Revenge Of The Roosters!

Yeah. I kinda thought this might happen.

One of the problems with free-range chicken is that sometimes it can be a mite too free range. It's like the difference between a fit, healthy jogger and an Olympic marathon specialist, y'know? All that butchery yesterday... I took a good, long look at the carcasses in question, and thought: I'm going to slow-cook these bastards. Very carefully.

This I did. And might I say the flavour was astonishing. I jointed the critters, dredged 'em in flour, salt and pepper, and browned 'em in butter. Then I put 'em into a big casserole dish along with onions, mushrooms, garlic, heaps of tarragon, about a litre of chopped roma tomatoes, a cup of white wine and enough stock to bring it up to the level I wanted. The whole schmeer went into the oven at 140C for about three hours.

Meanwhile, I put together a green salad. Sliced up some potatoes, fried 'em with chopped green onions and more tarragon and pepper. And every now and again, I turned the bits of chicken to ensure they cooked nicely.

At the time of serving, I poked the chicken with a knife and fork, and I admit I was slightly dismayed. But I soldiered on, loaded up the kids' plates, and we settled in for a meal.

Elder Son was the first one to crack. He chawed at his drumstick/thigh combination, then paused and looked at it closely. Then he looked at me. Then he grabbed his knife and kind of stabbed it, but nothing much happened.

"I can't eat this," he opined. "This chicken is too tough!"

What I refrained from saying was the truth: that if this chicken had met James Cameron at the right time, Arnold Schwarzenegger's film career would have died in the ass, and the Terminator series would have been made about mutant farm-fowls from the future, not some pansy-ass goddam robot. No... what I actually said was this:

"Come on, boy! We're human beings. Homo sapiens! Your hunter-gather ancestors would have killed for a meal like this! They would have wept over the exquisite flavours, and raised the mighty hunter upon their shoulders in celebration!"

He looked at me again, and had another go.

Meanwhile, Younger Son had put his drumstick/thigh chunk down, and was giving it a very piercing look. I, on the other hand, had the upper half of the bird -- sans wings, which were on the Mau-Mau's plate -- and was busy separating the flight muscles from the breastbone with much growling and gnashing of teeth.

Younger Son looked at me. I growled some more. Then I said: "Dammit, boy! We're at the top of the food chain! We are the uberpredators! Are we going to let ourselves be beaten by a mere chicken? Will we flee the table, admitting that a simple barnyard bird is tougher than we are?"

His eyes narrowed. He raised his chunk of chicken in both hands, lunged forward, and snapped. I saw the tendons in his neck stand out, the muscles at his jaw knot. He growled, and whipped his head back and forth like a savage wolf, and tore a chunk of dark, dark flesh away from the bone.

The Mau-Mau didn't even try. She just licked all the tarragon and tomato off the outside of her chicken wings, ate her salad and potatoes, and demanded custard.

When Natalie came home, the kids were in the bath. I had defeated the upper half the bird by dint of age, experience, bloody-mindedness and the fact that it actually tasted fucking brilliant. Younger Son had dealt with most of a thigh and a significant portion of drumstick, but the sheer bloodlust in his eyes and the vicious growling noises were making me a little nervous, so I let him call it quits. Elder son bent a knife and a fork, and managed a bite of the drumstick.

I stuck some sausages in the lovely casseroly stuff, and whacked it back in the oven. Natalie duly tried the chicken and discovered for herself that it could have gone twelve rounds with Mike Tyson, and still been able to bite the bastard's ear off later. But the casseroled sausages went down really well...

... so.

I'm guessing that future roosters from that particular source will be used for the making of stock. And given the flavour of the birds, I think they'll do an excellent job. But there's no way I'm trying anything else with the bastards. There's Sylvester-Stallone-Rambo tough. There's Clint-Eastwood-Dirty-Harry-Tough. There's Jason-Statham-Chev-Chelios-tough.

And then there's free-range, Killer Commando Chicken tough.

Why Is Science So Lame?

Seriously. I mean, scientists are forever dicking around trying to cure malaria or unravel the genome to cancer, or maybe build shinier solar stuff, when what the world really needs is completely something else.

Non-fartogenic beer. That's a good example, right there. Who's out there, researching day and night to save us all from stinking great eye-watering, ass-burning beer farts? Nobody, that's who. But if you turned up tomorrow with fart-proof beer that tasted great and got you drunk just as fast -- dude, they wouldn't be able to get your name on the Nobel scrolls fast enough.

But that's not what I'm really talking about right now. Fart-proof beer isn't a bad idea, but what the world really, really needs is a self-disassembling chicken. Absolutely.

See, today we had some visitors. Actually, we had a couple today, and one leftover from the night before . That was Miss M the Student Dietician who turned up last night for Thai fish stew, and crepes with home-made vanilla ice-cream and garden-fresh raspberries. She stuck around to watch Igor up in the Cinema Zone with Clan Flinthart, plus a whole lot of popcorn and a large pitcher of that gin and curacao stuff... made for a good evening all around.

So Miss M and Nat and the kids were all hitting the blueberry pancakes this morning when our other visitors arrived -- a couple of local folk, who brought with them a pair of goddam roosters. Why? Because the local folk in question, who are perfectly lovely people in their own right, are animal softies. They rescue 'em. And keep 'em. And look after 'em.

And they aren't much chop when it comes to going the chop-chop with the excess of roosterage.

Enter Mr Flinthart and his Cleaver of Chicken Slaughteration.

Once the visitors toddled off, I felt I could go about Silencing the Roosters without alarming anyone unduly. So I seized the cleaver in question, opened the travel cage, and pulled out one of the big, white chooky bastards.

Cranky bloody thing it was, too. Lots of blurrrking and borrking, and attempts to gouge yours truly with the impressively large and sharp spurs on the back of the feet. Nasty. No wonder the lovely visitor-folks wanted rid of the damned things...

So I took Rooster One out to the wood-chop zone, and laid its head on the block. And who should come bolting around the corner but Younger Son, eh? Mightily excited, he is. Apparently some banana-brain has told him that chooks run around after you cut their heads off, and he is truly desperate to see...

...great.

No, I'm not gonna consult with Natalie, I figure. The Younger Son needs to understand how this stuff works if he's going to eat meat. I'm no vegetarian, as you all know -- but I don't have much time for people who will eat meat, but can't face the ugly facts behind that delicious, tasty meal. If you can't bring yourself to kill and clean the meat for your table, sez I, stick to the greenery. And no: I've never slaughtered a cow. But the odd lamb, occasional goat kid, and wallaby? Yep. Without blinking.

So I shrugged, and brought down the cleaver - which is fiendish sharp, oh yes - and Rooster One loses its Command and Control module. The head sits there on the chopping block, blinking and opening its beak remarkably like unto a chicken too stupid to know that it's dead, while the body leaps about, flapping and spraying blood, and Younger Son stares in fascinated horror...

I don't think he's going to have nightmares. But just to help him along, I made him put the head into the compost heap. And then, after I plunged Rooster One into a pot of boiling water to loosen the feathers, I left Younger Son hard-a-pluck, and introduced Rooster Two to a chunk of century-old hand-crafted German steel.

And there was much plucking, and stench of wet feathers, and then there was gutting and there was blood and me with my hand deep in a dead chicken's body cavity, grouting around for the little fraggy bits that you can never quite get loose. And at some point or another, Elder Son came out just as Younger Son discovered that you can squeeze a dead chicken and activate its voicebox, so there was macabre Zombie Chicken noise happening. And Elder Son wanted to know what was going on, so I called him over to help hold the remaining unviolated chicken corpse, and just as he was about to reach for it I gave it a squeeze and it went "blu-urrk!" in a convincingly chickenlike fashion and he jumped about a metre and a half and Younger Son fell about the place laughing, getting blood and feathers all over himself, and earning me the Wrath of Natalie who was Not At All Amused by Zombie Chicken antics.

Now both plucked, cleaned corpses are reposing quietly in the bottom of my refrigerator. Tomorrow I will joint them, season them, and slow bake them until they're crispy golden brown, to be served with new potatoes and garden salad and maybe a nice dry white wine... but nevertheless, it was still a horrid, ugly, stinky, feathery sort of job. And what I really want for Christmas, dear Science, is a chicken that will kill itself. And then shed all its feathers in a single fluffy cloud. And then fall apart into nice, neatly sectioned joints, with the giblets in a pile of ugly in the centre, ready to be properly disposed of.

Is that too much to ask, O Mighty Geneticists? Or are you too busy diddling around with second-rate shit like AIDS, Swine Flu, and a cure for Stephen Conroy?

... actually, I have to admit that I'd be prepared to accept a cure for Stephen Conroy. That would be cool too.

What's A Science Fiction Writer To Do?

Jeez.

I love a good piece of fiction as much as anyone. But it's rough when supposed newspapers get into the SF act. Check this article here. Really. It's pretty funny, in a po-faced "you're supposed to take this shit seriously" way.

I particularly like this section:

In addition, popular NASA and space researcher, Richard Hoagland, has publicly come forward to reveal that the October 9, LCROSS ‘bombing’ mission of the moon, discovered an ancient base at the moon’s South Pole. Reviewing the scientific data achieved by NASA’s LCROSS mission, Hoagland concluded, also on the popular late night Coast to Coast AM radio show, that “LCROSS is part of a carefully constructed campaign to prepare the populace for imminent disclosure. The President of the United States will soon announce that scientists have discovered ruins on the moon, he added. Nobody saw the LCROSS debris plume because the probes struck a building which swallowed the effects of the explosion.”

I mean -- that shit's gold, right there. But seriously, how's an SF writer supposed to get a look-in if the journalists are printing this kinda stuff? Should I be trying to convince the editor of the Examiner.com that I should have a column of my own? I'm definitely capable of spinning much more convincing crap than that. But is that a good thing? Do they want SF that sounds plausible? Or is their target market wedded to tinfoil hats and mad-arsed conspiracy theories?

Never mind. Since all the revelations are due to happen before the end of 2009, we shouldn't have to put up with this much longer. And I suppose it's more entertaining than sightings of Elvis, eh?

Idle Moments #4

Snot Escalation

Mrrphph.

Okay, yeah. For the first time in my forty-odd years, I've been suffering hay fever. Bastard grass pollen: sinuses full of wet concrete, itchy eyes. Bastard bastard bastard.

But those shiny new all-day antihistamines have been keeping me going nicely. I've been dropping one every night before bed, and sleeping reasonably well as a result. And that's all I ask. I can hack a bit of snot by day, but I really do need to breathe easily to sleep.

For some reason, though, the last couple days it hasn't gone so well. I couldn't work out why.

At least, I couldn't until this morning, when I woke up with a sore throat and a cough too. Y'see, all three of my offspring have had varying degrees of cold, cough, sniffles for nearly a week. And apparently, my number has finally come up. The Ubiquitous Hay-Fever Snot masked it, though, and it wasn't until the illness escalated that I figured out something was wrong.

Bloody typical it should happen on a day when the temperature spiked up at 29C. That's not unbearable by any means, but it's not goddam comfortable, and I always feel shittier when I've got a head cold and it's hot outside. Pfah. Vile micro-organisms! Abandon my nasal passages or face the wrath of the Flinthart immune system!

In other news: the last of the medical students goes home tomorrow. We didn't actually see nearly as much of her as we'd like in her two weeks, but that's how it goes. I'll be driving her to the airport at 0700 or so tomorrow, which will give me a day in Launceston with the Mau-Mau to get some Christmas shopping done.

It's the last day of school for the year tomorrow, too. Yay! One more set of obligations scratched off there.

Meanwhile, the raspberries are coming in, and the first of the black berries are ripening. I picked two litres of raspberries yesterday, and another two litres today, and about a litre of blackberries today to match the half-litre yesterday. Mmmmm.

It was good, though. Gave me an excuse to rev up the cooking tonight -- smoke-grilled vegetable salad with sea-salt, pepper, and balsamic vinegar; smoky grilled salmon with home-grown dill and lemon... and for dessert, a raspberry medley. That included fresh raspberries, raspberry sorbet, and raspberry pandowdy topped with fresh whipped cream.

Of course, I had a couple nice beers with it, and promptly felt like shit... fuck I hate head colds.

Mandatory Video Footage

That would be Elder Son, more or less performing Silent Night on the cello before the assembled masses of parents at the School Awards ceremony this morning. Poor little bugger: he's got some kind of cold/throat lurgi, and he's mostly lost his voice. I promised him we could scarper immediately after he did his gig, but shortly after I arrived, one of the teachers quietly nixed that plan. Apparently they had an academic award to give him, so he had to stay.

Happily, he shared the award with his very best friend, so a happy ending came to all. Except me, of course. Because the full award ceremony went for two hours. Sigh.

Tonnes of laundry have been done, and I've officially farmed out the job in the future to the boys. Elder Son will gather laundry, load, operate and unload the machine. Younger Son will fold and sort clean, dry loads. They'll both score 50c for such operations, which should work out okay, since we've got a moderate-sized front-load machine, not a monstrous great toploader.

Of course, I'll still be dragged into the hanging up and taking down bit of the process, because the clothesline is a bit too high for the kids. But at least it throws some of the responsibility onto the little barstewards. Let's see how much dirty laundry they generate NOW, eh?

Dinner is almost prepped: twice-cooked baby taters, and chicken stuffed with sundried tomatoes, onions, and home-made meatballs (leftovers from a barbecue the other day), slathered with tomato paste and basil (stuffed in under the skin and all), wrapped in a big dough sheet and slow-baked; fresh garden salad. Of course, I won't be eating because as soon as Natalie or the babysitter gets here, I'll be off to sword training.

Never mind. We're getting closer to the end of the year every day.

Staggering Towards The Finish Line

Natalie made it back from Canberra on Friday evening/afternoon, and promptly had to be on-call. At least the night went fairly smoothly.

Yesterday we were double booked. Elder Son was committed to perform on cello for his music teacher's end-of-year concert. Meanwhile, Younger Son had his birthday party scheduled. Kind of necessary: poor bugger's born on Christmas Eve, so it's tough to gather his friends on the day itself.

We had to split it. Natalie took Elder Son into Launceston. I understand there was a practice in the morning, then a break of a few hours before the concert itself. They went to see Planet 51, but I'm informed that Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs is better.

Meanwhile, that left me as Party Dad. I baked a chocolate cake in the shape of one of those Warner Bros cartoons -- black and round, with a bit sticking out at the top with a fuse. It was only 2d, since I couldn't figure out how to make a spherical cake keep its integrity, but I did write TNT on it in red icing.

Younger Son was delighted, particularly as the black (did you know you can get black food colouring now? True!) icing was strongly peppermint flavoured. The whole ensemble was his request anyhow. Where does he get these bent ideas?

Other than laying in a stock of party food, my only other preparation for the party consisted of hastily wrapping a last-minute present (a snorkel and mask set) and buying a bunch of high-powered waterguns. And that, my friends, was a stroke of genius.

It was a warm, sunny day. The boys arrived. They seized the waterguns, and it was on.

First, they hunted the dog. (I pitied the beast.) Round and about, over and under, they pursued the poor bastard like paparazzi spotting a blonde hair on Tiger Woods' shoulder. After the dog finally disappeared completely, they turned on each other like the feral beasts they are.

Mid-day until two this went on. At two, they filled up on sausages and birthday cake, and then they decided to watch a Godzilla flick on the big screen in the shed. I made lots of popcorn and cordial, and set them up comfortably.

Within half an hour, they'd give poor Godzilla the arse, and they were back out in watergunland. Oh, and did I mention that the Mau-Mau had her best friend up for the afteroon as well? They were armed too.

The second phase of the Great Watergun Massacre went until five in the afternoon, when parents finally realised their kids had been missing for some time...

By then, of course, Natalie was back with Elder Son. And a couple random visitors had dropped by, just to jazz up the day a little. So I fed a whole lot of people, and failed to get much of any use done.

Today? Well, Nat took the kids to the swimming pool in the morning for a while, and that was nice. But Mad Neighbour Anna had a soiree in the afternoon, and I'd promised a salad, so there was shopping, and similar. (The salad was good, by the way: prawns, turmeric rice, cucumber, capsicum, spring onion, heaps of coriander and sushi dressing. Yay!)

Then I took a Dremel tool to the soles of my feet, which are once again cracked and callused... blah. Hurts like hell to walk, lately. And there's no use fucking around with pumice stones or the like. I have an odd skin condition which causes rapid formation of callus and keratin layers, so the hide on my feet is just too thick to confront with anything short of power tools. Seriously. It took me half an hour with a sanding drum on a Dremel to remove the gargoylish armour. But with the keratinized plates reduced, the remaining skin will be more flexible, less prone to cracking. For a brief period, anyway.

The afternoon party went very nicely. Again: warm and sunny. The kids played in and around the spring-fed pond next to Mad Neighbour Anna's house. We drank wine, and glögg (pronounced 'glerg'; and I'm assured that since it's Swedish, the two dots above the o in glögg do NOT comprise an Umlaut. That is German, I was told with a very severe look. But I didn't get told what the Swedes call their umlauts...). I should point out that glögg is Swedish for "mulled wine", so it wasn't a terrifying experience or anything. Frankly, a little disappointing. I always envisioned glögg as something that might invade Earth or stomp Tokyo, maybe.

The turnout wasn't enormous, but it was lovely. Genuinely marvellous people. The kids had a great time, I drank wine and ate good food and argued ecology and dams and education and good stuff like that... and then it was time to bring the kids home to bed.

Tomorrow, Elder Son has to perform on the cello at the schools awards thingy. And in the evening, I have sword training -- but Natalie is on call (probably) because one of the docs at the surgery has had a bit of a family emergency, and everybody is rallying 'round. We've organized babysitters, though, so I can still go... which is good, 'cause it's the last sword session until February.

So as you can see, things are slowly, slowly easing. There will be no ju-jitsu on Wednesday. School finishes Thursday, or maybe Friday. Sword training finishes tomorrow night. Younger Son's party is out of the way. Cello and violin commitments are nearly done. The end is in sight...

... if I can just survive that long.