Simon Rumble’s blog

As mentioned yesterday, Holly and I managed to get a booking at Oscillate Wildly for last night, our ten year anniversary. I'd attempted to book back in May, but they were already booked out. Fortunately they put me on the waiting list, and it seems someone pulled out.

So how was it? Spectacular! I'm not one of those bloggers who takes photos of every course—I appreciate those who do, but for me it spoils the experience—so I'll just touch on the highlights.

The tomato snow was delightful. Full tomato flavour, but with a shaved granita texture. Essentially it was frozen gazpacho, so it shouldn't be too hard to replicate, and I might give that a go in the summer.

If you're wondering what Tonka is, don't worry, I had to ask too.

My favourite two dishes were the duck and the lamb. Both were beautifully cooked and had intriguing taste combinations. Sassafras with the duck was interesting. A faint hint of root beer or sarsparilla coming through over the duck and cinnamon. I wouldn't have thought of combining either flavourings with duck, but it worked surprisingly well. And I don't particularly like sarsparilla or root beer.

The lamb was definitely the highlight. A few small slices of the most succulent, slightly bloody lamb served over slices of eggplant. The reduction poured on one side of the plate was just amazing, and I wonder how much effort goes into this element alone. The other side of the plate had roasted pistachios and a sweet quince/port sauce which also went nicely. But the reduction almost had me licking my plate.

At $300 once we'd bought wine (though they allow BYO for $3/person) and left a tip, it's not a cheap meal. But then, we don't celebrate a decade together very often, and we're both foodies who love these kinds of taste sensations. I wouldn't recommend it if you're after a meal rather than an experience. This is playful food, messing with your sensing and toying with accepted ideas of flavour.

Maybe for our 20th anniversary we'll get to El Bulli? If I make a booking now, we might just get in.

Ten years ago I snogged a lovely young woman at The Globe nightclub in Newtown (now a backpackers hostel and pizza joint). Ten years on and we've travelled the world, cycled thousands of kilometres together (including across a country), lived in another country, had the odd argument, moved back to Australia, bought a house and settled into life together. Life is good!

Happy anniversary Holly. Let's make it another 100 years eh?

Just got a call to offer me a table at Oscillate Wildly tonight. I'd attempted to book months ago for tonight and it was already booked out. Yay! I've wanted to eat at this place for ages.

Review sometime over the weekend.

Nick Davies gives an update on the police attack on 93 unarmed demonstrators at the Diaz Pertini school building at the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa, Italy. It seems despite clear evidence that the police indiscriminately bashed the crap out of people, none of them will be going to jail.

This kind of injustice, with violence meted out by jackbooted fascist thugs of the state, isn't uncommon. I've seen police start riots a number of times at otherwise peaceful demonstrations. They get off on it.

I wouldn't be surprised if the injustice here provokes some to take action themselves, given the state has been unable to deliver justice.

We've had a shiny new fence installed all around. It's been a few months in the making, getting quotes and agreement from three different sets of neighbours. Finally it's done. We now have a gate on our side passage, and the new fence is quite a bit higher. No more chatting over the fence to the neighbours, unfortunately.

Time to get some passionfruit going. It also means I can get cracking on the rest of the garden beds and plant my apple trees.

Spotted this morning walking through Sydney Uni, some Catholic pilgrims (the lanyard and pass is a giveaway) taking a photo of... the wall of HK Ward gymnasium. Weird. Maybe they saw Mary?

I'm trying to work out which annoying t-shirt to wear handing out condoms on Saturday, now that we're allowed annoy Catholics.

The options are:

And

Christianity: The belief that some cosmic Jewish Zombie can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.

Makes perfect sense.

The former has the advantage that I already own it. The latter I could make pretty easily.

Last week I had a whinge about trying to buy one of Gotye's albums online and failing. A day later I got an email from the man himself!

I was very disappointed to hear about your shoddy experience with the Creative Vibes web store in trying to buy my Boardface album. (Google alerts got the info to me...)

He then went and offered to send me the plastic versions of all his music, which duly arrived today. Awesome!

That an artist cares so much about his fans is heartening. It helps that he's supremely talented, but it sounds like he's finally getting the recognition he deserves too. He recently signed to a label that also has this year's best Eurovision song entrant (and best ever French entrant), Sebastien Tellier. He's also playing in Europe, so get out and see him. I caught his set at last year's Homebake and it was brilliant.

Oh and Wally, I know you're reading this so hello and thanks!

I've been thinking over the weekend about my post about the iPhone and the crap plans being offered. The problem is the lack of data covered by these plans. I reckon the stories in about a week's time will be all about the $2,000 bills iPhone users have been copping due to going over the data caps and getting the punitive excess data charges.

I poo-pooed Mark and Stilgherrian's idea of forming an MVNO, a virtual mobile phone company. I still think that's way harder than they think, but I have an alternative idea.

How about if you signed up for a mobile data plan and instead use VOIP for the phone part of it? You could use an online service for cheap outbound texting, and inbound texting could come to the mobile SIM's number. You'd have a landline number so people calling you would find it much cheaper. Though you might need a different number for texting.

One potential issue: what's the bet the mobile providers shape down VOIP so it's unusable?

Break SHMBO's hair dryer while shrinking tubing for your new LED bike light system. Fortunately she has another, travel, one. Not as good, but it shrunk the tubing eventually.

I watched SBS's Insight on Tuesday this week. It's a discussion programme and this week's episode was about petrol prices. You couldn't find a more shameless group of rent seekers than the majority of the people commenting during the programme. They all want to be given government help to cope with petrol price rises.

The independent owner-operator truckies were loudly whinging about prices, calling for petrol excise to be removed. This is the group that enthusiastically embraced casualisation of the workforce, accepting risk in return for a slight improvement in profits. I have one suggestion for you: your costs have gone up, raise your prices! It doesn't take an economic genius to work it out now, does it? If you don't want to take on the risk of being an owner-operator, become and employee and form a union.

The student who travels hours each day to drive from her farm to university and work, spending $120 a week on petrol, I have a suggestion. $120 a week would get you a room in a half-decent flat share in any city in Australia. It might not be in the salubrious suburbs of Sydney but a flat in, say, Strathfield, would be fine. Petrol prices aren't going down, so you need to consider it. If you managed to get rid of the car completely, add another $5,000 to your annual housing and transport budget.

The price signal clearly isn't working. SUV sales up to May were up and I haven't noticed any decrease in the number of giant vehicles on the road. It seems to finally be kicking in though. Perhaps if the CSIRO's prediction of $8/litre happens, people will finally work it out.

The calls for reduction or removal of petrol excise are from the same kinds of people who would scream if other taxes were increased to pay for it. Here's the problem: petrol excise and vehicle registration pays for a small fraction of the full cost of road transport in Australia. If we had a true user-pays system, the excise would be going up, not down.

Removing excise and putting the burden on all Australians would penalise those of us who made sensible decisions about housing and transport, paying more to live closer to our workplaces and using public or petrol-free transport. I'm sick of subsidising you lot, so quit the moaning.

And, of course, we're all subsidising the road freight industry. They pay a tiny fraction of the costs they incur on our road infrastructure, to say nothing of the pollution. When Carlton United Breweries relocated their brewing from Sydney to Brisbane, how do you think all the (high volume, high weight, low value) beer gets to Sydney? That's the kind of behaviour we need the price signal to prevent!

Roll on $8/litre.