In which the pond wanders all over the shop, inspired by a taste for fine dining ...

 

Hands up those who think they share the same values as anyone who could scribble this sort of stuff ...

...I have limited sympathy for the Noma culties who pay 1000 bucks to go to the world’s most famous restaurant only to whinge about the reindeer brains in custard or toasted pig foreskin, or whatever scraped scalp-to-toenail morsel is served by the Danish foragers. But it’s reasonable to expect that when you’re dining at a top Sydney restaurant, you’ll get the pre-dinner drink you ordered before the entree arrives. But that didn’t happen when we dined at Neil Perry’s Margaret, the Double Bay restaurant named after his mum. I’m no lush or stickler for silly rules, but I couldn’t help thinking that my mum, a great cook and wonderfully fun host, would look dimly on me if I served a meal, even a great one, before filling a guest’s wine glass. It’s naff to rush guests, let alone paying ones.
And we’re not alone in that rushed experience. On other occasions, main courses have arrived before entrees have been eaten, even when the table reservation wasn’t close to bumping up against the two-hour limit.
I once asked politely if we could possibly have the mains re-delivered when we finished the first course. The waiter at Margaret snipped that I should have explained that at the start.
Nah. Just like it’s my job, with the help of my editors, to produce sparkling grammar, the role of the waiter, in tandem with the kitchen, is to work out how to serve drinks and meals in the right order.
When simple things go awry more than once, there is usually a problem higher up the chain. Maybe restaurateurs who imagine they are artists could relearn the power of an effortless pause. It heightens the pleasure.
Chefs or owners of these establishments (sometimes one and the same person) are taking themselves – rather than what they do – too seriously. Or perhaps they are taking the piss out of patrons who care more about dropping a restaurant name than looking for a place that understands the pleasure of dining well.
Perry is no newbie to the restaurant business. The two-hour time limit placed on reservations at Margaret seems to be driving the dining “experience” down the wrong path. At other places, too, this regimented booking culture makes dining out more akin to pre-booking a parking place at the airport. If Chloe’s can get the pace right – they have two seatings on weekends – why can’t the big boys of the restaurant industry?
I recall Perry’s Blue Water Grill days when I first moved to Sydney in the 1980s, a not-so-posh place atop the rocks of North Bondi. It was bliss because it didn’t take itself too seriously. Back then, the mission was clear as day: a night out should be fun, not a numbers game where dining has become a game of beat the buzzer.
I may be blacklisted from Perry’s Double Bay noshery for saying so, but I’ll make do with one of the very good green goddess poached chicken sandwiches at his bakery a few doors down the road. At the risk of opening a different can of worms, (I hear) there is a half-decent version of the same in the Qantas Chairman’s Lounge. 

Yes, it's quintessential snobbery,  of a 'leet Sydney food buff snobbery kind, demanding, whining and ever so princess blonde precious ... and that aside (I hear) does nothing to quell the rising sense that infested the pond reading this gibberish, because you just know she's been in the chairperson's lounge, but doesn't want to seem too braggadocious ...

That rising sense? The pond had absolutely nothing in common, none of the values, nor for that matter, the quid in the purse, in common with this ponce eastern suburbs scribbler scribbler, so far up herself that the rock oysters don't shine...

It is of course Dame Slap, in a session bypassed by the pond but heck, it says a lot.

Usually Wednesday would see another serve of Dame Slappery, but instead the reptiles are on a citizenship kick, which is why the pond happened to mention common values ...

There it was at the top of the lizard Oz digital page ... also featuring dangerous, difficult, uppity blacks ...

And it was the key feature of the tree killer edition, together with said difficult, uppity blacks...

And in the comments section below, the lizard Oz editorialist chimed in, as reptiles are wont to do ...

Luckily this menu for the day allowed the pond a decent random degustation, and so the pond could  avoid that rat in the reptile ranks, Milner minor of the deep north, and also Jennings raising the alarm ...

The pond wanted to hear what a foreign-owned corporation had to say about Australian values ... you know, the sort of values the corporation espouses in the WSJ or The Sun, or close-kissing cousin Faux Noise...

The question is whether a sanctimonious foreign owned company can lecture Australians about Australian values, when surely they'd be better off in Double Bay lecturing nosheries about food ...

The reptile editorialist then concluded the rant quick, but not so smart ...

"We welcome them"? Shouldn't that read that we welcome them each week with a raging rant from Dame Groan doing a classic groan about how migrants are rooning everything?

Moving right along, the pond wanted to do a little serve from the salad bar ... provoked by this splash ...

You can read the original story at Semafor, but it prompted a Jungian memory in the pond because Granta's Deutschland edition has been going on about the Germans at great length and it has formed the pond's toilet reading ...

It's not always possible to get past the paywall, but the pond found this ...

Once Again, Germany Defines Who Is a Jew | Part I
George Prochnik, Eyal Weizman & Emily Dische-Becker

... of some interest, if you didn't mind all the high-falutin' verbiage, up there with a discourse on Double Bay nosheries (the reference to "nosheries" is a way of avoiding mentioning the gor blimey cost of the meal) ...

A sample, from the closing ...

Dische-Becker:

It’s now apparent that the issue of anti-antisemitism represents a laboratory for larger anti-democratic policies, functioning as a precedent for prohibiting other forms of protest as well. First they canceled the Palestinian demonstrations, now they prevent other demonstrations mounted by the Left. For example, the government has begun cracking down on environmental activists with measures such as preventative imprisonment. The German police also recently declared Letzte Generation (‘Last Generation’) – an environmental protest group – to be an organized-crime syndicate. The police have behaved atrociously and illegally – banning, for instance, anti-fascist demonstrations in Leipzig after the sentencing of Antifa militants in May 2023. We’ve unsurprisingly also witnessed an increase in police violence – of racialized people being murdered by police in Germany, something that had formerly been considered inconceivable in unified Germany.

All of this brazen, wide-ranging repressive activity means that there is an opening for people to connect the dots. The people who have a first-hand understanding of authoritarianism and the people who cherish democratic freedoms most are people who have a history of being on the receiving end of political violence. There are many people in Germany today with that background.

Weizman:

Another area where opposition to these negative trends can be located is in the struggle for Jewish identity itself that is now taking place in Germany – that’s to say the resistance to the Israeli state model of a national-ethnic state in favor of a diasporic one, which is non-nationalist and sometimes non- or anti-Zionist.

It’s not that similar struggles aren’t being fought in Britain, in the US, and in other places, but it’s inflected differently in Germany because of its history and because of the responsibility that Germans have toward Jews. I do not deny that special responsibility; I just do not think that it’s for the Germans to say to us what kind of Jews we should be, what kind of project we should be part of. Both Emily and I, as Jewish intellectuals in Germany, find ourselves occasionally being deplatformed, being publicly disciplined – being lectured by the children and grandchildren of the perpetrators who murdered our families and who now dare to tell us that we are antisemitic.

Dische-Becker:

The Jewish identity question in Germany breaks down into two main factions: those who believe Jewish well-being and safety derives from appeals to the moral authority of the perpetrator-heirs, and Jews who see Jewish well-being and safety in solidarity with other minorities. That’s the dividing line. You can call it Left or Right but that’s the crux of it.

With respect to Germany as a whole, if the state takes a more rightward turn, via its assumption of national singularity, that will be the worst outcome conceivable for vulnerable populations, even beyond Germany’s borders. Germany is the arbiter in Europe when it comes to both antisemitism and migration. If Germany says it’s fine to drown people in the Mediterranean, then it’s fine to drown people in the Mediterranean because the people who are the most sorry for their past treatment of minorities and have learned the most from their abuse of racialized people say it’s fine. If Germany says the people trying to get to Europe are a danger to Jews so it’s fine to deny them entry, then it’s fine to turn them away.

In its more extreme form, German overidentification with Jewish nationalism means that the Germans arrogate to themselves the right to project how they would feel if they were Jews. So for a particular kind of German who has strong feelings about Israel, the response to a Jew who isn’t gung-ho about Israeli militarism is one of visceral disgust.

The alternative Jewish responses to the contemporary landscape that Eyal and I have been advocating violate the Jewish identity that Germans have been imagining for themselves. Faced with this German exercise in inhabiting Jewish history and sensibility, I just feel like saying, Go fuck yourself. I have no gratitude. Not for Germany, and not for Israel.

Weizman:

Once again, Germany defines who is a Jew, right? The irony that the German state would actually classify who is a Jew, and what’s a legitimate Jewish position, and how Jews should react, is just beneath contempt.

Why go there, and by such an indirect route?

Well Killer is the main topic this day, as Killer always will be of primal, mask-fearing Freudian interest to the pond, and Killer was in deep despair ...

Oh FFS, the precious petal is still rabbiting on about "medical tyranny", when most are sighing with relief that vaccinations and masks have helped them dodge a potent bullet?

But that's our Killer for you, and what's this about the US election? That foreign-owned corporation has done its very best to promote American values of the mango Mussolini kind.

Speaking of the prize boofhead, the pond did enjoy this proposal for a mango Mussolini Saturday Night Live parody ...

On June 14, 1946, Lucifer said to himself, “I need someone whom a jury will find liable for sexual assault in a department store dressing room in the mid-1990s, someone who will pay $25 million to the students he defrauded into enrolling in Trump University, and whom a court will find has submitted false property appraisals to lenders.” And so Lucifer made Trump.

“I need someone who offensively mocks other people’s disabilities, including Joe Biden’s childhood stutter, and who privately boasts of grabbing women ‘by the p****.’” And so Lucifer made Trump.

And finally, Lucifer said, “I need someone who will be indicted on 91 counts of crime in four jurisdictions for his conduct during and after his presidency.” So Lucifer made Trump. (Bulwark)

Sorry, it's a wandering sort of day, and Killer does his best to encourage the wandering ...

Why is the pond routinely surprised to find Killer in the Vlad the sociopath camp? Why is the pond foolish enough to be surprised?

Scattered throughout Killer's piece were sundry snaps, best tossed aside, especially as one featured his maligned sociopathic hero ...

Then there was another very short gobbet ...

The pond was wondering if the reptiles might provide a chance for the pond to feature a grundle rant ... and that mention of the Gaza disaster provides as good an excuse as any ... in full it's behind the Crikey paywall, but this gives a flavour ...

By golly, the pond might return to that rant after another short Killer serve ...

Sorry, we've moved from"medical tyranny" to ill prepared and perhaps fatal weakness?

Time for another burst of grundling ...

When he gets on a roll, he really gets rolling in an apocalyptic way ...

Meanwhile, on the West Bank ...

And if you want a full report, there's much more at WaPo, if you can get past the paywall ... and so be able to sample much more of the random cruelty and injustice than what's in this sampler ...

And so on and endlessly on ... and meanwhile, the pond supposes it should finish up its by now very cold serve of the mask-fearing Putin-loving Killer ... and dammit, who kept serving the drinks out of order ...

A circuit-breaker.?! There's going to be helter skelter bedlam no matter what happens ... the American-owned Corporation preaching weird American values has seen to that ...

And on June 14th, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, “I need a caretaker.” So God gave us Trump. God said, “I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, fix this country, work all day, fight the Marxist, eat supper then go to the Oval Office and stay past midnight and a meeting of the heads of state.” So God made Trump to organise riots and promise bedlam ...

The request for emperor status is in progress ...

And if emperor status isn't granted?

Donald Trump warned on Tuesday of "bedlam" in the United States if he is put on trial, following an appeals court hearing that appeared to lean towards rejecting his claim of presidential immunity...

..."They feel this is the way they're going to try and win," he said. "And that's not the way it goes. It will be bedlam in the country." (sorry, the pond doesn't link to News Corp)

There's some prime American values, coming to a noshery near you ...

And no doubt the bedlam of the future will be cleansed, just as the past is being cleansed, with the promise of more fun to come ...