izmeina: (Preciousss)
Izzie's been on the weekly slink to Fremantle. Today was particularly decadent on the munchies front. Visited not one but two eateries as well as getting a take away for tomorrow. So much for New Years' Resolutions but our excuse is that four weeks withdrawal from Juicy goodness is a perfectly valid excuse to indulge

Izzie has a confession to make. Always been more than a bit strange and different and the serpentine incarnation is no exception. This python does not gobble whole pigs and deer or sheep. Not even children - tempting as it can be at times. It's not the sort of thing mentionable in serpentine social circles but Izzie is a ........... vegetarian

The Juicy Beetroot is our usual snack spot and can best be described as a hippy haunt in a time warp. It used to be a burger joint until a greenie German came along and converted it into an almost vegan whole food cafe
But what makes this place so unique - it's just so very old fashioned and unpretentious. Izzie can think of no place else that would have pine nuts and cold pressed virgin olive oil in their salads without proclaiming it from the roof tops and all over the menu and with exorbitant prices to match. But these folks don't even mention it. It's just part of the commitment to real food at affordable prices.
And it gets even more affordable between 3 and 4pm which is Happy Hour and all the salads and mains are half price. Years ago used to only visit at this time - cheap creature that the Izzie is. But eventually the pleasure of half price munchies became infinitely less than the pain of most of the stuff been sold out by then

They are also the only place with real chai made with tea and spices and none of the nasty mucky sickly syrup that passes as chai in the so called trendy cafes

While they were closed for four weeks over the Christmas break, made do with some seriously sad substitutes - both Chinese based and serving look alike meat meals made with soya beans or gluten
Wearing our food snob hat and fondness for whole foods with the minimum of processing - Izzie does not eat real corpses and would most certainly not eat fake ones. But our reasons for being a vegie have nothing to do at all with the taste of meat which we must admit we found quite delicious. Guess it is the ultimate expression of the taste that the Japanese describe as 'umami' and which is probably best described in English as 'savoury' Mushrooms, cheese and peanuts are probably the nearest vegie versions of this flavour. Some aged cheeses - Gouda, Gruyere, Appenzeller and such can taste rather like roast beef
And some of these fakes could quite easily fool anyone but the most committed carnivore


But the Greasy Spoon - the McDonalds of vegetarian eating is in a class all of its own. Of course - they don't really call themselves that at all but go by the rather sad and fluffy title "One World" and hide behind a green mission to save the planet to make up for the fact that their food is crap and the in store entertainment is even worse. The place is run by a crazy cult based in Taiwan and are even wackier than the Hari Krishnas. At least the Krishna cuisine is based on real food and not a whole pile of soya beans and tvp pretending to be meat

Many moons ago, they sponsored a vegetarian festival in the city. They had their silly leaflets everywhere with happy dolphins and cows. But apart from this sentimental schmalz, the thing that really pushed this serpent's buttons were some of their arguments for adopting a vegetarian diet
Not the sensible stuff like eating low on the food chain or not wanting to contribute to cruelty to animals and factory farming but because a whole bunch of famous people were also vegetarians
The silly little pamphlet listed loads of folks like various Greek philosophers, Gandhi and Paul McCartney
Izzie innocently pointed out to the organizers that they had forgotten to put Hitler on the list. Oh they got ever so uppity. One silly twit said that it must have been an oversight and another added that Hitler is not exactly good public relations material and not the sort of person they want pictured on their brochures
Izzie replied that if you are listing a whole bunch of saintly people as proof that vegetarianism gives you a guaranteed spot on the moral high ground, then the fact that Hitler was also one even if you don't care to be reminded of the fact or to remind others of it - then it sort of stuffs up your argument totally and makes you look either devious or stupid
It certainly confirms the suspicions that eating vegetarian rots your brain

Mean nasty Izzie also added that this sort of stuff was far more likely to do harm to the cause than good. After all - it just proves the usual stereotypes that we are a brainless bunch of sentimental slush pots. Did we mention smug and sanctimonious too?
Instead of getting folks to go veg by bombarding them with stupid and spurious emotional arguments and guilt trips for the rest of the reasonable case, it would make far more sense to simply serve delicious food and make the case that way
In the old days when Izzie loved cooking and inviting lots of folks around for dinner - most of the guests did not even notice that the meat was missing since there were so many interesting tasty nibblies to choose from

There's tons of yummy stuff out there and the really funny thing is - there's nothing written anywhere in the Carnivore's Constitution that chickpeas, lentils and beans are Verboten. It's just that most meat eaters get stuck in the rut of meat and two veg and never really get adventurous

But today's entertainment was so ridiculously silly that the Izzie eyes were just glued to the screen. There's a video screen constantly streaming snippets from The Supreme Master Headquarters. Today's stories included The Fearless Leader presenting a "Shining Light Intelligence Award" to some man with a parrot in Tokyo and an recording of her with her disciples discussing the lessons to be learned from Martian civilization.
Must go googling for the website so we can share the Fail

It is not her intention but a better site to promote the joys of the flesh could not be found

Supreme Madness
Maybe you too can meet with the Martians

Tomorrow will be munching lunch at Analakshmi - one of a handful of vegetarian restaurants with REAL food and no preaching
izmeina: (Preciousss)
Looks like it's time to change the Serpent's motto to "Blessed are those who expect nothing for they shall not be disappointed"

Had for so so long looked forward to our two weeks off in October/November. Had been getting all nostalgic for Bridgetown for ages and ages and then there was also the Garden Expo to drool over too. And mid October managed to get an extra weekend tossed in too. Due to Thursday and Friday being the serpent's usual days off, this in effect added an extra four days. Absolutely fabulous. Well. That was the map. But the territory turned out rather different indeed
Last day at work was supposed to be Wednesday 22nd. But the Monday turned out to be hot, horrid and humid and the Izzie was getting a nasty stinking cold. By Tuesday a headache got added to the mix and said at work would be taking the Wednesday off sick. So that was an early start to those days off but that nasty bug left the Izzie feeling all cranky and tired until Sunday 26th
It was bad enough that the Garden Expo day turned out to be such a disappointment due to the Singapore style heat and stickiness. But the icing on the cake was booking the ticket for the grand adventure down south only to be told that due to work on the tracks, there'd be no trains in the morning leaving at 9.30am but a coach instead. But due to the coach leaving at 8.30 that meant that the grand plans for the 7am Halloween party were well and truly in the rubbish bin. Had been so so looking forward to that.
It turned out to be a gorgeous crisp and crunchy morning that day. The bus would have been bearable if we didn't have to change buses a ridiculous 3 times and ended up arriving 40 minutes late in spite of leaving a whole hour earlier.
So instead of being all relaxed and enchanted and in a magical mood after a relaxing train ride, ended up all grumpy and cranky and neurotic. All that wasted time also meant no visits to any gardens on the Friday like last time.
Took till some time Saturday afternoon before Izzie finally got in the festive mood. Got up to all sorts of interesting things and visited all sorts of gorgeous gardens but this is a proper pity party so they can wait for another post
At least the trains were running in the afternoons so the return trip was much more pleasant than the one down. Then got to planning what to do with the rest of the week before returning to work next Monday
First item on the agenda for Tuesday was to potter off to the usual cafe haunt, squiggle a few letters and things and toss 150 silver sickles into the credit card account. (had been flashing the plastic on the weekend to pay for accomodation and stuff)
It was raining, grey and gloomy so abandoned that plan and decided instead to just pop down the local shops at 5pm. Was certainly not expecting the big bad hole in the wall to declare "This transaction cannot be processed due to insufficient funds"
So slinked into the store sulking and counting groceries to the very last brass knut
Figured that we'd better drop by the next day before going anywhere. This time a new twist on the evilness. No insufficient funds but the ATM was temporarily out of service.
Couldn't go and actually buy anything in the shops just in case the stupid pay had still not arrived. Using another bank's machine was also out of the question as the fees are really rather outrageous. So went to the city anyway. The big blue ANZ ATM told the same story as the day before. Still the princely sum of six silver sickles left in the account.
Slimy little buggers. Since the new owners took over in May, Izzie's pay had always landed every second Tuesday. Sometimes as early as 2pm but always there by 6pm
Well. It did finally turn up this morning. But nothing like expected. The princely sum of 669 silver sickles when Izzie usually gets just over one thousand for the fortnight. Little shits should have gone the whole way and made it a nice round 666. Izzie is expected to live on this until 20th November (assuming they'll be making a habit of paying two days late) and 550 of that comes out tomorrow to pay the house goblins.
What a wonderful week this is going to be. Will be ringing the little shits tomorrow to see what exactly their pathetic excuse is. Had filled in and signed the time sheet and everything and requested to be paid 50 hours of holiday pay (plus the 2 days worked and one sickie) for the fortnight. Got a stash of at least 130 hours of annual leave so there's no excuse for not letting us have the fifty. But they obviously didn't.
So instead of paying that big chunk off the plastic like planned, will be stretching and bending the little bugger instead.
So spent the first week of these holidays sick and the second week broke with 5 half decent days in the middle.
And now the icing on the cake. Dearest Dudley will be arriving on Saturday morning at Petunia's place. He's arriving at 3 in the morning because he was too cheap to pay for a civilized arrival time. Oh and did Izzie ever mention that he didn't even make a phone call or send a card for Uncle Vernon's 70th birthday about four weeks ago? Funny - if a daughter did that, she'd be disowned and bitched about for the next 70 years but it's ok for a precious little boy.
Over the last few weeks, been all nostalgic about the Grand European Tour of 2006. It's silly to indulge in such memories of the past. It's gone and over. But the one bit of the trip that the serpent totally wants to forget, that is the bit that is rearing its ugly head.
The ma and pa asked if Izzie was coming to the airport to meet him. You must be bloody joking we says. Oh yesss. When he's going, most definitely. Will be nice to him for those two last days but otherwise - no damned way.
Oh but it's mean and nasty to hold grudges they say. Amazing isn't it. You get shat on and insulted for a whole week and are then expected to forgive and forget and turn the other cheek.
All that wimpishness does is reward and encourage arseholes.
Well - one thing to smirk and sneer about. The little shit is an eBay junkie. But he's a clueless git who needs to get his freaky friendses to do all the computer sort of stuff for him
The ma's got rid of her ancient windoze box and now has a sleek and evil Mac with Firefox. No evilnet explorer at all. So the poor little bugger will be totally like a fish out of water.
Revenge is a dish best served cold
izmeina: (Don't panic)
Due to a certain sporting event, mainland China is the flavour of the month these days. But evil Izzie - ever the iconoclast - loves to rain on the parade. Well - on second thoughts - rain is not such a good idea. It apparently helps clear up the smog and other pollution and lots of pollution and big time embarrassment for the Capitalist Party of the People's Republic of China is Izzie's dearest wish for these games

Been an ever so interesting documentary on the radio this week about among other things - The Great Firewall of China - 300,000 people policing the internet - it makes the Stasi look like a bunch of beginners
Several of the folks interviewed claimed that the Chinese much prefer money to sex.
Not sure about the people on the street but it's certainly true of the Big Bad Government. Not only the one child policy and the use of very large fines and forced abortions to enforce it but also a seriously scary refinement on the art of Just in Time Delivery

As tempting as it would be to spend the evening watching the Opening Ceremony in a Taiwanese restaurant - hopefully with the sort of snarkilicious commentary that Severus Snape would be proud of, the Izzie will be instead slinking in Cyberia and catching snippets here and there on youtube or dusting off the old television that the ma left here and hoping that its limited channel selection includes the games
izmeina: a snippet of Escher's circle of serpents (goblinsnake)
Slinks into another nasty netcafe after a day lounging about, being generally grumpy and looking more and more like a bag lady with her granny tranny. Nothing like being tired and trudging around with tons of shopping for doing wonders to one's general disposition.
Izzie has got it into her head that with Halloween around the corner, this is just the excuse we need to bake Nurnberger Lebkuchen which are cute little gingerbread biscuit thingies. Will also be mix up batches of Cockroach Clusters and other goodies as a nice surprise for our guest of honour on Saturday 29th October.
So, we bumps into a slight problem. Cannot think of any local store that sells Oblaten which are basically a kind of communion wafer used as the base for these biccies. Had the inspired idea of using sheets of rice paper and cutting out circles. But then there are more obstacles. Will not be bothering with the rum and we do not think that substituting absinthe is a good idea - well for the icing maybe! But we won't be using nasty sickly sweet sugar icing but chocolate instead. But the main sticking point at the moment is the magic ingredient "Speisestarke" This is literally Food starch but not sure if an acceptible substitute is maize cornflour or rice flour or what. Might not be such a good idea to leave it out altogether as there is no other flour like component to the mixture.
Will be making the mix on Monday, letting it stand overnight before baking it on Tuesday. So we really needs to get all our ingredients in the pantry by tomorrow. The peel of untreated oranges and lemons bit is easy as we got orange trees in our garden and lemons are easily come by here.

Will keep it simple with stuff like gingerbread or shortbread - straightforward recipes - if the ingredients are not always so simple. Is just that we seen the little critters in one of the upmarket department stores the other week and got oh so nostalgic. The prices were utterly outrageous and the Izzie out of curiosity decided to take a peek in her recipe collection. Turns out that the main expense is almonds and hazelnuts and the chocolate for coating if you don't use icing.
Would be interesting to see what colour icing raw sugar would make if zapped into powder with the Izzie magic wand. Sort of pale brownish we suppose.

Was going to go on an Izzie rant about the latest topics on this weeks' "Australia Talks Back" radio show. The slippery slope gets slipperier and slipperier every week.
One week the subject is "Should Australia provide a nuclear waste storage facility for the world?", Get a foot in the door on this one and in a few weeks time they will be discussing "Where should the nuclear waste storage facility be located" followed by "Should the government build it or contract it out to private developers such as Halliburton"

Pathetic arguments that if we export uranium, we are morally obliged to accept the waste products. What twaddle. We don't hear any suggestion of Australia being the Cadillac or Toyota graveyard of the world. Heaven knows how many tons of iron ore gets exported to Japan and made into cars but no one is expecting us to take back all the scrap metal.

Yesss. Izzie thinks - the waste is the problem of those who produced it. If they cannot deal with it safely then they should not be creating it in the first place. Izzie just so so loves this mentality of building a nuclear power plant to produce a pissy amount of electricity with a lifetime of 50 years at the most and then letting some one else in another time or another place worry about what to do with the waste for the next thousand plus years. Talk about the ultimate in privatizing benefits and socialising losses. (or externalizing costs as the economists prefer to call it)
(By the way, Izzie lived four years in a town that's main claim to fame was in possessing one of the oldest nukes in Germany. That explains an awful lot about this strange serpent we guess;))
I'm sure the British, French and Italians would have been most impressed if the Roman Empire had built nuclear power stations and they had the delightful chore of dealing with the attendant toxic waste.
Oh yesss. And all this oozy schmoozy flattery about geological and political stability. Political stability - well the Lying Rodent seems determined to turn the place into another Zimbabwe - but what the hell is a pissy little 200 years of European settlement in the grand nuclear scheme of half lives?

We suppose it is the same mentality that for short term gain causes a government to use stuff like depleted uranium or Agent Orange in some one else's country where some one else will have to live with the consequences for a long long long time just so that these guttersnipes can have a momentary military advantage. And turns out - it never does seem to last long.
Izzie was so so touched by the latest survey about the veterans of the Korean war. It was probably sponsored by the government and comes to the most surprising and amazing conclusion that the health of these veterans is significantly worse than other males of a similar age who did not go to that particular war. And to compensate for this - the government will give the poor buggers a gold veterans card entitling them to free health care. Oh how touching. Wait until most of them have fallen off their perches and the rest are all 80 plus and then get this sudden attack of the warm and fuzzies. At this rate, the poor buggers who got sent to Vietnam might get their gold cards in 2030.

What else can one expect from a government that is making life hell for two journalists who had the audacity to leak a government bill cutting the pensions and health care entitlements for other war veterans. This nasty pettiness too of military jingoism on one side and shafting actual war veterans on the other is just another nice little policy got from his Lord and Master over at the Texan ranch.
izmeina: (oro)
It is time for Izzie to abandon her convention of referring to the present incumbent of the White House as King George. He might often act like an omnipotent emporer but even taking into account the incidents of those missing 58,000 ballots in Florida and other unusual discrepencies, with a margin of 3 million or so of the popular vote, he has finally earned the title of President for the next four years.

Well. So the moral majority has spoken. It is reassuring to know that 52% of American voters approve of good old fashioned moral values such as state sanctioned post natal abortion, torture and detention without trial, government being economical with the truth and increased corporate welfare.
These activities are infinitely more preferable to such degenerate activities as prenatal abortion and state sanctioned same sex marriages.


It is especially welcomed, the return to good old Biblical Values of an eye for an eye and 100,000 lives for 4,000 lives.(and still counting) Let us just hope for the sake of the American public and the rest of the planet that other religious fundamentalist state sanctioned or private enterprise terrorists around the world do not adapt the same accounting standards as President Bush.

Maybe it is just as well that President Bush continues to drink from the Chalice that he poisoned himself. He does have a rather bad habit of making messes and then demanding that others clean them up. John Kerry is disappointed today but maybe he was lucky to miss out on that job after all.

As a citizen of the soon to be 51st state, Izzie does hope that we too will adopt that very wise piece of US legislation that prevents a leader standing for more than two consecutive terms. But then maybe, when the President has finished branch stacking in the Senate and Supreme Court, he can copy the noble example of Aleksandr Lukashenko and over rule those pesky checks and balances and declare himself in a referendum to be President for Life.

Have fun with the next four years of Constant Vigilance.

Profile

izmeina: a snippet of Escher's circle of serpents (Default)
izmeina

May 2025

S M T W T F S
     123
456789 10
11121314151617
18192021222324
25262728293031

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated 21/07/2025 04:44 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios