New poll: What should be my first post-Famine meal? I’ve listed my first impulse options, but feel free to leave a comment if you have something better!

Pay me NOT to eat!
No, I haven’t been kidnapped. That photo on the right is just my way of announcing that I’ll be participating in World Vision Australia’s 40 Hour Famine this year. The idea is that people sponsor me to go forty hours without food. It takes place May 14-16, starting at 8 pm on the Friday. All proceeds go towards hunger relief in Tanzania. This page contains more information on how to donate. Everyone who contributes will get listed and linked, and I plan to make hand-crafted thank-you gifts for you all as well. And of course, I plan to blog the entire event. I’ll probably be obsessing about food, so feel free to send me your favorite recipes to post. Will I faint? Will I go mad? Will I start hallucinating that the Snook is a giant hotdog? I really have no idea.

Owning a cat increases your vocabulary
Phrases that have crept into the Snook’s and my everyday speech in the past two months, which we have seldom had occasion to use before:

1. My cat’s breath smells like cat food.
2. No, Kitty… Kitty is a bad kitty!
3. Mom, Kitty’s bein’ a dildo.

I think I uttered every one of those during Amy’s trip to the vet last weekend. Good times.

Are you a typoholic? While my font identification skillz aren’t the best in the world, I still nurture irrational prejudices against businesses that use Comic Sans MS on their signage.

Wow, Xander’s in rehab. Best of luck, Nicky.

The 50 Best Restaurants in the World. Sydney made the list twice! Rockpool’s at #29 and Tetsuya’s at #13. We dined at Rockpool two years ago and it was the best meal of my life. Now I’m thinking Tetsuya’s might be in order for the Snook’s birthday in June…

Attention Aussies: EzyDVD is having a “boxset bonanza”. Buffy DVDs are half-price! Lots more too, like Simpsons, Angel, and 24. Free delivery within Australia. Forgive me if I sound like a paid shill here. I used EzyDVD a couple Christmases ago to order Snookums the entire James Bond DVD library. The order never arrived but their customer service was great and they dispatched another one right away. (We think somebody at Maine Logistics lifted it.) So I’m fairly comfortable recommending them. Now I just can’t decide whether to get Buffy Season 6 now or wait til we hit the States in November…

The Sydney Morning Herald website has a new design… and I’m not sure I like it. It’s just way too wide, and there just seems to be too much going on horizontally with all those columns. I like the addition of the search box though, and the navigation redesign makes much more sense. (Though it doesn’t seem to be completely finished. I was happy to see that Column 8 and Spike have been moved out from under the National section – which never made any sense to me – but if you go to either section, the breadcrumb trail on top still thinks that’s where they are. Weird.)

Words related to stress and anxiety. I’d completely forgotten about the undertoad. I also like hathos, testosteronic, and caving. The Snook and I cave a lot.

It’s not enough that I plaster the Snook all over my website… Now I’m getting him into print as well! Last week my coworker Mardi told me about a photo contest the Sydney Morning Herald Radar section was running. You were supposed to send in a “quintessential Sydney moment”, and the winner won a $900 camera phone. I forgot about it until right before the deadline so I decided to just send in a photo from my site. I went with Rodd and Amy eating cheese-on-a-stick at the Easter Show. To my surprise, the editor e-mailed me yesterday to let me know that I was a finalist. I ran to the newsagent this morning to buy the paper and check the results. Unfortunately, I didn’t win. They picked the “serious” picture of the homeless guy instead. Whatever. I still got the Snook in the paper!