(0)Just bought tickets to see the last Michael Bublé concert at the Opera House. Should be good. I’d also pay to see James Darren but I don’t think he’ll be coming to Australia any time soon. He’d make a good convention guest for Holodiction, actually.
I’m still receiving MyDoom e-mails by the boatload. It sometimes takes over half an hour each day to download them all on dialup. When will they ever stop?!
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(0)Est. is the restaurant that sits one level above the Establishment bar on George Street. The restaurant is surprisingly insulated from the sound below. When we went in at 7pm on Saturday, the bar was absolutely deserted. When we came back down from dinner at about 1am, the bar was packed and in full swing, yet we couldn’t even hear the thump of the backbeat from upstairs.
Est’s interior is elegant. The architecture inside, with its high ceiling and pillars, lends it an older feel which is not that common in restaurants. We had the private room (used to accommodate groups of eight or more) and I found the lighting was too dim for my tastes. What is it with dim lighting anyway? It’s annoying when you can’t make out your meal or the person across the table. And it’s not romantic when everyone’s perpetually squinting. There’s not much of a view out the window onto George St either, but otherwise, the setting and ambience is comfortable and relaxed.
At Est.
The Est tasting menu had seven courses – two entrees, two mains, a cheese platter and two desserts. They give you an option for three of the courses. As usual, each item on the menu had at least one word we’d never heard of before. The squab pigeon was cooked rare and had a pleasingly mild taste which contrasts with the strong flavour of pigeons cooked in Asian restaurants. The muscat grapes on the cheese platter had a fantastic tang. The mango, lychee and tapioca soup with the lime-tequila sorbet was terrific. The final course had an almond milk sorbet floating in a shot of liquor, along with an apricot and ginger souffle. Being allergic to liquor, I unfortunately did not make much headway into the dish before having to concede defeat amid the snickering of friends. It’s excellent mod Oz cuisine. The restaurant is a three hatter, but in my opinion it is still missing that “extra bit” that puts it on a different level from perennial favourites Tet’s and Rockpool.
Apricot and Ginger Souffle, Almond Milk Sorbet and Fresh Cream
The tasting menu was $120 a head. Apart from the two bottles of wine, we went through 11 bottles of water. They kept topping up our glasses and had we known the water was charged at $10 a bottle, would have been a bit less “thirsty”. Booking the private room incurs a 10% service fee, which we paid in lieu of a tip. Service in the room is patchy because the doors are shut and you can’t signal the attention of a waiter, but they appear to top up water and wine often enough. Good place to go to if you have a large group.
Comment of the night (topic was on companies forcing men to take paternal leave):
Kit (genuinely confused): But why would you want to take paternal leave?
Skye (incredulous): Uh, to see and take care of your baby maybe?
Kit (pausing to think): Oh yeah. They cry and stuff don’t they.
Photos above are from Shaf’s camera. You need a fairly strong flash when it’s that dimly lit and my camera wasn’t cutting it.
This movie is pretty disjointed and disorientating at the start. It not only skips between different groups of people who initially appear to have nothing to do with one another, but it also skips backwards and forwards through time. Luckily for us, things begin to gel towards the end. It’s a fairly enjoyable watch if you like movies done in a style reminiscent of Memento.
I’ve spent the majority of the last 24 hours catching up on my Enterprise eps. I’m sad to say that season 2 was composed of mostly uninspiring, insipid plot-driven episodes. There seems to have been a move away from anything deep or meaningful, and towards a hostile-alien-of-the-week style show. That said, there were a couple decent episodes. For example, “Cogenitor” (2.22) was refreshing. For once, they meet aliens who are understanding, friendly and patient even when insulted by Redneck Tripp who sees fit to apply human values to an alien culture. It’s another episode foreshadowing the development of the much maligned Prime Directive, and a significant one given the hard hitting consequences of Tripp’s actions. The writers continue to use the decon chamber as a soft-porn room. Not that I’m complaining, but those episodes tend to be awful in all the other departments.
Interestingly, in Season 3, Berman and Braga saw fit to rename “Enterprise” back to “Star Trek: Enterprise”, thereby bringing it solidly back into the franchise. Season 3 introduces a more solid arc of continuity, centred around the Xindi and a mysterious section of the galaxy called the Delphic Expanse, a sort of Bermuda Triangle where ships really do get abducted by aliens. Because it’s linked to the temporal cold war, the writers play around with time too much and the whole season is one big continuity screwup. I’ve learned to look past that, but it’s still pretty annoying when you have to suspend disbelief just so you can see what point the writers were trying to make. And there’s a lot of weekly “Captain Archer saves the world again” stuff happening which gets pretty tiring. Let’s hope something good comes out of this Xindi storyline.
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12:56pm (GMT +11.00) tomorrow 
