How to properly pet animals

Via Superior Distraction for the Bored

Gimme some sugar

I'm pretty ignorant when it comes to food, chemicals, what's going to kill me and what's going to make me live until I'm 200. When the conversation about this or that foodstuff or food practice gets complicated my policy is to trust the weight of scientific consensus, with the understanding that sometimes scientists gets things wrong. I also think it's a fair assumption that in general unprocessed food is going to be better for you than processed food. You don't need to be a member of Mensa to appreciate that eating an apple is probably better for you than eating apple pie. At the same time that doesn't mean I don't eat apple pie.

What I don't particularly care for (but largely find it pretty easy to ignore) is the growing tendency to refer to sugar as "toxin", treat gluten like a poison and get smug about eating that chocolate pie because it's made with dates and almond meal instead of white sugar and the tears of dolphins.

All of which is a long way of saying I enjoyed (and mostly agree with) this takedown, via Gawker, of the Food Babe who is, uh, well she's kind of the worst.

Cooking and eating goals for 2015 or How I Plan to Become a Domestic Goddess

1. Learn how to make a decent hollandaise.

2. Make a decent hollandaise.

3. Bake a loaf of bread that doesn't have the consistency of a large, edible doorstop.

4. Expand my recipe repertoire.

5. Find a way to stop Mr Whiskerley from killing my herb garden with his big furry grey arse. (To clarify: my cat likes to curl up on top of my herbs on rainy days. It's cute but enraging)

6. Make proper lunches to take to work, rather than eating my own body weight in toasted sandwiches 5 days a week.

7. Learn how to cook more vegan food so I can have Clowney to dinner more often.

8. Invite people for dinner more often.

9. Trade out my 70% cocoa chocolate habit for a 85% cocoa chocolate habit because apparently that's the only way I'm not going to die of dementia.

“Life hurls us like a stone, and we sail through the air saying, "look at me move.”

(Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet)

Devastating realisations I made today

My precious Cadbury Creme Eggs are actually 39g, not 34g (like apparently they are in... Canada? I don't even know), which means they contain an extra ~25 calories per egg. Not a big deal in the scheme of things obviously but maaaaaaan 150 calories per egg really felt a lot easier to sneak into my daily diet than 177 calories does. I don't know why this is so but it is. That is all.

Mission accomplished.

Via Rainbow Rowell.

"Life is not all fun and games and hounds of Baskerville..."

"So, please, believe me when I say this — I don’t mean it in a completely bad way — but Benedict Cumberbatch looks, to me, like what happens if someone pulls a fire alarm while Ralph Fiennes is in the middle of getting made to look like Lord Voldemort and he has to run out of the dressing room with only half of his face covered in weird latex and makeup. I don’t want to bump into that guy on the street, you know?"

The latest edition of 'Would you Rather', featuring Sherlock vs John Watson, is GLORIOUS and you should read it all here.

"Captain America gets rained on, too. The difference, I think, is that at some point he would go out and buy an umbrella."

I really enjoyed this bit of musing on a key difference between how Batman and Captain America deal with their manpain.

On a related note I think I've mentioned before that one of the things I'm really loving about The Flash is the comparative lack of angst and melancholy in Barry Allen's life, despite a super bleak backstory involving a murdered mother and incarcerated father. The series would be about one-tenth as enjoyable if The Flash mooched around like some tragic Batman, boo-hoo-ing about how he was a super powerful billionaire with a butler who probably brings him tea in bed in the morning if he asks.

Sophia Loren making pasta

Because why not.

Shoegazing Wednesday

One Art

By Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Music to eat honey out of the jar by (that may just be me right now)

Meat is Moider

Arguably the thing I like least about the internet is the way it allows people to read only things they already agree with and surround themselves with people who reinforce exactly what they already think (see: Twitter, also: people who only read The Guardian or any other unabashed left/right wing news source). So my recommendation to go and read this The New York Times op-ed on the health benefits of a plant-based diet comes with the disclaimer that I may only have found it interesting because I'm a smug vegetarian who likes to read about how she's doing the right thing and will probably live to be 305 years old. Death to plants!

N.B: The title of this post was just a shameless excuse to run this brilliantly insane photo of Morrissey because why not.

Lights, Camera...

If you’d asked me yesterday I would have said I like action movies... okay. At their best (Die Hard, Predator and my personal favourite Terminator 2: Judgment Day) they’re a perfect mess of fun, violence and jokes. At their worst (too many candidates to mention) they’re too dumb, dumb, dumb and too loud, loud, loud.

But this very enjoyable (and long so you need to commit) Grantland article on the mythical “Action Movie Star Championship Belt” makes me realise just how many action films I still quote on a regular basis and/or would happily plop down in front of tonight, if the opportunity presented itself. It has also made me think about the career of Vin Diesel and Sly Stallone in far greater detail than I had… ever intended to.

The premise is thus: Steve McQueen’s role in the classic film Bullitt makes him worthy of being the first-ever Action Movie Star Championship Belt recipient.

After McQueen (spoiler alert!) kills the bad guy at the end, he should have hoisted the first-ever Action Movie Star Championship Belt. How many actors won that thing? How can we figure this out? And is this piece a convoluted excuse to celebrate the surprisingly awesome Liam Neeson era — which peaked yet again with the recent success of Non-Stop? To that end, I sketched out the past 46 years using a complicated set of guidelines I created three minutes ago…

The article then wallows in the subsequent decades of action movies to decide which other stars deserved to wear it.

There’s Stallone:

On the heels of Rambo: First Blood Part II, we didn’t care if Cobra was about cops, snakes or a cop named after a snake. The movie’s confusing trailer promised us machine guns, car chases, bullets, explosions, and a toothpick-chewing Stallone wearing sunglasses. Wait, he was playing a cop who didn’t play by the rules and cut his pizza with scissors??? Even better! I knew this movie was released in May 1986 without looking it up. Why? Back in high school, me and my buddies were counting down the weeks until it came out. In a related story, there wasn’t a girlfriend to be seen at the time. Not a one. Anyway, Cobra was legitimately incomprehensible; I’ve seen it 20 times and still couldn’t tell you what happened. The screenwriter should have just been credited as “Written by 200 Pounds of Cocaine.” We didn’t care — again, Sly was wearing sunglasses, chewing a toothpick and blowing people away. What else did you need?

There’s Schwarzenegger:

This wasn’t an apex, this was an a-fucking-pex. In two years, Arnold somehow crushed the science fiction, action comedy, summer blockbuster, three-boobed women, special-effects nerd-vana and “It’s not a toomah” corners. Everything peaked with James Cameron’s breathtaking T2, which left us stumbling from the theater like we’d just watched a UFO land. There had never been a cinematic experience approaching T2 before. And this was coming off Total Recall, a movie that EVERYONE loved. Amazing. In 1992, a rattled Stallone waved the ceremonial white flag with Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot. Our enduring action-hero scoreboard: Arnold > Sly.

Hey it's JCVD:

Even more incredible, JCVD had to “act” differently as the two twins: One was a good guy and the other was a woman-slapping drunk, but you knew they were both Van Damme because neither one of them could act

Even Swayze makes an appearance:

Everyone discovered Road House on their own timetable. My moment happened during my sophomore year in college, when Nick Aieta and I rented Road House from Blockbuster just because the VHS cover cracked us up. Is this a comedy? Is it an action movie? What is this?

And many many more. It’s a great read. Get on it.

Ex Machina is a film apparently made simply to please me (and frankly it's about time)

1. It's about artificial intelligence, one of my favourite sub-genres in the broad church of science fiction.
2. Features object of my affection Oscar Isaac, who has made me love all kinds of things I didn't think I could love - a list that apparently now includes beards.
3. Features another OOMA affection Domhnall Gleeson - who continues to pop up in projects I love, which makes me only more certain that he and I are destined to be together forever.
4. Written and directed by Alex Garland, who as both writer and director is very much in my wheelhouse. By which I mean I think he and I both really enjoyed seeing Cillian Murphy naked that one time.
5. Seems creepy as hell.

Movie scenes to weep by

** Spoilers **

Bridges of Madison County.
(Get out of the truck, get out of the truuuuuuuuuuck, Meryl.)



Brokeback Mountain
("There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.")



Blue is the Warmest Colour
(I freaking loved this movie so much. Also just watching this scene makes me want to cut off my hait all over again.)

Dreams

I dream of a man or woman who will make this giant fucker for me and deliver it into my arms. I will be theirs forever.

If you're not reading the Fug GIrls' recapping The Royals...

.... you need to get on that.

Things I have told myself to alternately justify buying/talk myself out of buying Martha Holmbeg's cookbook, Modern Sauces

If I bought this book I could finally learn how to make hollandaise, bearnaise and feel fancy and clever.

You could make those things anyway without buying the book.

Pfft by looking recipes up on the internet? What am I, a cretin who doesn't value other people's intellectual property?

Um, no, dude. Nigella Lawson's excellent book, How to Eat, has recipes for heaps of classic sauces. You own a copy of it. It's right there. Start with that.

Okay but Holmbeg's book has a whole chapter on cream sauces. Let me repeat: A CHAPTER ON CREAM SAUCES.

How many cream sauces do you reasonably want to make?

ALL OF THEM.

I'm not sure...

She also has a whole chapter on caramel sauces. I mean, didn't even... know there was more than one. I thought caramel sauce was just... caramel sauce. One thing. Apparently I've been wrong all these years.

Again, how many caramel sauces do you...

ALL OF THEM. 

I feel like we're getting off track here. I appreciate that cookbooks are good fun to read and can be practical but in these times of financial austerity couldn't you just cook recipes you haven't tried from the books you already own?

But that... maybe. What's your point?

There's a shit-ton of recipes you've always wanted to try but never got around to sitting on your kitchen bench. Maybe you should try cooking them first and exploring what you do have before purchasing a new cookbook, which you'll dive into with enthusiasm only to put aside after trying, maybe three or four recipes, because you have the attention span of a young cocker spaniel.

ALSO THERE IS ANOTHER CHAPTER ON BUTTER SAUCES THAT IS ALL I WILL BID YOU GOOD DAY, SIR.

Things that are making me happy:

Re-reading one of my favourite books of recent years: Rainbow Rowell's Eleanor and Park. It's been awhile since I was falling-in-love giddy but this puppy brings it back like nothing else.

Darren Hanlon's delightful new album, Where Did You Come From?

Lindt 70 per cent cocoa dark chocolate.

The fact I no longer drink diet coke.

The return of The Flash. Blame it on my deep love of Tom Cavanagh but this charming, fun and super, um, good natured show has been a surprise delight.

The Adventure Zone podcast. And this is coming from someone who hasn't played Dungeons & Dragons for.... 20 years.

Things I ate today: A chocolate gold coin.

The appearance: It looks like a gold coin. Not like an actual coin you or I have ever used but sort of like the fake gold coins you see in bad fantasy TV adaptations. A little too big and prone to melting if left out in the sun, so not super practical as a currency.

The taste: It tastes like… inexpensive chocolate. That’s not a slam – I like inexpensive chocolate – but it’s a bit like those random Easter eggs you wind up hoovering up around this time of year.

The verdict: The chocolate tastes like compound and is maybe a bit sweet. Set against that is the undeniable fact that it’s a little bit fun to unwrap it from its coin package. Would I eat a block of this chocolate or, say, a whole bag of coins? Sure, if I was bored, hungry or in the mood for chocolate. But if I wanted to eat a lot of chocolate and had the choice I’d probably opt for a more premium chocolate of the Lindt or Green & Black variety. But for a cheeky morning pick me up that makes me feel, however briefly, like I should be wearing a jerkin, carrying a double-handed axe and collecting gems from the bodies of ogres, this is a win.

Things my husband said when I tried to recreate this sweet knee-socks look from the "Gold Dust" music video:

"You look like a lesbian goalie."

Guten Tag, Father

“When I was excited about life, I didn't want to write at all. I've never written when I was happy. I didn't want to. But I've never had a long period of being happy, Do you think anyone has? I think you can be peaceful for a long time, When I think about it, if I had to choose, I'd rather be happy than write. You see, there's very little invention in my books. What came first with most of them was the wish to get rid of this awful sadness that weighed me down . I found when I was a child that if I could put the hurt into words, it would go. It leaves a sort of melancholy behind and then it goes.” 

(Jean Rhys)

"I never had the Latin..."

Even Rachael knows

That this will end badly. And she's, you know, a replicant.

"He wants to laugh at the irony, he really does, as he lets Potter brand his arm and override the dark mark with a new one."

I don't read Harry Potter fan-fic (or, really any fan-fic) but I follow people online who do and wow this bit of fan art from alekina is pretty sweet.

"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. 

But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and 

the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you 

too but there will be no special hurry." 

(Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms)

Three

Via Rainbow Rowell.

a conversation between game developers

• "We have the power to simulate almost any imaginable scenario. What does the world need more of? What is there not enough of? What can we compose with the limitless tools of our imagination?"
• A pause.
• "Wa—"
• "War! Jinx you owe me a coke!"

(Via Ben Kling)

Harry Potter Valentines (I die)

Via Ben Kling - and you really should follow that link and check out the whole list.

Celebrity Valentine's Day cards

"The open sore on my leg is less of a big deal than people make out, just to reassure you..."
- Henry VII to Catherine Parr.

“Every man desires to live long, but no man wishes to be old.” 

― Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels

Things someone said to me on the phone yesterday

1. "I hit them with my stick and I'm the one who gets charged with assault."

2. "I call them a <CENSORED BECAUSE: EW> and I get called racist."

You don't need to find Channing Tatum attractive (and I don't)

To have faith the Magic Mike sequel will be several handfulls worth of fun.

Perfect, basically

"I thought there was an anguished moment of pure beauty in The Office. It was between Tim and Dawn, and there were kisses being sold for Comic Relief, and he gives her a pound. Of course they’re both terribly in love, but they haven’t admitted it. And she says “Well you have to have your kiss now.” and so they have to kiss. There’s this brief incandescent kiss. It’s the sexiest thing you’ve ever seen, and they’re almost physically stunned by it. But it’s so real and so content that I think today I’m nominating that as my favourite bit of TV drama, even though it’s in a comedy."

Steven Moffat's answer to "What is your favourite TV drama moment?" 

(Via Rainbow Rowell)

“Yahtzee!”

A year or so ago I wrote a really terrible "novel" about a girl who, through Circumstances, winds up stuck in a rom-com world (I know, I know) where she has to fight against all the genre's shitty cliches, including the best friend who exists only for plot and exposition purposes and the wacky misunderstandings she can see coming but can't prevent. I wasted about 80,000 words and a year of my life writing something incredibly lame and unfunny that needs to be burned in a fire immediately, while over at the New Yorker Mindy Kaling has gone and written something much, much better and using way, way, way less words. To wit:

The Sassy Best Friend

You know that really hilarious and horny best friend who is always asking about your relationship and has nothing really going on in her own life? She always wants to meet you in coffee shops or wants to go to Bloomingdale’s to sample perfumes? She runs a chic dildo store in the West Village? Nope? O.K., that’s this person.

I mean: hee! You can read the whole thing here. (Also you should know this article is years old, I just stumbled onto it today because I'm 4 years behind the world).

Love it

You might think...

... you don't particularly want to see a guinea pig pretending to be a baked potato but is that really true?

Me + Triple J Hottest 100

Via Lana Del Jace

I'm Hulking out over here

I’ve been stewing in my own juices a bit this week.

No, I’m not going to go all Falling Down or start slapping Andy around a bit, but in the past few weeks I’ve felt let down by someone who was a friend, frustrated at work and had an absolute turd laid in my lap by the housebuilding process. NO I DON’T WANT TO TALL ABOUT IT.

None of my complaints are particularly serious and they’re all frightfully First World but they’ve still been getting me down and simultaneously making me angry at, well, The World, which is a little dumb. Given I’m Australian, middle class and white plenty of people could argue The World has handed me a pretty cruisey deal.

Nevertheless, if you too are having the worst week you could do worse than dip into my indulgent Angry Kate playlist.

The Jesus And Mary Chain

I Hate Rock n’ Roll

Magnetic Fields

You Must Be Out Of Your Mind

Rage Against The Machine

Killing in the Name Of

The National

Fireproof

Today I got really bored and looked up ex-boyfriends on social media

One had pretty much zero social media footprint except for a photo of him and his wife at their wedding.

The other was posting Morrissey lyrics on Twitter.

Seemed about right, really.

Oh My Lord

Word. This made me happy for some dumb reason.

We all agree number 3 should be number one, though, right?

Not going to lie, this article won me over with its opening line:

Hand up if you don’t want to bone Mark Ruffalo. Ok, go away: this is not for you. The rest of you: welcome. We are all made of stars and of the desire to tug down Mark Ruffalo’s pants. 

Thoughts I had while watching Birdman (which I liked just fine)

1. God Edward Norton is ageing well.

2. Why does nobody seem to be talking about Edward Norton's performance in this movie? He's tremendous. Also that coat he's wearing right now is magnificent.

3. I want to see a whole movie about Edward Norton's character.

4. Dude is, uh, looking pretty ripped for a 45-year-old.

5. Why isn't Edward Norton onscreen right now?

6. I wonder what Edward Norton's character is doing right now?

7. Don't leave me hanging, movie: what happened with Edward Norton's character and his (in)ability to get it up? Damn you, Inarritu - why are you leaving me in suspense over the state of Edward Norton's character's cock??

Happiness, knowledge, not in another place but this place, not for

another hour but this hour

(Walt Whitman)

On a day of pretty shitty news on the personal front...

... it's nice to know a Belle & Sebastian song can still put a smile on my dial, 15 years on.

“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world's existence. All these half-tones of the soul's consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.” 
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Things I ate today: Cauliflower Cake

The thing: A piece of YotamOttolenghi’s Cauliflower Cake, cooked by me for dinner last night. Today’s lunch is composed, therefore of leftovers.

Appearance: Resembling nothing so much as a fat savoury muffin or scone (I did bake most of the batter as it appears in the pic above, in a cake tin, but I had too much so the rest went into ramekins), this cauliflower cake looks delicious: solid, slightly crispy on the outside and generally extremely munchable.

Taste: Yotam assured me in his cookbook, Plenty More,that the cake would be even better the next day and I’ve got to say ol’ Yotes did not tell a lie. I love me a bit of cold stodge – cold roast potatoes, for example, are so very much my jam – and this cake really delivers on that front. I have nothing against potato (what kind of madman would?) but I feel a bit virtuous eating something like that really tastes like a potato cake but contains cauliflower instead. My only criticism, and it’s a minor one, is that it might tend towards the bland if you ate too much of it. I address this problem by alternating with bites of my beetroot salad but a blob of chutney would also go down a treat. This may strike some as wrong but I’d also love to slice it up very finely and throw it in a toasted sandwich with some swiss cheese. Mmmmm double stodge. Also Andy insists next time I have to bake it in a loaf tin so he can call it cauliflower log because he's super weird so, uh, that might happen.

The verdict: A future staple. This cake took kind of a long time to make last night, in part because it was the first time I’d made it so I had to keep referring back to the recipe. But even assuming I couldn’t reduce that preparation/baking time it’s a worthy addition to my recipe roster because it makes heaps and tastes a treat the next day. Ask me how I feel at the end of the week but if I had a slice of this puppy in my lunchbox every day I’d be a happy chappy.

Note: For anyone who cares the version of Yotam's recipe linked to above is actually slightly different to the version in his cookbook. Essentially there's just more of it: the book version uses 75ml of olive oil, 7 eggs, 150g parmesan cheese, 120g flour, 1.5 tsp baking powder and either one small cauliflower or (in my case) about three-quarters of a medium-sized one. The rest remains the same. But really you should just buy the book, cheapskate.

Word

Via Rainbow Rowell's tumblr

NOT GREAT BOB

God bless the good people at Previously TV for reminding me of one of my all time favourite Mad Men moments. Also a phrase I should be using more often in my daily life. All the time. (Also you really should watch the actual version with audio because Pete's delivery is... something).

Word

Relax on Kepler 16b: Where Your Shadow Always Has Company

So first this happened.

Then this happened.

And I was happy.

News probably only I care about

Second season Fargo sounds nearly as awesome as the first season was, which was way better than True Detective YEAH I SAID IT SO THERE.

A boring list of things that are making me happy

1. Chocolate chips on my porridge. It started as a special treat. It's became a daily fixture. Is it wrong? I don't care. It tastes right.

2. A Visit From the Goon Squad which I'm reading about 100 years after everyone else. Despite being a keen reader I still have this weird hang-up sometimes that critically lauded books are going to be hard to get into. What a pill. So imagine my delight that this book has turned out to be a cracker.

3. The world of graphic novels. Between Saga and Y: The Last Man I feel like I've discovered (yeah, I know, shut up) a whole new genre of kinda-books to explore.

4. Trips out of town. Three days in Dunsborough and it felt like a month, in the best possible way. Must. Leave. Town. More. Often.

5. Movies. Into the Woods, Birdman and Theory of Everything will soon be mine. After a mini-drought it's exciting to be, you know, excited about so many new films coming out. Make mine a boysenberry choc bomb, thanks.

6. Friday. Well, you know, I'm only human IF YOU CUT ME DO I NOT BLEED?

N.B: The photo above comes from someone else's blog but it's a pretty fair representation of what I just finished chowing down.

That frustrating feeling

When you finish reading something you thought was amazing and you need to talk about it but you only know one other person who has read it and it came out years ago so nobody's talking about it online either and gaaaaaah.

Maybe just think about reading this graphic novel series, Y: The Last Man. I guess that's my point.

I camembearit...

If you're not reading Catalogue Living you're doing it wrong.