Sunny Breaks

This has been sitting in the inbox for a while — a pamphlet from the local TAFE listing the courses they’re offering. T A F E stands for Take A Holiday from unEmployment, which is basically what happens. It takes you off the dole statistics for a little while, which makes the gumment happy, so they get off your case which makes you happy and everyone’s happy, and then we had pudding.

‘Modern Cake Decorating’ struck me as hitting nails on heads, because when you get down to brass tacs, the Modern era was the apex of cake decoration activity. What are the alternatives – - post-modern cake decorating? – would probably involve a nasty little pastiche of things that don’t belong together on top of a cake. Like whale-blubber, nutra-sweet and some pieces of a chopped up bicycle. The point would be that much of what we consume today is perhaps even more of a health-hazard than what it replaced. Thanks science! Thanks FDA. Now that’s ironic! – what about renaissance cake decoration? Chicken fat, a hunk of cod and roast duck all deserve their earned place, but it’s not on a cake. – cake-baking, circa 4000bc — a handful of gravel.

Butter, brown sugar, castor sugar and vanilla essence don’t sound so bad after all that eh.

I see there’s also a ‘men only cooking class’. Now I’m really curious. I wonder if it involves drumming… – ‘confined space entry and retest’ – can you get in a cardboard box and close the lid, and if you could do it 2 years ago, can you still do it now? – ‘e-marketing’ – become a spammer. – ‘validation therapy’ – go to a classroom and have someone say nice things about you. – ‘testing of electrical handheld/portable appliances’ – how to tell when the batteries have run out in your walkman, and how to replace those batteries.