There are quiet checkout chicks in supermarkets, and there are chatty ones. Tonight, I got a chatty one - until I mentioned the "L" word.
She asked me what I had done, and I said that I had been to the markets. She then asked why I bothered, as they were crap. I told her that I had been to the Flemington markets, not one of the local markets that have sprouted in every public school in the area.
We both knew which markets we were talking about, but could not remember the name of the school. I simply blurted out, "The school opposite the loonie bin". At that, she went a bit red, clenched her mouth and started to tell me off, saying that it was downright rude to use the "L" word etc etc etc. She was all of about 18, and she gave me a 10 second tirade.
I was too gobsmacked to say much after that. For starters, I am not used to staff badmouthing the customers, no matter what they say. After all, she started the conversation. I was quite happy to browse the checkout magazines until she opened her gob. Second, I am not used to be upbraided by some youngster. Talk about fucking precocious, precious and disrespectful. Old people like me should be listened to - we hav much wisdom to depart. I should have told her I was Aboriginal, an elder of my tribe, and the featherfeet would be coming to visit her if she continued to scorn the knowledge of her betters.
I think her problem is that she had been there for a visit that lasted for more than half an hour. Frankly, if I had ever been to a loonie bin for a holiday, I'd be saying "I just had a vacation in the loonie bin. If you continue to write out that parking ticket, I will be forced to bite your nose off. I've just been to the chemist to get my prescription filled and the lithium hasn't kicked in yet".
What should we call former-residents-of-loonie-bins? "Special People Who Are Misunderstood"? How about, "Nutjobs who are fucked in the head".
Next time I am there, I'll have to go through her checkout and make funny faces.
Saturday, 14 October 2006
Letterboxes
There is a big ride on through Sydney next weekend - about 10,000 cyclists expected - and it pretty much goes past our front door. With that many bikes wandering around, the event organisers need to drop a flyer in every letterbox en route in order to let the occupiers know that they might not be able to get out of their driveway for an hour or two. Since I am a member of our local cycling group, I put my hand up to hand a few of these things out.
I didn't have a lot to do - my stretch was only a kilometre or two and it included no apartments. However, I decided to do it after dark as it was about 38 degrees out there today.
My first comment is that people should be given no say when it comes to choosing either their letterbox or the location of their letterbox. Little neighbourhood Stalins should be sent around to smash up all non-compliant letterboxes and install a standardised Chairman Mao version. Give people a choice, and a certain number will make some very bizarre and stupid choices. I should have carried a second bag of flyers that read, "You have a stupid mailbox, which makes you too stupid for words". However, I had no idea how bad letterboxes could be until I actually attempted to stuff a very simple, folded, one page flyer into a few hundred of them.
One stupid design is the dwarf letterbox. Obviously, the owners are about two feet high, because the opening is down below the level of my knee. I know that people were shorter in the old days when a lot of the low lying letter boxes were installed, but they weren't fucking hobbits. Besides, if you think about it, the postal service would probably favour tall Posties as they have longer legs so they should be able to cover ground faster than an animated garden gnome. If I was a postie, I'd carry a bag of cat turds and stuff them into anything below knee height and insert a flyer saying that a local group had trained cats to back up to kitty toilets and crap in them so that the parks would not be covered in cat turds, and that cats would probably be unable to distinguish between the new cat dunnies and their letterbox, so they should raise it in order to stop attracting cat crap.
The second stupid design was the camouflaged mailbox. I know that many people are sick of junk mail, but hiding the letter box behind a shrub, creeper or bush is a good way to avoid getting any mail. I should have taken a bottle of RoundUp with a squirter on the top and written "knob head" on their lawns.
The third stupid design was the mailbox like a steel trap. Yes, I know that there is a saying about people having minds like a steel trap, but I bet you never knew that you could also buy a letterbox like a steel trap. They have a vertical flap intead of a horizinotal one, and the flap is held shut by a very strong spring. Instead of slipping a neatly folded flyer into those letterboxes, I ended up stuffing in a crumpled ball of paper. I was taking any chances with them after the first one nearly cost me a couple of fingers. If I had a portable arc welder, I'd weld the damned things shut. It would probably take the stupid owners a few weeks to work out that it was not the extra strong spring that was stopping the flap from opening and the mail from appearing.
The last stupid design is the narrow mouthed letterbox. These things are typically found on older houses with a brick front wall. The slot is just wide enough for an old fashioned aerogram, which were pretty thin and flexy, but not quite wide enough for a modern, stiff envelope with a bill in it, or one of my flyers. Jamming a flyer in was like trying to grate cheese by using the wrong side of the grater - annoying and non-productive.
I can see now why people drive around at night smashing up letterboxes. Personally, I reckon the culprits are enraged posties.
I didn't have a lot to do - my stretch was only a kilometre or two and it included no apartments. However, I decided to do it after dark as it was about 38 degrees out there today.
My first comment is that people should be given no say when it comes to choosing either their letterbox or the location of their letterbox. Little neighbourhood Stalins should be sent around to smash up all non-compliant letterboxes and install a standardised Chairman Mao version. Give people a choice, and a certain number will make some very bizarre and stupid choices. I should have carried a second bag of flyers that read, "You have a stupid mailbox, which makes you too stupid for words". However, I had no idea how bad letterboxes could be until I actually attempted to stuff a very simple, folded, one page flyer into a few hundred of them.
One stupid design is the dwarf letterbox. Obviously, the owners are about two feet high, because the opening is down below the level of my knee. I know that people were shorter in the old days when a lot of the low lying letter boxes were installed, but they weren't fucking hobbits. Besides, if you think about it, the postal service would probably favour tall Posties as they have longer legs so they should be able to cover ground faster than an animated garden gnome. If I was a postie, I'd carry a bag of cat turds and stuff them into anything below knee height and insert a flyer saying that a local group had trained cats to back up to kitty toilets and crap in them so that the parks would not be covered in cat turds, and that cats would probably be unable to distinguish between the new cat dunnies and their letterbox, so they should raise it in order to stop attracting cat crap.
The second stupid design was the camouflaged mailbox. I know that many people are sick of junk mail, but hiding the letter box behind a shrub, creeper or bush is a good way to avoid getting any mail. I should have taken a bottle of RoundUp with a squirter on the top and written "knob head" on their lawns.
The third stupid design was the mailbox like a steel trap. Yes, I know that there is a saying about people having minds like a steel trap, but I bet you never knew that you could also buy a letterbox like a steel trap. They have a vertical flap intead of a horizinotal one, and the flap is held shut by a very strong spring. Instead of slipping a neatly folded flyer into those letterboxes, I ended up stuffing in a crumpled ball of paper. I was taking any chances with them after the first one nearly cost me a couple of fingers. If I had a portable arc welder, I'd weld the damned things shut. It would probably take the stupid owners a few weeks to work out that it was not the extra strong spring that was stopping the flap from opening and the mail from appearing.
The last stupid design is the narrow mouthed letterbox. These things are typically found on older houses with a brick front wall. The slot is just wide enough for an old fashioned aerogram, which were pretty thin and flexy, but not quite wide enough for a modern, stiff envelope with a bill in it, or one of my flyers. Jamming a flyer in was like trying to grate cheese by using the wrong side of the grater - annoying and non-productive.
I can see now why people drive around at night smashing up letterboxes. Personally, I reckon the culprits are enraged posties.
Sunday, 8 October 2006
Shopping centres are not pedestrian free zones
Some architects or urban planners or whatever the hell you call people that design concrete monstrosities known as shopping centre car parks must imagine that all cars are fitted with short range teleporters. I have just been to the Lane Cove shops. You park, and then find that there are no footpaths through the carpark to the shops. You just have to walk on the road through the car park and hope that you don't get cleaned up by a granny looking for a parking spot. It's insane - no thought has been given to how a shopper gets from their car door to the shop door - unless they park and then teleport from their car seat to the shop.
I can understand why you don't see a lot of footpaths alongside freeways for instance - pedestrians and fast moving traffic do not mix - but shopping centres? I thought the whole idea of shopping centres was to lure people out of their cars in order to spend money.
You might need brains to get into an architecture course at Uni, but you certainly don't need common sense.
I can understand why you don't see a lot of footpaths alongside freeways for instance - pedestrians and fast moving traffic do not mix - but shopping centres? I thought the whole idea of shopping centres was to lure people out of their cars in order to spend money.
You might need brains to get into an architecture course at Uni, but you certainly don't need common sense.
Back on the bike
After two months of no riding, I climbed back into the saddle fulltime this week - four days of commuting to work on two wheels. I took it easy each day, not wanting to push it and burn out. On the first day, I rode like a girl - literally. I simply caught up to one as I rode around The Bay and then stuck on her tail all the way into town. Women only make up about 10% or less of the commuters on my route, and I generally find myself blasting past them. They ride like grannies most of the time, so following one into town was a great way to keep my speed down to a sedate pace.
The non-commuting women however tend to blast past me like I am standing still. Tri-athletes and the like are just at a fitness level that is way out of my league.
Anyway, by Friday, the pace was picking up a bit and I was extending the ride a little bit by taking detours to add a bit more distance. Even that was probably too much - by Saturday, my lungs felt like they were being pulled out through my armpits. It is going to take a while to get back to my old form. Instead of pulling my belt in another notch every few months, that has gone into reverse of late and I have just gone out a belt notch. Must ride more. I want to buy some new pants and I want them to be smaller than the last lot.
The non-commuting women however tend to blast past me like I am standing still. Tri-athletes and the like are just at a fitness level that is way out of my league.
Anyway, by Friday, the pace was picking up a bit and I was extending the ride a little bit by taking detours to add a bit more distance. Even that was probably too much - by Saturday, my lungs felt like they were being pulled out through my armpits. It is going to take a while to get back to my old form. Instead of pulling my belt in another notch every few months, that has gone into reverse of late and I have just gone out a belt notch. Must ride more. I want to buy some new pants and I want them to be smaller than the last lot.
I blog therefor I ham
I decided to break the great pizza drought of 2006 the other night by whipping up 5 home made pizzas - enough to stuff to bursting all the family members on this side of the continent. The ratio was 4 adult pizzas to 1 kids pizza, and I needed ham for the kiddy number.
I eschewed the trip to my favourite wog deli for double smoked ham sliced into paper thin morsels, and instead decided (due to time constraints) to simply buy it from the deli located within our local supermarket.
God, was that foolish. I requested 10 slices of the double smoked stuff, which is about double what I need for a pizza, but I like to scoff it on its own as I make the pizza, so I always need extra. It's that tasty, it is hard to resist.
Stupidly, I didn't watch the deli-chick making up my order - I was browsing through an enormous basked of cheese trying to find an acceptable wedge of parmesan. It wasn't until I got home that I discovered that instead of 10 super thin slices - slices so thin that you can almost see through them - slices so thin that if you hold them up by one edge, they tear under their own weight - I had in fact purchased 10 slabs of ham, each about the thickness of a fence post. Even I, a totally hamfisted slicer of ham, could have shaved it more thinly than that. The slabs could have doubled as tarpaulins for patching holes in the roof next time a storm comes through and rips off a few tiles. You could take that ham on an outback roadtrip and use it to plug tyre punctures. It was almost solid enough to use as a frisbee, and if you played dog-fetch frisbee, it was so tough, your average dog would catch the frisbee about 100 times before putting a dent in the ham with his teeth.
I guess the biggest single difference between the people that work in a supermarket deli and those that work in a family deli are that for the supermarket folk, the deli is just a position that you work in. You might be on checkout one day, packing shelves the next and serving ham the day after. It's a low paid job that pays your way through Uni.
A family run deli on the other hand is presumably full of people that are selling food because they like that food. I would hope that the wogs flogging expensive olive oil at my local wogarama have tasted all the oils on the shelf and probably only stocked them after a taste test - not because some buyer in a distant head office decide to stock brands A, B and C because they were cheap.
Hence my totally crap ham.
I eschewed the trip to my favourite wog deli for double smoked ham sliced into paper thin morsels, and instead decided (due to time constraints) to simply buy it from the deli located within our local supermarket.
God, was that foolish. I requested 10 slices of the double smoked stuff, which is about double what I need for a pizza, but I like to scoff it on its own as I make the pizza, so I always need extra. It's that tasty, it is hard to resist.
Stupidly, I didn't watch the deli-chick making up my order - I was browsing through an enormous basked of cheese trying to find an acceptable wedge of parmesan. It wasn't until I got home that I discovered that instead of 10 super thin slices - slices so thin that you can almost see through them - slices so thin that if you hold them up by one edge, they tear under their own weight - I had in fact purchased 10 slabs of ham, each about the thickness of a fence post. Even I, a totally hamfisted slicer of ham, could have shaved it more thinly than that. The slabs could have doubled as tarpaulins for patching holes in the roof next time a storm comes through and rips off a few tiles. You could take that ham on an outback roadtrip and use it to plug tyre punctures. It was almost solid enough to use as a frisbee, and if you played dog-fetch frisbee, it was so tough, your average dog would catch the frisbee about 100 times before putting a dent in the ham with his teeth.
I guess the biggest single difference between the people that work in a supermarket deli and those that work in a family deli are that for the supermarket folk, the deli is just a position that you work in. You might be on checkout one day, packing shelves the next and serving ham the day after. It's a low paid job that pays your way through Uni.
A family run deli on the other hand is presumably full of people that are selling food because they like that food. I would hope that the wogs flogging expensive olive oil at my local wogarama have tasted all the oils on the shelf and probably only stocked them after a taste test - not because some buyer in a distant head office decide to stock brands A, B and C because they were cheap.
Hence my totally crap ham.
Sunday, 1 October 2006
Aeon flumoxed
I recently laid eyeballs on Aeon Flux, and boy, was I disappointed. I love a well done sci-fi movie. Bladerunner has always been a favourite. Firefly was a total loss. What I like to see is intelligent use of future technologies. Amazing technology is not good enough - it needs to be used in a way that is interesting or makes sense. Simply serving up woopie-doo special effects is not enough. That's what always annoyed me about the Star Wars movies - you had all this fancy technical gimmickery used in the most ridiculous fashion. Hover cars towed around by six legged bullocks. Balls!
Anyway, movies that did it well in the past have included Bladerunner, Gattaca and Minority Report. I liked Minority Report - not enough to watch it a second time, but it was contentedly adequate. I liked the eyeball recognition stuff with the personalised ads - which is just cookies taken a step beyond the internet. I liked the way Tom Cruise used gloves as an interface to the computer - like a mouse in the air. I liked the little heat seeking robot things. To me, they all made sense, in a horrible kind of way. Total Recall was also based on an interesting premise - memory implants, and they were done well for a good reason - taking holidays! I could relate to that.
Anyway, Aeon Flux had some groovy little technical things, like a strap on transporter thingy and some interesting implants, but the rest was garbage from go to woe. I'll tell you a major plot element right now, because the movie is not worth watching, so I can give a big part of the game away without spoiling it for everyone. It's set 400 years in the future, and most of the population has been wiped out by a virus. Only 5 million survive in one big city.
I'll digress for a second. At the start, it says the virus killed 99% of the population. If we currently have a world population of - what - 5 billion say, then a 1% survival rate is 50 million people. As usual, Hollywood is no good at maths. The should have said that 99.9% died out.
By the way, 5 million people is a city bigger than Sydney. The city that they show looks like a town of about 25,000 - more of a University campus than anything else. And it is not crowded. If you ask me, 99.995% died out and the remaining handful lived in a place the size of downtown Tamworth.
With a wall around the edge to keep nature out.
Anyway, the big deal is that the cure for the virus left everyone sterile, so instead of women getting pregnant, the government has been secretly cloning everyone and impregnating the women for 7 generations. The same 5 million people just keep going around and around and around again. It's a really good plot idea - I loved it. It was simply executed like crap. The director or the screenwriter started with a great idea and then decided to add lots of Matrix style action and shoot-em-ups and some lifestyle fashion technology. By that, I mean they let some fashion designer go nuts on all the apartment interiors to give us an idea of what Ikea will be selling 400 years in the future.
The shooting and stuff was just a total waste of space. Aeon is a super-assasin, which means she can pick up a pistol and kill about 100 cops in head to toe body armour. The fight scenes are just daft. I much preferred the action in Bladerunner, where you have one guy with a mega-pistol chasing some mean replicants through a futuristic version of Kings Cross on a rainy Saturday night. And doing it badly. I can relate to that.
I liked about 3/4 of the movie, and just hated the last 1/4. They should just cut and reshoot the last 25 minutes.
Anyway, movies that did it well in the past have included Bladerunner, Gattaca and Minority Report. I liked Minority Report - not enough to watch it a second time, but it was contentedly adequate. I liked the eyeball recognition stuff with the personalised ads - which is just cookies taken a step beyond the internet. I liked the way Tom Cruise used gloves as an interface to the computer - like a mouse in the air. I liked the little heat seeking robot things. To me, they all made sense, in a horrible kind of way. Total Recall was also based on an interesting premise - memory implants, and they were done well for a good reason - taking holidays! I could relate to that.
Anyway, Aeon Flux had some groovy little technical things, like a strap on transporter thingy and some interesting implants, but the rest was garbage from go to woe. I'll tell you a major plot element right now, because the movie is not worth watching, so I can give a big part of the game away without spoiling it for everyone. It's set 400 years in the future, and most of the population has been wiped out by a virus. Only 5 million survive in one big city.
I'll digress for a second. At the start, it says the virus killed 99% of the population. If we currently have a world population of - what - 5 billion say, then a 1% survival rate is 50 million people. As usual, Hollywood is no good at maths. The should have said that 99.9% died out.
By the way, 5 million people is a city bigger than Sydney. The city that they show looks like a town of about 25,000 - more of a University campus than anything else. And it is not crowded. If you ask me, 99.995% died out and the remaining handful lived in a place the size of downtown Tamworth.
With a wall around the edge to keep nature out.
Anyway, the big deal is that the cure for the virus left everyone sterile, so instead of women getting pregnant, the government has been secretly cloning everyone and impregnating the women for 7 generations. The same 5 million people just keep going around and around and around again. It's a really good plot idea - I loved it. It was simply executed like crap. The director or the screenwriter started with a great idea and then decided to add lots of Matrix style action and shoot-em-ups and some lifestyle fashion technology. By that, I mean they let some fashion designer go nuts on all the apartment interiors to give us an idea of what Ikea will be selling 400 years in the future.
The shooting and stuff was just a total waste of space. Aeon is a super-assasin, which means she can pick up a pistol and kill about 100 cops in head to toe body armour. The fight scenes are just daft. I much preferred the action in Bladerunner, where you have one guy with a mega-pistol chasing some mean replicants through a futuristic version of Kings Cross on a rainy Saturday night. And doing it badly. I can relate to that.
I liked about 3/4 of the movie, and just hated the last 1/4. They should just cut and reshoot the last 25 minutes.
Saturday, 30 September 2006
Why is the west always to blame?
I have not been to many miserable, downtrodden countries, and I have little urge to visit them anyway. However, I think it is interesting to think about different countries like Syria and Zimbabwe and Iran and China, Korea, Vietnam and Japan.
As far as the first three are concerned, they are poverty stricken wrecks because of the Great Satan. Some how, us evil bastards in the West have conspired to keep them down and to mire them in misery, injustice and filth.
Consider the last 4 however. China has been the train wreck of the 20th century - partitioned by the western powers, invaded by the Japs, civil war, communism, the Great Leap Forward and all that - and now the place is booming like no tomorrow. Given how ravaged the place was from about 1900 to 1975, it's amazing they even have electricity.
Then there is Korea, which was essentially blown and bombed to hell and back from 1950 to 1953 - and that was after it had been walked all over by the Japs for a few decades. Yet in just 50 years, South Korea has gone from a bombed out rice paddy to a country to be reckoned with.
Then there is Vietnam - apparantly the Yanks dropped more bombs on Vietnam than on Germany. The place was bombed pretty much into the stone age, yet it seems to be bouncing back pretty vigourously now.
And then there is Japan - a place that was firebombed into ashes and then nuked - twice. Look at the place now.
It seems that if you want to kick start economic growth and progress, the best bet is to pick a fight with the West, get the tar kicked out of you and then get on with it. If Iraq manages to follow these other bombed into the stone age examples, come about 2025, it will have overtaken the UAE as the boomtown of the Middle East.
Which is why we should nuke Iran now - they'll thank us for it in 25 years time.
As far as the first three are concerned, they are poverty stricken wrecks because of the Great Satan. Some how, us evil bastards in the West have conspired to keep them down and to mire them in misery, injustice and filth.
Consider the last 4 however. China has been the train wreck of the 20th century - partitioned by the western powers, invaded by the Japs, civil war, communism, the Great Leap Forward and all that - and now the place is booming like no tomorrow. Given how ravaged the place was from about 1900 to 1975, it's amazing they even have electricity.
Then there is Korea, which was essentially blown and bombed to hell and back from 1950 to 1953 - and that was after it had been walked all over by the Japs for a few decades. Yet in just 50 years, South Korea has gone from a bombed out rice paddy to a country to be reckoned with.
Then there is Vietnam - apparantly the Yanks dropped more bombs on Vietnam than on Germany. The place was bombed pretty much into the stone age, yet it seems to be bouncing back pretty vigourously now.
And then there is Japan - a place that was firebombed into ashes and then nuked - twice. Look at the place now.
It seems that if you want to kick start economic growth and progress, the best bet is to pick a fight with the West, get the tar kicked out of you and then get on with it. If Iraq manages to follow these other bombed into the stone age examples, come about 2025, it will have overtaken the UAE as the boomtown of the Middle East.
Which is why we should nuke Iran now - they'll thank us for it in 25 years time.
Filthy littering bastards
If there is one job I hate, it's mowing the verge. Mainly because I think that there is more lawn out there on the verge than in my backyard. And I am not about to go and sit on the verge in my comfy yard chair and read the paper. I will just suffer in my pokey little yard.
I have found though that the verge needs to be mowed more regularly than the yard for the simple reason that the longer the grass, the more litter it attracts. Call it the broken windows theory of lawn management.
If I let the grass grow enough to conceal a cigarette packet, people will ditch cigarette packets in the grass. If it gets long enough to conceal a beer bottle, it fills up with bottles. I am sure that if I let it get tall enough, people will start dumping cars on my verge.
Therefore, I have to keep the bloody stuff as trimmed as a pool table. I can see why the wogs just rip the grass out and concrete over everything. It's a lot easier than picking up after all the grots in the neighbourhood and then mowing the lawn.
I wonder if I will be able to mine the verge?
Not as in mine it for gold, but plant mines.
I have found though that the verge needs to be mowed more regularly than the yard for the simple reason that the longer the grass, the more litter it attracts. Call it the broken windows theory of lawn management.
If I let the grass grow enough to conceal a cigarette packet, people will ditch cigarette packets in the grass. If it gets long enough to conceal a beer bottle, it fills up with bottles. I am sure that if I let it get tall enough, people will start dumping cars on my verge.
Therefore, I have to keep the bloody stuff as trimmed as a pool table. I can see why the wogs just rip the grass out and concrete over everything. It's a lot easier than picking up after all the grots in the neighbourhood and then mowing the lawn.
I wonder if I will be able to mine the verge?
Not as in mine it for gold, but plant mines.
No wonder P-platers die like flies
It was bucketing down with rain a few weeks ago. I was driving back from who knows where on a very busy 2 lane road. Up ahead in the left hand lane, I could see a car trundling along quite slowly with its hazard lights on. Cars were changing lanes to get around it. As it was travelling quite close behind another car, I initially thought that it had broken down and was getting a tow.
Not quite.
When I got closer, I saw that it was one P-plater following another. The guy in front had obviously been zoom-zooming around a bit too fast for the conditions (and his skills) and had zoom-zoomed off the road sideways and had whacked a curb with enough force to bend the back wheel in about 30 degrees. Instead of sitting tight and waiting for a tow truck, Mr Numbnuts was trying to drive home with his mate following along behind with the blinkers flashing.
I've driven a car with a deflating back tyre and I know how wobbling the damn things can get when the tyres are not as they should be. But imagine trying to drive with a wheel bent halfway to the horizontal in the pissing rain. The poor little car was crabbing sideways and the driver was obviously having a hell of a time keeping it in one lane. I was glad I got past without him zipping into my lane for a bit of metal crunching.
You can pass a test and be issued with a license, but you can't be issued with common sense.
I had a bad case of the sweaty palms yesterday not far from home. I was sitting at a set of lights, waiting for the light to go green so I could hang right. Up in front of me there was a car pulled over in the left hand lane - again, a two lane road. It's a busy road, with traffic barrelling along at 80km/h, which is way over the speed limit, but that's what people do. This silly woman had stopped to let her kid out so that the kid could have a chuck.
Since people are idiots, they'd come roaring up the road and only see her at the last minute, and then they'd try and merge into the lane next door. I was sure she was going to get rear-ended as I sat there unable to do a damned thing. The worst moment was when two speeding semi-trailers went past side by side and one had to slam on the brakes in order to avoid her and get in behind the other truck. I was sure I was about to see a story that would make the evening news.
Of course it would be tragic and heart rending and all that, but it was all caused by one persons stupidity. There are good places to stop and let your kid throw up and there are not so good places. If you are in a not so good place, the kid simply has to hurl in the back seat. No point in getting a few people killed just to save the upholstery.
I got home without hearing a loud crash, so I presume she lived to be stupid another day.
People are morons.
Not quite.
When I got closer, I saw that it was one P-plater following another. The guy in front had obviously been zoom-zooming around a bit too fast for the conditions (and his skills) and had zoom-zoomed off the road sideways and had whacked a curb with enough force to bend the back wheel in about 30 degrees. Instead of sitting tight and waiting for a tow truck, Mr Numbnuts was trying to drive home with his mate following along behind with the blinkers flashing.
I've driven a car with a deflating back tyre and I know how wobbling the damn things can get when the tyres are not as they should be. But imagine trying to drive with a wheel bent halfway to the horizontal in the pissing rain. The poor little car was crabbing sideways and the driver was obviously having a hell of a time keeping it in one lane. I was glad I got past without him zipping into my lane for a bit of metal crunching.
You can pass a test and be issued with a license, but you can't be issued with common sense.
I had a bad case of the sweaty palms yesterday not far from home. I was sitting at a set of lights, waiting for the light to go green so I could hang right. Up in front of me there was a car pulled over in the left hand lane - again, a two lane road. It's a busy road, with traffic barrelling along at 80km/h, which is way over the speed limit, but that's what people do. This silly woman had stopped to let her kid out so that the kid could have a chuck.
Since people are idiots, they'd come roaring up the road and only see her at the last minute, and then they'd try and merge into the lane next door. I was sure she was going to get rear-ended as I sat there unable to do a damned thing. The worst moment was when two speeding semi-trailers went past side by side and one had to slam on the brakes in order to avoid her and get in behind the other truck. I was sure I was about to see a story that would make the evening news.
Of course it would be tragic and heart rending and all that, but it was all caused by one persons stupidity. There are good places to stop and let your kid throw up and there are not so good places. If you are in a not so good place, the kid simply has to hurl in the back seat. No point in getting a few people killed just to save the upholstery.
I got home without hearing a loud crash, so I presume she lived to be stupid another day.
People are morons.
Tuesday, 19 September 2006
Foodie heaven
It has taken my body about 3 weeks to recover from this feast, which is one reason why I have been off the blogging for a while.A couple of lovely friends invited us along to a 10 course degustation meal at Watermark, which is one of Sydney's fancier restaurants. I have not been there for years, as last time I went, I thought the wank factor was just totally over the top, which put me right off.
However, some years have passed, management might have changed etc so it was definitely time to have another go.
I only got one photo of the night as the camera battery died on me after I snapped this photo. Well, I lie a bit - I did get one other photo, but it was later in the night and I'd had about 20 glasses of wine and it is so blurry, I can't tell you what is in the photo.
My memory of the night is a bit hazy, but I remember a few salient points. There is a Hunter Valley winery called Piggs Peak. The winemaker used to live with the somelier from Watermark. Somehow they made a bet that a selection of Piggs Peak wines would beat a selection of fine wines from around the world - albeit those on the winelist at Watermark I presume. The night was billed as "Piggs Peak vs The World".
Piggs Peak also have some sort of club or members list, and it sounds like they put on a great members party each year. Our two friends are members, so we scored an invitation. I think it was limited to 80 seats, so we did ok.
The restaurant was setup in tables of 10, so we introduced ourselves to the other 6 people at the table and sat their looking at the array of 6 wine glasses in front of each setting and a complicated grid of letters. The deal was that each course would be accompanied by two wines - a Piggs wine and a "world" wine. Each would have a letter (course 1 had letters A and B). We had to choose our favourite wine and throw the winning letter in a bucket. The letters were all toted up and the winner announced at the end of the night.
The food was quite outstanding. The service was excellent - so excellent, I didn't even notice it. Then again, after 6 courses and 12 glasses of plonk, the kitchen could have caught fire and I wouldn't have noticed. They served up 3 courses together with a suite of 6 wines, and I quickly worked out that in most batches of 6, I really only like 1 glass of wine. Thankfully, most of the other table guests were the same, so we swapped the ones we didn't like with our neighbours and got a decent glass full of the good stuff (they only put about 1/3 of a glass in each one). I might have ended up with 3 glasses of my favourite tipple instead of 1/3 by horse trading around the table.
When the scores were announced and we were shown the wine list, I went through my left over letters and worked out that my favourite wines were all French. I had voted against the Piggs on almost every round. At least that is how it looked to me after 20 glasses of wine. I might have been confused. I might have been voting for sparkling water or olive oil for all I know.
The other nice thing is that we had a table full of alergic to this and alergic to that, so I ended up with about a 23 course meal. If a total stranger doesn't want their scallop, I am not going to knock them back. This is why I have to cycle.
I know I brought home a copy of the wine list, but I am blowed it I can find it on my desk. I wanted to mention some of the frog wines. I also want to see if I can buy some of them in Sydney without breaking the bank. The problem with having a good local wine industry is that we so rarely get to try something from across the puddle. I was amazed that I preferred frog from one end to the other, but hey, that's life when you are blind tasting.
Still, I want to visit Piggs Peak to give them another go. One thing I do remember is that they make HUGE wines - I seem to recall one red being something over the top like 17% alcohol. I thought it was like drinking turps, which is probably why I went for the more mellow and sedate frog drop. All that I know is that if we visit Piggs, we had better be staying the night close by.
Oh yes - Watermark gets a huge rave. I think the only down point about the night is that our driver didn't like us singing in the car on the way home. And I don't blame him for that.
Fete fat
It's been a while since the school fete, but this first photo shows the line up at the most popular stall. I had to take 3 photos and stitch them together to get most of the queue. I'm sorry if the photo looks like crap - just get a load of the queue.
Guess which product they were queueing for?
Monday, 18 September 2006
Evil old ladies
As I was taking the rubbish out today, I had a sudden flashback to a few years ago when I was living in a small apartment complex with individual rubbish bins. Some apartment complexes have a small number of large communal bins, but this place had one bin per apartment, and there was no manager or handyman who was paid to take them out each week.
Being the nice guy that I am, I found myself taking all the bins out around 3 weeks in 4. I only missed a bin night if I was away on a business trip or whatever. It was no big deal - they were small bins and they only had to be carried about 20 feet from the bin area to the verge.
The thing that drove me nuts though was that the enviro-nazi council only allowed very small bins. The bins were would be sufficient for a little old lady living on her own that living on cat food and oranges, but not a couple of people that had dinner parties every single week. Everytime I took the bins out, I'd be weighing them to find those with enough room to jam a bag or two of my rubbish into them. My altruistic bin moving was not entirely without purpose.
Anyway, there lived a little old lady on the top floor that wasn't there half the time, and most weeks her bin would have one small bag of rubbish in it. I never inspected it, so I can't tell you whether it contained Whiskers tins and orange peel, but it was the perfect receptacle for my dinner party overflows.
Only one problem. The old duck was ferociously protective of her bin. She never thanked me for taking it out and bringing it back in - she just left scathing notes on all the apartment doors if anyone dared to put some of their rubbish in her bin. I even tried taking the bins out late at night - like midnight - and sneaking rubbish into her bin whilst I was in a blind spot where she couldn't see me from her windows - and I was always sure she was sitting there at the window on rubbish night trying to detect who was putting stuff in her bin. It didn't matter. She always knew. And the wierd thing is that all the bins looked the same, and they had small numbers on the side, so it was pretty much impossible to tell from the top floor what bin the rubbish was going into.
Unless she was using binoculars.
Some time later, I met one of her daughters - who was about 60. She told me that her Mum went off to visit a friend several times a week, drank a bottle of sherry and drove home (in an old Datsun) completely shickered. I guess that's why oldies drive so slowly - it's not their eyesight - it's the bottle of extra dry sherry.
The problem is, she never got on the turps on bin night.
Old ladies can be evil.
Being the nice guy that I am, I found myself taking all the bins out around 3 weeks in 4. I only missed a bin night if I was away on a business trip or whatever. It was no big deal - they were small bins and they only had to be carried about 20 feet from the bin area to the verge.
The thing that drove me nuts though was that the enviro-nazi council only allowed very small bins. The bins were would be sufficient for a little old lady living on her own that living on cat food and oranges, but not a couple of people that had dinner parties every single week. Everytime I took the bins out, I'd be weighing them to find those with enough room to jam a bag or two of my rubbish into them. My altruistic bin moving was not entirely without purpose.
Anyway, there lived a little old lady on the top floor that wasn't there half the time, and most weeks her bin would have one small bag of rubbish in it. I never inspected it, so I can't tell you whether it contained Whiskers tins and orange peel, but it was the perfect receptacle for my dinner party overflows.
Only one problem. The old duck was ferociously protective of her bin. She never thanked me for taking it out and bringing it back in - she just left scathing notes on all the apartment doors if anyone dared to put some of their rubbish in her bin. I even tried taking the bins out late at night - like midnight - and sneaking rubbish into her bin whilst I was in a blind spot where she couldn't see me from her windows - and I was always sure she was sitting there at the window on rubbish night trying to detect who was putting stuff in her bin. It didn't matter. She always knew. And the wierd thing is that all the bins looked the same, and they had small numbers on the side, so it was pretty much impossible to tell from the top floor what bin the rubbish was going into.
Unless she was using binoculars.
Some time later, I met one of her daughters - who was about 60. She told me that her Mum went off to visit a friend several times a week, drank a bottle of sherry and drove home (in an old Datsun) completely shickered. I guess that's why oldies drive so slowly - it's not their eyesight - it's the bottle of extra dry sherry.
The problem is, she never got on the turps on bin night.
Old ladies can be evil.
What do VOIP engineers do all day?
I guess if you are a Chook, you sit at a big desk with a very complicated console in front of you and you deal with flapping customers (the guy in the background with his hands in the air). Or flapping managers.
Take your pick.
Buck buck buckaw!
What do agronomists do all day?
I believe they dream of driving tractors.
I'm not sure what type of tractor is pictured here, but the farmer is being very safety concious with his crash helmet.
Given the wold look in his eyes, it's probably a racing tractor. Capable of 19 mp/h flat out. That's 19, not 190.
Tractors today have lots of complicated electronics and hydraulics. Agronomists have to know their stuff if they are to figure these things out.
And don't run over the chooks!
I'm not sure what type of tractor is pictured here, but the farmer is being very safety concious with his crash helmet.
Given the wold look in his eyes, it's probably a racing tractor. Capable of 19 mp/h flat out. That's 19, not 190.
Tractors today have lots of complicated electronics and hydraulics. Agronomists have to know their stuff if they are to figure these things out. And don't run over the chooks!
Saturday, 16 September 2006
Helmeted riders more likely to be hit
By Tamara McLean, National Medical Writer
September 14, 2006 02:05pm
Article from: AAP
CYCLISTS who wear helmets for better protection on the road are ironically more at risk of being knocked down by cars, according to new research.
A study by a British traffic psychologist has found that drivers pass twice as close when overtaking cyclists wearing helmets than when overtaking their bare-headed counterparts.
Drivers shaved an average of 8.5cm off their passing distance when passing cyclists wearing helmets, increasing the risk of a collision.
"This study shows that when drivers overtake a cyclist, the margin for error they leave is affected by the cyclist's appearance," said Dr Ian Walker, from the University of Bath.
"By leaving the cyclist less room, drivers reduce the safety margin that cyclists need to deal with obstacles in the road, such as drain covers and potholes, as well as the margin for error in their own judgments."
The scientist used a bicycle fitted with a computer and an ultrasonic distance sensor to record data from over 2500 overtaking motorists in Salisbury and Bristol.
Dr Walker spent half the time wearing a cycle helmet and half without and was knocked down twice, by a bus and a truck, while helmeted.
He said while helmets had been proven to protect kids in low speed falls, it was questionable whether they offered any real protection to somebody struck by a car.
"Either way, this study suggests wearing a helmet might make a collision more likely in the first place," Dr Walker said.
He believed drivers perceive cyclists as an unfamiliar sub-culture of "lycra-clad street-warriors".
Riders wearing helmets were incorrectly viewed as very experienced and less likely to do something unexpected, which explains why drivers leave less space when passing.
To test another theory, Dr Walker donned a long wig to test whether there was any difference in passing distances when drivers thought they were overtaking a female cyclist.
He said drivers gave "her" an average of 14cm more space than for a man not wearing a helmet, probably because women riders were seen as more unpredictable.
The study, accepted for publication in the journal, Accident Analysis & Prevention, also found that buses and trucks passed considerably closer than cars.
September 14, 2006 02:05pm
Article from: AAP
CYCLISTS who wear helmets for better protection on the road are ironically more at risk of being knocked down by cars, according to new research.
A study by a British traffic psychologist has found that drivers pass twice as close when overtaking cyclists wearing helmets than when overtaking their bare-headed counterparts.
Drivers shaved an average of 8.5cm off their passing distance when passing cyclists wearing helmets, increasing the risk of a collision.
"This study shows that when drivers overtake a cyclist, the margin for error they leave is affected by the cyclist's appearance," said Dr Ian Walker, from the University of Bath.
"By leaving the cyclist less room, drivers reduce the safety margin that cyclists need to deal with obstacles in the road, such as drain covers and potholes, as well as the margin for error in their own judgments."
The scientist used a bicycle fitted with a computer and an ultrasonic distance sensor to record data from over 2500 overtaking motorists in Salisbury and Bristol.
Dr Walker spent half the time wearing a cycle helmet and half without and was knocked down twice, by a bus and a truck, while helmeted.
He said while helmets had been proven to protect kids in low speed falls, it was questionable whether they offered any real protection to somebody struck by a car.
"Either way, this study suggests wearing a helmet might make a collision more likely in the first place," Dr Walker said.
He believed drivers perceive cyclists as an unfamiliar sub-culture of "lycra-clad street-warriors".
Riders wearing helmets were incorrectly viewed as very experienced and less likely to do something unexpected, which explains why drivers leave less space when passing.
To test another theory, Dr Walker donned a long wig to test whether there was any difference in passing distances when drivers thought they were overtaking a female cyclist.
He said drivers gave "her" an average of 14cm more space than for a man not wearing a helmet, probably because women riders were seen as more unpredictable.
The study, accepted for publication in the journal, Accident Analysis & Prevention, also found that buses and trucks passed considerably closer than cars.
Wednesday, 30 August 2006
The meaning of goats piss
I have recently been inducted into that endemic fund raising thing known as "the school fete". The horror, the horror...
Apart from having to stay up half the night baking a cake, I then found out that our cake was probably inadmissable as:
So we front up at the fete, and I proceed to part with my money. There were lots of food stalls, so I availed myself of a hot dog (pretty ordinary), an "organic" chicken drumstick (smallest chook in the world, utterly tasteless), a souvlaki (best I have had this side of Greece) and a few other things that I have since forgotten about.
I then got suckered into spending money at the bottle stall. The deal is that a for weeks before the fete, kids are sent home to badger their parents to handover a bottle of something for the bottle stall. It doesn't matter what is in the bottle - vinegar, sauce, wine, your grandmothers false teeth. You just need to send in a bottle.
On fete day, every bottle has a raffle ticket stuck to it. You pay $5 for a ticket, and you get the bottle with the corresponding ticket.
The sod before me walked off with a very good looking bottle of wine, so I put in $10 figuring that I might get something decent.
Ha!
I ended up with a bottle of Rose and a Hunter Valley 2002 Chardonnay from a winery that I have never heard of.
I put the chardonnay in the fridge last night and opened it tonight.
I have never, ever in my life tasted such an awful bottle of goats piss. It was so badly corked, most of my hair stood up on end. I'm not game to tip it down the sink in case it does something horrible to the pipes.
School fetes - a great way to move crap from one household to another whilst extracting money from people.
Apart from having to stay up half the night baking a cake, I then found out that our cake was probably inadmissable as:
- It was not contained within a school approved cake box
- The said non-existent cake box did not have the ingredients written on the side in big fat texta - can't have the one peanut alergy kid in the school dropping dead from anaphalactic shock on fete day.
- It looked "too adult" for kiddies, which means that instead of being sold, it was probably scoffed by the ladies running the cake stall.
So we front up at the fete, and I proceed to part with my money. There were lots of food stalls, so I availed myself of a hot dog (pretty ordinary), an "organic" chicken drumstick (smallest chook in the world, utterly tasteless), a souvlaki (best I have had this side of Greece) and a few other things that I have since forgotten about.
I then got suckered into spending money at the bottle stall. The deal is that a for weeks before the fete, kids are sent home to badger their parents to handover a bottle of something for the bottle stall. It doesn't matter what is in the bottle - vinegar, sauce, wine, your grandmothers false teeth. You just need to send in a bottle.
On fete day, every bottle has a raffle ticket stuck to it. You pay $5 for a ticket, and you get the bottle with the corresponding ticket.
The sod before me walked off with a very good looking bottle of wine, so I put in $10 figuring that I might get something decent.
Ha!
I ended up with a bottle of Rose and a Hunter Valley 2002 Chardonnay from a winery that I have never heard of.
I put the chardonnay in the fridge last night and opened it tonight.
I have never, ever in my life tasted such an awful bottle of goats piss. It was so badly corked, most of my hair stood up on end. I'm not game to tip it down the sink in case it does something horrible to the pipes.
School fetes - a great way to move crap from one household to another whilst extracting money from people.
Sunday, 27 August 2006
Hells bells, I can bake!
The mud cake finally came out of the oven at half past midnight, after just over double the recommended cooking time. I managed to screw it up by getting confused and thinking that a 12 inch baking tin was the same as a 20 cm baking tin. As a result, instead of a thin, flat cake, e ended up with a big tall fat cake, and it took a lot longer to cook through the middle.
I was pretty sceptical of it when I pulled it out of the oven in the wee hours of the morning. i figured that come morning, the middle would be the consistency of the sauce in chocolate self saucing pudding. Well, it seems to have firmed up overnight and it is just the most amazing mud cake. Plus the mamothly overpowering coffee taste has dispersed somewhat in the cooking, so it no longer tastes like a short black with chocolate sprinkled on top.
I reckon half of it is enough to feed 30 kids.
I hope that the parents of 30 kids are prepared for 30 totally hyper maniacs this morning.
I was pretty sceptical of it when I pulled it out of the oven in the wee hours of the morning. i figured that come morning, the middle would be the consistency of the sauce in chocolate self saucing pudding. Well, it seems to have firmed up overnight and it is just the most amazing mud cake. Plus the mamothly overpowering coffee taste has dispersed somewhat in the cooking, so it no longer tastes like a short black with chocolate sprinkled on top.
I reckon half of it is enough to feed 30 kids.
I hope that the parents of 30 kids are prepared for 30 totally hyper maniacs this morning.
Saturday, 26 August 2006
Pedantry
"The Herd" have done a cover of the Redgum classic "I was only 19", and have recently put out a video clip to go with the song. I was watching the clip the other night when I noticed a problem with this scene - the rear sight on the SLR is flipped halfway forward, making it totally useless.
Yes, you need to be a total SLR-pedant to notice wee things like that. It's been 15 years since I last carried one, and I still remember stupid troopers getting bawled out for not setting their rear sights properly.
It's funny how getting yelled at is good for making you remember things.
Let them eat cake
God, I must be getting old. Number one's school is running a fete on Sunday and all the kids have to take a cake - and it has to be something that they have baked.
Hell, public education is full of good ideas. Let's give all the kids really bad bowel problems by getting them to eat stuff that other 10 year olds have baked. At least private schools are moer honest about the whole rigmarole - they just tell the mums to go home and start baking.
So we spent a few nights poring through Donna Hay cooking magazines in order to try and find a cake recipe that was kid proof. There are some kids that can cook, and others that can't. Number one has trouble making toast. Let's just leave it at that.
I suggested something simple - something so simple that even I could make it, and I can't bake for nuts. The result is shown here on the left - a jam-ripple cake. Yes, it really was very easy to make, and I put most of that down to the Kitchen Aide mix-master thingy. I just poured stuff into the bowl and it pretty much made the cake for me. I haven't worked out how to stick grease-proof paper into a springform tin yet - I think that gives you a good indication of how up on cake baking I am.
This photo was taken 24 hours ago. There is now just a thin sliver of cake left, and I might demolish that before bedtime. This cake has been a big success. Thanks Donna.
Number One of course decided that this cake was not for him, so we had to make another cake. One that was about 40 orders of magnitude more complicated. It is a chocolate mud cake, and it is in the oven right now. It's got 15 minutes to go. Given my luck, I will have to get up at 6am to make a jam-ripple cake because the mud cake will be an unadulterated disaster. I'm not blaming the author (Nat), because if I do, he won't bake any more cakes for us on our birthdays and that would be very sad. But maybe I should blame the author. After all, Nay is a pastry chef at a very flash Sydney restaurant, and he probably turns out mud cakes the way Fosters make beer. What the hell was he thinking when he gave a complete novice like me a recipe that is normally only used by brain-surgeon equivalent cake bakers? If anything, I will be banging on his door at 6am demanding that he turn out a cake pronto.
I guess it doesn't matter if it turns out to be gloopy mess, as we'll just call it chocolate goop and be done with it. Chocolate muck cake instead of mud cake. Kids will eat it. It's also so full of coffee and sugar and chocolate, their little hearts will probably explode after a few bites, so that should take care of any classroom overcrowding issues.
I should mention that this recipe calls for something like 375 grams of butter and 375 grams of sugar. I have no idea how much that is, but it sounds like a pound in the old measures. A pound of butter. My goodness, how many cows does it take to produce a pound of butter? A herd? A dairy? A colostomy? (That sounds good - a colostomy of cows). You mix the two together with about two blocks of cooking chocolate (sorry, that should be two slabs) and a bucketfull of coffee and hot water and stir. And stir. And stir. You're supposed to put the whole thing in the fridge for two hours and pull it out every 15 minutes for another stir.
If you've had anything to do with 10 year old kids, you'll know that 15 minutes is a difficult unit of time for them to grasp. The best way I know how to describe it is "half an episode of The Simpsons". Distraction set in after a few turns of the bowl, and I ended up with the job of finishing the cake.
Just what the hell was wrong with my jam-ripple cake anyway?
Five minutes to go with the cake baking. The moment of truth is fast approaching.
Hell, public education is full of good ideas. Let's give all the kids really bad bowel problems by getting them to eat stuff that other 10 year olds have baked. At least private schools are moer honest about the whole rigmarole - they just tell the mums to go home and start baking.
So we spent a few nights poring through Donna Hay cooking magazines in order to try and find a cake recipe that was kid proof. There are some kids that can cook, and others that can't. Number one has trouble making toast. Let's just leave it at that.I suggested something simple - something so simple that even I could make it, and I can't bake for nuts. The result is shown here on the left - a jam-ripple cake. Yes, it really was very easy to make, and I put most of that down to the Kitchen Aide mix-master thingy. I just poured stuff into the bowl and it pretty much made the cake for me. I haven't worked out how to stick grease-proof paper into a springform tin yet - I think that gives you a good indication of how up on cake baking I am.
This photo was taken 24 hours ago. There is now just a thin sliver of cake left, and I might demolish that before bedtime. This cake has been a big success. Thanks Donna.
Number One of course decided that this cake was not for him, so we had to make another cake. One that was about 40 orders of magnitude more complicated. It is a chocolate mud cake, and it is in the oven right now. It's got 15 minutes to go. Given my luck, I will have to get up at 6am to make a jam-ripple cake because the mud cake will be an unadulterated disaster. I'm not blaming the author (Nat), because if I do, he won't bake any more cakes for us on our birthdays and that would be very sad. But maybe I should blame the author. After all, Nay is a pastry chef at a very flash Sydney restaurant, and he probably turns out mud cakes the way Fosters make beer. What the hell was he thinking when he gave a complete novice like me a recipe that is normally only used by brain-surgeon equivalent cake bakers? If anything, I will be banging on his door at 6am demanding that he turn out a cake pronto.
I guess it doesn't matter if it turns out to be gloopy mess, as we'll just call it chocolate goop and be done with it. Chocolate muck cake instead of mud cake. Kids will eat it. It's also so full of coffee and sugar and chocolate, their little hearts will probably explode after a few bites, so that should take care of any classroom overcrowding issues.
I should mention that this recipe calls for something like 375 grams of butter and 375 grams of sugar. I have no idea how much that is, but it sounds like a pound in the old measures. A pound of butter. My goodness, how many cows does it take to produce a pound of butter? A herd? A dairy? A colostomy? (That sounds good - a colostomy of cows). You mix the two together with about two blocks of cooking chocolate (sorry, that should be two slabs) and a bucketfull of coffee and hot water and stir. And stir. And stir. You're supposed to put the whole thing in the fridge for two hours and pull it out every 15 minutes for another stir.
If you've had anything to do with 10 year old kids, you'll know that 15 minutes is a difficult unit of time for them to grasp. The best way I know how to describe it is "half an episode of The Simpsons". Distraction set in after a few turns of the bowl, and I ended up with the job of finishing the cake.
Just what the hell was wrong with my jam-ripple cake anyway?
Five minutes to go with the cake baking. The moment of truth is fast approaching.
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