IS THERE A THING OF which it is said,
‘See, this is new’?
It has already been,
in the ages before us.
The people of long ago are not remembered,
nor will there be any remembrance
of people yet to come
by those who come after them.

When you turn your PC on in the morning and browse through the usual sites of work and study avoidance—email, Google Reader, the front pages of the newspapers, twitter—you generally expect most things to be as they were when you closed the machine down the afternoon before.

SOME MEALS ARE CONVENTIONAL, tracing a predictable curve from an ingredient list to a final shape-form as described by a precise and accurate recipe. They’re the meals Jeremy Bentham would eat, or maybe as a sped-up Taylorism could be applied to gastronomy. Other meals aren’t like that at all, and refuse to conform to your little boxes made of ticky-tacky. They follow their own rules, man.

FIRST, ROAST A CHICKEN. AFTER you’ve enjoyed the bird (and the roast vegies, and the stuffing, and the gravy, and the etcetera etcetera), you’re left with a carcase and a whole lot of gristle and fatty bits. In the morning, grab a pair of scissors, slice the bones up, simmer them in water for several hours with a couple of small onions, some celery, a carrot or two, thyme, and lots of salt. You weren’t planning on going to work that morning were you? You aren’t too hung over from the very nice white wine you had with the chicken to handle the congealed leftovers before noon? Good. Once it’s all bubbled away, strain it into plastic takeaway containers and put them in the freezer for later.

AS A WHITEY-AUSTRALIAN, I FEEL deep down the imperative, despite criticism and all sense of self-reflection, to carry on my ethnic burden to cook utterly climate-inappropriate meals. It’s a reflex that should be familiar to anyone who’s listened to Paul Kelly’s narrator, languishing in clink, fantasising about Christmas gravy. By the age of twenty, like it or not, every Anglo kid has at some point in her or his life, accepted the terrible demands of tradition despite the urgings of the weather and common-sense and the knowledge of inevitable gastric punishment and eaten pudding and custard in December. We accept this, as a small price of eternal national foreignness. It’s normal, and funny. We make jokes about the dissonance.

The latest details from the Bureau of Meteorology list the temperature as 24.8°, with a 65% humidity, and I’m cooking French onion soup.

“HE WOULDN’T KNOW A TRAM was up him unless the driver rang the bell” was one of the old-fashioned stock phrases for stupidity a co-worker of mine once liked to use. He wasn’t from Melbourne: he was merely old enough to remember a Sydney where tram tracks ran down the centres of major roads. Whenever I wind up talking or thinking about trams and light rail in the context of urbanism I think of that phrase—-because trams, more than being vehicles in a streetspace, are much more important as tokens of human urban imagination.

INAUTHENTIC IS HOW I roll. It’s a slogan and a helpful cliché but every now and then it’s a literal description of the dinners I make.

RESPONDING TO PERSISTENT HECKLING, THE Right’s Michelle Rowland, speaking for the amendment, said the most popular last name in her electorate was “Singh” and that for many, the uranium issue was a reason for Indians not to vote Labor. The inner city contingent that favoured the ban was out of touch, she said.
“Just because you order the butter chicken from Indian Home Diner in Glebe Point Road doesn’t make you an expert.”

If you didn’t have the privilege of attending the most recent National Conference of the Australian Labor Party as I did, you can take away (ahem) from this quip everything you can possibly need to know about the event.

THE INTERNET IS A LIMITLESS source of contradictory information on how one should compost. I understand the basics; you put organic matter together with a decent proportion of carbon and nitrogen sources, then you leave it alone. But should I bother to shove a fork in it twice a week? Do I need a second to establish a cycle? What should my position on eggshells and scraps of meat be? Is it hot or cold enough? How do you promote organic breakdown and stop maggots or pests getting in? Should I have added chicken shit? Does one layer a compost heap like a good lasagna¹ or rotate the pile, or leave it be entirely? If I keep googling “nitrogen ratio” am I going to get a knock on the door from the Australian security organisation?

THERE IS AN ASSUMPTION THAT TV and radio… provide a means of expression and self-expression for a tiny group addressing a vast multitude. That assumption is no longer technically valid, and it is doubtful whether it ever really was. …
All the political problems arose with the realisation that the contours of society did not, or did no longer, follow the contours around which the broadcasting institutions had been built.¹

That’s a description of the destruction of the older institution of broadcasting in the 1970s, from which we got the current landscape of broadcasting and print. The simple problem was that older organisations—like Lord Reith’s BBC in the UK, and the older commercial networks—had been built to service a society the founders imagined as a relatively homogeneous, happy mass, in need of education and communal entertainment everybody could share and enjoy, in a community of shared recognition of mutual meaning. The social movements of the late 1960s and 1970s destroyed that happy illusion and print and broadcasting industries profoundly altered themselves to match the new world: in Australia, we got SBS, campaigning city-based tabloids, vicious and ruthless talkback, the short-lived Nation Review and the greatest still-existing fossil of the era, Rupert Murdoch’s Australian.

THE OWL IS EITHER A symbol of wisdom or bad luck, depending on which pagan tradition you prefer. The eyes on this one also stared out at me from the “Assorted” fridge at the local bottleshop, where the curious are tempted by the unfamiliar and challenged to test themselves against Beer Lotto. When the going gets tough the weird turn pro, as Hunter S (pbuh) remarked. Owl Stout went straight to the counter. Hitachino! Espresso! Hoooooooo!