Restaurants to remember # 5

LES BRASSINS
36 rue Keyenveld
1050 Ixelles
Bruxelles

keywords

"union bosses"
"child sexual abuse"
"clever"
"pornography"
"impact on the family"
"the safety of our customers"

You get my drift. Keep saying them over and over, and hopefully something will seep into the national psyche. I don't understand why Julia Gillard or Kevin Rudd, or any of their team have not responded to the wall-to-wall overuse of the term "union bosses" by identifying it as a keyword the Liberals are using. Just like they are with Johnny being a "clever" politician.

I have no doubt that the sleeping issues that lie in the backgound of the recent "emergency" response to an issue that has barely changed in 11 years—alcohol abuse, child sexual abuse, the availability of pornography—are the real reason this policy was concocted, to bring these issues into the subconscious of the "mums and dads", without explicitly addressing them as "problems" for the entirety of Australian society. Surely these have been popping up in Mark Textor's focus groups, and are seen to be important issues for the "Howard battlers" and conservative new families living on the urban fringes of our capital cities.

Much the same applies to why, for example, our private "public transport" companies are focuissing so much on consumer "safety", rather than on service provision, new lines, or getting more rolling stock, um, rolling.

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Pat, you old tart.

Lyrics I love (volume 4)

This could be the very minute / I'm aware I'm alive / All these places feel like home / With a name I'd never chosen / I can make my first steps / As a child of 25 / This is the straw, final straw in the / Roof of my mouth as I lie to you / Just because I'm sorry doesn't mean / I didn't enjoy it at the time / You're the only thing that I love / It scares me more every day / On my knees I think clearer / Goodness knows I saw it coming / Or at least I'll claim I did / But in truth I'm lost for words / What have I done it's too late for that / What have I become truth is nothing yet / A simple mistake starts the hardest time / I promise I'll do anything you ask...this time

Restaurants to remember # 4

MONSIEUR VUONG
Alte Schönhauser Straße 46
10119 Berlin

Restaurants to remember # 3

BAAN KANITHA
36/1 Soi 23, Sukhumvit Road
10110 Bangkok

Restaurants to remember # 2

MÄDCHENITALIENER
Alte Schönhauser Straße 12
10119 Berlin

Restaurants to remember # 1

LE RELAIS D'ENTRECÔTE
15, rue Marbeuf
75008 Paris

Lyrics I love (volume 3)

It all makes sense now I've calmed down / I should have seen it coming from miles down the road / But at the time we never think / That it might have been ourselves to blame at all

You shudder and beat your chest / But you'll never warm yourself up believe me / Where were you i'd made it through / But only god can judge me now, I hope he's in

Why do hearts break when we are on our own? / Just when you need to pump the life back in yourself / And why do earthquakes happen miles away? / When I only want the open ground to swallow me

Who told you I'd not come through / Before I could speak to you in my defence / Who made you the righteous one / When I'd only turned around for half an hour

Why do chalklines tell an empty tale / Surely its bad enough to end up on the floor / And you can scratch your chin / And think you understand / And how can you know whats going on inside my head / Maybe I'm better off alive than in my bed

Want, want, want

I WANT THIS T-SHIRT

Sepulchre

I have a favourite new website: findagrave.com

Now I have a checklist, all I need is the time and a convertible 1965 ford mustang.

The Festival of Light

One day. One city. One mobile phone. One eccentric fascination with lighting.

Now you see it, now you don't

Pick-up 52

So there I am, half cut and three-quarters stoned, standing on the corner near my house at about midnight on Sunday night. As we're standing there at the lights, waiting for a taxi, three likely lads, late teens/early 20s, come strolling across the road. I'm smoking, like I do after a couple of beers and a bottle of red. One of them stops and says "Hey mate, can I pinch a smoke?". "Sure mate" I say, and offer him one. "Thanks" and a wave. Like you do.

They're about 30 yards down the road when this young fellow comes running back, and somewhat sheepishly asks "Sorry mate, have you got a light?". "Yeah, but only these matches" I say, reaching into my pocket and handing over a new deck of redheads. "Thanks" he says, and goes to open the matchbox. All 47 matches fall out, all over the footpath. "Sorry mate, sorry" he says, and bends down, slowly picking up match after match after match, and putting them back into the box. It runs through my mate's and my minds to possibly help the guy. We looked at each other, at this young bloke bobbing around on the footpath chasing the rest of the fallen matches, and back at each other. Smile. Shrug. And go back to watching this poor cunt picking up all the matches, one by one.

Finally he gets the last one, lights his fag and scurries off after his mates. "I was in half a mind to help the poor bloke," my mate says. "Me too," I say, "but it was all too surreal".

Princes of Persia?

This, from David Seaton, pretty much sums it up:

The United States, it's Middle East policy driven by its domestic politics, (read the "Lobby") is trying to strangle Iran. In the neocon, "Grand Strategery", Iraq was basically a stepping stone on the way to regime change in Iran... "real men go to Teheran".

Of course this has all gone terribly wrong. Iran is the winner of the war in Iraq. The United States has been seen to fail in Iraq, and as Tony Karon quoted from the Coen brother's "Miller's Crossing" in Haaretz, "'You run this town because people think you run it.' Ergo, when people realize that you don't, then you no longer do."

Europe is not willing to sacrifice strategic energy supplies to make life easier for a lame duck American president whose short hairs appear to be in the possession of the Israeli Likud.

I came across this as a comment on the Guardian foreign desk:

The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.

But why have I had to live through it?

"Here's to you, Lynnie!"

And so she goes. A four-hour marriage to Paul Robinson and she's off. To the Maldives. Without so much as a yellow cab out of Pinoak Court.

Lyn Scully burst into my life in a leopard print bodysuit sometime in 1999, replacing the tired, old Fat Phil Martin with her bogan husband and troupe of daughters. And an improbable A-grade footballing son in the UK. For while there my heart yearned for the down-to-earth realism of Ailsa Piper's Ruth Wilkinson, but, as these things are, Lynnie was. And her leopard print became nothing more than the wallpaper of my life.

But then, alongside a powerhouse of Australian acting talent which included Val Jellay, Bud Tingwell and Joan Sidney, Lynnie got HER storyline, probably the best-executed storyline Erinsborough has seen in my long history of Neighbours watching. For so long Lynnie had been a doormat to her dull, gruff, bogan husband, but finally she had her chance to shine. Slowly, it was revealed that the woman she had considered her aunt for all her 40-odd years as indeed her mother, and the appropriate crisis of personality followed, the tears, the shouting, the desperation.

All soap characters, regardless of stripe, become endeared to viewers by by the traumas they survive. It is only in these moments of extreme duress and emotional firewalking that we really get an actor's or actress' range, they have to plumb the depths of their character with all the raw nerves exposed. And Janet Andrewartha showed 'em how it is done, accompanied by the stirling performances of Bud as her adopted father Henry, and Joan as the tearaway biological mother Valda.

And so we got an insight into Lynnie, and she emerged from her ordeal a stronger, more independent woman. But, as the Neighbours writers are wont to do, the transformation didn't last long. A few knock-down, drag-outs Ramsay Street stylee with Nat Bass' Izzy, and it was all over, red rover. Back to boring old doormat Lyn. The gumption, the self-righteousness, the indignation—the possibility of a Mrs Mangel for the 21st century—all out the window in favour her trademark nervous titter. And what a waste it was.

Neither did I get the Load Ship that I was after, either.

Which all goes to prove two things:

• that the current crop of Neighbours writers can't write a strong matriarch—Anne Charleston left for that reason: Madge, too, had lost the fire in her belly.
• and that I am a very, very tragic individual.

The Honeymoon is over

Just a week into his leadership of the federal ALP and Kevin Rudd has been served up a typical manoeuvre from Our Man of Tinsel. And what a beautiful wedge it is:



Consider a recent proposal made by a certain opposition leader that immigrants to Australia undergo a Citizenship Test—you know, bone up on our national language and its idiom, and understand a few things about our history—Captain Cook 's arrival, say, or convict settlement, squatocracy, or the White Australia Policy spring to mind as pivotal periods of our nation's great past. And then there's our culture—the triple-fronted cream brick veneer, the hero worship of outlaws and sportsmen, the Hawaiian pizza, Ern Malley and the denigration of anything vaguely intellectual (other than cricket statistics of course, which should probably have their own university canon should Our Dear Leader have his way). Naturally, these are all important parts of all the daily life of all Australians, and each and every one of us should be able to identify them on a multiple-choice quiz. Hell, maybe we should hold this Citizenship Test in a smoky pub where the winner gets to take home a passport rather than a slab of VB? Second Place would of course win a meat tray, culled from all the animals represented on our coins.

But I digress. This idea was originally proposed by former Opposition Leader Kim Beazley who was trying to outflank the Government on "Border Protection". And I quote The Economist:

Mr Beazley himself, however, has consistently fared badly in the polls, because he has been unable to explain how, or indeed if, Labor differs from the conservatives.

And so, with Bomber gone and many of his rightist policies under a question mark, what better time to raise the stakes thinks Johnnie. A silly idea which will unite his own cherished hansonites and cause a schism between the indignant Left and bickering Right of the ALP. And thereby they begin to tear themselves apart again.

This is the first true test of Mr Rudd's mettle.

There is a god!

HALLELUJAH!

As evidenced by the following, from Mr Murdoch's minions:

But last night, the new Opposition Leader pledged to stare down colleagues pushing favourites for the shadow ministry, saying he and newly elected Deputy Leader Julia Gillard would "significantly shape" the front bench.

"I will be leading this show and when it comes to the outcomes I want, I will get them," he said on ABC TV's 7.30 Report. "I don't particularly care if anyone has opposing views - that's what's going to happen."

And while I'm at it, what was so spectacularly bad about MedicareGold?