A Horse, a Horse, a Kingdom for a Horse… (Steak)

There are so many different strokes for different folks it makes a mockery of absolute truth, common sense, or even us keeping a semblance of  being sane. As some say; what is grist to the mill is porridge for the porkers.

Who can’t but be amused over the ‘shocking revelations’ that horse meat has been eaten in Britain? People were seen choking on their tripe and tripping over their chokos. What, eating horse? We are English, don’t you know? Cameron was keen in pointing out, the moral repugnance of having been dudded by the French in meat being horse meat instead of real meat, the holy ‘cow’. I am sure many were also outraged by having eaten horse, never mind morals of eating any animal.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-02-09/cameron-condemns-horse-meat-scandal/4509702

There is growing outrage, and of course, its les frogs who are to blame. What insult, with ’les chevaux’ being mixed into our beloved frozen hamburger mince. What will the neighbours think?

The irony must be crystal clear to many of the non-Anglo world that in a country where just about everyone is brought up on horse racing, betting and punting, that the eating of horses is seen as abhorrent, close to eating babies or to boarding out children to schools. (Hold onto your horses, we do that lovingly).

We all know that horses are not allowed to be whipped anymore and much is made to prove we don’t, with lots of TV footage of horses being stroked and even kissed (on the flaring nostril after having made a packet for the owner and the punters). Surely, that’s proof of our love for horses!

Yes, but what about the proof also that horse racing is cruel and not far removed from Espanol bull fighting or Indonesian cock-fighting. The animals are manically competing against each other and when their chance of winning is beyond hope they will end up in paddocks, hopefully looked after caring owners but many also with enlarged hearts, lungs and tissue damage. It is estimated that about 60% of horses trained for racing end up at the knackery well before their natural lives would have expired.

That’s right, next time you open a tin of Pal, look deep inside, you are looking at Beaux Hoofs or Triple Ur Dollar. Many also are so psychologically damaged, too nervous and flighty, unfit for casual riding around the paddock as well. We also know that many are damaged during racing with torn muscles, ligaments and tendons.

Look, having come from Holland I have eaten horse meat as well. Mea Culpa to all horse lovers. It was one of mum’s bitter disappointments that David Jones in Australia did not sell smoked prosciutto from horse meat.’ Oh, no we don’t sell horse meat,’ she was told. My mum blithely unaware of the cultural sensitivity, answered, ‘oh, you should try it, and it is sooo delicious… mmm…she smacked her lips.’ The shop girl disappeared, fainted behind the counter.

I don’t think the French, Dutch or Italians love horses any less than the Brits or Irish but make less of a fuss when eating them. The Dutch are more likely not to eat sheep. Those poor little lambs etc. It is strange isn’t it, with that lovely children’s song with little Bo Peep that it hasn’t filtered down in Britain to then also not eat lamb.

Different strokes etc… and so it goes on. The more one learns about people the more I like my lentils and stroke my Milo. Our incorrigible Jack Russell.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUql207FuW4

A game of chess anyone?

I just knew it. Competitive sport brings out the worst. Has anyone listened to the news? Did I not advice over and over again to award losers in sport instead of the winners? This is going to be big, I mean really big. Australia and sport are one. Forget about Craig Thompson, Slipper and Obeid. That’s just confetti for a reluctant shy bride. No one is going to catch the bridal bouquet from this lot of corrupt, drug addled doped up sport junkies.

The truth has now come out, glaringly.  The minister for sport looked glum. Drugs, crime, doping, gangsters are the catch words in sport now. Woe the parent that enrolls their child in sport from now on. Soon after this evening news I went for walk.  I already noticed children near our park running away from a ball that threatened to roll towards them. Within days people will be burning balls, cricket bats, sport-commentators will be strung up from goal posts. In the dark of the night people will be jettison their boxer shorts, in kerbs you will find redolent of sweaty thighs Lycra cycle gear, knee pads and other sport paraphernalia. I noticed rugby balls sticking out of the Salvos bins. The revolution against sport has begun.

The fault is not in sport but rather in insisting that the ‘winning’ is more important than just playing it. Not everyone was as lucky as I was in choosing sport as one of those activities that should only be indulged in for the fun of it, but ditched it as soon as I heard ‘winning’. I like the fun, the pure enjoyment of kicking a ball as hard as possible or to slice through a wave feeling the water rushing by. Alas, I had trouble finding sport loving friends who did not think that winning were all important. They thought of my tennis playing weird for never knowing the score. I left the tennis club.

Of course, it was always on the cards this would happen. The insane emphasis on winning trophies and medals took away what sport is about, a healthy way of burning of energy and excess calories. I played basket ball years ago for Scarborough but resigned when the coach rebuked me for throwing a ball in the basket of the opposite team, the nerve of him trying to lesson my joy of running and leaping about trying to get the ball in a basket. Who cared which basket?

There was just no enjoyment. Of course, awarding losers might sound silly but when you think that winning only awards the one entity and the rest made out losers, there is a lot that seems to stick in my craw from a social point of view. Does that not encourage the drug and doping that is now occurring worldwide? Why anyone wants to win is also a bit dodgy when you consider that it is likely most won’t. So what if you kick the ball a bit slower or in the wrong direction. Isn’t kicking the aim? If you kick slower or swim in the opposite direction, you are a loser? Come off it. Winning above everything else in sport is insane. It creates whole armies of despondent, depressed losers. No wonder sport had been drawn into drug, crime and despair.

If you are going to award medals, what about medals for empathy, tolerance, stroking a snake, kindness, knitting socks at the railway station, feeding a hungry duck or smiling at a brave lady slowly crossing an intersection, catch a shooting star? Where are the competitions in housing refugees, a race to house the homeless or feed the flotsam of society, the mentally ill and those lost souls with the dark disturbed look sitting forlornly on the park bench? Where is the race for communal inclusiveness whereby no one will ever be allowed to die unknown, unloved, uncared, a pauper’s grave?  Where are the medals and expert coaches to lower our incarceration rates or lower our unwanted teen pregnancies and those lost knee deep in gloom and despair?

There is one sport I would exclude from being subject to my scorn and deeply felt aversion in having to win at all cost. It is a sport that includes a king, a queen, rooks, knights and castles, pawns and a lot more. It is a compulsory subject at school in some countries and is often played outdoors. Everyone can play it, even ex rugby players and gangsters. You don’t need to win but is fun if you do. Just enjoy it.

It is a game and sport called Chess.

Election, Rejection, Erection.

We are again at the threshold of a possible change. The election in September is what will dominate much of the media and news. The worrying thing is the contemplation that Abbott will get in. Can you imagine? The horror, the horror of it all.  And Pyne, oh the pain…That face so contorted with spitefulness formed by decades of anger and malice. What makes him tick, one wonders. Yes, having watched him on Q&A, I could not but push the off button. The man seems filled with anger or revenge towards anyone with a different opinion to his own.

I could not help but chuckle when someone yesterday on the ABC Drum described Abbott as ‘The Lance Armstrong of Politics’. I am unsure if he is even in that league, suspect he is much more lacking in imagination than Lance. After all, Lance was so convincing, the whole world remained spellbound by his lies for years.

I stood back in amazement when that scandal unfolded, never in my worst nightmare could I have imagined that a metal frame and two wheels and a man dressed tightly in Lycra akimbo on this contraption could possibly create such turmoil. On TV I sometimes noticed whole mobs of cyclists bent over their bikes going hell for leather trying to go as fast as possible to a mountain top. I could not help but think of the possible itches and rashes that would have to be growing just as fast between their Lycra enhanced speeding thighs. That thought made me switch off the TV with the remote pointing at those cyclists with some cheerful alacrity.

I sometimes think that Abbott’s fondness for cycling and his strange swagger through Parliament might well also be related to Lycra.  Mind you, sitting for hours in Parliament would give anyone an itch if not bouts of incontinence to boot.

With the ageing population I noticed the canny Aussie entrepreneurial spirit rising again. Many super-markets and chemists carry blatant advertising of nappies for the ‘more mature’.  One local chemist shop has an ad where a greying ‘more mature’ man dressed in nothing more than white underpants clearly showing a huge bulging nappy,  smiling defiantly while standing next to his Jaguar staring straight into the camera. What chutzpah, what nerve and male libbers. A standing ovation for the male please!

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/01/30/3678527.htm

I haven’t quite reached that stage yet but H is making encouraging noises by pointing out the mature nappy division at Woollies.  This brings me to the erection part of my tale. Was it a dream or factual but did I read recently that men lacking in ‘firm enough for intercourse’ tumescence are at higher risk of heart attack? I think it must be true because I have been a little anxious about my own firmness of late. What do they mean with the specification of firmness? Is it some kind of angle measurement? Is anything over ninety degrees (from the floor up)) firm enough? I wished I never read that article, am forever looking and waiting for erections to happen now, and hoping to delay or prevent a heart attack. I used to be so happy waking up and admiring the morning glory greeting me ever so cheerfully. This morning, possibly through that rotten article it was not ‘firm’, just half mast looking a bit chagrined.

It is not easy being a man. We carry a huge burden.

Of course, our eating habits have changed. Who would have thought mums now buy a plastic bottle with the advice ‘just shake it’? The ‘just shake it’ seems to be a prepared kind of pancake mix. I would imagine the intending cook fills up the empty space in the plastic bottle with milk and then ‘just shake’ it, with mixture ready for pancake making. It probably makes about five or six pancakes and at $ 1.85 works out at the outrageous price of 30cents a pancake, not including the golden syrup or jam on top. Perhaps the ‘just shake it’ has been embedded from a latent subliminal message from eager husbands pestering tired wives late at night. A clever use of product enhancement.

It must be back-breaking work to put flour in a bowl, and then add some milk, a couple of eggs and whisk the lot together and get the old fashioned pan-cake mixture for a quarter of the cost. Walking slowly past the supermarket’s shelves there were other similar products. A cheese in a tube, some powder that turns into instant mashed potato, but the most irksome of them all, and H is so sick of me commenting on them, are…simmering sauces. My eyes forever keeping guard on our dietary habits, I even spotted a kind of meat-spread in a tube. It was called, I think, devilish spread which came in mild and spicy.

Yet, again, I switched on the telly and it’s almost obligatory now to find and watch a cooking show. No matter what time, there is someone with eyes turned heavenly upwards, saying ‘oh, how yum’ or ‘wow’. Fresh ingredients are tossed together; fish, meat, snails, frogs are being infused, thrown about and cooked almost to the point of a kind of Le Mans’ car race.

It’s all very confusing. There are options in watching French, Italian; Spanish cooks either cooking away in their own country or in top restaurants in Britain. They seem so enthusiastic, you wonder if they have mattresses tucked behind those huge gleaming stainless steel stoves and just take quick naps in between the stacking of delicious looking char-grilled hearts of goats and noodles with infused ginger and deep fried shreds and strips of celeriac with chanterelle-shiitake mushrooms on giant plates.

Then there are culinary delights shown in Vietnam, Indonesia, Burma, even Thailand. Fresh fish swimming, frogs are croaking and eels or snakes still slithering about. Within minutes it is all cooked and on the table with huge smiling families feasting away.

If pancake making is the only thing my grandkids will remember me by; so be it. It would be nice to have an epitaph on my pebble crete slab; “here lies the greatest pancake- maker” (but keep off the grass).

Cooking needs to be an act of love. You can never cook something in total indifference. When the kids are over, pancake making has almost religious overtones. Their own parents’ pancakes seem to lack ‘crispy edges’, I was told by Max who is the youngest of the three grandsons adding, ‘they are alright though’, not wanting to dob in his parents.

It is not as if I swoon over every pancake but I do hand mix the dough adding water and pinch of salt. I use real butter and cook on two cast iron solid pans on high heat. When I gently lower the mixture into the pan, the edges frizzle and sizzle out into the much desired golden crispy and crunchy edging. While hot, I rush them over to the kids seated at the round table, fork and knife in hand and at the ready. I squeeze some lime juice and sprinkle a light dusting of sugar.

I leave the rest to them.

We all know that even a split second appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show guarantees wealth and fame. That’s the power of untrammeled capitalism. If you mix that in with the word ‘humbling’ and a couple of sparkling crocodile tears carefully stage managed and filmed from the right angle and boy, do the sponsors start lining up.

Remember a while ago when Rupert Murdoch gave his first performance on the inquiry about the phone hacking scandal? After Mr Murdoch got down on his chair and felt comfortable enough he turned his face upwards towards the camera and announced with the sincerity of  Bill Clinton’s ‘no, I did not have sex with that woman’, ‘ this is the most humble day of my life.’  Today, Rupert’s media empire is capitalized at , give and take a couple of billions,  63  billion and the sixth largest company in Australia. It would not be surprising if the word ‘Humble’ will be subject to copy-rights in the future, might even get a patent taken out on it.  During the beginning of the scandal the company was hovering between 32 and 45 billion. Crime paid off handsomely and the ‘humbling experience’ certainly proved it to be for Newscorp.

I am sure Lance Armstrong’s future is now guaranteed just as much. Film rights, book rights, biographies. Boy oh boy, it’s just the beginning!

Banal confessions dripping with insincerity seems to be mainly the domain of the US. Surely, if Armstrong was sincere he would not seek an interview at the feet of the Goddess of Money and Fame, with all the world-wide fanfare and publicity that it would entail and instead lie low and hide his head in shame. He spouted again and again ‘the humbling’ of it all.

The most ‘humbling’, ‘oh, I am now under a death sentence.’ ‘I don’t deserve that’, he mumbled and humbled. The most ‘humbling’ of all times, he confessed tearfully, was the withdrawal from the Livestrong cancer foundation. Oh, seventy five million dollar a day I am now ever so humbly losing.

The foundation and original seeds of corny confessions might well have been sown some years back by Pastor Bakker and Tammy. Remember the disgraced televangelists, Jimmy and Tammy Bakker and the prostitute giving Pastor Jimmy a bit of light hand relief? The whole world was glued to their TV sets for weeks. For many years, the Bakers indulged themselves in conspicuous consumption funded by their televangelism on both land and satellite TV. No one at the time thought the glitz and glamour the Bakkers surrounding themselves with to be a bit unusual for a nonprofit organization…Jimmy was quoted as saying,” I believe if Jesus was alive today he would be on TV”. After it all came out, the tearstained confession of Jimmy Bakker on TV, would have to be one of the most bizarre events ever to have come out from the schmaltz world of American TV shows. Previous to that his “Praise the Lord” TV and Theme park in South Carolina made millions weekly. Some cynics afterwards thought that PTL always stood for “pass the Loot.”

Well, Mr Armstrong is well on the way of a comeback. The sponsors might sue him but were less shy when he was in the lime-light. Are they also giving back money made while the sponsored products were selling thanks to the fame of Lance at the time? For many years suspicion was rife but money as always speaks loudest. Who would be so silly as to upset the cart that was bringing in the loot?

I will never be able to ride on the back of ‘a humbling experience.’ It seems even more remote I will ever get an invitation to Oprah. Will you?