Heroic Olympic heroes!

Fastest sprinter over 10 gallons.

Longest high-jumping hour.

Heaviest ampere over the course of four centimetres.

Most patriotic non-Australians living outside of Australia.

How to make cheese

Hello! Welcome to my blog post about how to make cheese! Cheese making is a fascinating process that people have been doing for many many centuries, producing the wide variety of cheese substances that we know and love today, such as Home Brand Tasty, Kraft Singles, and that stuff-they-squirt-on-top-of-the-burgers-at-my-local-shopping-centre-so-that-it-looks-like-melted-cheese. Also, cheese making can often be a puzzling and counter-intuitive process: for instance, when you make the curds out of the milk, you have to heat it up to solidify it. Also, when you are salting the curds, the more salt you add, the less salty the cheese is likely to taste! Isn't that fascinating? Well, that doesn't matter.

Of course, I have extensive experience in cheese making myself, such as the one time I attempted to make mascarpone cheese in my kitchen, which is also the only time I attempted to make mascarpone cheese, which is also the only cheese that I have ever attempted to make. Plus, I have attempted to make this only cheese that I have ever attempted to make just this morning, so this extensive experience is still fresh in my head.

In the process of cheese making, I flooded the stove while attempting for over an hour to get the cream to the right temperature for adding the thickener. Also, the thermometer kept on wanting to topple headlong into the cream. Eventually I just chucked the thickener in anyway, and from a sizeable pot of cream, managed to produce an amount of liquid best described as lying between the miniscule to the non-existent. Then, I got ready to go to work. Then, my pants exploded*. Then, I missed the train.

In conclusion, if you are thinking of making cheese yourself, here's how to do it: don't**.

Traditional Kraft Singles makers at work.  

*This really is true. Please don't ask what I am wearing now, that would be embarassing for us all.

**This goes for the people who make Home Brand Tasty, Kraft Singles, and that stuff-they-squirt-on-top-of-the-burgers-at-my-local-shopping-centre-so-that-it-looks-like-melted-cheese too. ESPECIALLY for them.

A tale of two lists

Things to do today:
1) Clean kitchen.
2) Make gruit beer.
3) Make mascarpone cheese.

Things achieved today:
1) Made lists.

Definitely definitive

Hello! In this Sunday edition of  'Definitely definitive', we're going to take a sneak peek at the phrase... 'sneak peek'!

A sneak peek is an early look at something. It could be a show, a festival, an unpublished book, or anything, really! Note you aren't just looking at it - that would be just having a 'peek'!

A sneak peak could be one of two things. It could be a shifty mountaintop...

Or it could be a furtive orgasm had by yourself, or someone else. You could call it a 'sly high'.

A chique sneak is a fashionable but untrustworthy person. 

Sneaker pique is a person in sneakers being angry. Or just an angry sneaker.

Thank you for taking a peek at this sneak peak post!

Pink frilly brolly thrills

I have a pink frilly brolly that everyone keeps noticing. It's incredibly good at being noticed, my pink frilly brolly. You might say that, apart from keeping the rain off me, that's its special talent in the whole wide world. "One coffee please," I say. "Nice umbrella," they say. "I'm going to lunch," I say. "Nice umbrella," they say. "Hello," I say. "Nice umbrella," they say. "Robomatic chocolate birdseed," I say. "What are you talking about?" they say.

Well, aside from the odd occasion, that is, people really do keep noticing the pink frilly brolly that I have. And why shouldn't I have a pink frilly brolly with me? After all, it was very wet today. Also, pink frilly brollies are so manly.

I propose that the next time they invent a football team, they make them pink and frilly. With white spots. Just like my umbrella, only better at kicking balls.

After all, everyone would notice them. And pink frilly football players are so manly.

Lost in a concrete Eldorado

South Morang is what might be called an aspirational suburb: it may or may not exist. Up until several years ago it certainly didn't. Its very name seems to be based upon a geographical absurdity (there is no north Morang to be south of.) For some reason, Whittlesea Shire Council - which Lalor is a part of - decided to put their council chambers smack bang in the middle of this possibly-non-existent suburb. I can't quite figure that one out, but it seems likely that it is a very, very good joke that they've been having amongst themselves.

Suburbs which may or may not exist, as you might imagine, are rather good places to become lost in. Which the Baron and I did, last night. We caught the train line to the station that was not listed yet on Google maps, looking out of the windows upon the rows of suburban houses which we could not see because it was dark, and got off and promptly walked in the wrong direction while looking for evidence of a restaurant that proudly proclaimed itself - or rather, its reality - on the internet. I blame myself for using Google in the first place.

We walked by broad streets, packed with cars driving very quickly in one direction or another, along neat footpaths empty of people, next to immaculately-mown lawns devoid of weeds or trees, and past darkened council offices. We came to a looming Parthenon, festooned in lights; large posters on its side proclaimed it might be a place where we could hold a wedding, or a conference, or an opera. We continued over a watercourse into a narrower street, where houses built last year, last summer, or last week towered up at us, and we wondered whether we had taken the wrong turning down a street that didn't exist yet on the internet, or we had taken the right turning to go to a place that didn't exist anymore. Eventually we concluded that we had gone in entirely the wrong direction.

We flagged down a bus (which, rather conveniently, charged around the corner right at the point when we decided that we had gone in the wrong direction) and held a very puzzling conversation with a heavily-accented (I have no idea what accent his voice was heavy with) bus-driver who was, in turn, very puzzled by us. No, he didn't go along X Road. No, he wasn't quite sure where X Road was either. But he wasn't sure if we should be on this bus either, he turned soon, just after the station. Yes, yes, we protested, that's where we want to get off!

Eventually we were walking in the right direction towards a cafe whose existence seemed increasingly uncertain. We saw a purple sign, shining brightly on the other side of the road, and I wondered briefly whether that might be it. The Baron informed me it was an adult entertainment shop. We marched on past a fenced-off field - the original South Morang, perhaps - hung around with signs which said, ENVIRONMENTAL NO GO ZONE. And then, quite suddenly, around the corner of a rather modest-looking block of offices, we came upon it.

The 'cafe' turned out to be a cavernous hall that may originally have been intended as an an office building. A series of superfluous blue lights, blinking on and off, festooned the exterior, and to get in you had to go through a complicated system of two doors up to a main desk. We marched up to the desk and asked for a 'table for two'. (Looking out of the corner of my eye, I noticed two or three other diners scattered about the vast  interior as I asked this.) The Baron said, rather kindly I thought, "sorry, we haven't booked." The guy behind the desk waved us in in the gestural equivalent of a yawn. Soon after he had dispensed with the customary courtesies (drinks, menus, etc) he went back to the table he shared with a friend, and the two commenced gossiping.

We were left sitting, rather uncomfortably, right in front of the window, in between a bare street,  and row after row of customerless tables. Curiously, the empty street left me feeling as if I should be performing the part of a satisfied customer. The Baron and I did what we could to fill up the void - haggled over items on the menu, surveyed the decor of the cafe, eavesdropped in on the conversation of two others sitting conveniently close by.

At such places, of course, the price is also aspirational: you are subsidising the possibility of future customers. The meal may be wholly incidental; though, incidentally, when it came, it was also rather nice. But was it enough getting lost in a concrete Eldorado for? I suppose that all depends. Though on what it all depends, I have no idea...

If I may just take a little of your time

GOOD FUNGUS!
The mushrooms we've been growing in the shower recess for the past few months.

BAD FUNGUS!
The mushrooms we found that looked like the mushrooms we'd been growing so we ate them but might actually have been a yellow-stainer mushroom though we didn't get sick phew that was a close one.

GOOD FUNGUS!
Yeast, that wondrous eukaryotic microorganism that does... whatever eukaryotic microorganisms are supposed to do to make bread rise, and beer ferment.

BAD FUNGUS!
Tinea!

GOOD FUNGUS!
Mucor miehei, the wondrous coagulant found in vegetables that makes milk curdle, thus making the process of cheese-making so much easier for you if you don't want to use animal rennet!

BAD FUNGUS!
The mould that I found growing on one half a lemon I hadn't squeezed yet.

GOOD FUNGUS!
Champignons!

QUESTIONABLE FUNGUS!
Magic mushrooms! Because it's your own choice but surely there are more profitable ways of using your time?

Thank you for letting me take up just a little bit of your time in order to make this qualitative list of fungi.

A gender agenda to adore a door

I just learnt from Tim that Emily's List is celebrating 15 years by releasing fridge magnets.

 

Image via the Telegraph.

This is a perfect opportunity for Fridge Magnet Poetry!

TONY. HATE. IS.
JULIA. I. ADORE.
LOVE. MEANS. EQUAL.
ME. PAY. MORE.

***

A. GENDER. LOVE. IS.
HATE. TONY. 'S. SPEEDO.
AFFIRMATIVE. WOMAN.
ACTION. THE. TORPEDO.

***

AFFIRMATIVE. GOOD. ACHIEVEMENT.
FABULOUS. FUTURE. FOR.
FEMINIST. UNION. WOMEN.
ME. PARTY. MORE. 

***

GIRLS. LOVE. MONEY.
AFFIRMATIVE. PAY. I.
MORE. RIGHTS. FOR.
I. ME. MY.

***

DON'T. VOTE. JULIA.
FABULOUS. NOT. FOR.
LIBERAL. LOOKS. FUTURE.
IS. RIGHT. MORE.

***

CHIEF. TORPEDO. I.
ARE. AND. THE. 
DIVERSITY. LOOKS. LIKE.
MAD. IS. ME.

Piano lessons for wimps #1

Get a copy of J.S. Bach's 48 Preludes and Fugues, and only play the preludes.

Wanted: new book to become distracted from

After avoiding reading Sterne's Tristram Shandy for a series of days which turned into a series of weeks which turned into a series of months which became a period of about half a year, one evening on the train, all of a sudden, I finished the same novel, which came as quite a shock. It's said that many men have a mid-life crisis, a point at which they ask of themselves, 'where do I go from here?'. Well it's certainly true that avoiding reading a book over a period of days weeks months half years gives you almost unlimited scope for distraction. When you're me, that distraction entails reading other books, writing a goodly hundred-odd blog posts, finishing off two zines, and starting on a third. Now I've actually finished the damn book I'm not sure what to do with my life. Where do I go from here? Maybe they should ban reading on the trains.

Stuck at a loose end the other night, I picked up a Wordsworth Classics edition of Tales from King Arthur, a version of Andrew Lang's 19th century classic Book of Romance. It's the first lot of Arthurian tales I've read for a while, but of course by now I know all the characters so well, having encountered and re-encountered them through umpteen books - from T. H. White's The Once and Future King through to Edmund Spencer's Faerie Queen. I haven't read the Thomas Malory (that's another book I've been avoiding finishing for about a decade now - my excuse is that I have only the last half. It's easier to start something you can't finish than finish something you can't start, evidently).

Lang's main achievement seems to have been to translate the courtly manners of the original Arthurian stories into contemporary language. This seems to throw up occasional oddities of phrase, though -

While the King was wondering what sort of a beast this could be, a Knight rode by, who, seeing a man lying under a tree, stopped and said to him: 'Knight full of thought and sleepy, tell me if a strange beast has passed this way?'

The old narrative devices can seem very creaky. We learn in opening one story that 'it was the King's custom that he would eat no food on the day of Pentecost, which we call Whit Sunday, until he had heard or seen some great marvel.' For the story to proceed the marvel has to happen, and so 'Sir Gawaine was looking from the window a little before noon when he espied three men on horseback, and with them a dwarf on foot, who held their horses when they alighted.' Some visitors including a person not confined to the conventional height paradigm is a very meagre marvel indeed. Funnily enough, though, this turns out to be one of the best stand-alone stories, with one of the best illustrations:

 

Lang seems a little embarrassed by the Grail story, starting it with a little essay about the history of the Arthurian myths. There's a lot of obvious concatenation of the various knight's tales that goes on; he uses the phrase 'and they had many adventures' or 'and many more adventures happened to them' an inordinate amount of times during the saga. He doesn't do a bad job, all up, of giving a shortened version of the tales, but he does end up leaving out some of the best parts - for instance, the wholly incidental but very beautiful story of the wounded king, restored to good health by the grail.

We do learn a good deal about the knights and their various imperfections, especially Lancelot, which is all quite interesting given his dalliances with Queen Guenevere. (Lang doesn't go into much detail there, either - he generally seems to proceed by omission, following the opposite approach to, say, John Boorman in his film Excalibur, where he tells as many stories as possible by making everything happen to a few central characters. In Excalibur, Arthur is the wounded king, for instance.)

I quote enjoyed it, on the whole. Trouble is, I've finished it now, and I'm left asking again, er, where do I go from here? Probably should do some work or something. Damn reading on the trains! It only leads to trouble!

Cat news

Cat news: finally, the media is covering the important stuff
LALOR, SATURDAY - In a development of local, state, federal, national, international, galactic, intergalactic, universal, and multiversal import, Beatrice the cat has sat in someone's lap. She sat in someone's lap and stayed sitting in someone's lap before continuing to sit in someone's lap and then sitting in someone's lap some more and continuing to sit in someone's lap also in addition. After further lap sitting, closely followed up by another bout of lap sitting, she has continued with the lap sitting in order to further continue the lap sitting before sitting in someone's lap some more.

As this situation, with social, economic, legal, artistic, scientific, spiritual, and so on, implications develops, Beatrice the cat has continued to sit in someone's lap before, in a radical change, going over into someone else's lap and sitting in their lap instead and continuing to sit in that lap until she has gone over and sat in the first lap and continued to sit in that lap in an unprecedented bout of lap sitting. (Unprecedented since the last time it happened, that is.)

In related world-changing-life-altering-mind-blowing-community-evolving-etc news Harriet the cat has walked around the house and the garden rubbing herself against things. While walking around the house and garden rubbing herself against things she has continued to walk around the house and garden rubbing herself against things while also walking around the house and garden rubbing herself against things before walking around the house and garden rubbing herself against things. In a radical-bizarre-curious-explosive-and-not-very-different-difference, occasionally instead of walking around the house and garden rubbing herself against things, Harriet the cat has sometimes walked around the garden and house and rubbed herself against things or even rubbed herself against things before walking around the garden and house.

In response, Beatrice the cat has mainly continued to sit in someone's lap.

We'll bring you more on this developing development as it develops. (That is, if it actually does develop.)

ELSEWHERE IN CAT NEWS
OPINION - Is it a lap if I'm lying down? (Panel discussions involving all important experts everywhere)
ADVICE - Good things to rub yourself against. (Harriet the cat's regular column.)

PLUS! Cryptic crossword! 


1.  Backwards pan cooks a nice sleep.
2. Confused act, with whiskers.

Wiggle niggle

Amid speculation about the future of children's rock and roll outfit The Wiggles following the announcement of the departure of three of the original members, children and parents have been left in the dark as to the future of the "Black Wiggle", Horace Greely.

The basic set-design of the Wiggles has not changed for years: Greg is the yellow one, Murray is the red one, Anthony is the blue one, Jeff is the purple one, and Horace is the black one who has for years been involved in covert terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and is suspected of smuggling drugs and weapons into Australia from overseas.

As the much-loved Black Wiggle, Horace was a core member of the Wiggles, and participated in many of their most famous songs: the one about the dinosaur, the one in which Jeff wakes up, and the one in which all the band members sing about how nice heroin is and why don't their audience members give it a try, too.

For many years, Horace has been living in semi-retirement from the Wiggles, possibly because he has been sought by the law for his funding of paramilitary organisations in Latin America. However, he has come out of retirement several times, and speculation over his future in the band now is rife.

FUN FACT! - In Horace's signature song, 'Let's spell P-S-Y-C-H-O-P-A-T-H-Y', use of regular character Dorothy the Dinosaur was dropped because of concerns about a dinosaur being 'too scary' for children.