Apparently the Footscray McDonalds was in a state of MacMourning:

Meanwhile, check this restaurant in North Richmond. I’ll have to try eating there the next time I want some Aussie-Indian-Chinese. It’s trendy, yet traditional.

Help our kids by eating a Parma — from today until next Thursday, $2 from every chicken parma served at 77 pubs around Melbourne (PDF list) will go to the Royal Children’s Hospital Good Friday appeal. Yes, more than ever, superparma.com is sadly missed.

I can’t give you a picture rivalling this carpark mishap in Brighton, but I did snap this one the other day.

No, the car didn’t have a disabled sign. And there was plenty of other (legal) parking a few metres away.

Damn. Superparma.com is no more. And they built the site in such a way that it seems to be impossible to get at anything except the splash page via archive.org, so the ratings they compiled may be lost forever.

Groan. WarGames 2: The Dead Code now in pre-production, and aimed at direct-to-DVD.

OK. I was talking last week about not renewing with the RACV. As it happens my renewal form just arrived, and my membership runs out in a few weeks, so I’ll start shopping. Ultratune is looking pretty good (thanks Peter).

Ah, emails. Do we all know the danger of hitting Reply All instead of Reply? Will Joanna Purdy be the next Claire Swire? Or maybe this one won’t snowball. (I’m too polite to forward it around.)

PS. Sorry, a server glitch (well, actually an upgrade I forgot was happening) has (hopefully temporarily) lost a couple of comments on this post.

A Greenpeace report that came out last week says, among other things, that eating more kangaroos is better for the environment than eating beef, on the basis that less land clearing is required, and kangaroos don’t produce the methane gas released by cattle and sheep. I assume they’d also consume less water.

So the other day in Coles I picked up some Kanga Bangas to try. (I don’t recall seeing them in Safeway.) From the looks of it, apart from any environmental benefits, they also have much less fat than conventional snags (something like 90-95% less, if I have my sums right), so they’ll actually be healthier too. They’re also surprisingly cheap, for something I would have thought might be a niche product.

I know Jen tried them recently and liked them… but the real test is: do the kids like the taste?

No they didn’t, not very much. And I wasn’t that keen either to be honest. Perhaps it’s not that they’re bad, but that they’re not the usual taste. But there might be some other brands out there, and I can also try frying rather than using the grill, so I’m not giving up yet.

Every so often, some junk mail will sneak past the No Junk Mail sticker, often in a kind of junk mail Trojan horse, such as a copy of the Bayside Weekly. Last week a Barbecues Galore catalogue snuck in. Now, I know that they stock a wide range of barbecues, including the modest type of small unit that I’m considering, costing perhaps a couple of hundred dollars. But the catalogue highlights the high-end.

Holy crap. $17,990 for a barbie? Do people really buy this stuff? Are they out of their freaking minds?

Even the “cheaper” (and I use the word loosely) models on that page are $6990 and $7990.

Seriously folks, if you’re pondering spending this kind of money on a barbecue, take a good long look at yourself, go and buy one for 5-10% of the price, and give the rest of the money to charity. That kind of dosh would set up whole villages with supplies of water and food for years — if not forever.

(If I’ve missed something fundamental and there really is an actual reason for spending the price of a small car on something to cook sausages on, please enlighten me.)

I’ve mentioned this briefly before, but back in my uni days, my diet was pretty shocking. Often a bunch of us would go down to the corner shop (now razed and redeveloped as Yet More University Buildings). I’d chow down a $1.50 hotdog, and maybe some chips, perhaps a Big M or an OJ, and if there wasn’t another lecture imminent*, we’d retire to the back of the shop and play video games. I remember my friend Brian remarking that he played so much Tetris, he used to have dreams of falling blocks.

Those days are long since past me. I don’t know how many of those hot dogs I consumed, but it was probably more than was healthy.

Following some comments left, and as a result of the pizza place the kids and I sometimes go having an out-of-order phone on Wednesday, we decided to try Jasper’s Pizza in McKinnon. They made a good first impression, giving us bits of garlic bready pizza stuff to nibble on while we made up our minds what to order.

Then one of the guys behind the counter looked at me. I thought he was about to ask about TV (it happens; last night on the train I got buttonholed by a TravelSafe team), but instead he asked if I used to study at Monash Caulfield. “15, 20 years ago?”

“Yeah…”

“I thought I recognised your face. I used to run the corner shop!”

He said they sold up in 1994, and the Commonwealth bought the land, no doubt to commence the aforementioned razing and redeveloping.

So it seems I’m not the only one who remembers those $1.50 hot dogs.

I wonder what happened to the Tetris machine?

Oh, the pizza was delicious, by the way.

*Well, that we wanted to go to.

I have a cautionary tale for you. A few weeks ago I was merrily strolling through Bentleigh, and decided to see what they had in the discount supermarket place. To my delight they had some very cheap Cadbury breakfast bars. Ah, the goodness of muesli combined with the deliciousness of chocolate. Okay, so slightly past their Best Before date, but what difference could that make? 5 for $2, thank you very much — a rather splendid morning tea snack at a bargain price.

I ate one per working day for the next week.

The week after that, I got a massive pimple. So big it cast its own shadow. And just my luck, it was present one afternoon when I had to talk to Channel 10 about crowded trains. Yes, my pimple got broadcast on statewide television.

Sigh.

Of course it’s not just the acne that thrives on excess chocolate. There is the odd case of Diabetes in my family, and I noted last time I gave blood that my weight is creeping up — 77Kg, where I used to be about 75. So while some (principally the chocolate industry, I’m betting) like to push chocolate as being healthy, I can’t help feeling that it wouldn’t kill me to cut it from my diet totally.

So not only have I vowed not to buy any more Cadbury breakfast bars, I’ve stopped buying chocolate altogether. Well, almost. I’ve set myself a maximum of one small bar a week, and that’s only if colleagues are selling them for fundraising, Charlie Bucket-style, and I’ll still have the occasional hot chocolate (because there’s nothing I like better as a hot beverage when out).

Since then, no more big pimples. Touch wood.

(Oh damn, there’s a small one on my nose. There goes that theory.)

On Good Friday, it’s traditional for people of a Christian background to eat fish, rather than meat. So, with 68% of the country identifying with Christianity on the census, naturally last night it was pretty damn crowded in the fish’n'chip shop. A 40 minute wait, in fact, even with about ten people working behind the counter. I’m glad we rang ahead.

(No I’m not Christian, but I’ll happily latch onto any tradition that involves fish’n'chips at the end of the week when I don’t feel like cooking. Likewise chocolate eggs.)

Mind you, there was a pretty long queue at Olympic Doughnuts today, too. Is eating jam doughnuts a tradition for Easter Saturday?