technofun

How cool is this machine?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAX_3Bgel7M
http://www.juliusvonbismarck.com/fulgurator/

Imagine the culture-jamming potential of projecting images of acne at the Oscars, for example! Not, however, that they’d let a device that looks like this within cooee of anywhere paranoid about security. A makeover to look more mainstream couldn’t be too hard.

I believe the inventor is patenting it as fast as humanly possible to try to stem the obvious possible misuses of it.

It’s kind of a shame it wasn’t invented when most people were shooting film, though.

The Searchers

No, this isn’t a blog about John Ford, John Wayne, or even Vera Miles.

This is a blog to appease the appetites of all those people who come to this blog looking for various flavours of pigeon.

In the last while we’ve had people search for “what do pigeons eat”, “fat pigeons”, “bad things about pigeons”, “good things about pigeons”, “how many pigeons are there in the world?”, “knitted pigeon”, “Starsky cardigan”, “mannikin bird”, “roast pigeon bangkok”, “all kind of pigeons”, “exotic pigeons”, “fat fluffy animals”, “woohoo pigeons”, and, mysteriously, “scoopy pigeon”.

Most of these I can understand, many are highly respectable searches, and some we probably even have useful information about in this blog. But “scoopy pigeon”? Is somebody getting tips and assembling recipes for a roadkill feast? Responsibly taking their pet pigeon for a walk in the park, plastic bag in hand? I don’t get it at all.

Pigeon searchers, this one’s for you.

Okonomiyaki

Thanks to a dinner party hosted by our friends Chris and Miwako, we discovered this top ‘new’ (it’s been around for 400 years apparently) food in Sydney. It’s Japanese of course and means something like ‘whatever you like’. Whatever you like is mixed with eggs and cabbage and various other things and then cooked, sort of like a big thick pancake, on a hotplate and decorated in the cutest way with saucy spirals (somehow I doubt that mayonnaise is a 400 year old Japanese staple but what do I know?) and bonito flakes that wave at you and look like they’re still alive. And now we have found our new regular restaurant in London - Abeno.

It’s not primarily for the food that we loved Abeno, although it was very good - it’s the theatre of the whole thing. You are at a table with your very own hotplate, you order from a menu with many, many choices on it, then the (very cute) waiter/chef/cleaner-upperer brings all the ingredients to the table, mixes them, cooks them on the hotplate and serves them to you. It’s all very top fun to watch and induced us to leave an extra big tip because the cuties were working so hard..

Kiso mix - mushroom, lotus root and cheese (!), and spicy naniwa - kimchee mostly. One side cooked…

Flip, lid on…

decorated and ready to eat

Surprisingly, the kiso mix was the better of the two (we really only ordered it for novelty) - in some strange alchemical way the mushrooms, cheese and lotus turned into a tangy, crunchy yumminess.

And the best thing of all - we drank sake from a box! The box was filled way past overflowing -like a sake waterfall - to indicate the host’s generosity apparently. The funnest drink experience ever. It took me ages to screw up the courage to actually drink from said box in case there was some special Japanese way of doing it, but after consultation with Jamesy we decided that there was really only one thing to do…

Kampai!

We had so much fun Jamesy even came up with a haiku:

London sake spring

okonomiyaki here

but first we must drink

QI

QI, which stands for Quite Interesting, is the best quiz show in the world, and probably the only one not to be copied in Australia. It was quite disturbing to discover that Good News Week and Spicks and Specks are both British in origin, and Australia even imports the same guests! QI is hosted by Stephen Fry, a national treasure, (and he’s podcasting now). You can download it (illegally) not that I’d ever condone that sort of thing. And for your amusement, here is a clip from same - the cutest and funniest bird in the world, the mannikin bird - it moonwalks to attract a mate.

The Dread Herb Robert

Not really - just herb robert (geranium robertianum), which sprang up and is flowering in our back garden. So many lovely wildflowers here.

Devon and not cream

Just finished listening to the Guardian environment podcast, which has bad news about England - the new government policy is to pour money into nuclear energy and “new coal” and ignore renewables; bad news about bees - apparently there’s a new and bizarre disease called total colony collapse which is just as it sounds and no one has any idea what causes it; and then some good news - there’s a town in Devon called Totnes which has become the world’s first ‘transition town‘ - “a community in a process of imagining and creating a future that addresses the twin challenges of diminishing oil and gas supplies and climate change, and creating the kind of community that we would all want to be part of.” Now that sounds tops to me. And it seems that the Sunshine Coast of all places is aiming to be the number one transition town in Australia. Who’d have thunk it?

Ol’ Tripey

In case any of you our dear friends hadn’t noticed, we’re in old Blighty. Which is famous for tripe. Built on tripe. Tripe and onions, tripe and… um. And you may have noticed we like to explore the fun (and now exotic) bits of the eating experience, willing to do our bit for the nose to tail, so of course tripe it must be in all its forms! And so to Borough Markets, the first stop for any foodie in London. Bloody hell this place is marvellous, in fact the best food market we’ve ever seen, and boy have we seen some beauts - Bangkok - wowzer!; Adelaide - swoon; Prahran - yummy; farmers’ markets at Fox Studios in Sydney - aww (oh how I miss you Toby’s Estate)! Now where was I? Oh yes, heading to the best market in the country for the arguably signaturey dish of the country - after all isn’t tripe and onions why most of you have never even ventured near a piece of delicious cosy stomachio? Even though you’ve never even seen one, let alone tasted it?

But what did we find dear readery friend? NO TRIPE. That’s right. None. In the middle of the most populous city in the most populous country in the UK - no tripe.

I shall elaborate on my theory for this astonishing lack in the next post. Now I’m too weak from lack of innards to do so.

Already?

Oops - almost without our noticing, our blog’s first (or is that second?) birthday is upon us, and (with our noticing) we have been in this country for 366 days now. Insert cliche about time and activities that usually require wings here.

And today’s incredibly weird search engine set of terms that somehow led to our blog is - ‘future keys fat dish’. Huh?

Happy anniversary to us!

No really, the Universe IS against me…

The reason for not posting is thus - Lefty the up-until-now faithful laptop died. And very quickly too - suddenly there was no clock, then no battery display, then, well, nothing. Fortunately with all the other bits dying I backed up a while ago, but really!

So meet Floopy - shorter, lighter, faster and with disturbing keyboard changes - I have a pounds sign - £££££ - and a euro sign - €€€€€ - and the apple key no longer has an apple on it.

Knitting

For the first time in my life I managed to knit a garment all by myself. Yay! I finished above scarf (my own pattern and everything (i.e. I made it up as I went along)) for Jamesy’s birthday. And what fun it was! Before I started I had vague memories of trying to knit after my mother patiently cast on for me, but I can recall finishing only one thing - a Barbie ballgown made from a bit of French knitting coiled around and around. Very stylish!

The funnest part of the whole experience though was all the memories of my lovely Mum I got back - how many times did she patiently unpick my mistakes and encourage me to go on, how wonderful is it that she taught me to knit at all, and how many garments did she make for me?! My favouritest of all was the Starsky cardigan I so craved (even though I was in love with Hutch). What a fiddly pattern it was. It took Mum about a week to finish it.

Until I did it myself I had no idea how marvellous a knitter my mother was and how many thousands of hours it took her to complete the multitude of garments our family had. Shirley took me to ballet classes three times a week - 30 minutes’ drive away - so she stayed with the other ballet Mums and always knitted. When I wasn’t at ballet she knitted also. I had 2 pairs of leg warmers for every day of the week, about 8 wrap-around cardigans, an assortment of jumpers (that’s New Zealand-speak for pullovers)… the list is almost endless.

Happy Birthday dear Mum! I love you, thank you and miss you.