runcible spoon

5 blogs in the spirit of Blog Day 05

Kahli asked whether these five blogs had to be new, or just new to me.  Well, my friend, the answer is that I've opted for the latter and THAT is a hard enough task.

If they had to be new-new as well - that would KILL me.

The reason this task is hard, I suspect, is that there are only so many hours in each day (too few, in fact) and so one tends only to read the same handful of blogs regularly. Striking out and finding new blogs is surprisingly difficult - emphasis on the 'surprising' part, given there's a glut of the damn things!

Nevertheless, I have set the parameters of the task as meaning that I shall not be linking to any of the blogs I already reference in the sidebar (see 'Time Zones').

Here's some bloggy goodness:

kick-ass photo-blogger: rion.nu

tasty morsels and food goss: Sydney Food Diary

lit musings and all-round smarts: You Cried for Night

bazcat lotto and so much more: Sorrow at Sills Bend

and, finally, yes, this lovely traveller is still on the road, but I'll just eat my boiling rage that anyone could be on an RTW when I am not: Through an Open Eye

Good lord, it's nearly midnight. I only just made the 31/8/05 deadline!

Sugar mills and milestones

Oops. Sorry ... fell off the blogging map for a while there. My bad.

Blame it on my birthday, blame it on a busy week, blame it on a scratchy, sore throat. Hopefully it's resolved now (well, all save for the throat) and I shall bounce back in to posting. Thank you for your patience!

Actually, my birthday was funny because my boy took me to an 'undisclosed location' in Pyrmont, Sydney, for dinner. As it turned out, we had an amazing dinner in a building that used to house an old sugar mill.

While we were looking for a park, though, I still had no idea where we could be headed.

Pyrmont was a puzzling suburb to be taken to for dinner (athough very much my scene as it has great post-industrial vistas out to the water over old shipyards and factories) and it gave me cause to ask Andrew,

Darling, are you taking me to Star City Casino* so that we can eat at the buffet** with Shop-a-Dockets***?

To which he admirably replied, without missing a beat,

No, I'm taking you to Star City's buffet without any Shop-a-Dockets.

Editor's note: *) Star City Casino is also in Pyrmont. It's shockingly hideous; **)Buffet is very, very dodgy. Maybe one step up from eating at Hooters; and ***) Shop-a-Dockets are coupons that you get on the  back of supermarkets receipts in Oz. They give you discounts on crap you didn't want in the first place.

All this was amusing to me for one key reason: we have, on more than one occasion, actually eaten at said buffet and used Shop-a-Dockets to do so. Oh, my beautiful life!

At any rate, I am working this afternoon and then have class from 6 to 9 this evening. After that, I reckon I'll need to name my five Blog Day '05 picks. Bear with me!

Thank you for reading,
Tiffany

Blog day '05

I just read on my friend Daniel's site that 'twill be Blog Day 2005 on August 31.

What is Blog Day?

The idea is to recommend new five blogs on that day.

Or, as was said more eloquently on Wikispaces,

In one long moment on August 31st 2005,every blogger from all over the world will post a recommendation of 5 new blogs (in the same time). In this day all Blog web surfers will find themselves leaping and discovering new, unknown blogs and celebration the discovery of new people new bloggers.

But why?

I am suggesting this kind of activity because in the last months I felt that the more blogs there are, the less time I’m spending on new web logs. Because of the overload of information, I’m just visiting my favorite Blog and therefore, I’m sure that I miss a lot of good blogs.

Something pretty

This artwork, entitled 'Heart and Soul', is by Helena Tay.

I found her piece on Noise, a website showcasing youth art.  They have a different feature artist every day - all under 25.

Tay was born in KL, Malaysia, and says that she 'just wishes to see lots of colour and quirkiness in everyday life.'  Amen to that.

I think this image is gorgeous - all retro and sweet and endearing and cheery. Tay has a completely kick-ass website too.

Cloudberries

Is that not the coolest name for a berry?

It's insanely cool, and the fact that people eat a berry named after clouds just happens to be one of the first things I ever learnt about Norway.

When I was nine, the irrepressible, inimitable and wonderful Svanhild and Olaug came from Norway to visit us in Australia. They were truly long-, long-, long-, long-lost relatives and I just thought they were the bees' knees!

They carried in their large suitcases many, many cheeses, some smoked salmon and a large tub of cloudberry jam things which cannot be named here as they were All.Highly.Illegal due to Australia's strict Customs laws. But I digress.

The container that the jam was in was along the lines of what you might expect paint to be carried in and had its own handle - it was an industrial-sized shipment!

Now, today, I see that someone has come upon this blog by way of the search "cloudberry jam in Sydney Australia". Truly a web surfer after my own heart.

I'm sorry to say that my blog would not have helped you in your quest - but I now feel compelled to share my knowledge and can assure you that the delicious jam is obtainable from any IKEA store in Sydney ;)

Three things about our most Easterly point

Purple painted weatherboard houses, indigo dreadlocks and babies in stripey, hand-knitted beanies all co-mingle here.

Sign, signifier and frozen meats

Seeing a fridge like this makes me think a couple of things: first, ah, hostels, how I've missed you; and second, gee, I hope no one steals my food (better put it right at the back).

The level of signage on this particular appliance, however, was almost extensive enough to make one come over all po-mo and start talking about hypertextuality, non-linearity, and texts glossing other texts. The Meta-Textuality of the YHA Communal Fridge: there has got to be a PhD in that, surely.

But I digress. More on Byron Bay shortly.

Thoughts from a professional nose

I read this great article about a year ago, by a woman who works in Paris as a professional 'nose' for one of the big perfume houses.

A nose, I gather, is someone with an extraordinarily fine sense of smell who is employed by the perfumery for their skill and astute judgement in assessing fragrance - just the way that some people have very fine palates for wine.

I don't think it's so much a case of being a 'perfume freak' in case you're imagining some OTT Sex and the City-wannabe tripping around Paris overloading on perfumes and high heels. This woman seemed more to be a freak of nature, in that she was unbelievably attuned to scents and their connection to memory and emotion.

What stayed with me was her argument that society is suffering from a (fake) scent overload (a somewhat contradictory stance, given her job). She made a very convincing case against over-scenting, saying that she has little interest in her kids being exposed to lavender-scented toilet bowl cleanser and air deodoriser that smells like pine.

Instead, she said, she wanted them to know what the smell of a mouldy cupbard is like and what books smell of after they're stored and what smelling fresh-mown grass makes one feel.

I really liked that idea - the notion that particular, ordinary scents are worth educating ourselves in, and that all scents have value, purpose and meaning even if they're not the smells you think of as 'important' or 'beautiful'.

Saving Face

The film we went and saw on Friday night, Saving Face, is a rom-com with a twist given that the protagonists are Chinese-American lesbians.  And it is a sweet and entertaining piece of movie-making - as well as being something more besides. 

The reviews on Rotten Tomatoes are interesting in that they are overwhelmingly positive, and yet many describe the film as 'light', 'fluffy' or 'breezy'.  All those epithets are valid - and there were certainly moments where the film frustrated me with its relentless drive toward acceptance, happy families and glowing faces - and yet there was a deeper kernel of satisfaction contained within the movie as well.  Something that stops you from walking out and thinking, 'hmm, that was okay ... but sorta inconsequential.'

I guess it came down to the fact that the characters and situations portrayed seemed lively and new and well worth speaking about. Don't get me wrong - I am rather sickeningly devoted to the rom-com genre. But still, there is a limit to how many times we need to see Jennifer Aniston, Drew Barrymore, Kate Hudson or Jennifer Aniston (again) portray the same limited number of characters that seem to swill around Hollywood.

Any film with a bevy of bitchy Chinese aunties, an out Chinese lesbian, and a heavily pregnant mother who moves in with her daughter and precedes to watch back-to-back sessions of Mando-soaps all day and night makes a nice change indeed.

The weekend, a primer

Let's try for a rather meaningless and wander-y post about the weekend, shall we? 

I've finished up at work, I don't have any of my Byron Bay notes or photos with me and I'm generally in a mood to toss something light and insubstantial out into the nether regions of this blog.

So, the weekend it is. (Kind of like a first-grader's "What I Did on My Weekend" story - only I haven't actually done any of it yet! But come to think of it, that's the best part of a Friday night. All that lovely freedom stretching out in front of you ...)

I am anticipating the feeling of walking out into the bracingly cold air to meet my boy, and scampering off to Norton St, Leichhardt to see a film after scarfing down pasta at Bar Italia. The thing with Bar Italia is this: I suspect the pasta may be crap. It's sorta mass produced (even if in a low-key way), and sometimes the surly-looking 'chefs' stand in the grubby kitchen doling out bowl after bowl of the stuff like it's prison food. You have to get in a line to order, too.

But I love it all the same. I used to go there when I was little and it conjures forth the same sorts of happy, childlike associations of the 1980s Sydney dining-out 'scene' as do Chianti bottles with candles stuck in them (so de riguer in 1984!)

There are always kids clambering about in the tree and the portico out the back, and somebody's always ordering garlic bread, and there are always five Chinese guys in the kitchen who inexplicably cook the Italian food and make you wonder what their back-stories are.

And then, out front, the Italian extended family runs the cash register and the ordering process like a tight ship. My favourite part is the rather mean note that they've unceremoniously tacked to the expresso machine. It reads, in scratchy, angry texta pen:

No Skim.
No Soy.
No Reduced Fat.
We just use MILK.

Ooh, yeah, baby. Treat me mean like that and I might just come back for more!