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January 31, 2006
So Sandra Bullock will present
So Sandra Bullock will present an Oscar. Let me be one of the first to say who gives a shit.Posted by Peter at 01:34 PM | Comments (3)
Now I Get It
Prime Minister John Howard has backed calls by NSW Chief Justice James Spigelman for Australians to improve their manners.
Step up, team.
"Excuse me, Mr Umpire, but it seems that the baseline linesman and my opponent James Blake are both jigaboos and thus part of a white-hating conspiracy". (USE OF "MR" APPROPRIATELY DEFERENTIAL)
Mr Howard said he agreed with the chief justice and believed Australians were not polite enough to each other.
"If you wouldn't mind, get the fuck out of my country, you Lebo cunts". (POLITE, NON-CONFRONTATIONAL PHRASES ENCOURAGED)
"I think we have seen a marked deterioration in good manners," Mr Howard told reporters.
"ru horny baby? pls suk my cok l8r ok?" (PLEASE AND THANKYOU, MANNERS COST NOTHING ETC)
Mr Howard said he was particularly concerned about vulgar language used on reality television programs.
Of course. That's the problem.
Posted by Peter at 11:46 AM | Comments (17)
So Jacques Cousteau's grandson's made
And Jacques Cousteau's grandson's made a Tintin-style shark sub. Next thing you know we'll be watching TV in "Super-Calcacolor".Posted by Peter at 09:40 AM | Comments (6)
January 30, 2006
We Bought A Lemon (Tree)
This is Lionel:
Lionel is a lemon tree.
When we bought him he bore 18 glorious lemons. It was a citrus extravaganza in our house for weeks. (Not true - we actually pissed most of them away on G&Ts).
But now Lionel's little lemons just bud then drop off while barely embryonic, despite me depositing an astonishing amount of urine on him morning and night.
Please, if someone knows why, or can point me in the right direction (a googling informed me I am watering him either too much or too little - thanks for nothing, you useless tit of a search engine) I would be very appreciative.
Stop the carnage.
Save Lionel.
Posted by Peter at 01:53 PM | Comments (69)
January 25, 2006
In The Nick etc
Thank Christ. Something to blog about. Virginia tagged me.
FOUR JOBS I'VE HAD
Elvis Impersonator
Barman to Seamus Heaney (he nicked a glass)
Property Manager at a suburban real estate office
Television Critic
FOUR MOVIES I CAN WATCH OVER AND OVER
Caddyshack
Stand By Me
LA Confidential
Jurassic Park
FOUR PLACES I'VE LIVED
Black Rock, Melbourne
Blackrock, Dublin
Collingwood, Melbourne
North Carlton, Melbourne
FOUR TV SHOWS I LOVE
The Sopranos
Scrubs
Law & Order (vanilla only)
Buffy
FOUR PLACES I'VE BEEN ON HOLIDAYS
Italy
China
Cohuna
Houseboat on the Murray
FOUR OF MY FAVOURITE DISHES
Drunken Noodles at Cookie
Mum's Ki Si Min
Curry Laksa at home
My Nanna's Peas
FOUR SITES I VISIT DAILY
Bureau of Meteorology
Anonymous Lefty
Set Daily Puzzle
Overheard In New York
FOUR PLACES I WOULD RATHER BE RIGHT NOW
My friend Sus's house at Airey's Inlet
Monterosso al Mare, Italy
Cohuna Lawn Tennis Club
Freycinet National Park, Tasmania
FOUR BLOGGERS I'M TAGGING
Jessculture (will we ever meet?)
Jellyfish (to get her off her arse)
Glutbuster 2 (not strictly a blogger, but GB was a joint enterprise originally, so we'll give him a go)
HandcuffedLightning
There will be no emails. I think we can all live with that.
Posted by Peter at 07:36 PM | Comments (10)
January 20, 2006
Keating! The country soul opera we had to have. Highly recommended for all true believers.Posted by Peter at 08:05 AM | Comments (1)
January 19, 2006
Bravo to Torres News journos Corey Bousen and Damian Baker for evading government attempts to dehumanise refugees and discharging their duty to the public by getting this ripper of a yarn on the safely-landed Papuan asylum seekers. [Via].Posted by Peter at 12:59 PM | Comments (4)
Respect to Jelena Dokic for ridding herself of her father. Not only is he a violent bully, he smokes a pipe! He must be insane!Posted by Peter at 12:44 PM | Comments (7)
January 18, 2006
Help Wanted - Apply Within
So, in this war of ideology, us good guys on the left (if you buy into the whole left/right thing anymore) are pretty much getting bent over. I don't like it any more than you, but we are being well stitched up by a gang that are:
A. ORGANISED - many of them go to church at 9AM SUNDAY MORNING! They don't spend their time together swearing at each other IN PUBLIC.
B. DISCIPLINED - Sure, you have your out-there Petrosexuals breaking ranks to cosy up to the doctors' wives, but anyone with real clout who steps out of line (are you listening, Malcolm Turnbull? Peter Costello?) cops a whack on the knuckles with a ruler and has to stay back to clean the blackboard dusters. Unity. UNITY!
C. GOOD (=BAD) WITH THE WORDS - If John Howard doesn't like a question he's been asked, he just answers another one. He knows precisely what he wants to say, and he says it, regardless of what lefty scum like Tony Jones (T, call me. P.) try to get out of him. Problems are very easy to solve when you get to decide what they are.
Alas, while the Tories are skilled at question-evading, agenda-setting, line-toeing, the best we can offer is the ineffectual (Kim Beazley), the self-congratulatory (Kevin Rudd), the self-righteous (actors, Geoffrey Rush in particular), the utterly out-of-touch and possibly quite mad (Germaine Greer), or the drunk (Bob Ellis).
Oh, and convenor of the Australian West Papuan Association, Louise Byrne, who was asked by ABC journalist Tom Iggulden why her association didn't notify National Search and Rescue when it learned that a boat load of Papuan Refugees was missing somewhere in the Torres Strait.
TOM IGGULDEN: Do you think perhaps given the treacherous nature of the voyage that perhaps that would have been a good idea?
[...pause...]
[...pause...]
LOUISE BYRNE: I don't know. It's not that treacherous.
OMG! WTF!*
We know why she didn't tell them. Because she knew that if she did, the Papuans would have either been turned back or incarcerated behind razor wire until their children tried to kill themselves. And if the Papuans had a competent advocate in Australia, these facts would have been made very clear.
DREAM LOUISE BYRNE: No, Tom. It would have been an atrocious idea, given this government's record of violating grossly the human rights of those seeking asylum. It's a horrible, horrible situation, but our government has created an environment where it is safer to remain at sea in treacherous waters until you hopefully reach land than it is to notify National Search and Rescue. This is what our country has become.
Hey presto. Louise goes from "psycho lefty bitch willing to break The Law for islanders who are quite possibly unclean/carrying bombs etc" to "passionate advocate dedicated to exposing the failings in our systems and fighting for those who cannot fight for themselves".
But no, we get "It's not that treacherous."
Stupid mistakes. We make them. They rarely do.
* Note irony.
Posted by Peter at 09:05 PM | Comments (15)
And So The Viva
Q: Peter, didn't you used to have a blog that you posted interesting and occasionally saucy writings upon?
A: I did, but I fell into an interminable period of slackness where I just stole stuff from my friends/family and posted that instead.
Q: I see. And will you return?
A: I intend to. Meanwhile, enjoy my friend Chris' tale of the oral examination he underwent in the process of obtaining his doctorate from Oxford (England).
And so the viva. The thing to understand about Oxford is that it is very rarely OXFORD. In four years here I have never met anyone named Terence, been invited hunting or challenged anyone to a duel in the chapel quad (we only duel in mob quad darlings). I could count the number of balls I have been to on one riding-gloved hand and to my knowledge none of my friends own a manor house or castle of any serious size.
Ninety percent of my time is spent amongst a mixture of cheerful northern Englanders, Europeans and down to earth bright-but-unremarkable twenty-somethings with nothing better to do than read about the role of the adverb in renaissance France. Then, every once in a while, Oxford is quintessentially and indefensibly OXFORD.The viva (verbal defence of thesis) was held in the rooms (study) of a don (lecturer) in Merton College (scary) at two o’clock in the afternoon on Friday (Friday). Being technically an examination I had to wear a white bow tie, a
dark suit (my suit was bought when I was a fifth larger than I am now and Icould probably have smuggled in a knowledgeable dwarf had I had been more organised), a black gown (not a serious Darth-Vader-Music-inspiring sweeping cape you understand, but a little black number with irrelevant dangly bits that barely covers your arse) and a mortar-board hat. This is referred to as 'sub-fusc' which is Latin for ‘below your dignity’. The idea being that by reducing the candidate’s physical confidence and access to oxygen during periods of extreme stress you can really sort the dom perignon from the sparkling white.My examiners were wearing the same get-up (only with Vader cloaks and suits that fit) and there were two of them, ominously titled the External and Internal Examiners. So, I was standing outside The Door to The Rooms gathering the guts to knock and trying not to imagine what the Internal Examination might involve, when The Door swung open with a long drawn-out ominous creaking noise to reveal the Internal Examiner Himself (to be fair the ominous creaking noises may have been me trying to breathe through fast contracting white bow-tie).
Phillip Waller is a don’s don. He has a book case dedicated to his own publications and another one dedicated to other people’s publications about his publications. He never bothered with a doctorate himself and appears to have
burst from his mother’s womb fully formed, wrapped in tweed and smoking (both in the tobacco-pipe and the satanic sense) straight into the waiting arms of an Oxford fellowship. He is what people in the academic profession refer to in hushed terms as a 'formidable' historian. Every encyclopaedic sentence is punctuated incongruously with the phrase ‘as it were’, which generally presages a question about the role of accents in the fall of Jacobin Andorra, or the influence of real tennis in the rise of the third Reich. I have been having night-mares for months where I am being chased through a forest at night by an unseen creature in a black cape whispering ‘as it were’, ‘as it were’, and clutching a life-size blow-up doll of Buffy the vampire slayer.
Ahem.Philip introduced me to Professor Gary McCulloch of the University of London who as a non-Oxford academic is of course technically beneath contempt but as the leading figure in the history of education in the country still represents something of a challenge. Gary’s publications are many and ever-present and generally push the line that if Britain hadn’t gotten carried away with the whole egalitarian thing and started educating the masses with money better spent on Eton neck-wear they wouldn’t have ever A), lost the empire, or B) lost the ashes. My thesis, which in essence argues that the English upper classes are nut-cases, lies directly in his field in the same sense that New Orleans lay in the field of Hurricane Katrina.
The room was exactly as you are imagining it. Every surface was covered in books, pipe ash and the rotting thyroids of former candidates. We were arranged in a triangular formation in ancient worn armchairs, arranged in such a way that in order to turn and answer either examiner I had to expose the weakness of my argument to the other one. My own chair was about a foot lower than the other two and wobbled precariously whenever I produced a grammatically incorrect sentence. Gary’s was a sort of upright chaise lounge which gathered around him like giant bat wings and just behind Philip’s head, directly in my line of sight, was a stuffed ibis in a glass case wearing a mortar board. I shit you not.
The questions began immediately and essentially fell under one of three categories ‘why is your thesis irrelevant to all current scholarship’, ‘why didn’t you look at the Manchester tabloids/Soviet archives/relevant Wisdens (Gary)’, and most difficult of all, ‘what was the relevance of the, as it were, Buffy illustrations’. I fumbled my way through the cut and thrust of the debate, addressing myself directly to the ibis, resisting the urge to fall to my knees and declare myself a fraud and generally trying to drown them in a deluge of semi-articulate historical trivia.
The strain was well and truly starting to get to me and I was deeply regretting leaving my knowledgeable dwarf behind when without warning, Philip rose from his chair (not stood up you understand, he fucking levitated), extended his hand and asked if he could be the first to congratulate me, as it were, on succeeding in the viva for my, as it were, doctorate. Gary emerged from his seat (revealing, to my horror, that the batwings were actually A PART OF HIM) and offered to be the second to congratulate and the two of them ushered me, still babbling at the ibis, out of OXFORD and back into Oxford, and the rest of my life.
So to summarise, a small page of corrections and a great sense of disbelief later, and its job done. Now back to the port and snuff or Terence will never invite me up to the manor again.
Congratulations, Christov.
Posted by Peter at 11:41 AM | Comments (7)
January 12, 2006
The Google Zeitgeist is a
The Google Zeitgeist is a brilliantly laid out look at what we searched for over the year. It wisely concludes Britney is more popular than Mariah and Shakira.Posted by Peter at 11:32 AM | Comments (1)
January 10, 2006
Drunken What Now?
I'm back. There's bugger-all going on in the world that's of any interest to me at the moment, so let's ring in the Glutbusters New Year with one of mine and the Redhead's favourite recipes.
After being thrice-blessed with the joy that is Cookie's Thai Drunken Noodles, we did a bit of googling and ripped it off. Try our adaptation tonight. Impress your friends. I don't have a shiny cookbook photo but trust me, it's unreal. And easy if you're a cooking hack.
GLUTBUSTERS DRUNKEN NOODLES
(with apologies and thanks to Cookie)
Serves 2 + lunches for the next day.
Ingredients
1 packet wide Thai rice noodles (we use the ones from the fridge, whack them in the microwave and off you go)
1 medium onion, sliced
3-4 cloves of garlic, minced
1 bulb shallot, chopped (a few spring onions'll do it)
1 large red capsicum, sliced into strips
500g minced pork
1 egg, lightly beaten
big handful roughly chopped thai basil
3-4 Thai chillies (adjust for how chilli-tough you are - we use less, if any)
oil for cooking - something thin like canola
a couple of wee limes
Sauce
6 tb oyster sauce
3 tb rice vinegar (the Chinese stuff is best)
2-3 tb fish sauce
3 tb sugar (brown is best)
3 tb fresh lime juice
1 tb sambol olek (ground red chillies)
What to do, what to do?
1. Prepare the noodles as per instructions (boiling water, microwave, whatever). Make sure they're soft before you start cooking or you'll burn it.
2. Mix up the sauce and set aside.
3. Chop everything - you won't have time to do it once you fire up the wok.
4. Get the wok going on medium-high and heat a bit of oil in it.
5. Add garlic, onions and shallots and cook for a few minutes or until they're translucent.
6. Add the pork and stir until cooked.
7. Add capsicum and cook for a minute.
8. Reduce heat to medium, move everything over to one side and add the egg. You want to cook it like a little omelette. So let it go as long as possible, then flip it (this is tricky) and finish cooking it. Then shred it with a spatula or wok tool and mix it in.
9. Add chillies and mix well.
10. Add sauce and noodles. Cook for 2-3 min until done.
11. Stir through the basil and squeeze a bit of lime over it.
Serve with a crisp beer (I can't go past a can of Melbourne myself) or a dry white.
Good action, that.
Posted by Peter at 03:44 PM | Comments (3560)