KICK-ASS MOTHER-FUCKING NACHOS

At the moment i am in New York, it is 5 am I woke up at 3am because the heater is broken. I thought it would be good to blog my favorite dinner-party recipe at the moment.

KICK-ASS MOTHER-FUCKING NACHOS

You need to make Chilli, Tomato Salsa, Guacamole, sour cream (well... you can buy sour cream) and get some unsalted/unflavoured corn chops

Chilli Con Carne

Chilli Con Carne is like the easiest thing to make in the world. You can do what you like, it just doesn't matter. I change it around depending on what I've got in the cupboard and depending on who's eating it. I like it really hot, don't be such a pussy. You want it a bit hotter then you think because you have the sour cream and guacamole in the dish cooling everything down later.
Cook it for as long as you can, anywhere from 20 minutes to 3 hours.

You need: (I am leaving these super vague. If you don't cook much and that stresses you out you can find a recipe online but they are all stupidly complicated. As long as you have enough tomato to keep it wet it will taste OK. Just follow your heart)
Beef Mince
Onion
Paprika
Cumin (optional)
Dried/powdered chilli
fresh chilli (optional)
Tinned Tomato
tinned red kidney beans

fry onion with the paprika, cumin, dried/powdered chilli.
Add the mince and brown it.
Add the tomato
Cook for as long as possible on a low heat. Covered if you are cooking it for more then 1/2 hour or so. Maybe you will have to add water every so often
add the fresh chilli and kidney beans near the end, (they are already cooked in the tin) add the fresh chilli

if you are making nachos then put it in a an oven-able tray, sprinkle lots of cheese on it put it in an oven/under a grill to melt the cheese


Tomato Salsa
You need:
Chopped fresh Tomatoes
red onion
Coriander
Lime juice
salt and pepper

add them all together, let it sit for like 20 minutes. I don't like too much red onion maybe 1/3 a red onion to 2 tomatoes.

Guacamole
Dice some avocado, add some garlic and some lime juice. Stir it together with a fork, you don't need to mash the hell out of it.


To serve:
I like to serve everything in separate bowls and everyone just compiles it on their plate at the table. you have to ask each other to pass bowls around, it is nice.

cool, communication isn't my strong-point so if there are any questions just ask. If you make it let me know.

me and tom @ Disneyland

Podcast photos

Hey sorry I know there are supposed to be more pics up to go with the podcast but our internet is lame. I will try again soon

Tom looking inappropriately sexy @ Disney's 'Toon Town'

Me look inappropriately sexy @ Disney's 'Toon Town'

Belgium Diary Part 3: The gig

I left the apartment yesterday thinking I might have been a bit hard of Geel. (I wrote that blog at 6am, jetlagged) I had breakfast at the hotel, The hotel is ridiculously nice. It is some kind of old manor, I am pretty sure it has a kind of moat around it. Maybe it is just a creek. There is a little chicken pen and archways with vines on them. Breakfast was really great.
(note: I know that paragraph was boring but I don’t want to come across too negative so I am mentioning a good thing.)

3 separate people had recommended I go to the local flee market, I ran into Tom Rhodes who is also doing the festival and he was going there so we went together. As he put it ‘Well that killed 4 minutes.’ And there was an overwhelming feeling of ‘what now?’ It was 11am.
I don’t usually wake up that early, it is shocking how much time there is in a day. My god. The things people could achieve with all this time.

I spent the rest of the day preparing for the show.

Sometimes I do gigs on the Gold Coast but I don't really like it because I have to drive and hour home and if it is a bad gig that is a very long drive. (Plus the Gold Coast is a fucking piece of wretched shit)
I couldn't help but think if the gig sucked it would be a very painful flight home.

I think it is pretty amazing that people here would go to an English speaking show. I don’t think if a dutch speaking person came to Australia to do stand up many people would turn up.

I am not really sure how good my my gig was. A girl said to me:
‘Hey cool show. I think some people didn’t understand it because you spoke quite fast. They don’t watch enough Neighbours’

Tomorrow I wil head to London. That is exciting I have only been there once for a day.

Belgium part 2: Geel

I haven’t seen any retards yet. I have seen lots of shops selling adult diapers but no retards. It turns out that Geel has a population of 35 000. It has a massive psychiatric hospital, around 1000 patients (we drove past it. It is about the size of a University) and around 60% of them live in the home. Apparently that is a very good percent and people come from around the world to be cared for here. That is the only reason why someone would come from anywhere else to be here. It is the least interesting town I have ever been to.
There is nothing to do. I said to the hotel receptionist ‘What can I do here’ and she just gave me a blank look. There is a train station that can take me out of town. That is it.
They haven’t even bothered pretending to have a tourist trade. You know how small towns in Australia have a stupid tourist information centre and it tells you about the local park which has a good swing, and the main street which has cafes and restaurants and maybe like a statue of Ned Kelly. All of which you can usually see from the tourist information centre? They don’t even have that much.
I bought some chocolate from a recommended chocolate shop and it really is fucking amazing. I think the town took all their happiness and put it into this chocolate shop and now there is nothing left over.

BELGIUM part 1

I am going overseas for 10 days and will write a daily-ish Diary of my time here. This is part 1

I am currently on my way to Belgium to do a show. I don’t know anything about Belgium. I know they speak a variety of languages, none of them are English and I know they make good chocolate. I am fairly sure the capital is Brussels because that is what is says on my boarding pass. Specifically I am traveling to Geel in Belgium. I looked Geel up on the internet and all I could find out about it is that it is famous for looking after retards very well, and as a result it has a very large population of retards. It is kind of like their Adelaide. So from what I can gather I am on my way to do half hour of stand-up for fat retards who don’t speak English. I can’t help but feel mildly concerned.
When I first found out about it I thought it was the coolest thing every. Mostly caus I could casually say ‘Oh next week I am going to Belgium to do a gig.’ But now I realize that anyone can send an email saying they have an arts centre and promise to pay me a fee that covers my flights. 26 hours into that flight and I can’t help but feel like one of those dopes who fly around to the world to meet a lover they met online. I have a feeling Mandy wil turn out to be a 45 man with red hair.

I am currently at Heathrow airport. Gordon Ramsay has a restaurant here so I decided to have breakfast there even though I wasn’t hungry. Gordon was eating there! I say like 2 metres away from him and stared at him too much. Which is a scary thing to do caus I felt like he would start yelling me. I was going to ask him for a picture but I have been in a plane for 26 hours and don’t need any evidence of what I look like right now. I wish I said hi to him, mostly because it would of made this paragraph of my blog much more interesting.

First Dates

This was originally published in Girlfriend magazine. It appears here unedited.

Lots of things make me feel awkward.

Swimming carnivals makes me feel awkward. Once, when I was a kid, my brother dared me to ask mum what a tampon is. That made me feel very, very awkward. Leaving class to go to the toilet, doing a poo and returning knowing full well that everyone knows you took too much time to go to pee makes me feel awkward.

First dates are worse then all of the above.

They generally go like this: I spend the whole time worried that I am acting like a twat. I make jokes that aren’t funny and then apologise because they aren’t funny and then there is silence. In the silence I decide she hates me. Which doesn’t make sense because I am pretty sure girls don’t generally go on dates with people they hate. Then, because I spent all that time fretting about what she’s thinking and not what I am doing, I accidentally spill a super-coke on my penis in the cinema and am unhappy because I am cold and sticky, but relieved because I finally made her laugh.

That happened on my first ever date. Another time I invited a girl I liked over for dinner. Because I really liked her I decided to shave for the first time ever and I cut my lip. We had an excruciating evening of trying to fill the space with conversation and nervous laughing. I went in to kiss her and the cut opened. I am fairly sure kisses aren’t supposed to end with “I can taste blood”.

When I was 16, just after I got my boat licence, I took a girl out for a romantic cruise. I then crashed the boat into a very large, very unsurprising bridge. I cut my head open and joked “Look I am one step closer to being Harry Potter”. She didn’t laugh. Then my dad and uncle came and picked us up in white budgie-smugglers.

There are lots of other, gentler awkward things you have to deal with on a first date. Who pays for the dinner/movie? It is 2008 surely it is no longer the man’s responsibility? I am fairly sure the hipsters split the bill now, and when I offer to pay I almost feel like I am insulting the girl.

They are all reasons why I don’t like first dates. But, looking back, I think I had a second date with each of those girls. Probably because they spent the whole time worrying that they are acting stupid and that their hair looks bad. They didn’t have time to notice my shortcomings.

I think the trick with first dates, and I have never been able to put this into practice, is to just try and have fun and not worry about the other person. They said ‘yes’ when you asked them out, they definitely like you. They are probably more scared of you then you are of them… like a spider.

Obituary

An Unremarkable Diary: Obituary

In writing class today we had to write our own obituary, I am not sure I followed the task like I was supposed to but here it is:

By the time Josh reached his mid-twenties he had achieved mild fame for being incredibly mediocre at life. Then, seemingly overnight he transformed into an aussie hero. Born in Blackwater but spending his entire childhood in Brisbane, he became a stand-up at age 17. When he was 25 he achieved his life long goal of being voted Cleo’s Most Eligible bachelor. He was most famous for his published collection of romantic memoirs (originally published in Girlfriend magazine) and for being able to crack macadamia nuts between his pecks.
At 26 he was hosting his own tonight show, where me met his first wife ‘Missy Higgins.’ This came as a shock because before this she was a lesbian. They had 3 kids together before Missy tragically died of Breast Cancer. Josh continued to host ‘Josh Tonight’ during the evenings and studied Breast Cancer research during the day, eventually becoming the first person to find a cure for Breast Cancer. He received his first Nobel Prize for this.
Josh released his second book ‘Holy Shit I cured cancer!’ and it became an international bestseller, winning him his second Nobel Prize this time for literature. Shortly after he met his second wife, Nikki Webster. The marriage only lasted 3 days and Josh called it ‘The biggest mistake of my life, even worse then the time I vomited on King Charles.’ When Josh was 30 he retired as a talk show host, wanting to leave the show on a high and travel with his new wife; Delta Goodrum. They spent 4 years together chasing away illegal poachers in Africa, until Delta was tragically struck by lightning and eaten by a Lion.
Josh never remarried, convinced that if he is in a happy marriage his wife will die. He died in New York of a mutant form of cancer surrounded by his children and a variety of whores. He lists his only regret as not staying together with Nikki Webster for long enough for her to have a tragic death.

RIP Metoo

Today was my first day home in a while. The house felt weird, it took me a while to figure out what was different. Then I remembered my dog 'Metoo' had been put down while I was away.

It is such a sad story, his life.

as a puppy he was abused by his owners, they used to tie him to the clothes line and ride around him on motor cycles.
He was taken by the RSPCA and then adopted by my friend Tom's aunty because she didn't want him to be put down. She adopted too many pets and couldn't keep him, so Tom's family adopted him.
Tom moved into a rental house for a year and the metoo kept trying to attack motorcycles on the street, they couldn't fence the house because it was a rental so we offered to look after him until they found a house.

When they eventually found a house they didn't want him back, Tom's mum offered to put him down for us so we kept 'Metoo.' Even though we didn't really like him. (he is the dog in my pictures section 'The shitter one')

At our last house we got lots of complaints about his barking, he went crazy whenever a motor cycle went past. The complaints included death threats, but we couldn't manage to stop him from barking.
When we moved house he kept barking but so did all the dogs in the neighborhood so we hoped it would be OK.

It wasn't, people started to complain again. My Mum had tried lots of things but he wouldn't stop barking so she decided to, at last, put him down.

I found out in a voicemail message from her, I didn't really mind. I felt awful for my mum, having to make a decision like that and having to go through the whole ordeal alone. But I wasn't too sad about Metoo.

Being home today it has sunk in that he is dead. I feel really horrible for him. Killing a kind animal because he is a bit annoying is so... I don't know.
He was so harmless. I was creeped out by the image of him getting excited because mum is taking him for a drive, and then greeting the Vet with the same bounding enthusiasm he greets anyone with to then lie down and be killed. He would of had no idea what is going on, he probably even enjoyed the rare attention. No chance to fight back, no chance to say I'M SORRY GIVE ME ONE LAST CHANCE I WON'T BARK ANYMORE, I JUST REALLY, REALLY HATE MOTORCYCLES.