The Ultimate Flavoured Vodka, and just in time for Xmas...

SPUTNIK VODKA GLOBAL BRAND AMBASSADOR TO VISIT AUSTRALIA BY SPACE SHUTTLE

Sputnik Vodka's Global Brand Ambassador, Yuri Kalashnikov, will make a flying visit to Australia this Christmas – by Space Shuttle – to personally launch the new and exciting Hi-Carb, Full-Isotope, Onion-Flavored Vodka - Sputnik Cossack Maxi+ ™.

Mr. Kalashnikov will be visiting with his private football team and a collection of Eastern European typists and dictationistas. He will be available for interviews and photo-essays.

Sputnik Cossack Maxi+ ® will be released solely on-premise, at $98.17 RRP, and 110% proof.

Mr. Kalashnikov says he looks forward to "meeting of Australia women, for killing your wild white shark of water, and for to be eating much of your most fearsome bear - the koala monkey. This trip is pleasure, not business."

CEO of London’s International Soft-Drink and Spirits Competition ©, Charles Rupert-Roberts, has described Sputnik Cossack Maxi+ © as “the drink of the 21st Century”. Mr. Rupert-Roberts went on to say that “the Sack” (as Sputnik Cossack Maxi+ ™ has come to be known on the American College Mixology circuit) is “refreshing, demanding, easy, complex, versatile and uncompromisingly spontaneous. It is the essence of global liquor positioning.”

Sputnik Cossack Maxi+ ® and its secret, unique blend of carbohydrates, isotopes, and onion is set to bring the coming summer Down Under to life!!! Great on its own, it is also a perfect mixer, and stunning with food-matching, as an aperitif, or just on its own.

For further information, media packs, or hi-resolution images, please contact:
Fleur Slazenger-Du Pont: ✆ 0404 040404
For interview opportunities with Mr. Kalashnikov, please contact:
Bree Stuyverstánt-Stuyverstánt: ✆ 0414 141414
Read My Lips Media & Communications
2/14a Pashmina Mews, Potts Point, Sydney, NSW

***ENJOY CONSUMING MODERATION RESPONSIBLY***

Five Things To Do With...

Lifestyle lift-outs love nothing more than a list. And I’ve certainly composed my share of such silly lists over the last decade. “Five Things To Do With a Throw Rug”. “Five Things To Do With a Vegetable Peeler”. “Five Things To Do With Pinot Gris”. Good Lord. There’s only one thing to do with pinot gris, of course, and that’s to purposefully mis-pronounce it at every opportunity: penis grease. One certainly wouldn’t drink it. Some things must separate us from the anmal kingdom, after all.

Today a colleague at my office pointed out another “Five Things” list. It concerned coffee; yet all the advice was wrong, wrong, wrong. Here’s the correct list:

Five Things To Do With Coffee

1. Put a deposit on it or ask about lay-by options.

2. Be seen with it, perhaps at the races or a charity event.

3. Keep the beans under lock and key, lest they be accidentally run through your $1500 espresso machine, thereby rendering it unphotographable.

4. Use it as a platform for such word usage as ‘barista’, ‘fair-trade’, ‘free-trade’, ‘organic’, ‘biodynamic’, and other such bits of jargon-monoxide.

5. Get it loudly and terribly wrong.

Dutch aboriginality...

Andrew Bolt - or Andronicus Van Bolt as he is for some strange reason known in my office - is in trouble. Every second person you meet in the street is angry with him over his published opinions about Aboriginality. He wondered aloud if someone who has virtually no Aboriginal blood can claim to be Aboriginal. He wondered why some writers, artists, academics and activists claim Aboriginality when they were more Caucasian, at least in terms of their DNA, hairdos, looks and surnames. He commented ''I'm not saying any of those I've named chose to be Aboriginal for anything but the most heartfelt and honest of reasons. I certainly don't accuse them of opportunism.'' Which is the nicest way I've ever heard anyone ever accuse anyone else of opportunism in my life.

Yet this - I now realize all too clearly - is just a smoke screen. The real topic here is not Aboriginality in its Australian guise, but aboriginality full stop.

Andrew Bolt, born here in Australia, is of Dutch parentage. He once said "Like most of you, I'm indigenous. I was born here and have nowhere else to go." If one is indigenous one is born or produced naturally in a land or region. The term usually applies to aboriginal inhabitants or natural products. Lower case 'a' aboriginals are people who are strictly native, if we are sticking strictly to dictionary definitions. Which makes me realize that none of the writers, artists, academics, activists or Bolts mentioned herein are either indigenous or aboriginal, in the strictest sense. They are all - more or less - recent imports.

That we live in a time when it is trendier to be Aboriginal than it is to be Dutch should not cause us so much fuss. Perhaps if Mr. Bolt only said nice things about people more of us would want to identify as Dutch, regardless of how much or how little Dutch blood we had.

Greed Guides

It is the time of year for greed guides. Recently Uncle Bulgaria’s Wine Companion hit the shelves, and hit them in a way that the shelves certainly knew they were hit. This annual guide to Australian wine is a wonderful phone book, should anyone wish to contact the wineries listed. It also subtly suggests those wineries which make good wine and those wines which are of high quality. It does this by giving every winery listed a 5 Star rating out of 5 Stars, and giving all the wines listed a score out of 100 points. This score is either 95, or 96, or 97, or 98. Or possibly 99, or 100, or even 101. I know it sounds complex, but with the book in your hands everything makes instant sense. Proper wines for proper postcodes. If only we had such a guide to boat people.

The other guide about to set us all violently right is The Good Food Guide. This is another good phone book, albeit a lot of the numbers listed no longer answer. It is also a very useful dictionary of synonyms. Scan through the book and you will come across more ways to say ‘ambience’ than you thought possible, which is a very handy thing. If ambience were mere ambience then goodness knows what might happen next. Restaurant goers might soon start thinking a potato is just a potato.

If only wine guides could encourage people to not think in terms of scores, and if only restaurant guides could teach people how to actually eat in a restaurant, then they might prove to be useful publications yet.

Black Tot Day

On this day 40 years ago sailors suddenly had no more reason to go to sea. On the 31st July 1970, at 11am – or 6 bells during the forenoon watch – the Royal Navy ladled out their last tots of rum to each and every seaman afloat. An eighth of a pint – about 70mls – was the measure, although when rum tots first appeared around 1731 each man received a half pint – and that was a pre-Imperial half pint, so roughly 235mls.

Between 1731 and 1970 the tot went through various service manifestations. After a while it was watered down at a ratio of 3 parts rum to 1 part water, then 2:1; the tot was also broken into two serves – morning and evening; and it even had lime juice added to help prevent scurvy. A kind of prescription Mai Tai…

But in the end Britain’s House of Commons decided that modern war ships had too much gadgetry in them to be operated safely by drunken sailors. The tot was abolished, replaced by an extra can of beer per man per day. Which going all the way back to 1731 was what rum had itself replaced – a wine gallon of beer a day was the sailor’s right in the early 18th Century. A wine gallon? Yes, about 3.7 litres. Or 10 stubbies. It was small beer, though, roughly 2.5% alcohol by volume. Which I think makes it sound even worse. Try drinking 10 stubbies of light beer day in day out and see how intellectually uplifted you become…

It would be nice to think there is a navy somewhere still serving the daily tot of rum, but I’m not sure. The Royal Australian Navy abolished the rum tot in 1921 – the first Commonwealth country to do so. We’ve been a bunch of Nannies longer than I thought.

The Shockeroos

The poor Australian football team. Losing 4 – 0 to Germany in the opening match of their world cup campaign will be a loss too far, it seems. At least if they are dubbed the ‘Shockeroos’, it will grate less in the minds of real football supporters than their current team nickname – the Socceroos. Football is football, not soccer. Even that Americanism, ‘soccer mom’, is more palatable than ‘Socceroos’.

A win was always impossible against Germany; a draw would have been biblical; a 1 – 0 loss would have been thought proud; but 4 – 0… Blame has to be found. And it looks like the team’s Dutch coach, Pim Verbeek, is the one. He made selection errors, it is claimed, and no one is prepared to forgive him. This is a sad state for this rakish and charismatic man to find himself in. How quickly the tide of public sentiment has turned against ‘Aussie Pim’, as he came to be known during his brief but very media-friendly engagement to Lleyton Hewitt.

Western Samoan footballer, Tim Cahill, who was sent off in the game’s 56th minute, will now miss Australia’s next must-win match against Ghana, known colloquially as the ‘Black Stars’. Cahill, or ‘Aussie Tim’ as he became popularly known during his brief but much admired engagement to Australian tennis ace, Lleyton Hewitt, seems the only player in the squad likely to score, and a 0 – 0 result against Ghana will not do.

But how amusing would it be if from Group F, the New Zealanders - I'm sorry, the All Whites - should get through to the next round...

Her Majesty's Birthday. Not.

June is nearly upon us, featuring as it does Her Majesty’s Birthday’s public holiday, on the second Monday of the month. Her Majesty’s actual birthday falls – as all Australians know, of course – on the 21st April. Why Australia’s dutiful and respectful observance of its monarch’s birthday occurs on this June date is down to rather odd circumstances. Until very, very recently – 1936 – our monarchs’ birthday public holidays were celebrated on the actual day of birth, a tradition which goes back to one of the earliest tourists to this country, Governor Arthur Philip, who established the day in 1788, to mark the birthday of George III, which is – as of course we all know – the 4th June. Yet 148 years later, following His Majesty George V’s passing (20th January; His birthday was 3rd June, of course), the date was set in administrative stone, and for some strange reason those administrators chose the second Monday in June. Contrary to some popular theories held by silly old people, this second Monday in June is not the day formerly known as Empire or Commonwealth Day, which was Queen Victoria’s birthday, the 24th May. Be all that as it may, the second Monday in June is what we now have. I for one would like to see public holidays (without pay) observed for all our monarchs’ birthdays, going back to, say, 1603. It would amount to 17 public holidays a year, the majority of them falling in late May, early June, and November. Perhaps I am far too forward-thinking when it comes to recognizing these birthdays? Yet that is the bold spirit to embrace – to dare to dream of a better and more enlightened future for us all. An Australia anew.