NOWADAYS I SEE THE WHITE chalk silhouettes of 1980s Palm Sundays on the back windows of the middle-class people movers whose drivers want to boast about their happy families. I’ve been meaning to photograph someone’s back windscreen to illustrate the point, but I can never quite get there fast enough with my phone camera. Perhaps it’s just as well I see them so relatively rarely, considering the associations. If you’re over the age of about 25, once you’ve seen it, you can’t un-see it.

A RECIPE IS A LIST of instructions, just that. It’s not necessarily about food or edible goods; it can be oh so much more. As this is a blog not just about the consumption of meals and drinking, but also time and energy, it seems fair that I also document the other ways in which I choose to profligately squander the short time I will walk the earth.

I quite like the free email service Google provides. I also have a soft spot in my heart for using computers to do things in ways that aren’t entirely in keeping with the browser-heavy experience of those one generation younger than me. How can I reconcile these two?

FRESH PEAS, YOU ARE SO delicious to eat, but so very tedious to shell. No wonder I usually buy you frozen instead.

WHENCE, THEN, ARISES THE ENIGMATICAL character of the product of labour, so soon as it assumes the form of commodities? …The equality of all sorts of human labour is expressed objectively by their products all being equally values; the measure of the expenditure of labour power by the duration of that expenditure, takes the form of the quantity of value of the products of labour; and finally the mutual relations of the producers, within which the social character of their labour affirms itself, take the form of a social relation between the products.¹

Children of the first decade of this century have found their relationship to food revolutionised by the entry to television of a special genre of cooking show: competitive cookery. Food shows are as old as the medium, and the cook-off is hardly a new form of competition. The genuinely new format is the cooking spectacular with glorious winners and a hyper-marketed process of competition, the entry of reality TV into the field of food.

I READ THE NEWSPAPER, AND was infuriated: then I remember that above the level of incoherently muttering to one’s self, on the Maslow Pyramid of Internet Needs, lies the level of futilely declaiming to the void on one’s blog. “You’ve got one of those, remember”—I reminded myself.

Here’s Peter Brent aka Mumble in (this will become important) The Australian.

SPRING IN SYDNEY IS BOTTLEBRUSH season. Every LGA with the good taste to plant callistemon around the footpaths fills up with red trees and birds, as do the backyards of people with both bottlebrushes and flowering gums.

Lorikeets are lovely birds. They’re a consolation for those foot-puncturing razor sharp gumnuts that drop for the rest of the year.

THE ACCELERATION IS THOUGHT TO be driven by dark energy, but what that dark energy is remains an enigma—perhaps the greatest in physics today. What is known is that dark energy constitutes about three quarters of the Universe. Therefore the findings of the 2011 Nobel Laureates in Physics have helped to unveil a Universe that to a large extent is unknown to science. And everything is possible again.

As usual, the italics are mine, as are the goosebumps. As the great scholar of romantic exploration reminds us, all men are Portuguese, and they are lost, seeking the Indies.

WHAT IS THAT THING ON the side of the bottle? I think it says “Certified Vostok Space Beer”. I’m reading it right, but what on earth can it mean?

IF YOU WANT TO HAVE a discussion about automobility, the way we live in our urban environment, the nature of the State and sustainability, I recommend not trying to do it on a platform like twitter, where big pointy-headed words like that tend to chew up your character limit. You end up trying to make your points like builders shouting at each other into crackly CB radios, in separate noisy corridors, in a building being demolished. This—old fashioned, finite but relatively unconstrained—blog entry arises from just such an exercise in ill communication.

THANKS TO ARTIST DENIS BEAUBOIS, we know what $20,000 in clean hundreds looks like. But it’s thanks to a crime story like this one, involving a drug trafficker, a real estate agent, and $40,000 in dirty notes, that we’ve had a bit more about Sydney’s political economy illustrated.