Amateurs are drunks who vomit on other people’s shoes.
Oktoberfest, whether in Bavaria, or Kitchener, Ont. (that’s in Canada) is full of amateur drunks.
I once got invited to give a talk in Madison, Wisconsin.
Sure, it’s not Milwaukee, but the German influence was everywhere.
I was taken to dinner at some ordinary looking pub, but out back was an entire room devoted to beef-eating and polka music.
It was awesome.
And it wasn’t Oktoberfest, so it was enjoyable.
However, for those looking to gear up for Oktoberfest, because you can’t get enough of drinking warm beer in a concrete hockey arena (the Kitchener version), Adidas has you covered.
The Bavarian-based company is celebrating Oktoberfest in style this year, bringing back its classic lifestyle model, the Adidas Munchen, but with a couple of slight alterations for a much sloppier audience.
Aesthetically, the brown-and-gold Munchen Oktoberfest are apparently inspired by traditional Bavarian calfskin pants, featuring rich embroidery to match your lederhosen and an inner lining with a red-and-white micro-check tablecloth pattern, which evokes that special alpine sense. Pragmatically, they’re made from fine leather with “DBPR” coating, which, according to Adidas, makes the trainers durably beer- and puke-resistant (thus the DBPR).
Canada’s Driving magazine asks: who will clean up the barf in self-driving cars?
Bloomberg reports those working for companies like Lyft and Uber are already discovering a downside of the general public that retailers and restaurateurs and hoteliers have always known. People are pigs. It makes perfect sense that the same people who use white hotel towels to wipe their muddy shoes and return used appliances in sealed boxes will treat a hired ride just as poorly. Hell, some people treat their own cars in ways that would make you shudder.
I spent a weekend in New Liskeard once, a tiny town far north in Ontario (I’ve also been there for a weekend). They do an annual Biker’s Reunion every Canada Day. The place is inundated with visitors and drunken revellers. I took a cab back to my hotel (after a one hour wait) and asked my driver what he did if he had a barfer.
“Two hundred bucks,” he responded. “They get charged two hundred bucks.”
Realizing that it was overwhelmingly drunks who called for cabs at events like this, I wondered if the steep surcharge was actually enforceable.
“We only have two cars,” he responded. “You can’t hide puke.”
Mike Moffitt of SF Gate reports “Hunger Games” star Jennifer Lawrence vomited during a Broadway adaptation of George Orwell‘s “1984,” but she says it was not the harrowing torture scene that made her toss her cookies.
The actress’ stomach problems were first reported by Page Six.
The play’s upsetting staging has reportedly caused audience members to faint, although until Monday night, no one apparently has thrown up.
Those who have read “1984,” are well aware of a nausea-inducing scene involving a cage and a rat.
According to a Page Six source, “Midway through the show, Jennifer Lawrence bolted from her seat. Several people saw her getting sick in the lobby. The ushers were very helpful and courteous in helping her out.”
The site quoted a friend of Lawrence, who said the visceral staging had nothing to do with the actress’ stomach distress. “She caught the stomach flu from her nephews,” the source said.
It’s not the first time Lawrence has publicly puked.
At a Guy Oseary-Madonna party in 2014, she got sick and threw up on a porch.
She told Seth Meyers: “I was in such bad condition, and I look behind me while I’m puking, and Miley Cyrus is there like, ‘Get it together.'”
Ronny Chieng may be known to barfbloggers as the Malaysian correspondent on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, and his shit is funny.
And the dude knows food.
Kylie Northover of Melbourne’s The Age writes when asked about places to dine in Melbourne (that’s in Australia), Chieng swiftly sent back a small list of his favourite places – and a link, no less, to his own restaurant website.
Less food blog than a comprehensive list of cafes, restaurants and bars, Chieng’s site, I’m OK with Anything, also features his bio, links to buy merchandise and his agent details, but it’s foremost a comprehensive “guide to eating, drinking and playing in Melbourne city”.
“This is right up my alley,” Chieng says when we meet at his first choice, Malaysian cafe Aunty Franklee, in the city. “I’m all about this.”
Chieng loves his food, and when he moved here from Singapore to study law and commerce, he was shocked at the lack of late-night food options. This only got worse when he started comedy. But he’s seen a shift, and says it’s usually the Asian places that have spearheaded later opening hours.
“That then forces other places to start doing it too,” Chieng says. “When you do comedy shows, you usually don’t finish until about 11pm, then you have this adrenaline dump and you get hungry. There’s Supper Club and a couple of places but it used to be you had to settle for one of those shitty Lygon Street places; it’s good they’re open but the food is usually awful. That’s why I started the list.”
Visiting comedians would ask for recommendations and he would send out an email.
“That evolved into the website; now I just send people the link.”
Ronny Chieng Photo Credit: Comedy Central
His site covers brunch, lunch, dinner, late openings and bars, and while he doesn’t rate restaurants as such, he does differentiate between prices and “moods”, like “fancy but not super fancy”.
“Sometimes you feel like a $15 meal and sometimes you feel like a $30 one.”
Chieng is fussy about his Malaysian food, and Aunty Franklee, inside the Exford Hotel, serves the best char kwai teow, a hawker flat noodle dish, he’s had in Melbourne.
“It’s a dish that I judge all Malaysian restaurants by,” he says. “It’s hard to get this taste outside of Malaysia, and this is the best I’ve had.”
Chieng orders that and the Bak kut teh, a traditional pork rib dish cooked in a fragrant broth made with 23 herbs, for us to share.
Starters are not really a thing in Malaysian cuisine, he says.
“And there’s no rules – it’s very informal,” Chieng says. “You can even use your hands. In fact, I’m probably the best dressed person ever to walk in here.”
Born in Malaysia but raised mostly in Singapore, Chieng moved to Melbourne to study and in one of those almost unbelievable scenarios, decided to try out at an open mic night – despite never having harboured any desire to be a comedian – and found, with his deadpan delivery, he was an instant hit.
Was he always funny?
“I don’t think so,” he says, although that deadpan thing makes it hard to tell. “I gave it a try, just to confirm my suspicions, really.”
That was in 2009, in the final year of his studies – and when he couldn’t get a legal job, he chose comedy. By 2012, he’d won the best newcomer award at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, and was already touring the major comedy festivals.
And what does his Mum, who, as fans would know, often features in his material, make of his throwing away 10 years of study?
He says she’s “very happy” he got his degrees.
“She’s surprisingly OK – she never once mentioned anything about being part of my stand-up,” he says, again with a tone.
In late 2015, he was headhunted for US comedy news program The Daily Show after host Jon Stewart’s departure. His replacement, comic Trevor Noah, emailed Chieng out of the blue and asked him to come on board as a correspondent. Chieng was on tour at the time, and, as one would, accepted the gig right away.
He didn’t even have time to tell his parents before the news broke in the media.
“I moved straight from the UK to New York – I didn’t even come back to Australia.”
It has been “intense”. “Living in in New York is intense anyway but then with the Trump thing it became even more so,” he says.
On top of the long hours, for many months Chieng was co-writing his sitcom, International Student, via Skype, with Declan Fay in Australia.
“Not to mention I got married last September,” he says.
He married his Australian-Vietnamese fiancee at City Hall in New York, but he’s not getting out of it that easily, with two more “proper” weddings being planned.
“Mum was OK about it but we are getting married again in Melbourne and then again in Kuala Lumpur for my family,” he says. “The Asian wedding is coming!”
He also says no to a beer with lunch, but for less health-conscious reasons.
“The photos will turn out weird if I drink – I have one and my face goes red.”
Much like his character in International Student, one of six comedy pilots shown on ABC last year through its Comedy Showroom initiative, Chieng’s was the first to be made into a full series.
Based “loosely” on his experiences as a student at Melbourne University, it’s a comic look at student life when you’re straddling the cultural divides between locals and foreigners.
It is, Chieng says, an under-explored story.
“It’s all based on stuff that actually happened – I mean, nobody really broke a photocopier, but we had drinking games and I went out of my way to participate in one to get out of my comfort zone,” he says. ” I don’t think you can go through Melbourne Uni without doing a ‘boat race’, for example,” he says of the drinking game in the show’s pilot episode.
When Chieng arrived here, he knew only his sister.
“Usually the international students stick to themselves, but I wanted to make a point of making friends with other students, not just the international ones. I made friends with the locals.”
The series is co-produced by The Comedy Channel in the US, where it will also screen and Chieng reckons despite it being Australian, it will translate to America, where tales of college life are almost their own genre.
As for what lies ahead, Chieng has no definite plan.
“I come from the corporate world where everyone has a five-year plan, but performing arts doesn’t work that way; you just kinda do the best job you can with the gig you’ve got.”
International Student is on ABC, Wednesdays at 9pm, and on ABC iview (that’s the Australian one).
Linda Silmalis of the Courier Mail writes it has been dubbed Barf-gate — who chundered in a ministerial car, leaving the driver gagging and resulting in a clean-up bill costing hundreds of dollars?
The car was driven by a ministerial driver who transported NSW Nationals leader John Barilaro and Liberal MP Eleni Petinos (right, with Blues coach) from ANZ Stadium, where they had been watching the State of Origin match on Wednesday night.
The pair had watched the game with Mr Barilaro’s young daughter and one of his staffers.
Mr Barilaro was in a celebratory mode after a successful state Budget, tweeting from the game: “I spent today backing #NSW in small business AND State of #Origin! UP THE BLUES!!!!!”
By Friday, word was going around Parliament House of a driver fuming over what he had discovered in the car upon starting his shift hours — possible a day — later.
“The word is one vomited, and that set off the others,” a source close to the driver said.
Mr Barilaro, a married father of two, declined to answer any questions about the cost of the clean-up bill, nor who left the car in a mess.
A statement from his office confirmed Mr Barilaro and Ms Petinos were at Origin, but declined to confirm the figure to be repaid.
“The taxpayer will not have to bear any costs,” the statement said.
“As soon as the kid caught a glimpse of that produce lying there decomposing, he turned away, hunched over, and started throwing up like crazy,” said supervisor Carl Webster, adding that it was not uncommon for brand-new agents to react in such a manner when suddenly confronted with a putrefying, fly-covered rind. “He’ll get past it, though—you build up your tolerance after a while. The key is to not let it faze you but also never forget that this rotting pulp was once a sweet, delicious part of someone’s fruit bowl or lunchbox.”
At press time, Dunn had steeled himself and looked at the orange once more, but was vomiting again before he could make it back to the car.
For casual-corporate barf, nothing beats the South Bank Surf Club.
The South Bank Parklands, which were established on the former site of World Expo 88, are one of Brisbane’s most popular tourist attractions.
Approximately 11,000,000 people visit the South Bank Parklands each year.
On Sept. 23, 2015, Brisbane’s South Bank Surf Club allegedly made up a large batch of raw-egg-based aioli sauce and served it for seven days.
At least 29 diners were sickened.
At the time, the manager of the club said the cause was “a bad batch of eggs’’ provided by a supplier. They said the eggs had been used in sauces served with seafood platters.
“We’ve been caught out, unfortunately. Our customers’ wellbeing is our priority and anyone with concerns can get in touch with us,” they said. “To rectify the problem, we are not making sauces in-house.’’
Guess they were too busy courting biz-cas types to worry about microbiology.
Lawyers for the restaurant on Thursday entered guilty pleas to 22 charges of serving unsafe food over eight days.
The charges did not arise from unhygienic practices and the company had no knowledge the food was unsafe, the court heard.
Really?
Western Australian hockey player Kelli Reilly had snacked on buffalo wings with aioli sauce with her team at the restaurant the day before they were due to play in the final of a masters competition in Brisbane.
They won gold at the tournament but soon after, Ms Reilly was hospitalised for three days and still suffers from the salmonella poisoning.
She has not been able to play hockey since and has sworn off aioli.
‘I’ve been through a lot, I’d probably not like to comment on it all because it has impacted me a lot and my family,’ she said outside court.
(Thanks to a Brisbane-based colleague and barfblog.com fan who passed this along.)
In April 2015, Finnish public health authorities alerted European Union member states of a possible multi-country Salmonella enteritidis outbreak linked to an international youth ice-hockey tournament in Latvia.
The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), Finnish and Latvian authorities initiated an outbreak investigation to identify the source. The investigation included a description of the outbreak, retrospective cohort study, microbiological investigation and trace-back. We identified 154 suspected and 96 confirmed cases from seven countries.
Consuming Bolognese sauce and salad at a specific event arena significantly increased the risk of illness. Isolates from Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian cases had an identical multiple-locus variable-number of tandem repeats analysis-profile (3-10-6-4-1).
Breaches in hygiene and food storing practices in the specific arena’s kitchen allowing for cross-contamination were identified. Riga Cup participants were recommended to follow good hand hygiene and consume only freshly cooked foods.
This investigation demonstrated that the use of ECDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Information System for Food- and Waterborne Diseases and Zoonoses platform was essential to progress the investigation by facilitating information exchange between countries. Cross-border data sharing to perform whole genome sequencing gave relevant information regarding the source of the outbreak.
Multi-country outbreak of Salmonella enteritidis infection linked to the international ice hockey tournament
Epidemiology and Infection, pages 1-10, 14 Jun 2017, Pärn T, Dahl V, Lienemann T, Perevosčikovs J, DE Jong B
The 200th anniversary of Soren Kierkegaard’s birth has brought some stereotypical outpourings about angst and existentialism.
Me, it’s better to play hockey.
I have a soft spot for the Danes. Spending five summers hammering nails with a couple of Danish homebuilders in Ontario (that’s in Canada) taught me the value of being well-read and beer at morning coffee, lunch, and afternoon coffee. My friend John Kierkegaard would say, the beer is nice, but the work, it isn’t really so good.
When I went to Copenhagen in 1998 for a scientific meeting, there was beer at morning coffee.
Gordon Marino wrote in The New York Times that the way we negotiate anxiety plays no small part in shaping our lives and character. And yet, historically speaking, the lovers of wisdom, the philosophers, have all but repressed thinking about that amorphous feeling that haunts many of us hour by hour, and day by day. The 19th-century philosopher-theologian Soren Kierkegaard stands as a striking exception to this rule. It was because of this virtuoso of the inner life that other members of the Socrates guild, such as Heidegger and Sartre, could begin to philosophize about angst.
The adytum of Kierkegaard’s understanding of anxiety is located in his work “The Concept of Anxiety” — a book at once so profound and byzantine that it seems to aim at evoking the very feeling it dissects.
Perhaps more than any other philosopher, Kierkegaard reflected on the question of how to communicate the truths that we live by — that is the truths about ethics and religion.
“Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household. A person keeps this anxiety at a distance by looking at the many round about who are related to him as kin and friends, but the anxiety is still there.”
Kierkegaard understood that anxiety can ignite all kinds of transgressions and maladaptive behaviors — drinking, carousing, obsessions with work, you name it. We will do most anything to steady ourselves from the dizzying feeling that can take almost anything as its object. However, Kierkegaard also believed that, “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.”
In his “Works of Love,” Kierkegaard remarks that all talk about the spirit has to be metaphorical. Sometimes anxiety is cast as a teacher, and at others, a form of surgery. The prescription in “The Concept of Anxiety” and other texts is that if we can, as the Buddhists say, “stay with the feeling” of anxiety, it will spirit away our finite concerns and educate us as to who we really are, “Then the assaults of anxiety, even though they be terrifying, will not be such that he flees from them.” According to Kierkegaard’s analysis, anxiety like nothing else brings home the lesson that I cannot look to others, to the crowd, when I want to measure my progress in becoming a full human being.
But this, of course, is not the counsel you are likely to hear these days at the mental health clinic.
I can attest to that.
So when Tyson launches a no antibiotics ever campaign, it is appealing to crass consumerism, making a buck, and throwing science back to when Kierkegaard was born.
We want our social media and technology, but we want our food produced in some 200-year-old barn.
Tyson President and CEO Tom Hayes said earlier this year that the company would continue to innovate in product development while remaining focused on sustainable production practices. “For us, sustainability isn’t a single issue; it’s about focusing on multiple dimensions in order to advance the whole,” Hayes said during the 2017 Consumer Analyst Group of New York (CAGNY) Conference in Boca Raton, Florida. “We will use our reach, capabilities and resources to drive positive change at a scale we believe no other company can match.”
Amy and I went to a Phoenix Coyotes hockey game when Wayne was coach, maybe 2006, and this loudmouth behind us was bragging about some cougar he hooked up with in Boca.
That’s your benchmark, Tyson.
I have vague memories of another company, back in 2006, that turned its back on science and proclaimed no antibiotics.
They forgot about food safety, too busy being posers.
How’s that working out, Chipotle?
The language of this presser is full swallow-whole.
The company’s sustainability plans include establishing strategic partnerships to set science-based sustainability goals; continuing third-party audits of farms to certify humane treatment of chickens; improving how chickens are raised through a concept farm, with innovations designed to be better for the birds, the environment and food safety; and increasing transparency across the business, including sustainability efforts.
I’ve know people who can write this stuff.
Not me.
Not Kierkegaard
I’ve got no genius for evil, that makes me common.
The name “Kierkegaard” means “graveyard,” and “Søren” is an affectionate Danish moniker for the Devil.
Sorenne, you know you have some devil in you, and some science.
I love that barfblog Ben’s partner, Dani, wrote today that, “For those of you wondering, Barfblog Ben has no idea how to actually clean up barf in real life,” after she cleaned up dog barf at 1 a.m. and kid barf at 1 p.m. at the hockey store.
I feel your pain – and irony.
There was this one time, we were driving home from Florida, and we were already back in Kansas, and Sorenne barfed, so I barfed in response.
I viewed it as a pathetic fallacy barf.
And this other time, one of my daughters barfed as the plane landed and I handled it like a pro.
Maybe it’s a cleaning of convenience that Chapman suffers from.
That’s a lot of people barfing, and a disturbing lack of knowledge about what a deep clean actually means.
The Yolo County Health & Human Services Agency announced the virus, which causes fever and diarrhea, was rapidly affecting students, teachers and staff at area schools.
“The number of sick people is increasing every day at a very alarming rate,” the agency said in a press release.
The gastrointestinal illness, for which there’s no treatment, has impacted 32 schools in the county, located northwest of Sacramento.
Norovirus is highly contagious, health officials said. People can catch it by touching contaminated surfaces, coming in close contact with others carrying it and eating infected food.
I once got invited to give a talk in Madison, Wisconsin.
