The Twelve Minute Kidfood Countdown

This is my almost nightly ritual for two children who will eat little else at this time...

12 mins: Half fill a medium saucepan with hot water and set to boil (covered is quicker) on a gas hotplate. Remove block of frozen pasta sauce cubes (labelled 'BOL') and the bag of frozen cooked Honey beef sausages from the freezer. Every week or so I cook 'BOL' and sausages to freeze.

11 mins: Get two pasta plates. Place a 'BOL' cube on a pasta plate; cover with a sheet of kitchen paper. Separate out a single sausage from the bag. 20 secs in the microwave may be required to loosen one from the scrum.

10 mins: The water should be boiling about now. Add some salt. Take a bunch of 'Instant' spaghetti out of its bag ('Instant' claims 8 mins to cook - I do 9 mins for the kids) . Snap the long spaghetti in half and drop in the boiling water. Stir with a teaspoon to prevent clumping.

9 mins: Place dish with 'BOL' cube into the microwave. Cook on HIGH for 1 min. Get two glasses out of the cupboard. Get a wine glass.

8 mins: Use the pasta stirring teaspoon to mash down the semi-cooked 'BOL' cube. Reset microwave and cook on HIGH for a further minute (or less if it was a smallish cube of 'BOL').

7 mins: Get milk out of the fridge. Pull out completed 'BOL' and carry to bench using the covering paper as mittens if hot. Toss the paper. Put frozen sausage into a freezer bag and cook on HIGH for 1 min.

6 mins: Get tomato sauce out of fridge. Pour a glass of milk. Get raspberry cordial and pour a fifth of a glass. Pour a small glass of red wine.

5 mins: Retrieve heated sausage and tip out of bag onto its plate. Toss the bag. Cut the sausage up into bite size pieces with a knife and fork. Leave the fork with the sausage and deposit the used knife on the sink.

4 mins: Squirt some sauce onto the sausage pieces and squirt some more sauce onto the 'BOL'. Stir the sauce into the 'BOL' thoroughly with the pasta stirring spoon (see above).

3 mins: Clear spaces at the table. Add water to the cordial. Place a paper napkin beside Matthew's place. Put the glass of cordial on the napkin. Place the glass of milk beside Gracie's place.

2 mins: Free time! A sip or two of wine works well here.

1 min: Turn off gas, drain the pasta. Pour half into each dish. Stir the 'BOL' through the pasta. Gracie gets the 'BOL' and pasta and Matthew gets the sausage and pasta.

Blastoff! Call the kids and then stand around cajoling while they make excuses why they can't finish all of it...

This all has a ritual accuracy, as I have been doing this for many months now. We live in hope that vistas of variety will open up real_soon_now, but I'm not holding my breath just yet. How old are my fussy children? Matthew is 9 this month and Gracie is 8 in December.

A list of oxygen thieves of the last 100 years

A short list of people the world would have been better off without:

1. All the heads of Europe just prior to and during WW1. These pathetically useless mammals helped inspire the phrase: "What if you declared a war and nobody came?" Unfortunately everyone did come. 40,000,000 dead.
   
2. Adolf Hitler and his inner circle of humanitarian sidekicks. 70,000,000 dead.
3. US President Truman. This stupid prick had no valid human reason to drop the A-Bombs on 220,000 Japanese civilians - the Japanese military were already looking for a way to end the war and Truman knew it. He just didn't want the Russians to get to Japan first.
4. Joseph Stalin. Millions slaughtered by Stalin's resilient paranoia.
5. Mao Tse Tung. (Where the heck did the rename 'Mao Zedong' come from? The same guys who created 'Beijing' from 'Peking' I guess. Once names have been Westernised they should bloody well leave them alone. The new ones are rarely any more accurate than the old. So, how come we don't call 'Japan', 'Nippon'?)
6. Idi Amin. Most Amazing Man. Thousands killed or eaten.
7. Pol Pot. 1 - 3 million (Pol himself reckoned it was only a pardonable 800,000. What a guy.)
8. Kim Il-Sung (Dad). Human Rights? We ain't got no steenking human rights...
9. Kim Jong-Il (Son). Human Rights? We ain't got no steenking human rights...
10. Dim Sum Il Jong (Cousin). Human Rights? We ain't...(oh all right - that one is a little silly. I'll get back to being deadly serious)
11. Osama Bin Laden and happy friends. A comment is hardly necessary.
    
12. All those happy suicide bombers. Kill everyone who doesn't share your faith. Allah be praised. Kill the Shi'a if you're Sunni. Allah be praised. Kill the Sunni if you're Shi'a. Allah be praised. Kill all infidels because Allah is too piss-weak to do his own dirty work. Allah be praised. The guy suicide bombers all score 72 shiny new virgins each - what do the girls get? More Holy Rogering, I guess. Allah be praised.
13. Presidents Bush. A right pair of village idiots. Brought about the demise of far more Iraqis than poor departed Saddam ever managed AND set us all teetering on the brink of Holy Wars for the foreseeable future. Allah be praised.
    

I'm sure many names could be added but its MY biased incomplete list, not yours, so bugger off.

Public Idiot Number One

"Lordy sakes! Let's go to war with Russia if they don't do what we tell them!" (paraphrased and probably understated)

Oh super - just what the world needs - another testosterone soaked blathering idiot in a position of power. And won't she have that in spades if McCain keels over.

This person is probably more dangerous than Dubya ever was. One wonders if she is already planning her part in the (rather late, but still coming) Christian Apocalypse - "gotta get those End Times a' rollin' before The Lord up an' Raptures me away!" The sooner Jesus snatches her (and the 90% of U.S. Republicans who believe such nonsense) away for a bang-up fundie-fest in the clouds the better. One can only hope.

Websites of Woo #1: Metaphysical Spiritual Telepathic Healing and Transformation

The first in a series of Total Bullshit Websites (TBW's).

Words failed me as I dredged the rich vein of dross within this site.

Buy the Rejuvenizer®! (it's a vaguely glittery looking pendant that costs US$159, or various other lumps of rock or rings containing what appears to be opal from US$25 - $149)

Clears your energy field to 100% positive! Encoded with over 3.5 million (wowie!) healing and protective functions ... to clear your negative programming that creates dysfunction in your immune system, heart, spleen, thyroid and adrenals! Builds a matrix of higher dimensional frequencies around the body to protect the physical and subtle bodies from all the electromagnetic fields! Clears many kinds of viruses and bacteria! Clears energy blockages-created by the "high-tech" frequencies-in the area of the higher chakras!

Genuine proof it works! An unidentified (surprise) university researcher says:

"I have been researching various subtle energy and vibrational medicine technologies for several years. Recently, I carried out some interesting tests with the Personal Rejuvenizer ... I did an initial check up on myself and found 17 interferences. I did not harmonize them. I then wore a Personal Rejuvenizer for 24 hours and measured myself again. After 24 hours, 13 of the 17 interferences had been harmonized. After a further 24 hours, the remaining 4 interferences had also been harmonized. This was, to say the least, an extremely impressive result. I have not encountered another product with this ability to harmonize interferences so quickly and effectively." –A.G., Researcher, M.A., London University, M.Phil, University of Cambridge, U.K.

Hopefully A.G. did this 'research' in their own time. In secret.

This sickening display of pseudoscience infused with endless mystical mumbo-jumbo goes on for many pages. Read about how a new satellite system is wiping out everyone's etheric(?) body. The Rejuvenizers® will save you!

Read all at your peril: http://www.lighthealing.com

Check out the FAQ and you will learn how Phyllis created her Rejuvenizers® in the 4th dimension (time, hopefully) with the help of a group of Higher dimensional beings assigned to her (by who or what?) way back in 1988. "Unusual, I know, but all true." says Phyllis. Oh puh-leeze...

TBW RATING --- 10/10 'Surely nothing could be sillier than this...' - Petros

A far more effective posting

In an effort to improve my blogging skills, I will apply sound homeopathic principles to the rest of this entry...


































































...there.

An amazing improvement, I'm sure you'll agree.

Time passes

I just noticed it is nearly 2 years since I last posted to this blog. Pretty slack, I know. For the most part I am talking to myself, but this might not always be the case.

Anyway, I will try and get more stuff in here, even if it only to get shrapnel-face-girl (below) out of sight.

Cheers.

All together now: EWWWWW!

I will never, never, never understand why people subject themselves to piercing...
A few dozen neck hoops and a couple of lip plates and she'd be perfect!

Accidental Death of an Anarchist

Yesterday, a good friend turned 60.

Back in 1983 I directed a production of the political black comedy Accidental Death of an Anarchist and before starting production I had a very vivid image in my mind of what I wanted on the poster - the anarchist (who is not a character in the play) making a last gesture of defiance at the persons who had just pushed him out of a 6th story window.

The only person I could imagine for the image was my long suffering good friend, who on a hot summer day violently threw himself backwards onto a levee bank 36 times until I got the image I desired...

I plastered this all over town and the play was actually a great success.

My reasonably private friend never did tell me (at the time) that he was less than comfortable about having such an image of himself spread far and wide... so true to form, last night I pulled out an oversize copy of this poster for the appreciation of the gathered crowd celebrating my friend's birthday. What are good friends for...

PS. (waving own flag here) I just did a web search and looked at a bunch of other posters for this play that are kicking around. As far as I'm concerned, we win :-)

A Westie Moment

(Americans: 'Westie' = 'Redneck')

I was standing in a queue at the supermarket today and a voice several metres away said: "G'Day Santa Claus" After several seconds I realised the line was directed at me. I looked up to see a clean-shaven Westie (you can tell) about 10 years my junior leering at me expectantly. I smiled, vaguely.

"I call every guy I see with a beard, 'Santa Claus'!"

With that, he was gone. It felt rather surreal.

Here is a rather recent photo of me with my children. Do I really look like Santa Claus?


(11 years ago I was paid $250 to play Santa at a business dinner, but that's another story... :-)

American Measurements Dept.

Americans often use non-standard or obscure (to everyone else) measurements in cooking.

Q. How much is a stick of butter?

A. 4 oz (US) or about 125g (Rest of World)