An abridged history of American-centric warfare, from WWII to present day, told through the foods of the countries in conflict. For the official cheat sheet (breakdown of the foodstuffs), visit: http://homepage.mac.com/stefannadelman/foodfight/cheat.htm

First:

And now:

(Muriel's Wedding is one of my all-time favourite films; I highly recommend it)

A fairly engaging composition created entirely from stock sounds in Windows 98 and XP.

Today is John Frum Day, a peculiar holiday celebrated on the island of Tanna, Vanuatu. John Frum is celebrated as a deity, and this is apparently the last of the WWII Cargo Cults.

In a nutshell, the cults arose when American soldiers appeared out of the sky and sea, bringing all manner of bounty with them. The name "John Frum" is thought to have originally been "John From (America)". When the soldiers left, the natives prayed for their return, and thus is born a cargo cult. Sociologically fascinating, and I urge you to follow the links to find out more.

I've been looking for cherry-flavoured black tea for ages. I used to have it when I'd take Zoë to speech therapy, as they had some in the community kitchen. I tried to find out where they got it, but it was apparently brought in by one of the therapists who was never around when I was and I could never find out where she acquired it (it was St. Balfour, and this is in Melbourne, so if you know where I can get St. Balfour cherry flavoured tea in Melbourne, please, please, let me know).

Anyway, cherry isn't a very common flavouring in Australia for various reasons, and I've been unable to find cherry tea, despite having searched for it for some time.

Well, it seems that Andrew managed to score me some cherry tea, and gave it to me for Valentine's Day. He got it in a Japanese tea shop in the city, apparently. The stuff smells fantastic, and it's got little berries and stuff in it, very interesting to look at. And it tastes YUM, with a nice, slightly tart cherry edge. Mmmmmm. Cherry.

Pretty good husband, huh?

I got a new partial denture done. It's a metal one, MUCH more comfortable than the bulky resin (plastic) one I had before. I hated that thing so much I never wore it. Ugh. This new one is much more comfortable. I can eat with it in (yay!) and it sits much more easily in my mouth... I still have the excessive sibilance problem, but I may be the only one who really notices it (okay, so it's not that excessive, but it sounds that way to me).

Next on the agenda, get a partial plate for the top, and get my front two teeth removed. Yay. Not looking forward to that, but gum disease takes its toll. I expect a partial on the top will look a lot better than my natural teeth, anyway...

I've been on the net since 1993. Back in those days, the net was largely unknown to the general population, and it was populated mostly by people at universities and some military facilities. It was not easy to use. And therein lay the beauty of it.

You see, everyone on the net in those days had to have a certain bare minimum of tech savvy and/or intelligence. You didn't have to be a genius, but you did have to be able to figure things out and think for yourself, or you'd be hopelessly lost and you'd never manage to do much other than maybe get into your email (which almost certainly had to be accessed via a Unix shell using Elm or PINE).

And then AOL came along and then some bizarre product called "Internet in a Box" and the Dotcoms started to appear and oh, well, the little haven of reasonably intelligent people was gone and our inboxes were full of spam (yes, I remember the days when spam was pretty much non-existent) and Usenet went to hell in a handbasket, overrun by drooling idiots...

Okay, that's probably not quite the way it went, but back in my day, we had real, intelligent discussions on the internet, and we liked it! We thought a 14.4KBaud modem was fast! We were grateful! We didn't have any of this fancy PPP connections, oh, no, if we were lucky, we had SLIP. But you kids today, with your fancy ADSL and other high bandwidth connections and your Web Two Point Oh and your Facebook and your MySpace... HAH! Back in my day we had text .sigs with ASCII art in 'em and we were happy! Ecstatic! Whippersnappers...

You may or may not have heard that Maharishi Mahesh Yogi died. If you don't know who that is, you don't know your Beatles history or your Sixties pop culture very well...

In a nutshell:

"For three months in the spring of 1968, the Beatles came out of the psychedelic phase that marked Sergeant Pepper and wrote nearly 50 songs in a marathon of musical creativity.

They did it on the banks of the Ganges, as disciples of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, whose ashram had become the destination of choice for western hippies – a bit like Butlins, Ringo Starr said rudely."

[Source]

Maharishi and The Beatles eventually had a falling out and John Lennon wrote a rather bitter song about it, but he changed the word "Maharishi" to Sexy Sadie.

In his time on earth, Maharishi sold (yes, sold, for thousands of dollars a session) his copyrighted and trademarked Transcendental Meditation™ system to millions of people, becoming the head of an international empire worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Amongst Maharishi's claims were that meditation would calm the body, wake up the mind, and boost the cause of world peace.

Now, I'm a big, big fan of meditation. I try to meditate daily, though I don't always achieve long or productive sessions every day. Meditation does, indeed, have many medically documented benefits, and it's well worth learning and practicing.

However, I don't think it's done much for world peace (perhaps George W Bush and Tony Blair and John Howard just needed to meditate more?), and there's no need to spend thousands of dollars to learn how to do it. Just Google how to meditate and go from there, and give a miss to the late Maharishi’s multi-million dollar empire.

By the way, the big, guarded “secret” to Transcendental Meditation™ is to repeat a mantra (a word, syllable, or short phrase) over and over in your mind as you relax. When some thought or worry enters your mind, just quietly re-direct your thoughts to the mantra.

There. I just save you thousands of dollars.

Famed Etch A Sketch artist George Vlosich's portrait creation of Denver Nuggets' Carmelo Anthony. The video is a time lapse version; the actual time needed to finish the work was twenty-five hours. I find it particularly amazing because not only is it really good, it's done on an Etch A Sketch. I can't even manage a simple circle on one of those stupid things, and this guy does excellent portrait work with one. Amazing.