For Battle!

a.k.a. a recipe for movie-making success!

So it turns out that there are some interesting factors that make for a successful movie. Strangely, things like dinosaurs really don't help movies do well. Oddly enough, having a piano seems to be a boon. How do I know these odd factiods? They are backed up by science! Well, some amusing maths done for a competition lead to these and many more startling discoveries. The data was taken based on the last 5 years worth of US movie releases.

The full story complete with all of the ingredients to add is at
http://www.jeromecukier.net/blog/2012/01/23/hollywood-data/

A thing occurred to me on the ride home, in what I'm certain is not an original thought. If Republicans:
1) Believe that corporations have the same rights as people, and
2) Believe that embryos have a right to life, and
3) Are consistent
Then declaring bankruptcy in a start-up should be against the law.

Fortunately (for them) I'm not too worried about #3 turning out to be true. So that's all right then.

Mother - Nutmeg (Yseult's cat)
Father - random Kirribilli tom
Brother - Basil (also Yseult's cat)
Step-sister - Muscat

He was a fearless kitten. Muscat was so unimpressed to suddenly have a little brother and hissed at him for about a month. Fronti just ignored her.

When he was tiny Fronti could clear a room with his farts. That was when we discovered he was lactose intolerant. The farts stopped when the milk stopped.

He was also incredibly noisy for such a tiny creature. We used to have the cats sleep on the bed with us. Muscat would sleep near our heads but Fronti could only sleep at our feet. The noise of his purring would keep us awake otherwise. We thought the noise would decrease as his got older but we were very wrong.

At about six months old he was chased up a tree by a neighbours dogs. I had to call the fire brigade to get him down. I took photos of the event but the record was lost when the camera was stolen shortly afterwards. He happily rode on the fireman's shoulders down to my arms. I think the firemen were happy to have something to do at 6am in the morning.

We was a great catcher of mice, rats and birds. I didn't witness it but I was told that Fronti would sit in the backyard and taunt the magpies into swooping him. Fronti would leap up to try and catch them when they did. Fronti also loved it when Stig would give him fish heads to eat. Fronti would take them to the 'Fronti killing ground' and happily crunch them down.

At his largest, Fronti was almost 12kgs. But he was a cat with a large wheel base and while he puddled well he would never be considered obese.

At about seven years old Fronti developed a bladder problem which had him on special food for the rest of his life. This same condition killed his brother. Despite a few acute times, the condition was managed. At the beginning of this year Fronti suffered an injury to the edge of his eye which needed treatment. When he was a kitten he caused the injury to Muscat's eye which is still quite obvious as the cloud on her eye. In 2009, Fronti was diagnosed with a thyroid condition which had him injected with technicium and radioactive iodine to destroy the hyperactive bits of thyroid. Shortly after, he had a benign lump removed from his side. He has been an expensive kitty costing us probably about $7000 over his lifetime, but it's been worth it.

His most recent illness progressed much faster than I expected. Last week I noticed he had stopped eating, his meow was muffed and he seem to have a sniffle. The vet did a battery of tests which ruled out most common problems. We don't know exactly what killed him but it was likely some sort of tumour in the liver or kidney. Basically he died because he was old and the parts started failing. If we had caught the lung infection in time it was likely he wouldn't last much longer past it. It does explain the big cough he had during winter. I just thought it was an extra large furball but in hindsight it was probably the early chest infection.

Fronti was huge and cuddly and noisy. He was often the butt of many jokes and he was loved for it. He was greedy and lazy and warm and soft. We was also very gentle and usually obedient. He had a long and happy life for a cat.


Edit - I forgot to mention Fronti's drug days when he was heavily into the catnip. Those days he would head out before breakfast and lick the dew off the catnip and usually eat leaf or two. He would spend most of the day curled up around his precious plant. The poor old catnip plant was almost pruned to bonsai status.

Americans can be a bit schizophrenic about food.

Here's what I mean by that:

There is a type of cooking here known as "Texas BBQ". Not all Texas BBQ is alike, of course, but if you pick one at random you'll most likely find someplace where they lovingly prepare a meal along these lines:

1) Get yourself a nice cut of beef brisket.
2) Marinate in a specially crafted blend of spices.
3) BBQ.
4) Fork shred, so as to more easily embed flavour, without destroying the texture.
5) Gently smoke the meat for quite some time in a specialised smoker, over a variety of woods.
6) Heat to luke warm, put a big ole scoop on a sugar-infused lump of sponge rubber masquerading as a hamburger bun, along side a jumbo-sized serve of nothin, and sell.

VrrrrrrrrrRP! What?!? Run that last one by me again? You get something that looks like this:



And the meat is delicious! But after all that care preparing it, they might as well fire it down your throat out of a cannon for all the trouble they go with serving it. You can _almost_ admire the purity of it - we're about the meat and nothing but the meat! - but not so much as you actually want to eat one of these styrofoam-encapsulated blobs a second time.

Well just up the road from us is a place where occasionally is parked a trailer emblazoned "Big John's Texas BBQ". For all I know he makes a great sandwich - I've never had the heart to try one, after too many lukewarm lump experiences. But he makes spectacularly good meat. I'm not just saying that because the guy behind the counter has a Texan accent, and he's big (he may even be named John too.) I'm saying that because he's an artist. He paints pictures on my palette with protein and spice. A Michaelangelo of Meat. I've had it a couple of times for various reasons without ever actually ordering a sandwich, and its always delicious. And he sells it in bulk.

So rather than risk another hamburger bun fiasco, the other weekend I bought a pound of brisket off him. I spent the morning making fresh french bread, and timed everything else to be finished just as the bread came out of the oven. I grilled some onions with some fire-roasted Hatch chilies until they got all caramelised and yummy. I heated the meat to mouth-scorchingly hot - quickly, so as not to dry it out - and melted some good sharp cheddar over it. I served it on the aforementioned fresh french with some avocado, some black pepper, some of Big John's own vinegar-ey spicey sauce that he kindly packed for me to go, also hot. Garnish with crisp romaine lettuce and fresh tomato straight out of the fridge, for that nice temperature contrast and crunch.

It was fantastic. It was so good I went back and made another one and ate it too. I could barely move afterwards. My whole Saturday morning was consumed (sic) by lunch. I took a picture (which doesn't really do it justice, and in fact looks a bit oogly to me now; trust me, it was magnificent):


If they served these I'd happily pay $20 for one. So why the extravagant care over the meat followed by nothing else? I dunno; just American schitzo cuisine I guess... but it really is fine fine meat.

Been wondering where all those Cthulu-worshipping cultists have been hiding out? Wonder no more! Just check out this sign from our local paint store:



Still don't know what I'm talking about? (Why does this surprise you?) Look closer:



If that's not the motto of a doomsday cult or a Bond villain, I don't know what is.

(I ride past this store every day, and I keep meaning to take a photo of their sign, which I love. Finally got to it today...)

Hello Suddenlink,

Welcome to the neighborhood! When you took over from our old ISP a couple of months back, we had a few rough weeks with connectivity, no doubt while you assimilated new hardware into your systems. But your techs listened patiently while I explained in detail what was wrong with your DHCP servers, and eventually you seem to have got that sorted out; our internet is stable again, and faster than it was before, so bravo. Noone blames you for a bit of teething problems. And when you arbitrarily decided to move me, without informing me, from the terms of my old contract - that I had with your predecessors, since I have never entered _any_ formal relationship with your company - to one which costs roughly twice as much per month, you at least had the good grace to back down when I called you on it. True, it was after I'd been transferred 3 times and left on hold for an hour listening to to some unholy hybrid of a televangelist, a used-car-salesman, and a lost Wiggle deliver high-intensity sales pitch at me while apparently speeding out of his head on your hold loop, but the lady who eventually helped me was very friendly and understanding of any nervous tics I had developed, so I can let bygones go.

So I just wanted to say thanks ever-so-much for the kind offer that you included with that bill. I must have missed it at first glance, occupied as I was with the bottom line, but you're really too generous to offer to guarantee the rates for my internet service not just for 25 years, as your ad originally stated, but for life, as was carefully pasted over the top in what I've no doubt one of your marketing folks thought looked like an impulsive and artless scrawl.

Guaranteed for Life! In an industry nigh-archetypical in the speed at which its product becomes obsolete! Wow! 25 years from now you won't charge me a single penny more for the internet service that I'm getting today! If only my parents had signed up for such a deal when I was in high school, we could be connecting to CompuServe on a 1400 baud modem today!*

Suddenlink Marketing Department, I'd like to introduce you to Suddenlink Technical Development. Its high time you met; they may not be unassailably brilliant at what they do, but they at least know what the product is that you guys are selling. You apparently don't.

Cheers,
- rob.

*Note: For those of you not old enough to remember 1400 baud modems, this would be roughly equivalent to having your 80-year-old Slovenian neighbor shout descriptions of web pages at you in broken English through her kitchen window. In a thunderstorm. While dub musicians hold a spontaneous street party for teenaged dolphins out front. Bandwidth-wise, its got nothing on overcooked pasta.

There's a few more of these on YouTube: