Flopping

  • May 26, 2022

I went shopping for a while yesterday to the local mall, and things seemed fairly pre-Covid to me. Australia seems to have moved on more than the USA, and mask wearing is almost nonexistent. I’m still wearing mine, if only because I don’t want to risk catching it before I return!

The weather was beautiful, and the walk home from the mall was actually quite warm. Even so the Australians still talk about the cold, and it’s amusing how I seem to have adjusted to real cold compared to the brisk temperatures they find uncomfortable here 🙂

And then today, I went to visit Adam for some card flopping!

We played 12 games in total, using 4 decks each made from cards from two sets (Jumpstart and Crimson Vow). This was about 6 hours of Magic, and we’ve still got more packs to open, decks to build and games to play!

As usual Adam won virtually every game (he’s like a Magic AI) but it was great playing the game for the first time in years and catching up, and I’m already looking forward to our next games next week.

It was also relaxing to have a day where I didn’t walk 20,000 steps! It’s not as easy now as when I was a stripling 🙂

  • Posted in Australia
  • Robert

Review: BBQ Bacon Angus

  • May 25, 2022

I had a discussion with Sue the other day about art, and she stated that anything is art. Therefore let me create a piece of ‘food review art’ and tell you about my dinner the other night, a BBQ Bacon Angus burger!

This is an Australian McDonald’s menu item. Ordering this was an extremely brave and unusual step for me, since as most of you know I always just order the same thing (which at maccas would be a Big Mac meal). But I’m working as Bernard’s proxy here as a taster of new things, and I reckon this was one item he needed to hear about.

Here’s what the marketing photo looked like, compared to the one I got:

It’s a somewhat close approximation, although the cheese on mine wasn’t fully melted and the bacon was invisible from the outside. Peeping under the lid wasn’t promising:

Where’s the bacon?!? (Hidden in the back at the left if you look closely.) It didn’t look very appetizing but I was very hungry and it was time to see how this guy tasted…

At first things seemed promising: the bbq sauce was sweet and the meat tasted like a steak patty on a 1980s-era steak sandwich. But then I hit the cheese which gave me pause (it was a little rubbery) and then the ham bacon which stopped me dead (it was barely cooked and 50% fat).

I was about halfway through when the true horror of this Trojan burger revealed itself. But first let’s take a detailed second look at the official marketing photo:

Look at that white stuff at the bottom. What is it?!? Mayonnaise? Some evil sauce? I don’t know, but what I do know is it tasted awful.

Since my burger wasn’t symmetric, it wasn’t until I was at least halfway through that I hit a large deposit of this white stuff, and tasting it was like a punch to my face. I was immediately full of revulsion (had I eaten some already?) and regret (why didn’t I get a Big Mac?) and I’m sure I set some sort of speed record stuffing the remaining half of the burger into a bag and hurling it into the nearest trash can.

I’ll never eat one of these again, and truthfully wish I’d never had one in the first place. On a scale of 1 to 10, this gets about a -5.

Baranagarangaroona

  • May 24, 2022

Yesterday Sue an I woke early like roosters, and decided to walk over the same bridge that we had climbed the day prior! We wanted to do it for its own sake, and to visit a secret garden hidden just over the other side.

To get there we walked along the harbour walk that winds past Barangaroo, the new casino-that-isn’t-yet-a-casino. The weather was lovely and the new foreshore development was great and I’ll almost certainly do this walk almost every time I visit from now on. It led right to the bridge, over which we then strolled!

That’s the view looking back from the northwest side, and you can see Luna Park on the left. It may look cold and menacing, but it was actually quite comfortable. Right behind us from where this photo was taken was Wendy’s Secret Garden, which is an eccentric fairytale garden designed and built over many years by a Sydney artist.

After the return to the CBD and lunch it was time to head to Newcastle and mum’s, and the long-awaited reunion:

Dinner was meat pies followed by a Toobs binge:

You can bet this won’t be the first bag of Toobs I’ll be inhaling this trip 🙂

  • Posted in Australia
  • Robert