A Spot of Building

There are grand plans for it when it's finished. Well, not grand, but grander. Right now it is mostly used as a landing strip for sandwiches that I toss up so that I can eat them in bed. Needless to say, there has been an increase in the number of sandwiches being consumed in bed.

Imagine that you're already at a point where, most days, you're at two out of three meals a day being of the sandwich format. Plus, maybe, some sort of smaller sandwich type snack. Most days.

This is your starting point. Well, it's ours.

Any new advancements made to broaden the sandwich based meal horizon is something of which advantage will be taken.

Though sandwiches were being consumed in the bed previously, there was a limit on this because there was nowhere for unconsumed sandwiches, partially consumed sandwiches, or the resulting crumbed sandwich bag or plate to reside.

This is changed. We have homes for all those things.

It would be fair, and honest, to say that this sandwich based functionality is not a temporary situation. The plan now is that this sort of sandwich convenience be ongoing. If push came to shove and hard decisions had to be made, I would live among the boxes, and keep the 2220mm high sandwich table.

All in all, Panda and I are happy with what's going on here. Sandwiches are more or less a guarantee of that.

The Universal Appeal of Vampires

Having visited das Kino some four or so times recently, I've seen that Dracula Untold advert a few times.

Parts of it seemed appealing briefly, but parts were perhaps the opposite. Not perhaps.

Epic, army-fighting vampires aren't really my scene. They're the scene of other people.

Maybe it's just that I've read Dracula, or that I've read Dracula and have a reading comprehension level >= a 12 year old, but Captain Bat-Fist and Bram's count can't really be the same guy.

But, that's okay, on account of it's not meant to be. The Dracula of which there is going to be this untelling is actually the Universal Monsters Dracula, and not Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Is there a difference?

Yes. There is a difference.

Compare the character as he appears in Universal's Van Helsing (the one with Wolverine) to the one in Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula.

See what I'm talking about?

Knowing this, it's easy to see the appeal of going a bit bat-shit, and I'm honestly surprised that they aren't going full Captain Drac Sparrow all over our faces. Cheers to whatever it is that passes for restraint and subtlety over at Universal.

I've made clear a certain degree of vampire snobbery in posts past, but I've also been a little 'live and let unlive' on the matter. Regardless of how you choose to cast me in this I'm open to people doing what they feel they need to on the vampire front, but it doesn't create some sort of obligation on my behalf to participate.

I am totally free to do my own shit. I could make a sandwich. That is probably going to happen. Oh, my goodness, is that going to happen. It really, really is.

This is the sandwich:

And this is the Dracula Untold advert:

I guess the bit that made me briefly excited (prior to the arrival of the giant bat fist) was the line,

Sometimes the world doesn't need another hero. Sometimes what it needs is a monster.

That and Lorde's cover of the Tears for Fears classic, 'Everybody wants to rule the world'. The line though sucked me right in, and for a moment I was expecting something else.

With the recent news-cycles obsessed with religious conflict, civil unrest, and terrorism it would seem like the perfect time to take advantage of the existing fears and cultural shorthands to make a film about the supernatural reimagining of a guy whose life was defined by those very things.

Imagine a Dracula caught in the shifting hands of faith, who wages a campaign of terror against an invading army, tearing away at their morale and sanity, while justifying his tactics to the homeland he is trying to unite. A Dracula who is finally driven by nationalism, grief, and desperation not only to the supernatural darkness of vampirism, but also to the very human darkness that made him the dark prince of medieval psychological warfare.

A film about a man who while trying to be a hero, pushes way past the extremes of that concept and becomes both a literal and figurative monster.

A movie that would be dark. Like, crazy dark. A character so lost in the darkness that he can't possibly see a way back. There is no redemption. The well is too deep.

All we are left with is the knowledge of the man he used to be and the fate that awaits the broken, twisted creature of obsession that he will become.

Imagine that film.

That's what I thought we were getting.

I know that there was that Dracula: The Dark Prince thing, and that Vlad Tepes thing that are both kind of that, but they aren't really what I'm talking about.

 It's the cat-people thing all over again.

McCloud Nine

Once upon a time I made the decision not to go on a second date with someone part way through the first date. Actually, that isn't a one off. But the one particular time that I am referring to as the 'once upon a time' with which I started this paragraph was right after they had finished saying, 'Is he that Grand Designs guy? I think he is overrated and kind of idiotic.' In response I merely continued my meal. People like that can't be taught. It's hard to come back from that. I'm not that kind of wizard. I can't help these people. They're on their own.

I watch Kevin McCloud MBE and Kevin McCloud MBE related material. That is a part of who I am. I'm not likely to stop any time soon either. That is an intrinsic part of my makeup. I have the Grand Designs viewer gene. It's in there somewhere.

Have you ever seen the first episode in which you can absolutely tell that he got a haircut between the initial meeting with the couple and the next time he turned up? I have. Lots of times. I have a box set. It's one of the kit house ones. It is the first of the kit house ones. A great many followed. He likes kit houses. I do too. It's like Meccano that you get to live in, or like an Ikea cabinet that you get to live in. Either way it is a dream of mine.

I have often wondered if you could just order one of those little apartments that they build in the store. Just tick some boxes, choose a finish and then get the whole thing delivered. In a situation like that you would feel as though you had to frame the Allen keys afterwards. I would.

I like the idea of living in a prepackaged environment. I don't think I have enough individuality to really be concerned with how many other people had the same arrangement. I guess that is why I go to Ikea anyway. That and the hotdogs. Sometimes I go for the ride with other people just so I can stroll through the store and get hotdogs. As we have discussed before, I consider hotdogs to be a type of sandwich, and this brings them under a wider umbrella sandwich obsession.

I sometimes wonder if Kevin McCloud, with his background in interior design, likes Ikea, and/or their hotdogs. Or if he considers it an assault on his sensibilities. I wonder if he would do a walkthrough show with me. We could talk about the things that Ikea has available and we could eat hotdogs afterwards. Panda could come with us. A sort of journey to the place of his adoption. It wouldn't be weird. Not terribly. Maybe some level of weird. Panda is a pretty big fan. He might just stare at him and not say anything. That could be awkward.

I guess in this scenario in which Panda is staring at Kevin McCloud as we wander through Ikea I could be his sidekick. In a way. Kevin's. Not Panda's. I mean, I could be Panda's too, but for different things. Definitely Panda's when it's hotdog time. And lingonberry drink time. Flatpack gingerbread houses would be a tough call. I mean, it is basically a cookie house,which is Panda town, but it is also a kit house, which is Kevin territory.

Have you tried that lingonberry drink? I really like it, but that came with practise. Not that I rehearsed drinking it at home, because that would be just drinking. You don't drink it differently. It's like a lot of other drinks in that way. I suppose you could Swedish drink ceremony, but that is not what I am doing. I'm just drinking it. With my face. Specifically the mouth bit of my face. I know how to do that. I stuck at it for a while and it grew on me is what I am saying. It's really good with the orange flavoured one. They compliment each other. Like any two flavours of Slurpee.

The Sandwich on the Orient Express, and other Mysteries

Based on Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie.

Very loosely.

Loose is probably the most important word thus far.

I found a sandwich in my fridge last night. This isn't like the hotdog situation. I actually remembered buying it once I saw it. It was pretty special though, and I think I realised that right down in the very core of who I am, I am happiest when I am finding sandwiches.

Even though I had been recently responsible for the arrival of the sandwich into my life and the fridge, it felt like magic. It brightened my entire outlook on life. The key in this particular sandwich discovery was forgetting that it was there. I'm not sure how to guarantee this in the future, but I feel like finding sandwiches is something I could do for the rest of my life.

It was at about this stage that Panda decided that this was also his calling, and also something that he should go about as Hercule Panda, the great detective. I lost a little track of how we got to the bit where he spoke with a very bad accent and solved crimes around my granny flat for the better part of three hours, but it was amusing. I also lost track of how I managed to be both the client and culprit in a number of missing foodstuff related crimes dating back months. I also apparently started the Franco-Prussian War, and am personally, and criminally, responsible for the cancellation of Quantum Leap.

I say that I was the client, because I apparently am heavily in debt for the cost of the services of the 'world renowned' Hercule Panda. A debt that I am apparently required to pay in a variety of snack based currencies. There might be some sort of exchange rate investigation in the near future.

Now, if the adventures started as a loose adaptation of the works of Agatha Christie, they were somewhere beyond 'loosely inspired by' towards the end. Despite having seen nearly every David Suchet Poirot mystery, Panda became insistent that Poirot's, and thus his own, crime solving catch phrase was a variant of 'I solved the crime with my face', and then later 'faces', as a result of the 'language barrier'.

I tried to correct him on that, but I was informed that he was in fact 'a triple panda', which he explained as a result of taking the 'pandarocity' of two other pandas, which he in turn explained by  saying, 'Like that movie Highlander. Did you see that? I'm one of those. All pandas are'.

'You're cutting the heads off pandas?'

'They're all doing it.'

'You do know they're endangered?'

'There can be only one.'

The Astute Observation of Daily Ritual

Is sauce a spread? I suppose it doesn't matter. I'm going to keep putting it on sandwiches. I'm probably also going to keep putting condensed soup on sandwiches too, which puts it in a similar sort of category. That category of things I will have on a sandwich that aren't really solids. Sandwich-grade pseudo-fluids. Some of them might be actual fluids. Sauce is a fluid. Nothing pseudo about it. It's been a long time since I've had a really in depth understanding of fluids, and their membership criteria, but I'm pretty sure about sauce. If you've got me scienceyness than me, feel free to chime and educate, but at the end of the day it doesn't really matter what they are when they make it onto the sandwich. That's their goal. It's a hall of fame. Of sorts.

You know what is kind of like a sandwich? A hotdog! It's just a basically an abnormally shaped wiener sandwich. It's more linear. It's not abnormal for a hotdog, I mean some of them must be, but it's abnormal for a sandwich. Well, your more traditional sandwich anyway. Your longer sandwiches are more and more common these days. A Subway sandwich is still a sandwich. We don't exclude it just because it has two ends. Square sandwiches don't have that. They're squares. Squares don't have ends.

I found a hotdog last night. It was in my freezer. I was looking for something else. I was looking for ice cream. At four in the morning. I don't sleep. I knew there wasn't any ice cream. I didn't remember that there was any, I just hoped there would be somewhere in the back. There wasn't. There was a hotdog though. It was a Seven Eleven hotdog. I didn't know that was there. I moved it to the fridge bit, so that it would be easier to zap should the time come that I'm going to eat it. When the time comes, you want to be prepared.

I guess there really aren't that many rules concerning sandwiches in this day age. The modern sandwich is a varied and wonderful thing. It has come down to stuff between bread. That's pretty much the rule these days. The open sandwich tries to flaunt this rule, but it is a lie. It is the lie, and who ever wrote the menu is the perpetrator of that lie. That person who served it is an accomplice. It's a lie to take up more of the plate without delivering on that more.

Imagine if I was selling you a house, and I told you that the roof was over there somewhere, and then tried to convince you to pay more due to the increase in square footage. That's what a peddler of open sandwiches is doing to you. And they always charge more. It's a kind of fraud. It isn't a sandwich. It's bread with things on it, which doesn't make it a 'pizzette' or automatically qualify it as bruschetta either.

I'm no longer sure in which direction I was headed here. It might not of even had a thing at all to do with sandwiches, which makes the way that I started this whole thing seem more than a little strange. Now that I think about it, I had originally planned to bandy some words about in an attempt to say something astute about The Flight of the Navigator, but, well, I've just cruised right through lunchtime.

Petite, Whizzy Ninja-Bucket Action!

We made it back to Sydney. I took both my laptops away with me (the two main ones) with every intention of doing something productive, but I basically played Scribblenauts Unlimited and Batman: Arkham City whenever anyone left me to my own devices. I got a miniature food processor in a Kris Kringle on Christmas Eve. I originally got a 1kg (100 piece) box of pralines, but I managed to trade for the buzz box. It seemed like an excellent trade. It still does. I think I live for this thing now. It strikes me as the the sort of thing that a bachelor would have, and I am one of those now. It even only does a very small amount, as if it is saying, "Your life is yours, and so is this single portion of goop." I was pretty keen to get down to my bachelory ways straight away, but I wasn't immediately sure how one proceeds with this sort of activity.

I'd already decided on what I was having for breakfast, so my first step was to put that into my shiny new miniature buzz bucket. As far as bachelors go, we were feeling pretty bachelory.

I want to take a moment to focus on the mininess of the 'mini food processor'. It's not very big. They didn't lie about that. The box does suggest that one might have some difficulty fitting strawberries inside it, but that is misleading. I've included a picture of it with Panda, who isn't the same size as most pandas appear to be on the internet. We haven't done a side by side, but he is pretty small. I think you get the idea anyway. He is new to this. We couldn't remember if he had ever been used for size comparisons before. We don't think so. That blue teapot is also abnormally small, so there really isn't much in this picture that is helpful.

Once I had loaded my breakfast in, I pressed The Button. It only has one, which is good for us bachelors. It is also good because Panda's fingers don't separate. The result was a mechanically pre-chewed breakfast that looked a lot like freshly squeezed orange juice with bits of bacon in it, which might very well pass for breakfast in some places. Not at my places, or wherever I happen to be. I don't want that. If you're in a position to make me breakfast, keeping this in mind would be deeply appreciated. Mind you, if you're making me breakfast, I'm probably going eat what I'm given.

I fried it, which seemed like the only way forward at that point. I could've done one of a variety of other cookings, but there was already a pan out.

I didn't really know what to do next, so I put it on a sandwich. This is the height of civility. This is the kind of thing that civilised people do. I'm not sure about the whole processing and frying your breakfast thing, which seems a lot less civilised. That seems like the kind of thing that lazy people do, or at the very least the kind of thing that people with brand new, petite, whizzy ninja-jars do.

We're pretty happy with our first forays into this sort of activity. We like little machines that do things for you that you could conceivably do for yourself. We've been informed that this is the very same sentiment that will lead to the robot revolution.