Chab Gassie

Sishway’s parents told her never to dance.

“Don’t dance,” they told her. “We want you to do things other than what will make you happy. Like learn about business or something else that is considered heartless. You can see where we’re going with this.”

“Yes mother and father,” was all she said with her head down and her hand in a bucket of ice for some reason.

But every day after school she would go to the temple and dance for exactly 45 minutes. The holy men understood the importance of exploring the soul and her feet squeaking over the floor helped polish the holy tiles. They waited for her every day at 3.38pm and some of them would beat their drums, pluck their harps and knaw on their electric guitars as she expressed herself through body movements and not standing still in general.

One day, on her eighth birthday, one of the holy men finally spoke to her.

“Why don’t you dance for longer? When you take away your stretching, warm up and cool down time, you only dance for, like, seventeen minutes.”

“I didn’t know you could talk.”

“Why would you think that?”

So she danced for 65 minutes instead from that day forth and then when she was twelve she gave it up because she wasn’t that good at it anyway.

I feel the need to make the following information available to the public regarding xiaolongbao (sometimes shaolongbao) to ensure as many people as possible out there live enjoyable and meaningful lives.

1. Xiaolongbao exist

I hadn’t heard of xiaolongbao until I moved to Melbourne and now I spend my nights mourning for my lost childhood. This is why I must inform everybody, especially children, that xiaolongbao  do exist and they are delicious.

They are kind of dim-simmy with meat and liquid inside. The best ones I have had were at HuTong Dumpling Bar, but I’ve had some pretty good ones as Shanghai Dumpling House as well.

Just to repeat, xioalongbao exist.

2. Learn to use chopsticks NOW

I don’t see how you could properly eat xiaolongbao with a fork so you need to start practicing your chopsticks skills now to prepare you for when you encounter xiaolongbao. They’ll come to you in a bamboo steaming dish with greaseproof paper on the bottom. You’ll have to pinch one off the paper with chopsticks and then quickly put a spoon underneath to pick it up. If you poke it with a fork or try to dig it out with a spoon, you’ll most likely pierce the wrapping and the liquid filling will leak out. This will be annoying to you and your dining companions.

3. Don’t spill the soup.

When you pierce the outer layer of a xiaolongbao you will release steam and probably soup. It is recommended you do this before eating one to ensure you don’t burn your mouth. But this doesn’t mean you need to spill the soup on top of the other xiaolongbao (see figure 1). If you use the chopsticks/spoon method you need not spill anything. I recommend you practice picking up xioalongbao at home by half filling some water balloons and picking them up from a plate.

Consult your local Chinese dumpling bar to learn more about xiaolongbao.

Figure 1

The first vote I ever cast was for the Legistlative Assembly in Canberra and it was for Paul Osborne. Osborne was a former Canberra Raider who I thought was really cool. So I put a number one next to his name, but over the next few years he aligned himself with fundamentalist Christians and used his power to pass odd and unnecessary legislation, including one law which made it mandatory for those thinking of having an abortion to be given a booklet which outlined graphic details of the procedure. Worst of all, he seriously was not cool. Not cool at all. There was something wrong with that man. I learnt my lesson and now I always pay attention during elections.

These days I get a little obsessed over election campaigns because I have a background in media and communications and like to analyse how the parties use these things.

Gillard

One thing I have learned in doing advertising is that most people will take in what you tell them. This is why when Gillard said she was changing from the old Julia to the real Julia, a lot of voters understood and accepted this without deconstructing or analysing why she was saying this or even if it made sense. It is a sad fact that most people just take in messages like this.

The ALP has easily won the online battle with the Liberals only noticeable contribution being angry Tweeters and bloggers pounding out negativity. Here is should be noted that while I said people take anything they’re told on board, it still needs to come from somebody with some sort of reputation or authority, which is why these angry people are largely ingnored.

Abbott

Tony Abbott has always been a support character in politics and he has done that well, but now he’s stepped up as a main character and we’re seeing a little too much of him. You know those episodes on TV where a minor character is suddenly the focus of a storyline to build his or her character, but then a few episodes later it hasn’t really worked out so the writers put them back into the background? It’s kind of like that. Or to use an example everybody will understand, maybe like those episodes of the Simpsons where they focus on Principal Skinner for an episode and by the end of it the mannerisms that are usually funny in small doses – his dorkiness and the fact he lives with his mother – get repetitive and you start to flipping cushions as you search for the remote.

I did find it interesting when, at the Rooty RSL debate, he moved about two meters from on top of a stage to just in front of a stage and this gave him a massive advantage to Gillard who had remained on the stage. Again, people don’t think about these things, but good on him for being advised to move that two meters.

Abbott does have an unfair advantage in that SkyNews has a very lovely reporter in his camp beaming out reports every ten minutes while Gillard has some weird looking guy. This should be the topic of a Royal Commission in my opinion.

Final and 100% accurate prediction

My prediction is that Gillard will win by five seats with the help of the Greens, who will get about 12% of the primary vote. Abbott will stay on as leader and get rolled after eight months. People will ignore my call for a Royal Commission.

I am scheduled to get a tasty tax return so like a true Australian who doesn’t think much about the future and what may happen if, say, the tax return was miscalculated and doesn’t go through, I went and spent most of it.

So I bought myself 72 Copic markers because that was something I really, really wanted. Have you ever tried drawing with one? The wetness of the ink and the nib makes everything feel just great. It makes everything in the world seem just right and OK. I highly recommend it. Cruisy.

They’re kind of tricky to use but I’m getting there. They do a decent panda.

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I went into this exhibition with low expectations. This is because whenever I said ‘I’m going to see the European Masters thing at the National Gallery of Victoria’ whomever I told would say, ‘Oh, I hear it’s not as good as the Dali exhibition.’

This isn’t a smart thing to say because the Dali exhibition was a freak. It had people lining up from Southbank to Docklands. This doesn’t usually happen at an art gallery. Also it isn’t fair to compare two exhibitions just because they were held in the same place. You wouldn’t compare Lord of the Rings with two teenagers fumbling awkwardly in the dark simply because you saw both of these things in the movie theatre.

The point is, don’t compare anything else at the NGV to Dali ever.

Before going into this exhibition I recommend eating something because there are a lot of art works. I got exhausted, but maybe that’s because you can get right up close and almost put your nose on the canvas to examine every stroke to try to see how these geniuses worked – the security guards hardly complained at all.

I didn’t realise that a lot of the painters were quite young when they did some of the works on display at NGV; we’re talking 18-25. So why did they do amazing, ground-breaking work which has lasted over a century, while so-called creative 18-25 year olds these days write bad poetry about the USA, get tribal tattoos and make collages made from newspaper headlines and magazine models?

The exhibition gets 5 out of 5 because it was damn good.

Of course I got all inspired and tried to do something like the impressionists later on. Except I used a computer and wasn’t outside or actually looking at the thing, so I failed.