Not that we're Nazis or anything

Contrary to popular prejudice, the Great Escape did not happen some six decades ago in Germany. It happened yesterday. In our own front yard. Two Australorp chickens (not World War II detainees) were involved, who I will from henceforth refer to as the Australorps, because they are.

It also happened this morning, about 11 o'clock. Also this morning at 11.30. I haven't checked lately but they might be at it again. In fact, with these Australorps it's the Great Escape all day, every day.

Various methods have been tried to get the Australorps back home. Sometimes I round them up with a stick and get them to walk back to the house (often involving me leaping over the fence into the front yard of some neighbour who has barely had time to adjust themselves to the strange chickens foraging in their yard, much less the strange man who has just joined them). Alternatively, the Baron and I have also tried enticing them out of the garden they're not supposed to be in with food - which is rather like trying to tempt a kid out of a pavlova factory with a bit of meringue. Yesterday, just for a change, I tried having a tantrum. I can't say for sure whether it worked, I'll have to try that one again. I'm sure I'll have the opportunity to do so.

I understand that other Great Escape - the one they made a movie and stuff about - involved troopers and Tommy guns and motorbikes and all sorts of cool stuff like that. I haven't got to that stage yet with the Australorps, but I'm pretty sure I'm building up to it.

Sing a song of punctuation

To be or not to be

Eg or not eg

ie, that is, i.e.,

QE, to sum up, D.

2B or 2B not,

--- or ...?

Colons: single; or semi?

Double “”, or demi?

PS or BTW,

+ also ;)

Poetic grizzle

A few months ago I submitted a short poem about Thomastown to Red Room's Disappearing project - the idea of it was for poets to write something about an Australian place that had changed over time. Also some stuff about 'providing a digital map of Australia', etc. Anyway, they asked for a small biography and short written statement describing the area, explaining why I chose it to write about, which is where I should have really started being suspicious: the poem that I submitted turned out to be far shorter than my written description. Check it out -

Thomastown

Land of roller blinds and smash repairs

And garden gnomes and thinning hairs.

Of course it didn't get published. Red Room seems to view itself rather like an art gallery for poetry. Pop into an art gallery these days and often the artists' notes and biography and the descriptions of the artworks are more significant than the artworks themselves. (The most egregious example of this I can think of is an exhibition I saw in Newcastle Art Gallery once - the artist had taken a picture of an unremarkable corner of the park just outside the gallery, then printed it digitally in a blue wash, a green wash, etc. The same picture, slightly digitally altered, was hung up all around the room. Beneath one of the pictures was several sheets of A4 paper stapled together, in which the artist had written a gigantic essay about the meaning and significance of their meaningless and insignificant work.)

I suppose this is starting to sound a bit like an 'I didn't get published and so they're bad!' grizzle from me. Because it is, obviously. But I also think I have a point: if the idea is to explain the poetry and let us get to know some of the poets, then the effect is almost to give precedence to the explanation, like a kid writing an essay on Shakespeare without even reading Shakespeare first. (C S Lewis saw this sort of development early on, writing in his essay Lilies that Fester about how the state teaches children appreciation of literature, not being content to let kids read and write and appreciate literature for themselves).

Anyway, some of the poems are online. Here's one. Here's another. And here's a third. The poems are all right and the poets aren't bad either. How's that for appreciation!

Think for the day goes thunk

Spurtles are ace and you've got to use them to make you morning porridge because tradition and stuff, but every time you get to the point where you have to ladle out the porridge from the pot to the bowl you realise a little addition to the traditional spurtle design wouldn't go astray: an oblong on the end, designed for the specific purposes of ladling out porridge. This device could combine the traditional stirring powers of the spurtle with the modern ladling powers of, well, the ladle.

Maybe I could make one and patent it? I'd call it, I dunno, a Spurtle Plus Oblong On Nether, or S.P.O.O.N...

In which Tim examines the news

So I was just reading the news the other day, and apparently it's now illegal to abort babies masturbating in the womb in Texas because.... no, wait. I think I got that wrong.

Anyway, I was just reading the news a while back and it seems that it's illegal to abort gay babies masturbating in the womb unless they're in Texas, in which case it's compuls.... no hang on. Still haven't got it right.

So opened the internet the other day and started reading the news. It seems it's now illegal for babies to masturbate in the womb of pregnant gay fathers unless they're Texans because.... er, that doesn't sound right either.

So here's how it is, spot of news the other day. Gay Texans are now not allowed to masturbate in the womb, unless they've been aborted first, which is.... hang on, aborted masturbators are now not allowed in gay Texas because... no, it's been made illegal to teach masturbation to aborted Texans unless they're gay, in which case .... um.... that is....

Oh, bloody hell! Gay! Abortion! Masturbation! Womb! There's your freaking news for you. 

Ow is the winter of ow discontent

I'm currently toying with the idea of a television series spin-off from Masterchef - I call it Disasterchef. Not, as the name might suggest, involving cooks engaging in culinary feats of derring do in the middle of earthquakes or bushfires or volcanic eruptions and the like - though then again that idea has merit too - and not actually involving any chefs either. It would just have me. In my kitchen. Because, let me tell you, there's plenty of disasters waiting to happen.

A week or so ago I burnt my wrist while re-lighting the stove. To top that off, just a few days after that, I grated my middle finger along with some cheese. Not to be outdone, just two days ago I was waxing my cheese - waxing is always a disaster when I'm involved - and foolishly poured all of the hot wax into a plastic container, clearly because I thought the kitchen was far too clean. The wax predictably melted a hole right in the bottom of the container and spilled all over the floor, and, being red, the kitchen soon resembled a particularly charnel scene at the hospital. And, just today, opening a can of Minestrone soup, I (ow) cut my (ow) other middle finger (ow) so that (ow) now every (ow) word (ow) I (ow) type (ow) reminds (ow) me (ow) of it (ow) and I'm not even (ow) sure (ow) what I'm (ow) doing at this keyboard any(ow)more.

Honestly, it's getting so between the blood-coloured red wax, the blood-coloured minestrone soup, and the blood-coloured, um, blood, I can't even see the kitchen anymore.

Points for discussion

Calm down! How dare anyone tell me to 'calm down' at a time when the last thing I want to do is calm down! I refuse to calm down about the subject at hand especially when the subject at hand is being told to 'calm down', which is the most uncalming down thing to be told if I actually wanted to calm down! HOW CAN YOU TELL ME TO 'CALM DOWN' AT A TIME LIKE THIS?

Outraged? It's outrageous that I be described as outraged, even if and especially when I am actually outraged about something! I deserve my right to be outraged about something without being described as outraged, even if I am just outraged about being described as 'outraged' without the initial outrage leading to the description of 'outraged' actually being an outrage at anything at all, that is, anything apart from perhaps another description of me as being 'outraged', which of course and naturally is an outrageously outrageous way to describe someone as being.

Calm down about being called 'outraged' over my outrage over being told to 'calm down'? How could anyone ever dare to describe me as being 'outraged' over being told to calm down, it is not a very calming down thing at all, it is the very opposite of calming, it is outraging, it is umbragelous, it is horripilating, it is prepostifulish, it is an absolute scandal, it is utterly disgusting and completely shameful and shamefully outrageously scandalously utter, it is just wrong I tell you and what were we talking about oh yes I will certainly get outraged about being told to 'calm down' over being described as 'outraged' about calming down if I want to and what I want to do is just that!

But above all

'Guest' 'post'

Now don't ask me how this happened, and don't ask me why this happened, but I currently have a certain someone sitting at my shoulder saying 'blooooooooooog pooooooooooooost.... bloooooooooooooog poooooooooooooooooooooost'. I'm not sure what exactly is going on, but I think they want to write a blog post.... ON MY BLOG. Hang on, what?

So don't blame me for what happens next. What happens in the rest of this blog post is not my fault.

GUEST POST BY KIMI

KIMI
v.
H.
C.
123456789010KKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII&$$$$$$$$$$$e$#$$$$
ENTER

The esteemed author of this blog post.

Individually numbered in order of dislike

Voters will use magnifying sheets to read tiny font on Senate ballot papers  

ABC election analyst Antony Green says voters will need the dexterity of a contortionist to be able to read the Senate ballot paper which has grown to 1.02 metres in length. 

I don't see what the problem is here. Personally, when it comes to the Senate vote, I always vote below the line, so I get to individually number each of the politicians in order of dislike. It's not enough to be able to do away with their parties with one stroke of the pen; sometimes, you just have to create an ordered numerical list in which you place one member of the party behind another so you can quantify to a precise and specific amount your level of contempt for them and their policies. It is very easy indeed to vote for the worst politicians and place them up the end of the list, and not so hard to vote for those you want most, but somewhere in the middle, when you have to take account of all the ineffectual politicians, and sort the could-be-amusing parties from the possibly-quite-irritating ones and distinguish them from the actually-rather-disturbing groupings, there's always a pile up, and suddenly it's not just advanced origami and contortionism that you find yourself having to indulge in, but you also have to suddenly deploy everything you've ever known plus anything you've ever forgotten plus some of the stuff you never knew but now wish you had about algebra, quadratic equations, trigonometry, and arithmetical series, in order to make the two ends come together in a pleasing fashion. It's great fun, and I recommend it. Anyway, voters of a less masochistic frame of mind than me may find the continued growth of the Senate ballot paper infuriating and frustrating, but there's really no need. There's plenty of things you can do with a ballot paper to make it easier to handle:

1) Fold it up and use your scissors to create pleasing paper dolls, perhaps in the form of politicians you wish to vote for.

2) Roll it up, pinching one end tightly shut with a paper clip, and using it to deliver gifts of chocolates and sweetmeats to friends and lovers.

3) Actual origami!

4) Alternatively, you can hold it above your head and shake it back and forth to create convincing thunderous effects to awe and impress your audience. Never let it be said that Australians are not pragmatic people!

Ridgey didge bridge

AN AUSTRALIAN woman has found a bridge to love, marrying the 14th century Le Pont du Diable Bridge in southern France....Ms Rose did not say how she determined the gender of the bridge. - Telegraph, Jodi Rose bridges differences to marry Le Pont du Diable Bridge in France

Ode to a bridge 

O tensile structure of chromium steel 

Spanning land sea and sky like a God of this place

As you chant day and night to the thrum of the wheel

With your girders and pylons aquiver in space

O glorious neomodern geospatial design

You beckon me on with your galvanic gleam

Infrastructure so perfect, your arches so fine,

O marvel of science I am yours you are mine. 

(It was only part way through writing this piece that I found out the bridge in France this lady was marrying was centuries old and made out of brick. Oh well.)

UPDATE! - Well crap, I didn't even get the rhyme-scheme right. This poem isn't worth the paper it's not written on!

 

Ooh la la. 

HILARIOUS JOKES INVENTED BY ME TIMOTHY TRAIN

THESE ARE ALL JOKES THAT WERE INVENTED BY ME TIMOTHY TRAIN IN THE KITCHEN WHILE WAITING FOR A POT OF WHEY TO BOIL, YOU CAN TELL THEM TO ONE ANOTHER IF YOU LIKE BECAUSE THEY ARE ALL HILARIOUS.

Q: HOW DO YOU TITILLATE AN OCELOT?
A: WITH SEX.

Q: WHY IS THERE NO COUGH MEDICINE IN THE JUNGLE?
A: BECAUSE OF THE INSIDIOUS INFLUENCE OF CAPITALISM.

Q: WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A STEAM TRAIN AND A TEACHER?
A: ONE IS A STEAM POWERED ENGINE, AND THE OTHER TEACHES YOU THINGS.

THANK YOU FOR READING THESE HILARIOUS jokes ooh the caps lock was on sorry okay good night now.

The schlock of the new

I tried to use my new new card yesterday, but it turned out to be the new old card that I got after my old old card didn't work anymore. After working out all the confusion I managed to get my new new card working and threw out my new old card, but I can't help but worry how long it will be before my new new card becomes my new old 'new new card' and I'll need to get a new 'new new card' instead.

Cards are confusing that way. Sometimes, it's true, I'm tempted to use my bookshop card so I can get on a train, or my chemist card so I can borrow books out at the library, although until you can get books on the train or drugs out at the library I think this might be a somewhat vain fancy. (You can sometimes get a free Herald Sun from the train, so that's a start). I suppose all this is why people are calling for a united card that will have everything on it, from driver's licence to membership of a local bird watcher club, which is quite tempting really, since I don't have either of those. Even so, why go with the simplicity of the new when you can stick with the muddle and confusion of the old?

UPDATE! - I just thought of a new new title for this post to replace the old new title. Is it too late to get rid of the old new title and replace it with the new new one? I suppose it is. Anyway: AVANT CARDE. Hahahahahahaha cough cough cough cough....

Valiant attempt at the smallest punctuation mark in the world

PRESENTING A VALIANT ATTEMPT BY ME TO MAKE THE SMALLEST PUNCTUATION MARK IN THE WORLD, ARE YOU ALL READY? 

~

Well? Well? How'd I go?

That time I listened to the football with my cats

You will all be wildly surprised to hear the news that we have two cats, Harriet and Beatrice. As you would imagine, Harriet is an ardent supporter of the Geelong Cats, while Beatrice, like me, is a devoted, er, devotee of the Richmond Tigers.

This evening, while the Baron went away to the far north for a few days, we all indulged in a little group bonding activity and listened to the Richmond vs. St Kilda match on the radio. Here is how it happened:

FIRST QUARTER
I turned the radio up loud so we could all hear it in the house. Beatrice mostly slept on the chair in the living room by the radio for that time, but soon the excitement got too much for her and her ears pricked up. Meanwhile, Harriet, who obviously had less at stake in the game, slept up the other end of the house. It was an exciting first quarter of football all right, and we were all on the edge of the seat by the end of it. Well actually Beatrice had jumped off the seat by the end and was sitting in front of the piano.

SECOND QUARTER
Beatrice was clearly concentrating hard on her team's efforts this quarter. She just sat in front of the piano and looked ahead while the game went on. She was clearly gripped: she didn't move an inch. I'm not sure why she wasn't looking at the radio, but come on. She's just a cat. She wasn't expected to know that that was where the sound was coming from. Oh yeah, Harriet came out that quarter too and joined her sister in front of the piano and looked ahead too, I suppose just because Beatrice was doing it.

During the break between the first half and the second half, funnily enough, for most of the time Beatrice and Harriet continued sitting looking ahead to the piano. They couldn't wait for the second half to start! Well I'm not surprised, the tension was almost unbearable.

THIRD QUARTER
During this quarter, Beatrice went to the donut shop to get some treats for everyone. Well okay she miaowed at me and took me in to the kitchen while I filled up her food bowl with biscuits. The tension was almost too much for her in this quarter: she started poking around behind the couch. (As for her sister, well, she couldn't stand the tension at all - she ran outside.)

FOURTH QUARTER
Well for the thrilling finale to the game, Harriet did come back in but then plonked herself under the piano seat again. Beatrice had gone back to sitting and looking fixedly at the piano too. Actually, their eyes were very focused on the piano indeed. Hang on, I thought - are you cats interested in the football at all? Wait! They were looking for that damned mouse again! They weren't even listening with me! I had been fooled all along!

And that is the story of that time I listened to the football with my cats.

What? Oh yeah. The Tigers won.

 A thrilled cat.(Photograph courtesy of the Baron).

How to knead a quarter droplet with naught but an egg white and the whisker of a cat.

"Why do so many brewers have beards?" was the question posed a few months ago on a certain Facebook page of a certain brew and cheese making store. To which I was pleased to be able to respond: "Beards add flavour, like cat hair". As I recall, they agreed with the broad thrust of my argument but caviled with the inclusion of cat hair.

Splitting cat hairs aside, the question of ingredients and proportions and ratios and recipes for beer and cheese is endlessly fascinating. Bugger the dispute over metric vs imperial, pounds and litres and gallons and quarts and oddities such as 'The Vanishing Australian Tablespoon', what we really need to worry about is quarter-droplets and walnuts and nickels and the balancing of eggs and how to knead with spoons.

 Blurry out-of-focus cheese to be eaten by blurry out-of-focus hipster.

Directions in slightly recondite culinary procedures like brewing and cheese making can be irritatingly imprecise. When I first started making full mash beer I was driven crazy by the direction 'add yeast' in recipes. 'Add yeast? How much?' Brewers, apparently, used to just skim yeast off the top of their beers once brewed, (or took the yeast from the bottom once the rest had been drained away); placed in a new cask of unfermented ale the yeast would remultiply and go to work again. These days you can just go to the store and get yeast (it comes in a little square packet that sits comfortably in the palm of your hand), but this tiny packet is for a 5 gallon, 23 litre batch of beer. I still don't have all  the material to do a full 23 litre batch; all my beers have been little 1 gallon/5 litre runs. So one afternoon I found myself opening up one of those yeast packets, pouring out all the yeast, weighing it, working out roughly how many teaspoons it was, and pouring it all back into the packet. Then again, yeast is completely puzzling: when you add it to beer, you expect it to multiply anyway. It's an ingredient that grows! And then, equally mysteriously, at some point it will just collapse and waste away.

Cheese culture is just as puzzling; it's the bacteria that curdles milk, lives in the stuff, but dies off after a few days if you don't preserve or propagate it. I've had some culture in my freezer for months, and repropagate it every few weeks - though each time, it comes out slightly different. It was traditionally kept going by just taking a bit from the curds every time you made some cheese, setting it aside, and then re-adding it to milk when you wanted to make more cheese.

Cheese making books and recipes can sometimes sound completely fey and whimsical. My Rikki Carroll book Home Cheese Making is perfectly splendid in many ways, but it also contains some notable eccentricities. 'Break the curds into walnut-sized pieces' reads one recipe. 'Break into nickel-sized pieces', says another, which last direction seems to combine the question of size and shape with that of international finances. 'Cut the cubes [of curds] into rice-sized pieces' specifies a third, which is really getting ridiculous. Other recipes inform you that the curds when treated should have a consistency 'like cooked chicken flesh' , or 'custard'; on page 140, I even found 'The curds should now be about the size of a grain of rice, and they will squeak when chewed'. There are plenty of directions like 'stir curds gently', 'stir occasionally to prevent the curds from matting', which are lovely - though they are completely contrary to a direction I found in a recipe in the back of one of Kerry Greenwood's books: 'Punch the dough about for a bit'. Crikey. No wonder she's a crime novelist.

One recipe for Chevre I downloaded from the internet somehow manages to combine extreme whimsy with utter precision in the direction '1/8 of a drop of rennet' - rennet, of course, being the enzyme you add to many cheeses to encourage the formation of curds and the separation of the whey. It's difficult to imagine letting one drop of rennet run out of your bottle and then dividing that drop up (with - what, tweezers?) before adding the correct portion to the mix. Actually, I'm told the trick is to put the drop into two cups of non-chlorinated water, mix, and then divide that water into eight portions. I'm generally too lazy to do all that, but occasionally, when I make cream cheese, I do keep a jar of rennet in the fridge for several runs. It's easy:

Ingredients: 200 mils milk
200 mils pure cream
A tablespoon mesophilic culture (don't ask me how much this is from the packet, I don't know)
1/8 drop rennet mixed in 1/4 cup non-chlorinated water (ie, a splash from the jar)
Method: Heat the milk and cream gently to just over 20 degrees celsius, pour into a jar, mix in culture, add rennet, shake it up, and leave it in a room at 25 degrees celsius for a day and night. The kitchen will do, or, if you live at my place, the study, where  I often have the heater on. When the curds have separated from the whey (the whey will be the greenish liquid at the bottom), pour it into a cheesecloth bag over a bowl, tie the cheesecloth bag up and hang it up to dry for a day. Ta da! What you will have is a delicious cream cheese that nobody but you will want to eat because everybody is on a diet or doesn't like cream or suddenly seems to like their cat biscuits and which therefore you will be able to have all to yourself.

 

Cream cheese sausage: three of my favourite things. 

Anyway. Where was I?

So, while cheese recipes generally seem to have a 'bung it all in and see how it goes' approach, beer brewers can be rather pedantic, verging on completely obsessive about their directions, to the point of including tables and percentages and weighing up the chemical content in different types of hops and specifying the precise temperature at which barley malt should be mashed at and the fine details about which sort of malt to buy and whether you are stirring the malt with a spoon made from a rhinoceros tusk or the wood of a Nubian oak sprung from virgin soil that has been well watered with ox blood and I just made that last bit up but you get the picture. If you google a few full mash recipes you'll soon see that some brewers set out their recipes more like directions for chemical equations than anything else, which level of precision infuriated me just as much as the complete lack of precision in the direction 'Add yeast'. My beloved Laurie Strachan book, The Complete Guide to Beer and Brewing, is the exception here because it actually sets out the list of ingredients as in a recipe, and follows up with a method. (And following that link now, I discover another bizarre recipe direction, courtesy of Steve: when making sake, you apparently have to polish the fatty bit off each rice grain).

Old brew books, and old recipe books in general, have the same mixture of fastidious exactitude and imprecision. Checking out the online version of Digby, who collected a whole heap of mead recipes just because he could, you find that eggs feature heavily in recipes for the honey-based drink:

put in a New-laid-egg; if the Liquor beareth the Egg, that you see the breadth of a groat upon the Egg dry, you may set it over the fire.

Egg white is used as a clarifying agent -

let it boil gently, till you have skimed it very clean, and clarified it, as you would do Suggar, with the whites of three New-laid-eggs.

Plenty of other recipes have similar directions - 'it is to bear an Egge boyant', 'a New-laid-egg swims upon it', etc. (I wonder if the addition of eggs might also give the yeast nutrients (which they need to eat in their initial stages of growth); one old recipe for cider calls for you to drop a steak into the drink before it begins fermenting, which may have performed the same function.  Another old American brewing book I found in a Thornbury bookstore has several directions like 'spread the yeast on toast before adding to the liquid'.)

Other directions include 'Take one part of honey, to eight parts Rain or River-water', 'Take Spring-water', 'take six handfuls of Sweet-bryar'; there are instructions to not mix mead 'in a wooden vessel, for wood drinketh up the honey', and the singularly non-specific but nonetheless helpful and encouraging instruction 'Take of all sorts of herbs, that you think are good and wholesome'.

Old recipes for cheese, some of which I have in my under-used copy of Martha Washington's Booke of Cookery, are similarly intuitive:

TO MAKE AN EXCELLENT WINTER CHEESE
To a cheese of 2 gallons of new milke, take 10 quarts of stroakings & 2 quarts of cream. put to it 4 spoonfuls of rennit, set it together as hot as you cam from ye Cow...

Or I vaguely recall directions in other old recipes - possibly that I found on Gode Cokery - to 'set the cheese' so far from the fire, so it is the right temperature. (Actually, that reminds me, once I carried some cheese culture around with me for a day trying to warm it with my own body temperature, but it didn't set well - the culture was the sort that liked temperature to be around 25 degrees, room temperature; my body temp was the usual 37 degrees*.)

Those are about all the recipe eccentricities I can think of at the moment. But before I forget, I should tell you, I think I've finally worked out how, when you're making mozzarella, to 'knead with spoons': don't. See, what you have to do is wad the mozzarella curds together with a ball before dipping them several times in hot whey and kneading them. You can use the spoons to hold the curds under the whey, and press them on the curds to give them shape, but in between you do the kneading with your hands (covered in gloves). You just moosh them together to make them join up while squeezing out the whey. See? Now aren't you glad you rhetorically asked me? Don't rhetorically answer that. It could, rhetorically, get very heated indeed.

*(UPDATE! - This footnote is an update.) In Buffy, as everyone knows, vampires are actually room temperature. So theoretically you could culture milk by a simple method: 1) CATCH VAMPIRE 2) DON'T STAKE VAMPIRE 3) DON'T GET BITTEN BY VAMPIRE 4) STRAP CULTURE TO VAMPIRE 5) LEAVE FOR 8 TO 12 HOURS. There, you see, completely safe.

The best woman man thing for the job!

Clearly things have been a bit quiet and simple lately, and people have started to feel a little complacent, because the Australian Labor Party has decided to come along and make everything more complicated and confuse the entire public. Let me see if I can sum up the entire situation:

Certainly, Kevin Rudd was the Labor man best suited to be Prime Minister in the lead up to the 2011 election, a position which he held before Julia Gillard was obviously the best first female Prime Minister ever to contest the same election, for the Labor Party, which was definitely the best Labor Party to vote for in that historic election. Aside from being the only first female Prime Minister Australia has ever, or will continue to ever have, until the next one, Julia Gillard was also clearly the leader best suited to lead the Labor Party to the 2013 election, until Kevin Rudd took over those positions tonight, making him without a doubt the best man to be female Prime Minister elect ever, and in the unique position of being yesterday's man for the future two seconds ago today, but whether he will be the same man of yesterday's future when tomorrow is Monday is another question entirely. However, as Bill Shorten will have already said any day now, "Whatever Kevin Gillard, I mean Julia Rudd, I mean Kevin Rudd said, I'm sure he's right".

What does this mean for Australia? Concerns have already been raised over the fact that this backstabbing in the middle of a show down could lead to a blood bath such as we haven't seen since the Titanic fell flaming out of the sky, but on the other hand Tony Abbott is certainly not fit for the role of female Prime Minister, so that's okay then.

Confused? Good, carry on then.

Mission proposition

Considering the situation in Canberra (you know the one, yeah, that one) I propose a new phrase to be added to the Macquarie Dictionary:

Ruddy Gillard, to do a (phrase) - to wreck one's party and, by extension, one's country, through a needless and prolonged leadership crisis.

Doctor vs Doctor

Recently, courtesy of the Baron's library card, I've been watching old episodes of Dr Who - the Doctor from the sixties and seventies and eighties, I mean, when the Doctor was old, he wore impressive flowing capes and scarfs instead of leather jackets, sex and romance was absolutely inconceivable, and the show was actually good. I had a great time starting off with the Jon Pertwee Doctor's Invasion of the Dinosaurs. Scenario: the Doctor and Sarah Jane-Smith find themselves in the middle of London that appears to be completely devoid of people. "No cars, no pedestrians, no police, nothing!" cries Sarah. "Maybe it's Sunday. London always closes on a Sunday" says the Doctor conciliatorily. Later they try to call the police on a public phone, which doesn't work, maybe because it's been vandalised. "Nothing wrong with vandals", says the Doctor, "They're very nice people".

All this niceness was highly amusing; by the time a dinosaur appears - halfway through the first episode, demolishing a city building - I was actually cheering. There were the good old boys from UNIT HQ, of course, with their bullets that never worked, trying to fell a dinosaur; and the villain, with clipped nasal tones and sinister glasses (I'm not sure how but they really are sinister glasses), operating in some secret London laboratory. In, I suppose, the fourth episode Sarah gets abducted onto a futuristic spaceship full of colonists fleeing an ecologically-devastated earth - it's actually a fake spaceship, and the colonists have been brainwashed, in a clever 1970s twist that recalls various J G Ballard plots - and is sent to the 'Reminder Room' for 're-education' so she can be part of this grand ecological repopulation scheme as well. (I liked this bit very much: for one thing, it's refreshing to see a science fiction plot in which ecological paranoia is actually viewed as suspect. For another  thing, people always used to say about Doctor Who that 'the sets wobble'; well, here was an early Doctor Who plot in which the drama actually depended on the characters not noticing that the sets wobbled. No need for us to willingly suspend our disbelief when the actors do it for you.) And yes, it really does all end with the Doctor reversing the polarities of something or other because science.

Quickly, Doctor, reverse the polarities of this cup of tea before it's too late!

Hard Science Fiction adherents might object to the somewhat cavalier way that the old BBC show adopted scientific terminology, but it never bothered me as a kid: it's just science fiction with an emphasis on the fiction. In the other show I watched - The Android Invasion ('Invasion', along with 'Fatal' and 'Deadly' and 'Death' and 'Curse' and 'Evil' was always one of the Doctor Who team's favourite words) - there's a scene where Sarah has to free the Doctor from a post he's been tied up to so they can escape a 'matter dissolving bomb'. She can't cut through the cords with a knife, and the Doctor says 'The sonic screwdriver! Quick! Set it to Beta Omega!'  'Science as magic' appeared in those episodes of the new Doctor Who that I watched too, of course, though as usual the old series did it better: when the Doctor begins gallivanting around the universe with Rose Tyler, he gives her a mobile phone that, magically, allows her to call back home whenever she feels like it, no matter how far back or forward in time she is, or was, or will be, and no matter how far away earth is, or will be, or was.  You'd never get this sort of thing in the old Doctor: science may have been powerful, but the adventure relied upon characters being thrown onto their own resources, marooned in incredibly remote locations, and isolated from their family, their country, their world, and sometimes even their universe. The old Doctor Who show trusted its characters to be resourceful and independent and courageous in a way that the new Doctor Who show doesn't: that's progress - the new is less than the old.

Aside from all this, what really stands out about the old show is the technology, in all its rustic charm. No more are the computers and televisions and radios that I grew up with in the 80s new. They wobble, they blur with static, their knobs are too big or too small, there are no remote controllers, in short they don't impress anymore with their bizarre otherworldly gleam. The future is certainly not futuristic; whenever the BBC producers wanted to convey an image of the earth in, say, 100 or 1000 years from now they either seemed to go for the 'apocalyptic wasteland' look (empty desert, dotted here and there with grimy scowling men, probably with Yorkshire accents, going about in rags), or the ' claustrophobic spaceship' look (cream-grey walls, the occasional sets of flashing lights, electronic doors that slide open or shut on command for the characters).

In Android Invasion the Doctor and Sarah travel back to the earth on a rocket, and back on earth there's a whole impressive room for communication purposes with the rocket - that is, it's meant to look impressive but the computers just look incredibly dated, with probably less data space than my Dad's old Commodore 64. The Androids themselves are incredibly hokey - occasionally their faces spring open to reveal a metal plate with a few lights on it; when they don't have faces they're given suits to look like beekeepers, and are able to fire bullets out of their fingers. Invasion of the Dinosaurs ends in an underground bomb shelter of the sort that were constructed by the British government during the Cold War - incredibly extensive spaces complete with deep frying vats and a labyrinthine series of rooms for meeting up (or, in the case of this show, constructing a time warp machine in order to bring a series of dinosaurs into central London to terrify the populace to create a devastating distraction in order to continue on to the final stages of their diabolical plot which I'll get around to in just a moment when I have a glass of water). They do this using a nuclear reactor, which of course was down in the bomb shelter as well. Maybe the Doctor's fashion sense - capes, mile-long scarves, question-mark collars - was meant to anticipate a kind of future trend amongst his own people, the Time Lords, but then again his fellow Time Lords all had terrible taste in clothes, save, perhaps, The Master. Nothing dates quite so quickly as science fiction, something which Michael Moorcock - one of the shrewdest of Dr Who's fans - realises in his novels, which involve intercontinental, time-travelling, dimension-hopping characters moving through dimensions, places, and times that all seem to have been envisaged in other dimensions, places, or times - futures as imagined by the past, pasts as imagined by the future.

It's all very lovely, this look at the past Doctor Who and his journeys into a future that never was.  In just about every scene there's something that makes you sit up and remember how things were. Communications are by intercom, public telephone, landlines, not mobiles or computers. (Even when the aliens talk to their fellow conspirators via television it feels like an intercom conversation with images). The computers don't even seem to have keyboards; there are just large fiddly knobs on the right hand side. The TARDIS itself is an exceedingly eccentric device for travelling - no steering wheel at all, just a gigantic octagonal computer in the middle. Just watching the show makes me daydream now about the world I grew up in, where remote controls didn't even exist, and televisions really did have impressive arrays of knobs and switches and notches on them. I thought about the achingly beautiful, comforting televisions of the past - sturdy, squat little boxes, standing on legs in the corner of the room, pleasantly rounded around the sides, in warm brown and ochre colours - and compared them with the sleek, flat, gigantic, digital, plasma televisions of the present. Is it any wonder that the new, disappointing Doctor Who has been made for such an obviously inferior medium?

Take back the future, I want to go back.

Put down the milk, sir, and back away from the bath...

Milk. You know, watery white stuff, comes out of the udders of a cow, can be produced in great quantities, bottled, sold to people at shops, you can make cream and cheese out of it, excellent product. Seems simple, doesn't it? But at some point we all got confused about the whole damn thing, and we started getting things like 'raw milk' and 'bath milk' being sold on the shelves alongside, um, 'milk' milk. You know, 'Raw milk' - it's milk that isn't pasteurised or homogenised before being sold to customers. Same deal with 'bath milk'. Same as virtually all the milk that's been drunk by our ancestors since bovines and primates first began cohabiting the same spaces.

So today I made a raw milk cheese. I did it because you're supposed to get better results if you make mozzarella out of unpasteurised milk; fewer proteins and less culture get destroyed and makes the curds more pliable in the final stages. Well, no. Actually I made it because the very slight risk of contracting listeria from a slice of delicious raw milk cheese adds a delicious zing to the cheese and makes the taste that much more delectable.

In fact the raw milk wasn't nearly cultured enough for me; I even added a spoonful of yoghurt (live cultures: acidophilus, bifidus, plus a spot of Mozart and Picasso) to the mix and let it think about what it had done while I went off and wasted my time elsewhere.

Anyway, you know how it is with recipes: pour this in, heat this up, stir this around, let this rest, bla bla bla. So here I was, busily doing all this over the stove, and of course at some point - when you've got the mozzarella curds ready, you heat up the leftover whey, and you repeatedly dip the curds into the whey to turn them into mozzarella cheese, proper - you come across the baffling recipe direction:

Knead with spoons

Knead with spoons? You might just as well say make a cabinet with penguins. Fey and whimsical and ambiguous directions often pop up in my cheese recipes, I've got to say - I'm making a list which I'll be happy to report on soon - and this one is definitely being added. (This recipe was from Rikki Carroll's excellent Home Cheese Making).

How was the mozzarella in the end? Disappointing. I'm not quite sure what it is about the curds, but they still don't quite have that mozzarella feel to them. No, I don't know what that is either. Disappointing. But delicious. That tasty, tasty, just-possibly-with-a-hint-of-listeria-zing. I recommend it.

And remember, every bottle of raw milk you take off the shelves, you save from some hippy who wants to pour it into their bath. Because hippies having baths is so very, very wrong.

Think thing

Is thinking over
Overthinking?

Is thinking over thinking
Over thinking thinking?

Is overthinking overthinking
Thinking over thinking over?

Is overthinking ever thinking?
Is thinking ever over?
Or is this just overthinking thinking?
Is this think thing over?
Over.