I went to this festival in 2008 and it was certainly the highlight of the season. 3 days of music, entertainment, camping, sunshine and hijinks. Good times. The crowd is conspicuously free of fluoro teenagers and has a much more relaxed atmosphere than, say, a Fuzzy festival. I even ran into Jon Wall one night.

I recommend that all of the Party Posse get their tickets ASAP, it can combine the best of our festival adventures with the relaxation of a PP Teepee. The four day pass lets us get in the day before, to get prime camping position and less queuing for the ferry. No-one knows the lineup yet, but it doesn’t really matter. It is gonna be AWESOME!

Get your earlybird tickets here.

Ingredients

1kg potatoes, washed
100g butter
4-6 rashers bacon (with fat)
I bunch chives
Some kind of leaf e.g. baby spinach, endive, kale
Milk
Salt + Pepper to taste

Method

Chop the potatoes roughly and add them to a large pot with lots of boiling water. I like to leave the skin on to preserve the nutrients and add an extra bit of texture, this is a personal choice. Chop the bacon into small pieces about the size of your pinky nail. Chop the chives finely. If necessary, break your leaves into a smaller size – this is not necessary with baby spinach. When the potatoes are nearly cooked, heat all of the butter in a frypan and gently cook the bacon. Be careful as the bacon is likely to spit and jump and may burn you. Once the bacon is cooked to almost-crunchy, take it off the heat but leave it in the pan. We want to use the delicious bacon butter to flavour the stamppot.

When the potatoes are well cooked, drain them and roughly mash them. We don’t want a smooth paste, this is a robust peasant dish. Add the bacon and butter to the potatoes, then put some mashed potato into the frypan and swirl it around to recover as much delicious butter as possible. Put the butterised potato back in the pot. Add the chives and give it all a good stir. Add a bit of milk, but not so much that the mash gets too thin. Add salt and pepper to taste. Now add the uncooked leaves and stir it around. The idea is to wilt the leaves in the heat of the mash, you might want to cover the pot to help achieve this. The stamppot should be ready in a minute or so.

Serving

Give everyone a big dollop. If you are serving with a sauce, stew, gravy or casserole then make a well in the top of the mash large enough to accomodate. It is also traditional to serve a stamppot with smoked sausage called rookworst. Be prepared to come back for seconds. It is impossible to serve a stamppot and finish eating before you are as full as you can possibly be.

Eet smaakelijk!

I was working away when I heard a drawer close. Wondering how a drawer closed without me closing it, I went to investigate. Kneeling on the ground in front of the filing cabinet, "doing up his shoelaces", was a young sweaty man with a backpack on. It is unfortunate, and I almost feel racist to mention it, but he was of Aboriginal descent.

Darryn: What are you doing in my office?

Burgular: Tying my shoelaces up, what does it look like?

Darryn: It looks like you are a thief

Burgular: I’m not a bloody* thief, the door was unlocked

Darryn (Bluffing): I am going to call security

Burgular: What for? I am just here to tie up my shoes

Darryn: Open your backpack and show me what is inside

Burgular: *bleep* you’re a *bleeping bleep*

The Burgular opened his backpack and satisfied Darryn that there was nothing of ours in there, and the sweat pattern on his back showed that he came in with it.

Darryn: Leave the office now

Darryn escorts Burgular to the office Lobby, where Burgular pauses.

Burgular: You’re a dog. You’re lucky I don’t smack you one. Calling me a thief!

Darryn: Out

Exit Burgular

For the next 5 minutes my heart was pounding a bit, and I was glad that I am Big, and was able to appear threatening enough to make the Burgular leave without incident.

I think we should get one of those devices that makes a chime when the door is opened. The door is locked now.

Type of Cognitive Processing

Brief Description

Holistic
Processing information from whole to part; sees the big picture first, not the details.

Random
Processing information with out priority, jumps form one task to another.

Concrete
Processes things that can be seen , or touched – real objects.

Intuitive
Processes information based on whether or not it feels right know answer but not sure how it was derived.

Nonverbal
Processes thought as illustrations.

Fantasy-Oriented
Processes information with creativity; less focuses on rules and regulations

From http://www.mtsu.edu/%7Estudskl/hd/hemispheric_dominance.html

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