Dawkins:1 liberal Christians: 0

I just finished watching Cardinal George Pell get slow roasted by Richard Dawkins on our Australian Monday night institution, (for people without much else better to do) the TV show on our National Broadcaster, “Q&A”. It was, I would imagine, similar to the reaction I would have seeing Rowan Atkinson (as Mr Bean, or any other character for that matter!) fighting Tank Abbott in an Ultimate Fighting Cage. You wonder who the hell was organising the match-ups, wishing that the brutality would just end but curiously not being able to look away.

Seriously, Dawkins is an atheistic lightweight. You don’t send out any liberal theologian to do a man’s job in the fight about the existence of God, the nature of suffering, the origins of man or whether the bloody wafer is actually the physical body of Christ. No wonder he got stood on. OK, so how DO you fight Dawkins on smug philosophy 101 questions??

Firstly, you need someone who believes a) that God is REALLY amazing, not just kind of amazing, b) you need to have the balls to suggest that maybe we didn’t arrive here by evolutionary processes and c) understands both science and the experience of the metaphysical. Pell is simply NOT that man. That’s OK, fortunately we have tens (perhaps hundreds) of millions worldwide who could audition for that role. SO.. let’s answer some questions, hey?

1. If God made the universe, who made God? Yawn. Sorry, no seriously. Your problem is your God. Your God is probably, at best, a demi God, more at home with the plethora of  Hindu Gods or the Greek, soap opera variety. The God of the Bible, he who twisted Moses’ mind into a pretzel with the moniker: “I am that I am” is really, really big, amazing, in a pan-dimensional way. Scientists are well aware that time is a construct that falls naturally out of matter. The rhythm of time has its roots in creation. A starting point. String theory (all five of them) elegantly points us in this direction when it is considered that all matter is oscillation. That is all time is. Oscillation in a linear fashion. The last oscillation was before this one. The bubble of matter and residual energy that we now call the universe must be defined by it. All that is outside, unless it shares physicality as ours clearly does has no necessity to be bound by time. Indeed, it is rather strange that we perceived anything outside the physical. That is not natural. We have no evidence that 1.5 million other species have any idea of the non-physical.

Indeed, CS Lewis was one who clearly articulated this most curious dilemma. How on Earth could we have made up God? How do you imagine something we can’t imagine? Here’s a simple example of this. Scientists have known since Newton’s work on light and the extension of work by Niels Bohr, Max Planck and others that the light we see is but one part of an enormous spectrum which includes ‘light’ we can’t see. Can you imagine a colour you haven’t seen? Can you conjure up a sound you haven’t yet heard or a taste of food you haven’t experienced?

The very idea that we could ever have ‘invented God’ in such metaphysical detail being an intangible entity not bound by our physical universe is an extreme stretch to many theists. We simply find it hard to muster the faith that atheists employ to deny God’s existence.

Our neurological processes rely on the input of stimuli just like every other creature from the physical world, how can it conceive that which is unlike any stimulus it has every received? To suggest that God requires a creator is as anthropomorphic as those that suggest in science fiction that other lifeforms must have arms and legs and bulbous eyes.. it lacks creativity and shows a fairly primitive closed-mindedness to the likely possibility of radically different dimensions in those “10+1″ to our own. Next question!!

2. How can you believe in a literal 6 day creation?? It’s NUTS, man!!! I find this irony from secularists like Dawkins beautifully sweet. I, like many who value both scientific thought and a love for Jesus Christ have no difficulty imagining the vast bulk of our universe being stretched out in nanoseconds from point zero. The intelligence behind that beautiful, complicated and yet elegantly simple process could have done it in a fraction of the time. In the same way, that same God could order creation of life on Earth and the ridiculous diversity of life in six days.. he could do it in six nanoseconds if he so chose, but he used our clock, the 23 hours and fifty six minutes of the planet for days and gave it a jaunty tilt of 23 degrees to give us the beautiful complexity of thermal variation during the year that keeps life, fluids, fields and horny little sheep frollicking in the spring every year. Now, an evolutionist has plenty of cognitive space for the former (Big Bang Bloody fast) but not the creation (six actual days). Why? Because he must. You see, the universe is now a lot older than when I was in school, it seems to be over 5.3 billion years old now! Evolution which arises through the addition of new, novel or useful blueprints for viable proteins in the fabric of Deoxyribosenucleic Acid requires a LOT of time. A ridiculous amount of time. More time than Darwin in his wildest dreams could ever imagine. You see, the system works too bloody well. Our own bodies copy our original 46 chromosomes perfectly, for the vast majority of us, several trillion times over our entire lifetime. Let’s put it another way, the current US debt is around 15 Trillion US dollars. Let’s make it easier by imagining $100 bills making that debt up. If we stacked it up in neat piles, the notes would fill every inch of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre destroyed in 2001. Imagine though, if you had only one of those notes to copy and every other one was a copy of it? Even with the most sophisticated method of reproduction of ink on paper your 15 Billionth note would be unrecognisable using any method on the planet to reproduce it from existing copies. That is one human. We can go back through thousands of years of human evolution and see no change, let alone improvements on the basic model. We know this because scientist like Maughan et al (2002 here: http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/19/9/1637.full), Rainey (2009, here:Nature 461, 1219-1221 (29 October 2009) | doi:10.1038/4611219a; Published online 28 October 2009), and, of course, the nasty little thorn in the evolutionary side of Lenski in his much-quoted work (1991, here:Nature 461, 1219-1221 (29 October 2009) | doi:10.1038/4611219a; Published online 28 October 2009).

Of course, Lenski showed that a ridiculously simple creature like E.Coli, found in your poo, couldn’t evolve it’s way out of  a metaphorical wet paper bag (actually an environment with low glucose as a food stressor). In 40, 000 generations, only five genes played ‘hot potatoes” and not a single base pair was added to its genome. That is like a million years of human evolution. But hang on, we have millions of adaptations that flow from every stem cell that each of us are made of?? Yeah, I know. But hang on, there are MILLIONS of species alive and MILLIONS of others that aren’t with us today? Yeah, I know. But hang on, the universe it NOT OLD ENOUGH FOR THAT AMOUNT OF MUTATIONS???!!! Yeah, maybe, or else evolution is just a crap theory. Now this buggers up both George Pell (as a an evolutionary sympathiser) AND Dawkins???!! Yeah, I know. The REAL God can do things FAST. He doesn’t need the construct of time (created by Him) as a tool to design and create.

When objects are created ex Nihilo (out of nothing) there is the conundrum of apparent age. I have no problem with Adam having been created as an adult, not a baby, so on day one, he ‘looked’ like an adult male, even though he was one day old. The same for our planets and every object in the cosmos which developed this way.

Apparent age is also easy to understand. I dump a truckload of dirt in my back yard with a tip truck it arrived at more or less the same time (allowing for acceleration due to gravity off the truck). Now an ant who finds that pile five minutes later and notices the odd few grains of dirt still falling off the back of the truck can grab his pocket calculator (ok, it’s an analogy, OK?!!) and determine that it took forty five years for this dirt mountain to form… but he’d be wrong (could be a ‘she’ but there’s NO WAY, I’m looking up its abdomen!!). You see, the assumption of uniformity was false. Things rarely happen in our universe in a linear way (that’s why you need to learn indices and logarithms, kids *wink*!). In fact, we’ve seen beautiful layered ‘sedimentary’ rock form in months after one of the world’s most studied volcanic eruptions, Mt St Helens, in 1981.

Could the Earth have an apparent age? Yep. Could our crude methods of dating the planet be faulty, with weak assumptions and methodology? Hell yeah. Do I know how old the Earth is, exactly? Nope. Do you? Nope. Does it matter? Yes, profoundly, to an evolutionist.

3. (If there is a God), Why is there so much suffering in the world? The funny thing about our Western concepts of God is how they usually resemble the framework of Egyptian, Greek (and by Xerox extension: the Romans) than they do the first century idea of the trinity. The reason is the obsession with personal comfort. Fatalists like those common throughout Asia and the subcontinent have little trouble understanding it. The gods are fickle and crazy and you can’t guarantee good if you worship them but you can sure as hell (figuratively speaking only) bet that they will zap you if you don’t. You see, we love the rational thought and the fashion of the Greeks (if not the mathematics!) but it seems unfair that these gods can just let so much mean stuff happen.

Does it occur to rationalists that humans can be bloody mean. It takes NO time for young kids to be mean to each other, they learn it faster than the tune to Bob the Builder. Why don’t people take responsibility for ALL their crap? Not just the pollution, not just the planet what about your crappy behaviour??? Why is that ‘God’s fault’?? If you don’t get cancer, do you automatically assume that God has been looking after you? If you didn’t die in a tornado yesterday, did you stop to think that God was shining down on you??? So why blame Him for your crap?? Easy. Your God is not the Christian God. It is some other god.

What parent truly believes that the best way to raise a child is to wrap them in cotton wool and shield them from anything even slightly bad? It is a naive concept of a deity to attribute the main role of that deity to make life sweet. Unsurprisingly, this idea is most common where the richest 1% of people live on our planet. Being fat, lazy, materialistic and indulged is not enough.. if there is a God, he ought to be giving us EVEN more nice stuff!!! No. We have the poor because people are selfish, crave power and, in places, we’ve buggered up the land so that it can no longer support us. Along with that comes disease, depravity, violence and desperation. The solution for suffering is not by its removal but by a divine change of heart to turn the selfish to compassion, to turn injustice to justice, to turn those poor in spirit deprived of love to the original source of love in the one, BIG, God.

Ok, this is the longest piece I have ever written on the blog here. It’s not terribly funny but hopefully you can see that a robust faith that doesn’t piss around trying to be all things to all men is the only defence against the denial of God. Our faith is NOT about just being a good little sausage and gambling that you’ll get into heaven. Original sin did not evolve. The Bible is not simply a bunch of stories. If it is, how come believers like Pell pick and choose which bits are right. If Christ is a mere philosophy, he deserves a chapter in a text book, not lifelong devotion.

So far, we have just dealt with the physical, the nature of God and the problem of suffering but I suggest that neither Pell, nor certainly Dawkins, has ever experienced the metaphysical/supernatural/scientifically unexplainable. I and many hundreds of millions of other Christians have. Next blog will get really interesting… I promise!

QCS poetry.. not sure it’s “Gold, Jerry, gold!!”

Ok so pacing up and down a room of adolescents doing purportedly one of the most important tests of their lives is not exactly front row action in all that silence, dread panic and very clear instructions not to talk. So what do you do when you’ve planned your day, counted the lefties (9) and spotted the OCD students carefully spelling out the words “help” in 13 shades of Cerise pencil.

So you look. It’s a writing task. On Gold. Walking too fast to read the stimulus on the coloured printed pages without looking like a cheat or a sicko. So, OK, a writing task. “GOLD” and twenty five minutes to go. So I did what any sane, 40 year old Chemistry teacher would do.. I wrote a poem *shiny grin*. Maybe Jason Boyce could mark it and send it to me secretly, lest I would fail the test that I swore to 109 students would be “dead easy”!

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you:  Au⁷

my QCS writing task supervision poem, an attempt to link the seven deadly sins to the stimulus: GOLD!

Au⁷

The golden curl, dainty loop

swinging low on ivory neck

As that gaze

Amazing pins him. Heck.

His tarnished ring alerts. Now in darkened pocket

drops.

He flirts and saunters over, rising as the man he was stoops..

His ticket bought, ritual weekly.

Life on hold for chance

Vain vapour hope of increase

He’s saved his dreams, her dance.

She clasps his hands. Yellow ping pongs fall,

Nicely

His future fixed, ‘Her freedom’, she whispers, meekly.

In hidden green and red, tiny jewelry,

Fruit mince pie crumbs on the floor

The paper rip

eclipses carols…adore

the hyperactive shiny band, inscribed with someone else’s

name.

His pallour stark, next to her fury..

Butter bright and gliding, tails melt.

Sizzling across the pan

Another dozen cookies bake

Making up for absent man.

The girth increasing. Adipose tourniquet,

tight.

Lemon lard, A broken cardium, felt.

Solar disk on wall, resplendent.

Swansong recognition, proud.

Muted hearing birthed of crashing cymbals

Symbol of a younger crowd.

Rock King, a god amongst adoring fans,

mass.

Hollow history, ego, id now codependent.

Crunching warm canary beach at noon

Another late-start nameless day.

His board at home uneaten dole check feed

needs met, his ganes strays.

Aimless leaden body worships, faithful skin

Bronze

As the days pass quicker to the final tune.

Spadeful praise the sister saves neatly

Smart and wise, dutiful daughter.

Familial standard lofty, lucky, creepy.

heaps coals on ‘you know you oughta..’

Raining streams of light from butthole,

Pure

You wish her dead, or gone, discreetly. 

Do we really need an Animal Kingdom? Or Ant Queendoms.. at least?

Let me start by disambiguating the title of this article, I do not mean this in the same way I might say “Do we need a Carbon Tax”. I am quite fond of animals, certainly some more than others and I like all animals if the distance between us/wind direction/probability of them eating me is contained appropriately.

I go to thinking recently about ants. Proverbs admonishes us to “go to the ant, you sluggard!”, though is less specific about what one should do once there. When I go to ants, I find myself wasting inordinate amounts of time just watching the little buggers and wasting even more time. Yes, I am happy to admit it, going to ants makes me MORE of a sluggard.

Ants have a Queen. It’s a fairly straightforward feudal system with one obese, constantly egg-laying, queen and thousands of serf-like ants whose job it is to basically get anything edible, carry away tiny ant poo-poo, feed the young ants, answer emails to the colony, provide good PR for the colony to keep up profiles for the economic outlook and some to make sure that all ants are paying the appropriate levels of tax. Ok, maybe I need a little bit more time with David Attenborough before writing articles like this.

What if ants discovered other forms of government? Would it work for them? What if some group of ants worked fast enough to spend a few spare minutes, ok, years, to learn German, get a hold of The Communist Manifesto by Komrade Karl himself (and maybe a couple of hundred ant-friends to turn the pages for him)? Could they rise up against the bourgeoise and demand smoko breaks, leave loading and sensible grey clothing?

Would it work? Could we see each ant with self-determination in a matrix of worker-friendly general groovy feeling towards each other translate into a place where all ants could feel respected rather than expoited. Well, the first problem I could foresee is that someone has to have the baby ants or the experiment is far to short-lived to ever catch on in the insect world. I really don’t mean to be sexist here.. well, actually, yes I do because the female ants have got to do it, really. In the Ant Queendom, the Queen’s job isn’t really that crash hot. Hell, she’s more Catholic than pure monarchy in the procreative sense. Never gets out in the sunlight, always coping with morning sickness, cravings for lamb chops and custard and  knows for damn sure she’s never getting into those ‘pre-pregnant’ jeans ever again.. Not with a bot-bot approximately 45 times larger than it was!!

No, the job of the boss, in this system at least, is not so much that of largesse  as ‘Large S’ (as in Sucks, with a capital s). I often say to people, the job above you always looks easier than it is!

The second problem is one of orienting goals. A decent communist society needs societal goals. Like maybe going to the moon or marching in large numbers with your feet high in the air or parading the fact that you have lots of very destructive penis-shaped objects that strike fear into other ant mounds (rather than generous amounts of material for budding ant-comedians!). What could be such a goal for ants? I guess colony-wide efforts into Ant-railways would be pretty cool. Making lots of comrade issue antboots might cut down a bit of chitin-damage on the delicate ant-footsies (they do have six, you know) but really, they need a loftier goal and it is here that ants have no chance in the sabre-rattling stakes of insect superpowers.. You see, as many humans in tropical environments are aware, you have ants and then you have white ants. A more lethal insect superpower you have never seen.

These little bastards EAT HOUSES. Human houses. Lots of them, all day every day. They are single-minded with their goal: to eat every bloody stick of wood in the entire world. Not bad. Not bad at all. No amount of black (or green or red with purple polka dot) ant propaganda painted in those deep dark tunnels is ever going to generate enthusiasm for a loftier goal for their civilisation, unless, of course, they took a shady little leaf out of the English playbook in Jardine’s era and encourage a healthy trade in addiction to flourish.

You see, early trade in the ‘orient’ as it was quirkily referred to, in the 18th Century was very much one-sided. the Chinese had cool stuff but thought that Eurotrash gear was, well, just that. Not to be dissuaded from sound principles of crude capitalism, the English did what any self-respecting supporter of capitalism of the time would do… it started drug dealing Opium. This led to the locals getting high and the Mandarins (not those small orange things, silly, the shortish, funny-collared things) to get higher and mightier. Consequently, the Mandarins lost, the English got Hong Kong (and free reign to continue drug dealing).

Now, what if those cunning ants were able to secure a product which termites could not resist, which would render them exponentially more dangerous to mankind and present a very useful bargaining tool? Well according to a reliable source (well, not so much a source as an advertising campaign from the Coca Cola company) we already have that product, a legal stimulant simply called ‘V’. Termites go WILD with it!

So our ant communities have a noble goal of V production, with a stated species-wide threat to unleash their powerful product on their Rogue-Ant cousins unless humankind can meet the demands of the more ethnically-coloured ant species. Maybe, ‘you give us food, flavoured beverages (except Budweiser.. or ANY American beer for that matter), tiny ant couches and teach us how to develop Premier League football competitions and enormous 42 millimetre televisions or we feed the white ants…..V!!!!!

This could work. Ants would no longer need to work doing much at all, once the stocks of (unused, unopened) V was plentiful enough. They could get fat and drunk and watch football and enjoy the fact that humans are working their tails off for ants while other ants are still munching on the houses they go to work to pay off.

Some amongst you might cynically suggest that this form of government is perhaps closer to the Cosa Nostra than it is to Utopia. To those same cynical people I might suggest that perhaps our ants not fiddle with their governments too much after all, since I seem to recall a country that has gone this route in a manner far too close to this allegory.

Just a thought *wink*.

Where are they now? Chile !

It’s been a while since this blog has considered those forgotten nations that really deserve more of our attention. I’m pretty tired about hearing about how the US spends money like a drunken, innumerate sailor with poorly stitched pockets or how heinous the tabloid press is with our privacy. I have a sneaking suspicion that most people’s lives are pretty darn boring. Otherwise, why would we need such rampant escapism in our spare time? All they would see at our place is some guy writing meaningless drivel into a computer.. oh, that’s me…

Now we really ought to hear about Chile more often but we just don’t! Our regular readers will expect, very soon, the obligatory quiz, oh, here it is (how’s THAT for timing, huh?!):

Which of the following is REALLY the Chilean Flag?

A)

B)

C) 

One of the most interesting things about Chile is that it is the longest, thinnest, country in the world. Yep. If Chile was a supermodel it would be draped in the finest Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent and Versace instead of stripey Alpaca ponchos. It is remarkably svelte! Now this actually causes some safety issues as well, you could imagine the problem if you lived up on the Andes somewhere in Chile with a long driveway and a dubiously maintained handbrake. It would come as a shock to see your car down the driveway and sitting awkwardly in the Pacific Ocean below. Your Alpaca would not be impressed to be the second most important mode of transport either…

Of course, Chile is known for lots of things. Football? Not so much, really. Food? Meh. It’s really hard to go past a decent Mexican taco or quesadilla. Chileans do manage a peculiar dish or, more correctly, way of cooking called a Milcao du Curanto which involves digging a big hole, sticking a fire in it and chucking in heaps of mashed and ground potatoes, sausages, seafood, old boots and the odd weird uncle that you tend to get at family gatherings. I have some extremely unreliable evidence that long before the Spanish Conquistadors introduced funny hats and severed limbs to the Incas, a boatload of Maoris on holiday had a nice hangi on the beach.

So the legend goes, some particularly hungry Incas crept out of the hills after the Maoris left, drunk, singing and telling Hawaiian jokes to each other. They found only a warm mound of sand, under which the Maoris had sensibly thrown their rubbish, after the Hangi. In it, of course, were the usual sausages, too burnt for even a hungry Australian to eat, Prawn heads (George Colombaris was not present to explain how to extract Crustacean Oil) and the ubiquitous amounts of potato salad (that apparently every culture on Earth appears to make too much of at barbeques!). Well, suffice to say, the Chileans loved it. Previous to that their best dish was a cake purportedly make out of dirt, taro and Alpaca droppings. To the virgin palate, this is, remarkably, what Milcao du Curanto tastes like.

Chile has beautiful beaches, cool, spectacular mountains, truckloads of culture, ruins, classy hotels and places where you can buy souvenir wooden alpacas (or real ones, given a big enough bag and indiscriminate customs officers in your country of origin). So why don’t we hear more about it? Ah, readers, this is the part of the show where we do the fabulous country makeover.

It would be remiss of us to go any further without discussing the merits (or otherwise) of the nation’s motto which translates as “By reason or by force”, which sounds curiously like parenting advice to one with petulant toddlers. It’s just too gubernatorial. You really need to show that you have a laid back vibe when your whole country is really one bloody long beach. Don’t go getting heavy man. What are you forcing us to do? I’m not touching that Milcao crap with a barge pole buddy!!!

How about a far vibier (it’s not a word but seriously should be, man) motto? Hey, since writing articles for Belgium, Portugal and that other country, their column inches in some publications has gone up measurably, according to a vague statistic I manufactured especially for this article. A truly great motto would be: “Life’s a beach, and then you fry!”. Which not only sounds about as laid back as you can get but also explains the inordinately high rates of skin cancer and eighteen year old girls that look like unwrapped Egyptian Mummies.

Here at File 13, we generally recommend a flag makeover and Chile is no exception. The correct flag in the quiz was this:

Yawn. Sorry, this flag always has this effect on me. It honestly looks like the scraps on the cutting room floor when they designed the US flag. One star, half a white stripe and then a red one. Really? errrgh. It’s an embarrassment, man. My proposition is to kill two important birds with one important stone (actually just an ordinary stone would do, it’s only a metaphor for those into animal rights wanting to kill me with, in that case, a particularly hypocritical stone). Let’s do a flag that looks funky AND shows people how to pronounce your country!! Here are some options, mainly because I am honest enough to admit I don’t know the correct way to pronounce it:

Flag 1:

What a great flag, right?!! Chilli:Chile.. how cool (or hot) is that? Even the bloody country looks like a chilli (albeit, long, dried out Chilli but let’s not split Alpaca hairs, right?). Now, if I am not correct with the pronounciation, then this might be a more suitable flag:

How COOL is THAT, for a flag (can you believe our country makeover service is FREE here at File 13!!!!). It screams, “CHILL, EH?”.. with an Eric Estrada-like chilled out dude on a retro chair. I wish it was our Australian flag, man. I’m saying man a lot in this article. It sounds a little sexist. It might well be. If I could find a chilled out woman, I might say woman, but I haven’t met one yet. Of course, from a female point of view, ‘chilled’ from a male point of view could really just be ‘lazy’ from a female point of view.. as in “get off your chilled out arse and put those 16 day old underpants in the wash, YOURSELF!”. I reckon this guy has been SO chilled for SO long that his underwear may be attached to the chair… this could be a problem.

There we have it. New flag, new motto, thrill rides down to the sea in cars with faulty handbrakes and Alpaca rides.. what’s not to love? Well, we might have to recommend fasting whilst visiting, otherwise we really need to develop a new national food. Chilli-icy poles anyone?

My more successful alter-ego…

Ok, so I’m finally going to admit it publicly… Heston Blumenthal and I may share some features in common. After the twentieth person now has suggested to me that he looks exactly like me, I will admit that several bizarre coincidences between the two of us may exist (in addition to the fact that even I thought, from a certain angle, that someone had merely taken a photo of me, made a rather elaborate website, invented a ridiculously popular restaurant and TV show just to fool me.)

There are, however, certain key differences:
1. It appears that he has two proper ears (thought the right one does look quasi-deformed on Heston).
2. He is a living cooking legend. I can merely feed people well.
3. He is insanely successful, presumably rich and gets embarrassing emails from ladies. I am, on these criteria, not even modestly successful, nowhere near rich and generally get emails reminding me to buy milk. Which, more often than not, I forget to.

Now, having finally seen this guy on TV last night on Masterchef for the first time, it is clear that God, as previously suggested, has a great sense of humour, or is running out of ideas, creation-wise. I like to cook, have no formal training, like to introduce ‘science’ into my cooking, love the bizzarre and tricky when making recipes and, I am told, have the same wry sense of humour.

 

Now, using the same cutting-edge technology employed in my previous post on Chewbacca, we can splice the two photos above into the composite below:

Hmm.. perhaps we are not really THAT alike..

Anyway, this blog also contains a recipe which I am drinking as I write this, inspired from the pressure test/challenge last night on Masterchef. I give you: “Mickovich’s Maleshake”, an adult twist on a yummy kid’s idea!

Mickovich’s Blokeshake

Ingredients:
600mL of Guinness Stout Beer
600mL of full cream milk
4g NaHCO3 (1 tbsp Baking powder)
4 tbsp sugar
10g 85% Cocoa dark chocolate (grated)
4 tbsp malt (malted barley/horlicks also works)
4 tbsp honey
400g of premium high buttermilk vanilla ice cream

Method
a) Making honeycomb
1. Put hob on moderate heat and in low, small frypan mix 1 tbsp honey and 4 tbsp of sugar, stirring constantly.
2. Mixture will go from crystalline white, through yellow bubbling (as water evaporates out and sugar oxidises), keep stirring until it reaches an amber colour with tiny bubbles only.
3. Take straight off heat and immediately mix in 1 tbsp NaHCO3 very quickly, mixing thoroughly (takes 5-10 seconds max). Pour onto greaseproof paper, allow to rise and cool.
4. 15 minutes later, when cool to touch and just solid, put into freezer for further 15 minutes.

Method: Beer mixture

1. Open cold can of Guinness and pour very slowly on a 45 degree angle into a glass bowl.
2. Warm 600mL of Guinness in a warm water bath (80 degrees outside), stirring with a thermometer slowly. Allow all bubbles to evaporate out whilst keeping the temp below 37 degrees Celcius (heating higher will denature complex proteins from beer).
3. In a separate glass, mix 100mL of boiling water, remaining honey and malt until fully dissolved. Allow to cool to 40-50 degrees.
4. Combine malt mixture and cooled Guinness and place into freezer.

Method: Making the shake!

1. pour Guinness/malt mixture into milkshake cup to 1/3 full.
2. Add full cream milk until 2/3 full.
3. Add a generous dollop of Icecream
4. Mix until thick.
5. Smash 1/4 of honeycomb in a bowl with 1/4 of dark chocolate (grated).
6. Roll a ball of icecream in mixture until completely coated.
7. Gently drop ball into milkshake
[Note: because the Guinness is heated only to below 37 degrees, this drink has not fully evaporated the ethanol and remains alcoholic. I imagine, for some of you, this is good news, but it IS an 'adult milkshake' so don't go serving to your children, even if they won't go to sleep any other way!!]

I hope you enjoyed this recipe. I’m thirsty and am not driving for a while, so I may make another one!

cya!

GenericOracle

Running to stand still…

Treadmills are indeed a fascinating piece of exercise equipment. After watching too many daytime television slots in the holidays advertising exercise machines, it occurred to me how much of our lives in the comparatively rich West is devoted to getting off the shackles of our excess.

For the best part of four decades, these noisy little boxes that have long taken over from the hearth in the loungerooms of our middle class homes are the portal to covetousness. The world of TV shows us how to live our lives in excess and then, what to do when the guilt, fat or loneliness catches up with us. A recent conversation with an Australian Army Serviceman confirmed the tragedy of this fascination with that ‘other’ world. It appears that the US is installing grid electricity throughout villages in Afghanistan to places that have never had it, whether they like it or not. Why? He asks, with some good reason.

The Afghanis have lived without it thus far, have relatively small carbon  footprints compared with any English-speaking visitor to their village and have no use for it, skills or safety awareness to maintain it, and have little desire for, perhaps, the most common use of it in the developing world: the Television.

Indeed, from shanty homes on the infamous ‘smoky mountain’ rubbish dump in Manila to the vast hectares of slums of Kolkota, briefly thrust into Western consciousness in the movie ‘Slumdog Millionnaire’, TVs are slowly creeping into the homes of the up and coming poor around the world. The result? Chiefly some A-grade envy, from the sounds of it.

You see, without television, the poor have no real idea what is apparently possible in terms of lifestyle. Unfortunately, because the images come through television, they still don’t, but gee it sticks in their gourd! Happy poor can become miserable, despondent and deeply resentful poor. Far be it from me to suggest that the world’s dominant culture desires to implement its most potent weapon of mass cultural destruction through history’s most potent advertising means in the war torn piece of rugged dirt known as Afghanistan.

In the words of Bono, “Am I buggin’ ya? I don’t mean to bug ya!”

After participating in what is colloquially known as the ‘refugee run’ at Crossroads International in HK during December, and another simulation simply known as the ‘paper bag simulation’, the plight of the poor overseas has become just a little clearer. Here was I, in the heartland of the Australian middle class, thinking that the Middle Class had dibs on the concept of running to stand still. In a place where the financial axiom that “a middle class mortgage will always grow to accommodate the repayment capacity of its owners’ holds truer than Pythagoras’ theorum, we see hard work terminating in garage sales, meal replacements and private health insurance to offset the expensive medical bills.

What had been less clear is that the world’s poor do precisely the same. With the one key difference that if they stop running, they die. Is there a solution?

No, but there are hundreds. Can we live more simply? Can we eat less, keep fit (without plugging in exercise equipment to lose it) and consume less? Can we buy differently? Would you visit the truly poor? Would you lend time, money, compassion, your own bedrooms to someone that needed it? Would you handle affordable accommodation in your street without protesting? Would I take ANY of my own suggestions?

I’m not sure, but I’d like to think so. 2308 times in the New Testament taking care of the poor is mentioned. Mostly by Jesus. I don’t think for some time that I have been comfortable professing Christ whilst doing so little for the poor. This has gradually, albeit belatedly, been changing over the last decade and I plan that it would change more.

So my treadmill stands in the corner of my loungeroom, a shrine to our propensity to run just to stand still. It would be nice, in 2011 to move at least an inch. Bless you all.

Countries we never hear about #3: Venezuela

Ok, it’s been a while and I’d like to say that Ban Ki Moon has been on my back about another article in the “where are they now?” countries articles but he has not because a) I have a bad back and b) He doesn’t know me.

While we are on the topic though, why do World Leaders continue to insist on having hilarious names. Must I, every time I see a news story on SBS (at least twice a year), be subjected to the head of the United Nations whose name only makes me think of Westpac bending over?? Let’s not get started on Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. His name makes Ronald Raygun seem positively cartoon-like.

Answers later, so you don’t cheat!

As usual, I digress. For today we have the honour of recognising a nation whom I am quite sure you have heard of but 13% will believe that this nation is in Africa, with all the other ‘funny sounding ones’ but you’d be wrong. Yes, we are speaking of the glorious nation of Venezuela!

You’ve heard of Angel Falls, the Andes, the Amazon Jungle and Pabellon Criollo right? Ok, three are places you can visit in Venezuela and one is not actually the Presidente but a shredded beef dish. If you thought the dish was Angel Falls you should visit your Geography teacher and give them a serious punch in the nose.

Venezuela wallows in its unenviable relative anonymity for much the same reason as other countries discussed on this blog. It is simply TOO representative of South American countries. Invasions by people who ate paella back sometime before football was invented, morbid fascinations with military dictatorships and Zorro. Hot jungles, Cold mountains, women with G-strings on beaches and.. whoa. Back up! Brazil? Anyone? OK, so some South American countries have made their way into the International Sovereign State Celebrity list, it must be possible.

So what has Venezuela got going for it? I’m glad you asked! A cool flag for starters:

Yep. Primary colours, some pretty stars and a little cresty-thing with, oh, no. A horse, some wheat and, yes, another flag (which makes a flag, with a crest which features a flag). When will these South Americans learn not to set graphic art deadlines to Flag designers right before siesta???

“Hey Pablo, are you feeneeshed with the flag design now?”

“Huh, no Paulo, I am not. I hem however (with single finger raised in the air) neeearly feeneeshed!!”

“Ho K, I am so tired Pablo, I will see you later Hombre!”

“Man, I too am buggered. One more theeng in thees square.. one more theeng!! Oh, stuff it! Another flag!! Now where eez Mr Teddy??”

Some simple changes I’d suggest? Firstly, not a horse, a UNICORN!! Yeah, who doesn’t like a Unicorn eh?? With any luck, Venezuela could even get a decent polo team, glue horns onto the white horses and get a sponsorship deal through Mattel with Barbie on board, Yeahhhh!

Next. Not wheat. That is so, agrarian, so Stalinist. Croissants man!! Everyone loves Croissants. Now, I can hear roars of derision already that Croissants are French, blah, blah, blah. However, I have one word for you, ok two: French Fries!! You’d also get the approval of quite a few muslims (mostly short-sighted ones) who would really like the crescent, particularly if it was a green, mouldy croissant! I know. People should hire me as a PR consultant with this genius but, sadly they don’t.

Now, the final change I’d recommend to the flag would be to swap the flag in the crest for a big screen TV. Then, build the biggest big screen TV and show the flag on the screen, with the flag on its screen and the flag on its screen and so forth down to the smallest flag on the screen of the the TV on the flag. The best bit, though? tourists who visit the screen could be shown a subliminal message in the smallest screen on the flag on the screen that encourages them to pay over $1 USD for a Coke, whilst visiting. Stick a vending machine next to it with Coke for $1.10 US and watch the GDP rise, baby!

In conclusion, the country could also consider actually getting a President called Pabillon Criolli. Sure it is a national dish of shredded beef and rice but the rest of the world already thinks it could be the president and the Venezuelans would think it was a hoot! There we have the crucial point of marketable difference: the first South American state to NOT take its politics too seriously. Of course, it may take some time to degrade it to the state of the chookhouse of Australian parliament, the circus that remains the Italian parliament or the sheer Anarchy of the Taiwanese equivalent but it is all baby steps on the way to International Celebrity!