Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Sickly Reading

The only good thing about a sick baby is that they tend to have longer than normal day sleeps. For an equally sickly mummy this means mummy has the luxury of sitting in bed for an hour or so. What a treat! While I've been resting up, aside from keeping Kleenex in business I have been finding amusement in strange places.

So what kinds of websurfing does one do when one is curled up in bed surrounded by snotty tissues? One reads the NSW State Government Name & Shame Site. What on earth is this? This is an awesome site dedicated to telling the people of our state which restaurants and cafes have been busted for unsafe cooking practices!

For a clean freak like me, this is the ultimate train wreck. I can't look away but I feel sick as I trawl through the restaurants reading what kinds of ikky food handling offences they have committed.

Take Bourke Street Bakery for example. For my non-Sydney readers let me tell you a bit about this place. It is a bakery that seems to pride itself on amazing pastries and being too cool for school. It is a kind of grungy, trendy place with aloof and often unfriendly staff.

The type that study Kierkegaard at university and wear skinny jeans and have keffiyehs around their necks positioned to look as though they'd just been thrown on, when really we know they spent half an hour fiddling. Unless you are equally cool they just grunt at you or raise their eyebrows when you place your order.

They have delicious pastries and yummy sandwiches but their prices are not so delicious. I've been known to spend a small fortune there. They use lashings of butter on everything so the brown paper bag is always see through by the time you take your first bite. Mmmm fatty goodness. Anyway I found them on the site!

It says their violation was that they "Failed to display potentially hazardous foods under temperature control - Ham, cheese, chorizo and pancetta displayed at temperatures of 19C-20C" Come to think of it, I have noticed that their sandwiches are on the shelf behind glass but they are not refrigerated. Shame on them. I have been reading all sorts of offences, some are more revolting than others. I have a rapidly growing list of places I don't want to try.

It got me thinking, what kinds of weird and wacky research do you get up to when you have spare time online? My mum tends to favour the auction sites. Often telling me of obscure items I could get for a bargain. My husband has been known to waste hours on IMDB looking up random film facts. So, tell me where do you find yourself wasting time on the web?

17 comments:

  1. you mean besides stalk random blogs about all kinds of random stuff?

    I also spend time on IMDB, ebay, etsy. But my biggest passion is researching house designs of all things big and grand (that I will never be able to afford). I could spend hours on the net looking at, and designing, my house if i ever won tattslotto

    Hope you feel better soon C! Same to Tinkers!

    xoxo

    ReplyDelete
  2. Okay ... it's ebay, BUT now I'm onto all this blogging stuff, I totally stalk the lot of you! Scary huh.

    ReplyDelete
  3. definitely agree with IMDB...i'm also into browsing through wikipedia, amazon, facebook, and textsfromlastnight.com and cakewrecks gives me a good laugh sometimes...

    of course besides the usual blog stalking haha

    ReplyDelete
  4. Glad you're all feeling better!
    I wish I actually spent time reading something worth reading. I compulsively refresh - thus the shattering response time of 3 seconds to any comments left for me... Pretty sad.
    How's that verifying the dry cleaner man's sons actual place of residence in Chicago coming...?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Twas interesting what you said about snotty service staff. Today in Manuka (Canberra), I came across my fair share. What the? I'm SO jack of this, I can't begin to tell you. Snooty service and waitstaff are, like, SO out of vogue now. All it does is tell everyone else on the planet how low on the evolutionary scale these people are, and how bile-fully bitter they are because they haven't yet snaffled their lead role (and never will). Hello! You're effing waitstaff! You don't qualify for such a 'tude!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Maybe I shouldn't comment as I studied Kierkegaard at uni.

    I waste time on apartment therapy, design blogs, ravelry, various crafty bloggers, Tech sites such as lifehacker, gizmondo... and of course keeping up on what available in all teh cool childrens stores.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I LOVE THINKING OF RANDOM THINGS TO PUNCH INTO MY COMPUTER AND SEEING WHAT COMES UP.FOR EXAMPLE, I LOVE WATCHING RE-RUNS OF THE TV SHOWS I WATCHED AS A KID,SO WHEN I FIND AN ACTOR OR ACTRESS THAT HAS VIRTUALLY DISAPPEARED OVER THE LAST 20 OR 30 YEARS, I TYPE THEIR NAME IN TO LOOK AT CURRENT PICS AND SEE WHAT THEY HAVE BEEN UP TOO.SOME ARE REALLY INTERESTING AND SOME ARE BETTER LEFT UNFOUND!
    I HOPE THAT YOU AND YOUR DAUGHTER GET WELL SOON!

    ReplyDelete
  8. Blogging, of course...
    And deviantart.
    And recently, twitter. Oh, the time I spend reading tweets!

    ReplyDelete
  9. Get well soon!
    A friend got me hooked on this site: http://www.polyvore.com/
    Very fun to create dream outfits and then go shopping. Of course I can't afford the shopping part but it's still fun to see where all the links take you and sometimes discover a fun find. I also spend tons of time (and money) on etsy as a seller and a buyer.

    ReplyDelete
  10. hi! im new in blogging and i'm not pretty sure if I'm making it right.. i read your blog no one knows but i'm a chef by heart, my friend whisper me about this site.. i hope i can be one of your blogmates..
    keep safe and God Bless

    ReplyDelete
  11. wasting time? I thought that was known as "constructive use of huge blocks of time"

    Sending get better soon thoughts...

    ReplyDelete
  12. I stalk, err, read other people on twitter and blogs, blog myself, or search craigslist for that one item that will make me fabulous. What that is, I am not sure, but I will know it when I see it. Oh, and I am with Extranjera, I compulsively refresh my blogger and twitter home pages to see anything new that might have occurred in the last three seconds.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Blog-surfing. My blogroll just keeps on growing, lol!

    ReplyDelete
  14. Thanks C, I've been meaning to catch up on my reading on the Name and Shame site, but I've been too lazy to Google it. Clicking on your link has saved me the hassle.

    I enjoy reading reviews of cosmetics and hair products at makeupalley.com. Saves me money on buying crappy things that don't work too.
    My latest obsession has been voting and reviewing at UrbanSpoon.com. I've even made it onto the Top Contributors list. So smug!

    ReplyDelete
  15. i look at homes for sale in different parts of the country that i would like to live--ones that i will never be able to afford :)

    hope you're feeling better!

    ReplyDelete
  16. I probably shouldn't have written this post! Now I have a million and one more places to visit online. Oh dear! Thank you for the links though, I have already started checking a few out. I love the Polyvore one and of course texts from last night as well. Funny! As for the dry cleaning man, he is so annoying. He has gone back to the tales of the 95kilo pet dog who sleeps on his bed. He hasn't told me any of those for at least 3 months.

    ReplyDelete
  17. I watch lots of comedians on youtube. Even bad ones. Or Croatian Folkloric Dancing, just for a laugh.

    ReplyDelete