Self important twit of the week

Some of you may have seen a news story a few weeks ago about Jean-Marie Le Pen, a self-important French politician, objected to being having an embarrassing photo of himself taken in public.

While I'm very glad to see that a court has chucked out the frivolous lawsuit for $56,000 in "damages", I am less pleased to see that the court did fine the photographer €1 as a nominal judgement, and also ordered he pay Le Pen's legal costs.

What sort of crap is this?  They decide there's no claim to be made, but the defendant still has to pay the costs of some politicians's entitlement syndrome?  I realise, as do all thinking people, that the French are an arrogant set of insular, incompetent, lazy cowards, but apparently even their legal system doesn't extend to a level of intelligence beyond this.

Luckily the defendant is going to appeal the decision, and I fervently hope it gets chucked out.

Typical useless politician.  Wants all the media coverage in the world, but only while it's favourable, and thinks he can use his clout to stomp on someone who shows him doing something embarrassing.  Drop dead.

The court also required that the photo be taken down or face a further fine of €1,000 a day, which is more bullshit.  I have no idea what French law is (and for that matter the flight the selfie was taken on was between France and Italy, so does it even fall under French law at all?), but certainly in my legal jurisdiction there is no general right to privacy that protects a person’s image, particularly when not for commercial purposes.  In other words, if you're in public, you chose to be so, and you can't stop your photo being taken.

So fuck you Le Pen, and welcome to the Streisand Effect.

Chilli recipe

1kg minced beef
2 medium onions
4 garlic cloves or a couple of decent spoons of minced garlic
1 teaspoon chilli powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons ground cumin
1 teaspoon oregano (leaves or ground, meh)
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1/2 bottle of tomato paste
At least 5 big green jalapeno chillis, chopped - deseed some depending on heat preference (and wash in cold water if even less heat desired).
Tabasco sauce or other chilli sauce, how much is up to you
1 can chopped tomatoes
2 cans kidney beans
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 tallie of stout beer (fill the tomatoes can)

To serve:
sour cream
shredded cheese



Fry the mince off in a large pot.  Chop it up with a spatula and get some browning happening.  If any water cooks out, evaporate and continue cooking until you are frying and the mine has a decent crust.

Add onions, garlic, chilli powder, salt, cumin, oregano, cayenne pepper and Tabasco sauce.  Cook until the onion has softened a bit.

Add everything else left on the bench!  Drink the rest of the beer.

Stir really well and bring to a boil.  Keep stirring so the meat as is broken up as you can get it.

Cook on a low heat for an hour or so, you want the beans tender.  Stir occasionally to stop the bottom catching.



To serve, put up a decent bowl full and add a big handful of shredded cheese.  Stir in so the cheese melts.  Top with a big spoon of sour cream, and add chilli sauce if desired.

For added yums, serve with buttered toast.

Just in case you needed a new way to kill yourself or anything

This is a 12.4 litre 7 cylinder radial bolted to a pair of water skis.

Because what could possibly go wrong, yeah???  Hold my beer!

Some further reading suggests that this particular method of killing yourself is. amazingly, not unique.

This sort of contraption is known as an "idroscivolante" in Italian, which is apparently another way of saying "fucking deathtrap", replacing the more common usage "Fiat".

Decided to up my game a bit

In preparation for getting into rum brewing, I have decided that I had better up my game a bit in the storage department.

5 litre flagons are good for general handling and oaking, but you need a lot of them, and they are not cheap.  They also make blending difficult.

I've experimented with the 15 and 23 litre glass carboys but they are very expensive, and there's just something about putting that much product into one glass container that doesn't sit well with me.  They're also difficult to seal effectively, as you can't get the swingtop caps (no little holes for the wires), and the one time I tried corking one solid the pressure differential on the first warm day shot the cork across the room with more verve than I have any intention of encouraging further.

Wooden barrels of any size make glass look cheap, and I don't know I would trust any but the best ones re leakage.

So given you can only keep the stuff in glass, timber, earthenware (yeah right) or stainless steel, I did what had to be done and bought a keg.

The "small" bottle on the left is 5 litres, the big fella with the siphon in it is 23 litres.  The keg is 50 litres.  The skateboard is from Masters so I don't shear a pin moving the thing.

Sanitising kegs takes some commitment.  With fermenters you just chuck in some sanitiser solution, half a jug of warm water, and shake.  The process is much the same with the keg, but you need to be Gregor Clegane to do it.

Anyway, I just sealed it up with about 1/2" of air space and it's off to live in the cupboard for a couple of years, and we'll see what she tastes like then.  In the meantime, let the rum begin (or at least we will when the useless feed store gets my 20 litre drum of molasses in, which they were supposed to have here three days ago).

Australia Day and black hypocrisy

I see that yet again the local layout good for nothing coons have stirred themselves out of last night's cheap cask moselle hangover to protest Australia Day.

Of course, they all drove there, are wearing modern clothes and shoes, are carrying smartphones and only have the knowledge and language to make their complaint due to the "invasion" of the white fella's civilisation, but let's forget all that when it comes to putting our hands out for a land grab that always conveniently happens to be on the site where a multimillion dollar development has been proposed.  It's never on a block of land in the middle of fucking nowhere, because apparently the degree of cultural value ascribed to a location is a function of how much they think they can screw the white fella (or the sycopathic lefties among them, anyway) out of for it.

As always, I'll make my usual offer to the coons.  You can have a couple of million acres of the place, as it was 20 million years ago, and we'll build a nice fence around it.  Do what you like with inside it.  Catch kangaroos, spear each other, abuse your children, bang rocks together, whatever.  I'm sure it's all an expression of a rich and diverse "culture".

Set one foot outside it and expect to reap the benefits of civilisation and you shut your fucking useless mouths, because you've contributed precisely nothing to the development of the country, all the while complaining with your hands out that your society is being oppressed.  Most of you are too brain dead from alcohol and hitting each other over the head as a form of social discourse that you couldn't express what that was if your lives depended on it.

You know, those lives that have improved in expectancy by over 50% since colonisation?  Those ones that we spend more than 50% extra on than white people who stay off the ganja, don't drink themselves into oblivion on cask moselle and methylated spirits, and don't think that spearing someone else is a perfectly acceptable form of mediating a dispute?

Because, of course, what have the Romans ever done for anyone?  Bastards!

Another Saturday, another experience at Peabrain Central

So it's time again for the Saturday ritual - line up at Peabrain Central to collect the parcels that the cretin postie somehow randomly decided couldn't be delivered during the week.

Front up at the counter, hand over collect-me card and driver's licence, carefully turned UP so the correct address shows.

Postdroid looks at the card, looks at the licence, looks at the card, looks at the licence, looks at the card.  One more cycle and I'll assume it's gone into an endless loop and that I need to reset it with a slap upside the head.

Finally, the postdroid reaches the end of whatever if-then-else statement it was stuck in, and says: So... is the the current address?

Me:  Let's look at this logically.  I realise it's a new concept, I'll speak slowly.  The licence would have been issued at my current address at the time, yes?  There's a sticker on the back with a different address.  Again applying logic, that would post-date the issuance of the licence, with me so far?  Right, so that leaves us with a few possibilities.

(1)  I still live at the original address and somehow a change of address sticker with some random location has appeared on the back of the card.  Wonder how that happened?
(2)  There's an original address on the card, a change of address sticker which I could only get by, you know, actually moving to that address, but I've decided to mess with your head by moving back to the address where I lived at the time the card was issued.
(3)  I don't live at either of those addresses!  I've moved somewhere random, yet I still travel back to my old suburb to get my mail, because I have nothing better to do with my time and I just love coming here.
(4)  Or, we could experiment with the idea that because the address on the back of the licence matches the one on the collect-me card, it might just be the right one, yeah?

Which one are we going with?

Postdroid:  There's no need to be rude.

Me:  Available evidence very much suggests otherwise.  I would say obviously, but since I'm talking to someone that can't match up two fucking addresses out of three available, that may not be apparent.

Bye, David. Miss you.