Long Time No Blog

Not a lot of internet access of late. Meh. Busy: Melbourne, Geelong, Melbourne, warm days in the sun, oh so chilly in the shade. It's amazing how severe the temperature discrepancy can be down here.

The usual range of unique but stereotypical Christmas Hostilities. Many of those Things That Cannot Be Blogged About.

My favorite present from this obsolete pagan ritual was a book called How To Be a Better Foodie"! Excellent culinary snobbery compendium! The only problem that my memory is so bad that I won't remember anything I read.

One deliciously pretentious but unfortunately erroneous thing I noted was that Madagascarian vanilla is sort of considered the bee's knees of vanilla, merely because it is so expensive. A total wank - vanilla is vanilla. It's just that the natural fertilization in the native Central American habitat of the vanilla flower is done by a certain breed of Mexican bee. Those bees don't live in Madagascar, nor do any other insects that naturally do the sticky job, so the farmers who imported the vanilla plants had to develop a technique to fertilize them BY HAND - a very labor intensive process. And THIS is why they charge such a high price for Madagascarian vanilla.

Other than that piece of completely useless digression, I love the book!

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Cricket tomorrow at the MCG, home to Singers the day after to change suitcases and then off for NYE (+10 days) in Bali. Hoping to catch up with Madame Chiang, with or without her cats.

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My mate Nick (whom I will meet in Bali too) sent a great Christmas email - I haven't actually received his permission to reproduce it here yet, but once we meet in Ubud in Bali after NYE he can let me know if I have overstepped any boundaries by quoting it in full below - in lieu of me writing anything at length of any interest.

He says at the end it should be a blog post -I think it should be a newspaper column or something. Some great observations!

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When did sending Christmas messages get so difficult?

Back in the good old days, you took up pen and paper and started writing cards and accompanying letters. Family first then friends. After about 5 letters you ran out of enthusiasm for writing the same thing over and over to different people. So you gave up. Alternately you ran out of money to buy cards, envelopes and stamps. More often than not you ran out of time as you should have started in November but it is now December 23. Stuff it! the card and letter won’t arrive on time, why bother! After all there is always next year.

Later the quality of reproductions got better and you could type or even word process the one letter, copy it multiple times and add a written personal message at the bottom before signing. This saved the time component but didn't address the cost component (or timing).

Later still you had e-mail and web sites. So for me I created a Christmas Message on a web page and then e-mailed a link to friends. The heyday of “Nick’s Newsletter” was 1998 – 2001. (Suspiciously this is very similar to what you have just received.) Unfortunately most of your friends were not on e-mail or the web and you still had to resort to manual means.

With time most people got an e-mail address and you could quite happily send Christmas messages by e-mail with only the odd one or two missing out.

More recently we have social networking sites. It has all got very complicated again. Now you have friends on Facebook, LinkedIn, e-mail, mobile phone, the blogosphere and other places besides. Suddenly you have to send the same message to multiple people on multiple communication channels and that is just sucking into your time once more. Christmas is getting complicated once more. (This is flowing, I may turn this into a blog).

So here we are in 2009, no we are at the end of 2009. You are receiving this e-mail because:
1) I love you; or
2) I like you; or
3) at some stage you have been an impact on my life and I still cherish that memory;

And

I still have some record of an e-mail address for you.

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LOL!

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On a housekeeping note, I've had to remove the Blogroll temporarily (I hope) from the sidebar. Some of you may have been getting a warning from Google about my site being linked to a site that had "Malware" on it. Don't panic - I have not been hacked (again) but there was a hidden link in my blogrolling widget from 7 months ago that led to a site that allegedly contained some trojans. It's an old blog-site, now defunct I guess, that I once had linked to...

I've no idea how to clear this list to remove the offending link. I HAVE removed the website from the blogroll widget but can't erase that troublesome old link.

Any help from Blogger experts would be appreciated.

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Also, 2010 is the last year of the decade, not 2009.

E@L