Stuart McCullough

When it comes to the culinary arts, I can put up with just about anything. I can tolerate ‘jus’ even though my heart longs to leap out through my chest and scream ‘pretentious!’. I can even put up with a wanton use of the term ‘reduction’. Heavens above, I can even turn a blind eye to things that have been ‘caramelized’ beyond recognition. When it comes to food, I can endure all sorts of chicanery. Anything, that is, except a dish that has been ‘deconstructed’.
Continue reading “Deconstructing Degustation”

Is nothing sacred? As it turns out, reality television is not the most reliable means by which to find the love of your life. Who’d have thunk that a process involving televised dates and horticultural beneficence might be anything other than failsafe? Let me frank (which, at this point, is a lot better than being Blake), I have never watched an episode of The Bachelor. As best I can tell, it’s an awkward mix of Survivor and team selection for the lunch hour cricket match in primary school. Even though the series ended with a marriage proposal, it was impossible not to suspect that, in fact, the whole thing would end in tears.
Continue reading “Come Back Dexter, All Is Forgiven”

Perhaps something was lost in translation. Or maybe Russian journalists are simply accustomed to telling people what they really think of them so long as said people are (a) not Vladimir Putin and (b) located somewhere on the other side of the earth. There’s no doubt about it – our Prime Minister has been comprehensively slagged off. In Cyrillic script, no less.
Continue reading “Insolent, Arrogant, Incompetent, Awesome”

There’s a sign around the corner from my father’s. By the side of the Mornington Tyabb Road in a loose, spray-painted script, the sign promises ‘stable manure’ for just a few dollars per bag. What is left unsaid is whether the manure has always been stable or has achieved this through a combination of clean living and therapy. Perhaps it’s best not to ask. To tell you the truth, I’d prefer not to know the going rate for a bag of ‘unstable manure’. This is because I have a substantial fear of the stuff and will do almost anything to avoid it. This makes our decision to holiday in Bali – home of the infamous Bali belly – even more perplexing.
Continue reading “I’ve Been to Bali Two”

Flying is the ultimate ‘don’t look down’ experience. But as I tighten my seatbelt on the plane, it’s clear that air-travel has changed. I wait for the moment to arrive, but it never does. It seems that somewhere in the quest for low-cost air travel we have abandoned the one thing that distinguished flying from other forms of transport: the hot towel. Frankly, without a hot towel I might as well be sitting on a tram. Who is it that makes such monumental decisions? Is there a committee? Was there a plebiscite? The stewardess refuses to answer any of these questions no matter how often I push the button. As a result, I’m forced to improvise by wetting one of my socks and using two biros as a makeshift pair of tongs. ‘Hot towel?’ I ask.
Continue reading “Tales of a Reluctant Traveler”

It’s hard not to take it personally. Irish rock group U2 decided to spam pretty much all of Western Civilization with their latest album by dumping it onto people’s iTunes accounts for free, whether they wanted it or not. They’ve unloaded it on pretty much everyone in the world – except me. Granted, it’s a huge exercise and my exclusion could be a mere oversight rather than a deliberate campaign to exile me from the broader pop cultural universe forever, but given a choice between accident and conspiracy, I choose the latter.
Continue reading “Et Tu, U2? Betrayal by a Mega Band”

At first I misunderstood. I was waiting for a take away coffee when an email appeared in my inbox without warning from a large Department store. The subject line declared: VIP Sale – Hurry last days! I know for a fact that ‘VIP’ stands for ‘Very Important Person’ and not, as I’d previously thought, ‘Voluptuous Idiot Pants’. I don’t know much about VIP sales except they’re about as frequent as a visit by Halley’s Comet. There was not a second to lose. Instantly, I leapt to my feet and abandoned my low-fat soy latte with half an artificial sweetener. Away from the madding crowd, my fingers worked furiously to type out the only question anyone would want to ask when time was so clearly of the essence.
Continue reading “I.C.U.R.A.V.I.P. (Or, How to Buy A Rap Superstar)”

At first, I couldn’t be sure. Soon enough, it was a conclusion I could not escape – the clock on the computer at work was losing time. Seven minutes per day to be precise. This may sound like a lot of not very much – after all, what can you really do with seven minutes anyway? Turn up on time, for starters. Catch the right tram. When you think about it, dislocating yourself by seven minutes in each twenty-four hour period can really catch you off guard. Worse still, the effect was cumulative. Today it’s seven minutes. Tomorrow it’s fourteen. As I write this, I am not in the here and now but am stranded twenty-eight minutes ago. Spooky, isn’t it?
Continue reading “The Finer Points of Time Travel”

It’s over. The battle between modesty and narcissism has ended with the latter emerging victorious, fists bloodied but raised and clutching a mobile phone. Doubtless, Narcissus will shortly be posting photos of himself, a triumphant grin slathered across his stupid face, bragging to all of cyberspace about how he vanquished his foe once and for all. Forget about holding anything back or leaving something to the imagination. Give up altogether on wanting to foster a little mystery. The information superhighway is much like an international airport – everything, it seems, must be declared. And in a world of over-sharing, nothing strips away any remaining vestige of mystique quite like a ‘selfie’.
Continue reading “To Thine Own Selfie Be True”

Truth be told, I was never really interested. For me, it was something to do when stuck on holidays, when all televisions in a fifty-kilometre radius had malfunctioned. We didn’t have one at home. But at every caravan park we ever visited – from the dingiest lump of dirt with an adjacent toilet block to the self-proclaimed ‘holiday resorts’ – there was always a ‘Rec’ room and in that Rec room there was always a ping-pong table. As I approached the door, my heart could not help but hope for Pac Man or even a little Dig Dug. Upon pulling the handle, a dingy squat would be revealed, various incomplete board games in a pile that looked as though they had been recently assaulted and a decrepit ping-pong table.
Continue reading “Balls Up! The Demise of Ping-Pong”