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I can’t read your nametag !

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Who invented nametags ?  Almost a month has passed, and with all the travel and adventures, Los Angeles with the glasses of no name, Boston – what a difference a few years make, – South coast of England – Paris – Nashville then home. No time to write about any of the thoughts and impressions of any of it.  Thats interesting in itself.  Writing requires time.  Adventures soak up time.  Then by the time you get past it all… how much did you really remember ? Who did you meet ? What did you say ? Did you change their heart ? Did you change the world ?

There is a noisy conference happening, in three places on the journey I’ve stopped, unpacked, and attended for a few days in each place.  I see someone looking at me, that kind of look, you know, when you should recognise them, but you don’t.  There seem to be depths of recognition, out of place, it’s hard to recognize people.  I expect to see X in Boston, not Alhambra.  I expect to see Y in Houston, but from Mars, not in Paris eating Canapes with a glass of champagne.

Still I met some new people – I know I would recognise some – if they wore the same thing – had the same hair – spoke the same – walked the same – when next I might meet them.  Could I remember their name ? maybe not.  But I would remember them, yes, certain I would.  But change the hair, the clothes, the other things, the walk, the talk – then you cannot remember them easily.

“Never mind, my mother died, I got a new boyfriend, I changed my hair, it’s longer now,  but really did you have to read my nametag first when I was there smiling at you ?”

“Those glasses look cool by the way, where did you get them ?”

“I made them – force of circumstances really – look – you can see the lenses don’t quite fit” I said.

“I hardly recognised you in them ”

Let us go then, you and I, I finally remember you, that a year has gone by, that we actually liked each other, that we spoke for hours, that our hearts also liked each other, and other things.  Do you have time ? – perhaps we could go out there on the balcony and chat for a bit – do you mind ?

Za’atamite Toast – Innovation 17

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Something new and quick for the midnight to dawn shift ?

So I generally don’t get into cooking… just ask my wife and kids, but when a concall happens before sparrow’ I have to improvise.  So improvisation is just using ideas that you pick up and trying things out, to see how this and that fits.  Anyway for a non-chef to engineer something so crazy as za’atamite toast, you got to wonder right ?

So here is the very carefully thought out [scratch that] experi-mental recipe…

Take some old french stick left over from the day before. Then , take your sword, and cut it like Zorro, alongways in two, and turn on the sandwich maker.

Get some of that spray on olive oil and then spray both sides of the sandwich maker..

Take care to remove any old crumbs stuck on it and left behind by the kids…

OK so you got the sandwich maker on at last,… wait till the green light comes on…

Then a quick spray of olive oil .. Fresh from the can mind .. Doesn’t matter about the virgin level..

OK then get the french stick you cut in half, and lay it out on the sandwich maker..

Close the lid.. And put pressure on it while the bread toasts.. It will gradually compress the bread while it is cooking.. This approximates flat bread, but still with that nice baguette taste…, and increases the overall heat capacity which will come in useful later..

OK when toasted and before smoke comes out.. Take it out and lay it on a breadboard… side by side.. Mmm.. Don’t eat it yet.

Quick before it cools down… Spray a dash of olive oil on the toast..Then get your jar of oregano… sprinkle that on the still hot toast.. If you did it right, it sticks to the oil and the heat from the compressed toast somehow blends it all nicely..

Then get your handy jar of vegemite and spread vegemite on the toast.  Spread it right on top of the oregano, this way the oregano doesn’t fly off when you try to eat the toast.

 

Then get some fresh black coffee or green oolong tea to the side..

Take a moment to thank God for innovation and life, before the dawn and the concalls start.

Yabbie Dam Dreaming

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Dreaming out the window close, and onto the frosty misty oval, with the emply flagpole post,  at my desk, always a mess inside, and with a burly teacher on a chalkboard neat writing, and information being offered in lines of text verbose for us all to take note.

Perhaps we could escape from class, after, and go up to the yabbie dam to yabbie with string and meat. The muddy water glistening in the sun, with at the shallow end, a glimpse  of a yabbie crawling up to catch a bit and then yanked out by the claws and jaws, with yabbie on string and into the bucket in the mud. Cries of joy of course, having caught a Yabbie, dang the cold, the ice and the wet.

But yesterday Jacko wanted to build a raft, with a couple of logs, and rope, to float out on the icy Yabbie Dam.  So we dug out some sucky logs and slimy bits all over, went slip sliding along the muddy bank in school clothes already grey, and now wet and a mess, with our jumpers all slimed up from the algal on the logs, so slippery.  But still we made the logs fast together with a rope, but not stable to stand on.  Our limited engineering, although environmentally sound, was not for the faint hearted.  We managed to drag it around, and if you lay on the slippery slimer logs, you could paddle across the frigid dam in the cold rain from above, and look down through the green into the Yabbie kingdom below.

Still, we enjoyed the secret break from school, with enough risk to exercise our imaginations, and cunning.  How to avoid being caught by prefect-ures and dominating curly teachers, who would whip a cane out as soon as look sideways at the bedraggled students coming in, just fresh from the Yabbie dam, with a bucket of Yabbies, we might get the chef to cook on the side, so they turned all red like a poor students lobster.

Now back to history, the history of the civil war, the anthropology of mesopotamia, and still we wonder on it, with the chalk and writing, and having to copy it all to learn it.  No one ever wrote nothing about how to Yabbie, and how to build rafts from logs and twine, and how to catch them with meat on a string.  You just knew, and without ever having written it down, I could do it all again tomorrow, without a refresher course.

Design A Burger

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Imagine that ! Design your own burger type joint. Aussie style would be “I’ll have a works burger – two eggs, and double beetroot thanks love!.”
Ingredients get thrown on the plate, and then after a short time with egg rings, salad, and a touch of bacon burning, you get your burger.

It is hard to find these kind of places in the USA. The burger has become not a simple food item bought on the way to somewhere, but something of an end in itself, with the idea of design it yourself burgers.

Last night, I managed to make it to a gourmet burger design restaurant with some work mates. We sat down and were handed menus. Having never had to design a burger before, i sat down with the pencil and ticked off a number of options.

From a design point of view, we were given 7 degrees of freedom of design, some optional, but for each degree of freedom of choice, there were many options, some of which could be combined.

Just a quick calculation – approximate now – we had around 37,241,747,201 burger variations, including the burger of the month choice, all for 3 standard prices. Amazing, really, that it would take that many burgers created to exhaust all possibilities on the do-it-yourself menu. I think its brilliant. The chance of anyone actually having had the exact same burger is pretty slim, but I guess many people would choose the same items through fear or force of habit, on the other hand, others might choose the most outrageous combinations possible.

BUT – I could not create an Aussie works burger out of all those variations possible.

WHY ?

Here is why –
– No beetroot
– No possibility to burn the bacon

Never mind, I love the thought of having created a great burger design, only ever to be made once, at high speed, eaten, and then forgotten, except perhaps somewhere in an electronic memory, at a gourmet Design A Burger joint – somewhere in time. By the way, I named mine “Fire Island” just for fun.