Almost Six Months Delayed

My blog, that is. What's the point of keeping a blog if you can't keep it updated? Normal days are ok, but when I come back from an overseas trip, it takes me months before I can put in a week's worth of travel blog entries. It gets worse if I do frequent travelling. I just don't know how the other bloggers do it. They must be employing ghost writers or something. Updating a blog is easy, but making it interesting and relevant and full of nice pictures is not.

Anyway, my second-to-the-last entry is still stuck at my US vacation last September 2006, and since then I've been to Jakarta, read a few books and watched tens of movies. So today, I've decided to start fresh. To h3ll with continuity. It's not like hundreds of people will flame me for the time warp. Heck, not even all my sibling read my blog. I'll just have to work my way backwards until the gap is filled (whenever that might be).

Top Gear and Left Bank 2

Through the years, Monday nights have always been SBS nights for me. Gone are Pizza, Mythbusters, John Safran, etc., but in their stead we have Top Gear, South Park, and Drawn Together.

Talking about Top Gear, today's Supercars episode has the Bugatti Veyron with a mated dual v8 engine (making it a W16 engine), 4 turbochargers, 10 radiators and 1000 brake horsepower competing with a Cessna 182 to deliver truffles from Italy to London. Guess who won. Anyway, one of the background music played during the segment is a melodic, chirpy, happy tune, which struck me as immediately familiar, but for the life of me, I can't remember where I heard that music. Closed captioning tells me that the title is Left Bank 2. My brain is associating it with a movie I've seen, and since it gave me a happy positive feeling, I'm sure it's a good movie. Twenty-four hours later I'm still racking my brains for a clue. Then it hit me - it was the introductory music played by the theater at the Art Gallery of NSW. At the start of every film screening, that music would come on, and the screen would show messages like, "Please turn off mobile phones and pagers", "Please do not ruffle your belongings", "Please do not talk during performances", etc. Ah, another one of life's little mysteries solved.

Chorizo Recipe

A few weeks ago, jolly ol' Jamie Oliver was on TV cooking up some lovely chorizo dish. I watched him, and I go, "I can do that." Easier said than done for a guy whose kitchen repertoire consists of fried eggs and mashed potatoes, maybe some French fries. How hard can it be? A quick check with Google, and this is the (modified) recipe I came up with:

• one big potato, boiled, peeled, and cut into chunks
• half an onion, cut into strips
• green bell pepper, cut into strips
• one stick of chorizo, cut into thick slices

Heat olive oil in skillet over high heat. Saute potato chunks with salt. Fry until browned on all sides. Transfer potatoes to a bowl.

Put pepper, onion, and chorizo into skillet and cook until vegetables have softened. Season with salt and pepper. Add a little white wine. (I can't find any open bottle of white wine, so I put in some Chinese rice wine. Hey, wine's wine, right?) Add vegetable/chorizo mixture to potatoes, and toss well.

Beautiful!

Lunchtime Fishing at Gordon's Bay

Right about lunchtime, a colleague who's crazy about fishing wanted to check out this new fishing spot he discovered during the weekend, and if we wanted to come along. Sure thing, man. Any excuse to get out of the office. Gordon's Bay is in the Randwick area, which is not too far, so it shouldn't take us long. He was saying that he was there snorkelling last Sunday, and he saw this Japanese catch four black fish in under 15 minutes. Considering he's been getting only one or two after hours of fishing, he reckons today is our lucky day.

Fifteen minutes to get there, 15 minutes to prepare his gear, 15 minutes of fishing, 15 minutes back to the office. One hour of lunch break should be enough. Yeah, right. After an hour, he's only managed to catch one black fish. Lots of bites (and getting wet), but no fish. My other colleague was unwilling to leave unless he catches his own fish. By 3pm, we all gave up and went back to the office. By 5pm, we were playing table tennis. Ah, that's the life!