Sausage roll madness

With just 23 days to go until the Koh Samui Adventure Race, it’s articles like these that just send my fat-boy instincts well off the radar.

The SMH published an article this week in Good Living on where to get the best sausage rolls.

With recipes such as traditional pork and beef (with mace and nutmeg), lamb and pine-nut (with parsley, lemon and mustard), pork (with fennel and grated carrot), and lamb and harissa (with almonds, currants and poppy seeds), it’s one of the few times I’m glad I’m so far away from home! It would be carnage.

So where can you find the best sausage rolls around Sydney (according to Good Living)?

• Berry Sourdough Bakery and Café, Berry
• Summer Hill Village Patisserie, Summer Hill
• Bourke Street Bakery, Marrickville

Any other suggestions? What about the bakery on the way back up to Coffs?

Meils – please do an intelligence mission for me on the Marrickville one and report back…if it’s any good, I’m thinking we should go on an excursion there next time I’m home…

A foodie’s rant

Gloriously titled, the article ’10 things I hate about chew’ runs through a number of Simon Thomsen’s pet hates when dining out. A wonderfully insightful piece on the state of dining in Australia - the bloke can write too!

Meils – take notice!

Some of the funnier pieces included:

3. Seasoning. Also known as The Pepper Grinder. A growing number of restaurants don't offer any salt and pepper on the table. That's fine - the chef should season, but bringing a pepper grinder the size of a nuclear warhead to the table and asking if we want some before we've tasted the food is inane. I ask for it to be left on the table and promise not to steal it.

6. Overblown menu descriptions. Sometimes it sounds like the ingredients are having sex in a Barbara Cartland novel.

Mulesing

Interesting segment from the ABC's Bush Telegraph on mulesing from last Friday...

Listen in here.

I think I need to Take 5

On page 69 of this week’s Take 5 magazine, a social journal of high repute, you will find a picture of Clare, a surfboard and a mysterious-looking orb (I’ve previously blogged the photo).

My mate Millgate submitted the picture on my behalf into the journal’s resident psychic Jenny Smedley, asking her what the orb in the photo means for us both.

As you can see in photo to the right, it sounds like there’s a baby on the way…

Panda PR

It's panda-monium in Northern Thailand at the moment.

The Chiang Mai Zoo has painted their elephants to look like pandas in a PR attempt to help remind Thais of the plight of the national symbol. Not sure if this is brilliant, weird, animal cruelty or all of the above.

As background, the Thai public went absolutely nuts after a rare baby panda was born in Thailand in late May this year. Since then, there's been a panda frenzy amongst the Thai public with panda pens, panda screensavers, panda mobile covers, a panda song and other assorted panda accessories on sale left right and centre!

Golf's got it right

From last weekend's Fitzfiles:

I WANT to pen a paean on golf. In what other sport can you get anything remotely close to the scene we witnessed at the British Open last weekend? I mean, a legend of the game such as Tom Watson - whose last major win was 26 years ago! - taking on the world's best, including not only Tiger Woods, but a 17-year-old from Japan, a 16-year-old from Italy, other players of all ages from as far afield as Colombia, Argentina, Denmark, Sweden, South Africa, Spain and Fiji … and getting within a single shot of winning the whole tournament! Not one of them threw a tantrum; not one raised hell in local nightclubs before or after their rounds, all behaved impeccably. The sporting theatre of the whole thing was spectacular, and there were no corporate billboards flashing, no logos emblazoned on the greens, no nuttin'. In all the codes in all the world, golf is the big-time sport that has got it absolutely right, and Watson's achievement last weekend served to highlight it as never before.

The internet, news and democracy

Fascinating article from this week's Economist on the future of media...what impact will the internet have on not only traditional newspapers, news and advertising, but also democracy...

...Technological change has destroyed all sorts of once-popular products, from the handloom to the Walkman, and the world has mostly been better for it. But news is not just a product: the press is the fourth estate, a pillar of the polity. Journalists investigate and criticise governments, thus helping voters decide whether to keep them or sack them. Autocracies can function perfectly well without news, but democracies cannot. Will the death of the daily newspaper—the main source of information for most educated people for at least the past century, the scourge of corrupt politicians, the conscience of nations — damage democracy?...

Read the full article here.

Romanian handbags

Can Facebook make money?

I just enjoyed a delicious spag bol lunch and an inquisitive article from a recent edition of Fortune magazine.

Interviewing Facebook’s majority owner and the company CEO, the article asks a few questions about the business viability of Facebook, how marketers are currently using the site as a new consumer channel, and alludes to where Facebook will be in a couple of years time.

For those with no idea of how Facebook works, the article also provides a bit of a cheat sheet on the different components of the social networking site.

Check it out here!

Think you're tough?

Have a go at this bloke…

(From SMH online, courtesy of Clare)

'Ninja' kangaroo terrorises family in bed

Not a bird, nor a plane, but a kangaroo has crashed through the bedroom window of a Canberra family's home before terrorising its unsuspecting occupants.

The family, from the suburb of Garran in Canberra's south, were awoken in the early hours of Sunday morning when their pet dog began barking from the garden.

Moments later, a kangaroo burst through a three-metre high window of the house's master bedroom and onto the bed where Beat Ettlin, his partner Verity Beman and their nine-year-old
daughter, Beatrix, lay.

"My initial thought when I was half awake was [that] it's a lunatic ninja coming through the window," Mr Ettlin told The Associated Press.

"It seems about as likely as a kangaroo breaking in."

While the family took refuge under the blankets, the injured animal proceeded to jump on top of them, gouging holes in the furniture and smearing blood all over the walls.

The next thing Mr Ettlin heard was his 10-year-old son Leighton screaming from his bed: "There's a 'roo in my room!"

"I thought, this can be really dangerous for the whole family now," the 42-year-old said.

A chef, originally from the Swiss city of Stans, Mr Ettlin followed the thrashing and bleeding two-metre tall marsupial and wrestled it into a headlock before dragging it down the hallway and out the front door.

Left wearing just his shredded underpants and with scratch marks on his leg and buttocks, Mr Ettlin described himself as "lucky".

"I had just my Bonds undies on. I felt vulnerable," he said.

Porterhouse or Peking Duck?

An excellent article from this morning's SMH online.

Peter Hartcher discusses the diplomatic wrestling between the US and China and the influence their differing economic and political ideologies are having on their respective superpower statuses.

See it here: China flexes, and the US catches a chilly reminder

Giving 110%...

A funny little opinion piece from this morning's SMH Online about language and sport.

Click here.

Thailand politics: What the?

Wondering what’s going on in Thailand at the moment?

Clare and I have received countless messages, texts and emails asking if we are safe from Thailand’s chaotic current political situation.

In a nutshell, there has been some violent and aggressive protests happening at the moment, with a group trying to oust an apparently corrupt but recently elected government, all in the name of democracy. There has been at least one reported death and 48 people injured from the protests.

To be honest, I haven’t seen much of it. I’ve merely felt the subtle shockwaves emanating from the protest’s epicentre about 6kms north of the area where we live and work – mainly in the form of reduced traffic, lunches with Clare (she had a couple of days off) and an increasingly crappy exchange rate.

The issue has undoubtedly been the talk of the town over the last couple of weeks, and with international reports covering the more outrageous of protest scenes, Thailand’s image is suffering immeasurably.

Amidst all of the images of machetes, marble guns and military, how can we distill what really is happening???

Well, I started to pull together my take on the events thus far…halfway through I read an article courtesy of The Economist which came out today. The article provides an excellent analysis of the current political environment and perfectly sums up my views on the situation. Here’s a slightly cut down selection:

WORSE THAN A COUP
Sep 4th 2008

An authoritarian rabble should not be allowed to turf out a deeply flawed but popularly elected government

STANDING up for democracy sometimes entails standing up for some unappealing democrats. Thailand’s pugnacious prime minister, Samak Sundaravej, is an especially hard man to defend. A ferocious rightist, Mr Samak was accused of inciting the policemen and vigilantes who slaughtered dozens of unarmed student protesters in Bangkok in 1976. On becoming prime minister following the election last December that restored democratic rule after a 2006 coup, Mr Samak chose for his cabinet some of the most unsavoury figures linked to the government of Thaksin Shinawatra, the prime minister deposed in the coup. But with the army on the streets of Bangkok again, Mr Samak is for once, if not in the right, then at least less wrong than those calling for his head.

His government is deeply flawed. But it would be wrong and dangerous if the authoritarian rabble who have seized Government House in Bangkok forced it out of office. After violent clashes between supporters and opponents of the government, Mr Samak this week declared a state of emergency in Bangkok.

If the protesters, the woefully misnamed People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD), do succeed, democracy in Thailand — not so long ago a beacon, by Asian standards, of pluralistic politics — will be in grave danger.

PAD...argue that the rural masses who favour Mr Thaksin and Mr Samak are too “ill-educated” to use their votes sensibly. This overlooks an inconvenient electoral truth: the two prime ministers had genuinely popular policies, such as cheap health care and credit.

The palace and a Burmese road to ruin

As in the build-up to the 2006 coup, PAD leaders are trying to oust a popular government on the bogus pretext of “saving” Thailand’s revered King Bhumibol from a supposed republican plot. Some of the PAD protesters reportedly believe their sit-in has the crown’s tacit backing.

In the official version of modern Thai history, the king is the great defender of peace and democracy, who comes to the rescue at moments of crisis. Now would seem to be one such moment: some wise words from the king could do much to defuse tension.

Thais like to believe they are good at seeking compromise to avoid conflict. But there has been little sign of compromise in the past three years, and there is now the risk of a bad one.

It’s really just a case of which is the lesser of two bad situations – stick by a democratically-elected, but corrupt, government representing the views of the majority of Thais; or dissolve Thailand’s fragile democratic foundations by bowing to the violent and stubborn demands of a large minority group trying to gain influence in a seemingly corrupt political environment.

Bush blokes battling

According to Mount Isa’s mayor, times are tough in the Australian bush at the moment, especially if you’re a hetero bloke living in the town.

This from BBC online…

The mayor of a remote Australian mining town has come under fire after saying
that female "ugly ducklings" might benefit from its shortage of women.

John Molony told a newspaper last week that "with five blokes to every
girl, may I suggest that beauty-disadvantaged women should proceed to Mount
Isa".

The council has since been swamped with complaints from both men
and women.

But Mr Molony has refused to apologise for the remarks,
saying he was "telling it like it is" in the Queensland town.

With a supposed ratio of 5:1, I can’t help but wonder why Cr Molony hasn’t used the opportunity to sell the town’s man-tourism…just think about the $$$ that could be made from conducting tours for single gay men looking for their own ‘brokeback bloke’ holiday fling!

You must be kidneying

Last year I took the piss in a post about how much my body would be worth with a humourous little online test called the 'cadaver calculator'.

This morning, I feel like a bit of a boob.

Page three of The Straits Times this morning features a couple of stories about a 26 year-old Indonesian bloke who will go to jail after selling one of his kidneys for 186 million rupiah ($AUD17,000).

In Indonesia, that amount of money equates to a staggering 16.5 years of hard labour - his previous occupation. After being layed off six months prior, he needed the money to support his parents and family.

The sentencing judge was reportedly quite lenient with his sentencing, taking into account his poor background, remarking "when he was identified by the syndicate as a potential donor, he was approached with an offer which for a person of his social and economic background would have been difficult to resist."

And it's not an isolated case. About a fortnight ago, The Taipei Times reported on a Vietnamese bloke who died after selling one of his kidneys in China. He went through with the ordeal because he didn't have enough money to ask his girlfriend's family for her hand in marriage, a customary cultural practice in Vietnam.

Something I'll keep in mind next time I think about whinging about the cost of beers in Singapore.

Surfing superstars

On the world's largest suspension bridge...

Clare and I had exhausted the natural tourism of KL, so we decided to go for somewhere a little more manufactured - Sunway Lagoon, reportedly the world's largest water park. It may have also been the world's largest collection of seedy Indian men leering at Clare and other women in their swimming costumes...

To get to Sunway, you need to catch a 25min cab out of town to this gigantuous shopping mall in the middle of nowhere.

Seriously, this place was massive. If there was ever a hell for a man being dragged by his girlfriend around the shops, this would be it. It's like a spiraled maze of fiery commercial torment.

Inside the shopping estate is the other bastion of devilish commerce and trade - Sunway Lagoon Theme park.

The main attraction of Sunway Lagoon for Clare and I was their man-made surf wave.

I was all limbered up and excited that morning, knowing that many of the sub-continental tourists we were to share the park with could barely swim, let alone surf. It was going to be a great day - we had a good chance of getting a nice long, unique surfing experience.

Oh, but one problem, the wave pool was closed to the public.

Shut the gates, put your cossies away, don't bother buying the wax...bloody closed....

Cerrado...被关闭...Chiuso...закрытый...閉じられます...

I was nonetheless pretty disappointed.

Clare had heard that there was a surfing demonstration on at noon, so we thought we'd go for a bit of a look anyway.

When we got there, we saw four lifeguards, of varying abilities on the board surfing for a gaggle of TV cameras, positioned across various parts of the lagoon.

TV3 Malaysia had set up shop for a live outside broadcast to the nation - similar to a 'Great Outdoors' style of broadcast.

Clare and I cheekily asked if we could have a surf, not thinking they'd say yes...until the producer gave the OK!!!! Yeah!

So we ended up getting the surf AND being the featured surfers on a live Malaysian national lifestyle program. Better give Quiksilver a call to arrange some sponsorship...

To be honest, that was probably the highlight of the day...the rest of the park was pretty lame, but there were many kids and women in their full hijab seeming to have fun on the slides.

This is a picture of the lagoon from the suspension bridge...note the massive hotels and shopping centre in the background.

Clare flying high on a hydraulic raptor ride.

A Canklism chuckle

This from Pharmacy Daily:


Be vigilant, people.

Sunny days, for Mike Bailey in this week's Mosman Daily

Check this letter to the editor out!

Cliche count: 5

And for the record, I haven't blacked out my name to keep filthy bully-boy Liberal sympathisers from knocking down my door - just thought it's not something I'd like to post on the internet...

So where to from here? Well, it's all about restoring the balance, so Willis has tasked me with getting another letter in the Mosman Daily equally taking the piss in support of Mike's main opponent Joe Hockey.

However, I'm most certainly not the only person in my family to be hitting the papers this month. My 88 year-old Nan was named best dressed lady at the 101st Manildra show a few weeks ago (her third crown, might I add), and was consequently photographed for inclusion in the Molong Express.

Anyway, I've spoken with the editor of the Molong Express and have arranged for a copy to be sent to me. I'll post it up here as soon as I receive it.

I'll keep you informed...

Go go go! (Bag)

Be alert, but not alarmed people - some hot news in Sydney today.

Sydney's Lord Mayor, Clover Moore, has joined forces with the Federal Attorney-General's department to launch a new campaign creatively named, "Lets Get Ready Sydney".

As part of the plan, the campaign will today release 200,000 booklets which advise what to do in the event of a terrorist attack or natural disaster.

One of their suggestions is for people to prepare a 'Go-Bag'...essentially something you can grab on the run if you're confronted by a group of pissed off Decepticons or a five-story high carnivorous dinosaur.

What has Clover and her good mate Phil Ruddock suggested people pack?

Hat Toilet paper AM/FM Radio Sunblock Torch Spare batteries

Spare keys Notepad and pen Runners Water Disposable gloves Adhesive tape

But I think they may be forgetting a few items:

• Ipod - nothing can go wrong when you've got Jack Johnson ticking along
• A copy of Nostradmus' Les Propheties - a bit like a movie preview
• Lamb sandwich - you'll get hungry whilst running away from aforementioned carnivorous ancient reptile
• 100mL bottle of Ultra-sensitive Day Moisturising Lotion by Jurlique - even in a catastrophic, possibly life-ending event, it's essential you maintain a radiant complexion
• MacGyver - he can get you out of anything
• A few beers - to drink whilst MacGyver does his shit
• Some doritos - to eat whilst you're drinking the beers
• A spare pair of undies - just do it

What would you put in your 'Go-Bag'??

Transformers vs Pasha Bulker

Here's two major events that are happening in Australia at the moment:

1. The Transformers movie will be launched this Thursday. Yeah! I'm thinking of going perhaps later this weekend or early next week - will give you a full report after.

2. There has been a bloody great big oil tanker - The 'Pasher Bulker' - stranded off Nobby's Beach (just north of Newcastle) now for around three weeks. There are reports that, with a rise in the tides, they will be able to move it tonight. See here for a bit of extra detail from news.com.au's recent media coverage.

How are these two related? Well, I just saw a solution to the problem as outlined in point #2, utilising the ingenuity of point #1. See below:



(Thanks to my old man and Mr Wirris who drew my attention to this video)