You put what in what?

Another kitchen-related whinge. I was making breakfast this morning for my kids, cooking up porridge (or oatmeal, if you prefer). Number 2 son was having cereal, which he was going to follow up with a bowl of porridge. He takes after me.

The porridge smelled a little strange. I'd noticed this at one point last week, I thought it had smelled a bit fishy; number 2 son differed, he thought it was chicken-y. This happened two days in a row, then I noticed the oatmeal was about a year past its use-by date and I threw it out and bought some new stuff. I appreciate that oatmeal might get stale, but how would it get fishy? A mystery. All was fine for a few days.

Then this morning I went to the supermarket early with number 2 daughter, we'd run out of milk. I sent her to get it while I bought some fruit. I noticed that she'd come back with what was advertised as "kids' milk", which, judging from the label is regular milk that's been boosted with omega-3. I didn't care.

So this morning I noticed a vaguely fishy smell to the porridge as I was cooking it. Then number 2 said his cereal tasted strange. Then I realised. They had put fish-oil in the f&*cking milk.

Toaster

I'm staying in my ex-wife's house this week and I'm going to have a whinge about the toaster. Yes, that's what I'm reduced to. I know you're doing that rolling-your-eyes thing but bear with me.

We got this toaster as a wedding present (I think) which is fine. You'll notice it's quite wide (or maybe long, depending on how you look at it). It's quite a lot wider than, say, a slice of bread. So it looks as though it was designed to toast two slices of bread at once. NO! It's not quite wide enough. If you put two normal-sized slices of bread in it they jam together in the middle, and when you push the lever thingy to make then go down they get all jammed together in a very disagreeable way.

When I use it, I try to imagine what the process was like for designing it. Did they deliberately create a toaster that was designed to toast something that's long, but not quite as long as two slices of bread placed next to each other? What would that thing be? And why not give it, say, an extra inch of width while they were at it? In my mind's eye I see a meeting at the toaster company, the young edgy guys from design are showing off this new model that's designed to toast longer bread, and some been-around-the-traps executive (in my revisionist toaster fantasy it's ME) waves his hands to shut them up and tells them to lengthen it just a little bit more. They're struck dumb, his wisdom is so obvious, so humbling.

Or maybe it wasn't like that at all. More likely it was just all a bit haphazard, the toaster's an evolutionary backwater. On the other hand the toaster's worked fine for 14 years, which is longer than the marriage.

Beer

You'll thank me for this later, I know. I discovered today that if you have a beer that doesn't have a twist-top (and the Peroni pictured here is a perfect example, given that it's exactly the beer I had in my hand when I made this discovery) and you can't find a bottle-opener, you can use a kickstand from a kids' bicycle.

Perfect!

Bad analogies

I was browsing on snopes, and there was a thing that went around which was allegedly a collection of really bad analogies and metaphors taken from high school essays. (Of course, it was nothing of the sort, they were all from the Washington Post, where they were part of a contest. They were deliberately bad.) Some of these were really good:

The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife's infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge on a formerly surcharge-free ATM.

McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the sidewalk like a hefty bag filled with soup.

He was lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck either, but a duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a landmine or something.

New favorite

I have a new favorite website. Have a look.
PassiveAggressiveNotes.

Too good to check

From Crikey.com.au, in the letters and comments:

"Geoff Russell, Animal Liberation SA, writes: There is an interesting statistic that is relevant to both the Garnaut report and climate change. It comes from a large European cancer and nutrition study group of about 60,000 meat eaters, vegans and vegetarians in the UK --- 41% of vegans are single, compared with 13% of meat eaters and 25% of vegetarians."

Sitcom

In Crikey, Guy Rundle describes some especially insipid music as being "..like.. the theme to a cancelled sitcom". I love it.