Juxtaposition

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


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

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

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

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

La Grande Bouffe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stupid frogs.

The Last Samurai

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should I pick up other peoples fags?

No, I am not talking about stealing queers.

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

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

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

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

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

Mileage

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

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

Markets - the food that John West rejects

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

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

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

Strength and fitness

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

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

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

Spring Cycle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cats piss

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

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

Whatever - it stunk.

The loonies have taken over the supermarket

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Letterboxes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shopping centres are not pedestrian free zones

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

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

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

Back on the bike

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

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

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

I blog therefor I ham

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hence my totally crap ham.

Aeon flumoxed

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

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

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

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

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

With a wall around the edge to keep nature out.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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?