What I Cooked Last Night

The Australian's Wish magazine rents out its expensive pages to world famous brands in return for advertorial articles. It pays to get these right. The latest print edition commences a story on one of Italy's oldest prestige eyewear manufacturer thus: For its latest collection, the Italian eyewear brand Persil has gone for a vintage look ... I'd be asking for my money back if I were Mr Persol.

When The Spectator magazine launched its Australian edition some years ago, I couldn’t find it in the newsagent's. I asked the newsagent. ‘Yes,’ he beamed. ‘ The Spectator ! We have it! It’s in the sporting section down the back!’ There it was next to Runner’s World and Fly Fishing and Gun Dog . I didn’t say anything, but some weeks later it had been moved to the current events and politics section next to The Economist and Time and BRW , so I suppose someone else did. The cover price of The Spectator has doubled from $4.50 to $8.95 over the last decade, so I was surprised to find an ad in the current issue offering a gift subscription at $139. That’s $2.673076923076923 a copy, a discount of 76.0759615%. I like to be precise. Fine. Your gift recipient gets the magazine and you get the credit, having paid a quarter of the price. Further, if he or she is in the same household, you get to read the magazine anyway. She is, and I will. But there was something else in the d...

Someone sent me a letter offering me a free telescope. Should I have accepted? It was the editor of Time magazine, or at least one of his associates. I suppose the editor is too busy reading letters to the editor to write letters from the editor. The writer wanted me to have the telescope with his compliments, and I thought that was very nice of him. I don't even know him. The telescope was described as having lots of pixels. I could gaze at things that were far away and see them in fine detail. Pixels at the end of the garden. The moon. The graffiti on a city-bound tram. He didn't just offer me the telescope. No: he also offered to send me one of his magazines every week for a year, and I wouldn't have to pay for it. Not the full price, anyway. I would pay only $1.85; while the 'regular newsstand price' was $5.85, from memory. This made me feel slightly dishonest, as if I were to gaze out my window through my free highly-pixelled telescope towards the newsagen...

Australian Gourmet Traveller chief food writer Pat Nourse explains the loneliness of the long-distance restaurant reviewer : " ... you need to eat out on a Tuesday night in winter when you'd really rather just go home." Nourse's angst is understandable. Naturally, food reviewing is a higher art than other criticism: "It's not like reviewing a film where you can take a cheap shot and make a small dent in a Hollywood budget. It's someone's livelihood." Someone's livelihood??? Ask your threadbare independent film-maker friends what they think of that comment. However, the loneliness and angst pay off: There are only a handful of full-time reviewing jobs in the Australian media and the competition is fierce. ... It certainly takes skill to write about food, like this on Sepia from the current issue of GT: "The more classical salad of roast squab is a lovely dish, the very pink pieces of the bird arranged among tendrils of green over litt...