Would you just look at Tina Arena!

I mean just look. Look at her! She's getting around France like she bloody owns the place!

Crap food on Qantas flights

It's really just getting ridiculous how bad the food is on short sector Qantas flights. Namely Sydney-Hobart, Melbourne-Canberra. Just awful. It's all epitomised by the "Chicken panini". It is a hideous fat bread concoction "filled" with "chicken" in a "dijonnaise" sauce thing. Little cubes of "chicken" in this icky sauce, a few limp pieces of carrot or other vegetable type ingredient, and there's your meal! If you're lucky, you get a cube of Cadbury chocolate. Does Qantas seriously think these "meals" are a selling point for them? Is this what they call "full service"? Long live the days when you would take Ansett and be presented with a steaming hot, foil-covered meal that you peeled back to be met with a woosh of vapour smelling of little boiled potatoes, some kind of meat, and a tasty sauce.

So anyway, back to the paninis, they are crap. I don't have a problem with sandiwches per se. But when the bread is too thick and dry and tasteless, and the contents are smoodgy and icky and limp they are no fun at all.

And another thing. These horrible paninis, or as my one the other day was called "French Connection" (France should sue), have ridiculous lists of ingredients. This was a ham, brie and lettuce one. The ham wasn't bad. The brie was a bit tasteless, but hey, at least it's brie. Lettuce consisted of three stalks of limp baby spinach. So the ingredients should be bread, ham, brie and lettuce. Check out the actual list of ingredients:

• Sandwich pain de mie (white flour (wheat flour, thiamin), water, butter, milk, sugar, yeast, salt, soy flour, emulsifier 472e, amylase, stabilizer 412, flour treatment agent 300, sesame seeds)
• honey ham (soy protein, food acid 325, honey, maltodextrin, vegetable gum 407, mineral salts 451,452, antioxidant 316, flavour enhancer 637, sodium nitrate 250
• brie
• lettuce

What the hell was wrong with the flour in the first place such that it needed a flour treatment agent? And why was it unstable? And why did it need soy flour in it? And sugar? And thiamin? I take a multivitamin, I don't need an airline to further dose me up.

Why is there soy protein in ham, and maltodextrin, and frigging sodium nitrate? That's a well known allergen. Then you've got some kind of relative of MSG to enhance the flavour...how about using a decent tasting ham in the first place.

And then they go and call this French!

Oh, and another thing, on a bloody Dash 8 they manage to serve way better food (well, snacks) than on the mainline Qantas jet services. Launceston-Melbourne service, we got crackers with a very tasty sundried tomato dip, King Island Camembert, drinkable red wine, and an after dinner chocolate mint!

Bogans in a park

There are some bogans in a park across the road from my house. They've set up on a park bench with a box full of beer and are yelling such things as "fuck you then" and they are throwing sticks at each other.

Why aren't they at their homes watching Australia's Got Talent?

Would you like something to suck on?

The UK has said "let's regress 10 years and send this bunch in to Eurovision 2007!" Admittedly they've got uniforms (they're a bit "Deeper Shade of Blue" though aren't they), and it' much better live than in the studio. To use a Fop term, "as a general proposition Schooch are to be supported"

Måns Zelmerlöw Fever

Canberra, or more precisely, PopGoesCanberra headquarters, is in Måns Zelmerlöw fever. In case you don't know (where have you been?), Måns came 5th in Swedish Idol and won Swedish Dancing with the Stars and has just come third in the final of Melodifestivalen 2007 with the AMAZING song Cara Mia. I have no idea what Cara Mia means, but it has appropriate lyrics like:

"Oh Cara Cara Mia/Cara Cara Mia/Love is all we need/I swear I'm never gonna leave you/Cara Cara Mia you're the one for me/when someone loves like I do/dreams can come true/so tell me tell me now/oh cara cara mia/how can you leave me now"

It's all just amazing and to top it off, Måns is incredibly good looking (in a fairly ordinary but a bit posh kind of way). You can see the official music video and the performance from Melodifestivalen below.

The song/music video features an old fashioned phone (fuzzy sounding bit!) gregorian chants, storming chorus, huge key change, a bit at the end that seems totally out of the place from the rest of the video, nice salsa-like dancing, fuzzy over the top clubby dancing, and a big pull the chick close to your chest so her boobs look hot bit!



And the Melodifestivalen performance has big Nanne Gronvall style fans and Nanne Gronvall style dancers!



NOTE that the crowd goes wild at the exact right spot, the big clappy bit! AND they have big balloons! And there is lots of smoke! And he dances in a very stilted but horny way! I could go on forever....

And to top it off, Måns likes planes, because he says in an interview that before Idol, "I thought i was going to be a pilot"!!!!