SO CONFUSED RIGHT NOW

I think the trees in my street are a bit confused. They seem to think it's autumn and not spring. Oh My God it must be climate change. This was the sight that greeted me this morning when I went out to my car.

THE WORLD GOURMET CENTRE

LIVE - OVERCOME

Such a song.....

AHHH THE WAR, IT WAS A GAY OLD TIME

I stumbled across these pics a few days ago. Genuine adverts for a brand of towels back during WW2. It was obviously popular and patriotic to use the military in an advert and to associate your product with the military.

"If it's good enough for the boys in green it's good enough for us" right?

Hmmm I do wonder however just what message they were trying to portray with these adverts. It sure looks like the soldiers were having a merry old time of it doesn't it? I especially love the look on the Islander dudes faces ....

"What the hell are those 'happy' white boys doin in our canoe and how come they're posing like that? Why is that guy holding that palm like that? .... Damn, there goes the neighbourhood"

20 YEARS AGO TODAY

Private travel into foreign countries can be requested without conditions […]. Permission will be granted instantly. Permanent relocations can be done through all border checkpoints between the GDR into the FRG or Berlin (West). — Günter Schabowski, November 9th, 1989

A wall came down in Berlin. I vividly remember watching it on TV. Throughout the 70's and 80's I had grown up hearing about the evil communist state of the USSR and how it threatened our lives. We were told there were enough nuclear weapons to blow the world off of its' axis if both sides let rip at the same time(there still is), they could invade at any moment. The reality was very different.

The USSR was almost bankrupt, oil prices had fallen drastically and they simply didn't have the income to compete with the US military machine. Reagan knew this and as soon as Gorbachev was elected he pressed him. Thank god for Gorbachev and his sanity and lack of vanity. He took one on the chin and the wall came down. Some still wish it was up.

Okay, thehistory lesson ends here, albeit the abridged history of 'communism and the fall of the Berlin wall', but it is what it is. There are some great pics in this flickr group of life in Berlin between 1961 and 1989 if you're interested.

OVERDRIFT STAGE 2

A couple of years ago I posted the original Overdrift and I know you've all been hanging out for the sequel...hang no more. I highly recommend watching the first one and getting the background on Initial D before you watch this.

"The Vulcan huh? 50k uphill, 70k downhill, 40 hard turns, 5 of which are hairpin and the last 3 kilometers all on top of an active volcano. It's practically a non-stop drift from start to finish with only a 15% chance of survival. Yeeeeaaah I remember that one"

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and whilst I'm on the topic of drifting check this out


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THE HOOD # 95

Another piece added to the long haired girl, at least we now know where the parachuting babies come from.

CHOOSE JESUS

Chris and Caz's housewarming last night, best housewarming gift ever.

Creation versus evolution....don't get me started

THE MAGNIFICENT ONE

Akira Kurosawa has at least one fan on the Gold Coast, I know it's a small stretch from the Seven Samurai to a modern day gun belted Japanese chef but it's a stretch I'm prepared to make. My brother Justin sent through these pics today of his lunch at a Japanese restaurant on the Gold Coast. Check out the dudes bullet belt knife belt. Love it.

LOVE WILL TEAR US APART

Not that I am in anyway feeling morbid about my earlier post tonight, far from it, it was actually a bit cathartic. It's just that I'm not one to ever let a good segue go to waste and thus I now present you with Joy Divisions Love Will Tear Us Apart

BE NUMBER 4000

I have another blog called YeLPanorama and it's where I post my pics in bigger and better versions. I think some pics just deserve a larger format. It's been going since April Fools day 2007 and it doesn't really attract a whole lot of visitors, which is fine by me. But if you hurry you can be the official 4000th visitor to the site. There is no prize other than the personal satisfaction of a win and hey maybe you've not been winning of late and thus this easy win will perk you up or you'll get there and be the 4001st visitor in which case this will be another failure for you and so it's probably best if you don't go there.

Okay then.

I TAKE THEE (I THINK)

Lately I've watched a number of relationships disintegrate, people I didn't really know and some I did and just today someone very close to me (whom I shall not name for their privacy) ended a very long relationship. So it's got me thinking and I'm just gonna dribble on some here and get some thoughts down.

I've had my fair share of breakups including two 10 year long relationships. It hurts when they end, painful painful hurt. I'm pretty damn sure that I don't want to feel that pain again, I definitely do NOT want to feel the pain I felt with the most recent long term break up. But it comes with the territory right? Us humans need partners, both sexually and for companionship, so the physical and the mental. Or do we? I've been single for 7 years now but in that time there's been a few short term connections and for various reasons they haven't worked out. But I miss having a partner from time to time and not just for the sexy time, there's just a pile of things in life that you do that you really should share/experience with somebody else.

I guess my question is, are we supposed to mate for life? Our parents or at least our grand parents did. What changed? Is it that we're too selfish these days and we put ourselves first more often or is that we've managed to become more self sufficient and we don't need the good woman or good man to stand by our side as we trek through the perilous journey called life.

We need to produce offspring to survive as a species, but more and more people choose not to have children or like in my case circumstances just never allowed it. I guess I still have plenty of time to do that but then I require a partner that I feel is good enough to raise my children (there's that selfishness again yeah?). Hey, maybe tomorrow I will meet the one who makes my everything great and loves my tastes in music and movies....whoa look out, but then again do you really want to feel that pain again....one day? Yeah you probably do because it comes with the territory.

Aint love grand ;)

Christ, when did I become Carrie Bradshaw?!?

HEADPHONES ON VOLUME SET TO 11

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Kleptones - MashupCentral 005 promo mix by AudioPorn Central
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nice and loud does it

A LITTLE GEM

Years ago when I was an apprentice chef my head chef owned a Volkswagen Karmann Ghia. One day he dropped it off at his local service station somewhere in Melbourne to get some work done on the engine, came back the next day and it was gone. All the servo said was "it looks like someone stole it over night dude". He was 99% sure the service station was in on it but could prove little. They're great looking cars so no sup rise that this one caught my eye as I walked passed it on the weekend .

ARCH OF HORROR

If somebody knows what this is meant to be then please enlighten me. I'm guessing lightning bolt but I'm not sure, I know it's supposed to be a central art piece to the new Northbridge Piazza (and isn't that as dull as dullsville could be) but to me it just looks like a challenge to the first drunken bogan to walk under it.

"Betcha can't climb that"

"Beshya I ken"

THE HOOD # 94

Floaters

This is what happens when I stay sober on a Saturday night, I go for a Sunday morning walk.
I think I'll make more of a habit of it.





















I really want to float somewhere right now

Bigger and better versions over at YeLPanorama

THE PANEL #3

DINNER MAN WALKING

Dinner with Waz and Gaz tonight at Nine. Long overdue birthday meal with Gaz as I was away at the time. Decided to play with some settings on my cam during the walk to the restaurant, turned out pretty okay methinks...

I just love the view of Perth from my street, Im gonna miss this next year when I move.





Hyde Park



Bulwer st, almost there



Nine Restaurant
okay I cheated a bit on this one, took it on the way home, note we were the last to leave....good form



The reason we went to Nine, sashimi plate. Should have used my camera and not my phone.

Larger versions over at YeLPanorama
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WHITEWALL ME

Hand painted whitewall tyres on some shitbox of a car, spotted by Adam as we grabbed some lunch at work today. Stay classy Perth.

ART IMITATING ART

A slow start to the working week for me, I took some me time this morning to measure up the insides of the house I've almost bought. It's going to need a whole heap of work before I can move in, probably wont be in it until this time next year but it will so be worth it. So many cool ideas flowing already. My bestie female friend Karks and her boy Marco are going to be my architects so it will be a cool project. After we measured up it was off to Soto to mull over a few ideas.

Oh and since when has copying someone elses art been considered art, art worthy of selling too? Maybe it's the only way you and I could ever afford a Warhol original. And the green ones, whaaaaaaaat, looks like the stuff I made in primary school when I was cutting shapes into potatoes and pressing them onto paper. You want how much for it? No thanks and straighten that picture.

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LET ME EDUCATE YOU IN THE ART OF COOKING FLAMINGOS

I guarantee nobody will ever find my blog by googling the above sentence. So anyways I was eating Peking duck for dinner the other night and (oh by the way this is gonna be a long train of thought post which should end with a story about an ancient Roman gourmet and a restaurant I once owned) I was contemplating how duck has become so popular over the past years. It used to only be chicken but these days people are just as cool eating the dark bird. Personally I love duck, so many ways to cook it, so good.

So I started to wonder what would be the next big thing in "birds for dinner", as you do. It was then that I remembered a recipe I once saw for cooking Flamingo.... :pause: .... Yeah I said Flamingo, I know you're probably screwing your nose up right now but when did we start being so fussy with the animals we eat? People in the past have eaten swans, ostrich, cranes and even peacocks. Okay I'm probably just talking about ancient Romans and the like here but eat them they did.

I found the Flamingo recipe in a cookbook I own called Apicius. It's one of the oldest known cookbooks around. Supposedly written by a dude called Marcus Gavius Apicius (natch he has a wikipedia page) who was a Roman gourmet and wealthy lover of all things luxurious. He lived in Rome under the reign of Tiberius and was famous for his banquets and flamboyant lifestyle. I'm assuming he was a fat bastard. One day he realised that he was almost broke and decided that rather than die poor he would kill himself. If he couldn't live like he was accustomed to then he'd throw one last banquet and eat some poisoned food at the end of it...so he did, or at least so the legend says.

Somewhere along the way he is said to have written down his recipes for others to use and thus we have Apicius the cook book. The thing about this cook book is that there are no measurements, purely ingredients. The thinking behind this was that old Marcus didn't want the common folk to cook his dishes, so if you wanted the amounts you had to ask him and therefor you had to know him. An odd way to operate but hey it was Rome in its' heyday.

Which brings me to my restaurant. When I decide to branch out on my own I was always going to call it Apicius, not that I was really going to do any of the dishes in the book, I just wanted to pay homage to this story. It was fairly successful as a business but after 2 years of slog I decided to move on and I sold it to two of my staff who kept it going for 2-3 years more and they made an even bigger success of it all. The building is still there in Fremantle but the restaurants it now houses change names every second week or so it seems.

Hmmm Ostrich eh? Why not? I mean we eat Emu don't we?

/end of train of thought
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RANDOM IMAGES # 34

WHY DO I LIVE HERE AGAIN?

Another sad chapter in the Nanny State

By Gareth Parker | View Archive October 23rd, 2009, 10:39 am

British public intellectual Charles Landry could not have been more correct in 2007 when he identified Perth as "the city that says no".

To the list that reads no shopping after 6pm, no shopping on a Sunday, no daylight savings, no pubs open after 10pm on a Sunday, no innovative new architecture, no mid-rise buildings near the beach, no new football stadium and countless other examples, you can now add "No jumping off the Cottesloe pylon".

Renovations of the iconic structure, beloved by generations of beachgoers, were finished today after $122,000 of Federal taxes and a $50,000 Lotterywest grant were tipped into the project.

Yet we find out today that the concrete pylon, originally constructed as part of a failed shark-proof fence, has been deliberately angled and covered with a slippery surface so that swimmers will not be able to climb it.

The reason? Public liability, of course.

"We have had situations where people were diving into water one metre deep. We feel a lot more confident in terms of the liability issue now," Cottesloe Council manager engineering services told thewest.com.au this morning.

A question to Mr Trigg and Cottesloe Mayor Kevin Morgan. In 73 years since it was erected, precisely how many times has the council been sued for an accident on the pylon?

What a joke.