Ruminations

Back in 1995 I bought Natalie Merchant's first solo album Tigerlily. Since then it has done extended duty in my car CD player and now has a new life in iTunes on my laptop.

Not many albums sound as good to me today as when I first bought them, which makes it all the more strange that I've never so much as looked for any of her newer work. A situation that I shall remedy right now.

If it should come to pass that you find yourself enjoying half a bottle of cab-sauv over dinner to the point that your eyes seem to be pointing in entirely different directions, and if you should then feel inclined to toss half a dozen of your razor sharp kitchen knives into the sink ready to do the dishes, and if you enjoy playing the piano unencumbered by Band-Aids, you should probably stop before plunging your hands into the hot water...

The 80GB hard drive that seemed inordinately capacious back in the old days of photos is no match for the world of video. One dose of evening news and an episode of Parkinson and 10GB was snaffled up in a moment.

I'm not very tidy with my disk space. I don't clean up my messes, I duplicate a bunch o'stuff and keep both copies, I download things and never get rid of them (even if they're crap). But now I had 5GB of Stargate to save and nowhere to put it. A disk spring-clean was in order.

A dip into iTunes found a selection of tracks I was unlikely to ever listen to. Trombone concertos, the free-to-download experimental vocal gymnast, all the stuff without discernible melody or rhythmn - 6GB cleaned up there. All the burn folders and ancient backups - 4GB. The fifteen copies of the bug database left over from 2005 - 2GB. Half an hour later there was nearly 20GB of fresh 'n' tidy new empty disk space.

It's soul cleansing - like loosing a whole lot of weight. Without giving up meat pies...

Just before the bus pulled away from this bus stop this evening on the way home from work, a couple of Japanese tourists asked the bus driver, in halting English, if the bus was going where they wanted to go.

There was a guy already on the bus who looked Japanese, but from his accent he'd been in Australia most of his life, and didn't know how to speak Japanese.

It made me wonder - how many white guys are there who've spent their entire life in Japan and don't know how to speak English?

In the light of the Elvis Festival in Parkes, NSW, it struck me that the Elvis impersonators are looking decidedly elderly...

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.