cronicbadger

I visited the local farmer's market today. First time ever, although I'd known of its existence for the past few years. It's held at Newcastle Showground most Sundays and has become quite popular - and I'm not surprised.

There's pretty much everything you'd expect at a large open/covered market (think Melbourne's "Victoria Markets" but smaller by several orders of magnitude); handcrafted jewellery, soaps, incense, jams and pickles, fruit drinks, wine, meats, breads and dairy produce, vegetables and fruits, chickens (live ones), etc.

There was a good representation of products from Wollombi growers, mostly wines and condiments, that had me thinking how I really should go visit the area. Wollombi is a pretty interesting region, being part of the Hunter Valley but it's enclosed location has a micro climate that farmers love, and scenery that visitors love.

Potatoes for $1 a kilo, a bag of locally grown lemons $4, local wines starting at $5 a bottle, a lovely grape juice and ginger carbonated drink locally made... you get the picture.

I was so impressed that from now on I intend to do much of my grocery shopping there.

I've been having an immensely enjoyable time reading Ben Thompson's "Badass Of The week". This is an on-line encyclopaedia of "badasses" from the modern day, history and fiction. The well-researched and intelligent articles are presented in colourful language - even the continent of Australia gets a well-deserved entry, alongside such greats as Nicola Tesla (Father Of Electricity) and Alexander Selkirk (the original "Robinson Crusoe").

http://www.badassoftheweek.com/

Here is an excerpt from the page on Baldwin IV of Jerusalem, who during the Crusades, despite being fresh out of his teens and dying from leprosy, led a small force of 500 knights in an attack on Saladin's army threatening Jerusalem:

"...Saladin had pretty much figured he had the Crusaders by the balls at this point, and in his haste to send the Europeans crying back home to their mamas he fucked up and forgot to keep an eye out for insane lepers hauling ass at Mach3.5 across the countryside. Baldwin and his Templars caught the once-unbeatable tactician completely by surprise, and before Saladin's men had even had a chance to figure out their swords from their dicks the young Leper King was leading a massive charge of cavalry all the way up their assholes..."

I just wish we had this in History class at school, I would have actually taken notice and learned something.

Here is a fun quiz! In this list of ten websites (source article will be revealed later) , five are deadly serious and five are just taking the piss. Can you figure out which category each website belongs to? Answers next week!

http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0094/0094_01.asp
http://www.raptureready.com/
http://www.landoverbaptist.org/
http://www.truechristian.com/
http://www.timecube.com/
http://blogs4brownback.wordpress.com/
http://objectiveministries.org/
http://www3.telus.net/trbrooks/perfectproof.htm
http://shelleytherepublican.com/
http://www.godhatestheworld.com/

Answers here:

DEADLY SERIOUS
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)

JUST TAKING THE PISS
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)

I switched over the TV tonight, Sunday, and started to watch an interview with the pro golfer, Tiger Woods. The woman interviewing him asked a series of shallow, uninteresting questions. Mr Woods responded with surprising depth and articulation. As the interview focus bounced between the two my disgust increased - who the hell was this bimbo of a journalist?!? And then I realised I was watching "60 Minutes".

I haven't seen the news show 60 Minutes since the 1990's, so it's come as a shock to see how low the quality of their "journalism" has sunk. It's little better than one of those cringe-worthy morning shows or the E! on Foxtel.

So I switched to SBS to watch "Dateline". The show's frontman is George Negus, one of the original three hosts of "60 Minutes", and watched a well-produced item on child abduction in China, then an incisive, insightful and newsworthy interview with some US politicians.

It just reaffirms my faith in the intelligent programming from SBS and ABC compared to the shit the commercial TV stations are dishing up.

Tonight I was listening to a Sri Lankan diplomat interviewed on the television news in relation to the Tamil refugees currently ensconced on an Australian customs ship anchored in an Indonesian port. He was explaining about how the Tamil people who were herded into military-controlled processing camps after the comprehensive and crushing defeat of organised Tamil resistance were enjoying their new life so much that many did not want to leave their camps.
There was supplied footage of smiling Tamil kids playing cricket, mothers laughing with their children, a camp school with happy children doing their bookwork... all very nice and proper.

Something stirred inside me. I'd seen footage like this before. Somewhere.
And the name came to me:
"Theresienstadt concentration camp".

During World War 2 the Germans made a propaganda film at the Theresienstadt concentration camp that portrayed it as a place where Jews deported from Germany led happy, productive lives working and playing and smiling...

It was a lie of course.

YouTube has some footage:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-9x-8ys7t0

The large camps set up for processing of Tamil civilians are, by definition, traditional style Concentration Camps (please, don't confuse these with WW2 German "death camps", which served an entirely different purpose). Now there is nothing wrong with concentration camps of course, since many modern, civilised countries have used them for controlling unruly civilian populations; for example, the USA for native American and Phillipinas, Great Britain for the South African Boers, the Soviet Union for the Cossack and Chechens.

See the following Wikipedia entry for an explanation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_camp#Concentration_camps

However, the Sri Lankan government spokesperson also suggested that terrorists could possibly be on board the ship.

This second comment raised my hackles. Sadly, the moniker "terrorist" is becoming a debased currency used to demonise any undesirable group of people of which some of its members are involved in a brutal armed struggle in which both military and civilians are targeted.

So what's this post about, you wonder? Is it about the misuse and watering-down of the formerly grave term "terrorist"? Is it about my distaste of government propaganda?

No, I'm simply pointing out the lack of honesty of the mainstream news services in not calling a "spade" a "spade", or in other words, the complete lack of use of the term "concentration camp" when reporting on the camps set up to control the Tamil population and the Sri Lankan government's blatant refusal of international access to them in order to ensure fair and humane treatment of the civilian prisoner population.

It's absolutely delicious!

Put some neapolitian icecream in a bowl and drown it in a good dry white wine. Extremely yummy.

I wish I could have taken the credit for this idea, but a quick Google search shows that the Americans have been doing variations of this for some time.

The following are a few of my mum's anecdotes from when she worked as a nurses' aide at the TB ward at Rankin Park Hospital in Newcastle, in the 1960's.

Tuberculosis (TB), for those who don't know, is an insidious infectious disease of the lungs, barely controllable by a handful of increasingly ineffective drugs. In the later stages, patients cough up blood and bits of their lungs.

Andrew, in his 20s, after a trip away from the hospital to visit his parents in Sydney, got off the train at Wyee and then threw himself underneath another, preferring a quicker death.

An eleven year-old boy who slowly faded away, and one day his bed became unoccupied. New sheets, neatly made, ready for the beginning of the next shift.

An entire family admitted, eventually only the little daughter survived.

I'm not a fan of the gratuitous use of swear-words, but if there was ever a time and a place to use them, then it was 40 years ago on a small, sun-drenched plain...

http://doctorstainforth.wordpress.com/2009/07/21/walking-on-the-moon/

It was a cold night and I decided to let the cats sleep in the bedroom. One on a blanket on the floor, the other at the edge of the bed. All was well until about 1:00am a tremendous fart lit the sky - or at least split the silence.
One of the little buggers must have been eating cabbage on the sly.
"Holy shit! Okay, which one of you did that?"
They both pretended to be sleep, obviously sniggering to themselves at my bewildered disgust and almost-hidden amusement.

A few weeks ago the news was splashed across newspapers and websites - Kraft, those evil American usurpers, were changing the formula for Vegemite! The company surveyed the opinions of 30,000 people and came to the conclusion that cream cheese added to the formula would make it easier to spread. But what about vegemite soup, you say? Surely the cheese component would precipitate in hot water when making Vegemite Soup, thus spoiling a trusted staple! Truly, Kraft had obviously gone insane.

And so, many people across Australia and New Zealand were incensed by this upstart interloper fooling around with an Aussie icon. How dare they!

However, as it came to pass, Kraft had neglected to mention that it was a new Vegemite-based product they were releasing, and plain old Vegemite would remain the same as it has always been. Carefully-worded press releases had given the impression that Vegemite was going to be the next victim of the unstoppable juggernaut of American cultural imperialism. How many thousands of dollars of free advertising did they obtain from the outrage-powered press? Whatever the figure, it was a clever ploy on their part.

But it puzzles me why anyone would want to put yet more crap into a product that is, for all intents and purposes, scum scraped off beer fermentation vats.

In recent years the quality and usefulness of computer software has increased, thanks in part to increased processing power and the open source software movement.

The company I work at relies on a great deal of automated software, and we go to great lengths to select and use the best software for specific purposes. That ethos extends into our personal use of software at home.

This blog entry was inspired in part by some recent personal purchases made after extensive research.

These are what I consider some of the best software products for MS Windows, organised by category:

E-Mail Client:
Thunderbird (Mozilla)

WWW Browser:
Opera (Operasoft)
Notes: Opera stricly adheres to W3C web standards so not all sites work with it - so keep IE as a backup for those few websites that need a less demanding viewer. Google Chrome may be closing the gap though, and may be the browser of choice in another year or so.

File Explorer:
Salamander (Altap)

Source Code Control:
Subversion (O/S Sourceforge)

Software Bug/Issue Management
Jira (Atlassian)
Notes: It's an Australian company, too!

Photo Image Management:
Photo Commander (Ashampoo)
Photo Manager (ACDSee)
Note: Photo Commander can be obtained quite inexpensively with the regular Ashampoo deals. I recommend signing up to the Ashampoo customer mailing list.

Multimedia Viewing:
VLC Media Player (VideoLan)
FLV Player (Martijn Devisser)
Note: Both are Free. VLC Plays most formats. FLV Player plays FLV format.

PDF Viewer:
Sumatra PDF (Krzysztof Kowalczyk)
Note: Sumatra is free. Small footprint, light and fast.

Website backup:
Webzip (Spidersoft)
Notes: Another Aussie company.

Office Productivity w/MS Office compaibility:
SoftMaker Office (Softmaker and Ashampoo)
OpenOffice (OpenOffice.Org)
Note: As with all Ashampoo products, you can usually get a special deal for Softmaker Office for about AUD$10-20. Until I purchased Softmaker Office via Ashampoo I was using OpenOffice.org. SM Office is faster, lighter and much more file-format compatible with the Microsoft Office applications. The only advantages over it that OO.Org has are the other applications such as Draw, Base and Math.

Personal Information Manager (PIM):
Ultra Recall (Kinook)
One Note (Microsoft)
Notes: Both are very good products which have strengths in different areas. There is a free cut-down version of Ultra available.

While gearing up to make a batch of ginger beer I decided to do some "side ferments".

The first was a bottle of Apple and Guava juice. It turned out surprisingly well- about 4% alcohol and finished with a young, sharp taste similar to grapefruit. Quite nice.

The other lot was more interesting: A few weeks ago I'd found a number of two-litre bottles of pear wine in the back of the garage. This had been there for some time - about three years. It had been too sweet for my palate so got stored away and forgotten. Anyway, I decided to ferment it further.

I've just tried some and it's had a fair amount of the sweetness removed, and is surprisingly smooth. However, the alcohol content is rather high and is possibly one of the closest drinks to a pan-galactic gargleblaster this side of the local cluster. Nasty - but niiice!

*hic*

I made tea tonight. Rice, red cabbage and baked fish cakes.

The warning signs were there as this delicious fare was plonked onto the dining room table:
"What's that red stuff?!?"
"Oh, I'm glad I'm on a diet."
"Um, at least you tried."
"It's certainly chewy. Is that flour I can taste?"
"I don't want to know what's in it."

I explained that the second tray of fishcakes was better since I hadn't covered those with dough:
"You made a second batch of THESE?"
"Oh Jeez"

Later, while washing up, my sister took some off the second tray and said that they at least tasted fairly good - but backed away in mock horror when I mentioned I still had half a bowl of the mix sitting in the fridge.

"Just leave. Get out of the kitchen, Marc!"

Okay, it was a disaster - the colour scheme looked like the parlour of a Chinese whorehouse and the taste was "somewhat chewy". However, in complete disregard of international treaties I am placing the recipe here in the public domain for you to try and judge for yourself.

Ingredients:
8 potatoes, 1 sweet potato, half head red cabbage, white rice, 2 large cans pink salmon, 1 large can corn kernals, 5 eggs, two brown onions, some flour, margarine, olive oil, curry powder and salt.

Directions:
1. Wash, peel if green, slice the potatoes and sweet potato. Boil for about 30 minutes.
2. Chop up the cabbage, just let it boil for as long as it takes to make everything else.
3. Open the cans and drain out the juices.
4. Peel then chop up the onions. If you're a bit unsteady with kitchen knives and it's a warm day then you might be able to honestly tell your dinner guests that blood, sweat and tears went into the meal - they'll feign their appreciation just that little bit more due to your revelation.
5. When the taters are done drain them then pour them into a bowl. Throw in a big spoonful of margarine, sprinkle a spoonful of curry powder and a touch of salt, then mash it all up.
6. At this point in time you should have handy an even bigger bowl - put in the mashed potatoes, cover them with the salmon and corn and onion, break some eggs into it (don't worry about seperating the yolks, since we all need protein anyway) then mash it all up.
7. Spread some flour onto some newspaper placed on the kitchen bench. I used the Form Guide from the Newcastle Herald which seems to leave less ink stains on the bench than colour supplements.
8. Use a big spoon or your hand to dollop out blobs of the mashed-up things and roll them about in the flour. Put the proto-fishcakes (or fish rissoles if you're posh) into the aluminium foil-covered baking tray.
9. Did you preheat the oven to 200 degrees Celcius? Oh shit, you forgot!?! Well do it now, then get back to the fish dollops.
10. Was that the doorbell?
11. Put some rice into a saucepan of boiling water (see 8 above). About two or three handfuls should do. This WAS going to be rice vermuccelli but the packet at the back of the cupboard had those little dead moths inside it. How do they get in there?
12. When the tray is full of flour-covered dollops, put the tray into the oven and set the timer for 20 minutes.
13. When you hear the smoke alarm go off in the hallway the rice should be cooked. To perfection.
14. After the fishthings have been cooking in the oven for ten minutes or so, get them out and flip them over to brown their undersides. They'll probably stick to the aluminium foil since you forgot to grease the aluminium foil properly. Don't worry, things could be worse.
15. The rice by now is a sodden, gluggy mess that sticks to your spoon like the facehugger from "Alien". Ignore it. It won't go away, but you should feel reassured by the fact that the meal will be saved by the cabbage. You simply cannot under- or overcook Red Cabbage. And it looks good. In fact, your guests will be so mesmerised by the purplish-red organism on their plate that you could slip them a side-serving of dog turd and their noses would barely twitch.
16. Okay, face the facts: the fishcakes are in the oven, and have to be let out sometime. Now is probably not a good time, but you have to act like a man and face up to your responsibilities. Just do it!
17. Get some clean plates and put the spoonful of rice onto one plate and then cut chunks off it for the others. Use pliers or tongs or something to transplant the red cabbage (don't waste time putting on gloves, it's dead) from the pot to sit next to the pieces of rice. Prise the fishcakes from the tray, remove the stuck-on bits of foil, then prop two or three against each tastefully-arranged display of rice and red cabbage.

At the dinner table, before the situation takes a turn for the worse, it might be a good idea to make your excuses and leave quietly.

NEWS FLASH: Go to this absolutely wonderful website here for all things 8-bit!
http://www.8bittoday.com/

And now, back to your regular scheduled programme:

Five years after it first screened I have finally began watching the "re-imagined" Battlestar Galactica television series. I missed most of the episodes on free-to-air television and so, upon finding some free time over the Easter break, decided to buy the DVD of the pilot episode and Series One (there are another three more are out there, I believe).

Awesome. The acting rages from excellent to passable, the episode stories are generally pretty good and fit in well with a number of story arcs. The CGI deserves a special mention in that it is gritty, splendid battle scenes that appear to have been shot from a zoom lens and constantly falling in and out of focus like with the shaky camera-work in The Bill (before it became crap).

The two original series (yes, I'm old enough to have seen those on their first runs) were fun, although the second series, known in Australia as BattleStar Galactica Discovers Earth was a little silly. The only things carried over from those series was the wisecracks and subtle sense of humour in some of the set-piece scenes. I prefer the new dark tone, however, and am surprised at how long it has taken me to get around to seeing the series in its entirety.

RATING: Three Thumbs Up

I don't play a great range of video games these days, but recently became utterly captivated by a first-person perspective shooter (FPS) named "STALKER - Shadow Of Chernobyl". I'd recently bought "Doom 3", another FPS, third installment of the classic Doom. For me, however, Stalker is by far the more enjoyable game of the two, even though both bear many similarities.

The problem with Doom 3 is that it is too linear, regardless of the superb graphics and sound. It IS fun to play, but once I discovered STALKER, I have not gone back to play Doom.

STALKER is based on the premise that in 2006 a second catastrophe occurred in the Chernobyl Exclusion zone which made the environment much worse. By 2012 brave groups of people were entering the zone to either make their fortune discovering wierd artifacts created by the second nuclear accident, or for more sinister political reasons. The player is one such fortune-seeker, albeit with a mysterious past cloaked by amnesia.

What makes the game special is that it is non-linear. Of course there are scripted missions and an ultimate end-goal, but the player is not forced to carry out a set range of tasks chapter-by-chapter. Instead, the game has a rich underlying control system for its non-player characters (up to 1000 of them exist) which makes them act as individuals - they have lives, friends, alliances, needs, wants, fear, etc. Small missions are generated randomly, such as helping a compatriot recover some lost item, and characters remember your actions. For example, if you shoot someone's colleague then you are a marked man and better watch your back for the rest of the game.

There are plenty of things to do and places to explore at your leisure. Just wandering around admiring the scenery is an enjoyable activity, as is taking pot shots at the packs of wild dogs and mutant boars scurrying about in the abandoned fields and factories.

Ten out of ten.

Today I had the opportunity to visit my sister and flip through some old family photograph albums I'd never seen before. They contained the usual pics of relatives, parents, siblings and so on. But what was odd was that there were some of me taken when I was in my twenties.

I was usually the person taking family snapshots back then. The few photos of me I have were taken in formal setting - either head and shoulder shots or me hiding behind siblings in those group portraits.

So, I saw these new photos that I didn't remember being taken, and in them I am NOT FAT.

Yes, not fat. In other words, THIN!

I always thought of myself as a fatty, obese even, back then. But these photos are of a me in my twenties and I'm thin, and, dare I say, about 6 weeks of toning up exercise away from having a totally flat "washboard" stomach. This freaks me out. There is no distortion in the photo, and there are more photos from around that time that show the same.

It's freaking me out. Seriously!

Ain't it grand.
YouTube hosts so much stuff that I thought I would never see again:
* Classic television advertisements from the 1970s and 1980s, often made available by people who have access to studio tapes or found them on old video tapes they'd had in storage.
* Video tutorials on just about any subject.
* Computer scene demos. Without recorded demos I'd have to load and run these on emulators on my computer which is time consuming. It's far easier to visit youtube and search for "atari 800 demo" than go find an emulator, download a disk image of a demo, load it using what syntax is required,... etc.
* Music videos. I love these, especially those from the olden days.

The hosting of copyrighted material on YouTube may be a contentious one, but I do believe it can benefit the copyright owners. For example, free exposure and the potential to gain new fans and sales. This happened in my case: While doing a search several years ago for Eurovision Song Contest performances I stumbled upon the 1972 entry, "Apres Toi". I'd already amassed a complete audio and video library of the performances going back to the 1950s so I browsed the associated links - and came to the conclusion that the singer, Vicky Leandros, was rather good! Since then I've imported a number of albums from this and other artists who are almost unknown outside of Europe, all thanks to YouTube!

While landing in Melbourne after an interstate flight I noticed something odd about the wing. Can you see it? Look closely...

It's little moments like this that reaffirm my faith in the spontaneity and freedom of artistic expression.



The Jetstar logo has been roughly sketched in the oily underside of the nearest airbrake. Apparently some maintenance worker had an artistic interlude in between looking for oil leaks and metal fatigue.



Although there is an alternative theory - a friendly Wiccan put the pentagram there as a good luck charm to ward off the gremlins!

Take a listen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WXIhTodJ6M

The music is hundreds of years old but certainly not destined for the scrapheap. The fact that these pieces have survived the ravages of time and the whims of a fickle ever-changing public ear is evidence of their sheer quality. Most of what was written in that era has been lost or is rarely performed, usually for good reason.

Have a listen, and feel free to trawl the YouTube vaults for the compilations from classical music enthusiasts. There are some real gems to be found.

Many years ago I used to mow lawns every weekend. It was easy money, good exercise and interesting. Most of the clients were local friends of my elderly relatives, the jobs picked up via word-of-mouth. I'd charge low rates, but the perks made up for that - scones, drinks and conversation. Elderly people can often be quite interesting conversationalists due to their ability to draw upon a long lifetime of interesting experiences.

The years have passed and these people are now dead. I'd like to list their names and touch upon a few aspects of their life.

Mavis Kelly was of Irish descent, and hated the colour orange, even complaining when she had to sit in the orange plastic seats at the nearby Pensioners Association meetings. Until her late 70s she worked in the cloakroom of Newcastle Racetrack and seemed to always have purple-dyed hair.

Jack Hoyer was, IIRC, an ex-engineer or mechanic with the Navy. I remember with fondness his meticulously laid out gardens and tool shed. Very good attention to detail. Sadly, his wife died and soon after dementia got to him. He moved to Perth to be with his children and I lost contact with him.

Melba Jones's deceased husband was the original Bex man on the old radio advertisements. She was a very nice person. Sadly, a misdiagnosis by a fool of a GP meant that diabetes-related circulatory disease claimed one of her legs and forced her into a home.

Ruby Hughes had a sought-after collection of historical documents about the local aborigines. Very bright and insightful (or perhaps incisive?). I still remember being taken aback when she discussed how the "suppleness" of younger women gives them an advantage during childbirth. She was diagnosed with a brain tumour aged 80, and was gone within a month or two.

Et cetera.