Peats Ridge update before New Year

Festival is great, if insanely hot. Tomorrow is forecast to hit 37 so we're likely to be packed and on our way pretty early.

Disaster struck this morning: broken thong. Being a bloody hippy festival, there's magical rocks for sale, but you think I can buy a pair if regular, petrochemical, industrial thongs? Fortunately Holly's feet are near my size and she's wearing her trustifarian sandals.

Last night I saw Decoder Ring and PVT. Good as usual. Awesome band discoveries were The Seabellies (very slick) and Fishing (kinda Hudson Mohawke wonkiness done mostly live).

Tonight Louis and I ate dressing up with amazing costumes Linn Linn made. Should be very cute.

Posted

Peats Ridge Festival

We've had a lovely day so far. This is watching Washington in the late afternoon.

Posted

I Hate Math! (Not After This, You Won't) : Krulwich Wonders… : NPR

Vi Hart calls herself "a recreational mathemusician currently living on Long Island." She talks faster than a machine gun, loves math, and draws like a dream. Her newest video: "Doodling in Math Class: Snakes + Graphs" is eye-popping.

Vi Hart

Source: YouTube

via npr.org

Wow this woman is amazing. Her videos are just incredible, if you can keep up. The surrounding article is also worth a read.

Posted

Wikileaks: major news reports miss the major point

Is it just me or are the major news services missing the whole point of the Wikileaks US embassy cables?  Sure it's a bit embarrassing for the Yanks that their data all got into the public domain, but I'm sure all the players know these kinds of unflattering accounts are a regular part of diplomacy.

The really important thing here is that if a disgruntled employee with access to this data was able to very easily gather the whole database and leak it to Wikileaks, how many other sources are there leaking it less publicly?  There's upwards of three million people who have the appropriate security clearance. Do you think some of them might be financially distressed (given the recent GFC) and be open to a little cash incentive to leak it somewhere else?  Or have some other easy method to apply leverage (especially given "Don't ask. Don't tell.") So the question is probably less which intelligence agencies have been regularly receiving this data and more which ones haven't! Of course, their versions wouldn't have had the redactions of personal identifiers and the like that we see in the Wikileaks data.

Pulled pork

This weekend I made pulled pork again. It's such a great treat and uses insanely cheap meat.  I pretty much followed this recipe from Kidspot, with about $15 worth of pork shoulder and a bit of a mixture of BBQ sauces, since I ran out of one and had to crack out the Daddy's brown sauce.

The key ingredient to this recipe is time. It needs the full 10 hours in the slow cooker to soften all those nasty stringy bits of well-used muscle in the shoulder. This can be difficult to arrange if you're planning to eat it the same day, though if you have little kids it can be less difficult to arrange as you're up early.  Mine wasn't ready until 22:00 last night, so we didn't eat it until today.

Chilled, the pulled pork is a bit like lean rillettes. Shredded pork in jelly, juices and a little fat.  Nothing like as salty though.  I was an exchange student in Le Mans, which is famous for pork rillettes as well as a car race, so I have a bit of a soft spot for them.

This morning I had a bit of a treat breakfast.  Toast, a little pulled pork, eggs and some habanero sauce. Delicious!

Tonight we used it for dinner.  Burritos with some pulled pork and a heap of salad, all the greens from the garden. Again, divine.

There's still stacks left. At least enough for another burrito meal and a few smaller packs in the freezer to be used for pizza toppings.

I do love this dish!  Highly recommended.

Fantastic weekend

We've had a fantastic weekend.  Gorgeous weather, good times.  Yesterday we kind of hung around a bit, played, cooked and the like. I cooked up some patience-required pulled pork (more on which later). Louis enjoyed his Mum's lovely spaghetti bolognese.

We also visited the new waterplay park in Marrickville and Louis had a fantastic time splashing about. Marrickville Council are doing some fantastic stuff for kids, and it'll be especially awesome once our new local pool opens in December!

Today we took Louis for his first every bike ride with our new Weeride bike seat.  He absolutely loved the experience!  Tomorrow we'll start taking him to daycare by bike.

Then, Sydney FC won out at Parramatta.  A nice feeling we haven't had much of this year.  Photo shows Holly, Louis, Matt, Jameson and Maz.

Posted