It was hot, and I decided to utilise the presents my fellow and I gave to each other for Christmas to spruce up our kitchen. He got an ice-cream machine, I got a Kitchen Aid (potentially the most useful thing I own). So I beat some eggs and sugar in the later, added it to some cream and milk over heat, let it cool, and I put the mixture into the former to spin into a most delightful summery treat. With luck it would soon be dripping down my chin. This is where is all fell down. The delicious creamy mess, which tasted and smelt delicious, permeating the whole house, was curdling right before my very eyes in the above picture. Only, it was hiding under the thick, rich, bubbling surface, and alas I did not know until it was too late. I tried pushing the lumps through a sieve, twice, but there was no way to undo the damage.

So, lesson learnt, and my advice to you dear reader is this. When you spend $30 on ingredients, make sure you don’t fling your sugar covered recipe aside like the pro you know you’re not. Read the instructions carefully, go over them a few times, and when is says “stir constantly” make sure you are not doing the dishes at this point.

Alternatively, think of the loss as a cheap cooking class in ice-creamery, and look on the bright side, all that cream and sugar is down the sink, not round your mid-section.

I think I might make sorbet next time.

Stack cup noodles to the moon. Great concept done bleedin well.

http://on.cupnoodle.jp/

Amazing chalk art from Julian Beever.

more here – http://users.skynet.be/J.Beever/pave.htm

This great little thing is out soon. Copy edited by Spit & Polish too – www.spitandpolish.net

I want to claim this story for my own, but really it is my friend Anna’s.

Late last week she was riding the peak hour 112 tram down Brunswick Street into the city en route to work. It was about 8am, the tram was packed. She was sitting in a four-seater booth going backwards, there was a man in the adjacent booth, sitting in the same seat as her, only on the other side of the tram, next to the window (can you picture it?). Anna’s booth was full, two people to each seat. The man, a rather unsavoury fellow of about 30, wearing tracksuit pants, was sitting next to a woman reading a book, no one dared sit opposite him.

Then, all of a sudden, the man gets to his feet, moves to the empty seat opposite him, pulls his trackies down and proceeds to take a dump on the tram upholstery. He doesn’t hover above the seat to allow for the poo, he just shits all over himself and the seat, and doesn’t even flinch. He then rises and turns to see the mess he has created, wipes his dirty faece-covered bum across the seat, pulls his scummy pants back up and returns to his original seat next to the woman engrossed in her book.

Immediately the stench is release and the surrounding 10-15 people can smell what has happened and leave the tram at the next stop. The next tram is not far behind, and the shocked passengers (my friend included), board the next tram. Several stops later there is a hold up ahead. The tram in front is being evacuated due to the tram poo – the tram driver of the defecated tram having to drive his empty tram into the city alone.

Sourced have since revealed that there is in fact a serial-shitter who frequently poos on trams in Melbourne. But what is even more disconcerting for any public transport user, is that perhaps the seat you sit on tomorrow on your way to work will have once been sullied by the serial tram poo man. Beware and take care.

10 reasons why I hate cheap dirty rotten scoundrels, Jetstar.

Let me give you the backdrop for this hate list. I was on my way up to the National Young Writers Festival in Newcastle on the weekend, destined to be an enjoyable weekend away with friends. Say it ain’t so.

1. Their jets ain’t got no stars.
2. They canceled my flight to Newcastle 2 hours before it was scheduled to depart
3. At this point we were given 3 options: refund, flight the following day, flight to Sydney on Qantas and bus to Newcastle.
4. For some reason I was coaxed into option 3, for I needed to be in Newcastle earlier than tomorrow.
5. The Qantas flight was delayed and when we got to Sydney we sat in the Jetstar arranged bus for 2 hours before leaving for the castle
6. Jetstar are liers, they told us the bus ride to Newcastle was one hour, it was two and a half in fact
7. The bus Jetstar organised for us took us to the Newcastle airport (40 minutes out of town) – by this stage it was 3am
8. Jetstar told us they had organised taxis into town, they had not. We had to hitch-hike into town mid morning, and due to the previous circumstances were flustered and lost the code to our accommodation.
9. Jetstar employers are bitter and nasty because they don’t get paid enough because the company doesn’t factor customer service into the ticket price.
10. I will tell everyone that I will never buy another Jetstar ticket again, but next time I book an interstate ticket, Jetstar will have the cheapest rate because they have a monopoly, and that will be the draw card for me cos I am a sucker for a bargain, especially with plane tickets, and I will book with them again.

The flight home was again delayed nearly an hour, so I was relieved when I finally made it home, but some further highlights from the trip to Newcastle were discussed in the car on the way back from the airport:

- Getting mooned in the bus at 1am by four young local boys
- ‘No shots in Newcastle’ – to our horror, this is the response we got from the bar tender at the pub when we asked for a round of tequila shots (apparently they are band in Newcastle)
- No mixed drinks after 9pm (another strange communist law)

Apart from that Newcastle is really a beautiful city, and despite my dog-gone moaning, I had a great weekend there and at the festival – http://www.thisisnotart.org/

It’s a rare to find radio that’s this interesting. Concentrated, intelligent and highly compelling mind juice.

Link

Every mediocre professional sporting team has at least one. They are the player that, despite inevitably having shown freakish skill and total domination their junior footy ranks, somehow, when it comes to playing in the big leagues, it’s abundantly clear that they’re just not up to it. I loved Troy Schwarze not because he was a good player, but because he was a bad one.

Troy Schwarze was one such player. He played several seasons for St Kilda in the AFL, and is now, sadly delisted and wandering through the football wilderness where failed athletes go to get bitter and fat. But at his prime, and it was a brief prime, he was the kind of footballer that gave hope to every unco that ever saw him play.

He was the very definition of a galoot. Tall, lanky, horrible posture. His chin was too big for his head, his head too big for his neck and his eyes were impossibly close together. Atop this creature was a kind of brownish, woolly mop, that rarely if ever, shifted in its arrangement.

As a player, he would have this uncanny knack of turning attack into defence. He would hesitate, for no reason, and this sense of panic and impending doom managed to multiply itself thousands of times and transfer straight into the crowd. Just looking at Schwarze go near the ball would cause any supported to tense up immediately in apprehension. He would fumble, drop marks, take forever to make a decision, and then make the wrong one. But whenever that happened, and it happened often, you could really tell that he was sorry. He didn’t mean it. He knew that he wasn’t that good and you could tell he was really quite sad about it. But he never stopped trying.

His great redeeming feature was that he could kick. He would spear passes down forwards’ throats, kicking 50 meters without the ball rising above six or seven meters in height. They were bullets. Then one day, he had a fairytale match. With seconds to go, against the best team in the competition, he kicked a huge goal from 55 meters out and won the game for St Kilda.

For a beautiful heartbeat in time, he was a hero.

I bought this acqua mohair jumper the other day. I had seen it a few times at the local bazaar and every time it just kept staring at me, taunting me, and whispering, ‘take me, take me, I’m warm and fluffy‘, and then it would say under it’s breath, ‘but I am mohair and I will molt all over your other clothes when you wear me, especially black things, but I am so beautiful that you will love me anyway, and I promise I will keep you warm‘. So I bought the mohair. It was too hard to resist, and all it’s warm greeny blue jumper love came at a palatable price, so why not, I thought, it’s winter.

I was looking forward to wearing it this morning. I had thought about the warmth it would bring to my wind numbed body as I strolled to the train on my way to work. It lived up to it’s promises.

Then, with my new found love, I thought I would do some research into the mohair. A protein fibre wool produced as a fleece on Angora goats, sure, I knew this. Then I found this picture of the sort of goat the big fluffy sweater comes from, check out his locks.

If ever you start to think that you’re really, really important, let this little graphic cut you down to size. It lays out the history of the universe, condensed into one calender year. Fish only came out of the sea 11 days ago, the dinosaurs died out the other day, humans appeared just over 5 minutes ago and I’m a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of a second old.