Combating food waste with restaurant doggy bags
25 February 2025
Being able to take the left-overs of a restaurant meal home seems like a sensible idea all around. Aside from dishes that, for whatever reason, may not be safe to eat later on, or the next day. While some dining establishments are averse to the practice, we’ve seldom had any problems.
One place doggy bags are direly needed are in food court situations in shopping malls. Here, much food is served as if it were a restaurant, and only sometimes in take-away cartons. We eat regularly at a place near where we live, and the food waste — plates of sometimes barely touched meals — defy belief. It makes me wonder why people ordered the food in the first place. But, if a way to take those left-overs home was an option, maybe not all of it all would go to waste.
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Next up: the James Bond sequel trilogy and Bond villain origin stories
24 February 2025
Long time producers of the James Bond films, Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson, have agreed to sell the decades old film franchise to Amazon. The new arrangement gives the tech giant full creative control, and Amazon has already indicated they intend to “move beyond the franchise of the James Bond movies”.
Who knows exactly what that means at this stage, but looking at what happened to Star Wars, after series creator George Lucas sold the sci-fi saga to Disney in 2012, probably gives us a pretty good idea of what to expect.
Good luck 007.
I gave up on the Bond films years ago. I think 2012’s Skyfall was the last one I went to a cinema to see. I never made it to No Time to Die, the Daniel Craig finale, which was released in 2021.
But Bond had stopped being Bond a long time ago. Indeed, the entire premise belonged to a bygone era. The barely plausible Bond had ceased to be relevant. Even Roger Moore, who portrayed the fictional British intelligence agent seven times between 1972 and 1985, once told late Irish–British broadcaster Terry Wogan, he thought the character was ridiculous:
“Bond films are so outrageous, the stunts are so outrageous,” Moore told Wogan. “Everything is beyond belief.”
In a way though, the slapstick nature of the earlier films was a big part of their allure. The stories were a bit of light-hearted, if fast paced, escapism. Efforts in recent decades to make the series darker, and grittier, to appeal to a new, and wider audience, seemed futile to me. Why not retire the James Bond films all together, and create a brand new character, and story arc, instead of rehashing something that’s decades old? But this is a point I’ve made before.
It’s not like there’s a shortage of new stories to bring to the big screen. That, however, is clearly not the way Amazon sees the situation. As with Star Wars, they know there’s a ready, nostalgia craving audience, waiting to see whatever new Bond offerings are forthcoming.
I take Amazon’s desire to “move beyond” will see movies, TV shows, video games, and graphic novels, among other things, based on other characters — from what will no doubt become the Bond universe — assuming centre stage in stories of their own. With nary a glimpse of Bond in sight. I don’t know, some of this stuff might be ok, but maybe it won’t.
Good luck 007 fans.
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A supermassive black hole is set to collide with the Milky Way
21 February 2025
It’s true: a supermassive black hole is on a collision course with our galaxy. But the happening is at least two billion years away.
And even then it may not be a black hole, but rather a “massive invisible object” thought to lurk within the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a smaller galaxy that presently orbits the Milky Way, but which is slowly falling towards us. Once the LMC collides — though merge is probably a more apt word — with the Milky Way, the black hole, or whatever the invisible body that the LMC hosts, will make a bee-line for Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy.
When those two objects eventually collide — an event that will unfold at a likewise cosmologically glacial pace — the result will be the formation of an even more monstrous black hole.
While the black hole merger process may be drawn out, assuming a black hole indeed resides inside the LMC, it will no doubt be a bumpy ride for whatever interstellar objects lie in the path of the two, as they fuse together. Perhaps the solar system will find itself in harm’s way here. The only consolation there is it’s something we won’t be around to see.
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Twenty-five years blogging, the more things change, the less they change
21 February 2025
Matt Webb has been blogging for twenty-five years. What an incredible milestone. Obviously, much has changed in the realm of self-publishing since Webb started out in 2000. Back then, as he points out, we blogged as if we were using social media platforms like Twitter/X:
So I would post 4 or 6 times a day, like most people. Just a line with a shower thought, or a link and a comment, or a response to someone else (I had a couple dozen sites I would pop open each morning).
Now we — though maybe not so much myself, or the more #IndieWeb people reading this — use social media platforms, specifically Instagram, as if they were blogging platforms.
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blogs, history, self publishing
A pre-war deal between Ukraine and Russia? What deal exactly?
20 February 2025
If Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had made a deal with Russia three years ago, the war in Ukraine could have been avoided. According, that is, to United States President Donald Trump:
This could’ve been settled very easily, just a half-baked negotiator could have settled this years ago without the loss of much land, very little land, without the loss of any lives, without the loss of cities that are just laying on their sides.
Was an undertaking not to join NATO meant to stop Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempt to take back territory he’s long considered part of the old Russian Empire? Or were the Ukrainians expected to offer a whole lot more?
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current affairs, politics, Ukraine
David Sedaris flying boasts were not a first-class act in Australia
20 February 2025
One thing you can say for certain about American author David Sedaris is that he polarises opinion. Some people think he’s wonderful. Others are far less complimentary.
Freelance Australian writer Annemarie Fleming, used to be a fan of Sedaris, until she saw him speaking during a recent Australian tour. Fleming found a number of Sedaris’ quips to be off-colour, but his repeated boasts about flying first class, were the last straws:
Throughout his 90-minute performance, he mentioned that he flies first class multiple times. By the third time, I found myself on my feet and walking towards the usher.
Sedaris polarises opinion.
In 2013, I wrote about distasteful comments he made, following the suicide death of his youngest sister, Tiffany. In 2025, that piece remains among one of the most accessed posts on my website.
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Somebody Down There Likes Me, a new novel by Robert Lukins
19 February 2025
Melbourne based Australian author Robert Lukins returns with a new novel, Somebody Down There Likes Me, a follow up to his 2022 book, Loveland.
As with Loveland and his 2018 debut, The Everlasting Sunday, Somebody Down There Likes Me, is set outside Australia, this time in a town called Belle Haven, in Connecticut, in the United States, during the final years of the twentieth-century:
Against the backdrop of the last decadent gasps of the twentieth century, the Gulch family have led a charmed existence in the ultra-wealthy enclave of Belle Haven, Connecticut. Now, the empire they have built is on the edge of collapse, and as the decades of fraud and criminality that lie beneath the family’s incredible wealth is exposed, the Gulch children are summoned.
I read Loveland a couple of years ago, and look forward to Somebody Down There Likes Me. I must also get hold of The Everlasting Sunday as well.
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Australian literature, books, novels, Robert Lukins
Intercepted, a Ukraine war documentary by Oksana Karpovych
19 February 2025
Ukrainian film director Oksana Karpovych’s documentary, Intercepted, which features phone calls between invading Russian soldiers and their families in Russia, has one of the starkest trailers I’ve seen in a long while.
Phil Hoad, writing for The Guardian, described Intercepted as chilling, and compelling:
Juxtaposing intercepted calls back home from frontline Russian troops with shots of the devastation they have wreaked in Ukraine, this film is a bleak and searing wiretap into Putin’s warping effect on his people and the psychology of power.
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current affairs, documentary, film, Oksana Karpovych, politics, Ukraine
How would you like to go without technology for twenty-hours?
18 February 2025
This fund raising event, taking place in Perth, Australia, on Monday 29 March 2025, has been popping up in my news feeds in recent weeks.
Two hundred and fifty participants will spend twenty-hours in a space just two metres square, sans screens and devices. Talking is also out of the question. Instead, those taking part will write their thoughts in a journal. The goal is to raise a quarter of a million dollars to create two thousand and one hundred Mental Health Maintenance scholarships for young adults.
Twenty-hours without screens, devices, and talking? This sounds like an opportunity some people would want to jump at…
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What is a digital mending circle? A sign of the times I think
18 February 2025
Jack Cheng, an author based in Detroit, Michigan, in the United States, hosts a now fortnightly online get together called a digital mending circle:
What, you ask, is a digital mending circle? A virtual co-working session for the kinds of oft-neglected maintenance tasks that accrue around our digital lives. Instead of darning socks and patching jeans, we update personal websites, delete unused accounts, work on side projects, or even just catch up on email.
The sessions run for ninety-minutes. It’s a smart idea, blocking off a set amount of time on a regular basis, to devote to these sorts of minor, but still important, matters. I find myself trying to do things like this when a free ten to fifteen minute window randomly opens up.
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