O tempura! O mores!

Not battered Japanese, sadly, but almost as fluffy.

It wasn't the first time I'd passed by the monstrosity above, though it had been quite a while, and it was perhaps the fact that I was returning from a successful mission to retrieve quite a nice art-deco sideboard from a rather tacky exectutive housing estate that made the stuck-on columns stick out all the more.

That and the fact that the polystyrene core is showing through the imitation danstone effect veneer in places, lending the joint an air of rather more genteel decay than it deserves. I doubt he was thinking of small-time gambling dens in suburban Sydney, but I suspect this isn't what Albert Speer meant by his theory of ruin value.

Reports, demise, exaggeration...

That's right.

62 little coloured blocks for every person on the planet.

Don't underestimate lego, folks!

Not dead -- assisting the human with culinary and other enquiries

It's been a quietish summer on this front. Bar December's outbreak of fluvially-challenged equine spam (is this a particularly gelatinous form of foot and mouth disease?) and the human hogging the computer to wrestle with the problem of jokes that are no longer funny once you try to explain them, I've been doing not much other than observe the decline and fall of the cherry tomato empire, soon to be supplanted by the upstart snake beans.

I ventured into the kitchen this evening to find the human engaged in trying to fit the remains of a packed of pasta into a jar that had held what is euphemistically named "Cranberry drink," and couldn't help climbing up to investigate.

The human, meanwhile, wouldn't stop muttering that his experiment had finally proved wrong the angry socialist flatmate from a half-remembered John Birmingham novel, who claimed that the manufacture of pasta to be two centimetres too long to store in an empty juice jar went to show the lengths capitalism will go to to conspire against universal happiness. He may have been right about capitalism, it seems, but I can't find the reference -- googling "felafel socialist empty juice pasta jar" produces some strange results!