wogball

The socceroos qualified for the world cup yesterday. I'm a pretty patriotic guy (a scoundrel, if you like), so I was walking around with a grin for a while. I read on Ricky's blog, in various articles on SBS' site, that maybe this will help soccer challenge aussie rules and rugby (he doesn't mention the national sport - cricket) for sporting dominance in Australia. Good god, I can't think of anything worse.

All sports are surrogates for war, but none so much as soccer. Sport as a substitute for partisan emotions, be it for country, club or colours, is a wonderful idea. Every sport in the world keeps this on the pitch. Except soccer, amongst whose fans violence is commonplace. I know a bunch of fans of soccer teams, but very few fans of soccer. Take me. I'll cheer for Australia, but put me in front of a game between two neutrals, and I couldn't give a damn, and am likely to get annoyed by the lack of "courage" and "honesty" in the game. Like war, its an outlet for partisan competition where the competition itself is greatly lacking of aesthetic appeal. That it is the closest thing there is to a "world game" is a sad accident of history that we should not reinforce.

So I'm pretty happy for the socceroos, and hope they go well, but they can stay in Europe as far as I'm concerned.

craziness in the streets

I bravely walked 15 minutes home from the metro last night. I didn't see any burning cars, but I did see a pair of shiny black shoes on a window sill with a sign saying "Servez vous" (help yourself). The streets just aren't safe.

underground cookery

Tonight I'm testing my culinary bounds.

My favourite dish of all time, or at least the most nostalgiacally cherished in my twisted little memory, is veal parmigiana with ravioli. Between about 9 and 14 I reckon I ordered this dish perhaps 20 times at the Underground Restaurant in Innisfail. By the end, Silvio Mantovani, the chef, didn't even ask me, he just wrote it down. I've found plenty of other places that offer such a dish by name, but they aren't the same thing. I have no idea how they made it, but I'm giving it a shot tonight based on memory and a mishmash of recipes found online.

So, anyway, the basic recipe tonight is that I take a veal escalope (don't know in english). Ideally I beat it with a hammer to within an inch of its life, but I don't have a hammer. Then I coat one side with flour, then an egg/milk/pepper mixture, then breadcrumbs with a little bit of grated parmesan cheese mixed in. I fry this one side, then lay on a slice of prosciutto, followed by a dose of parmesan cheese, then I fold over the veal to seal the prosciutto and parmesan inside, pinching it closed with a toothpick. This then goes into the oven with some tomato sauce and a slice of mozzarella. The ravioli I've bought, since I have even less chance of duplicating their amazing home-made pasta, and none whatsoever of making that into credible ravioli.

I'm going with a gaillac for wine. The bottle doesn't say what grapes it contains, but it comes from the area between Toulouse and Albi, through which I travelled on a train with Chris and Mick a few months back. From what I remember of previous gaillac escapades, I think its likely to be a cab-merlot or something nice like that.

the weeks roll by

... and no blog entries. I'm a slackarse, it's true. You've found me out.

Actually, the truth is that I haven't been doing much. Saturday my new mobile phone and SIM card turned up, so I played a little with that (as much as one can without an activated SIM card).

The plan, meanwhile, was at some point over the weekend to head along to the Salon des Vins et de la Gastronomie (wine and tasty food) with Sophie and Liz. Liz couldn't make it, courtesy of a heinous workload at uni, but Soso and I trotted along Tuesday evening. We tasted a bunch of whites (Rieslings, Sauvignons, Chardonnays and an Anjou or two), I tried a bunch of reds (Grenache - ugh, Merlot, Pinot Noir, Chinon, among others), and by the end, a little less sensitive to subtle taste (and gravity), I tried a couple of cognacs. We also bought some jambon from the pays basque, which I hope to get into this weekend.

Great fun, but a pretty slim return for a four-day weekend. Oh, I bought gumboots, too, with a view to going mushroom-hunting, but now that's cancelled. I still have gumboots, though. Whee!

terror laws

So the terror laws that Howard's pushing, with the decreasing support of the state premiers, are probably in violation of the constitution, and of international human rights laws. They seem to be coming along well, but we still need to make sure that they violate the Geneva Convention, the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, suburban zoning restrictions, the treaty of versailles, Moore's Law and the bible.

can't hold a candle to the candle

Last Monday I made two orders. About lunchtime I logged onto the Candle Records website and ordered 3 new Lucksmiths' CDs and a DVD. In the evening I called SFR and asked for a new SIM card. The first order was previewed to be 1-2 weeks, the second 72hrs + time of delivery. Then, on Wednesday, I ordered a mobile phone, from another online shop in France, with an expected delivery delay of 2-7 days.

I only have one of the 3 packages, and its only slightly surprising that it's the one that came from 16,000km away instead of those from <1000km. French efficiency.

In other news, it's T-shirt weather! Well, it is in my head.

origins vs nationality

At some point in the family tree (its actually a DAG), all of my ancestors came from the British isles, but I for one am sixteen-sixteenths Australian most of the time (110% when playing sport, of course).

'oops

Went to another basketball training last night, this time a group that Liz coaches from her uni or something. My calves cramped again - every time I do this I promise myself to do some fitness work, but it's just so much easier to sit at home and play games or watch movies. Anyway, I did OK, good rebounding, but I still can't hit a jumpshot.

craziness

On Saturday night crazy harpies set upon each other and on me, leaving marks of a nature most incriminating.

plurals! infinitives! hyphens!

I've been correcting franglais this week: english written by francophones. Its tedious and time-consuming, and it's annoying when the same error recurs, or variants of the same error recur, over and over again. Having said that, it's pretty easy work and it serves to build up my language karma before having to write a bunch of my thesis in french next year.

YS Falls

YS Falls.

Astute readers will notice that a few new photos have snuck into the right hand column, and that they don't look like France. They're not. They're of Jamaica, and they're from this flickr photo set. Whatever my qualms about the people, it's undeniably a very naturally beautiful place. Having said that, I'd take Josephine Falls over YS falls (pictured) any day of the week.

mascot

The mascot of my university, the symbol to strike fear into the hearts of any who would oppose us, to stand before them as a beacon of our strength, resilience and power, is a triton. They've put more emphasis on this in their new logo (warning: PDF).

This is all impressive right up until you translate triton into English. I'll save you the time. It's a newt.

return to brevity

Quiet weekend, mostly gaming. Grabbed a copy of NBA '06 and refined my hoops skillz a little. Tried to do some netgaming with P & D, but BG2 and NWN both refused to play ball.

back on the recepisse

After two or three glorious months of having a proper carte de sejour, I'm back on a recepisse (provisional thing). I went in on Thursday and lined up behind 77 other people, but realised I had forgotten an envelope, so went walking to try to find one, figuring my number wouldn't come up for at least 30 minutes. I couldn't find one for love or money, since newspapers in france are sold by bars, not by newsagents. I wound up in town, where I bought what I needed from the GPO and headed back out. My number had gone past, but I grabbed another and it only took 25 minutes or so of queueing. I guess they had two servers on to help with the increased demand from students arriving, but it was much better than my previous sorties.

oh, island in the sun

Ah, Jamaica. I've been avoiding writing this up for a week, but here goes.

So I headed off a couple of Saturdays ago to Montego Bay for the Models conference. A train to Paris, in which I wrote up my notes for the first of my two presentations, then a wait at CDG until I could check in for my flight to Heathrow. There were maybe a dozen or so of us on the flight going on to Models, including Jean-Marc and his wife. At Heathrow we were running late, and had to hurry to get to the gate in time for boarding, along with a few Germans that we met, including Gregor Engels. Anyway, the Jamaica flight, in a sign of things to come, boarded an hour late, so we (by now perhaps 30 Models'ers including Germans, Spaniards and others) were in plenty of time.

Jamaica is a poor place. I guess I hadn't figured on that so much, but the ride from the airport went past some pretty marginal housing, a goodly quantity of barbed wire, and an army jeep full of guys carrying semiautomatic weapons. The hotel could not have been a bigger contrast. After passing guarded gates, it was basically a colonial compound. 3km of private beaches, swimming pools everywhere, buses and golf carts to ferry people around. There were 5 rooms, I think, in our villa, and we were taken care of by our own cook and butler, which was a pretty weird vibe for me personally.

The conference itself was pretty good. The MTIP workshop on Monday, at which I presented, was valuable (in a global sense) and interesting, and I chatted with a number of interesting people. My talk in the main conference on Wednesday went well, after some soul-searching on Tuesday night on how to frame it. I got very positive commentary from some people, and only one real critic. I also had a chance to chat with someone from the graph grammar crowd, which should serve me well going forward. Elsewhere in the conference, I chatted with a bunch of people, including the Microsoft Research guys from Cambridge, who are doing good work.

Living in the resort was weird. I had a swim in their lap pool, which was something I'd wanted to do, but I didn't have a swim in the sea, more from lack of opportunity than lack of desire. I'm not used to luxury, though, nor to having 'servants' (though I use the term with hesitation). That said, when I left Friday into town, it was into uncertainty, not relief. The hotel into which I checked in town was pretty dodgy, with a choice between a noisy aircon and stifling heat. Also, and I'm no interior decorator, but the decor of the room was purple and green. I'm not talking pastels, either, these were verdant rainforest green and eyebleed purple.

So the weekend began, and an interesting one at that. Friday night we headed over to the pelican to meet some other people from the conf. We were a pretty international group of 7 people: ukraine, canada, brazil, england, germany, estonia, australia and france were all represented either in nationality or residence. There was also a jamaican guy who the german guy had met, who proposed to take us all on an excursion down south the next day. Gradually we accepted, and in the morning we piled into a couple of rented* cars and headed out.

It was a good day. We went to a house where they kept hummingbirds and had them perch on our fingers and drink nectar from bottles. We went for a river tour and saw egrets, mangroves and crocodiles. We went to some pretty amazing waterfalls and swung on a rope swing. We bought baked fish, hot breads and coconuts from roadside markets. It was fun.

The fun ceased the next day when the two guys who had paid deposits on the cars realised that our erstwhile friendly guide had taken them for a ride in more ways than one. Neither he nor the ~US$1000 in deposits were to be found. As for me, I went for a walk up and down the tourist strip, pushing aside the guys hawking tourist schwag, hash and hookers.

After finding a park to lie in and read for a while, I walked west towards town. Along the way I was approached by a young guy, and we started talking about cricket and stuff. We kept walking, him showing me stuff around town. After a while he suggested we go grab a beer and a joint. I turned him down on the joint, but we bought a beer and he bought himself some weed. It was probably at this point that I realised I was in the wrong part of town. It was basically a ghetto.

I really shouldn't have been surprised that, when I tried to take my leave, my 'friend' and another dude who had followed us started asking for cash. I was pretty annoyed. They were really indirect about it - "Sometimes, we show people around and they show us respect by giving us like ten, fifteen thousand dollars (about $US160)." - but the message was very clear. I wanted out of there, so I offered them increasing amounts of cash until my wallet was empty and they suggested I go to a cash machine and get them their money. In hindsight this is weird, but I basically negotiated them down to about five thousand, claiming to be a poor impoverished student. I was pretty conscious that I had a laptop and a digital camera in my bag worth 8 times what they originally "suggested". So I withdrew some money, like $50, and hotfooted it back to the tourist strip. The rest of the afternoon I wallowed and wondered why the TV wasn't showing the Australia-Jamaica soccer game. Later, withdrawing money for a taxi to the airport, some dude claiming to be called "Mr Cool" offered me weed or women, claimed he ran the streets in the area (still on the tourist strip), and asked me to get some cash for him while I was at it. I just shook my head and walked away.

So I didn't get a great taste of Jamaicans as a people. It went beyond me and my friends being robbed, though, or getting crap pushed on me while walking down the street. It was the two-facedness of feigning friendship first that got me. Probably it was also the fact that I bought it, but I value that sort of naivety, and I resent it being taken advantage of.

So thus endeth the lesson, right? No fear. Arriving back at CDG via Heathrow, I found myself alone watching an empty baggage carousel. Turns out Air France, in their wisdom, put my suitcase on a later flight, and I, like a moron, had left my house keys and phone therein, making it impossible either to head home and have the suitcase delivered later, or to call and ask someone to put me up. My laptop's email archives and Gabrielle came to the rescue, and after recovering my suitcase, 4 hours late, I met her in town and she found me a bed in her son's room. As a final rub, my phone wasn't in the suitcase. Air France promised to reimburse me the monetary value of the phone, but it doesn't have any; the value was in the list of contacts and the number.

So my work blog will say the trip was very useful, but it says right here that it sucked.