I’ve been thinking, it’s all the fried crap you’ve been eating.
Now. Show me how you can ruin a pasta dish and do it in style.

When a witch tells you your diet isn’t up to scratch, man, you’d better listen. I listened. At least I think I was listening, but at some point I blinked and found myself mentally wandering down Norton Street for a short black and a couple of almond biscotti, taking in the fumes. Sorry about that.

SINCE LATE FRIDAY I’VE BEEN laid flat with the kind of headcold that I find comes around about once every two years or so, like swift kicks in the face and throat followed up with rabbit punches to elbows, knees and each vertebra.

In the past I’ve been quite happy to call up my boss, claim some of that lovely sick leave hard-won in the EBA by the power of collective bargaining, tuck myself into bed with a packet of Codral Day & Night and sleep about eighteen hours a day. Being sick just isn’t the same, though, when I’m not leaving someone else with my work or shirking my responsibilities.

Not, of course, that I expect sympathy. Indeed, here’s some Faith No More, telling the world (and Bono, whom I met just the other day) just how much the universe empathises.

PORT JACKSON, SYDNEY’S NATURAL HARBOUR, appears in all of the tourist brochures and Lonely Planet guides as the centre of the city, and its spiritual heart: but they are all wrong. The harbour has a rather good-looking Bridge (though the Gladesville Bridge, the Cinderella stepsister arch of the city, is always overlooked). It’s got a freaky egg-shaped warehouse for elitist affairs. I admit, the ferries are good fun, but what’s left? A Navy base or two, the Casino, a few bits of National Park, and the rest is pure pleasure garden for fund-manager multimillionnaires and shiny stockbrokers gorging on derivatives.

DR GORDON MOYES WAS a member of the upper house of the NSW Parliament from 2003 2002 until the most recent election in March this year. Originally standing with Fred Nile’s Christian Democrats, he broke with his Parliamentary colleague in spectacular fashion and ran unsuccessfully as a Family First candidate. He is very traditional, very conservative, and very religious. When someone like that warns you about extremism on the Right, it’s worth cocking an ear.

TAKE FIVE HUNDRED YEARS OF cross-Atlantic commerce and movement of people, voluntary and otherwise, stir in massive amounts of energy, add misery, guns, money, Portuguese forts in unexpected places, and scorched earth everywhere else, leave it be for the benign neglect of time to assimilate everything, and you might just wind up with something as good as feijoada.

“Agricultural land has not increased at anything like the same rate [as population] so things are going to have to change, as simple as that.
“[Either that] or you put up with the food riots, or hope for a good war to reduce numbers. These are not alternatives.”
Professor Batterham is the deputy chair of a working group which advised Prime Minister Julia Gillard on food security.

If there’s one thing I’m grateful for about having had a liberal education, it’s an appreciation for academic freedom.

BY THE WAY, AND SPEAKING OF 1994, if you aren’t reading Executed Today you’re missing out.

Beavers may have embraced death, but that didn’t make him immune to the pleasures of the flesh.

Last meal request: Six pieces of french toast with syrup, jelly, butter, six barbecued spare ribs, six pieces of well-burned bacon, four scrambled eggs, five well-cooked sausage patties, french fries with ketchup, three slices of cheese, two pieces of yellow cake with chocolate fudge icing, and four cartons of milk...

IN 1994, ROBERTO BAGGIO OF Italy mistook the crossbar for a highbar, and history was made. In Petersham, my friend Salv cried, Norton Street mourned, little Portugal on Stanmore Road cheered, and a larger bunch of high school kids learned lots of new non-English swear words from the cars passing by. Tu e la tua razza va f’an… what?

SO THE PRIME MINISTER MADE a speech. As speeches go, it’s not actually that bad, speaking as someone who’s drafted notes for a few of them. Addresses the topic, makes some good noises, intelligently mentions the subject of the speech, isn’t boring. And since it seems to address precisely the experiment I’m taking with my life for the next little while, that of not entirely working, and doing some study, it’s of particular interest.

To my mind it comes across a little bit too much as the Nightride bus of meaning, which has had to endure the 11pm-4am shift of habitual language, and has had the suffering drunks of pandering to the press gallery vomit half-digested cliché all over the back seats. Sure, it gets you where you want to go—but then you want to brush your teeth and have a shower. If think if I read the phrase “forwards not backwards” again I’ll go out and throw myself under a vehicular unit of public transport infrastructure. The front end, not the back end.

I’VE JUST PUT A TEAM together of your 17-year-olds who’ll be sick of living up in the land of the falafel in western Sydney playing in front of a 12,000-seat stadium that’s still not put up…

That was Eddie McGuire, Collingwood’s house ghost, describing the alluring attractions of earning a high income and playing football in Western Sydney.