I'm going to make a post about Master Chef Australia. Its a reality TV show and I've been watching it almost every day so even though I feel lame writing about it, I also don't.

Mainly my issue is with Chris (that picture makes him look good). He makes food that makes me want to sing songs of praise. For example, last night he cooked a 3 course meal consisting of:

• Duck and black pudding stuffed into a duck's neck
• Half a pigs head, marinated and baked to crispy
• Beeramisu, which is like tiramisu, using chocolate stout instead of coffee

After this, I decided that I would be happy to fly interstate just to eat at any restaurant he was running. His idea for a restaurant is exactly where I want to be. The problem is that having watched the show has given me an insight into his personality. He's a grumpy, know-it-all who loves to tell everyone how it is and looks down on most of his competitors. He is also greasy, bloated and mono-browed with a bulbous wino nose and wears a hat all the time. Now I would call myself greasy and bloated and I also like to wear a hat, but my nose is in pretty good shape and I have two very distinct eyebrows. Also there is certain hat etiquette which hat-wearers should follow. For example, when you go to meet some of Sydney's top chefs and you have a meal with them, you should take your god damned hat off. Especially if its a wobbly-brimmed straw hat, stained dark from your greasy hair.

I guess that what annoys me most about him is that one of my good friends refers to him as "Dan" which makes me want to scrub myself with bleach in a bath full of drain cleaner.

In looking for links for this post, I stumbled across an Australian Muslims forum where they were discussing the show. Many of them agreed that Chris's food looked well made, despite the fact that a pigs head on a plate horrified them. One user commented that throughout the show they often drink alcohol and so isn't watching the show the same thing as associating with people who drink alcohol. I just had to wonder what kind of dreary world-view makes you think such things.

Woah, something happened to my brain today. Blinding pain behind my eyes. Feeling dizzy for no reason. I even had a little puke after lunch. I guess its a migraine, only the second time in my life I've had such a thing.

I made a family of blue people in the sims. There is an incredibly fierce dark-blue woman and her skinny, blue, teenage house-girl. I expect a lot of lesbianism to occur in this family. Mating with passing men should produce only girl children. An army of fierce, blue women and their girl-servants will take over the town in due time.

Yep, the sims lets me play out my fantasies in vivid, real-time 3D format.

I keep organising music nights with cucurucho only to flake out due to various complaints. Today's complaint is the migraine. I very much want to be Meat Pigging every day, but when it comes down to it, I just don't seem to have the cajones.

And that's the end of that chapter.

I think twitter may be bad for me. Its been all abuzz with news from Iran for a week or so. I've tried to stay out of this issue for a few reasons:

1. I don't really know much about what is going on there, nor about the history of Iran.
2. Its hard to really know what's going on there due to things like the expulsion of foreign media, internet censorship and leaked news from people I don't know, nor do I know their motives and politics
3. Generally if I see a bunch of guys with rocks and sticks fighting a bunch of guys with uniforms and weapons, I'll automatically be on the side of the guys with the rocks. But I know that a popular uprising against the Iranian president is a dream come true for the US government and its not like the CIA don't have a history of being involved in things like this and considering the above two points I really don't know what to make of it.
4. I really dig the idea of a concurrent physical/cyber conflict going on between a government and it's people. This is all very exciting, but I'd rather just watch it than form some kind of commentary on it.

And none of this should seem particularly unusual, except that I'm using twitter heavily at the moment and in between everyone making their icon green to "show support" and the constant, low-level noise, I just feel like I'm one of the odd ones out. Then I look around at people just around me in general and realise I'm not. Which makes me think that twitter is not necessarily the most sane headspace.

I got another clue when I saw that a trending topic was that two people who were married, and who a whole lot of people knew (kate someone?) were now getting divorced. Huh. I'd never head of either of them but it seemed like a big deal on twitter. Bigger than Iran for a little while. Of course today every single trending topic was related to Michael Jackson.

I remember the early 90's, before global "news" carnivals had turned the personal lives of a handful of Californian residents into everyone's business. We had an exchange student from the USA and one of the first things she spoke to us about was OMG Michael Jackson, referring to the very first accusations from kids against him. We'd heard a few things here and there about it but I didn't know anyone who was talking about it. And when she told us all about it, I didn't really care all that much. And that's still how I feel because, lets face it, I love some of what he did and its still there if I choose to listen to it. Everything else is nothing to do with me or anyone I'll ever know.

For a week now we've been talking to Ruby about how great it will be to have a big girl's bed. On Sunday we took the outer side off her cot so now she can get in an out as she pleases. Her initial reaction was very excited, she got up on her bed, jumped around, got back down again, grabbed a toy, climbed back up with the toy, etc. She's big enough now to climb up onto our bed on her own and loves to jump around on it, so this is like a more Ruby sized version. What we were hoping for was that instead of waking up in the morning, throwing all her toys out of her crib then getting bored and yelling until we woke up (usually happens by 7am) she could just get up and amuse herself in her room for a while.

The scary part, for us, was putting her to bed with the new setup. We stayed upstairs after she went to bed, listening for any mishaps. I went in to check on her at one point and she was laying asleep with her arm over the side of the bed. About an hour later there was a thud and a cry. We ran in there to see her laying on the ground, confused and crying. I picked her up and she was mostly just tired and surprised, but not hurt. She laid her head against me and sobbed sleepily. I put her back down and she went back to sleep.

This morning, as I dressed for work, I could hear her in there, playing with her things, but she barely made a noise. So I think the experiment went well.

Lots of little things like this keep happening as our daughter makes the transition from screachy worm monster into normal human.

Tanglecats Ho! Originally uploaded by danoxster.

Well once a year a Queens birthday long weekend comes around. Despite it having no actual connection to the birthday of the Queen, its one extra day a year where I don't have to come to work. It's possibly the only useful thing that living in a monarchy does for me personally and it is still not enough to stop me cursing her majesty's visage on the back of every coin in my pocket. I hope that when we finally shed that pointless head of state we won't lose our public holiday.

The weekend was dominated by the virgin voyage of the tanglecat market stall. Ang was so nervous on Saturday that she didn't do much other than prepare for it. I took Ruby to the farmers market, mainly to buy things with a set of $50 bills to get enough note change for the stall. On Sunday we got up at 0700 hours and collected all our gear together for the walk over to Eveliegh. We got there about 15 minutes late (late enough to send Ang into a mild state of panic) but ended up with ample time to set up. From then on I walked Ruby about the markets, wearing a tanglecat hat (so everyone could see just how good they look on a baby) while Ang and Fiona got down to bizznizz.

They ended up selling most of their stock and made enough money to buy more materials for next time. They also got orders for adult versions of the hats and some people even paid up front. I went home and pretty much played the sim for the rest of the weekend. Ang got home around 6 after spending 6 hours on her feet talking and smiling. I think she hurt her smile bone. We spent Monday just lazing, brunching and lazing.

An enjoyable weekend. God save the Queen. Rah Rah Ballyhoo.

Compulsory mask, brought in to combat the flu epidemic after the World War, 1918-1919 / Sam Hood Originally uploaded by State Library of New South Wales collection.

New gas-masks for the NSW Fire Brigade, Castlereagh Street headquarters, Sydney, 1927 / Sam Hood Originally uploaded by State Library of New South Wales collection.

There are a few bands/singers who I was so completely devoted to as a teenager that now I can barely listen to. Its all music that I still think is good, but I just can't work up the mental effort to even think about them much, and listening to them is hard. The three that stand out the most are: The Cure, Nirvana and Björk.

The cure I really got into when I was about 13. The first album I bought on my own was a cure album and at one point I owned almost all of their albums. I spent a good amount of the summer of 1991 sitting alone at home listening to disintegration over and over again.

The first time I heard Nirvana's Bleach I actually think my brain was rewired and I never thought about music in the same way again. This sounds overly dramatic, but few pieces of music have inspired me as much as this album. Everything they put out was a revelation to me and I couldn't get enough. When I found out that Kurt was dead I cried, I thought it was a hoax. In my teenage way I really though I was connected to him.

I remember seeing the film clip to the Sugarcubes Hit one night when I was staying up late watching rage. The fact that someone like Björk could exist struck me as a miracle. Something that could take me completely out of the world of people as I understood. When her album Debut came out I was living in Denmark and had been listening to a borrowed copy of Life's Too Good recorded entirely in Icelandic, thinking that I was starting to understand a new way of seeing the world. After Debut was released I developed quite an obsession with her. For over a year an entire bedroom wall of mine was covered in pictures of her. I would actually think about my daily life and wonder if I was acting in a way that would impress bjõrk.

I don't know what happened. I can hardly listen to these three any more, though deep down their effects on me are still there. They still influence my view of the world and the way I appreciate art and music. But the idea of sitting down to any of their albums just makes me cringe now.

ruby sings along
Originally uploaded by danoxster

Ruby and I had some time alone last night while bastardang went to meet up with her knitting circle. I made us some dinner and then we got down to listening to some music. She really enjoyed it and especially liked the cramps. At one point she started singing along and I found her rhythm was spot on and her melody was pretty good too. I managed to record a bit of it (embedded above).

At the end you can see where she notices the camera and makes a grab for it then gets shirty when I pull it away from her. She's not very patient at the moment, but none of that really matters if you can rock.

So I'm impressed with her on two counts. One, she seems to have the music in her, and two, she has great taste.