There’s a blog I like written by a food lover who spends some time in our ‘hood, Elegant Sufficiency. She takes beautiful pix too. I am over photos of graffiti, but these charm me. Read on for two more.

Noodlepie’s is a beautiful blog (just check out the detail in “The Vietnamese pate mystery“), but it’s Saigonese (and its author seems to live now in Toulouse which is going to make it hard for him). My interests lie more with Hanoi. Sticky Rice covers the food of Hanoi excellently, and in trying to find anything of interest about the Footscray Vietnamese Market in English on the web just now, I came across evidence that Mr or Mrs Rice came to Melbourne in May. The Ricester sampled our pho and declared it to be Saigonese in style and damned good too. It’s his photo — yes, I’m lazy.

Wowee. Seems I started this blog in February and it took 6 months, until 23 August 2006 to get to 20,000 page loads. Now, two months later, the 40,000th page load has occurred, today. You wouldn’t know if from the parsimonious lack of comments you readers leave.

Let me tell you something. We bloggers like comments. We like looking at your websites if you have them. If you like the blog, tell me. A comment that says “interesting” or “who cares?” will be cherished. So, who are you? What do you think? Why do you glide so silently through my blog?

Because I did such a crap job of reporting the Slow Food’s “A Taste of Slow” festival, I have found some links to blogs of folk who did a better job, like Esurientes — The Comfort Zone, and Caper Berry Gravy and A Few of My Favourite Things. If you know of any other good wrap-ups, let me know.

This guy’s point of view — “largely pretentious yuppy rubbish” — definitely deserves representation: I have this nigling problem with the whole scene, and I think it comes down to this. This shows me to be hard to please, and really, the slow food movement can be whatever it and its members want. But for me, slow food should not be expensive; it should be a movement of the celebration of simplicity and home-cooked food, a rejection of the overpriced delicatessen. I would have liked to see big crowds of Italian and Greek families competing in an Olympics of home cooking where the teams could consist only of nuclear families, and 44 gallon drums spurting fire were provided to each team. Then peppers could be char grilled, goats roasted on spits, tomato passata produced in vast quantities and octopuses thrashed periodically to soften them up as they were roasted over the fire, basted with bitter herbal liquors. The Vietnamese could have made their minced meat wrapped in char grilled green leaf parcels, and taught the pronunciation of Phở. No doubt lawyers have ensured that no such festivity is possible.

According to Wordpress, the blogging system I use, the 20,000th page load occurred today. Whatever a page load is. Miss K would say that’s me reading each of the 79 posts 253 times, but she would be wrong.

And according to Stat Counter, 6,403 “unique visitors” have come by. Every time someone has a look who hasn’t had a look in the previous half an hour, they get counted as a “unique visitor”.

It is true that many people (including a surprising number of people whose webservers are in Iran) are only interested in the tits in the World Naked Bike Ride post, but happily the article on Wabi Sabi Salon remains the most read. Thanks for this marvellously apposite photo go to Kendall Rae of Canada.

Bugger the opinionated Stephen Downes, letting the cat out of the bag about my local boasting 5 open fires, The Carringbush, and nominating it the best cheapish restaurant in the Hun’s latest survey. Interestingly, he’s managed to negotiate a deal whereby his reviews are reproduced on his own rudimentary Wordpress blog. Two places nearby which got into his book 100 Gastronomic Experiences to Have Before You Die are Babka in Brunchswick St (“perhaps the world’s best cafe” from a man who eschews hyperbole) and some noodle dish at Fenix, down on the Yarra near Victoria Gardens shopping centre (best restaurant in the financial year ending 2005 (why oh why in the financial year?)). Since his blog has categories for each score, one can see that The Carringbush is in fact the equal eighth best place in Victoria (well, it’s one of 7 on his blog scoring 17 and only one scores 19 and 6 score 18). You’re right. The photo has nothing to do with any of the threementioned establishments. It belongs to Rolf Strohmann whose Night in Bangkok Flickr set is seriously good.

Really, you know, it was a boring idea to write a blog about a suburb, though I still consider comendable my determination not to contribute further to the annals of published diaries yet another account of an as-yet rather unfinished pedestrian life. But believe it or not a tech journalist told me he thought I had put the first bit of putty in an empty niche of the web: the microenvironment blog, which made me think that a blog about the cavity occasioned by the slashing at an early age of my umbilical cord could be like, even cooler. But what would you say? Perhaps part of its charm could be that it would only be updated every few years, when some navel escapade or other came across the horizon. Anyway, this journo threatened to write an article on the phenomenon, but of course did not. Now he has more ammunition: Fitzroyalty has sprung up, though it must be said Brian’s relevancy criteria are being relaxed a lot faster than mine. The photo’s his. And his blog put me onto the somewhat stalled but nevertheless interesting Smith St blog.