Date Archives → August 29, 2012

#WEFO T-Shirt

A while back there was a discussion amongst West Footscray locals about the etymology of the suburb’s abbreviation “wefo”, a discussion started by its commodification by this $65 cushion from design gallery Post Industrial Design. I’d first seen the suburb referred to as WeFo in an email from November 2008 so the abbreviation’s history predates its growing popularity as a hashtag on Twitter and at a guess, probably started when people began to feel uncomfortable about gentrification and needed an ironic response.

And what’s more ironic and discomfiting than buying it, and wearing it on a tshirt.

Click through on the below images to buy in your choice of colour and style. Prices start at $17.

Food Idea Generator

Are you a chef who has hit a creative wall? A home cook who has prepared everything that a Nathan Myhrvold-led team can throw at you?

Now that Ferran Adria is out of business, surely a machine can take his place as an inspiration for cooks too lazy to go foraging or grow their own food. I present to you my food idea generator.

It has currently made around 3,000 random modernist cuisine recipes for you to try. A handful look truly delicious but most are nauseating..

Try it for yourself here.

Eggs, Penang

Eggs, Penang

The logistics of food is endlessly interesting when you step outside the reach of the robotic hands of supermarket distribution. Along with the produce, transport is what adds a degree of regional variation to most markets. One of my most enduring memories of one market in Cambodia is seeing a Toyota Camry, whose backseat had been hastily waterproofed with plastic tarpaulins, filled to the ceiling with live snakehead fish.

There are certainly more preferable ways to transport food, but there is no perfect means to transport food, which is why the humble cargo bike (below) can continue to compete with every other vehicle on Penang to transport eggs.

Egg Bike, Penang

Whenever I see a bike like that, I just want to follow it.

Note to PR folk: I am not Phil Lee

I can categorically state that I am not Phil Lee, author of the Rough Guide to Norway. You’re looking for this guy.

I receive a lot of spam from PR companies, processed goods manufacturers and publishers of which I read none, but over the last few weeks, it has started arriving from Oslo. Maybe I’m big in Norway, I thought, like troll metal or fermented trout. Then I received something loosely personalised:

I saw that your book “The Rough Guide to Norway ” is coming out shorty and picking up steam via Barnes & Noble’s popularity chart. I wanted to pitch you an incredible way to build more buzz and keep the momentum moving. (this won’t cost you anything)

As much as I am interested in which shorty is coming out, just a small tip: read the About page of a blog before firing off spam. Or even better, don’t send PR spam at all.