Clutching at Straws
May. 24th, 2008 01:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bliumchikToday I failed at toasting a cheese sandwich.
How, you might ask, does one in fact fail at cheese on toast? Surely this simplest of foods, the staple of the poor university student's diet, is impossible to fuck up?
And you would be correct, barring a sudden eddy in the space-time continuum turning the butter into arsenic, cheese on toast should not be fuck-up-able. There is cheese. There is toast. There is the application of heat. It is not difficult.
Unless you, like me, lack a sandwich toaster, or rather cannot be bothered digging it out, and yet forget that frying pans do not squish your sandwich the way specialised sandwich-toasting equipment does.
And you flip your sandwich with a spatula.
And the cheese falls out.
***
So then I went up to UNSW to be on Stan's trivia team. This was the computer science faculty's trivia competition, so all questions were fairly geeky, even the ones that did not involve mathematics. (I spent the Tech Round fiddling with straws and experimenting with tripods - more on that later). There was a Youtube Round in which we were shown videos and then asked questions about small details in them. The last video was, delightfully, The End Of The World. Anyway, the straws! For every point we were given a small white plastic straw, and with our straw collection we were to build a free-standing tower as high as we could.
Unfortunately the higher it got, the more likely it was to transform into a free-falling tower, so we sacrificed height for structural integrity. I came up with a pretty cool design that looked like bamboo torches, but it really didn't work any higher than my shoulder. We should've placed, though, because the tallest tower totally fell over right after being judged.
I got there a bit early and hug our at the Uni Bar, which had a pretty good band I've never heard of just finishing up their set - The Young Lovers. A quick google shows that they are from Melbourne, are getting pretty popular and have a cute bassist who really hates shoes. Awesome!
***
ETA: this is hilarious! The cat is so relaxed! The old dude is so philosophical! I cannot stop giggling!
How, you might ask, does one in fact fail at cheese on toast? Surely this simplest of foods, the staple of the poor university student's diet, is impossible to fuck up?
And you would be correct, barring a sudden eddy in the space-time continuum turning the butter into arsenic, cheese on toast should not be fuck-up-able. There is cheese. There is toast. There is the application of heat. It is not difficult.
Unless you, like me, lack a sandwich toaster, or rather cannot be bothered digging it out, and yet forget that frying pans do not squish your sandwich the way specialised sandwich-toasting equipment does.
And you flip your sandwich with a spatula.
And the cheese falls out.
***
So then I went up to UNSW to be on Stan's trivia team. This was the computer science faculty's trivia competition, so all questions were fairly geeky, even the ones that did not involve mathematics. (I spent the Tech Round fiddling with straws and experimenting with tripods - more on that later). There was a Youtube Round in which we were shown videos and then asked questions about small details in them. The last video was, delightfully, The End Of The World. Anyway, the straws! For every point we were given a small white plastic straw, and with our straw collection we were to build a free-standing tower as high as we could.
Unfortunately the higher it got, the more likely it was to transform into a free-falling tower, so we sacrificed height for structural integrity. I came up with a pretty cool design that looked like bamboo torches, but it really didn't work any higher than my shoulder. We should've placed, though, because the tallest tower totally fell over right after being judged.
I got there a bit early and hug our at the Uni Bar, which had a pretty good band I've never heard of just finishing up their set - The Young Lovers. A quick google shows that they are from Melbourne, are getting pretty popular and have a cute bassist who really hates shoes. Awesome!
***
ETA: this is hilarious! The cat is so relaxed! The old dude is so philosophical! I cannot stop giggling!
