Salt and corrosion

Earlier in the week Masterchef featured a contestant who attempted to make liver pate out of a kidney. Yum.

However, that wasn't the most disturbing thing I've seen while watching Masterchef this week. That honour goes to a series of commercials for Boost chocolate bars, which feature vignettes of a man who shares a flat with a life-size bar of chocolate. The first one had them playing Scrabble and arguing over the word 'oligarchy', and that was... unusual. It's the second one I've seen, though, which I find really icky. It's the bubbling chocolate water in the foot spa, mostly.



Yesterday, while I was busy with high-powered financial, er, stuff, Brian was in his corner of our office watching DVDs. Specifically, a medical education DVD, featuring actors playing patients going to see a real GP. One patient in particular, a middle-aged businessman suffering from anxiety, was played by the world's worst actor. He was hilariously bad. It's hard to explain, but when the doctor asked him if there was a pattern to his anxiety and he said, 'Yeah, doc, I reckon it's worse on... Fridays when I've... had a few drinks,' well, that was the funniest thing I've ever heard. Up till then I'd been listening quietly, but that bit made me laugh, after which Brian played the whole thing again so I could savour the physical performance as well. You've never seen so much thoughtful chin-rubbing. He was also good at holding his chin and nodding while looking into the middle distance. He was a chin actor extraordinaire.

The scene after that had the doctor asking himself if the patient had a drinking problem, but I think he should have tackled the acting problem first.

Every year, my boss and one of my colleagues do the rounds of the medical careers expos, spruiking* the virtues of general practice (and in particular, general practice in our region). A few years ago, our marketing guru came up with a sun and surf theme (as in, 'be a doctor here and you can go to the beach every day!'). I don't know how successful that was. Anyway, to fit in with the theme, my boss decided to buy (or, possibly, steal from his children) a toy pirate's chest and fill it with chocolates. This is the [COMPANY NAME] Treasure Chest, and we are, apparently, famous for it. Well, famous within the circles of people who set up stands at medical careers expos.

Anyway, when it's not starring at medical careers expos, the treasure chest lives on a coffee table in the reception area, where it is constantly stocked with mini chocolate bars for the enjoyment of all comers. It's interesting to see what's popular and what's not. The Cherry Ripes** are always the first to go; the Crunchies*** are the last, with the Time Outs and the Boosts somewhere in the middle. That sounds about right to me.

I said I had to pick up some stuff at the supermarket yesterday lunch time, so Leeanne gave me some money from the petty cash tin and entrusted to me the duty of buying some chocolates to top up the treasure chest. Such responsibility! I decided on a bag of Fantails (toffees covered in chocolate with trivia about movies on the wrappers). Putting them in the chest, I felt briefly sorry for the last, sad Crunchie and ate it and I swear I could feel my teeth fizzing the way the Crunchie does when you bite it.



* spruik (-oo-) v.i. & t. (Aust. sl.) speak in public, used esp. of showman; advertise, sell; ~'er n. speaker, salesman, showman. [orig. unkn.] (I saw from the spell check's hissy-fit that I had used an unfamiliar Australian term.)

** Check out the chocolate people on the Cadbury home page. At one point in the ad, the chocolate son takes a bite out of a chocolate dog that's barking at him. That's just wrong. It's also interesting that the people are chocolate and yet they are apparently meant to be white, with blond hair and blue eyes. I'm not sure what to make of that.

*** That wikipedia page claims that the Violet Crumble is similar to the Crunchie, which is in no way true. Well... it is a bit true, but Violet Crumbles are much nicer.

According to the commercial, the good folk who make Panadol have come up with a way to get paracetamol into the body quicker, which is why we can now purchase Panadol with Optizorb. I don't know what Optizorb is, but I like it. I wish other things came with Optizorb. Dark chocolate, for one. In the supermarket yesterday, I noticed that the people who make Nurofen, not to be outdone, are now making Nurofen with Zavance, which makes similar sort of promises to Optizorb. I like Optizorb better, though.

You know what's got natural Optizorb? My oyster mushrooms. On Monday evening I set up my coir log and the photo here shows it this (Saturday) morning, like an alien forest.

I don't like to generalise, but teenage boys are rubbish at greengrocery identification, aren't they? The ones who work in supermarkets, anyway. I first developed this theory when confronted by a male checkout chick (a checkout chap?) who tried to scan a grapefruit as a very large orange. He had the it on the scales surrounded by real oranges like a hen with her chicks. Yesterday's checkout chap was puzzled by something different. He looked at it for a second, frowning, then asked me, 'Um... what's this?'

'That's an eggplant.'

'Thanks.' He picked up the next item and frowned again.

'That's a banana.'

He grinned at me. 'Yeah, I knew that. I just can't remember the code.' Fair enough, then.

Also in my supermarket basket was a mountain of cat food, including what appeared to be an exciting new gourmet flavour, Woolworths' own Tuna with Chilli. On getting it home, though, I realised that the Tuna with Chilli tin is slightly larger than the other cat food tins and, significantly, lacks a picture of a cat on the label. So I suspect it may be mis-shelved people food, although I'm reluctant to try it now. I'll put it at the back of the pantry where I won't see it for ages, so when I find it I'll have forgotten its provenance.

Finally, I'm not keen on Cadbury chocolate, but I love this ad. The appearance of the balloon always makes me laugh:

For many years the people at Hi Fert (a crop fertiliser company) inflicted a terrible ad on radio listeners, exhorting them to 'give the Hi Fert boys a go'. I realise that doesn't look so bad on the page; the true horror of it lay within the numerous repetitions of the slogan by a flat, droning voice. Imagine a man being really depressed that he's had to take a job advertising fertiliser and investing his performance with a complete lack of feeling, and you'll get the picture.

I heard Hi Fert's new ad today, and it's no better. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's worse. They've discovered rhyming. It's still the same voice, now droning a badly-scanned poem urging us to put some Hi Fert fert on our dirt for a growth spurt. There was more but I couldn't take it in.

Well, it was all go in the Daisy house last night! I unintentionally (but very successfully) set fire to the kitchen. Somehow, the plastic spatula I was using to poke the chicken breast baking in the oven was placed a little bit too close to the gas flame and it melted and something went whoosh! and there was a big jet of fire that subsided into a number of steady, smaller spot fires. I got it all sorted, though, and even as I was doing that I was thinking, 'I'm being very calm about this'. And so I was, until it became apparent that the kitchen wasn't going to burn down and I wasn't going to die of smoke inhalation, and then I got a bit shaky and had to go and sit down. It also freaked the cat out for the rest of the evening. (I should point out that the only real damage was to the spatula, two oven mitts, a saucepan and the mesh piece of the range hood, so, all things considered, it could have been worse.)

While recovering from that little adventure, I saw a very peculiar ad for a pizza chain's new Eight Meat Pizza. The very name makes me feel ill, so I won't be ordering one to find out, but what meats would be on an Eight Meat Pizza? Beef, lamb, pork, chicken... I'm pretty sure a cheap pizza chain doesn't do venison or duck, so what else is there? Or do they use eight different types of sausage?

Anyway, the ad featured a faun - a Mr Tumnus-style faun - wanting to order one of these pizzas, only to hang up in disgust when he found that it didn't have faun on it. Why would a faun want to eat faun meat? That's just... odd. I don't like being puzzled by pizza ads.

Advertising feature re QR codes:

"The barcode has always been a portal to fun... but it's about to be your new best friend."

There's nothing like a touch of hyperbole to start the day.


A few people did double-takes as they saw me walking to work this morning. Ordinarily, that would send my paranoia off the charts, but today I'm fairly sure it was because I was carrying a sword. If only they had also seen the partial suit of armour (back plate, breast plate and conquistador's helmet) in the bag I was carrying. Mind you, I doubt the conquistadors could have conquisted anything with papier mâché armour and blunt (but surprisingly heavy) weapons, no matter how impressive they looked.

The armour turned up at my house yesterday afternoon. I wasn't entirely surprised to see my mother's partner, John, walk up the driveway with it: he's the Keeper of the Keys to the Prop Shed for the local theatre company, so I'm used to seeing him carting about unusual objects. I was slightly more surprised to find that one of my colleagues had hired it and that the two of them had organised for me to deliver it (thanks for telling me that, chaps).

As soon as he left, of course, I tried it on. I can rarely resist trying on hats (or tea cosies or anything else that's vaguely hat-like, to be honest), so I couldn't pass up a conquistador's helmet, and from there it was but a moment to tie on the armour as well. It's not a look I'll be recreating in everyday life: the helmet didn't go at all with my pigtails, and the breast plate was made for a man much taller than I and gave the impression that I was wearing an armoured fake pregnancy belly.

The armour was a big hit at work, though. Everyone had a go, and one even wanted his photo taken in it.

Today I was asked for directions three times. Three completely different people sized me up and decided that I look like the sort of person who knows (a) where to get shoes repaired, (b) the location of particular café and (c) how to get to the cemetery. As it happens, all three were right, although my directions to Mrs Broken-Shoe were a bit vague. The easiest one was the woman who stopped me as I was walking past and said, "Excuse me, I'm not from here and I'm meeting a friend at a place called Logan's. Can you tell me where it is?" I thought she was joking at first, but eventually I pointed to the big sign not two metres behind her that clearly said "LOGAN'S". She was quite embarrassed, but we had a laugh about it.

I received a postcard in today's mail. I saw the picture side first and wondered which of my friends was wintering on the Gold Coast. Then I turned it over and read the following message printed in a handwriting font:

Dear Miss Daisyname,

It's amazing up here. Just been for a surf and Daniel stood up for the first time! Will email you a pic from the road...

Patrick & Daniel

What? I don't know any Patrick or Daniel. I suspect advertising, but I don't know for what.

I'm now going to describe an ad I saw on TV last night. Picture this, if you will:

The ad begins with a very low-budget 3-D animation of the upper part of a female torso wearing a pink sports bra, with a glowing red rash coming up through the cleavage and eyes on the decolletage. The breasts swivel round slowly in opposing directions to simulate a mouth moving, and they sing in a man-doing-a-woman's-voice high warble, "You don't have to suffer and cry the whole day through."

While the singing continues, the image changes to a similar style animation of a front lower female torso wearing modest green bikini underwear. There are eyes on the stomach above the bikini. A glowing red rash is coming down the legs.

The image changes again, this time to the rear view of a lower female torso wearing a blue bikini, with eyes in the small of the back. This time the glowing red rash appears to be coming from between the buttocks, which swivel round slowly and sing, in a ridiculous bass voice, a duet with the breasts: "You don't have to suffer and cry the whole day through."

Cut to a photo of a bottle of something called 3B Sweat Rash, while the three animations appear in little boxes down the left side of the screen, still singing.

The end.

Is your mind as boggled by that as mine was?

Super Cheap Auto: It's everything auto and much, more more!
Port Fairy Wooden Boat Festival: More than just wooden boats!

Why? Why name your business after a very specific thing, then claim it's more than that? I suppose a slogan like that makes the product seem like value-for-money: "What? I just came to see the wooden boats, but you're telling me there's more? Wow!"

There has been much excitement here recently because a branch of the Bunnings Warehouse hardware chain (slogan: Lowest prices are just the beginning... of what?) has opened. Seriously, there hasn't been this much excitement in town since... well, since ever, to be honest. Such a to-do. Still, easy for me to be unimpressed. I expect I'll be squeaking with excitement if we ever get an Officeworks (slogan: The works).

Anyway, the new Bunnings store is on the eastern fringe of the city, in a new retail development that is essentially a large parking lot surrounded by some rather Soviet-style concrete boxes containing branches of national chains - hardware, whitegoods and so on. It's a deeply unattractive place. I was out there this morning and, twelve hours later, I'm still depressed. It's growing pains, I know: if a city is big enough to have a Bunnings, it's really on the map. It just feels like we're losing the quirky charm of not knowing exactly what sort of merchandise will be available at the local hardware shop in favour of becoming just like everywhere else. And why do these edge-of-town retail strips have to be so brutal and functional and hideously ugly? Would it kill the architects to design these things with a bit of charm?