COOKING UP SOME RANTS Baking trays, baking paper, rolling pin. Unsurprisingly their presence hasn't been missed in my kitchen until I determined to try baking my onw shortbread. Butter wrappers can be used in place of baking paper, but one needs some warning to start saving them. Also looking more closely at the ingredients, given the amount of butter required I'm not even sure if it's going to be cheaper than the budget brand packs used to be at the supermarket. Anyway I bought some baking paper last week, cleaned off some scraps of galvanised iron sheet to use in place of baking trays, and found a cardboard tube that I'll wrap in baking paper to use as a rolling pin. I'll see how I go but I'm expecting disaster. At least the pressure is off a bit, there's nothing worse than slaving away to cook dinner, stuffing it up, and ending up with nothing edible at all. Not that I'm ever really very adventurous with cooking, it's usually just when I'm unwell or extremely tired. That evening the day after the second COVID-19 vaccination dose was the last time, jeeze that was hell. From next firday I'm going to be unwelcome by the CFA (volunteer firefighters) because I haven't had my third jab, then after the 15th of May I'll become one of the state government's official unvaccinated non-people (_after_ they gave me my "fully vaccinated" certificate!) and unable to go into resteraunts, bars, nightclubs, and various other places I can't remember. But they might have changed all the rules by then anyway. Since they relented on blocking unvaccinated visitors to "non-essential retail", none of these forbidden places are actually ones that I've been going into anyway. Even before that when I went to the trouble of carrying around the extremely impractical paper copy of my vaccination certificate, nobody ever asked to see it. Masks finally came off inside stores last week though, so I'm very happy about that. I only recently had to staple folds into the old underpant elastic on my 3D printed face mask because it was getting slack. I never did see anyone else wearing a solid-plastic face-mask. In all it got a handfull of comments from strangers, but overwhelmingly just weird looks - ranging from the curious to the slightly terrorfied. Mind you I thought I was done with it many months ago, and then all the rules came back again, so who knows whether it will really stay off. Other phloggers seem keen to share opinions on what's happening in Ukraine. Many real-life humans probably do too, but so far the few I've talked with haven't brought it up. Since my early teens (when Ukraine still had a Russian-friendly government) I've been facinated with Russia, the former soviet union, and particularly the instability during the collapse and transition to capitalism in the 90s. So I'm facinated by this new chapter, as well as frustrated at how poorly contextualised much of the mainstream reporting has been, but I still hold to my standard stance when it comes to entirely foreign affairs: I've never been there, so what would I know? Besides the dubiousness of the reporting on most foreign matters, there's inevitably a serious difference in culture which defines the exact objectives of the people there. This doesn't just apply to places like Ukraine, I had the same opinion with regards to Trump in the US, of whome everyone in Aus loved to voice their dislike. At the end of the day, I think that much of what goes on in the US, and much of US culture itself, is nuts. If I had my way there'd be a lot of things I'd change that neither major polical party publicly considers a problem. So what meaning is there to me spouting judgement over their government? All that really matters is how their government and its policies interact with our country, and Trump was pretty good to Aus actually. But I will say that the Ukrainian government, or at least its leader, has to be a bit nuts to have continued to pick a fight with Russia even after it became absolutely clear that NATO wasn't going to fight the Russian army directly in their defence. Any understanding of Putin's support-base in Russia (though from many media reports you'd easily believe no such thing existed) shows that he really couldn't stand to have on his record as president both the loss of a Russian-friendly government in Ukraine and NATO (US, basically) forces on his doorstep there instead. - The Free Thinker.