Death To Skippy

October 16th, 2007 | researchmaterial

Greenpeace campaigner encourages Australia to slaughter and eat more kangaroos to help save the world from global warming, environmental activists say.

I am all for this. I believe roo is still on my list of Animals I Have Not Yet Eaten.

24 Responses to “Death To Skippy”

  1. Goes strangely well with sour cream.

  2. Ask Ben to send you some.

  3. Kangaroo meat is only good for DOG FOOD.

    Seriously.

  4. I had tataki kangaroo last Friday at a fusion Japanese restaurant – it was absolutely amazing.

    It’s great meat, really. A cross between good moo-steak and Venison when it’s cooked properly. Funny thing is, it’s be the most expensive dish on the menu at any fancy restaurant here in Oz, but you can pick it up from the supermarket for 10 bucks a kilo.

  5. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Trr90QgxBnw

  6. A bit tough, but very tasty. If you show up in Vancouver again, a place called Locus serves a great roo burger.

  7. Back in the 90’s they were selling it in UK stores as ‘exotic meat’, which riled the veggies – who picketed head offices dressed as kangaroos. An Aussie supermarket PR diplomatically helped defuse the row: ‘I’ve been roo huntin’ meself mate, it’s fun, the blighters are vermin, they eat all the grass’

  8. Have a look at http://www.alternativemeats.co.uk/

    Haven’t tried kangaroo, but springbok and ostrich were nice.

  9. It’s delicious. And becoming my meat of choice.

    Skippy – it’s what’s for dinner!

  10. Kangaroo is an interesting bit of meat. It walks the line between being tourist food (just like how you Brits serve up pigeon in a Ye Olde Pub) and actually being quite good. I’ve had some after a few extra drinks and it can be done quite well.

    Though when it is bad, it is tough and shitty. Have you ever had alligator? That is what bad kangaroo tastes like.

  11. Put some roo in your doo. God damn I’m funny…

  12. I have heard that german sausage makers reckon that roo meat is some of the best sausage meat around. Also there are so many of em out here its not like we’ll ever run out.

  13. Roo mince is also great for bolognese sauce. The meat has hardly any fat in it.

  14. chili con skippy is fantastic. roo meat is in most aus supermarkets now and is very popular.

  15. The key with kangaroo meat is that, in the amount of space it takes to raise a herd of beef cattle, you could get something like three times the amount of meat by raising kangaroos on the land instead.

    I’m a fan of kangaroo sausages, myself, but I have a few objections to plain kangaroo steak. It has a very metallic taste to it. Though that might have just been the bullet.

  16. I’m just sayin’, I’m eating some right now.

    Southern Hemisphere ftw

  17. Yeah, i’m ll for killing roos.

    I loooove Roo. I eat it whenever I can.

    But enviro wise, roos are a rarity in that their population actually increased when Europeans turned up and made way for farming land. Some breeds are endangered and getting rarer, but the common grey, thanks to interesting biological quirks like the ability to jump over fences, be constantly pregnant, reach 60mph and kill dogs, is going stronger than ever. So killing them is a good thing, and eating them is just a matter of cooking it right (low in fat, so they won’t stay tender if well done, must be eaten bloody to medium rare).

  18. There was a segment on 60 Minutes a while back about some American woman (who had never been to Australia) finding out about a guy who shoots them for a living. He worked as pest control for the State and to make human/dog food. She tried to sue him for animal cruelty.

    The look on his face was magic. “I’m being what’d by WHO?”

  19. Is there some way we can get a kangosterducken?

  20. Kangoturducken? Simple.

    Just go back in time to 1640, find the Dutch ship Haze (a 26-gun converted merchantman, probably off the Portugese coast) and send it to the bottom of the Atlantic. Her captain, Michiel de Ruyter, would later become one of the heroes of the Anglo-Dutch Wars. Without him they lose badly, and as part of their enhanced war booty the British learn about a poorly explored continent south of the Spice Islands. They show up at “Charlesland” a century before Captain Cook, and when the Acadians refuse to swear loyalty to the Crown in 1755 it’s off to the outback for them.

    The development of French Canadian Rules football I leave as an exercise for the reader.

  21. I had some kangaroo back when I went to Australia. It’s good, but I think being able to say you ate it is cooler then it tastes.

  22. In Soviet Australia, kangaroo disembowel you. So just singe the fur off over the fire and eat bloody.

  23. Get your hibachi on and grill them kangaroo fillets quickly – make sure they are medium rare… Serve with a bit of red wine butter and Warren is your uncle!

  24. Roo is a good meat. I’m vegetarian these days but used to eat a bit of roo as a carnivore. Lived for some time in a remote desert township in northern Australia where kangaroo tail was a highly prized delicacy. Easy to cook too. Just throw it on the fire until the fur and skin burns off and the fats sluice out.
    however ’twas a little gristly for my tastes.

postfix, spamassassin, dovecot and sieve?

jwz - 30 Jul 10

Dear Lazyweb, how do I use both SpamAssassin and Sieve at the same time?

Is the way this works that Postfix writes /var/mail/jwz via procmail, and then dovecot reads from there and moves the messages to ~/mail/ via sieve? I can't even tell.

Postfix main.cf has mailbox_command = /usr/bin/procmail.

/etc/procmailrc is:

DROPPRIVS=yes
:0fw
| /usr/bin/spamc -u $LOGNAME -x -s 100000000

/var/mail/jwz gets X-Spam-Status headers written into it. So far so good.

/etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf (for dovecot 2.0) has:

protocol lda { ... mail_plugins = sieve ... }

Dovecot is managing to read messages out of /var/mail/jwz and deliver them to me over IMAP, with SA headers intact. But it's not running sieve, possibly not even running its own lda, and everything I have googled so far is a twisty maze of illiterate wikis that may or may not be written for versions of the software that is 5+ years out of date.

I thought maybe the answer was to add
| /usr/libexec/dovecot/deliver -d $LOGNAME
to the end of procmailrc, but that let me to discover that:

% cat testmsg | /usr/libexec/dovecot/deliver -d jwz
Exit 75
lda: Error: dlopen(/usr/lib64/dovecot/lda/lib90_sieve_plugin.so) failed: /usr/lib64/dovecot/lda/lib90_sieve_plugin.so: undefined symbol: tried_default_save
lda: Fatal: Couldn't load required plugins


So I guess I have the wrong version of the sieve plugin? I have: dovecot-2.0-0.18_114_rc3.el5 and dovecot-sieve-0.1.17-5.el5 on CentOS release 5.4 (Final)

Untitled Post

blissblog - 30 Jul 10

Grasshopper Podcast Appearance

Jean Snow - 30 Jul 10

Grasshopper Podcast Appearance

I mentioned last week that I’d be a guest this week on game developer Grasshopper Manufacture’s podcast (Flower, Sun, & Podcast), and the episode (5) is now up and you can download it here (it should be on iTunes too). Check it out if you want to hear me ramble (and ramble) about mostly game-related topics.

Pictured, the Grasshopper conference room — complete with ping-pong table — where we recorded the episode. Big thanks to Grasshopper producer Esteban Salazar for inviting me on the show.

Thor 612 & Spider-man Vs Thor 2 Out

Kieron Gillen - 30 Jul 10

Catching up a little with stuff that happened when I’m away. I’ll talk Generation Hope later, but here’s the two comics I’ve got out this week.

My Thor In Hell and Hel arc continues. Here’s the five-page-preview. Enormous metal seriousness. My dual influences remain I, Claudius and the cover of 1980s Metal albums. Assorted random reviews: IGN. A Comic Book Blog. Weekly Comic Book Review.

The concluding party of my two part character-study/fight-comic. Preview here. And no reviews which I can find, but pleased to see that at least some people thought it was funny. Few things make me worry more than writing comedy.

Oh - here’s Seb’s review of the first one, which will give you a taste for it.

Vintage Jantzen: The Pin-Up Powerhouse

Coilhouse - 30 Jul 10

So… any Mad Men fans in the ‘haus? No spoilers in the comments, please, because I’m not sure if Mer and Zo have had a chance to catch last Sunday’s Season 4 premiere. But without giving away any plot points, I just want to ask: what was up with Don Draper pulling a Dov Charney with his horrible Jantzen pitch? Our colleague Copyranter eats this kind of American Apparel shit for breakfast. The Portland-based swimwear company was portrayed as a stodgy, conservative business to whom Draper declares angrily, “you’re too scared of the skin your two-piece was designed to show off.” I guess he (and/or the show’s writers) never saw Jantzen’s Vargas-inspired campaign, which ran in LIFE in 1947 (below). Dear readers, I proudly tag this post “Stroke Material” and present you with my stash of vintage Jantzen advertisements from the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s. Sun-kissed beauties with Bettie Page smiles and space-age swimsuits – as well as a few clever parodies – after the jump.


Read the rest of Vintage Jantzen: The Pin-Up Powerhouse


Post tags: Advertising, Fashion, Stroke Material, Ye Olde

You're Welcome ...

Kung Fu Monkey - 29 Jul 10



Cinnamon is waiting at PortlandDogXperts.com for someone to rescue her, after her star turn on the Leverage Season 3 finale. The madman Okie is still under contract to the TV show.

Deep Rivers Run Quiet: Ryan Francesconi?s ?Parables?

Coilhouse - 29 Jul 10


Photo by Ben Corrigan.

Ryan Francesconi‘s wonderful music has been lilting around the edges of my life since 1995 when I briefly worked together with him and Dan Cantrell in the Toids, an experimental folk group that riffed off various Eastern European idioms in tandem with Francesconi and Cantrell’s eclectic compositional styles. Back then, Francesconi was one seriously intimidating guitar/tambura/bouzouki shredder! He reveled in playing faster, smarter, better than anybody. He’s a shredder still, and no one can approximate his style… but over the years, wisdom seems to have smoothed over some of the sharper, more Malmsteinish edges of his virtuosity. Lately, the music he makes has deepened into an expression of something far more present, and pure.

Nowhere is this more apparent than on a quietly stunning record Francesconi released earlier this year, called Parables. A series of songs for solo acoustic guitar, it reflects his interest in American bluegrass, Bulgarian folk, jazz improvisation and Baroque lute music. Recorded live (no overdubs!), the music is graceful and green with nods of kinship to everyone from Nick Drake to Herman Hesse to the forests of the Pacific Northwest– which is where Francesconi lives when he’s not trotting the globe.

Speaking of– if you’re a fan of Joanna Newsom, the name Ryan Francesconi is probably already familiar to you, since he’s been one of her key players for several years, leading her live touring performers in the Ys Street Band and arranging/playing on just about every song on her new triple album, Have One On Me. They’re kicking off their summer West Coast tour of the States tonight in San Diego, California. Newsom had this to say about Parables:

“Ryan Francesconi is one of the most awe-inspiring musicians I’ve known. On “Parables,” he distills his many realms of artistry [...] into a beautifully minimalist, poetic, intricate, emotionally realized study of themes, variations, organic counterpoint, and such devastating forays into fractal-metric out-lands that it is nearly impossible to believe he’s picking those strings with just one hand. This is solo music that sounds like an ensemble, an ecstatic and measured reconciliation of West African / Balkan / Baroque / bluegrass influences, which ultimately resembles nothing I know.”

Pick up Parables on vinyl over at Drag City (they’re currently sold out of the CD), or in Mp3 format from CD Baby or iTunes.


Post tags: Events, Faboo, Music, Personal Style

Nick Cave Rewrites The Crow, Cillian Murphy to Star?

Coilhouse - 29 Jul 10

Nick Cave’s participation in the remake of the new Crow has been confirmed, and I’m finally starting to get excited. The Crow, a film based on James O’Barr’s eponymous comic book series, was a sort of holy grail to me and my darque little crew back in the early nineties. Unapologetically dramatic, The Crow had everything an angsty kid could want:  love, destruction, hot bloke in makeup, great villains, pretty girls. There was one year when I watched the film at least five times.

Now, I haven’t actually seen it in over ten years, for fear that it won’t hold up. I’m told it doesn’t. Still, the concept of a shiny new remake of my childhood/adolescence favorite is an uncomfortable one. Nostalgia and Brandon Lee’s death on the set veil The Crow in shimmery, inviolate mystery, and, had it been anyone other than Nick The Stripper doing the re-write, I would have probably shunned it. As things stand though, I think there’s reason to get at least a little fired up, especially with new rumors of Cillian Murphy possibly signing on to play Eric – almost as weird as casting Brandon Lee! If only Stephen Norrington could be replaced… Yes, then I can almost picture it. Until we know more, let us remember The Crow that once was. I leave you with a question: who would you cast as the ideal Eric?

The Crow is available on YouTube in its entirety.


Post tags: Comics, Fairy Tales, Film, Stroke Material, Surreal, Uber

Igor Oleynikov

Coilhouse - 29 Jul 10

A patchwork biography of Igor Oleynikov: Growing up in Lubertsy, Russia ? a small town outside of Moscow ? his entrance into the art world was at the Russian animation studio Soyuzmultfilm in 1979. Since 1986 he has been illustrating children’s books and has done 25 to date.

Children’s book illustration is a lot like veterinary school ? the common misconception being that medical school has a much higher barrier of entry, and yet the opposite is true. Children’s book illustration is a notoriously difficult nut to crack.

Oleynikov’s work is testament to the talent involved in the field. His paintings are lush and yet his tones are muted just enough to give everything a dream-like quality. In addition, they possess that air of danger and foreboding so often found in literature for young readers. Really, I could look at these all day. See more after the jump and even more here, here, and here.


Read the rest of Igor Oleynikov


Post tags: Animation, Art, Russia

Cthulhu Cthursday: Arkham ? shit, I?m still only in Arkham

Ectoplasmosis - 29 Jul 10

When I found this last weekend, I watched it obsessively a number of times. It just seems right. Not exactly a vision of prophecy, but for a myth of collapse it will do?

Apocalypse -Cthulhu- Now by Cthulinos [Youtube]
Apocalypse Now intro – In case you’ve forgotten the visual pun [Youtube]


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