Food, food, glorious food

I'll begin with a couple of photos taken at the City of Melbourne, City Gallery. The themed displays are changed a couple of times a year, or maybe more often. You don't need much more than ten minutes to check it out. The current theme is Melbourne's relationship with food.

I think I would have quite liked to attend the Lord Mayor's dinner in 1921.

But the seating looks a bit a tight, and you would have to be very social too.

Pray tell, where are the salt and pepper shakers? Bottles of wine? 

I've half been looking for a new dinner set. My old one is missing pieces, broken, and some things are chipped. I don't want anything too weird, but a bit more than plain white. I quite liked this one, until I learnt it is Corelle. I don't know what Corelle is made of. It doesn't quite seem like plastic but nor does it feel like china. It is also quite expensive, yet maybe it is good value because it doesn't chip or break very easily. 

These are are my meals on wheels, rearranged and improved by Phyllis. This roast lamb, I think.

 

Crumbed barramundi fish with chips and vegetables added by Phyllis. 

Spicy chicken with my supermarket bought potato salad and a fried egg. Very satisfying. 

Lamb sliced and seriously rearranged. 

Now on to meals cooked by Phyllis. 

He experimented with baking muffins.

He bought an icing bag and made some overdecorated cupcakes.

Mini quiche were delicious. 

Crumbed prawns with rice and salad were good. 

A kiss is needed before we hoed into nachos. 

After my afternoon rest, which means me lying on my bed and staring at my tablet screen, when I arose at 5.30, I found this note. I didn't hear Kesav go out. 

We have free trade with the US

Yep, in 2005 Australia and the US signed a free trade agreement, that seems was not worth the paper it was written upon. 

#47 slapped a 25% tariff on steel and aluminium imported from Australia. While that will affect Australia, we are not paying. The citizens of the US will ultimately pay. In the US, people on the street seem to have no understanding of this. They think Australia will be paying. No, it is US companies who import steel and aluminium that will pay, and US citizens will ultimately pay. 

The is a day coming soon where Australia can expect more tariffs over some rather tenuous matters.

He does not like the ban, as I believe is also in place in Europe and Great Britain, on the importation of American beef. Given we export beef to the US, this is puzzling. The reason we and the aforesaid areas of the world won't import US beef is that it is full of anti biotics and growth hormones, with the cattle often grown in an intensive farming manner. Nah, we don't want that. Aim for clean and green. 

Prescribed medical drug prescriptions are subsidised in Australia. At the moment the cost can not exceed around $31 and if the current government is re-elected, this will drop to $25. For poor old age pensioners like me, it is capped at around $7. I don't understand what the issue is here, but I guess it is about US drug company profits. The drug companies are lobbying the US government very hard to punish Australia. 

Our government is pressing for pay to view companies like Netflix to include some local content. I don't think that is unreasonable, but again, it is problematic for the US. 

Nor is it unreasonable for Meta and other large US tech companies to pay the content producers for direct copies and links to their sites. Will be hear of a tariff slapped on us for that? 

Where there are joint US and Australian research facilities here, #47 wants to know effectively about Australia's diversity policies etc. I assume funding would be cut if the expectations are not met. 

Many of the above are direct interference in Australian domestic policies. 

I read somewhere today that the world needs to show a bit more appreciation for the money US has spent around the world, more than compared to say Europe. Bah, America has only spent money where it sees there is an advantage in funding countries, people and organisations, so save me from 'What we have done for the world'. That is just what countries, including my own, do. 

Let's end with a laugh. 

What I wrote on the 1st of April in 2005

That's 20 years ago. I hope to make this monthly but no guarantees. I may go a day either side of the 1st of the month if I really dislike what I wrote. 

We were wrong

Not a little bit wrong, but so terribly, terribly wrong. It is thirty years since the American Embassy in Saigon was evacuated and so ended a miserable piece of history. Obviously I can remember some of the Vietnam war, but I can't really distinguish between my memory of it and what I have learned since.

Did I say 'ended a piece of history'? Well, not quite. The photo on the front page of yesterday's Age shows it is not really over. The repercussions continue. The picture is of a disabled 25 year old son of Vietnamese soldier, a victim of Agent Orange, in a roofless cage.

But it is not just the physical. Mostly for mental reasons, 43% of Australia's Vietnam veterans are on TPI (totally and permanently incapacitated) pensions. These pensions are not given out easily.

If anything good came out of the whole nasty business, it might be Vietnam and Australia now have a close connection. Well, maybe.

The real good is that never again will young Australians be conscripted and sent off to an unjust war by politicians. Yes, I expect we would fight to protect our country, but we won't interfere in someone else's. We will leave that for the politicians and professional soldiers.

Monday Mural

As I write this, a chicken biryani is being cooked. I've already eaten, but there will be some for my lunch tomorrow. Cooking a meal here is a production bigger than Ben-Hur. 

Sami is back and so on with the mural. 

I saw this mural just two days ago, and I thought I'd posted it already, but it is still in my mural folder, so I guess not. It's quite a large mural. 

A visit to northside

Melbourne is divided by the river Yarra. People who live on the north side of the river, the hipster types, the young artistic types, and the left of politics comfortable middle class despise the wealthier south siders of the Yarra, with their fascination of property values, labelled clothing and the latest trends. God forbid, there are a lot of voters for our conservative party led by Peter Dultrump.

I ventured northside yesterday by the 11 West Preston tram and returned home by a 207 bus and then a tram. The Saturday bus service is not very frequent and gosh was the bus loaded. There is a green right turn arrow from Russell Street into Lonsdale Street but it wasn't working and it took four sets of the lights to turn right. Absolutely disgusting treatment to bus travellers. The bus should alert the traffic lights of its presence. 

Phyliss and Kosov had their friend Sarah visit today. They cooked up a meal and ate in the afternoon and then went out together. 

I was thinking of having a takeaway pizza tonight as part of my balanced diet but Phyllis told me I will have one of my meals on wheels, quiche with roast potatoes and vegetables. Then Phyliss said he was going out. What about my dinner you promised to serve? Phyllis relayed instructions to Kosov as to how to heat my meal and present it a nice manner. It was good. Kosov is mentally exhausted. His social interaction battery is much smaller than Phyllis', and as I write, he is working on project for his food safety studies. 

Oh yes, today I went out wearing a clean shirt. I was in a cramped space to eat before an outside table became available. Egg yolk dripped from my burger onto my shirt, and then fat. To top it off, coffee spilt from my cup onto my shirt. Somehow even my phone screen was splattered with something. I am becoming an old man with dribbles down his shirt. At least at this point in my life, I knew my shirt was dirty and changed once I was home. 

Oh what a doll

Phyllis' parents sent this with Phyllis as a gift to me when he returned from his visit to Chennai late last year.

I've spoken to Caroline, Phyllis' mother on the phone, and Kosov's younger sister. I think both families know the lads have good accommodation and a caring old aunty.  

So this was a gift from Caroline and her husband, a Kathakali dancing doll. Such dolls are all over India and have many different names but this one is special, and given what it cost, I think it is handmade and bought at a local village not far from Chennai. 

It has a rollie poly base, with a male and female body and face. I often give it a push to make make it rock back and forth as I walk past it. I am quite fond of it. 

Thoughts about words

I am not sure where I was going with this old post draft. 

About twenty years ago while driving Mother somewhere on one of our motorways, a driver did something bad in front of me and in the presence of Mother, who had slapped me as child for saying bloody, I dropped the c word. You c***. It is not a word I normally use. I can't remember using it since. I immediately apologised to Mother, who continued on telling me about her medical woes without seemingly to notice. Nearly twenty years later, Mother was correct and her medical woes proved to be fatal, with a lot of medical woes along the way.

While I've never mixed among the lower classes in England, apparently they use the c word without abandon. The word becomes boring with overuse and loses its effectiveness. But like gay men embraced homophobic terms, so too are women embracing the c word. I recall a beggar calling me a fucking old poof. He stated the obvious. His insult was a fail.

I am never sure if is appropriate to describe a black American as being black. I think the preferred term is African American. That's fine with me. Whatever. But I laugh when I hear stories of Americans who visit England describe black English people as African Americans, even though the black English have no connection to America. In Britain, you are British, and your colour and racial heritage is not so publicly important. You are British first. The plight of disadvantaged African Americans in the US is the equivalent in Britain of the plight of the disadvantaged British. 

It is a queer thing that so called African Americans, many who have been in the US for far longer than their British counterparts have been in Britain, yet they need to be distinguished as Afro Americans, and not just Americans. 

Whatever, black American, black British and black Australian, they all face discrimination. It is just not so in your face in Britain and Australia, and there are programmes to promote an inclusive workplace. That has just disappeared in the US. This Afro American term is very queer. The first black slaves arrived to America in the early 1600s, yet they need to be name qualified beyond just an American by the colour of their skin. I am not naïve enough to suggest your best mate is a black person, yet here, I do see socialisation between the Indian immigrants and white Australians, through work, neighbours and of course food. 

The leader of Australia's His Majesty's Opposition Party is one Peter Dutton, an extreme conservative, and he would like to do many of the things that #47 has been doing in the US. I gave some thought to a insulting adaption to his name and the best I could do is Duttrump. Yes, the wrongly named conservative Liberal Party leader is Peter Duttrump.