Everything Mixed Together

I've got as far as installing the Gallery2 software, and soon there will be actual photographs too. Click on the Gallery link at the top left of the screen to see what's (not yet) there.

We're saving it.

I don't know what's going on in Western Australia at the moment. Some sort of political rush of blood to the head - first we get daylight saving time, and now I hear that we'll be able to alcohol on Sundays without also ordering a three course meal. WA comes leaping into the 20th century.

Add that to Australia's new "craze" of environmental awareness, fresh blood at the helm of the Labour Party, and the Democrat's Bush-thumping in the US, and the world seems a marginally brighter place.

All that remains is for someone to shrink the 50 cent coin to something smaller than an Olympic discus and I'll be all set for a merry Christmas.

Of course WA has tried daylight saving time before, but it's always been abandoned on account of it distressing cows, fading carpets or some other tosh. The premier of another state even claimed that it would lead to a surge in skin cancer. This time around we have a three year trial, after which there will be a referendum on keeping it for good.

Let's hope the dairy farmers and carpet lovers aren't in the majority when the time comes.

Tonight on the ABC: The best albums of all time (as voted by ABC viewers - hardly a representative demographic of Australia). Looking at the Top 100 there were two albums by a group called Tool. They were the only group in the whole list I had never heard of.

I filed it away, and then moseyed on over to Paul's Blog to see what he has been up to. Quite a lot by the look of it, most of it in Italy, and next on his list of European adventures is ... Tool in concert.

How freaky is that?

Take a Mr Kipling mince pie, chop it in half, and push double cream into the gap between the filling and the pastry lid. Eat each half in a single mouthful. Wash down with brandy. Repeat as required...

Excellent.

Roundabout this time each year I write Christmas cards to people in far-flung corners of the world. Many of them I'm in regular contact with, which is to say that I send a card each year but, other than that, the opportunities for an exchange of life events are few.

A Christmas card is an ideal place to offer a tantalising glimpse of the year in the form of a quickly scribbled note - it's a small space, and since you have a couple of dozen cards to write everyone forgives you for only writing a sentence. My grandmother was a card-note expert. I'd often get something like "Going to Totnes for lunch Tuesday. Not as sunny as last week. Garden looking lovely. Uncle Eric dead."

Computers didn't help with card-writing. They're e printed on thick toilet paper so absorbent that any attempt to mass produce a card message leaves you with an illegible black blob where the words should be.

Instead there is the Christmas Letter. Some people are good at writing them, and craft a small work of literary genius with colour photos, amusing side bars and accounts of the family's adventures and achievements over the past year. "Back in July Derek completed his second masters, this time in Greek philosophy, and Teddy won the state archery championships. Florence continues to impress us all with her French Horn."

I can never think of anything to say. The house didn't blow up or fall down. I didn't change job/wife, no additional children popped out, the dog is the same goofy furrball as last year. And nothing that I have done really seems significant enough to commit to a once-a-year letter. We went on a holiday to Busselton, of which there would be photos, except that I broke my camera on the first day. I went on a business trip. There are now plants in the garden. Everyone is doing OK.

Very soon the postal deadline and my own procrastination will mean I don't have to think about it any more.

At least, for another year...

There are good things to say about Dome cafes. The food is tasty, the prices aren't heart-stopping, the coffee is fine, and the waiting staff are plentiful and seem to know what they're doing. But this last weekend my dad and I ran into the sort of problem that suggested that underneath the wooden counters and artful cheesecake there is a fast food joint waiting to burst out.

We were there for my stepmum's celebratory half-century cooked breakfast and, having completed fifty successful years on the planet she was quite justified in asking that the tomato should be served raw, rather than grilled. And that was a problem, as there was no option for raw tomato on the computerised register.

Instead, after considerable tapping on the touch-sensitive screen, we were offered a "Slice of Tomato", this being a side dish, usually inserted into a burger. At a cost of $1. Even though the cooked breakfast came with a perfectly serviceable tomato of its own. For the pleasure of receiving an uncooked tomato, we had to pay extra.

And so, when the plate arrived, I was entirely unsurprised to note that it had two tomatoes. Both cooked...

To a guy, can there be anything more inaccessibly alien than mascara TV commercials?

My dentist, like every dentist the world over, has a copy of Ronald E. Goldstein's Change Your Smile book. I was sitting in the waiting room today waiting for my six-monthly check-up (once again a pillar of dental health, thanks very much) and as usual I found myself staring at the woman on the cover.

At first glance she looks like your typical 1980's US sitcom housewife with big hair and lots of make-up. But when she smiles you can see all of her teeth. Smile at yourself in the mirror - can you see all of your teeth? Looking at the cover a big longer the teeth became everything, and in the end she looked more like one of the monsters from one of my five year old's sci-fi cartoon DVDs.

As I was called to the dentist's chair my lasting impression was that she was about to eat a guinea pig. Whole.

Pizza Marketing Quarterly is the must read journal for pizzerias all over the country. Filled with adverts for industrial grade pizza ovens, and accounts of international pizza-making competitions.

The best pizzas are apparently cooked long and slow. In the world of fast food that means 255 celsius. For eight minutes...

Pizza in a cone: is the world really ready? If it is then it'll be satisfying our "inherent need to enjoy a pizza in an urban context" and fulfilling the pizza makers' "uncontrollable desire to revolutionize the habits and customs of a gourmet population".

Let's watch out for those uncontrollable desires.

There's a shopping centre close to my house. For the last few years it's been the place to go when you didn't need anything too exciting. There's a couple of supermarkets that sell the basic stuff, a liquor store, a hairdresser and a store selling vaccuum cleaner bags (cos out here in the 'burbs we do a whole lot of vaccuuming). And apparently a couple of dozen other stores less exciting than even the vaccuum bag place.

But we're a growing suburb and, all winter, builders have been expanding the shopping centre into a whole new retail experience...

The thing is that I only ever go there after dark on Thursday evenings, and I wasn't about to go exploring the building site at that time. From inside you got no clue that anything was going on, but then a week or so ago a sign went up annoucning the opening of the new shopping centre in three days' time! Where?!

So this week I nipped in to get the weekly trolley load of sensible healthy options (and my secret stash of chocolate and chips) and was rewarded with a movie scene moment. I walked in through the old shopping centre, in through the (demolished) door of what used to be the liquor store and there in front of me, where there had previously been a wall stacked with cheap wine, was a bright and shiny new shopping centre. It was like wandering into Toon Town, but with more chrome and fewer dancing animals. Happy people were gazing around in awe, stunned that they no longer have to drive 15km to find a decent coffee shop. Excited children skidded around on the shiny new floors, knocking over the "Meet Bob the Builder this Saturday" signs. Shoppers rushed to the new greengrocer, half expecting that a brand new shop must mean never-before-seen fruits and vegetables.

It was high excitement.

Then I tried to do my shopping in the new supermarket. It took me three times as long because all the things were arranged differently. Who puts ice cream in aisle 17?! Everyone knows that ice cream goes in aisle 22...

I've hung off writing anything on this for a couple of weeks, thinking that the first post should contain something significant, an big intro, a fanfare.

Then it struck me that no-one reads the first post until after a bunch of other posts exist, and then they scroll down to the bottom of the page, and there it is. The first post gets read last.

Better to just get on with it...