best mix, but a good mix. I liked it.
They live to feed me another day.
Except that the bastards were out of chocolate brownies. A thousand curses on their smelly feet.
The Moroccan is a simple chicken fillet burger where the fillet has been rolled in Moroccan spices. Lightly rolled. The burger flipper has clearly never eaten at Kazbah in Balmain, where the chicken is not lightly dusted with spices. It is not rolled in spices. It has spice packed and stuffed into it until it is 50% chicken and 50% spice. It is a bit over the top. I like a bit of tasty stuff, but I also like to eat chicken. If I wanted a spice burger instead of a chicken burger, I'd order a spice burger.
Thankfully, Lashings does the chicken burger with a hint of spice. It's not boosted up with pepper or chilli or anything like that - it's just a nice mix of Moroccan spices. Not the best mix, but a good mix. I liked it.
They live to feed me another day.
Except that the bastards were out of chocolate brownies. A thousand curses on their smelly feet.
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