Hey Jesus... The Beef And Potatoes?

I just binned a fairly negative post I was going to stick up here about some nonsense the tendentious Australian media is writing about at the moment. In a nutshell though, the media is writing nonsense that is not even slightly factual: they are making false claims about something that is non-value added and straight out of the ground belonging to the Crown and that is leased to entrepreneurs, whilst forgetting about the decades of value-added profits that other people around the world have been generating and have tucked away into Swiss banks already.

But if I posted all that nasty stuff you wouldn't get to see or appreciate the wholesomeness of what truly wealthy people get up to... So... I binned it. And instead,

Yesterday, my wife took over a chicken mozambique (kind of mild curry thing) to a brilliant and very very wealthy deep coal gas engineer who lives in a mansion in the premier local suburb.

I had to warn her to tell him though, before he ate it, that there is a difference between fresh hand-ground spices and proper traditional cooking, and the commercial cooking he might have been used to from going out to commercial restaurants.

Now I watch Dr. Phil as much as any of the other several million+ of his viewers, but let me tell you, illicit drugs are dangerous but I don't think it really is true that illicit drugs are as powerful as a properly-made Tamil curry or a Mozambique chicken 'casserole.'

Well, okay though, this is how you get to eat these things with me at my place:

...firstly, it's late afternoon or evening. There are uniformed people who massage you for as long as three hours or so in the massage rooms, using myrrh and benzoin and almond oil. You wear comfortable slippers and something loose and you are taken into the dining area, which is in candle-light and the orange glow of the warming brazier. Suddenly 'Diving Faces' by Liquid Child hits up deeply on the Bose. People wear emeralds around the table.

Glass Slipper - by Louboutin

You sit in Jarrah and leather dining chairs designed by my friend Karl Teuchert (I drag him out of heaven for this) of ARTRA and someone offers you champagne. And then the food is brought in and you are served. And you get to see some novelty, or some innovation, something new, always something new...

And let me tell you, you are not going to remember much else until you wake up the next day.

See the water, wine, bread...? We are the meat & potatoes.

And another thing – this is all real stuff I'm talking about here. Ordinary cardamom seeds out of the pods, if toasted a little and mixed with cloves tops and mace shroud (fresh), in some kind of delicious food will knock your socks clean off. Try it if you don't believe me. The staff don't need to be wearing Nombre Noir or SL's R de N, but that also helps and if you are conned by me into drinking the champagne out of straws (concentrates the gasses), you won't last thirty minutes. Wealth is what it is. And it isn't money per se.

Next post, I talk about Beef Bourguignone, one of the most complex dishes to do correctly, but one of the most rewarding when done correctly.

John E. N. Ward (himself).

Samsara - the eternal return

“Travelling forward to the past...” (A phrase from an old SAMSARA perfume advertisement.)

I must confess I was a little disconcerted when I saw Dame Stella Rimington on morning television today. She's been on and off the media over a few years now and she still seems to speak with a freshness and interest in her voice that either tells me she's been having a great retirement, or that she loves to share reminiscences about her old job as the one-time head of MI5.

And who wouldn't?! I knew this and that and I couldn't tell – and now I can. Sort of.

So we've had Germaine Greer tour through Oz just recently, and now Dame Stella. What's going on – that we should be 'graced' with these U.K. luminaries at the moment?

Dame Stella said her role at MI5 was as a protector. And she kinda said a few words about Islamic terrorists and begged off what she did about it in her time saying: hey, well, she had had her hands full with the IRA back then.

Not a spy

At least she acknowledged it wasn't exactly 'a war...' As in, 'a war on terrorism.'

I think these people are all a little naiive. Actually I am referring to the entire enclave that has had the public – especially the public of the United Kingdom by the throat since around Thatcher. In the evenings recently I've been watching Rebekah Brooks talk down both to a very senior judge as well as a quite brilliant QC. And I'm also sick of listening to Greer and hope she'll soon be consigned to a wheelchair and parked alongside that other piece of Oxford/Cambridge mischief Stephen Hawking.

Here's my question: did Dame Stella have no clue whatsoever that Rupert Murdoch was running quite the efficient little industry bugging thousands and thousands of people all over the United Kingdom all that time? Not even a tiny-teensy little clue...? Well hell boyh! MI5 screens and monitors the top cops and civil servants don't they? For gun analysts they sure as hell couldn't apparently work out the significance of the associations that were being maintained!

The top lady spy's story appears to be that one of the great capabilites of the master/lady spy from London Town is to be able to walk into a pub full of men, and strike up a conversation and extract a lot of detailed information about stuff from the unsuspecting target.

Uh-huh. Okay.

Actually I hope that Brooks doesn't get stepped on too much, go to jail and all that kind of thing. She's just doing a job for lots of dough. Same as I might, maybe, given similar circumstances, maybe. Who knows. Her boss is a crooked-minded individual who simply just doesn't realise that he is that – who's had the run of the whole place for a good long while. Enough already, Rupert!

Anyway, if they drag it all out, Rupert Murdoch will fall off the perch before Brooks is squeezed too hard. At least they've been apprehended at least. Though not by MI5, m'lud.

But notice how the media's use of Rimington has set the agenda again? Back to 'the terrorists!' And away from those right under her nose trampling over people's legal rights every day. Still. I wonder which media company publishes her books. Well, actually I don't wonder, do I.

Best Austerities,

Calvin J. Bear

Immersive Luxury

Immersive luxury. That's the current catch-phrase in the big marketing houses who do Mercedes, BMW, and all the rest of that expensive middle class trash. I think an academic name of Gilles Laurent came up with some kind of study that claimed really wealthy people, when examined as to their lifestyles and habits, spent a lot of time – in other words, were immersed – using certain items and objects that could therefore more truly define the concept of 'luxury,' compared to many other commercial products that were generally, and probably incorrectly, also given the title of luxury products. I've scanned the study itself and think that it is terribly flawed, but that hasn't stopped the manufacturers of expensive stuff exploiting the academic cachet of the phrase 'immersive luxury.'

So, according to the researchers, food, music – and basically a lot of things commanding smaller dollars per unit – were not luxury items. What utter rubbish. It takes around 18 months to properly process a vanilla bean pod – not sure how much longer these idiots want you to immerse yourself in a luxury thing, but layering your mistress's french lace panties over half a dozen bourbon vanilla beans is decadent, and having her soak her tender pink feet in vanilla pod foot-baths will draw the vanilla essential oils up through the ascending bloodstream and help you correctly identify pussy in a masked party in a dark ballroom underneath a black satin-shrouded table on a dark night with only a few tea-lights showing the way to the ends of the obfuscated tunnels...

A vanilla bean is, I believe, in fact more expensive by weight than a new Mercedes... But it doesn't take a ridiculous sum to own the experience thereof, nor utilise the value therein.

A decent sweaty martini is a very great luxury between people who know each other well enough to have martinis together with.

Okay, I like the pink diamond in this pic, I find it a touch too middle-class Sino-design centric for my own absolute taste, but now, it is expensive, but I rather doubt anyone will be immersed in it so long that it would seem like an unhealthy obsession. But it is luxury! And so is the martini, the vanilla bean, Al Pacino's espresso, Cavalli's latest fragrance edp, and any number of things some of which may be had for small money by unit of. It isn't about money. Luxury is about quality, pleasure, and passion. And knowledge. A Paul Van Dyke album is extreme luxury. If you understand it.


Best,

J.

Abducting The Cook

What do people get up to when they have few real problems?

Well, there was a thing that used to go on occasionally when I was around ten or so... Abducting of cooks. Yep. In fact there was this one particular older lady from India somewhere – though from memory I don't think she was northern Indian. She was incredibly good. She could cook dishes from absolutely anywhere but she had a few specialties for which she was absolutely famous. In fact she was unreasonably good.

Who started it all were a set of brothers and cousins who all carried the middle names of 'Roxborough.' Although their mother was from a stonkingly wealthy shipping family (not related to me however, sadly), their father shockingly insisted on making his own money as well, from doctoring or surgeoning or something of the like... The outcome was that the kids always had better toys and gadgets than the kids from all the other wealthy families with generally one stay-at-home parent. And, for some reason no one could ever fathom, they managed to have the time and patience to put together those ridiculously big and complicated Revel plastic kits of huge battle ships...

But they didn't possess the best cook.

The best cook belonged to another 'doctor family' – this time with the wife being the doctor and the husband an Oxford law and history graduate who for family reasons and politics was 'merely' a senior school teacher.

My own thrown-together mild chicken curry
from last night.

...And then one day the cook was abducted by the reprobate kids and forced to cook for them one weekend in secret when there was a gathering celebrating Churchill's birthday or Gandhi's ascension to heaven or the General Milk Company's contracting the doctors for some mercantile purpose, or something. The big families were going to have their household cooks do the honours, you see.

The whole thing was as far as I can recall both the greatest scandal and the most intrepid and successful event the country had witnessed since WWII ended. The tale of how the victim-family was invited to sample the dishes at table to see whether they could detect what was going on or not ranks as the biggest prank ever carried out in the hallowed dining rooms of the upper crust of this particular country that shall remain nameless here. I feel absolutely sure that cases of Tiger Beer were donated by the brewery beforehand so that the targeted doctor was as sozzled as possible before eating his own abducted cook's fare.

But then, it didn't end there because ransom was demanded in fact, for the cook to be returned, no one ever admitted formally to who had purloined the cook, and I am pretty sure both money changed hands, and the cook had to spend time at another household as well, that had bribed the kids to get her for a week, I think.

Oh yes wait a minute, I remember, (now) Professor Derek Llewelyn-Jones and Major Hunt of the Everest Expedition were g's-o.-h., at the dinner. Nothing to do with Gandhi or Churchill or General Milk.

Ah, those were the days. And those were the people. They don't make 'em like that any more. Well not much like that anyways.

Best, Calvin J. Bear

The Roman Pornocracy

If you are very well-read, let's not say 'educated' - it means something entirely different today to what it meant fifty years ago... Well, if you are knowledgable, the thought will occasionally occur to you that so-and-so must have access to the higher books of learning, in spite of what is commonly portrayed about them.

I ask myself, now and then, for instance, what books does Paris Hilton read? She shows, apart from the obvious things she shows, that she has some fundamental appreciation about higher culture. What that will turn out in the end to shape of her life I cannot detect, but she will likely not make certain types of mistakes that others have made who are in the spotlight and have wealth and position of some kind. I think in particular right now of Lord Black – Conrad Black – of Hollinger International, the previously quite substantial media group. And I think of Lord Black in terms of the current Lord Leveson Inquiry into the machinations of the print media in London. Oddly, at least it seems so to me, there has been no instance or indication that any of Conrad Black's newspapers were engaged in the same scandalous behaviour that Rupert Murdoch's were. How two competing participants within the same industry grouping could behave apparently so diametrically differently in their commercial practices begs the question why Conrad Black experienced so much animus against him.

No, there is no printable answer; for we are living in the last times of Rome under Nero, that is abundantly clear. There is a particular kind of stubborn stupidity in anyone believing that we are not; it is unreasonable any longer no matter how pacific you may want your equanimity to be. It's the ostrich-in-the-sand thing!

It has been all too easy for Rupert Murdoch's Octopus arms to imply mud where there wasn't any, and to have the hypothetical mud stick with tangible effect, while the strictly legally tangible stuff was dragged out in tricky courts over too many years with underlying animus driving officers of the court, frankly. Young Conrad Black was, I fear, a rich youth naiive about the sharks in the pond. He displayed his wealth too openly to too many and had too much fun, and this was of course a sin to the Puritans. Ever was it thus: Jesus was feared by the Romans to be the literal blood claimant to Caeser's family wealth and title, and at least 50-something claimants to the legal title to inheritance of James Stuart's Mint of silver coin were around the place when the self-promoting Puritan, Cromwell, stole King Charles' money.

Little that I should care though. I care for things like what Paris Hilton reads, and how Deanne Berry keeps motivated in her fitness regimes, and who the hell devised the SuitSupply of Holland's advertising campaign. As I say, we are living in those times that in Rome were called 'the Pornocracy.' And when in Rome...

Best,

Calvin J. Bear