The Sydney Grind

Hillary Clinton accepts Obama’s offer of the Secretaryship (word?) of State. Reading through the list of appointees, I saw a lot of familiar names. If, like me, you are an interested amateur when it comes to US politics, the following might help.

Name: Hillary Clinton
Appointed: Secretary of State
You may remember her from: Married to former President Bill Clinton, first lady 1993-2001. Wellesley College, Yale Law School, parnter of Rose Law Firm. Senator for New York state since 2000.
Quote: “We are the president” - according to James B Stewart

Name: David Axelrod
Appointed: Senior Adviser
You may remember him from: Nothing, but he has an Autobot surname (a more introspective variation of Hotrod?) and a moustache that makes him look like he’s still living in 1984.

Name: Gregory Craig
Appointed: White House Counsel
You may remember him from: special counsel to Bill Clinton, defending him against impeachment. A reversible name. Yale law schoolmate of Hillary and Bill.

Name: Ron Klain
Appointed: Chief of Staff to the Vice-President
You may remember him from: Chief of Staff to the Vice-President (Al Gore). Supreme Court tipstaff.

Name: Tom Daschle
Appointed: Secretary of Health
You may remember him from: “Senator Tom Daschle (D)”, from his days as Senate Majority Leader. Wikipedia says of Daschle: “Daschle became a brother of Alpha Phi Omega”. The article does not explain how Daschele’s brother acquired such a quirky name, and whether the surname Omega indicates that said brother was adopted from Greece.

To be continued.

Yesterday, London’s Telegraph carried a piece about how iPhone’s new voice-recognising Googling tool fails to recognise British accents. Then today, its antipodean and tabloidal namesake tells us that the iPhone gets confused by Australian accents.

I bet the same thing is happening across the world: every paper puts a local spin on what is really the same story (”iPhone’s new voice-recognising Googling tool is crap”). Just imagine it:

“US English accent confuses iPhone” — the Seattle Bugle.

“Vaticano Latin too much for iPhone - Cardinal warns against playing God” — the Vatican City Bull.

“iPhone refuses to understand Korean - Comrade Kim Jung-il denounces evil imperialist plot.” — the Pyongyang Times.

I was walking down the long, dark valley of the shadow of death that is Phillip Street (and not in a particularly elated mood, as you can probably tell) when I looked up, and saw - sapphire blue sky reflected in the windows of Chifley Tower, and behind, Governor Phillip Tower, its roof foils gleaming in the sun, against a brilliant sky dotted with whispy clouds. I was happy.

Sometimes, you just have to look up.

Since everyone else seems to be blogging about the election, I might as well jump on the bandwagon as well.

While I was watching a McCain-Palin interview on the New York Times website, it happened to freeze right at this moment:

If you use your imagination a little, that’s how McCain might look like if he were to suffer a slight mishap while driving.

In any case, nointrigue.com for Obama! For all it’s worth, given I don’t actually have a vote…

Name: Sushi Tei
Address: 1 Chifley Square, Cnr Elizabeth St and Hunter St, Sydney 2000
Website: http://www.sushitei.com/
Phone: +61 2 92327288
Type: Sushi restuarant/sushi train
Cuisine: Japanese/other Asian
Opening hours: 11:30am-3pm, 5pm-10pm

Sushi Tei (”Sushi pavilion”) is a chain of Japanese restaurants concentrated in South-East Asia (and even has a branch in Shanghai). Its Sydney branch is conveniently (for me) located at Chifley Square.

Sushi Tei specialises in lightly flavoured dishes that play on the natural flavours of commonplace, perhaps even mundane, ingredients. Its specialties include sushis, grilled rice dishes, and soups. On my most recent visit, the two of us shared a seafood paper hot pot, a salmon steak, a crispy sushi roll, and a soft shell crab sushi roll. The food was not ground-shattering, but I found no major fault with it. The paper hot pot looked elegant, and was delicious, with salmon, scallops, enokitake mushrooms, tofu and some kind of noodly thing on the bottom. I also recommend the sushi selection. Apart from the two mentioned above, the crispy salmon skin makizushi excellently combines the flavour of salmon with a crunchy texture. Highly enjoyable.

My only grumble coming out of this visit, though, is that serving sizes seem to have continued to diminish. I am fairly certain that the last time we ordered the soft shell crab roll, the crab legs protruding from the ends of the roll were not so juvenile looking. Considering the price, though, the meal was still fairly good value. Plus, the speed of service makes the restaurant a good choice for a quick, working dinner.

The best thing about the restaurant is the ambience, which is relaxing even at the busiest of times - with light wooden lattice dividers separating the tables, but not detracting from the light and airy atmosphere lent by floor to ceiling windows. The kitchen is open plan. If you want a better view of the sushi chef in action - at the expense of sitting on stools instead of 60-minute chairs - there is a sushi train counter.

Conclusion: Good value, good ambience, and ideal for a quick, quality meal.

Food: 7/10
Service: 6/10
Ambience: 7/10
Value for money: 7/10
Overall: 7/10

Thanks Dan!

And today, I accepted the summer clerkship offer from Blake Dawson.

I bought a Nikon D80 camera on Monday, and am now spending a good part of my afternoons walking around the city like a lost tourist - lost, because I’m constantly digging out the manual to work out how to work one setting or another. I look so much like a tourist that a kindly Melbournian tried to help the confused Asian tourist that I appeared to be.

Taking photos with a complicated camera is so much fun! Not only do I get to fiddle with lots of settings, but I can almost always be sure that the photos will turn out nice by using more or less of the automatic settings. So long, that is, as I remember to do elementary things like flicking on the autofocus switch. Here are a couple of photos that I’ve uploaded to Wikimedia commons :

One in 10 Tasmanians racist: So, 46.6% of people in NSW believe that some cultural or ethnic groups don’t fit into Australian society. This sort of figure is bound to shake off any naïve belief that Australians have fixed the scourge of racism. I guess, though, it wasn’t altogether surprising given the brouhaha at Camden and Bass Hill. What would you do to create a more tolerant society?

A while back, CityRail started having these Empty Trains. I can’t for the life of me work out why anyone would choose such a stupid name. Does it mean that there’s no one inside? Does it mean it doesn’t go anywhere afterwards, as in, it’s terminating? (If so, what’s wrong with the word terminating?) I suppose it’s better than a (null) train.

The real WTF in the picture, though, is how a platform 23 service ended up on the Illawarra Line screen.

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