I’m not a happy little Vegemite

There was an advertising campaign in the early nineties that revived the whole black-and-white “I’m a happy little Vegemite” campaign from the ‘60’s, and it was updated in colour and yet still filled with footage of kids of all ages engaging in the sort of strenuous activity that preoccupies children: jumping on a trampoline, popping balloons, running through a sprinkler on the lawn, etc.

It was all good wholesome stuff, and nostalgic for many.

What used to jar me out of reality was the final image of a chubby, happy baby sitting in a high-chair, with Vegemite smeared over his mouth and face, and globs of it clinging to his fat little chipolata-like baby fingers. This kid had obviously been shoving fistfuls of Vegemite into his toothless craw like it was chocolate sauce, and was going giddy with the salty insanity of it all.

I remember first seeing this, and being shocked out of my fucking mind.

Much like when a bright light is suddenly shone in your eyes and it takes a while for the afterimage to fade, so too did my mind flare out to whiteness when I beheld this hell-spawn. It was a least a minute before any thoughts started trickling in through the phosphor fog, which is a good thing, because in that space I’m pretty sure I’d forgotten how to make my heart beat.

Actual child-beast from ad not pictured

Subsequent screenings were viewed with a mixture of awe and revulsion, with a smattering of scientist’s curiosity. What manner of hellish chimera was this child? Was it even human? And if not, what hideously demonic womb issued forth this gibbering salt-fiend?

The most frightening thought of all, was what happens when chubbo’s fingers scrabble at the last smears of Vegemite in the jar and there’s no more left in the house? I’m thinking the terrible Mephistophelian poltergeist fury unleashed would make even Damien shit his pants. Twice.

What has brought this anti-Cupid back from suppressed memory is that recently I have been indulging in some Vegemite and cheese sandwiches -- a bit of Australian culinary culture that reminds me of home. It’s also bloody tasty, and even though I’m a good cook I can whip one or two of these bad boys up in a minute.

Here’s your recipe guide:

Ingredients

Two slices of bread
One slice of cheese
Vegemite
Butter/Margarine (optional)

Instructions

1. Lay out both slices of bread.
2. Optional step: spread butter or margarine on the bread.
3. Place the cheese on one of the slices.
4. Using a butter knife, smear a thin coating of Vegemite across the cheese.
5. Place other slice of bread on top of cheese

Congratulations! You have now formed what the scientific community calls a “sandwich”.

Girls eating sandwiches can be hot

I have been hand-crafting these wonders for years, and when it comes to the ol’ Vegemite and cheese sangers I am Jamie-fucking-Oliver (only with 100% less twunt).

All of which is a concern, as recently instead of step 4 being the creation of a uniform veneer of Vegemite across the unsullied cheese, I’ve become more like Pro Hart or Rolf Harris, in that I dip my knife into the jar like it’s a bucket of paint and I liberally smoosh huge chunks of the vegetable tar onto the cheese. Uniformity is out the window, and it’s not uncommon for me these days to bite into a section of sandwich to find a huge bolus of Vegemite there.

Most damning is that sometimes I eschew the cheese as a foundation for the Vegemite and attack the bread itself.

Maybe I’ve lost what it is to be Australian, or maybe my diet over here doesn’t include enough salt -- but I do know that I’ve been voraciously attacking these sangers with the gusto usually left to a cow stampeding toward a fresh salt lick.

The last thing a salt-lick sees

I should probably impose a Vegemite moratorium for a while. Just ban myself from it for now. I know that what’s left in my current jar cannot withstand many more attacks…

…but then again I also know where a ready supply can be had.

You sexy, sexy temptress

I love you Josè.

You were always an inspiration to me, and the best sister a guy could have. All through your illness, I kept remarking to myself at your incredible strength, determination and humour.

If only I could have a tenth of that I would be a much better man.

I love you.

The Ebola Man is coming

I'm not entirely sure what brought on my (morbid?) fascination with new and emerging diseases, but the fact that H5N1 is a ticking time bomb, plus stories like this one and the quote "...these are good times for pathogens to be invading the human population", actually give me a tingle of excitement.

I'm not against the human race, nor some tree-hugging powered-by-tofu kind of guy, but in some bizarre way I find this fascinatingly...fascinating. I see it as a whole War of the Worlds kind of thing, where in that scenario these hulking "immeasurably superior" aliens are undone because one of them didn't wash their hands after taking a shit.

Wash your damn hands.

And while human health and medical technology is making immense strides, it's amazing how much money is pumped into research and analysis of the human organism and how many billions are spent each year on health care.

All up, the human body is an incredibly complex series of interlocking systems -- and I suggest you watch House to see how one failing thing can mess it up*.

The human body is intriguing, but with this vast complexity, this intermeshing of mechanisms, it's amazing how something so simple, so basic, and so primordial can stuff things up.

Viruses (virii?) and bacteria are very, very simple things. Hell, viruses aren't even considered a living organism, and the prions that cause Scrapie, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), Kuru, Creutzfeldt-Jakob and Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) are actually caused by mutating protein crystals that the body's amino acids cannot break down. You can’t burn them, irradiate them, inoculate against it – once a prion gets in your brain you are stuffed.

Currently as I’m living in Asia, I’m watching the gradual encroachment of H5N1-infected chickens, and the way tiny outbreaks keep popping up around the world I reckon it is only a matter of time before there’s a wide-scale outbreak again. And once H5N1 mutates and becomes easily transmissible, we are going to be fucked...partially.

The WHO estimates 5-150 million dead worldwide. Keep pumping out the Tamiflu, guys.

BTW, there’s a movie coming out this year called Poultrygeist: Attack of the Chicken Zombies. Hopefully when it comes out bird flu is still contained, so it looks like a bad B-grade horror movie, and not a real-life documentary.

We're doing what now?

Singapore at the moment has a freaking massive outbreak of hand, foot andmouth disease in children, and yet the papers aren’t really hyping up the “fucking outbreak, run!” aspect of it, rather they’re keeping the populace calm as usual. So here’s a Singapore foot and mouth Fun Fact: In the last week of March, cases of the potentially fatal disease in children jumped from under 400 cases reported the week before, to 800.

More worrying than H5N1 and foot and mouth, is the fact that I am writing this as one of the first generation born without smallpox vaccination. There’s an entire planetary generation completely susceptible to small pox. Luckily the deadly strains are kept under lock and key, in the States and Russia, although the confessions that Russia had a full program of weaponising strains of smallpox, by the ton, doesn’t exactly ensure the world that all smallpox stores are safe.

So is a global Captain Tripps coming? Who knows, but the not knowing, the encroachment of H5N1, and the rapid emergence of entirely new pathogens keeps things lively…for now.

*I have noticed recently that many House episodes rely on the MRI a little too heavily, with subsequent episodes running along variations of “Run a full MRI!”, “We can’t!”, “Why not?” and so on, with the rest of the episode showing how they get a workaround to stuff the patient in the thing, or how they somehow manage to band together and find some way to diagnose and heal the patient without the MRI. House really should have the MRI in his adjoining office – it would save a lot of limping about and definitely save the producers a lot of money by getting rid of one set location.

God bless you, Internets!

Please enjoy the following galleries.

(dogs in cars)


(dogs with Mona Lisa)

(dogs in shawls)

(and of course, dogs in bee costumes)

Screw you, Medical Science! Let 'em all die...

As anyone who has lived through any age can tell you, theirs was the golden age. Ours is an age of boundless innovation in many disciplines: energy, physics, biology, manufacturing, computing and so on. What is possible today was not possible yesterday, and what we only dream that may be possible in ten years may actually only take five to come to fruition.

But it's medical science that's got me worried, and the major breakthroughs that happen every few weeks. See, I'm all for long-life and I'll guess we'll cross the social and economical implications of that soon enough, but what's got me irked is the development of new wonder drugs...wonder drugs, that those arseclown spam-kings think I wouldn't mind getting forty or fifty emails about each day.

I mean, just what in Christing fuck is Cialis?!?

No, no, I don't actually want to know, but I just want the Cialis-spam pain to stop. What about returning to the good old days of spam when it was mainly porn? Sure it still jammed your inbox and was frustrating, but I don't know of anyone who really complained about a glimpse of animated-GIF boobs.

And I figure that since we can't seem to catapult the spammers into the Sun -- no matter how many letters I write to the Queen -- then maybe we need to halt all research and production of new drugs. It just makes sense.

Please Medical Science, give a guy a break!

One of my formacidic buddy photos used in APC Magazine

(click for larger)

Yep. All that time futzing about with my camera and insects has paid off. The May 2006 issue of Australian Personal Computer has come out with one of my ant macro shots used to *ahem* ball-tinglingly awesome effect.

I've many great macro photos, and am more than happy to discuss deals if anyone want to use these shots.

In a world without laws, an outlaw runs from the law...

I've recently borrowed a friend's notebook, and have come crawling back to the warm and loving embrace of teh Internets. Ah Internets, how could I leave you so?

While this means I have been engaging in all manner of Internet shenanigans, a large part has been catching up on a few month's worth of movie trailers. I'm a massive movie buff, and I revel in the delights of a well put-together trailer, but unfortunately this is a hard-to-find treat these days.

Every time I see a one-sheet for some amazing pap like Cheaper By The Dozen or Bringing Down the House, I shake my head at the shit that the movie-viewing public wil put up with. Now I don't mind an endless stream of garbage churned out for the teeming masses of mouth-breathers out there -- it gives them something to do between eating sticks of butter or raw cookie dough -- but when lowest common denominator infiltrates what could be potentially good or great movies and makes ok movies, I object.

And nowhere is this more evident than in the humble movie trailer. I consider the late seventies/early eighties, the absolute zenith in movie trailer editing. Back then you'd get a couple choice shots of the movie, some shit sample from the soundtrack, and whole fuckload of exposition about what watching this movie would do to you and your brain. You still wouldn't know a great deal about the movie, but damn you'd want to go to see it.

These days, you're pretty much given the story of the movie in truncated form, including all the fucking spoilers, and then you're expected to see this Cliff's Notes version fleshed out in full?!?

I totally get pissed with the mystery being taken out of movies from the fucking trailers. I blame the American public for this, and since most movies are churned out of Hollywood, and the trailers similarly so, I feel justified in giving a big fuck you to Hollywood, and fuck you to the mouth-breathing American Idol watching dullards who need their information spoon-fed to them.

Movies are about the mystery, and joy of seeing the story unfold. At least for me. Ah stuff it, I've broken an anger-vessel in my brain.

Codacil: While I cannot help but jump on the bandwagon for this, the only movie possible that the trailer cannot tell me anything I do not already know (and that's not a remake) is whatever trailer they come out with for Snakes on a Plane.