Blueberry Fool

Zucchini fritters w/ beetroot salad

2010-02-02T21:49:00.008+11:00

Yum yum. Nice summery dinner here.

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3 or 4 large-ish zucchini (or courgette, as they say on the continent)
1 wedge of fetta, small cubes
half a bunch of dill, chopped finely
1 or 2 corn cobs, just cut the kernels off
1 crushed clove of garlic
3 eggs
roughly 100-150 grams flour (you'll be eyeballing this)
pinch of baking powder

Grate the zucchini up, then squeeze the ever-loving shit out of it. You want to get as much fluid out as you can. Dump it in a bowl with the fetta, dill, corn, garlic and eggs. Give it a stir, then start stirring in flour and baking powder. You want it reasonably soft - think gloopy playdough. Remember: you can always add more if it's too soft, but there's no going back if you put in too much. Fritters should be egg-y, and springy, not chewy and dry.

Shape into patties and fry in some extra virgin olive oil on a medium heat for about 4 minutes on each side, until browned and yummy. Delicious!

Very simple salad:

1 beetroot, grated
pack of mesclun +a small cos or whatever you want
1 cucumber, sliced
just a little bit of chopped salad onion, or some shallots, something for a little bite.
olive oil
vinegar

Grate the beetroot, toss through the salad with the onion and cucumber. Dress it with just a little bit of extra virgin olive oil and a splash of raspberry vinegar (or you could go with lemon for something more pedestrian!). Simple, but sets off the fritters very nicely.

Frittata with orange salad

2010-01-21T20:39:00.006+11:00

There are a few meals that regular appear in our summer menu - the weather calls for salads. Tarts, pasta with acidic, salsa-like sauces and frittata.

What's not to love about frittata? An eggy, cheesy base that marries with almost anything; a meal that is equally good hot or cold; a meal you can prepare quickly, cooks in several different ways, and you can leave alone until it's ready. Fantastic.

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This particular Fritta used:

3 or 4 waxy potatoes like desire, sliced
10-12 eggs (it was a big 'un!)
1/4 of a spanish onion, chopped
8-12 cloves of garlic, chopped
a small handful of grated parmesan
200 mls or more of milk
some semi-dried tomatoes
some kalamata olives
a bunch of continental parsley, chopped
a bunch of rocket, chopped

But you can put anyhting in a frittata, really, that's the beauty of it!

So, slice your potatoes thinly. Put a layer of potatoes across the bottom of a non-stick pan. In a bowl, combine eggs, garlic, onion, milk, 2/3 of the cheese, semi-dried tomatoes, olives, parsley, and rocket. Whisk it a little, then pour about 3/4 over the potatoes.

Spread another layer of potatoes on top, then pour over the rest of the mix + rest of the cheese. You may need to top up with more eggs + milk whisked together. Don't stress it, just keep adding until the mixture is over the final layer of potatoes.

Traditionally at this point you'd slap that puppy on a hot plate, but because I make such large frittatas and I prefer a little consistency, I actually put it in an oven pre-heated to 180 then forget about for anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour, depending on the size.

Meanwhile, you can make this delicious salad, courtesy of Jamie Oliver, with a few additions:

1 summer bulb of fennel
1 red onion
1 cucumber
1 bunch of rasdishes
4 oranges, peeled, segmented and cubed
Some radicchio and other lovely italian leaves
2 tsb of nice vinegar (I used walnut vinegar)
6 tbs olive oil

Basically slice everything except the lettuce and orange as thinly as possible, as cold as possible without freezing. Mix it all (except lettuce) together, then mix up your vinaigrette, dress the salad a little and taste (you might want more vinegar, I did). Put the slicey goodness on a bed of the lettuce and you're done!

Braised fennel & artichoke Salad, with warm lentil tabbouleh and Lemon Thyme Tea

2009-12-29T19:28:00.007+11:00

Yup, I'm back. Got something to write about again, to wit; our slow but sure move to eating little but vegetarian at home. Lynn and I have always eaten 3-4 vegetarian meals a week, but as this year has progressed, I have been pushing that number higher and higher for health, environmental, and ethical reasons. So I'll be posting up my vegetarian recipes here.

First entry (and last of 2009!) is a doozy: two beautiful warmish salads, and a great summer drink.

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Braised Artichoke & Fennel Salad with Potato

Olive oil
1 bulb baby fennel, sliced
1 small bottle of baby artichoke
4 small, waxy potatoes such as Desiree, sliced
a bitter salad mix
salt for seasoning

Put a dash of olive oil into your pan, followed by the fennel, saute is _gently_. Meanwhile, heat a small pot with boiling water and add the potatoes. Rinse the salad with water and set aside.

Once the fennel has browned nicely on both sides (about 10 minutes), take the pan off the heat. Drain the potatoes and set aside, then tip the fennel into the now-empty pot. Add the entire bottle of artichoke hearts, then put it back on a low heat, with the lid slightly ajar.

After 5-10 minutes, take the lid off and let the liquid evaporate. Once it's nearly dry, plate your salad mix, then mix the potatoes in with fennel and artichoke, and spread the mix over the leaves. Garnish with tips from the fennel bulb.

Warm Lentil Tabbouleh with Fetta

scallions (shallots to us Aussies), finely chopped
6-8 garlic cloves (or more, woo!), finely chopped
1 can green or "puy" lentils, drained
1 slice of fetta, cubed
a bunch of flat-leaf parsley, finely chopped
salt and pepper for seasoning

Heat a pan to low, add a dash of extra virgin olive oil. Add the scallions and garlic, some salt and pepper, and saute _gently_ for 5 minutes or until translucent. Add the lentils and stir the mixture for 3-5 minutes. Once it's nice and warm, add the fetta and parsley. You're done!

Lemon Thyme Tea
This is really, really good. Delicous! The perfect thing for a summer arvo.

half a bunch of lemon thyme (the younger the better), chopped
a decent glop of honey (maybe 2 tbs? maybe 3?)
juice of two limes
juice of one lemon

Put all the ingredients in a teapot. Add boiling water. Let steep for at least five minutes. Fill a glass with ice, add the tea. And enjoy. You will.

Pappa al Pomodoro e' Pasta Zucca

2008-09-07T20:49:00.005+10:00

Italian bread tomato soup and pumpkin pasta. A nice meal tonight, just as well because I suspect the freestyled semolina bread I have rising in the oven will not have been a good experiment. In my opinion, semolina breads just take so damn long to proof, I always underestimate, especially when using a levain. Anyway.

Pappa al Pomodoro

ripe roma or any other kind of tomato
basil
400g tin of tomatoes - chopped, dice, wholepeeled: it don't matter.
five cloves of garlic (or more! I usually go to town!), thinly slice
olive oil
water
preferably stale bread - roughly 400gms, but don't be too obsessed about it.

Slice the romas in half, season them, tear in some basil, drizzle on some olive oil, and into a 180' oven for 20-25 minutes. Meanwhile, fry off the garlic and the chopped stalks of the basil, after a few minutes, add the tin of tomatoes, plus a tin full of water. Boil it for 15-20 minutes. Add the bread, torn into small chunks. and simmer for another ten minutes or so, and then add the tomatoes from the oven, plus some more torn basil. Garnish with a little cracked pepper, maybe some parmesan - delicious!

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Pasta Zucca (Creamy Pumpkin Pasta)

There's some carbonara elements to this, smooth, and subtler than you might think.

four drumsticks
a small butternut pumpkin half
3 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
4 small onions, or two big ones
olive oil
salt and pepper
fresh oregano
small container of light cream
two medium eggs
40 grams or thereabouts parmesan
a sploosh of dry white
Whatever pasta takes your fancy

Dice the pumpkin into finger sized segments, cut the onions into wedges, then combine them with the chicken, garlic, 3/4 of the oregano, salt and pepper, and olive oil, and bung it in a 180' oven for 20 minutes or so.

Put your pasta on now if it takes more than ten minutes to cook.

When the chicken is cooked, scrape the meat from the bone (skin is up to you, I didn't use it), and chuck into a pot with the rest of the oven mix, and put it on a low heat after giving it a vigorous stir witha fork (we're trying to break up some of the pumpkin here).

Add the cream, eggs and parmesan. More vigorous stirring (now we're trying to mix up that egg and cream).

After it has mixed, add a sploosh of white wine to taste. Don't let it get too hot!

Spoon it into the pasta - it's rich, so don't go nuts. In my opinion, people tend to oversauce their pasta in general. Garnish with the remaining oregano. Yum yum!

I christen thee Bake-Tacular

2008-08-17T21:47:00.013+10:00

Ahhhh. Experiments. Sometimes they go right. Right = Happy Paddy. Prancing about the lounge, lovingly gazing at my creations, and hopelessly covetous; I regret eating the beautiful food I have created! Even though it tastes sooooooo good!

Bad experiment. Sigh. Bad = Sad, Angry Paddy. A divot in my brow like a hole in a golf course. Not even Survivor is enough to make me smile.

Today was a success. Four baked goods, three experiments, and potentially three successes - two guaranteed.

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1. Cinnamon Scrolls

From my lovely friend Sarah. I have been meaning to make these for a while. Sarah said they were easy, and hot damn she was right! I'll be making this babies over and over. Delicious, and surprisingly low on the butter and sugar. Yeasty though. Lord are they yeasty!

2. Danishes

From the inimitable Wild Yeast. I confess - I had grave doubts and concerns about this one. The recipe is really (ultimately a little needlessly, in my opinion) complex - there are dozens of steps, with hours rest in between.

Puff Pastry traditional works through a kind of lamination process - where you roll it out flat, and butter it - over and over and over. Keeping the dough cold is crucial. It's not a fun process, and in my opinion the gains over store bought puff are marginal at best.

This is a different process, it involves rolling out a barely incorporated dough with _huge_ chunks of butter in it. I admit I was skeptical, but wouldn't you be? Look at this!

Look at the butter! Ye gods! THE BUTTTTTTTEERRRR!

So you have to roll it out:

*Hands belong to Awesome BakeFriend Pat.

Unbelievably, it started to incorporate. The dough - partly because it's so cold - is very stiff. Stiff and yellow. It reminded me of nothing so much as pasta dough in its qualities.

After appropriate chill-out times, you have to shape it. Because I need to change my middle name to: "Let's Make A Double Batch!", Pat and I had quite a few danishes ready to go: way too many for my meagre kitchen.... 38 or so...

After, smear on the cream cheese mix, peach halves, morello cherries and boysenberries, then you're good to go!

I couldn't believe it: they tasted as good as the looked!!!

Key learnings from this: Breaking up this recipe as Wild Yeast implies can be done is probably a good idea. Individually, the steps are not too time consuming. All together they are pretty damn time consuming. The biggest step is combining the butter and the flour. That's a lotta rolling!

This said, I think that this recipe could do with some work: all those refrigeration times are definitely not required. They are only there to keep the dough cold. If the weather is cold, or you're able to contain yourself and keep your groping hands off the dough, they won't be necessary.

Also: I would be reluctant to refrigerate the dough to the outside of those time limits. 4 days, etc. is a really long time in the fridge. Too long, in my opinion. Sure it would work, just maybe not well.

Finally: don't use too much cream cheese; it will inhibit the rise a bit if you do.

3. Jeffrey Hamelman's 66% Rye Sourdough from Bread.

Still getting the hang of Hamelman, I think. His book is a tremendous wealth of knowledge, but the two recipes I have tried so far, whilst not bad, haven't been up there with my favourite recipes.

I am finding his doughs in general have a higher hydration than I would expect, and the dough then has a kind of satiny, silky feel. Also, I'm not getting the proofing rises that I general ly expect from these doughs. Both recipes I have made so far have stayed very flat in the proofing process, far less than my trusted recipes. I've waited over his leavening times, and still, not much action.

I get an oven rise, to be sure. but it's - hmmmm - it's just not quite right. Despite slashing, I get rise lifting up the bottom of the loaf (hexagon loaves! No fun!). Also I find on cutting the bread that I get a slightly dense, almost rubbery texture - not the soft or chewy texture I generally prefer.

This all said, I haven't cut the loaf yet, so the jury's out. The loaves are the front two in the first pic.

4. My Trusty, Delicious Wholemeal Loaf.

From Boas, formerly of Folding Pain, now of Grain Power. I have to say; this is the my favourite bread that I have ever cooked, and that's saying something. The flavour is brilliant. The texture: both soft and chewy. It keeps well, and makes great toast. And most importantly, it's practically indestructible - you can screw around with it endlessly and it still holds up. This recipe is fantastic.

What a blissful day of baking! I wish every day could be like this!

Baked Donuts

2008-07-21T20:53:00.004+10:00

Donuts, so delicious, yet so incredibly, incredibly fatty. For example, The original glazed Krispy Kreme donut weighs 52 grams and has 12 grams of fat. The New York cheesecake donut has 330 calories, of which 170 are derived from fat. This bad boy has 19 grams of fat, 30 per cent of the daily requirement! In one donut.

So, the prospect of baked donuts with less fat (but still not guilt free!) is an appealing one.

The recipe I used can be found here. I would be tempted to add a little more butter to this recipe next time.

The donuts were good - make no mistake, they're not as good as fried - kind of like a chewier, moister brioche. They cook like lightning, so whip em out of the oven pretty fast.

I do think that sourdough has slightly ruined me for yeasted breads, however. I find myself questing for that complex malty, nutty, three-dimensional taste that you can only get from a long ferment and a natural levain. Sourdough donuts?? Hmmm, an interesting possibility.

The big question, is do I like these more than the different, but delectable, choux pastry?? Hmmm, probably not. Choux pastry is about as easy, and so light and versatile. It's easy to eat more of it though.... They are beautiful, glistening like calorie snowballs in the light...

A brief note for everyone

2008-06-02T22:04:00.005+10:00

This is a crisis:

Burma

This is not a crisis:

Paying a bit more for petrol

Get the fuck over it. 5% extra for petrol = roughly $5.50 per 70 litre tank@$1.60 a litre. Big whoop. In Europe, it's like $2.50 a litre. Shockingly, the continent somehow manages to survive without catastrophe, armageddon or ritualised cannibalism.

The interesting thing about this is that the price isn't being dictated by scarcity (peak oil people need to relax, too), but because of (hedge fund) investment. A bubble. But will this one burst?

Turkey with a raspberry jus

2008-05-30T21:31:00.004+10:00

Ah, Friday night and I want something easy, yet delicious. This fits the bill nicely.

Turkey thigh cutlets
A carrot
Broccolini
Raspberry Jam
White balsamic vinegar

Season the cutlets lightly with salt and pepper, meanwhile heating up a fry pan with a very healthy splash of olive oil to medium high.

Add the cutlets, three minutes on each side, no wanton flipping! We want some caramelisation here. At the same time, add the carrots, wedged nicely, also no unnecessary flipping.

Once the cutlets have cooked, and the carrots are nice and sauteed, take them out of the pan, chuck on a plate and pop it in the oven (circa 70'C) to keep warm.

Now add the broccolini to the pan, it will soak up most of the oil, that's cool. Turn it with some tongs every now and then, it will be nicely cooked in about three minutes. Flipping at this point is fine! And into the oven with this too.

Deglaze the place with 50-60mls of white balsamic vinegar. You could just use white wine vinegar, but it will take longer and probably won't taste as good. This is all about easy.

Let it bubble away, and stir, stir, stir. Grab the raspberry jam and add three or so teaspoons, keep stirring. If it looks too thick, add some more vinegar. At this point, you can turn the heat to low.

Keep stirring as it reduces, and take a break to plate the meat and veges, and once the jus is nice and tacky, drizzle it over your dinner. Remember, the jus will thicken once it cools down (dependent on how much jam), so don't go too nuts with reduction.

Brilliant, albeit a little more Pollock than Turner. And it only took fifteen minutes from woah to go.

The only thing that could make this meal better would be using the meat it was intended for: a succulent, gamey duck breast. But, they go for about forty bucks a kilo, so we make little comprises. Oh, and I forgot one more ingredient - a restorational gin and tonic in the biggest glass you can find. It is Friday night, after all.

Public Intellectuals

2008-03-05T22:13:00.003+11:00

This article at bookforum.com came out last year, but I only read it today. I have to say, it's one of the best pieces I've read for a while.

It's about the public intellectual - or rather, the decline of the public intellectual.

This in itself is a pretty interesting idea if you ask me. An age where think tanks are growing faster than lesions on a leper. Yet, by its own definition - disinterested public intellectual are about as common as a jackalope, and no less ersatz.

I like this piece because - beyond being well written - the author of both the article, and the original book, talk about something that rarely crops up in discussions of writing and writers: the day-to-day existence of being one, which is typically not a particularly pleasant existence especially compared to the well-compensated benefits of tenure or the comforts of a well-paid think tank gig.

There was one quote, however, which really got my attention, situated as I am (or briefly was) between these two definitions.

...publicist. It had once referred to an informed and authoritative writer on public affairs—something like wonk but with more honorable overtones. “‘Publicist,’” wrote Jacoby, “if it once connotated an engagement with the state and law, is almost obsolete, victimized by Hollywood and ‘public relations’: it now signifies someone who handles and manipulates the media, an advance or front man (or woman). A public intellectual or old-style publicist is something else, perhaps the opposite, an incorrigibly independent soul answering to no one.”

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Now, I can easily see the temptation to deride this metamorphis as another cheapening blow to meaning; taking away the edenic perfection of the naked idea and adorning it with nipple tassles, twirling them for change. But I think there's more to it than that.

Publicists - in the original sense - were decoders. Analysing ideas, pulling them apart and putting them together again, interpreting for us - us being a general public with a far wider communal, public knowledge than we have today.

Publicists as we know them now are quite different. They are spruikers; touters in an intellectual - or retail - marketplace. Decoders, certainly, but for different reasons. But I don't think this changes are bad, necessarily.

Rather I would say that firstly, the contemporary marketplace for ideas is both a crowded and a neo-liberal one. Gone is the quiet agora of yesteryear, with big papers, and big radio, big tv. This has been shattered, taking with it much of that shared public knowledge (or shared consumption, at least). Secondly, there are so many ideas, so many public affairs, they need promoting.

The decoding is now already done now. I think our stories, discourses, whatever you want to call them are that much more sophisticated; they have decoded themselves. To paraphrase McLuhan, I think the message is the message.

Thus, what is effectively public has changed. We don't need decoders now, we are swimming in a sea of interpretations; the story itself - its mere existence - is an interpretation. Contrary to crotchety protests otherwise - it's not the Dead Sea, you can sink in this body of water. So we need heralds. And so, we are given the modern publicist.

I'm not defending the job of the publicist, it can be as moral or immoral as you like, but by the same token, it's a role we all play: touting the ideas we like, writing and talking in blogs, forums and newsgroups about them.

Though the author of the piece talks about over-educated, disaffected youth creating the right conditions for a new generation of public intellectuals, of publicists in the classic sense of the word, I think he has ignored the greater implications and potential of the change he discusses.

Publicists have changed, because public has changed. To communicate to the masses now is not for decoding and interpretation - they do that themselves. It's for promoting, fighting to get to the forefront.

The rigorous analysis of idea still happens, but not to the masses. Those days have gone; the masses have shrunk. And in these new, dwarven audiences - perched on the giant shoulders of thousands of ideas - we still have publicists. Dozens of them, well-educated, well-qualified and frequently disinterested, at least no more interested than a half hour at the bookends of the day will allow.

Certainly, there are the blowhards and cretins; bombastic and wasteful, but the idea of a cadre of universally well-respected public intellectuals is a nostalgic myth, as false then as it is now.

So I don't despair about these differences, they make perfect sense to me. And frankly, I think a new definition of both public and intellectual is in order. We have moved to a more egalitarian and democratic vision of both.

Does this make sense? Or am I just raving, trying to do a little decoding of my own?

Iron Chef America

2008-02-21T22:02:00.004+11:00

Interesting article here about a restaurant critic who went along to an Iron Chef America filming.

The article is a bizarre mix of legitimate complaints about the the whole premise of the show, and the hopeless whiny mewlings that - gasp! - things take a lot longer in real life than in a one hour tv show.

For me, the most disturbing accusations are that a) the chefs know the ingredient ahead of time, and b) prepare a menu ahead of time, and c) get their sous chefs to prepare the meal a second time for the tasters.

The fact that the competition is stacked in the competitor's favour shouldn't surprise anyone who has watched the show. I'm cool with that, but I do expect them to make up the ingredient, that's just shit otherwise.

update: For another, less-hysterical-but-similar account, go here.

Bread

2008-02-21T20:54:00.007+11:00

I have been baking bread, have even become a little fanatical dare I say. Bread making is, I suspect, like that a little bit. The internet has a treasure trove of breadmaking sites, redolent with advice, mouth-watering photos and fascinating possibilities.

Bread-making is both surprisingly scientific, and deeply intuitive. The science equips you with a knowledge of what the changes in the dough mean, but only your hands, plumping, twisting, knocking back and dusting, futiley shaping batards, boules and syphilitic bagguettes; knobbly and uneven, can tell what the bread is. The nature of the bread, as it were.

I have started my own sourdough - caught and tamed the wild yeast quietly grazing on the dry flour, prodding and agitating it until I have a toro; an aggressive, agitated beast apt to leap on the smallest feeding of flour and water and punch it full of bubbles, sour it with its constant companion and friend, the lactobacillus.

I have made sourdoughs and ciabattas, pain au provence and ryes. Wholemeals, linseed loaves with a crunch like crackling, and brioche. Some have been excellent, some a bit so-so, but not outright failures; bread is tricky to get right, but harder to get wrong.

That doesn't mean you can make some old favourites, however...

The only thing you really need for successful bread - beyond that holy quartet of flour, yeast, salt and water - is time.

Bread would test a menhir's patience. Sure, you can make it quickly with vast quantities of instant yeast, or even faster with baking powder. But that is an unsubtle, boorish bread; barging about in your mouth like a gatecrasher, and leaving nothing but a vague, gummy taste.

No, for a good loaf, you will have to wait. It's not a lot of work, but you will need to forget it; plant the seed and wait patiently for the harvest. As the yeast goes about its work, the carbohydrates get broken down into different things, and something magical happens.

Something nutty. Malty. Complicated. Something subtle, and perhaps smoky; a deep taste that - if chewed in the right spirit - can transport you to the German hearth from whence it originated. The tall, brick oven in a French backyard, the hurly-burly of a San Francisco minefield.

In short, something delicious. Expect more posts to follow; bread is surely all about the bacteria, because I have definitely been infected with something!

Photos from Vietnam

2008-02-17T19:04:00.006+11:00

Powerlines in Saigon.

Saigon powerlines were astonishing in their variety and complexity - a gordian knot with a bristling electric core. I was constantly amazed that I didn't see more of these broken down, or lashing charred corpses. God only knows how many people are actually paying for their power.

On our way to the airport, there was a massive traffic jam (and when 90% of the traffic is on scooters that obey - shall we say - flexible road rules, you know there's a real problem), due to one of the overloaded towers falling down. Lucky there wasn't anyone selling fruit or books underneath it.

Vietnamese Coffee

You don't need to be a genius to see how this one works. Hot water and a shitload of coffee go in the aluminuim container. It drizzles down onto the layer of sweetened condensed milk on the bottom. Teeth-shatteringly sweet, and stronger than Ronnie Coleman, I reckon they could use this coffee in place of adrenalin shots for anaphylaxis cases. Needless to say, other than a cautious sip of someone else's, I stayed well away.

Orchids

There lots of brilliant gardens and gardeners in Vietnam. The climate is a horticulturist's dream - stunning variety and no dearth of rain anywhere.

Roses, day lilies, astonishing produce all abound, but there were two things that really stood out. The bonsais - I had no idea that Vietnam loved bonsai as much as the Japanese - and the amazing orchids.

Coming from Queensland - no slouch in the orchid stakes - I can only imagine how British and American tourists found the riotous displays of orchids - dazzling colours and varieties. This was at the Dalat Annual Flower Festival, and was one of thousands of stunning orchids we saw on the day.

Vacation!

2007-12-13T09:03:00.001+11:00

I'm off to Vietnam for three weeks! Woooooo! I'll try to post when I'm over there, but no promises.

In the meantime, I had an intensive, bread-tastic day on the weekend with my friend Pat, it was so so awesome.

Full details are over at her blog. Check it out, I implore you, the pics speak for themselves!

Give a little bit

2007-12-06T21:41:00.001+11:00

Interesting post over at Passport, Foreign Policy's blog, asking the question that I'm sure has been on all our lips at one time or another: What if America was more like Sweden?

Dara has just realised their Humanitarian Response Index, and the US is ranked a pretty dismal 16 - about halfway down, but still beating France and Japan (they are very tight with aid).

Predictably, Nordic countries take out the top three spots, and Australia is only marginally better than the states at 14. What really lets us down is - of course - working with humanitarian partners, which we are totally shit at, preferring to go it alone in most cases (let the record reflect, there is a certain regional limitation here, but it still doesn't explain the shoddy overall score).

New Zealand manages to rank 7 (also not great with humanitarian partners). It makes me think of a fascinating little what-if scenario, given that around fifteen years ago, our countries were in quite similar positions regarding many policies, particularly welfare, and I've little doubt we would have scored as well or better than them with an index like this.

In some ways - and I'm sure the long white cloud 'twixt our islands manages to mist over quite a few things - I feel like as a nation, we decided to turn away from many of the commonalities we had with New Zealand, and pursued instead a more reactionary, populist, dare I say a somewhat easier way of doing things.

Passport's own little thought experiment gives rise to some depressing numbers; if the US gave as much aid as Sweden, many of the world's problems could be addressed.

The most disturbing thing was that large numbers of Americans think the country gives a whopping 25% of GNI as aid. The reality is 0.22%. I have seen a similar attitude in Australians regarding our own aid contributions. which is surely a slap in the face to libertarians who fancy that charities will pick up any slack. Clearly, people expect their governments to be more charitable. In all honesty, I'm surprised they aren't.

In Australia for example, with the ludicrous amount of spending going on pre-election, a billion here or there wouldn't have been missed - probably not even noticed - and I fail to see how being more generous and caring could be a negative in the electorate (well, most electorates). Then again, John Howard has been in for eleven years, and his platform wasn't exactly Mother Teresa's. Perhaps I'm being naive, over-expecting people to be more generous than they are.

Ciabatta

2007-12-03T22:00:00.000+11:00

Well bugger me twice and call me Shirley, this recipe didn't just exceed my expectations, it lured them into a dodgy nightclub, gave them a fizzy blue drink, beat them, raped them, and left them to wake up in a bathtub of ice with a dull ache in the small of the back.

Heading back to the website I mentioned about a month ago, The Fresh Loaf, I settled on this recipe, for ciabatta.

I confess; I was skeptical. This was well beyond my meagre breadmaking experience, and breadmaking I think attracts some.... strong personalities. There's a lot of misinformation out there; people with cooking in general - but certain areas in particular - seem to fall in love with the process, forgetting what they're actually doing it for.

People always seem to think - in cooking as in life - that there's only one way of doing things. One way of making curry, one way of making bread. I have rarely found this to be the case.

Hence, this recipe calls for a dough mixer. In my house, I am the dough mixer. So, another reason to be worried.

But, I discovered the most _amazing_ technique. It's called stretch and fold, and as the name implies... you stretch the dough, and then - ta da! - you fold it.

I've always hated the kneading aspect of bread. It's bloody hard work; I defy anyone not to crack a sweat in ten minutes of proper kneading. Worse, it's only sporadically effective. Sometimes, the bread rises, sometimes not so much.

And of course, if you think about it, kneading is a terrible way to get bread to rise and develop properly. What you're trying to do with kneading is stretch the gluten fibres. Obviously rolling and pushing the bread around is not a very efficient way of stretching the fibres, especially compared actually stretching them.

I was shocked at how effective this was. The dough in ciabatta is like 90% hydrated (nearly equal parts water and flour), and it looked like this:

That is sloppy man, practically pancake batter. Wetter than a sauna. But, almost miraculously, I could actually feel the dough forming as I stretched and folded. I have never experienced anything so effective in my prior dough-making adventures.

Not to say it was thick after the many risings, hell no. I thought it would simply end up a doughy puddle in the oven, but lo! It rose, and yea, it was delicious. Really delicious. I'm going to make this next weekend, too. It was indistinguishable from what you would get from a baker.

Breadmaking, a brave new world for me!

True Love

2007-12-02T22:33:00.000+11:00

Ooooh, I read a review of a really cool sounding book last week.

Michael Dirda is the Washington Post's chief book reviewer, but more than that, seems to be their chief book lover. In addition to his reviews, he has a live column every week where people just natter about books.

His latest book is called Classics for Pleasure, and it's about classics that you may not be aware of, or may not consider classics. It sounds awesome.

Rather than reiterate the merits of a Shakespeare or Dickens, he takes you along less-traveled but equally scenic and adventurous routes: Rider Haggard's She, Jean Toomer's Cane, G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Svejk. Also the poetry of George Meredith and Anna Akhmatova, the fantastic tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann and H.P. Lovecraft, and the novels of Eca de Queiros, Jules Verne, and Ivy Compton-Burnett. He explains his choices persuasively: his love of great stories, exciting poems, and humanist philosophies.

Those are some of the writers I really enjoy, but more than that; this is an area of literature I adore: the small alleys and byways, forgotten treasures and undiscovered country.

Some of the most intriguing, fascinating authors I've ever read have been stumbled upon this way. You find them at the Lifeline book fair, old, gigantic second-hand bookshops redolent with the musty aroma of yellowed pages, and under the table stacks at remainders bookshops.

But you can't find them just by looking, at least not usually. Sure, the occasional treasure glints at you from amongst the Clive Cusslers, but usually it's an obscure corner of the internet that furnishes you with the name. Perhaps an interview with an author, or a recommended list they've provided. I've found the individual prefaces in front of short stories often make great recommendations, particularly in older or reprinted anthologies.
Dirda has written a lot of other, similar books, and I'll be acquainting myself with his back catalogue in short time I suspect. I'll leave you with a quote he has about one of my favourite books, Rebecca. I couldn't agree more with his conclusions.

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." With these unforgettable words the reader is launched into one of the most powerful visions of . . . what? Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca is a far more complex work of art than commonly believed, being one of the half dozen greatest romance novels of the century and a subtle undercutting of the whole romance genre. It is simultaneously a devastating examination of the sexual politics of marriage, a haunting study of jealousy and psychological obsession, and a classic of suspense.

Somalia

2007-11-29T19:57:00.000+11:00

Oh man, I've been reading about the latest travails of Somalia at the moment, an international conflict - and catastrophe - that hasn't been generating as many headlines as it should.

The many troubles in Somalia are an excellent example of how the U.S can be so myopic when it comes to international relations; feverishly pursuing its aims with no recollection of why those aims exist, and no recognition of its limited reach as a nation. In shying away from an unpalatable future (some would say reality), the United States has encouraged something arguably worse, with little regard its consequences in the region more broadly.

Some context: The situation in Somalia is very bleak at the moment. Hundreds of thousands of people - maybe millions - are dead, and even more are refugees. The situation is comparable to Darfur, perhaps even worse. The background to this fighting has six or so players involved:

More...

The Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), who briefly attained power in 2006, though they have been agitating for it for a much longer period. The UIC are very conservative, banning footballs, music, videos and women working. However, they are _relatively_ popular, and - though their ideas of it may not be wonderful - they are at least interested in governance, as opposed to simply taking what they can get, at least in the short term.
The current transitional government, who have been in power since they overthrew the UIC. Though internationally recognised, this government is widely seen as ineffectual, corrupt, and worse. Many members are undoubtedly former warlords from the area, and the behaviour patterns haven't changed much. UN and other aid workers have been held and shot at by police and army forces; allegations of abuse are widespread. Worse, several areas of the country are declaring independence, and the UIC and other Islamic rebels are certainly not being kept in check, nor is piracy in the Aden Gulf.
The United States government, who have been unsuccessfully involved with the area for decades. Terrified of a rising tide of Islamic governments, like they once were of communists, they have been launching strikes against Islamic rebels, and the UIC in its many forms. Perhaps, too, the US is genuinely opposed to many of the things the UIC stand for: the government certainly could be viewed as terrorist friendly, unlike their other ally in the region...
Ethiopia, whose army was responsible for deposing the UIC, backed by the US and the North Korean arms they purchased with US approval, in stark contravention to international sanctions. Of course, Ethiopia is hardly a paragon of human rights, and they certainly aren't in Somalia for altruistic reasons. In reality, the two nations have their own complicated history, and Ethiopia - whilst eager for US dollars - no doubt covets much of Somalia for its own, as it has down for years.
Much as it covets Eritrea, whom is supporting the AIC. The reasons are not religious - only half of Eritrea is Muslim and the rest Christian - rather they are hoping that by supporting the AIC, the war in Somalia will take some of the heat off them. Eritrea and Ethiopia have been fighting over borders since the country first declared independence. Eritrea hates Ethiopia with a passion, and vice versa.
and finally, the often-referenced, not-so-often-seen Al Qaeda, represented heavily in reports from the US military and intelligence agencies, the claims of the transitional government, and the presence of Yemenis, Afghans, Iraqis and others in a location that shouldn't technically hold much interest for those nationalities, beyond strategic. The relationship between Al Qaeda, the UIC, and other conservative, Islamic governments in the region is not really well defined, and god knows the US has certainly seen the smoke of Islamic governments and assumed the fire of terrorism before (or at least promoted the association). That all said, there is clearly are some links, however.

As you can see: a complicated situation, but the one 'player' I haven't mentioned yet are the poor bloody civilians of Somalia; starving, killed, raped and imprisoned on a daily basis in huge numbers. Staggering numbers.

The United States is worried about a spread of conservative Islamic government in Africa, especially in a nation that could - if in the the right position - control or seriously effect the flow of traffic into the red sea, and thus the Suez canal, and thus a gigantic chunk of international trade.

However, I seriously question the wisdom of promoting the current situation in Somalia, and through the highly dubious Ethiopian government at that. Christ, didn't they learn from their efforts in the Congo, or indeed Somalia the first time around?

There is nothing stable about what is going on currently. Of course, the lives at stake are black, and unfortunately for them of little relevance to international trade, but nonetheless the US should be able to remember that the friendly dictator today is the Saddam Hussein of tomorrow, and their stated goals of democracy and candy for all certainly don't gel with either the Ethiopian government or the warlords currently in the transitional government (or out of it; simply doing whatever the hell they like in the area).

Whilst many of the aims of the UIC are not particularly worthy - downright horrible in fact - they seem to be offering millions of people the best chance of stability, and simply making it through the day, than any other alternative at the moment. The threat of terrorism in Somalia has certainly been realised under the transistional government, and I genuinely question whether the UIC would make that any worse.

But instead, the US have continued to alienate what look to be the eventual rulers of the country, rather than trying to bring them into the fold. It's an interesting attitude, in contrast to how the US treat the Saudis; an equally conservative country that fields accusations of supporting terrorism and a governmental model equally enimical to the candy/democracy doctrine. Of course, the Saudi government has the power to screw with the states, whilst the Somalis can barely manage to get their own house in order.

Meanwhile, we prevaricate and Somalis die. It's a horrible situation, and one that deserves more attention.

More info here, here, and here.

Trendy Restaurants

2007-11-27T20:40:00.000+11:00

Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Bombs.

Gah. I went to Billy Kwong last night, home of celebrity chef Kylie Kwong, and allegedly one of the best Chinese restaurants in Sydney.

It was average. And when you're paying $90 a head, average becomes bad. In a 9 course banquet menu, there was only one dish I couldn't have made, easily, at home. The flavours were about as complex as primary school maths, and the meals - though not badly made - were no better or worse than literally dozens of other Chinese meals I've had for considerably less than ninety bucks.

Trendy restaurants, in my experience, are almost always disappointments. This is not a case of high expectations, either. I had no expectations whatsoever when I went to the Danks St Depot earlier this year, and the meal - again - was very average indeed. Not bad, but absolutely nothing special whatsoever.

But back to Billy Kwong: I cannot understand how this restaurant can be feted so much when it was so very, very ordinary. It merely confirms to me that reviewers - floating around in the rarefied atmosphere of the foodie world - have in fact completely lost touch with what real food is, and also are completely powerless to resist the lure of hype and spin.

The food was essentially home cooking. Fish steamed with soy and ginger. And nothing else. Now, I am the last person to deride home-cooking, but there's a reason it's called home-cooking: Because you make it at home. I go out to eat food that is either too much trouble for me to make, or simply beyond my capabilities - criteria that cover everything from $3.00 banh mi to $50 mud crab.

It genuinely surprises me that people who profess to be so genuinely in love with food, can fall so head over heels with something so pedestrian. Clearly, it is not the food these people love - they obviously don't know anything about food. This kind of thing really pisses me off: when something so accessible, so democratic - anyone can get, and appreciate, a good meal - gets turned into some bourgeois, secret, trendified form of knowledge that only a certain type and class of people can understand. The same thing happens with literature all the time.

By the same token, I need to get over myself. People who really love food, they don't give shit that some over-priced restaurant in the inner suburbs is parting fools from their money. They know as surely as I do that something as simple as a good pickled onion and some bitey cheese can provide a culinary pleasure to be reckoned with, and that there are a wealth of wonderful, accessible things to eat, both in the home, and outside it.

Nonetheless, my resolve is firm. No more trendy restaurants for me; it is a waste of time.

Lynn tells me that very few Asians she knows recommend Billy Kwong because it's basically home cooking, and they know there are dozens of better Chinese restaurants in Sydney. And, I should add, my three fellow diners were also distinctly underwhelmed with the restaurant, and they don't bring the culinary baggage I do to the table. So word to the wise, avoid it, a $10 plate in Chinatown will be no different.

The night before

2007-11-23T22:20:00.000+11:00

Well folks, we stand on the cusp of an election - an election where the possibility of change hangs nascent in the air, dawn stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops - but will it come?

God, I hope so.

I'm nervous tonight. Nervous, excited, a small medley of emotions threatening to break out circa 7:00pm tomorrow night. I was fifteen when John Howard was elected Prime Minister of this country, my political knowledge and awareness was very low - or rather, around the same level as most Australians making a decision tomorrow. I can't even remember what I thought; whether Howard was a Good Thing or a Bad Thing.

How times have changed. In those eleven years I have literally grown up. I now have a political science major, I've worked on election campaigns, my interest has sky-rocketed, and now I'm in no doubt as to whether John Howard is a Good Thing, or a Bad Thing. John Howard is a Fucked Thing.

I will be really, really sad if the Coalition win tomorrow. Yet I will try to counter that disappointment with the knowledge that - even after eleven years of a corrupt, incompetent, morally evil government - the country is still doing okay. Not great, but okay.

And it's because of good people, working hard to to expose, oppose, and try to solve the problems. Governments may come and go, but people tend to stay the same. So take heart, fellow readers and friends, that if Labor loses, we'll still all be around, and if they win; so will the other bastards, so let's not get complacent.

Keep your powder dry.

PS, fabulous odds at Portland Bet if you want to put your money where your mouth is and you think Labor will win a lot of seats. For your information, I have money riding on 89, 90, 91, and 92 seats. Big odds, but damn it, I want to believe!

Whatever it takes

2007-11-21T22:51:00.000+11:00

Ah, I can only imagine Liberal HQ's all over the country are starting to take on a certain "fuhrerbunker" atmosphere. This week has seen some increasingly desperate (and pathetic) attempts by the Libs to try and rein in what I pray to God is an imminent Labor victory.

The latest culmination of this is Liberal Party members distributing fake, racist flyers branded as Labor material in the seat of Lindsay.

The extra charming part is that the group of individuals behind it include the sitting members' husband, and allegedly at least one member of the state executive. Lovely.

That all said, I can understand that impulse that drives these doltish poltroons. It reminds me of one Graham Richardson, who infamously said he was going to stiff Bob Hawke - the prime minister he helped install - after missing out on a plum ministry job he coveted (he did, by the way, for any non-Australians reading).

When you're involved in anything you feel strongly about, it's very seductive to buy into that 'whatever it takes' mentality. The other guys can seem so wrong - so evil, if you want to take it that far - that any small moral compromises you make, even some larger ones, are all in service of a greater good.

Of course, when couched in terms like that, it seems silly. A six year old can tell you that the ends do not justify the means. However in the hurdy gurdy of a campaign - political or otherwise - the lesson is not so clear cut.

I think the reason why this kind of thing is so alluring, is because it's actually right, to a small degree. Some means do justify some ends. That can mean compromise sometimes, or simply something morally grey in exchange for something morally fantastic. But it's a dangerous path to tread, and one that involves constant self-interrogation, at least in my limited experience.

It's also a form of discrimination, I think, because it involves demonising who or whatever you're fighting against. It's a kind of game theory: positing two oppositional forces, and the only way to win said game is, of course, by winning it. I despair of this kind of thinking: it has blinkered many a brilliant political mind.

But real politics - or rather, real democracy - isn't just about winning, much as we may think or wish it so at times. The madness of campaigning can make even the most level head forget this, and with heads that are not so level (in this case tilted so firmly to the right they make Quasimodo look like a member of the Queen's guard), the results aren't pretty.

Democracy and governance are in fact not about winning at all, and the status of one party or another is - or should be - immaterial. One of the many reasons why I loathe this government so much is because of the calculated and joyful disregard it has had towards these two things; democracy, and governance. Here, clearly, is a group of people that care more about winning more than the actual prize they are competing for, and most certainly the citizens they are duty-bound to represent.

I don't mean to say the Liberal Party has a monopoly on such personalities: I'm quite certain every party has its fair share. But you only have to look at the campaigns run by the various parties this year to see the difference.

Those voices - the gamers - will always clamour to be heard, but sometimes they need to be disregarded; condemned and denied, whatever it takes. That's the real challenge, and it happens far away from the letter-boxes and daily grind of the hustings.

Believing in fairy tales

2007-11-20T22:05:00.000+11:00

Interesting couple of articles over at The Guardian, tackling that old chestnut (or I should say, 1ppm chestnut), homeopathy. Jeanette Winterson, award-winning writer, is a fan, though she can't say why exactly:

it is hard to talk about what it is that homeopathy actually does, or why it works. For my part, I want to know more, not less, but I can't dismiss the thing in the way that Sense About Science, many doctors, and some journalists are asking me to.

Ben Goldacre, Doctor, blogger at Bad Science, not so much:

By pushing their product relentlessly with this scientific flim-flam, homeopaths undermine the public understanding of what it means to have an evidence base for a treatment. Worst of all, they do this at the very time when academics are working harder than ever to engage the public in a genuine collective ownership and understanding of clinical research, and when most good doctors are trying to educate and involve their patients in the selection of difficult treatment options. This is not a nerdy point. This is vital.

The differences between to the two articles are stark, and a potent reminder to anyone who thinks that right-wingers have a monopoly on sloppy reasoning and egregious ignorance (I know it seems that way sometimes, but no!).

Goldacre sets up the various strawmen employed by homeopathy advocates and calmly sets them alight. Everything from trials, publishing, and the actual reality of thinking that something that is one part in millions can do anything gets a guernsey. I applaud these debunking articles; they're important, for the reasons that Goldacre talks about in his piece.

It makes me shake my head that people can lap up such rubbish, but at the same time, it doesn't surprise me. Before anyone starts accusing me of deriding anything outside the mainstream, allow me to defend myself.

I think that anybody who is as sickly in general as myself will have had a few experiences with so-called "alternative" therapies. Heck, their GPs may have suggested it, as mine have many times over the years, and my specialists.

So I have tried a few different things, some were more successful than others, some (most, sadly), not at all. But the difference between homeopathy, herbal supplements, and acupuncture is simply this: evidence. Many, many studies have confirmed that things like acupuncture, St John's Wort, valerian and so on, actually work, to some degree or another. Homeopathy is distinctly lacking in the old double-blind, clinical test department.

So yes, it surprises me that people can believe something so manifestly silly. But then, we all have to believe in something, don't we? Just the other day, I was hectoring someone about the importance of authenticity in Communications as a field, and I prefaced my lecture with the following, which I believe very firmly:

"There are so many messages out there nowadays, spun in a hundred different ways; people can just pick and choose what they want to hear."

And I think, by and large, that's what we do. Sure, homeopathy has no basis, but shit, neither does intelligent design, or religion in general, and that doesn't seem to stop anyone.

I myself, have deeply held prejudices; welfare, for example. Sure, I will always heark back to the evidence to back myself up, but even if there wasn't any evidence, I would have a hard time letting go; it's just something I believe in. Plus, there's just so much evidence. Dig about, and you can find someone saying anything, many of the people respectable by various standards, however worthless. The medium itself can confer respectability - a blogger not so much, but when Paul Sheehan writes about Miracle Water in the SMH, people start thinking, "I'm thirsty!" (yeah, ploughing through that much bullshit sure works up a sweat).

I think this capacity to believe so irrationally is a fairly human trait, and it's the same thing that lets us enjoy movies, read novels, etc. Blowing fifty bucks on some wheatgerm pills seems a small price to pay for such joys.

But also, I think it's a reminder that letting individuals makes all the decisions is generally speaking a very bad idea. Malcolm Turnball has just got in trouble for giving his mate $10 million for a magic rain-making machine. A cynic might suggest that Malcolm wasn't too concerned with whether said machine actually worked, but other coalition ministers have made equally stupid decisions about stupid technology (Brendan Nelson leaps to mind).

Policy is important, it takes the emotion out of these decisions, or at least tries to, and so does the public service, when it's run properly. Tempting as it might be, I hope Kevin Rudd resists the temptation to dump many of the people who now lead government departments (with a few exceptions: Peter Shergold, Barbara Bennett).

Homeopathy ain't gonna make it onto the PBS, and that's as it should be. But I believe there has been plenty of equally moronic decisions in eleven years of this government, and sadly that's not just something I feel: the evidence in this particular case is overwhelming - in spite, not because of - the double blindness of the media and the Australian people.

My new addiction

2007-11-20T21:23:00.000+11:00

This has been on the internet for a while I believe, but it has sunk its razor-sharp, philanthropic claws deep into me!

Freerice.com donates 10 grains of rice to the United Nations World Program, for every word you get right in a vocabulary guessing game.

Needless to say, this is a vice that particularly appeals to me - all the more so because it's for a good cause. Have a go, see how far you get; I seem to bottom out at around 46, 47. After that, I seem to get as many wrong as right, and so it grinds to a halt. Good fun!

Chorizo and feta salad

2007-11-18T20:43:00.000+11:00

This is a good salad. I was a little worried that some of the flavours wouldn't mesh, but my instincts were right. This was delicious; a real melange of textures and flavours, smooth and crunchy mixing so well with salty and mild. The only thing I would change is to add one more cucumber. That's the perils of freestyling sometimes: ratios can be hard to guess.

A wedge of Bulgarian feta.
One Chorizo sausage
Some mesclun salad mix
some fresh or frozen peas
a cucumber
eight or so small truss tomatoes
some dry white, ciabatta style bread
a lemon
olive oil
vinegar
salt and pepper

Pre-heat the oven to 200' celsius. Dice the Chorizo finely, put it in a large pot/pan and put it on a low heat, stirring occasionally - not too much, we want some caramelisation.

Cube the bread, pop it on a tray, and put it in the oven.

Peel the cucumber's skin, and then peel the rest of it into ribbons. Add it into a bowl with the mesclun, and the peas (thawed/cooked if they're frozen, and there is nothing wrong with frozen peas, don't let anyone tell you otherwise).

Cut the feta roughly into cubes. Treat it rough, we want some crumbling action here. Add that to your big salad bowl.

By now the Chorizo should be hissing like a cut snake, and your kitchen filling up with a delicious smoky aroma. The bottom of the pan will have a disturbingly large amount of fat in it. Take the bread/croutons out of the oven, chuck them in the pan, and crank the heat up high. Stir it, stir it like you just don't care! (this is smoky, so unless you have a range hood, watch out!)

The croutons will soak up the fat, and become even crunchier. Once you're happy with their delicious toastiness, turn the heat off.

Slice the truss tomatoes into wedges, sprinkle with salt and pepper, drizzle with balsamic or red wine vinegar, and pop em into the oven for 10-15 minutes.

Whilst that's semi-baking, combine the lemon juice and olive oil, salt and pepper, and shake it to make a light vinaigrette.

Take your tomatoes out, toss the salad with the chorizo and crouton mix, and the lay the tomatoes on top. Drizzle with the dressing (not too much! There's plenty of acidic things in this dish already). And you're done. Yum, a great, light summer meal.

Total Recall

2007-11-18T18:32:00.001+11:00

I read an interesting article at National Geographic (one of the most excellent Magazine websites, by the way) about memory.

In some ways, however, I find our current ideas about memory more interesting than any one article. I think memory is a growing preoccupation with western society in particular. This is tied intimately to the growth of the internet, I believe, which - as an expression of memory and thought - is virtually unparalleled, and growing exponentially.

Articles and studies are popping up every where on the net, and to be sure it's an attractive subject. With so much knowledge swirling about in the world, I'm sure everybody has fantasised about retaining every mote we come across, I certainly have.

But I think the prospect of total recall is a somewhat disturbing one, also; promising a definitive world where none exists. Like a movie, memories - however perfect - do not show you what is happening off the screen, in our minds. A deep focus can be just as ambiguous as a shallow one, and to pretend otherwise is an exercise in futile positivism.

More...

The article talks about AJ, a person whom I've read about before, who apparently remembers virtually everything that's ever happened to her. Scientists are at a loss to explain why this is so; AJ's neural structures are not so different from ours, according to the research.

AJ's differences, however, seem to be more in her method than her madness, so to speak:

To supplement the memories in her mind, AJ also stores a trove of external memories. In addition to the detailed diary she's kept since childhood, she has a library of close to a thousand videotapes copied off TV, a trunk full of radio recordings, and a "research library" consisting of 50 notebooks filled with facts she's found on the Internet that relate to events in her memory. "I just want to keep it all," she says.

Preserving her past has become the central compulsion of AJ's life. "When I'm blow-drying my hair in the morning, I'll think of whatever day it is. And to pass the time, I'll just run through that day in my head over the last 20-something years—like flipping through a Rolodex." AJ traces the origins of her unusual memory to a move from New Jersey to California that her family made when she was just eight years old. Life in New Jersey had been comfortable and familiar, and California was foreign and strange. It was the first time she understood that growing up and moving on necessarily meant forgetting and leaving behind. "Because I hate change so much, after that it was like I wanted to be able to capture everything. Because I know, eventually, nothing will ever be the same," she says.

What a sad, sisyphean, picture that seems to me: An endless struggle to retain something forever sliding away, like trying to hold water in your hands or run up a loose sandhill.

From this description, it doesn't sound to me like AJ remembers everything at all; indeed, it sounds more like she's trying to memorise everything. As a professor of psychology points out in the article: perhaps AJ isn't so different at all: everyone remembers what's important to them.

And there's the rub: we remember what's important. It might be books we've read, people we've met, events, or scents. Whatever. But this, I think, is largely self-fulfilling. If we didn't forget, if we remembered everything, how would we know what is important?

As humans, I think we have developed the mental pattern of accepting our memories as important, or at least relevant. If, suddenly, our minds were flooded with not just the relevant or meaningful, but also the meaningless - the babel of society - how would we separate the two? Everything would become important, and, and like poor AJ, we would be left forever scrambling after the tiniest memory - the breakfast we had in 1997, number of fireworks in the 1986 Maleny Show.

As attractive as that idea may seem in abstract, from a more utilitarian point of view, what good are those memories? How do they serve us - not only on a day-to-day basis - but as people, as cultures?

I think forgetting is an essential element to change. If we never forgot - if everything stayed the same in our heads, why would we let go? Open ourselves to new possibilities when the old are still so tangible to us?

I suspect a total recall would give us a sense of false confidence. If we could remember everything, we could be so wise, so knowledgeable. But wise and knowledgeable people have made many terrible mistakes, as they should, because not everything is knowable, and our fallible memories serve as a potent reminder of that.

Paradoxically, a perfect memory devalues knowledge. It implies no need to learn, because everything would be simply known. Much like Neo in The Matrix, we could just upload the skills we needed. Effectively, what we do with the internet every day. But this of course isn't real learning. Another article I read highlights this difference:

Real learning modifies the human being who undergoes it. We change; we grow; we see reality differently. If we don’t, then we have not, in fact, learnt: we have merely skimmed the surface of a learning subject. Learning is participatory, which is why in any text-based subject, reading is usually more educative than watching a DVD. The more passive the student can be, the more the information simply passes over the mind, rather than entering it

A perfect memory would be the ultimate form of passive learning. And we would all become experts, shovelling facts away without questioning them, or ourselves.

No thanks. I'll stick with my finite memory, and use the internet and my filofax to fill the gaps in between. I'm sure, if it's important, it'll come to me.

Picture above is a palimpsest; a piece of writing on top of another.

Booking it

2007-11-15T22:17:00.000+11:00

I was recommended the most _amazing_ website recently, it's called The Book Depository.

Books are one of the few things that I'm deeply, truly and helplessly materialistic about, and this website is like a dream come true - a beautiful, nerdy dream!

So what's so special about the Book Depository then? Well, think Amazon, with one important difference: Free postage. Yup, free. Even to Australia.

Let me give you a minute to allow that to sink in.

Most people don't know, but in Australia, we really get stiffed for book prices. Paperbacks, particularly, are considerably cheaper overseas. This wouldn't bother me so much (actually, I lie; it would. Thirty five bucks for a paperback is ridiculous), if the author was seeing any of this money - but they get sweet FA, and royalities have in no way increased with rocketing prices.

So, the Book Depository, without the ball and chain of postage, is a cornucopia of very cheap books indeed, and as my order arrived this week, I can assure you it's pretty fast and exactly what it says it is.

Even better, the Managing Editor has a blog, and it's good one, too. Short but sweet. His latest post is about how impoverished novel writing is. This is another thing that I don't think people are aware of. In Australia for example, a bestseller is considered circa 20 000 copies. Provided your publishers have played their guessing games right, selling 6000 books will result in an invitation to write another.

6000 copies in Australia. With the writer getting somewhere between 60 cents and 2 dollars a copy. So between $3500 and $9000 - pre-tax - per book. And you can take 5-10% of that off for an agent, which you won't get published without. . It's a mug's game, if you're in it for a living, and never think otherwise. Even a national bestseller will get you under $50 000, which is why getting published in the states is such a big deal for Aussie writers.

Mapping the world

2007-11-14T21:44:00.000+11:00

I came across a nifty little website today; it's called world mapper, and it reshapes the world according to different criteria. Can you guess what the one above is?
Non-communicable diseases.

Of course, the only thing that skews the perspective somewhat is the population density, which of course makes places like Australia and Russia appear really tiny, except, of course in this map, the one based on alcohol consumption (see also what it does to the predominantly muslim parts of the world).

You can always look at the control map, to get a simple population density projection, with which to compare the others to.

Rising Life expectancy since 1972 is a particularly disheartening map when you look at what happens to southern Africa, as is the affordable drugs map (though it is interesting to see the contrast between developing nations on this criteria).

Films watched and books published show Australia performing well per capita, whilst daily newspapers shows Japan and India as the place to be.

Predictably, the United States looms larger than it should on virtually every map. There is one interesting projection, however, the closest to the true dimensions most countries should have. Prisoners, believe it or not (though the States are also overweight in this regard).

I could go on for days, but you can check the index out here, there are 366 maps. Fascinating, though I would say that worldmapper can makes us forget the sheer numbers in some countries. India may not publish many books per capita, for example, but it has a gigantic - and thriving - publishing industry.

Maps are interesting things, whilst these highlight some predictable ideas, there are others where the reality of the space is very different from the maps we carry around in our heads. Now I know how my Dad feels every day...

Canon Fodder

2007-11-13T20:41:00.000+11:00

I'm reading a book that I'm not particularly interested in at the moment, but sometimes an uninteresting book can lead to interesting thoughts.

The book is The Metropolitan Critic, by Clive James; a book of his early criticism. One of the reasons I'm finding it less enjoyable than I expected is that James presupposes a level of familiarity with the people and books he writes about.

I can't claim that level of familiarity in 90% of the cases - indeed, I think it's an achievement that I recognise the names. Croce isn't a dude you come across often without an English Major (which I don't have), and even with one, people like Edmund Wilson are encountered only on the periphery (nowadays, I should add).

I think James does this - wades into his reviews with little textual context because he very much believes in the idea of a canon - that hypothetical collection of books we should all know, or at least know of throughly. I don't know, but I suspect this view was somewhat rustic even in the seventies - now, I think it's almost totally defunct.

Is this a bad thing, or a good thing I wonder?

More...

Part of me rebels against the idea of a canon - as much from practicality as principle. The bewildering array of books in every genre, in every age, makes the notion of a broad canon a hopeless illusion, even in those mighty categories of literature, etc.

It's possible in the nineteenth century - maybe, but in the twentieth, time has not edited the range of worthy or interesting literature down to anything approaching manageable yet. One man's Beckett is another's Mansfield, is another's Buchner, is another's Colette, etc.

In principle, I don't like this kind of writing, or thinking, overmuch. Criticism should be about opening people's minds to new ways of thinking about text - and by default the world in which they live - rather than denying them, or locking access to those thoughts away because they don't have the knowledge.

If I had carried out such thinking in my own criticism, 90% of my writing would be babble.

As a reader, however, I can't help responding to the idea of a canon. Where this most resonates with me is in the field of fantasy writing. I actively try to read what could be considered the canon of fantasy writing, the real classics, from the 19th century, moving on right throughout the twentieth. It gives me a wonderful sense of the development of the genre; its antecedents and weird offshoots.

Moreover, when I look at the mountainous piles of shit - trembling forests were reduced to this! - that passes for fantasy in your average bookstore fantasy section, I think that if more people had a sense of where the genre truly lived, had a sense of its masters, they would not be so eager to pick up David Eddings, or proclaim Terry Goodkind a genius.

My investment (literal and figurative) in the fantasy canon has exposed me not only to a wealth of books I would never otherwise have read, but also renewed my flagging faith in the genre, and educated me in its myriad uses and explications.

So perhaps, as readers, a little bit of auto-didactism goes a long way, however we should never presume that as writers. In doing so, I think we lock out the very people most likely to read more. It also serves to alienate readers; texts of all stripes are after all a reflection of the world in which we live; if you can't make that connection clear - and therefore valid whether someone has read the text or not - then I think that your writing has failed as real criticism.

So I believe you can have the best of both worlds. Accepting canons as an unattainable goal, we can encourage people to make new entries in their own canons, or to ponder at least the ideas that hide in the texts they haven't read: they may not know the books, but they recognise the ideas.

The picture is a canon table from the Book of Kells, beautiful isn't it? If you want your own canon, a good place to start is here.

Raymond Chandler

2007-11-11T21:19:00.000+11:00

I had a nice weekend, went to Canberra and caught up with two of my great friends. Sadly, after finishing two weeks of mushy pap (I just had my wisdom teeth out), my stomach started going back to its usual terribleness under the onslaught of normal food and limited amounts of alcohol. Goddamn colitis. I have a choice of nice food and bad stomach, or no flavour and the kind of stomach I used to take for granted. It's a tough one.

But I digress. There's a great article in the LA Times about a new book on Raymond Chandler. It's got a lovely tone to it.

Chandler is so much a part of the furniture that we tend to forget how great he is. The plots of "The Big Sleep," "Farewell, My Lovely" and "The High Window" are swift and workably complex, but they didn't bring much that was new to the crime story, even in their own time. He despised the lazy arrogance of wealth and power but lacked the rigor with which Dashiell Hammett viewed social and political corruption.

No, Chandler was a romantic, more like F. Scott Fitzgerald than the worldly Hammett, and through the character of Marlowe he became a haunting poet of place, this place, Los Angeles, whose split personality of light and dark mirrored Chandler's own. He caught the glaring sun, the glittering swimming pools, the cigar-stinking lobbies of seedy hotels, the improbable mansions, the dismal apartment buildings, the sound of tires on asphalt and gravel, the sparkling air of the city after rain and how the fog smells at the beach at night.

I agree wholeheartedly with that assessment. Chandler is one of my favourite writers, and I think highly underrated. His prose has a snap to it; leaner than a wolfhound and yet still incredibly evocative. The character of Phillip Marlowe - sadly copied and parodied so much that we forget the original - is a three-dimsenional, tragic figure in many ways: a good man, disgusted by the world he sees yet unable to escape it, or himself.

In my opinion, Chandler has been a big influence on American writing - easily as much as any Faulkner or Hemingway. If you haven't, pick up a copy of The Big Sleep. It's easy to like.

Bread Porn

2007-11-08T22:16:00.000+11:00

Photo taken by Scott Lynch @ The Fresh Loaf

Oh. My. God. I have just stumbled across the most amazing website; The Fresh Loaf.

Anyone who knows me is aware that baking is not a big part of my cooking personality. I can do it, sure, but not well. Sweetgoods are my particular weakness.

I am, however, partial to a bit of savoury baking. Shortcrust pastry is so easy it's almost a crime not to make it yourself (almost as much a crime as frigging around, making puff pastry is). And I'm justifiably proud of my pizzas.

I've dabbled with breadmaking. People say it's complicated, but it's not really. Bread seems more resilient than sweet pastries; it will cheerfully put up with variables and experimentation that classical baking would collapse (sometimes all too literally) under.

It is time-consuming, though. And sometimes hard-work. Baking evangelists tend to complain about the quality of store-bought bread, but in my opinion you can get some pretty good loaves out there if you're prepared to pay for it.

That said, having a look at the _amazing_ pictures on The Fresh Loaf, and I'm beginning to think it might be time to take up breadmaking once more. Summer - at least in southern climes - is a good time of year to start baking; the climate will never be more encouraging to your yeast. I think trying to get a loaf to rise in the dead of winter in Canberra, in a house with no heating, is an exercise in nihilism I'll not easily forget.

You can't put it down.

2007-11-07T22:04:00.000+11:00

Sigh. I'm moving all too quickly through my book, and the ending is a horizon that - after many years and other books - is finally beginning to move closer, and it makes me sad.

There are few books I've read, where I reached the point where I would have been happy to read the same story forever - never picking up another book, simply absorbing the characters, the situations, and the quality writing.

I think, as you get older, that feeling becomes rare because every new, unusual book you read opens up a new vista of oft-times irreplaceable experience. So it's very special to me now, to have this feeling, and also know that these characters I started reading about as a what? Eighteen year old? Seventeen year old? will finally get their peace in one form or another.

Robin Hobb is a superb writer. People often deride me for reading fantasy - and make no mistake - it really pisses me off. These people are almost always not particularly well or widely-read, certainly not compared to me, and their snootiness regarding genre grates on me. Excellent writing works irrespective of genre.

Her books though ostensibly fantasy are really all about relationships, and the compromises people make between what they believe is right and what they feel. These particular books are all about the toll that the state can take on the individual. They're not overtly happy stories; the state, after all, can take a pretty heavy toll on the individual, and the individual's needs.

I will miss these people once I finish reading about them. It makes me chuckle: recently I read an article about humans falling in love with robots. People commenting seemed bemused; how can we possibly fall in love with a robot? I wonder, how could we not? The emotional connections I have felt with people on a page have been equal to the majority of feelings I've had in real life, and these insubstantial mind-ghosts - some diaphanous hybrid of words, my inklings, and the thoughts of another - are far less immediate and demanding in their presence than a corporeal robot or some such.

Nonetheless, they are demanding enough to me: I'm off to bed to read.

Torture

2007-11-06T20:49:00.000+11:00

Read this fantastic post at the Small Wars Journal about water-boarding. It's a smashing post, and - though I doubt anyone who might read this needs a reminder - serves to highlight what exactly it is people are defending when they try to make waterboarding legal. This guy has done it, had it done to him, and seen it dozens of times. Sobering stuff.

We live at a time where Americans, completely uninformed by an incurious media and enthralled by vengeance-based fantasy television shows like “24”, are actually cheering and encouraging such torture as justifiable revenge for the September 11 attacks. Having been a rescuer in one of those incidents and personally affected by both attacks, I am bewildered at how casually we have thrown off the mantle of world-leader in justice and honor. Who we have become? Because at this juncture, after Abu Ghraieb and other undignified exposed incidents of murder and torture, we appear to have become no better than our opponents.

I found it interesting that, for all his experience, the poster doesn't get very deeply into the details of what waterboarding feels like. But then I thought, why would he? How many words can you summon to describe slowly drowning, a process that can - in itself - literally drive someone mad.

Military wonks are an interesting breed. I always enjoy reading real strategy/military posts/blogs, because they are almost inevitably well-informed and thought-out. I myself studied strategy at uni - alas in my second last semester - and it was one of the most fascinating units I did. Unfortunately all did was serve to make me aware of how completely ignorant I am on the topic - one of the most widely researched and published of all the many topics I studied at uni.

Flying too close to the sun

2007-11-05T21:45:00.000+11:00

Well bugger me. Something that I've always thought was an urban legend turns out to be mainly true. Huh.

When I was a kid, I was part of the genesis of that great campaign, Slip Slop Slap. Part of said campaign was the fact that "UV rays are just as bad on an overcast day".

Now, even as a kid I thought this was a crock of shit. How could they be worse on a cloudy day? Plus, I've been out on tonnes of cloudy days with nary a burn to show for it.

Well, I was right in the sense that an outright clouded day certainly doesn't have worse or equal rays, but on a cloudy day UV rays can indeed be worse. A lot worse.

I'm surprised and chastened in equal measure.

PS No posts about the election. I have nothing to say at this point; I said it all last year. The wretched cant of electioneering has pretty much made me switch off until election night, unless something amazing happens. It's all so boring and predictable.

Not that I don't appreciate Howard's increasingly desperate scrambling, I do, just in abstract.
I guess I've just proven the point: I got more burned (out) on overcast day.

Androids dreaming of electric sheep

2007-11-04T21:10:00.000+11:00

It's rare for me to find a place on the internet that is immediately evocative and consistent in the way a novel can be, for example. It's not a criticism of websites, per se. I think it's the nature of the medium, to be honest.

We tend to be relatively upfront about ourselves on the internet, and as Whitman said, we contain multitudes. I think these tend to wend their ways onto and into the web pages we create.

All the more interesting then, is BluebellFM, the home of two robots, idly speculating and sending their small messages out into the world.

I'm not sure I like it, exactly, but I like how it made me feel. These quiet, eldritch corners of the internet are so different from the mean, it's like opening the bathroom door and looking out onto a jungle suddenly.

The mise-en-scene of BluebellFM is beautiful, those drawings are wonderful, and everything fits together quite perfectly.

Right time, right place

2007-11-04T19:44:00.000+11:00

This enterprising blogger has attracted the attention of the mighty Metafilter, only four posts into her/his first blog.

Based on their excellent latest post, about photographs taken at just the right moment, I can only surmise futher linkage for them.

Return

2007-11-02T19:43:00.000+11:00

It's raining, what a perfect end to the week. My doors are open, and I can hear the rain-wet hissing of tyres as people hurry about on the cusp of their weekend. I'm safely ensconced on my lounge, sipping a german beer the colour of creamed honey and breathing in the moist night air.

I have started a new job; it's busy, organised, and you can imagine my unbridled delight at not having to work with people who think Muslims are "a dirty race" - or at least know better than to say such things in general conversation.

It's also fabulously well-paid, and by my standards holds quite a lot of responsibilty. Paradoxically, I keep having to remind myself that it doesn't actually matter. It's easy to forget that sometimes; people are so eager to buy into the significance of their jobs, in my case the spin we actually manufacture.

But we're not doctors, saving lives - we're not even teachers, educating minds. We're just making money - a vital goal, in that someone has to do it, but not uniquely special.

Nonetheless I'm very happy. I worried, when I was a writer, that turning to the private sector - or even getting a 'regular' job - would represent a selling out, a horrible ethical compromise. Back then, I was already in a position where my ethics were subject to a sustained and potent attack, and succumbing. I couldn't imagine what privations a regular job would force upon me.

Ironically, I have never felt anywhere near that pressure since. A private sector job is what it says it is. A form of prostitution, I suppose, where what the client wants is up front, and there's no pretension that it's anything but a financial transaction. You're not expected to fall in love.

It's quite liberating compared to writing, where I was most usually expected to carry out the same functions, but pretend it was love, or truth or something. Sometimes it was, but usually it wasn't. Compared to that pressure, the pressure of constantly faking it, a regular job seems quite easy-going. It's quite pleasant.

But my favourite thing about my new job - of many things I like - is not the job itself, nor even that I get to work in the same building as my girlfriend (which is quite lovely I have to admit). My favourite thing is the forty minute commute. I am reading so much right now. It's heaven.

Rainy Day, The
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The day is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
The vine still clings to the moldering wall,
But at every gust the dead leaves fall,
And the day is dark and dreary.

My life is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
My thoughts still cling to the moldering Past,
But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast
And the days are dark and dreary.

Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.

I wish every day was like this. I adore rain.

Changing Minds

2007-07-23T22:06:00.000+10:00

Ahhhh. I had a nice weekend. It was my mum's 60th birthday, and we all had a great time up in Tin Can Bay, mum's newest home, and the fetching locale for her twilight years (snigger.... Don't hit me mum! Or cut me out of the will....double snigger).

Anyways, though our family is not without its interest in politics, I've certainly developed a reputation as the political one. With my immediate family, this is not worth mentioning; they're regularly subjected to my rants, conjectures, and outpouring of a medley of emotions. With other members of the family, however, that I don't see so often, I often find myself bailed up to explain my opinion on one thing or another at the largest gatherings.

Needless to say, this can be a somewhat fraught exercise. I am from Queensland, after all, and my somewhat bolshie principles are not the median up there. Also, the last thing I want to do is either a) tell someone what to think. In my opinion, rarely a useful activity or b) get into an argument with a relative, where - inevitably - we reach the point where someone says something I find inexcusable, and then it's just awkward all round.

But shutting up has never been a forte of mine, so I carefully, sincerely I hope, wade into these conversations. I felt good this weekend because - for the first time that I'm aware of at least - I changed someone's mind.

The conversation was revolving around senate majorities. As someone who's worked for the Democrats, obviously I hate senate majorities. My family member on the other hand, thought they were great.

I find this fairly common opinion - not when it comes to senate majorities, but politics in general. People are loathe to give the other side(s) a say in things. Watching the antics of the Liberal Party, I can fully understand these impulses, especially in particular cases when the other side is advocating something that is truly wrong, stupid, immoral etc.

And this is the argument I usually hear for it. And I think it's a compelling one. However (and this is effectively what I said to my relative), it's easy sometimes to forget we live in a democracy, and at any given moment, in any particular government, there will be roughly 49% of people - a huge number of people - who did not vote for whichever party happens to govern.

However much we may disagree with them, or think they're stupid, immoral or incompetent, we don't live in a society where stupidity prevents you from voting (unless you're really stupid). This other sides - left, right, or in the fourth dimension - deserve representation as much as the people who vote for the governing party.

When an MP is elected, their charge is not to represent only the people who voted for them, it is to represent the 42 000 or so people in their electorate, regardless of which way their vote went. This means decisions, by necessity, should be conservative and heavily considered.

Compromise is so often seen as bad thing in politics. People view it as selling out, betrayal, immoral. But I think compromise is a good thing in general. Compromise should happen in a democracy because there will never be consensus. This doesn't mean you have to pander to every batshit crazy idea that flies into the room, but you have to acknowledge that the people you represent have diverse and often conflicting views about things.

Caught in the hurly burly and lowest common denominator of a parliament floor - or worse, a backroom - it's easy to forget this, I think. And also - less sensationally - when there are decisions that have no easy answers, or even any good ones.

I feel like principles can sometimes be a luxury in politics. Righteous indignation feels fantastic, but it rarely improves anyone's life. In the context of policy formulation it is superfluous, and sometimes little more than an effort to shy away from getting blood on one's hands; and we all know what happens when good people stand by and do nothing (except write editorials).

I feel like salvation in this context comes through policy. When examined, I think most people would be suprised by how much consensus there is between parties when it comes to specific policies. Mostly, unbelievably, it is consensus. When there is an obvious way of doing things for the better, people can recognise it, at least until politics gets in the way.

In this respect, sometimes I really do think policy and politics are incompatible. The temptation to score points is too strong. This is why the increasing politicisation of the public service saddens me. The old "frank and fearless" modus operandi is increasingly being replaced by "deference and denial". It does no one any good, in the long run.

You end up with stupid policy, that doesn't meet its stated goals, is usually hideously expensive and frequently engenders decades of cock ups afterwards. Stupid policy is different from policy you disagree with in this respect I think.

Well, anyway, I said most of that, and my relative thought about it for a while, and then said, "You know, you've changed my mind about that. I don't think a majority is a good idea any more. I'm not going to vote Liberal in the senate."

I was kind of surprised, to be honest. People - myself most definitely included - rarely change their opinions once they've formed one, rarely make a compromise - in their heads - between the two or more viewpoints on offer. It's a hard thing to do, especially when you're not sure whether it's the right thing to do or not.

Surprised, and happy. I felt like I made one real difference to someone's vote, and if that's as far as my political achievements ever extend, I will be quite satisfied.

Boom crash

2007-07-18T19:36:00.000+10:00

I'm back. Long time no see, I will try to be a little more regular now; some of the things keeping me busy have settled down.

I got hit by a car yesterday. This is the second time in five years through no fault of my own that this has happened.

Two times in five years may not seem like a lot, but given that my first 21 were car accident-free, this seems kind of high to me. I don't know whether to be grateful I only have cuts, scrapes and bruises, or furious that two drivers have had so little regard to my life as to nearly kill me, twice, in five years.

One thing I am furious about is that last night's culprit had the chutzpah to insist the little man was red. He certainly was by time I picked myself up from the ground, gingerly patting myself down like airport security to see what hurt where, and more importantly: how much.

I was, not surprisingly, kind of out of it, and despite the helpful dude in another car who got out to help me, saying "No, I'm pretty sure the man was green." I wasn't sure, and accepted the driver's vociferous protest at face value, especially since nothing seemed to be broken except half my phone.

However I went back to the lights today, and checked the progression: no doubt about it, the little man was green when this idiot, in his haste to get home so he could watch the news, or The Simpsons, or just check the mail, put his foot on the accelerator, ignoring the road rules, and drove straight into me.

In itself, bad enough, but to lie? Sheesh. What a prick. I dunno, maybe he did think it was, he obviously wasn't paying much attention.

It scared me as a regular cyclist, and it's starting to scare me as a pedestrian, how blithely people accept their power behind the wheel. I regularly, on my walk home from work, see drivers doing silly things, seemingly oblivious to the destructive force of a one tonne vehicle travelling quickly.

I guess it's to be expected, really. Having the attitude of a potential killer behind the wheel doesn't encourage calm, steady driving. It certainly doesn't make it a pleasurable experience, if my memories of learning to drive are anything to go by.

Nonetheless. I find it disturbing the double standard our society has with driving. People can be drunk, speeding, reckless, cause accidents, and maybe not lose their license, certainly not permanently. The way the courts act, you would think having a car is somehow a) a "my dead hands" god-given right or b) necessary somehow to live.

Whilst a car may be vital in country areas, where I grew up and my sister lives. In a city they are totally unnecessary. Convenient, to be sure, but unnecessary. I'm living proof of that, no thanks to car owners, however.

I wish we took driving infractions a little more seriously. These people are potential killers, and I find nothing untoward about the idea of people being banned from driving, for life. We don't let child sex abusers ever work with children once convicted, for example. And driving re-offenders, whilst I believe not as high, are still really high. People don't seem to learn.

I will be interested to see how I go in Saigon at the end of the year in this regard. Crossing the road there is portrayed as an act of blind faith. Never high, my faith is now very low, mashed into the bitumen with the parts of my mobile phone. Destroyed by someone's refusal to take their responsibility seriously.

Security

2007-05-22T20:53:00.000+10:00

I read this story in the paper yesterday, and it made me a little sad. To allude to my previous post: hope losing its feathers.

Treasurer Peter Costello's regular morning jog up the roof of Parliament House is a breach of parliamentary security, a Senate estimates committee has heard.

Mr Costello took up jogging late last year and ends his Canberra outings by running up the grassy slope to the flagpole at the top of Parliament House.

He told reporters that he liked to jog a lap of the parliament and finish by racing to the grassy roof, where he would "clasp my hands together like Rocky Balboa".

To reach the summit, Mr Costello would have to jump over a low security wall designed to stop vehicles from being driven on to the roof.

Department of Parliamentary Services head Hilary Penfold told the Senate finance and public administration committee that pedestrians were not supposed to access the roof.

I remember, quite clearly, when anyone was allowed onto the roof of Parliament House.

There are, depending on you who talk to, many things to love about Canberra, or very few. But something everyone tends to agree on is Parliament House. Compared to the White House, or The Houses of Parliament, there is really is something to Parliament House, its green sward gently rising over Canberra, an omnipresent reminder of why we are there.

The House itself, both inside and out, is beautiful. Courtyards are tucked away; tiny gardens that M.Ps and their staff can gaze wistfully at during the day. Precious gifts from other governments perch serenely on pedestals throughout the House. Jade statues, or ugly paintings, or macabre abstract sculptures harking back to a national folklore we can never remember; a struggle for freedom or tale of courage from somewhere far away.

It doesn't take a genius to pick up the metaphorical meaning of Capital Hill. The idea of a parliament that is always under the people is a powerful one. Whether holding them up, or wholly subservient to them.

Also, I think it bespeaks some of the better attitudes Australians can exhibit: an openess to anyone, a blindness to class, or other older, more entrenched systems people leave behind when they come here. A connection to the land that highlights its importance in our lives.

I remember riding my bike over parliament house. Rolling down the hill on crisp autumn afternoons. I've spent more than one Christmas dodging kids and dropped hotdogs as people gaze down at the giant tree and stage full of carolers. Name me one other country that hosts free, open Christmas carols on - or in - its house of government.

And that didn't change after September 11, at least not straight away. No, it took a couple of years before the government realised there was political mileage to be had in fears of a non-existent attack.

The sward was then defaced by huge, water-filled barricades. Initially it was enough to stop imaginary vans driving up and detonating. Of course, it would have been easier, cheaper, and saved a lot more lives just not to go to Iraq in the first place, but you know, fighting evil, etc. etc.

You could squeeze past the barricades at either end. There was a gap there so, regrettable as it was that Parliament House was now ring-barked - a white scar circling the base - you could at least still walk to the top from the bottom. And if you wanted to enter the building, there was still a security entrance on the summit, like there always had been.

But then that wasn't deemed safe enough, either. Invisible bombers might get out of their invisible vans, climb the hill, and blow themselves up - with enough explosive force to rip through the many layers that protects politicians from people.

So now no one is allowed up to the top. Not unless they've come through the front door, anyway. I can't help reflecting on this change - though minor - with some sadness. The days of family picnics and bike rides over Parliament House gone for all time, it seems.

It;s also a surprise to me, that our government - ever-vigilant to the importance of spin - would so willingly subvert the metaphor of the hill. What was once free, open to all, is now closed off, accessible only to certain people at certain times, and somehow in grave peril. Our freedom has been destroyed in order to save it.

In some ways, the barriers dug into the hill are worse than never having a hill in the first place. The luscious, chequered grass an almost edenic ideal; now banned, confined to past. A constant reminder of what we traded away. Weird. Then again, I guess they couldn't pave over it.

Still, it makes me sad. Of course Peter Costello should be allowed to run to the top of the hill and wave his arms like Rocky. Everyone should be: it's a great feeling, to be standing on top of Australia.

Rip off

2007-05-20T21:20:00.000+10:00

Wow, I just read an achingly beautiful essay by Erik Campbell (linked to from Arts and Letters Daily).

The essay itself concerns plagiarism, but I'll just paste the second paragraph, which - a heh - doesn't have much to do with plagiarism.

I recall the day when I finally understood one of Nietzsche’s statements which had previously baffled me, one which Harold Bloom is fond of quoting. To wit: “There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.” What happened was, I was talking one evening to a co-worker about the war in Iraq and, after explaining why I think we should get out of there fast, he suggested the following: “We should just nuke the whole goddamn country. What’s Iraq? Desert. We nuke the whole goddamn country and turn the desert to glass. Then our troops just have to look down and find the oil. Easy. It’s all about easy extraction.” Then he laughed and slapped my back in solidarity. That laugh, I thought, is the sound of hope losing its feathers.

I really liked this piece; it's one of the best essays I've read all year. It's very long, but I highly recommend it.

Campbell is essentially talking about how we are all plagiarists - we can't help regurgitated the many things we read, watch and share. He tells an hilarious story about the time he unwittingly plagiarised, and not "soft" copy, either, but the hard stuff: a whole stanza from a poet he loves.

I think this is an issue that anybody with a regular creative output has to face. It also manifests in a fear of being derivative - though I will say that fiction is more of a concern than non-fiction.

More...

I don't think I've ever plagiarised anyone - wittingly or unwittingly - since I was a teenager. I'm not the close reader Mr Campbell is, so - much as I love some writers and their writing - I doubt their work has etched itself in my memory like that.

As for being derivative; I don't think it's a crime. In fact, I'd go further, and say that I actually like reading derivative stuff, so long as it's done well. Writers rarely want to copy Wilbur Smith (well, I refuse to believe they do it for any other reason than desperation for cash), they generally want to copy great writers; and if they're half as good as the writers they're aping, that's good enough for me.

Also, I believe that personality will out in the end, tucked into untended corners of paragraphs and throwaway sentences that the writer won't even remember - or at least, that's how it's always seemed to me.

I used to worry about this a lot when I was a younger writer - partly because I was reading a lot of young writers' work, either fiction or non-fiction, that struck me as so derivative as to verge on real plagiarism. Nowadays, I just don't give a shit. The artifacts in my writing that are relics from the texts I've read, most notably my almost-obsession with em-dashes and semicolons (Victorian ghost stories), have become parts of my writing that I love the most. Occasionally I'll be a little more conscious in my adaptation, but I still end up writing something that feels different, at least to me.

I think the real trick is in reading the original properly. If I had a dollar for everything nerd's stories I read, about a musclebound nerd who gets all the laydeez, etc. I'd probably be able to buy Random House.

But is that really what separates the best from the worse? I've read books about those things that were fantastic; and many that were shit. I think people often try to copy their emotional reactions to what they read, rather than the prose itself. But it's like trying to make a copy of a pie using only a picture: you get the pastry absolutely right, but you miss all the good stuff inside.

I guess it's similar to all those "rules for writing" that different people have for different things. It's very attractive to think there's a recipe for success - in writing as in life - but for years I've only had one rule: Whatever works. If it works, use it, if not then begone. And obviously, Fitzgerald, Dick, Tyler, etc. They work. So we shouldn't be too hasty in tossing them aside, as readers obviously, but also as writers. That's where the good stuff is, in my opinion.

Choko...

2007-05-18T19:41:00.000+10:00

On mother's day, Lynn's mum gave me some chokos. It made me laugh a little, I have to confess. Where I grew up (Maleny), chokos were so plentiful - and considered so horrible - that people would leave boxes of them beside the road, free to a good home.

Nonetheless, these little guys make a regular appearance in Vietnamese cuisine, so I decided to adopt a traditional Vietnamese dish that you probably won't have had; it's rarely on the menu in restaurants, and isn't full of flavours that we typically associate with Vietnamese food.

Vietnamese spicy choko.

two or three free range chicken thigh fillets, cubed
vegetable oil
a leek, believe it or not, but any type of onion-y thing would work
three birds' eye chillis, or six/seven if you like it hot like me!
a few pinches of good vegetable stock powder (i.e. Vegeta [quite salty] or Massel) or salt
some garlic cloves - at least three
two chokos, cut into strips.
a can of chopped tomatoes
some bok choy, or Asian greens.

Heat the oil in a medium high wok, add the leek and stir fry for two minutes. After that, throw in the chicken, stock, garlic and chillis. Stir fry for another three minutes.

Add the chokos. One thing with chokos: the skin is edible, but it's noticeably tougher than the flesh, and not totally pleasant. I would recommend peeling, unless you're addicted to nutrition or something (pfft!).

Stir fry that for another two minutes or so, and then add the tomatoes, and maybe 70mls of water, depending on how juicy it is, and some stock/salt to taste, if necessary.

Put a lid on the wok, turn the heat to low, and let it simmer for around ten minutes. After that, crank the heat back to medium, add the bok choy, and stir it in. Serve it on rice, yum!

Provided you don't overcook the chokos, this is a really nice dish. When they retain some crunch, they're surprisingly tasty: infinitely superior to the buttery mush I remember eating as a kid. Also, Vietnamese tomato dishes are almost all delicious. A more traditional meal involves a pork meatball embedded in tomato halves, and the same sauce. It's fantastic, and one of Lynn's favourites.

Tigers!

2007-05-16T22:51:00.000+10:00

Wow, great photo set over at Pravda; tigers swimming. There's some great avatars just waiting to happen.

Addendum: On Lateline, Joe Hockey has just claimed Kevin Rudd has been getting a free ride from "compliant media". Man, the laughs just keep coming. In other news, Clowns have accused accountants of turning everything into a circus. I love Tony Jones.

Out for a duck

2007-05-16T22:35:00.000+10:00

Ahhhh, comedy gold. The instant this landed in my inbox, I knew I was gonna blog it.

Dear Patrick Garson,

The ABC rejects your assessment of Insiders.

The ABC believes that the situation in Zimbabwe warranted extended
commentary from the Prime Minister. The Budget was discussed, as were Australian Workplace Agreements.

Insiders panellists have been selected from publications across the
nation, with the aim of offering our audience a variety of opinions and
views. The aim of the panel discussion is to canvas a range of issues
and ideas, and to give our commentators the opportunity to challenge and debate each other. You are free to draw your own conclusions on how successful the program is at meeting these standards.

Yours sincerely,
Kate Edwards
Audience Liaison Officer
ABC News and Current Affairs

>Below is the result of your feedback form. It was submitted by
> () on Monday, May 14, 2007 at 15:02:33
>-----------------------------
------------------------------------------
>From: /insiders/contact.htm
>
>Subject: re: this week's episode
>
>Name: Patrick Garson
>
>Address:
>
>Email:
>
>Comment:

Hi,
I'm just writing to say that I'm going to be switching off Insiders; I feel the quality has been steadily sliding, even though I used to love it.

I couldn't believe Barry spent 10 minutes on Sunday asking John Howard about the cricket, when the budget came out in the same week. That's ridiculous. As if there weren't more important things to talk about? You don't need to be a genius to figure out that Insiders' viewers will be more interested in policy than in cricket.

I also feel the standard of commentary in general has decreased. I watch(ed) the show to be educated about policy and governance decisions I may not have much knowledge in.

Unfortunately the program seems to have devolved into a gossip circle for journalists, with a focus on the unknowable (the campaigning strategies of various parties), and the unknown (the mind of the average voter, which surely Paul Kelly et al would have little connection to these days).

When the polls or parties contradict what the guests have to say (as they both have often this year), there is little to no acknowledgement of it, and the guests continue to peddle the same shallow ideas (e.g. Kevin Rudd, and the phrase "honeymoon". They only people talking about that are the Insiders themselves.).

I am now left with Lateline and the odd episode of the 7:30 report for real interviews with politicians, and a nuanced, three-dimensional look at the policy of the day. Shame on you Insiders, you should be - and are capable of being - much better.

A few points:

"The Budget was discussed, as were Australian Workplace Agreements." Well, ye-es. The budget was discussed, but not because Barrie Cassidy actually asked about it - John Howard bought that one up off his on bat (boom tish).
"The situation in Zimbabwe". Hmmm, the interview wasn't really about the situation in Zimbabwe, though, was it? It was about the Australian cricket team touring there.
You'll see I'm not making this shit up. Read the interview yourself. Just under two thirds of it (62%) is about the cricket. That leaves 38% for the budget and AWAs, or 19% of the interview each.

Another way: 4 pages of 6 is about the cricket. The fucking cricket. Welcome to what passes for journalism today.
Sheesh, if this is the audience liaison officer, I'd hate to see the head-knocker!

But hey, at least the wrote back, eh? Shame the show is getting shittier and shittier though.

Bent Objects

2007-05-15T21:51:00.000+10:00

Bent Objects is the blog of an artist named Terry. He makes beautiful, whimsical pieces. This is one of my favourites, called Matches.

Bad Combination

2007-05-15T21:32:00.000+10:00

Jesus Christ, NATO is thinking of deploying troops to help oil companies.

Nato is considering deploying sea-borne rapid-reaction forces to help private oil firms such as BP, one of its senior officials has announced.

Jamie Shea, director of policy planning in the office of Nato's secretary-general, said the proposal may mean sending Nato forces to Africa, Asia and the Middle East to protect oil companies' facilities.

"In Nato, we are looking very actively at using our maritime resources," Shea told a conference in London on Monday. He said Nato wanted to "see how we can link up with oil companies".

Shea said he had so far discussed the issue with Royal Dutch Shell and BP, respectively the world's second- and third-largest Western oil companies by market value.

Woah. You really don't need to be a foreign policy expert to know that this is a tremendously shitty idea.

People in countries like Nigeria already feel that oil companies (Shell, in Nigeria, for example) are screwing them to the wall. Coupled with a kind of noveau imperialist Euro-American conglomerate doing body guard work, they are gonna feel so much worse.

I wonder if this is mainly politics for NATO, mainly revenue-raising (I'm sure they hate watching Blackwater take all the dosh), or a combination of the two. It also raises a whole heap of questions as to what ethical framework, exactly, NATO troops will be operating under.

One of the reasons why Blackwater, et al are so popular is because they can do what they like, when they like it pretty much, with little accountability, unlike the UN, for example (although, with some of the reports coming out of East Timor, they aren't looking so hot these days, either).

Furthermore, it questions NATO's whole existence. They have been recast in recent years as a peace-keeping force, and an advocate for stability. This doesn't fall under either of those categories, really.

Either way, I think this is more than a bad move; it sounds like gross stupidity at this stage, and I hope it doesn't happen.

Norway again

2007-05-15T21:20:00.000+10:00

I know, I know, but they really are the bomb, I tells ya!

From Slashdot:

Norway has become the latest European country to move closer to mandatory government use of ODF (and PDF). According to a press release provided in translation to me by an authoritative source, Norway now joins Belgium, Finland, and France (among other nations) in moving towards a final decision to require such use. The Norwegian recommendation was revealed by Minister of Renewal Heidi Grande Roys, on behalf of the Cabinet-appointed Norwegian Standards Council. If adopted, it would require all government agencies and services to use these two formats, and would permit other formats (such as OOXML) to be used only in a redundant capacity.

Interesting stuff. I'm a big fan of open source. I run Linux at home (I'm typing this on a new distro as we speak, actually; Elive. It's pretty and fast), and my work computer is chockers with great, free programs like VirtualDub, 7-Zip, Foxit, and many many more.

I'm surprised it's taken governments so long to realise the millions of dollars that can be saved with open source. IBM has known it for ages, and I've heard on the grapevine that they're developing their own Linux OS to replace Windows on all their computers.

Whilst I don't think the Open Document Format is perfect for end-users yet, I think its time is fast approaching, as I do for Linux distros in general, which are getting more and more user-friendly every day. I'm not Mr Technical myself, and I haven't had too many troubles.

What this spells for software companies is anyone's guess. One thing is for sure; those profit margins are going to start sliding, maybe even until they're commensurate with development costs. Most hardware companies faced this point in the face of great competition many years ago. I'm looking forward it, actually, especially because I believe the open source movement cares a lot more about standardisation than the private sector.

The more I do online, the more I come up against the importance of standards (try building a website that looks the same in Firefox and Explorer. I dare you.). This will definitely be a good thing for innovation, and development of the web in general.

More budget idiocy

2007-05-10T09:16:00.000+10:00

I don't have much time; running late for work, but sweet georgia brown, after getting up on my high horse about policy (or lack thereof in the budget), I read this in the paper this morning:

Young mothers will be recruited to a Federal Government schools campaign to warn teenagers from having children just to get the $4000 baby bonus.

Tuesday night's Budget contained $500,000 for an educational campaign to help teenagers understand the ongoing financial consequences of having a baby.

Jesus Christ. Is this the twenties? Key paragraphs in the article (my emphasis):

Stories abounded after the introduction of the baby bonus in July 2004 that some teens thought the payment, now worth $4133, was easy money. And the teens, it was said, were spending the money on partying, not prams.

Although most social workers were sceptical that the problem was widespread, the Government responded by changing the rules.

Shit, I don't know about you, but I find using TODAY TO-FRIGGING-NIGHT as a tool for policy development, hmmmm, I don't know, TOTALLY RETARDED!!!!!!!

Has there been any evidence that the baby bonus has sparked a slew of teenage bogan pregnancies and flat screen televisions? Anywhere??????? Hellooooo? Evidence.

Sigh. What a crock.

Budget

2007-05-08T22:03:00.000+10:00

Do I have any thoughts? Not really. This budget is about as surprising as a film directed by Michael Bay.

I will say this however: rebates, tax cuts, bonus "one-off" payments. These are not good public policy.

They are not policy at all. If there is a structural problem, you need to change the structure; eliminate the problems - not accept them, and try to give people compensation for them. That will never work - it is a band-aid solution to an artery wound.

Worse, giving compensation to these problems can sometimes encourage them. A budgetary example is an increased child-care rebate. Now, I worked in child-care for five years, so I can say quite confidently I know more about the industry than most people.

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Firstly, like all social welfare/caring industries, it is hard work, and grossly, woefully underpaid. People who think childcare is a rip-off largely need to take a reality check. If you want qualified people looking after your kids, giving them activities, resources and nutritional food to keep them occupied constructively for hours, a proper OH&S policy, a safe environment for kids to play, and insurance (ye gods, insurance!), then it's gonna cost you.

So, childcare is expensive, but we have a situation with household debt etc. where in most families both parents have to work, and therefore need childcare. Unfortunately families can end up paying most of their second, lesser income on childcare this way. And they hate it.

What's a government to do? We have a situation where childcare - unlike school, for example - only gets minimal government funding. And thus we end up getting a child-care rebate in an attempt to mollify angry parents, for $35 bucks a week.

It sounds like a lot - nearly $2000 a year, but in reality $35 would be lucky to get you one day of after school care, certainly not a creche, or after and before school care. That's how expensive childcare is.

So we have a rebate that costs the government a lot of money - $35 dollars a week for every child in childcare across the whole country, but that doesn't actually help the parents. It covers maybe a fifth of their costs, at most.

Meanwhile, the factors that cause all these problems are still in play. There is another at play, too: the centres themselves.

Most childcare centres - but not all - are run for profit. Some areas only have for-profit centres, and these places - though they care for kids, I have no doubt - also care for their shareholders. They are not charging very much as it is. I cannot stress this enough: childcare is hideously expensive and most centres are under pressure to cut corners wherever they can. The not-for-profit centres (largely government funded) are probably losing money, or just breaking even as it is, but kids may not be happy, and parents may not be happy with the standard of care.

For-profit centres will be making money, but also there, kids may not be happy nor parents.

There is yet another factor at play here, too... Because parents, and kids, have not been happy about the standard of childcare, in the last eight years there has been a massive regulation of the industry.

Minimum standards covering every facet of care, coupled with regular assessment. If you don't pass this assessment, you will - after a series of processes - lose your accreditation and your centre will be forced to close until you fix things.

Before this regulation came in, there would have been few childcare centres that would have met the incoming standards. The centre I mostly worked for was one of the best in the ACT, and it still had a shitload of work to do to meet regulatory standards.

Meeting these many, many standards costs money, and as the industry grew more regulated, the cost of caring was (regulation is mostly finished now) steadily increasing.

This is the kind of environment that the $35 dollar rebate has entered into. An environment that has seen costs steadily rising for a number of years - in excess of inflation. So, needless to say, most childcare centres will - justifiably in most cases - be putting their prices by, ummmm, let's say $35 a week.

This is why band-aid solutions don't work. They ignore the contextual and structural background in favour of something ineffably cheaper (most times) and easier - but also ineffably hopeless.

Parents, who are getting a measly 1/5 of their costs covered at best, are going to lose that coverage immediately because there is a background of higher costs that hasn't been taken into account.

And that's just one example. There are many more. We have a government that's been in power for over ten years. Cuts, rebates and thresholds don't cut the mustard. Reform is what they should be doing - hell, policy; real policy should be par for the course. But it's not. I get an extra $16 dollars a week or so with this budget. That's not even enough for a weekly train ticket.

I would trade that up in a second - heck I would happily pay more tax - if we had a national dental policy, or national tax reform, or a real childcare funding policy. But instead I get two cokes-and-a-hamburger. No wonder we're all so fat.

Two chicken favourites

2007-05-08T21:23:00.000+10:00

Mmmmmm, good fettucine. Egg pasta is the bomb, and so is oregano.

egg fettucine
a medium knob of butter
five cloves of garlic, chopped finely
five medium shallots, also chopped finely (and I mean shallots, not scallions. Somewhere, some time in Australia, there was a horrible mix up about this, and we're still struggling to recover.)
three organic chicken thigh fillets, sliced
1/2 - 1 tsp chicken/vegetable stock powder, and some cracked pepper
nine or ten swiss brown mushrooms, sliced finely
a glass of dry white
most of a can of evaporated milk
parmesan, grated
chopped oregano

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Add the butter in pad on medium high. While it's melting, season the thighs with stock and pepper, and then throw them in. We're going for caramelisation here, so after the initial browning, don't stir too much, and you may need to put the heat up higher.

Once you have a decent amount of sticky, gooey caramel bits all over the pan, turn the heat down to medium and put the garlic and shallots in (you can stir now, burnt garlic is an abomination!), once they're cooked (five minutes or less), deglaze by adding the wine (a minute or so).

Once that's done, add the mushrooms, and cook them, too. Then put the evaporated milk in.

Evaporated milk is an interesting one. You rarely see it in recipes - except diet books in which it acts as a cream substitute. I wouldn't recommend it as a substitute, per se - evaporated milk has a different flavour to cream, somehow maltier and a thickier, less waxy texture. However, that maltiness actually works better in some savoury situations.

Anyway, that's basically the recipe. Put the heat on low and let it simmer for a few minutes, add a little bit of parmesan to thicken the sauce, and cook the fettucine. Yum.

Finally, I've blogged about red-cooked chicken before.

I've just been freestyling the recipe since, basically, but I've finally got some photos. Unfortunately, the stock looks better than the chicken!

Still, you can imagine how good these flavours are impregnated in a delicious corn-fed chicken.

Ethical Investment.

2007-05-05T22:43:00.000+10:00

Jesus Christ, I know that I rave about Norway all the time, but seriously, that country is the shit! (AND, it has the rainiest city in the world! WOOT!!!!) Ahem. Back to the business at hand:

It has a _shitload_ of money care of North Sea Oil Revenues. But, typical of Norway, the government is being careful about where it's going to invest it.

Norway has amassed a fortune of more than $300 billion over the last decade, thanks to its profits from oil exports....
Norway’s investment choices have become a focus of attention in the last nine months over the exclusion of Wal-Mart, the American retailer whose big-box stores do not exist in this pristine country.
... Public pension funds on both sides of the Atlantic commonly avoid investing in certain companies on social or ethical grounds. But it is rare for a sovereign state to make such judgments, and rarer still for one to do it in the pointed, public way that Norway has.
Among the first companies to run afoul of Norway’s standards were makers of cluster bombs and nuclear weapons or related components — a list that includes General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman, in addition to Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
Then last June, Norway added Wal-Mart Stores to its blacklist, alleging that the retailer was guilty of tolerating child-labor violations by its suppliers in the developing world and obstructing unions at home. The fund sold off more than $400 million worth of Wal-Mart shares.

Fascinating stuff. Needless to say, Norway has copped a lot of shit about this. Firstly, the US hate it, and - not surprisingly - so do the companies themselves. Both have mounted very detailed cases as to how and why Norway has got in wrong in declining to invest in the Freeport Grasberg Mine, for example.

Personally, I think 99% of those objections are total bullshit. It's not like the fund controllers are rolling a dice here - there's a very strict system outlining this behaviour.

More compelling, however, are the 'slippery slope' arguments. So Norway won't trade with Walmart, but they will trade with Saudi Arabia; an undemocratic regime with some of the worst, legislated treatment of women in the world today.

These kind of arguments about hypocrisy are something that regularly emerge around issues of environmental or ethical action. If Australia can't reduce the world's greenhouse emissions, why should we bother reducing our own? If Al Gore loves the environment so much, why does he live in a mansion? If Africa's leaders are going to steal money, or Iraqis will inconveniently insist on getting blown up, why should we help them?

The problem with accusations like this, is that they don't work on proactive things, because they posit a world where a small difference is no difference. By continuing to trade with Saudi Arabia, Norway does not make the workers of Walmart any worse, nor are they encouraging Freeport to fuck up another developing country's environment.

However, by refusing to trade with either Freeport, or Walmart, they are encouraging those companies to do something about their shoddy, ethically bankrupt practices. Yes, they probably should stop trading with Saudi, and they may very well in the future.

But whether they do or not, this doesn't make their other efforts obsolete; it doesn't affect them either way.

This is something right wingers frequently seem to have trouble understanding. Every week they seem to accuse Tim Flannery, Kevin Rudd, or whowever, of being a sell-out because they do different things in different areas of their lives. Such multiplicity, however, never seems to be a problem for heroes of the right, like Alexander Downer, or more recently John Howard - who changed his seemingly very strongly held opinions about the rightness of WorkChoices for something a little different this week.

It's ironic, because in a world where so many right-wingers live, where the market will sort out everything, and the poor, drug addicts, and indigenous people who have shit lives are in that position wholly through their own lack of hard work and gumption, individuals obviously wield an enormous amount of power, and thus their actions have a huge influence.

But not if they want to reduce carbon emissions, or bring ethics to the market.

Oh well. I think what Norway is doing is fantastic, and if our government had money like this to play with, instead of the a frigging massive foreign trade deficit that seems to rarely get mentioned, I would love it if we did the same.

YouTube Shenanigans: Home Shopping Disasters

2007-05-05T22:31:00.000+10:00

This guy has compiled eight videos of home shopping going horribly wrong. Heh heh heh. Here's one of my favourites.

What I'm reading: Hell to Pay

2007-05-05T20:02:00.000+10:00

George Pelecanos is an American crime writer who regularly gets rave reviews. Now, I'm not a huge reader of crime fiction, but good writing is good writing - and I'm a big fan of Ian Rankin, so I thought I'd give the P-man a red hot aussie go.

Big mistake. Holy shit, how could so many respectable papers (Guardian, Ind on Sunday, etc.) get this so wrong? Hell to Pay was crap.

The novel is set in Washington, like all Pelecanos' books, and follows Derek Strange, a black private detective who lives in one of the hairiest neighbourhoods. After someone close to Derek is killed, he decides the titular hell must be to pay. Meanwhile, he's also grappling with his relationship, and a couple of other things.

Now, the problems. The many problems. Unlike most British crime writers, Hell to Pay isn't a mystery, quite the opposite. The book opens up on the killers, and by the second chapter it's quite obvious who the victim will be. Don't be too excited, though, nobody's going to get killed until around page 200. Egads.

In the meantime, you'll be left with the story settling into place like mud from the Jurassic slowly becoming rock. I guess this wouldn't be so bad, if Pelecanos' prose was sparkling, or his characters irresistible. Sadly, that's not the case.

Strange is a hard-bitten gumshoe straight from the fifties. A Philip Marlowe, without the rich interior life that made that character so compelling. As he goes from his loving, patient girlfriend to massage parlours, the only original thing is Pelecanos' relentless categorisation of every object.

Characters in this novel don't put their shoes on, they put on their Sketchers, or Campers, or Manolos. It doesn't matter what the POV is, apparently everyone in Washington knows Sketchers from Campers, and never calls shoes sneakers.

Strange is apparently and R&B fan, so needless to say there are thousands of R&B songs played throughout the novel, and he knows who played the frigging triangle in each song, and feels compelled to tell everyone in hearing distance.

In itself, this wouldn't be so bad. Rankin's Rhebus, for example is also a big fan of music. The problem, however, once again is consistency. Strange isn't the only R&B encyclopaedia in the book, and when someone puts on a fairly esoteric electronica cd, and he recognises that, I cracked the shits.

Meanwhile, Pelecanos is rolling in cliches like a pig in shit. His prose his flat and littered with stupid, rookie mistakes. For example, in the first chapter, the three similar characters introduced are referred to by not one, or two, but three different names each. Holy crap George, way to make it easy for everyone.

In conclusion, stay away. Don't be sucked in by this guys reputation like I was.

Money is art

2007-04-26T22:28:00.000+10:00

Some of these origami notes are really cool. I still prefer Australian dollars, though; looks good and is worth more! (nearly, anyway...)

Two-tone fish and Japanese salad

2007-04-26T21:58:00.000+10:00

This was a nice meal after a very satisfying run tonight. I went to a php course today. Sheesh man, talk about a strict syntax, php makes CSS look very sloppy indeed (not the hardest thing to do, to be fair).

Two tone cutlets:

a salmon cutlet
a mackerel cutlet
2 tsps honey
a dessert spoon of soy
a teaspoon or so of sesame oil
3 cloves of garlic, crushed

Combine the honey, soy, miso, oil and garlic, rub into the fish and let it marinate while you take care of the rest.

Japanese salad:

A red oak lettuce
a carrot
a cucumber
a tomato or two
half an apple

Dressing:

two tablespoons of soy
a tbsn mirin
a teaspoon of sesame oil
two cloves crushed garlic
a pinch of white sugar (these are all very "or so" quantities. Taste it. Make sure it's a) not too salty, and b) you have enough vinegar)

Slice, dice, julienne and smack the salad ingredients upside o' the head. Arrange them on top of the lettuce.

Mix together the dressing ingredients and then drizzle on top.

That's the salad done. Now, put the cutlets under the grill (on high) and cook em, basting with any leftover sauce.

It should take around, if not less than ten minutes. I had originally planned on cutting the cutlets post-cooking exactly in half, so it would truly look like one, two-toned cutlet, but I'm sorry to say my hunger got the better of me. A heh.

That's the gist, though. A delicious, and very healthy (albeit slightly salty - sorry Jangers!) meal.

ANZAC Day

2007-04-25T21:53:00.000+10:00

Happy Anzac Day, or sad, whichever way you feel. Beyond a momentary gratitude that thousands of diggers died so we could have a public holiday, Anzac Day tends to stir a bit of ambivalence in me.

Charges of glorifying war are, in my opinion, definitely valid - albeit not entirely. Hell, I see my Nana doing it all the time, and I don't blame her, not really. The War was - and is - the defining event of her life. Nothing like it was ever before or since. When she talks about the war, there's a life and interest in her eyes that few other things these days can summon.

And of course people want to glorify war. The idea that the sacrifice and death was meaningless, base, political and unnecessary is anathema to them, and that's not surprising.

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And yet, it is meaningless. To pretend that Anzac Day is anything but a shiny bit of spackle - gloss on the skull bones of humanity - is such a wilful act of misdirection and denial it's almost breathtaking.

Yes, war is hell, and yet so many of our world leaders - and citizens, and media - seem to view it as a necessary hell. A hell that is perhaps not such a bad thing, so long as we see it only on the horizon, a blood-red glow to the sunset.

Whilst heads were bowed today, eyes blinking away sleep before filling courageously with tears, heads on the other side of the world were being blown up.

These people are victims of war. They did not volunteer, they were conscripted to battle. And they remember, not those who died fifty years ago, but those who died yesterday, without a choice, without even the benefit of thinking they were fighting "evil", or to save the world, or some ridiculous such.

Whilst we piously thud our hands into our chests, thinking of "the horror, the horror", and the noble innocents who died to fight it, we are myopically ignoring our own bloody fingerprints on a chain of corpses that stretch from Iraq and Sudan, to Chechnya and Burma, and many, many other places.

If John Howard truly believed in the message of Anzac Day, he wouldn't have sent soldiers to Iraq, and those soldiers wouldn't have gone. This bullshit, following-orders/ we're-just- the-grunts mentality has a simple name, it's called the Nuremburg Defence, and it didn't work for Keitel and Jodl, and it shouldn't work for anyone.

Instead we hear about "mateship", and "the Anzac spirit" - whatever the hell that is; blindly following orders in a battle you can't win?

If we really believed war was hell, there wouldn't have been an Iraq, or a Vietnam, or a Korea. More importantly: there shouldn't be an Iraq, or a Vietnam or Korea. That is the true message of Anzac Day.

The inscription Lest We Forget conjures a bitter laugh in my throat. Lest We Forget? How, possibly, could we forget, when we are reminded of it every day? The banal, exploitation of war.

The victims, headless, armless; tortured. Blown up, and torn to shreds by shrapnel, land mines, cluster bombs, and mortars. The political expedience of it; the grubbiness, the money and calculated profit scrawled across our papers, annual reports and tv screens every night of the week.

Lest we forget? Ha, how could we possibly forget when we have never stopped to remember? War is not just hell, it is madness; a blank screaming face, incoherently bellowing for eternity. It's easy to shed a tear, easy as pulling a trigger. That's what we should remember about Anzac Day. The struggle not to kill. There's a cause worth fighting for.

3 Day Speed party

2007-04-25T21:36:00.000+10:00

Anyone who's spent some serious time with me knows that sleep, and lack of it, plays a big part of my life. When I can't get enough sleep, it goes badly for me, and everyone around, too.

I guess that's why this article about a 3 day bender on shabu - pure methampetamine - sounds terrifying to me.

More Shabu was smoked somewhere in the nether region of time between two and five this Friday morning. Now it's a few minutes after seven. Bonnie is back on the laptop. The weird music blasting downstairs has entranced Jason, who is lying on a couch, eyes closed, fists clenched, doing leg lifts in halved time with the beat. The remainder of the crew -- Sasha, Heather, Emile, a graphic designer, and Ike, who deals cocaine -- have fled upstairs, where they sit in a circle in the Shabu smoking room, jabbering.
They talk over and across each other constantly, their conversations cross-pollinating, topics bursting into side topics and tangents: Malcolm X, Andy Warhol, West Nile virus, Alaskan salmon, cruise ships, Rastafarians, back-in-the-day MTV videos, Schoolhouse Rock cartoons, drug laws, gun laws, cop shootings, the Ten Commandments, the Seven Deadly Sins. It goes on and on, ever-changing, devoid of weight. It is chitchat mania, right up until the discussion turns to why they're doing this, why they're sitting in a candlelit room on a workday morning, geeked out of their skulls.

Shudder. Whilst the idea of oblivion can be legitimately appealing sometimes, this article really sent a shiver up my spine, and confirmed my wholly grandpa status.

Sleep is a precious commodity in my life, to be traded up only grudgingly, and - much like the addicts in this article - something to be pursued at all costs, and desperately imbibed on the weekend; drunk with it, and then my working week comes, and I have to scrape by on the bare necessity.

The idea of spending three days awake makes me feel sick.

Ethanol: driving yourself to an early grave

2007-04-23T22:28:00.000+10:00

I have been a long-term sceptic of ethanol as a proclaimed panacea to our car emission woes, so you can imagine how thrilled I was to read this article confirming my bias.

"Ethanol is being promoted as a clean and renewable fuel that will reduce global warming and air pollution," said Jacobson, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering. "But our results show that a high blend of ethanol poses an equal or greater risk to public health than gasoline, which already causes significant health damage."...

..."In our study, E85 increased ozone-related mortalities in the United States by about 200 deaths per year compared to gasoline, with about 120 of those deaths occurring in Los Angeles," Jacobson said. "These mortality rates represent an increase of about 4 percent in the U.S. and 9 percent in Los Angeles above the projected ozone-related death rates for gasoline-fueled vehicles in 2020."

So, ethanol is not the magic bullet that farming lobby groups (corn in America, sugar cane and wheat here) paint it as. I think things like this highlight some of the problems when it comes to policy solutions for global warming.

When we lose focus on reducing emissions full stop, we may very well end up with a cure that is worse than the disease. Similar to carbon-offsetting, some of the ideas we are now entertaining are simply replacing one problematic material with another. If we start out with small quantities, the trade off doesn't seem so bad, but it's only a matter of time until we're faced with bigger problems

A similar dynamic is at play with the notion of cloud seeding to increase the density of clouds, thus reflecting heat and sunlight away from earth. Great, we reduce the temperature, but then we get global dimming, an equally serious problem.

Now, I'm not saying ethanol is out and out a baddie, however. There is a point where driving is largely unavoidable, and cars have to run on something. However, we are not at that point yet - nowhere even close to it - and I think things like this illustrate the futility of thinking that the way we live won't have to change, to do something about global warming.

I don't know if our lives will have to change to save humanity, so to speak, but I think most people want a little more than that. Our lives will have to change to keep the environment remotely like it is now, and that means less driving for a start.

Toor Dhal & Okra

2007-04-23T21:47:00.000+10:00

Yum yum. I love dhal, and whilst I usually prefer the masoor variety (i.e. red lentils), I only had toor (split yellow lentils). These guys take a lot longer to cook, and have a nuttier flavour and rougher texture.

I took the opportunity to try out some of the curry powder Tara bought me back from Nepal. It was interesting - I like to fancy myself a bit of a gun when it comes to spices, but I still had some trouble dissecting what was in it.

There was definitely some tumeric, and asafoetida, cinnamon and cumin, but there was lots of other stuff in there, and buggered if I could tell what it is. Definitely a curry powder from Nepal, rather than India; there were some asiatics flavours in there for sure. Maybe a small amount of five spice?

I digress. Here's the recipe:

three small onions, or two medium to large, diced finely.
a thumb-thick pad of butter, or two dessert spoons of ghee
at least five large cloves of garlic, sliced.
three teaspoons of curry powder
two teaspoons of tumeric
a teaspoon of cumin seeds, coriander seeds, and salt,
250 grams of Toor Dhal, or so.
a can of diced tomatoes,
water!

Put the butter into a pot on medium heat, once it's melted throw in the onions, curry powder, spices, and salt. Stir it for five minutes, and then add the garlic. Stir for another two.

Add the dhal, and stir it up for a couple of minutes, then throw in the tomatoes, and at least 500mls of water.

Put the heat on low, and keep stirring occasionally, topping with water as it cooks. Toor dhal takes an hour and a half to cook, and it may still have a little crunch.

Okra. Mmmmm, this was great. The recipe comes from that grande dame of Indian cuisine, Madhur Jaffrey.

Personally, I don't always like Madhur's recipe, sometimes I feel she sacrifices taste for authenticity, and sometimes her methods are needlessly complicated. That all said, her knowledge of Indian cooking is parallel to none; both in history and practice. If you ever want to find out about real Indian food, buy her books. I have learned a tremendous amount from Jaffrey's books.

Okra with Onions (Sel Bhindi)

two teaspoons of whole coriander seeds
1 whole, dried red chilli
1/4 teaspoon tumeric
1/2 - 3/4 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons vegetable oil (bollocks, I used one, if that)
2 smallish onions, chopped into rings or half rings
340 grams fresh okra, topped and tail, and halved length-ways (and width-ways if they're big)
fresh coriander (optional)

Grind or pound up the coriander seeds, chill tumeric and salt, and put aside.

Put the oil into a wok or pan on medium high, throw in the okra, and stir fry for 10 minutes or so. Don't stir it too much, we want to brown the edges here.

After that, put the onion in for five or so - again, until it's brown, then add the curry powder. Reduce the heat to low, stirring for five minutes. After which, add the fresh coriander if you want.

Done! This was really yummy.

The high life

2007-04-17T13:11:00.000+10:00

via Arts and Letters Daily comes this hilarious article about a critic going on an Edwardian diet for a week.

Lunch at Rules, Covent Garden: Oysters, foie gras terrine, roast cod with asparagus, mutton hotpot, pink Yorkshire rhubarb and clotted cream.
A stonking meal in a stonking restaurant. But alas, Sue and I are being taught the chew-chew diet, or Fletcherism, the dieting system devised by Horace Fletcher which compelled diners to bow their heads and chew each mouthful for one minute, until it had liquefied and could be simply absorbed by the mouth. After each minute’s chew is up, a bell is rung and one is allowed to swallow. We look ridiculous, and it makes the food taste revolting, but it does result in my eating less. Or perhaps that was because I have had 2,500 calories at breakfast and haven’t poo’d in two days.

Ahhhh, beauty is truth, truth poo jokes. That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

But there is more than poo jokes to this article (damn it!). The decadence is astonishing; if I ate like that for even a day, my stomach would make the battle of Somme look like a hiccup, and the bathroom would probably resemble Flanders circa 1917, except without the poppies.

It's a good reminder too, I think, of the kind of background that something like Marxism sprung up in, and also many of the western antecedents for unionism (although both of these arguably came about between 50 years and a century or more before).

Whilst the landed gentry were feasting like this every day - hosting dinners that would cost $5000 Australian dollars at least once a week - there were people literally dying in the street from malnutrition.

I do think it's easy to forget that we in the west - working, middle or upper class - are really part of a global bourgeoisie, and that we've succesfully managed to outsource much of the proletariat to other countries, and in some cases whole continents.

Certainly, ascribing definitions like this ignores Marx's whole means-of-production arguments, and would no doubt attract the ire of a traditional Marxist.

I would argue, however, that Marx never envisaged a world where his definition of a proletariat would have so much disposable income, and furthermore, never imagined such a thing as a knowledge economy readily accessible to many or that the state would ever actually manage to look after people.

I thought of this last night when Tim Minchin closed the Melbourne International Comedy Gala with song called "Fuck the Poor" (sorry, couldn't find a vid), essentially castigating the audience for buying their guilt away with fifty bucks here and there.

It was harsh, man. Personally, I think fifty bucks is better than no bucks, but Minchin has a point: I think there is a tendency for people (myself most definitely included) to forget about the absolute poverty we largely don't see.

I don't think the answer is to give away all your earthly possessions and live like an ascetic. I don't, in fact, think there is any one answer, but policy is always a good place to start.

Australia is totally not great in this regard. Firstly, Our government is rat shit when it comes to foreign aid, - despite what the public wants. And it's even shitter than it looks, because more than 90% of the money we "give" through Ausaid, is actually spent on officials of Ausaid, and paying consultants (like the delightful Trevor Flugge), so countries don't see diddily of that.

Will this change under a Labor government? I dunno, but frankly I don't see how it could get much worse.

Certainly, when it comes to the Solomon Islands, and tramping off to 'rescue' a country, the government is very quick to talk it up. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. Despite the general failure RAMSI, I think it was done with good intentions, and has achieved some small but notable successes.

However, it's only half the picture. Not even that. Developing countries could do with a good police force, certainly, but they're really desperate for some moolah, dispersed in a good policy framework.

It will be interesting to see how Labor positions itself on this one. The public seems to be well aware of Australia's luck vis. the resource boom, and would like to spread some of the largesse about.

Maybe one day more people in the region will be shouted Yorkshire rhubarb and clotted cream by Australia, and not just rich executives staying in the Hilton Baghdad.

YouTube Shenanigans: Chicken Cops

2007-04-16T22:39:00.000+10:00

Cool, two chickens break up a fight between a couple of rabbits.

I know this is the internet, and everyone's an expert, but some of the commentators say this is a fake, personally I dunno. I have a small knowledge about CGI and its symptoms, and frankly I don't know how anyone could whether this is fake from the quality of YouTube vids. Looks real enough to me.

Bubbles

2007-04-16T22:35:00.000+10:00

Bubbles are so pretty, and Soapbubbler has a page choc-full of photos of em. Beautiful.

Via Metafilter.

Twenty years in China

2007-04-16T22:11:00.000+10:00

Holy shit, I thought David Hicks had it bad, but check out this story about two CIA agents whose mission went horribly wrong, and they ended up detained for twenty years.

There may be some among us who can imagine 20 days in captivity; perhaps a fraction of those can imagine a full year deprived of liberty and most human contact. But 20 years? Downey and Fecteau have consistently sought to downplay their period of imprisonment; and neither has done what arguably too many former CIA officers do these days with far less justification: write a book. Downey has said that such a book would contain “500 blank pages,” and Fecteau says the whole experience could be summed up by the word “boring.”

Wow. I cannot imagine what these guys went through, and the fact they seemed to come out of it relatively sane and happy is amazing.

However, as horrible as this is, there were two things that leapt out at me.

a) There are many people in prisons in Australia and heaps in the US that will be there for twenty years or more. Obviously, these conditions are much better than the Chinese prisons, but I have no doubt they are in many ways similar, and in some ways probably worse.

In both cases, twenty years is an incredibly long time for 'rehabilitation'. And in both cases it is sometimes not long enough. I guess the moral of this point is that no one should be locked up for twenty years, and that time has a questionable relationship to changing a person's thoughts and personality.

b) As horrible as what these guys went through, the torture they endured is nothing compared to what the United States has done to the people in Guantanamo Bay. When Bush delved and Mao span, who then was the gentleman, eh?

A Moroccan feast

2007-04-09T12:47:00.000+10:00

Lamb Kofta

We had our friends Pat and Jangers over for dinner on Friday night. I was a little perturbed when I realised that my promises of a Morrocan feast were going to be severely compromised by a dearth of open grocery stores.... Nonetheless I'm pretty happy with how it went.

I can't remember the exact recipes I used for - lol - all of these. With a limited number of resources, they weren't exactly what I would have done if Woollies had been open.

Kofta:

Lamb mince - 500g or so
a finely diced onion
three cloves of garlic

a curry powder made from, in descending order:

tumeric
cumin
paprika
peppercorns
dried chillies
a little bit of fennel seed
a litle bit of Cinnamon
a pinch of salt.

There could be some other stuff too... Mix that all together with the mince, shape it one some skewers and grill. Onwards!

More...

Simple Chicken Tagine

This was arguably the recipe where lack of ingredients was felt the keenest, hence "simple". That said, everyone agreed it was the best.

about a kilo of chicken pieces/w bone (I used freerange drumsticks and thighs)
olive oil
three preserved lemon wedges
around 500mls salt-reduced vege-stock
three medium/small onions, finely diced
a large head of garlic, finely diced
about six bay leaves
some kalamata olives

A curry powder made of:

tumeric
paprika (for these two nowhere near as much as in the kofta)
coriander seeds
cumin
peppercorns
cloves - four
cinnamon

Brown the chicken in the olive oil under a medium-high heat. Take it out, and then add the onions and turn the heat down to medium. After a couple minutes, add the garlic, and curry powder.

A couple of minutes after that, throw in the preserved lemon, olives and stock, and let it deglaze any crunchy bits that may be stuck on the bottom. Then put the chicken back in, and put the whole shebang in a preheated 180' oven for at least two hours.

This chicken tagine was really great, but remember it should start off very watery, and end up reasonably thick. You may want to put it on the stove to let it reduce after the oven time.

Sweet Potato and Orange Tagine

This was pretty good, too.

about 600gms sweet potato, cubed
an onion, finely diced
some olive oil
about a dozen bay leaves
a can of diced tomatoes
a few cherry tomatoes, if they're in the fridge
about ten dried apricots, sliced thinly
a spoonful of raisins
about 200mls orange juice

A curry powder made from:

paprika
tumeric
cloves
cinnamon
four cardmon pods
peppercorns
coriander seeds

I think that was all... Add the oil, onion and curry powder to the pot, fry on medium until the onion starts to cook,add the potato, and sweat for five minutes or so.

Add the rest of the ingredients, and then cook for about forty minutes on as low as you can, and still see a few bubbles at the top.

The whole shebang plated, with some raita.

And dessert...

Scorched Almond and Lemon Envelopes w/ basic vanilla icecream

Lynn's cardamonophobia meant she didn't like this (gr!) but I thought it was great.

almond meal - 1/3 - 1/2 cup
slivered almonds 1/4 cup
icing sugar 1/2 cup or so
juice of half a small lemon
two ground cardmons pods - just a pinch
a little buit of water
puff pastry

Scorch the slivered almonds in a fry pan - be sure to take them out quick smart once they start to cinder, nothing burns faster than nuts.

Mix the slivers in with the almond meal, cardmon, icing sugar, and stir to combine well.

Then add lemon juice, and just enough water to give you a thick paste. Sppon the paste onto your puff pastry and even it out, wrap them up, and then put it in a 200' oven for twenty minutes or so (we're just trying to cook the pastry here).

To make the easiest, most soft serve-like homemade ice cream in the world, just whip up some cream a little bit of icing sugar and vannila essence. When it's good and thick, freeze it, stirring every now and then. Too easy.

Publish or be damned

2007-04-05T13:52:00.000+10:00

Wow. Today I discovered (albeit six months late) that a friend I lost touch with has had her novel published.

This is turn provoked in me the terrifying memory that it was ten years ago I first met Grace, at a 'masterclass' for young writers, held by the Queensland Writers Centre over a series of rainy, humid days at their office on Wickham Terrace in Brisbane.

I liked Grace because - this might sound funny - she was serious. She was serious about her writing, and thoughtful about it, too, and even though I hadn't read the unpublished novel her sixteen year old self had produced, I thought it was likely to be good.

To my somewhat judgemental sixteen year old mind, Grace was practically the only person there who I felt was 'serious'. Most of the others were seemed to care quite a lot about being 'writers', but not about writing; neither widely read nor desiring to be so.

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I wasn't toting a novel myself at the masterclass, back then I wrote Ionesco-like plays about people drinking their own urine, and realist short stories, that inevitably revolved around people discovering disappointment in their lives; missed connections and wrong assumptions.

I don't really know why I did that - in some ways it seems to be a dominating concern in my writing, fictional or otherwise: the gaps in connections between people, the things in ourselves that we project outwards. Metaphors, in one form or another, frequently in lieu of the real thing.

Grace and I have pursued our writing in quite different ways. She continued pushing with her fiction, starting up the Clarion South writers workshops, putting out short stories in Aurealis and the like. My fictional output slowly but surely dried up - hurt in part by the loss of 35-40 000 words of a novel I was working on at one time (leaving me with only the unfocussed beginnings, another 30 000 or so that I still carry around in my 'suitcase o' crap').

Instead, I moved into non-fiction; criticism, mainly. Features, articles, book reviews and interviews. It taught me a lot about writing - to be honest, more than I got from writing fiction, but I still cast my gaze to that road not travelled, and wonder - and doubt - that I ever have a book in me.

I turned away from fiction, in part because it was hard. Comparatively, getting non-fiction published was an absolute snap, and still is in my opinion. Also, I don't know, my ideas started drying up. Not in a writers' block sense; my output was still tremendous, thousands of words every month, but I just didn't feel - don't feel - that I had anything to say.

Criticism is the opposite of creative writing in some ways; taking something apart and looking at it in a different way to make something new; reconstruction, not construction. But I remember, quite clearly, the opposite feeling; that I did have something to say.

I still - even years after producing what I think is some really, legitimately good writing - feel that I somehow 'sold out' a little in turning away from fiction. And now that place seems like a far away island to me. I would like to return someday, and there is still, lurking in the corners of my computer, the odd short story, unfinished novel, and breath of a ghost of an idea for some creative output.

I don't know, I still feel I need some kind of experience to turn me in that direction. I suspect the original impetus came from a combination of the long hours of adolescence, and trying to process my parent's divorce and the aftermath with my brother. An equally cataclysmic event would not be welcome again, but perhaps my future travel plans may widen my mind a little. Until then - like I just have - I can always turn to someone's else's work to sum up my feelings.

Our revels are now ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into are, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself
Yea all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with sleep.

Situantional Control

2007-04-03T13:37:00.000+10:00

I'm back!

My month-long hiatus is at an end. The election is, thank God, over (very interesting, considered thoughts to follow), and I have had a week's sabbatical, slowly regaining some of my energy levels. I'm ready to start reading, cooking, living again after so much hard work during March.

I read two fabulous articles during lunch today, one I know quite a bit about, the other I know very little about. In some ways, they both tie into things I have thought about or experienced whilst working on the election campaign.

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Philip Zimbardo was the man behind the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment. He has written an article recalling his personal experiences, and how the experiment is still surpremely relevant today.

I studied the Experiment as a wet-behind-the-ears first year sociology student - as I'm sure have most sociology students, and it's as fascinating to me now as it was then. I think Zimbardo is right when he talks about how easy it is to minimise social and institutional effects, when in reality they wield an incredibly potent influence.

Of course, the fact that most of us participate in the same institutions tends to render the effect invisible, and perhaps those on the right are keen to downplay things like this because it clashes with some of the libertarian principles they hold dear. The idea that we're not all islands could seem an unconscionable imposition on an individual's sovereignty.

Nonetheless, I believe these are things we should remember and explicate wherever possible - not just for power arrangements with strong dichotomies, either. The places we work and circles we move in are all in thrall to these same currents. Heck, it forms the very marrow of reality television.

Also, perhaps it may incite a shred of sympathy - or at least a more utilitarian viewpoint - when it comes to condemning those we think have erred, a thought I had to hold at the forefront of my mind when digging through this mammoth profile of Paul Wolfowitz, and his time at the World Bank.

The New Yorker is one of those last Grand Dames of the print world still doing proper investigative journalism, and though long, this article is a treat. Wolfowitz - considered by many lefties to be the devil incarnate - emerges as a three dimensional figure. However, whilst highlighting his many ideals, the piece also shows the spotty application of said ideals and the more disheartening reality of his time at the helm of the World Bank.

For me, this piece really highlight the importance of democratic decison-making, whether it's in politics or a company. Wolfowitz may have the best of intentions, but his knowledge is less than god-like, and it seems he has succeeded in alienating a huge proportion of World Bank staff and donors, and thus provoked a flood of resignations.

In some ways, his problems represent a perfect snapshot of US administration in general. Convinced he's right, Wolfowitz has gone about achieving his aims with little regard to the counsel or feelings of others. Moreover, he's convinced he's right, even when he's wrong. The checks and balances designed to limit bad (and more broadly I guess all) decison-making in large bureacracies have been steadily removed, with predictable consequences.

Also, Wolfowitz - like so many in the US administration - can't see the forest for the trees. Convinced there's one answer to a problem - or that there's an answer at all - he vigorously pursues his aim, even in the face of failure.

Whilst I can understand his pragmatism on one level (the last month has involved much decison-making by committee, and it is slow, frustrating and equivocal much of the time) - the need to just get things done - the perils of such an approach I think are self-evident. Wolfowitz has stacked the Bank with his Republican pals, against the advice of existing staff. Lack of diversity fosters a group-think that can only be damaging to the bank, and a myopia when it comes to policy priorities.

Hmmm, this rant is at the risk of becoming longer than the article! It is long, but definitely worth a read.

Apologies

2007-02-28T22:07:00.000+11:00

So busy. Sooooooo busy, with my real job, my election job, and a wedding on the way (not mine, thank sweet jesus). Rewarding stuff (well, in two cases, no prizes for guessing which), but still I am _drained_, and the colitis seems to be staging a minor rennaissance (hopefully only temporary).

I'll try to post when at least one of the above quietens down. Plus a fish tank drama that involves yeast, and about twenty litres in the carpet. A heh. Must sleep make man go now!

YouTube Shenanigans: It's Cold Out Here!

2007-02-19T22:51:00.000+11:00

Best. Weather Report. Evah.

YouTube Shenanigans: Foosball Dynamo

2007-02-19T22:33:00.000+11:00

Lol! This is for you Sarah, after your post the other day. This has to be the most kick-arse foosball I've ever seen.

Good Boy

2007-02-19T22:13:00.000+11:00

Hmmm. I read this last week, but it was so interesting I have to post it even though it's old.

A fascinating article from NY Mag about praising children.

For a few decades, it’s been noted that a large percentage of all gifted students (those who score in the top 10 percent on aptitude tests) severely underestimate their own abilities. Those afflicted with this lack of perceived competence adopt lower standards for success and expect less of themselves. They underrate the importance of effort, and they overrate how much help they need from a parent.
When parents praise their children’s intelligence, they believe they are providing the solution to this problem. According to a survey conducted by Columbia University, 85 percent of American parents think it’s important to tell their kids that they’re smart. In and around the New York area, according to my own (admittedly nonscientific) poll, the number is more like 100 percent. Everyone does it, habitually. The constant praise is meant to be an angel on the shoulder, ensuring that children do not sell their talents short.
But a growing body of research—and a new study from the trenches of the New York public-school system—strongly suggests it might be the other way around. Giving kids the label of “smart” does not prevent them from underperforming. It might actually be causing it.

Interesting stuff. I've studied education (unit, not degree) at uni, and did five years of after school care, but I have to say I was still surprised by the huge difference types of praise can make.

That kids respond so strongly to praise doesn't surprise me at all. The little scrappers love it, and let's be honest so do adults. I guess it goes to show you how a fear of failure can shape even the youngest minds.

My parents must have done a good job: I've always pretty much believed that if you work hard enough, you can be good at anything (I know I've written about the dialectic of "genius" and how much it bothers me on this blog before).

Nonetheless, I think this article is still pause for thought in the way we interact with children; as the author notes it's hard to shake the preconception that parents should praise everything. I don't know how effectively I could do that as a parent. As a carer it was easy - but that was based partly on the assumption that parents were there for 100% support.

Moreover, I think this article is pause for thought in how we deal with adults, too. As someone who works with volunteers on a regular basis, I wonder how much this praise model holds true for them...

Personally, I like to get praised for my effort and my talent! If I had to pick one though, I would go with talent, purely because I believe any talent I do have is wholly the result of hours and hours of work. That said, when I've busted my butt on something I'm particularly experienced in, like recently with a text-based video-editing program, that recognition felt pretty good. Hmmm, interesting stuff.

What I'm Watching: A Prairie Home Companion

2007-02-19T22:00:00.000+11:00

This week's dvd podcast: A Prairie Home Companion. Basically, I think Robert Altman movies are bit like anchovies: People who like them will take them in virtually any form, but if you don't like them, nothing's ever gonna change your mind.

I like anchovies.

Revelation

2007-02-15T14:14:00.000+11:00

Interesting. I was listening to the Book Show this week, and there was a long interview with Robert Faggen, who has just edited a large collection of Robert Frost's notebooks.

Faggen's hypothesis is that Frost is a largely misunderstood writer, far from the genial meditator he's frequently taken for.

Today, I was reading Art and Letters Daily, and came across this article about the "real" Frost.

Frost's popular Yankee image, which he assiduously cultivated through readings, lectures, and even some of his poems, helped him to win the immense popularity that he enjoyed in his lifetime: four Pulitzer Prizes, a spot on the dais at the Kennedy Inaugural. Yet Trilling recognized that the aged poet would not be helped in his passage to posterity by this Norman Rockwell carapace, which could only seem more fake and dated with the years. That is why Trilling insisted on calling Frost, to his face, "a terrifying poet." Really, he had less in common with Longfellow than with Sophocles, "who made plain ... the terrible things of human life."

Trilling's remarks came in for what seems now like a surprising amount of criticism. When the New York Times reported on the speech, affronted readers wrote to suggest that Trilling should be taken "to the woodshed," while Frost consoled himself with "a nice plate of buckwheat pancakes and Vermont maple syrup." This anxious resort to the very clichés of Americana, which Trilling had decried, only proved how right he was. It was vital, for Frost's longterm artistic reputation, to separate the maple syrup from the poetry.

I enjoy Robert Frost's poetry - though I confess to not giving it the close reading Faggen's book and this article seem to call for.

What this highlights for me, though, is - hmmm - not the futility exactly, but the danger of New Criticism, and its modern-day proponents. The idea that there is a point, immovable in time where you can say, "Yes. This is authentic."

Sometimes it feels like a love affair, the feelings of admiration and delight you can have for a particular author. The sense that reading a book is a beautiful collaboration between you and someone else; a kind of game where someone spins something beautiful from the fabric of your - and their - perceptions about the world. God knows, it's something I indulge in regularly.

And yet, read something like this, and that feeling of co-creation, of meta-play can evaporate. The Frost generations of Americans played with was as much a creation as the poems themselves, it seems. In the dissonance between his public and private personae, he cultivated the arguably more fictional of the two.

But I don't think this is necessarily negative. If anything, it's a reminder for us all to go back, and look at the texts we love with a different cast of mind - we can never really finish reading anything. A source of inspiration, as well as frustration, I guess.

Gadamer talks about horizons; our horizon is the entire sum of our experiences and thoughts - ourselves - it is impossible to escape from our horizon, that is, we can never really be or understand someone else's horizon, but, it expands all the time, so horizons can fuse. What an elegant description of the reading process. Gadamer calls the fusion of horizons "true understanding".

I think about this concept often when I'm re-reading something I haven't read for years. My horizon has changed so much during that time - what will happen during the fusion now? If you view interpretation as creative - which I bloody well do - it can be quite exciting. What beautiful new understanding will take place this time? Armed with these notebooks, I'm sure you could make an exciting revision of Frost's work. As he puts it himself:

The Door in the Dark

In going from room to room in the dark,
I reached out blindly to save my face,
But neglected, however lightly, to lace
My fingers and close my arms in an arc.
A slim door got in past my guard,
And hit me a blow in the head so hard
I had my native simile jarred.
So people and things don't pair any more
With what they used to pair with before.

Frozen movement

2007-02-14T08:50:00.001+11:00

Beautiful photograpy. Denis Darzacq takes pictures of dancers in improbable positions.

I love the everyday settings of these photos. It makes them so surreal; people being sucked up into the air by alien tractor-beam.

via Kottke

2007-02-14T08:50:00.000+11:00

What I'm Watching: An Inconvenient Truth

2007-02-12T22:22:00.000+11:00

The ABC guys and I have been talking about podcasting for close to a year now. Well, I've beaten them to the punch! So long as it remains relatively easy, I shall endeavour to upload an mp3 dvd review every week - it's basically a slightly more coherent version of what I do live.

The file is around two megs, and the review itself will always be around two minutes. I don't know if anyone wants to listen to this guff, especially cause there's nothing interesting visually to accompany it, but I'll keep an eye on the stats and see if it's worthwhile.

First up is An Inconvenient Truth, and yes, I do have a strange accent. Even stranger when you consider the fact I grew up in rural Queensland and didn't go overseas till I was ten. Long after said accent appeared. Enjoy, or not, whatever really.

Food, food, food

2007-02-12T08:28:00.000+11:00

Needless to say, a lack of posting hasn't meant a lack of eating!

Here are some of the meals I havehad in the last week. I highly recommend the salad, and I made some bang-up peach and lemon icecream that I forgot to photograph, also.

This is a pizza I made during the week. The base was a little puffier than usual, but I didn't mind. It's just a salami/oregano/assorted flavours one. The other one I did was with good quality ham, capers, rocket and brie, that was good too.

This was just some steamed snapper with ginger and shao tsing wine. It was nice enough I suppose. I dunno, I find cooking with fish kinda tricky, and if you can't get ball-shakingly fresh stuff, it never tastes as good as I want it to.

Yum. Prosciutto, fig, and fetta salad, with a taragon dressing. I made this for our friends Pat and Jangers. Fresh figs are in season at the moment, and though shockingly expensive, I just can't resist grabbing some when I'm down at the shops. The colours in this salad were even richer in real life.

An oldie but a goody, I've blogged about before: Nigel Slater's lemon and basil chicken. This is easy, and very delicious. The rich sauce ( made with white wine, garlic and olive oil) is perfect for mopping up with bitter rocket.

I also made some yummy muffins last night, but that's enough photos for now!

Rain

2007-02-12T08:05:00.000+11:00

Ahhhhhhhh, this is what I woke up to this morning. Gorgeous.

Anyone who knows me will know that I love rain, and - above any other weather condition - I hate the heat.

Summer leaves me like a husk. It interferes with my sleep, leaving me writhing in an agony of wakefulness at 2 am, filling my dreams with tortured imaginings, replete with talking, and sometimes walking.

It leaves me enervated and sweaty; unmotivated and irritable. I kid you not: a big reason behind my move to Canberra back in the day came from a desire to live somewhere cold.

Rain, on the other hand. What bliss. It can never rain without reminding me of home; the comforting hiss of rain on paddocks; drenching kykuyu and running down slopes.

The stacatto percussion on our tin roof was the best lullaby I could imagine. The thick fog that enveloped the ranges and made seeing more than twenty metres a cotton-bud fantasy.

Rain is introspective, private. The whole world becomes your interior landscape in the rain. Going out walking is wonderful; a wholly private experience, streets and parks normally buslting with activity become silent graveyards. In the paddocks, cows huddle placidly under trees, scrub turkeys ruffle their feathers and try to cope as best they can, and a chorus of frogs start up a harmony you can hear from a mile away.

The second novel I tried to write when I was much younger was set entirely in the rain. Reading back on what wasn't lost in the great hard drive crash of 2000, I shudder at some of the writing, but my love for rain shines through. Any paragraph describing the weather still resonates. Every type of rain you can imagine - storm lashed sheets of water; wind-flicked, pixie-like motes dancing through the air, the steady, determined rain that beats into the ground with a grim indifference. Dozens of varieties of rain, filled with loving detail; you can practically feel the cold water running down your forehead.

I wish every day was like this, it makes my heart glow like burnished copper.

Hypocrisy, thy name is Steve Jobs

2007-02-08T07:41:00.000+11:00

From this article from the SMH:

Apple boss Steve Jobs posted an open message to record studios today, asking them to do away with security software that prevents music bought online from playing on different types of MP3 players.
Apple would "wholeheartedly" embrace eliminating Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology that prevents songs downloaded from its online iTunes music store from being played on iPod rivals, Jobs said.

Riiiiiight. This, coming from the boss of Apple. Sure, they would stop DRM. A company with some of the worst DRM out there (barring Sony's notorious 'Rootkit'), a company whose DRM is so restrictive and limited that it's actually illegal in some places.

A company that sells a player which will only let you use one media player to upload and encode your music to your player, and will only let you do so in a proprietary format that virtually no other player can play.

And it's also the company behind Quicktime and itunes, two programs that are incredibly difficult to uninstall, and when you get one, you get the other, whether you've asked for it or not (and don't get me started on the needlessly bloated size of quicktime; gives Acrobat a run for the money and that's saying something).

So forgive me if I'm a little skeptical, Steve, but I can't see Apple rushing to clear the DRM away in a hurry,and if you wanted to do that, there's plenty APple could do internally before they need to cast their gaze elsewhere. Pft.

Miracle Fruit

2007-02-08T07:24:00.000+11:00

Now this is a cool little thing - a fruit that neutralises all sour flavours, leaving you with the sweet remainder.

So-called Miracle Fruit has been around for a while:

Miracle Fruit (Sideroxylon dulcificum) was documented by an explorer named Des Marchais during an 1725 excursion to West Africa, according to Sina Najafi’s interview with Adam Leith Gollner, which can be found in the current issue of Cabinet. Marchais noticed that local tribes picked the berry off shrubs and chewed it before meals. From there, the amazing Miracle Fruit was seemingly lost in the shuffle of colonialism, and was later tested by the U.S. Army and several pharmaceutical giants before being rejected suddenly by the FDA in 1974, under mysterious, X-Files type circumstances (a “high speed car chase;” “men in sunglasses”). Gollner is working on a book examining the “fruit underworld,” including the sad odyssey of the Miracle Fruit, which is legal in many other countries. In Japan, some Weight Watchers-style meals revolve around it, and miraculin can be purchased in tablet form.

They seem to be making appearances at "fruit parties" all over the country...

The miracle fruit party was last night. I arrived to find a group of twenty-five or so curious people, a spread of citrus items, and, wrapped up in a Ziploc bag in the refrigerator, a bunch of little red fruits: the understated star of the show, miracle fruit.

They're bright red, about the size of an olive, odorless, and just a little bit soft. The center is mostly pit. To get the most of them, David explained that we should chew the pulpy part for about a minute and coat as much of our mouth as possible with it. Then we'd be free to spit or swallow and experience the magic of miraculin.

But what happens when you eat them???

Limes tasted like lime candy, lemons like lemonade, and meyer lemons and red grapefruit were some of the most tasty things I've ever eaten in my life. On the other hand, pineapples and kiwi were cloying, coffee was mostly unchanged, and wine was just plain disgusting.

I also got several different stouts and bitter beers. Guinness was good with it, but the real stars were the more serious stouts. Samuel Smith's Oatmeal Stout (my favorite beer, maybe?) was heavenly, and Brooklyn Brewery's Black Chocolate Stout (a good, but normally very bitter beer) was amazingly smooth and creamy. They both seemed to have more body, and more of a flavorful sweetness than stout normally has. The lovely bitter notes, again, were not entirely masked, so unlike what the miracle fruit did to wine, stout was still stout. It maintained all of its characteristics, the miracle fruit merely altered the dynamics of the characteristics, emphasizing the chocolatey, earthy, malty, and fermenty flavors, while smoothing out the bitterness. Many people in attendance described the chocolate stout as tasting "just like ice cream."

Sign me up, man, sounds intriguing.

Via BoingBoing

How to be a freelancer

2007-02-05T22:41:00.000+11:00

God knows why you would want to, but this is a pretty good guide if you're interested in becoming a freelance writer.

My own experience broadly tallies with the writer's own, though I would shave that list of important things down even further.

The important things that helped me were undoubtedly:

Pick your pitches - make sure the publication you approach is likely to print you and your story. Experience, subject, length and style are obviously important.
Be a business - claim everything under the sun, invoice properly and harrass late payers
Send out pitches all the time
Understand the brief - really part of the first tip.
Meet your deadlines.

Really, all my experience comes under the rubrik of professionalism. Act serious, and you'll get taken seriously. Also, I reckon be hard on yourself - it's a lot easier to take internal criticism than an editor's later down the track.

Too easy really. Oh yeah, and if you really want to make a living, be prepared to be poor, and spend about two thirds of your time either writing fluff, or worse: betraying principles you hold dear. Whoopee! ;)

Coffee and milk

2007-02-05T22:32:00.000+11:00

Irene Muller takes some very cool pictures of milk and coffee. I love the flower-like shapes of these. Her other galleries are also worth a gander, there's some cool stuff there.

Interesting Times.

2007-02-05T22:04:00.000+11:00

Sorry for the absence, my awesome friends Emma and Jason came up over the weekend, and so there was digusting amounts of food and Anchorman referencing. Regular transmission to resume, though expect a few changes in the future.

Part of the changes will be due to the fact that I have, much to my surprise, been hired as part of the NSW Democrats team for both the federal and state elections this year. It's a contract role, and thankfully I won't have to leave my current job, but I'm certainly going to be kept quite, quite busy until well into October.

I'm excited and nervous about this. The reason why I joined the party was to make a difference, and it's difficult to imagine a position where I would be able to make a bigger one. I have no illusions about the party's chances in either election (very long odds federally, reasonable for the legislative council) - but beliefs aren't a popularity contest, at least not with many of us.

So I'm excited because I'm doing something for the things I believe in, and this represents a tremendous opportunity for me - giving me a whole new set of challenges and experiences. Real, paid work for a political party's campaign is going to be dynamite on my resume, and is a really interesting direction for me to explore in the future.

I'm nervous because I sincerely hope that I have the skills to make a difference. Though I've studied politics in arguably the best university for it in the country, and worked for a variety of ngo's, peak bodies, volunteer organisations, etc. I have never worked for a political party, nor for an election campaign.

Change can be the hardest thing of all to effect - being right, or winning an argument isn't enough in this context, it's not even relevant. I have no doubt there will be much apathy, anger, disorganisation, opposition, and limited resources to be overcome, within and without, over the next eight or so months. I sincerely hope that I can do it. I wanted to make a difference, so now I just have to make one. Wish me luck.

I'll blog about what I'm doing as much as possible; hopefully as I learn new things, some people might be inspired to read them. I have no plans to stop reading articles, books or cooking, however, so that's still going to make it as well. I thought about splitting the blog, but damn it, a fool is a melange of ingredients, so things continue as they are.

Interesting times ahead, and to think I was worried 2007 might mean a scaling back of my ambitions!

I think therefore I what?

2007-01-31T14:03:00.000+11:00

Great article at Time Magazine by Steven Pinker. It's all about consciousness.

It shouldn't be surprising that research on consciousness is alternately exhilarating and disturbing. No other topic is like it. As René Descartes noted, our own consciousness is the most indubitable thing there is. The major religions locate it in a soul that survives the body's death to receive its just deserts or to meld into a global mind. For each of us, consciousness is life itself, the reason Woody Allen said, "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying." And the conviction that other people can suffer and flourish as each of us does is the essence of empathy and the foundation of morality.

Man, this is a well-written piece. Some people pay Pinker out for his pop-science, but I think he regularly demonstrates the very best assets of writing for a wide audience. His work is always accessible, tremendously lucid prose combining with fascintating ideas about the underpinnings of life.

It's a slightly scary thought, that we're really nothing more than the sum of our brain impulses. That personality is a concept that seems to exist only because we have one body to cram said impulses into. It highlights the malleability of personality, I guess, which - though intimidating - is probably good thing. After all, the capacity for change can make a very big difference in a person's life, and the lives of those around them.

If for no other reason (of which there are a plethora), this is why we should never have a death penalty.

The War on Tranquility.

2007-01-31T13:35:00.000+11:00

Good piece over at the L.A Times about the War on Terror, and the west's hysterical reaction to 9/11.

IMAGINE THAT on 9/11, six hours after the assault on the twin towers and the Pentagon, terrorists had carried out a second wave of attacks on the United States, taking an additional 3,000 lives. Imagine that six hours after that, there had been yet another wave. Now imagine that the attacks had continued, every six hours, for another four years, until nearly 20 million Americans were dead. This is roughly what the Soviet Union suffered during World War II, and contemplating these numbers may help put in perspective what the United States has so far experienced during the war against terrorism.

It also raises several questions. Has the American reaction to the attacks in fact been a massive overreaction? Is the widespread belief that 9/11 plunged us into one of the deadliest struggles of our time simply wrong? If we did overreact, why did we do so? Does history provide any insight?

It's not to long; really worth a read. Is funny, because I was having a conversation with mum - spurred by the Le Carre I just finished - about this only two days ago.

Essentially, I was saying that it shocked me how quickly we in the west were able to find a new, global threat and implacable enemy after the end of the cold war. I didn't realise it at the time (the wall came down when I was eight, so I wasn't really cognisant of the tensions), but the nineties must have felt quite unusual to those who had lived through the preceding decades.

I also remember, when George Bush first came into power, how I worried that the U.S was going to frame China as their new global enemy (cf. the spy plane incident, wow, it seems so long ago now).
But, terrorists came along and all that disappeared under a wave of fear. I also remember how it was around that time, that tabloids stopped reporting on Asian gangs and started focussing on Muslims, and how increasingly hysterical, divisive racist and ignorant this focus has become five years on.

Now, I hear people spouting all kinds of stupid shit (example: Person at work confides to me that she thinks Muslims "are a dirty race. They're just dirty, you know?"), and I wonder how she can fail to recall that she really didn't give a shit about Muslims six years ago, and what happened to all the Vietnamese gangs who were terrorising hard-working Aussies out in the suburbs back then? And the wogs, wops and spico's before that? And the Baltics before that?

Prior governments, to their credit, didn't try shifting the country's collective fears onto Vietnamese, though (at least not in policy). Things have changed in that respect, and not for the better.

And now, I stand at the train station each morning gazing morosely at the huge piles of garbage sloped against the platform because someone would want to blow my sleepy suburb's station up, and so there are no bins anymore. I can't take toothpaste on a flight because I might want to blow that up - even if there are far more practical ways of doing so than unstable and unreliable gel explosives. Australia and America have trooped off to Iraq like the League of Flying Dickwads, and created a mind-blowingly expensive all-out catastrophe there. I see things like Cronulla, replete with a rank brand of nationalism better suited to Berlin, 1938. So-called Muslim Extremists get hammered, whilst the legion of White Extremist groups in Australia get off scott-free, and poor David Hicks is left rotting in a cell for another however-many-years.

Do I think terrorism is over-rated? Fuck yes, and I resent the efforts of those in authority and narrow-minded racists, scared of their own shadows because they look black, to make me afraid to catch a plane or train, walk in certain suburbs, associate with certain people, and think and feel certain things, nothing so much as, "What a load of bullshit this all is. " I resent that, and the fact that if I do think it's all bullshit, I'm somehow branded as UnAustralian, or worse.

Meanwhile, the CSIRO tells us that Sydney's going to be so hot in fifty years that you could fry an egg on the pavement and the sand at the beach is going to turn into glass. But that's not a global threat, that's not going to cause thousands of deaths, and threaten our "Aussie" way of life. It's the terrorists; they're the ones we need to worry about, spend money on, villify.

What a crock.

Good news

2007-01-28T19:31:00.000+11:00

OTTAWA, Canada (AP) -- Canada's prime minister apologized to Maher Arar on Friday and announced the government would compensate him C$10.5 million (US$8.9 million) for its role in his deportation from the U.S. to Syria, where he was tortured while held in prison for nearly a year.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper again called on the U.S. government to remove the Ottawa telecoms engineer from any of its no-fly or terrorist watchlists and reiterated that Ottawa would keep pressing Washington to clear Arar's name.

"We think the evidence is absolutely clear and that the United States should in good faith remove Mr. Arar from the list," Harper told a news conference in Ottawa. "We don't intend to either change or drop our position."

Interesting, I read something like this and wonder how Mamdouh Habib is going in his efforts to get recognition from our government of their disgusting acquiescence in his illegal detention and torture - let alone compensation.

Props to Canada - being governed by a conservative party, also, let the record reflect - for having the cojones to own up to their mistake and pay for it, even if a court effectively forced them to. No one forced them to do it so unabashedly.

What I'm reading at the moment: Our Game

2007-01-28T18:58:00.000+11:00

I finished a John Le Carre novel, Our Game, on Friday with relatively mixed feelings. Le Carre is a good writer, with a singular vision, so it's very hard not to respond to that.

At the same time, he's made the characters in this novel so unlikable I ended up on a bit of a downer by time I closed the covers! It's a good book, I guess; just not a very likeable one.

The book - not surprisingly - tells the story of a spy. Tim Cranmer has been made redundant with the ending of the Cold War. He has retired to the country with the beautiful, much younger Emma and is determined to put his past behind him.

Unfortunately, the former double agent he looked after, Larry Pettifer, has other plans. When the novel opens, Larry has absconded with Emma and thirty million pounds of Russian government money. Where have they gone? Does Emma realise what kind of men she has become entagled with? Tim must make a journey through his own past, as well as the post-communist political landscape to find the answers.

If you're familiar at all with Le Carre novels, you know you can expect three things: betrayal, failure of government systems and the death of an innocent. Our Game doesn't disappoint in this regard, although unlike some other Le Carre novels, I'm not sure what else is on offer here.

Obviously his prose, story and characterisation are always good. The plot takes some interesting turns before petering out towards the end, and the character of Tim - the spy who's always fought for the good guys he didn't believe in, now even more lost - is quite solid. The problem is, he's just not very likeable.

And if Tim isn't likeable, Larry and Emma are even worse. Larry, an inconsistent rogue, arguably ruined by Tim's machinations, is alternately hypocritical and selfish whilst Emma barely more than a cut-out; mostly a walking cliche or worse; just an idiot.

Though I liked so much about the novel, these unlikeable characters really killed me. Compared to the avuncular George Smiley, Le Carre missed the mark here. Nonetheless, I still think that in years to come he will be considered one of the twentieth century's great writers, evoking (hopefully) some uniquely twentieth century concerns.

Smoking

2007-01-27T12:30:00.000+11:00

I can't give a via for this one, because I've seen it all over the net in the last couple of days. Nonetheless, too beautiful to ignore.

These photos of smoke by Graham Jeffrey are just gorgeous. He photoshops them to get the colours, (with saturation and hue,basically), I'm such a fuddy duddy I wish he didn't, but they're still achingly beautiful and delicate.

If they come here they should learn the language.

2007-01-27T11:27:00.000+11:00

Happy Australia Day weekend. Whatever. I've never really bought into nationalism/patriotism. To me it just seems like a slightly watered down form of racism, basically. I mean, why would we think, as Australians, that we're better than a bunch of other people we've never even met? No thanks. However, that's not even the can of worms I want to open.

Something that has regularly been pissing me off for a while now is this whole "if they come over here, they [insert minority here] should be prepared to learn the language". I've heard this bullshit schtick from the regular cadre of racists and pig-shit ignorant 'patriots' that you would expect, but I've also had a couple of tussles with otherwise quite reasonable people.

It drives me crazy, for a couple of reasons. Mainly because such a statement is built on a number of false premises.

Firstly, 99% of the time, it's coming from the mouths of people who barely speak one lanauge, let alone two. The idea that learning english is a bit like learning to ride a bike obviously reigns supreme in their minds. Sadly, it's not quite that easy.

But more seriously, I think people who believe in this forget one thing, and assume another.

What they forget is that we live in a largely libertarian society, and in a libertarian society, the rule is basically that you can do whatever the hell you want, as long as it's not against the law. This is a big principle in western liberal thought, but you know, when it comes to the pakis or whatever, it seems to get thrown out the window.

Just as the government doesn't tell people what religion they should practise, what clothes they should wear, music they should listen to, etc. etc. it has no right to tell people what language they should speak. People should be allowed to decide for themselves; it is their right, as citizens and individuals.

The inevitable reposte to this goes something along the lines of community engagement. "But speaking [insert minority langauge here] is divisive. It leads to segreation and a lack of community engagement."

Firstly, who gives a shit? Libertarian society, freedom to choose, etc. If people don't want to learn a language, for community engagement or no, that is their choice. We really don't have the right to go shoving langauge choices down someone else's throat because of an ill-formed notion of community engagement.

Secondly, the whole premise is bullshit. The idea that pretty much anyone interacts with a 'wider' community (wider than what??) is largely untrue. Time and time again, sociologists have shown that people tend to associate themselves with others who are as demographically close to them as possible.

Being able to speak english is neither here nor there with that figure. Rich people tend to hang out with rich people, poor with poor, one level of education with the same level. In asking people who do not have english as a first language to engage with the whole spectrum of the community, we are asking them for a standard that we do not apply to ourselves.

There is also a nasty undercurrent of racism underpinning this concept. The unspoken implication to all this is that a community that doesn't speak english is not an Australian one. A community that does not speak english is assumed to be antagonistic to one that does. It is a dangerous community; isolated, suspicious.

This is a ridiculous and racist view. As someone who has spent time in several communities where english plays a small to non-existent role, I refute the idea that to 'be' Australian you need to speak English.

As much as our prime minister and other racists would like otherwise, there are in fact a huge number of Australians who do not regularly speak English. These people are Australian, their citizenship is not something that disappears because they speak a different langauge, and their values - like it or not - are Australian values, because they are Australian.

These are vibrant, fecund communities. They are not isolated, cut off from the main, somehow poorer. They are communities that participate in all the activities that somehow make one 'Australian' in the eyes of racists: barbeques, watching sport, going to the beach. More importantly, they are communities that vote, pay tax, accept welfare, read papers and listen to the news etc. etc.

It is this concept of community that we should reflect on during Australia Day. Not some homogenous, blindingly white vision of Australia and what Australian values are, as if there is such a thing, and as if the government - or anyone - has the right to tell people what to believe in.

The hysteria Australia has descended to - started by September 11, dutifully fed and fertilised by our government - has distorted and warped what we should be celebrating, not just on Australia Day, but every day.

I remember in the nineties, that advertising campaign, "I am, you are, we are Australian." I can't imagine seeing that ad today; it would fly in the face of what our government is telling us to think about others and what they believe in. But for all its cheese I liked it. It was a celebration - not a tolerance, or worse an outright rejection - of difference, and it saddens me to see that attitude ridiculed as somehow weak and naive. I feel it is an attitude of great strength and generosity. That's the part of Australia - of the world - that I am proud to be a part of.

Lamb Salad with pomegranate jus

2007-01-27T10:56:00.000+11:00

Another salad. My deep love for yellow grape tomatoes must be quite apparent by now. This one was even better than the last I think.

a lean lamb fillet, salt, pepper, coarsely ground coriander seed, some vege oil and juice from half a lemon
60 mls red wine vinegar, about 150 mls pomegranate juice (you'd be suprised, most grocery stores have it now), a teaspoon of white sugar, one star anise.
lettuce, grape tomatoes (hurrah!), cucumber, some snow peas, a rather firm, tart plum and half a salad onion
some hommus to garnish

Season the lamb with the salt, pepper and coriander. Depending on its thickness, you may want to slice it long ways in half. Thin is what we're going for here. Let it sit there while you wash and cut the lettuce and other salad components.

Heat a pan up to medium-high, add the vege oil and just a couple of drops of sesame, and when it's nearly smoking add the lamb. It will sizzle up nicely. After about a minute on one side, flip it over, keeping the high quite high, and squeeze out the lemon over the fillet.

Because this cut of lamb is relatively fatless, it will soak up that lemon greedily, leaving it infused with a gorgeous lemony tang.

When it's still touched with pinkness in the middle, pull it out and put it on a plate. Add the red wine vinegar to the pan and deglaze all those sticky bits.

After maybe a minute of that, add the sugar, pomegranate juice and star anise. Keep the heat high - it will probably take around ten minutes until the jus is reduced is enough. (you can ditch the star anise at about five).

Jus is just a vinegar-based reduction sauce. The kind of thickness you want is like cheap balsalmic vinegar: slightly tacky. Once it's reached that point, take the pan off the heat.

Slice you lamb thinly, mix it in with the other salad ingredient, drizzle the jus on top and with a spoonful of hommus, you're in heaven! Yummmmmmmmmmmy!

Quote of the day: Tony Snow

2007-01-24T22:59:00.000+11:00

From Foreign Policy's excellent blog.

Wonkette previews tonight's State of the Union address with a snippet from Tony Snow's press briefing yesterday:
Q Have you seen [the speech]?
MR. SNOW: Yes.
Q Is it any good?
MR. SNOW: Yes, of course it's good. (Laughter.)
Q Does it have anything new in it?
MR. SNOW: Yes, it does.
Q What's the best part?
Q Really? I mean —
MR. SNOW: You know, it's difficult to say. It's like looking in a drawer full of diamonds.

Unfortunately, they're blood diamonds.

A drawer full of diamonds. That's fantastic.

What scientists wished we knew.

2007-01-24T22:45:00.000+11:00

Hmmm. Interesting. The Guardian asked 250 scientists what they thought everyone should learn about science.

Seth Lloyd Professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
You do not have to be a scientist to do science; you can be a child, a computer, or an intelligent rat. As long as you can verify a result, it is part of science.
Freeman Dyson Emeritus professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton
Science is about uncertainty. We do not yet know the answers to most of the important questions — nature is smarter than we are. But if we are patient, and not in too much of a hurry, then science gives us a good way to find the answers.
Richard Dawkins Charles Simonyi professor of the public understanding of science at the University of Oxford, and a science writer and broadcaster
I wish everyone understood Darwinian natural selection, and its enormous explanatory power, as the only known explanation of "design". The world is divided into things that look designed, like birds and airliners; and things that do not look designed, like rocks and mountains. Things that look designed are divided into those that really are designed, like submarines and tin openers; and those that are not really designed, like sharks and hedgehogs. Darwinian natural selection, although it involves no true design at all, can produce an uncanny simulacrum of true design. An engineer would be hard put to decide whether a bird or a plane was the more aerodynamically elegant.

There's lots more there. Interestingly, most of the answers are based on analysis. Scientists, it seems, wish that everyone learnt how to think well, a noble enough aim, but my favourite is the last one:

Gerardus 't Hooft Professor of theoretical physics at Utrecht University and joint recipient of the Nobel prize in physics, for his work on the quantum structure of electroweak interactions
Is it really true that the world wants to hear only one thing about science? And then continue after that, with its ongoing religious, superstitious and political disputes? Maybe the world wants to hear only one thing from me. What could that be? All the important things that the world has already heard from my colleagues might be incomplete — my colleagues may have forgotten to tell the world something. What could that be? I do not know.

Beautiful.

It's hard out there for a level 7 Pimp

2007-01-24T22:40:00.000+11:00

Facile posts tonight, I'm tired, I had an interview about a potential job with the Democrats so I didn't get home til late.

This cracked me up. A guy turns to prostitution to make his world of warcraft worthwhile....

My free trial was set to end at midnight. I hadn't earned any gold whatsoever, and my character wasn't advancing quickly enough to turn a profit. I knew what I had to do. I bravely started clicking.

Log off.
Create new character.
Human race.
Female.
Warrior.
Blonde.
Name: "VillageBike"
Accept.
Enter world.

The only tool you wil ever need....

2007-01-24T22:35:00.000+11:00

Saw this on Neat-O-Rama. Hilarious.

Smoked Salmon and Dill Cannelloni

2007-01-23T22:21:00.000+11:00

Yum. This was good. Ricotta. Is there anything it *can't* do?

a pack of smoked salmon, half a bunch of dill (or so), around 400gms ricotta (err on the side of generosity)
cannelloni pasta
A tomato pasta sauce (I ain't telling you how to make that, you can just buy a bottle if you want)
plain flour, 2tbs butter, at least 400 mls milk.

First up, the bechamel. Melt the butter in a pot, then add the flour, stir it around on medium heat until the flour is cooked a bit, slightly translucent (making a roux; the world's most versatile gravy base). Then slowly add milk. There really are only three things you need to remember with bechamel: don't put too much milk in at once, stir it constantly, and don't put the heat on too high.

As the sauce thickens, add more and more milk until it gets to the point where it's not thickening any more. For lasagne and cannelloni, you want a pretty thick sauce; clag-like, dare I say it...

Good, sauce is done.

Now mix up the ricotta, salmon and dill, with just a little salt and pepper for seasoning (more pepper). That's the filling.

Stuff the cannelloni tubes with the it. I found my fingers were best for this, though it is a slightly messy operation. When they're full, put down a layer of the tomato sauce, a little white, and then the tubes, side by side.

Top with more tomato sauce, a healthy layer of bechamel, and then some cheese (staying with the smokey theme, I used some heavenly Tilba smoked applebox, but tasty would be fine, or pecorino, etc.).

Bang it into a preheated oven (180') for no more than forty minutes, and you're done! Easy, and really delicious; I would be tempted to use something like this as the main course if I was having lots of dinner guests over in summer. It's still classy, but wildly easy to prepare and you can do it hours earlier if you want.

This Little Piggy Went to Market.

2007-01-23T21:35:00.000+11:00

Anybody who eats pork that isn't free-range should read this article from Rolling Stone.

I have the utmost respect for vegetarians, and I believe that if you do eat meat (like me), you should at least make an attempt to ensure the animal who died for you lived a relatively good life. Free-range bacon is widely available in grocery stores, and if you have no excuse for not buying it.

A lot of pig shit is one thing; a lot of highly toxic pig shit is another. The excrement of Smithfield hogs is hardly even pig shit: On a continuum of pollutants, it is probably closer to radioactive waste than to organic manure. The reason it is so toxic is Smithfield's efficiency. The company produces 6 billion pounds of packaged pork each year. That's a remarkable achievement, a prolificacy unimagined only two decades ago, and the only way to do it is to raise pigs in astonishing, unprecedented concentrations.
Smithfield's pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs -- anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.

The temperature inside hog houses is often hotter than ninety degrees. The air, saturated almost to the point of precipitation with gases from shit and chemicals, can be lethal to the pigs. Enormous exhaust fans run twenty-four hours a day. The ventilation systems function like the ventilators of terminal patients: If they break down for any length of time, pigs start dying.

That's just the start. Do read the whole thing.