Hic Sunt Dracones

Or, My Post Christmas Pizza Recipe.

Dedicated to: my boys Nic and Dan sitting in The Crown (SE12) drinking Guinness at two in the afternoon.

Ingredients:

• One pizza base (two for 40c, best deal Ben’s found all year!)
• Some tomato paste
• Pineapple (pieces or crushed or hell, rings if you have knife technology.
• Salami (too much)
• Ham (enough)
• Garlic (as much as your sissyness can handle)
• Chilli (peppers, flakes, sauce, whathaveyou, and ditto)
• Olives
• Cheese

Method:

Preheat oven to 180 degrees (celsius FOOLS!). I don’t know why, but I remember being told 180 was the magic temperature that everything could pretty much be cooked at. Has worked so far. The oven at Chez Smith doesn’t have any markings on it – so I’ve just assumed straight down is about 180. Throw the pizza dish in to the oven to preheat as well. That’s right, we have a specific pizza dish. Who knows where it came from. If you don’t, a standard flat baking tray will surely suffice.

Take your base and apply your tomato paste. I had a little tub of 250g, I used about three quarters. I’m sure you can use as much or as little as you want. I’m sure there is a better method to deploy sauce to base than my “spoon it on and then smear it about” method – it’s probably the method you’ll use.

Take your salami, realise that you have far too much for a pizza. Eat some of it. Still too much? Eat more. Still too much? Sod it, slap on as much as you deign necessary and then put the remainder back in the fridge. Or eat it. Go with a nicely symmetric layout by the way. Otherwise you’ll anger the pizza masters, in the wood fired fortresses.

Take your ham, realise that leg ham is probably a terrible pizza choice. Tear it up into more pizza suitable shapes and sizes. Throw willy nilly onto the pizza.

Take garlic (crushed in a jar in the fridge, because I don’t care how much cheaper garlic cloves are, the stupid garlic crushing machines suck, and don’t seem to make sense for cooking for one, and the only time I really care about having whole cloves is when I’m roasting them, and I don’t do that too often, but damn they taste good don’t they?) and er, well put in on the pizza too I suppose. Throw at your neighbours if that’s what you’re in to.

Open can of pineapple. Curse makers of can openers for making a singularly unfriendly to left handed type people type device. Figure out how much pineapple you want on your pizza and make it happen.

Get your olives. Eat some of them because they taste so good. I went with “Party mix” from our surly Coles’ delicatessen because hey, why not. Put the olives you have not eaten on to the pizza.

Sprinkle your chilli power onto the pizza. If you went with hot sauce, you could have worked it into the tomato paste at the start, but it’s too late for that now – you’ve learnt something for next time. Chilli flakes or cut up chillis go go.

Grate some cheese. Because it’s Christmas (and I’d already gone with the PARTY olives) I had mozzarella cheese and yup it is actually worth using a different cheese here. Call me Mr Gourmet Cheese Pizza Fascist if you want, but I’ll call you a cheese eating surrender monkey in return. Cover pizza in cheese.

Put in oven.

Wait.

Does it look good? If so, take out and eat. If not, wait some more, then look again. If possible, the beat of the brothers Gibb’s Stayin’ Alive is an ideal beat to follow. If at no point does the pizza look good, it should eventually start to look black and horrid. At this stage, either eat it anyway, or throw it at your neighbours.

Serves: about 1.3 Me, and goes nicely with a nice 2008 Coke. Just like everything else does. You damn commies.

So what you’re looking for is four random links from the Internet? Well I’ve got some. It’s 50% Wikipedia and 50% YouTube, you can’t ask for better than that.

Best thing on the Internet today without a doubt – Amazing Robocop Rap BAM! Sadly, that name is rather weak, but er yes. That thing rocks my world. When you watch it, make sure you click on the “watch in high quality” yup. Ah, it is mighty. You better go watch it. There is also the Amazing Predator Rap by the same dudes. It too is awesome, but not quite as sensational the Robocop version, although maybe that’s just because Predator isn’t as awesome as Robocop? Seems reasonable.

Two wikipedia links? Sure I got them.

• A version of the Alien 3 screenplay that “had Ripley’s escape pod crash landing on a monastery-like, wooden planet.”
• Penile plethysmograph: a controversial type of plethysmograph that measures changes in blood flow in the penis.

In Australia, or so I’m told, Hugh Jackman doesn’t bust out his Wolverine claws once. Not once! No wonder it’s not the box office smash hit it was intended to be. Rookie mistake. Rookie mistake.

Give me that thing
Give it my friend
Give me good good times around the bend

I appear to be a sucker for iPod ad songs. The latest Touch version is using a song by “The Asteroids Galaxy Tour” – Around The Bend, and what a nice name for a band. Pity they’re Dutch. Sigh, they’re Danish. I don’t know why I find that funny.

I just “ironed” eight shirts. I didn’t even know I had eight shirts.

I don’t know if anyone is keeping track of these things, but if they/you are, then you can go ahead and reset the “days since I last bought a 3.5″ disc” to last Wednesday. Needed one to boot a machine to install something on, and CDs or USB or Networks just won’t cut it. And this a modern motherboard (I think I narrowly avoided needing one for WinXP to install a SATA HDD driver a few weeks back. Which is additionally silly)

“OK”, I said, tossing the phone into the back of the car.

“They are under P for pirates.”

But of course. Where else would you put Pirates? (Excluding the 1600-1700s)

Also, this arresting of an MP in England? It seems wrong doesn’t it? Anyone know where I can find some good discussion on it? Saint: I’m looking in your direction, this is far more interesting than US politics… Unless we’re talking about Gitmo, the RIAA, or the right to shoot people ’cause like, you want to.

[subtle segue]

They (being a subsidiary of The Man) cut our Christmas party budget by 25%, which sadly actually effected the booze allocation by 40% which I’m a bit worried about. Last year a mate and I fully dominated the bar tab, and I suspect that process is not to be repeated. You might scoff, but truly, we did. It can largely be blamed for my continued fondness for Baileys. Being gay probably isn’t helping either. Or so I’m repeatedly told by various world wide associates. Can’t recall if I’ve discussed it, but last year’s event was theoretically a cocktail evening, but was only beer and wine from 5-8:30ish, so I stood around drinking coke. Then suddenly, once the boring speeches and assorted niceties were out of the way they opened the bar up good and proper. And Craig an I got it on with the killing. Meanwhile everyone else pretty much continued on with the beer and wine. The fools. So from then till they kicked us out it was full speed ahead and damning of the torpedoes. Baileys and Kahlua was the call (I don’t know why), mixed in with the occasional Jaeger Bomb (these are very silly, but you seem able to get some non shot drinkers into them if you’re persuasive). And then the bar was closed and I think we can confidently say that we’d set the bar tab much further back than everyone else. What with spirits being generally more costly, and of course with us being hard, and everyone else being sissy.

Then I walked home in the very warm November evening, getting weather updates from Mog 1.0 weather SMS service and found MCS at the Nations.

And that was a good night.

PS. This is utter crap, our company just signed a large deal that should set us up for the next few year and they’re quibbling over not a lot of money. Boo hiss etc. Still I’ve managed to inflate our numbers slightly by sending people to NZ aha. Suckers. PPS Hi Mom!