I don’t know Kylie Banning from a bar of soap. But I suspect she could well be my new BFF. And it’s all because of those three (OK four) little words I’ve been waiting to hear my whole life – “mango daiquiri jelly shots”.
Now, my love affair with the humble shot goes back a very long way, and was crystallised on the night I hired out a hotel suite to host an Oscars viewing party. I made what seemed like about 100 vodka jelly shots and by conservative estimates had at least 91 of them myself.
Delicious.
Ever since then they have been a bit of a party staple, even as my repertoire has expanded to include creamy concoctions that tell of carnal pleasures with cowboys. But they do say variety is the spice of life, and with the Oscars fast approaching, I needed fresh inspiration.
Enter one very smart cookie called Sam, who brought forth her copy of Kylie’s book “Legless, desserts to get you in the spirit” which, as the name suggests, offers up alcoholic recipes for everything from fondues to pudding.
Again, I must say, they all sound delicious. But in truth I was only interested in one section – the vodka jelly shots. And who would have thought you could be so creative with ingredients such as vanilla and blackberry mousse, honey, vanilla and cinnamon?
I felt duty bound to do some thorough ‘research’. But as predicted there was only one clear winner – and here’s a recipe I’m sure she won’t mind me sharing . . .
Method Dissolve jelly crystals in boiling water. Pour into blender with pureed mango, blend, then add alcohol and blend again. Pour into shot glasses and refrigerate to set, preferably overnight.
You can read more about the book here. But in the meantime, happy shooting!
Some of my work colleagues have decorated my desk surrounds with what they call a wall of spunks. And they mean it entirely ironically since the largest image is of an Identikit composite.
For the most part I let them go, but every so often one of them takes pity on me and adds someone who does not boast man boobs, excessive chest/face hair or some combination of the two. Which is how Bear Grylls got a guernsey.
Now, I’ve been a fan of Man vs Wild for a long time, even knowing “he and the crew receive support when they are in potentially life-threatening solutions, as required by health and safety regulations”.
I won’t hear a word against him. And to the detractors who call him a fake and a fraud, I simply point out he has some serious adventuring credentials. I mean the man climbed to the summit of Mt Everest when he was only 23, becoming the then youngest Briton to do so.
It was an incredible feat. One I could certainly never hope to emulate. But why stop there?
After all, it’s just one of the famous 7 Summits, otherwise known as the seven highest mountains on the seven continents. But where are the others? I set out to find out. And here they are…
Then we get to the final and somewhat controversial summit. The Bass list includes Mt Kosciuszko in Australia (2228m) while the Messner list broadens the continental definition to Oceania or Australasia and slots in Carstensz Pyramid in Indonesia (4884m).
Either way, getting the set is an impressive feat!
I grew up early enough to be a fan of Hall & Oates, but not early enough to see them in concert. So when I found out they were touring Australia, I had to go.
The chance to see Out of Touch performed live was just too much to resist. Plus, they were being supported by Icehouse, one of my all-time favourite homegrown bands. And the combination prompted me to look further into something that had always intrigued me.
I knew John Oates had teamed up with Iva Davies to co-write Electric Blue, which was one of Icehouse’s most popular songs. But what I didn’t know was how they came up with the title. And it turns out the setting was a little risque!
You can read full versions of the story here and here, but to paraphrase what happened, Oates was relaxing on a topless beach while Iva was out windsurfing when an unexpected muse crossed his path. “This gorgeous topless chick is walking towards me on the beach and I’m thinking, “Well, I can’t look at her tits, so I better look at her eyes. So she had these blue eyes, and I swear to God, it popped into my head, and that’s how I came up with the idea.”
Walking down the stairs at work after my colleagues (and daylight) had disappeared for the day, my mind was consumed with thoughts of dinner.
Would I cook or would I buy in? Would I have meat or would I have seafood? Would I have room for dessert? You know, the big questions of our time.
Suddenly, as I hit the third bottom step, I spotted something out of the corner of my eye – an oval head and a forked tongue. Snake! It was a snake! And my body reacted accordingly, sending me back up those steps faster than Usain Bolt.
Fortunately, the animal didn’t follow. But it did leave me with a slight pickle. There was only one exit and the snake was in the way. Seemed like it was going to be a long night, but eventually it slithered away and I was free to go.
Naturally, my first use of this freedom was to post the incident on Facebook, if only to reinforce for my American friends that Australia really is teeming with deadly creatures. But it did make me wonder if we deserved this reputation, especially when it came to snakes. I headed to the Australian Venom Research Unit to find out. And the answer, in a nutshell, is yes.
Now, I would have guessed we would have three or four of the world’s most venomous snakes, but the real figure is 11. That’s right, 11. And when you count out to the top 25, we can account for 20 entries. Scary stuff, and that’s before you even look at the fatality factor.
While I don’t want to get into the science of it, venom danger is measured by something called LD50. And basically, the lower this number, the less venom is needed to cause death. So when you see our inland taipan returning a figure of 0.025 you can understand why it’s best left alone.
Here is the complete top 25.
Entries are listed by – species, LD50 and distribution
1. Inland taipan 0.025 Australia
2. Eastern brown snake 0.053 Australia
3. Coastal taipan 0.099 Australia
4. Tiger snake 0.118 Australia
5. Black tiger snake 0.131 Australia
6. Beaked sea snake 0.164 Australia
7. Black tiger snake (Chappell Island ssp.) 0.194-0.338 Australia
8. Death adder 0.400 Australia
9. Gwardar 0.473 Australia
10. Spotted brown snake 0.360 (in bovine serum albumin) Australia
11. Australian copperhead 0.560 Australia
12. Cobra 0.565 Asia
13. Dugite 0.660 Australia
14. Papuan black snake 1.09 New Guinea
15. Stephens’ banded snake 1.36 Australia
16. Rough scaled snake 1.36 Australia
17. King cobra 1.80 Asia
18. Blue-bellied black snake 2.13 Australia
19. Collett’s snake 2.38 Australia
20. Mulga snake 2.38 Australia
21. Red-bellied black snake 2.52 Australia
22. Small eyed snake 2.67 Australia
23. Eastern diamond-backed rattlesnake 11.4 North America
24. Black whipsnake >14.2 Australia
25. Fer-de-lance >27.8 South America
Strangely enough, there’s no sign of the trouser snake, which some women would argue is the most dangerous of them all.
BTW according to the unit’s figures more people were killed by bees between 1979 and 1998 than spiders, marine creatures or ticks. Now why haven’t we seen that reflected in a horror movie??
I buy magazines. Lots of them. And predictably they lie on my kitchen table for weeks on end until I finally get around to reading them. At which point I’m always not in the slightest bit surprised to discover headlines such as ‘Posh’s Divorce Shock’ are entirely false.
Anyway, today I decided it was time for a gossip glut, so I dived right in, learning more about the Kardashians than I could ever want to know, from errant boyfriends (Kourtney) and divorce woes (Kim) to baby making (Khloe).
However, the real bonus was discovering a Chinese 2012 horoscope. I mean I knew the new year had rolled over some weeks ago, but I figured there was still plenty of (hopefully) good luck coming my way.
First though, I had to learn about which animals tallied up with which year. And I have to say I was mildly disappointed with what I found. I mean, why would you reach for a dog or a cat when you could flag a peacock or a bald eagle? Or even a tarantula. But since the creatures are seemingly set in stone, I decided to get on with it. And here’s what the signs boil down to, bearing in mind they don’t match to the exact calendar year.
For the record I am an ox, whose traits apparently include determination, strong will and finding comfort in the home, a couch or a good DVD. So far so good. But sadly I can look forward to career upheaval, new romantic prospects and more exercise in the next 12 months. Think I’ll stick with what Libra has to say …
And as anyone who’s seen the Bill Murray movie knows, it’s an occasion on which patriotic Americans gather together to punch Ned Ryerson in the face. No wait, that’s no true. Although it was very satisfying to watch.
Anyway, the real name of the game is to see whether it will be a short or long winter. And it’s here groundhogs such as Pennsylvania’s Punxsutawney Phil (star of the 1993 movie) really earn their keep.
Folklore says on this particular day the groundhog comes out of his hole after a long winter sleep to look for his shadow. If he sees it and retreats back to his burrow there will be six more weeks of winter. If the day is cloudy and therefore shadowless, he takes it as a sign of spring and stays above ground.
Phil only shares his prediction with the president of the Inner Circle, Billy Deeley. Last year he saw an early spring so it will be interesting to see what he comes up with this year.
In the meantime, here’s a couple of fun and (mostly) factual tidbits from his official website…
• Phil has been predicting weather for more than 120 years. He is accurate 100 percent of the time.
• Phil travelled to Washington DC to meet President Ronald Reagan in 1986.
• Phil appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show in 1995.
There’s something about a great movie speech that lingers long after the credits (and apparently now compulsory post-credits scene) have rolled.
Some reach deep into a soul, some are witty, some are crude beyond measure. But all stand up as a poignant reminder of the power of speech.
A couple of my favourites, in no particular order, include …
* Colonel Nathan R Jessup going berko at Lt Daniel Kaffee in A Few Good Men because he “can’t handle the truth”.
* William Wallace entreating his followers to remember ”they may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom” in Braveheart.
* Sam Gamgee declaring to Frodo Baggins that “I can’t carry it for you, but I can carry you” in The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.
However, the one I love most – and wanted to learn in full – comes from the pens of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in Good Will Hunting.
The scene in question centres on Will (Damon), a genius-level janitor who avoids jail time for assault, in part, by agreeing to see a therapist.
Robin Williams plays the counsellor, Sean, who has little success in reaching the troubled young man – until the below exchange, which occurs after Will snidely analyses a painting he sees in the therapist’s office…
Cue scene..
Sean I thought about what you said to me the other day, about my painting. Stayed up half the night thinking about it. Something occurred to me and I fell into a deep, peaceful sleep and haven’t thought about you since. You know what occurred to me? Will No. Sean You’re just a kid. You don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about. Will Why, thank you. Sean It’s all right. You’ve never been out of Boston. Will Nope. Sean If I asked you about art you’d probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo, you know a lot about him. Life’s work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientation, the whole works, right? But I bet you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You’ve never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling. Seen that.
If I ask you about women you’d probably give me a syllabus of your personal favourites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can’t tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy.
You’re a tough kid. I ask you about war, you’d probably throw Shakespeare at me, right? “Once more into the breach, dear friends.” But you’ve never been near one. You’ve never held your best friend’s head in your lap and watched him gasp his last breath, looking to you for help.
And if I ask you about love, you’ll probably quote me a sonnet. But you’ve never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone that could level you with her eyes. Feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you. Who could rescue you from the depths of hell. And you wouldn’t know what it’s like to be her angel and to have that love for her be there forever. Through anything. Through cancer. And you wouldn’t know about sleeping sitting up in a hospital room for two months holding her hand because the doctors could see in your eyes that the terms visiting hours don’t apply to you.
You don’t know about real loss, because that only occurs when you love something more than you love yourself. I doubt you’ve ever dared to love anybody that much. I look at you, I don’t see an intelligent, confident man. I see a cocky, scared shitless kid. But you’re a genius, Will. No one denies that. No one could possibly understand the depths of you. But you presume to know everything about me because you saw a painting of mine and you ripped my f****** life apart.
You’re an orphan right? (Will nods) Do you think I’d know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are because I read Oliver Twist? Does that encapsulate you? Personally, I don’t give a shit about all that, because you know what? I can’t learn anything from you I can’t read in some f****** book. Unless you wanna talk about you, who you are. And I’m fascinated. I’m in. But you don’t wanna do that, do you, sport? You’re terrified of what you might say. Your move, chief.
I am a massive fan of David Hasselhoff. And you know why? Because he knows he is B grade and he owns it.
He knows he’ll never be recognised with a Grammy award and still he continues to release inflict us with his music. He knows he’ll never co-star with Meryl Streep but gave his all to Anaconda 4. And when he was filmed trying to eat a hamburger while intoxicated, he didn’t try to blame it on ‘exhaustion’.
In short, he gets the joke, he knows it’s on him and he still signs up to play the German dodgeball coach. And more power to him. I mean have you ever had a German No. 1 single? Have you performed on the Berlin Wall? Did you make a rumoured $100 million from Baywatch? Thought not. Me neither.
Anyway, the hirsute one came to my attention today via a rumour he had had a crab named after him. And to be honest, I initially called BS. I mean the jokes about crabs and Pamela Anderson would just be too easy.
But it’s true. And there’s good logic to the science.
The crab under the spotlight is a new species boffins found on the Southern Ocean floor of the Antarctic, where it apparently lives about 2500m below the surface. But what really caught their fancy was that it had an unusually hairy chest – a bit like The Hoff himself – and thus the nickname was born.
Doing a massive (and well overdue) spring clean of my house I came across a shirt I hadn’t seen for ages. It was plain white with a picture of Little Miss Bossy across the front and a bunch of signatures from former workmates.
Now, this was given to me as a joke – well half a joke – so it was a nice walk down memory lane to find it. But it also prompted me to look into who created the Mr Men collection, which was a favourite growing up. Even if the likes of Little Miss Brainy and Little Miss Curious should possibly be going by the more modern term of ‘Ms’ by now.
Anyway, in a name that came back to me as soon as I read it, the character creator was Roger Hargreaves and the idea for the series came to him one morning in 1971 when his son, Adam, then six, asked “What does a tickle look like?” It was a very good question and prompted Roger to draw a little orange man with a big toothy grin, a blue hat and extraordinarily long arms. Thus the first Mr Men was born.
From there Roger went on to populate his universe with everyone from Mr Nosy and Mr Grumpy to Little Miss Busy and Little Miss Curious. And in a nice turn of fate Adam has now grown up to be the writer and illustrator of the books he inspired so many decades ago.
When God was handing out useful traits such as logic and domesticity, I was not only hiding behind the door, I was in the cafe across the block reading a trashy magazine. And I’ve felt the effects all my life.
In high school, for example, I did chemistry, physics and advanced maths on the recommendation of the powers that be, only to find the most lasting memory is of crawling through a gas cabinet to steal a teacher’s chocolate biscuits.
If there’s such a thing as a pure right brain, I have it. So while I can give you a creative solution to any problem you care to throw at me, put a linear equation in there, and I’m utterly stumped.
To try and get around this, I like to do logic and reasoning-based puzzles as often as I can. So today, while I was at the newsagent buying the latest edition of Vanity Fair, I also picked up a book of Mensa mind games.
I had hoped to get even one puzzle right, but it seems all those sudokus have paid off, as I breezed through a bunch of them. It was enough to encourage me to go online and test out their workout, which returned a respectable score of 25/30. Perhaps not enough to be asked to join the likes of Geena Davis Sharon Stone in membership, but better than expected.
And it got me wondering about where the idea for a club of geniuses (I’m paraphrasing their charter) came from. Turns out there’s an Aussie connection.
His name was Roland Berrill, an eccentric and flamboyant barrister who was educated in England. He founded Mensa in 1946 with an Englishman called Lancelot Ware, a mature student at Oxford.
The pair met by chance on a train and while Ware is credited with the actual idea, the Aussie did the founding by, for example, supplying the start-up cash. By the time he died a few years later he had recruited about 400 people. Today, membership is about 110,000, on all continents except Antarctica.
To learn more about the Aussie chapter, visit their official website here. Or if you just want to have a crack at the worksheet I did, you’ll find it here.
PS: The word “Mensa” means “table” in Latin, signifying its status as a round-table society where race, colour, creed, nation of origin, age, politics, education and social background are irrelevant.
What can I learn today? 