Pictures and Words

I was awoken this morning by MeatGirl…actually, when I woke up, she was standing in the doorway, staring at me. It was a little creepy.

But as soon as I was awake, she insisted that I come down and check the meat. “Exciting developments,” she said, “exciting developments have occurred!”

I didn’t even have to take a photo, because she had been down earlier this morning, and snapped this:

Five sausages, half the bolognaise, and it's hard to tell, but we started with about twice as much Kangaroo Steak.

Desperate times, ladies and gentlemen, call for desperate measures.

Up next: Desperate measures.

Hello! My name is Peter C. Hayward, and for a little over 72 hours now, there has been a plate of meat sitting in my back yard.

It looks so...empty.

Well, it’s been a busy three days so far. The meat count has gone from 5 to 4 to 16 to 9, and will probably change again before the day is out. More importantly, we’ve all learned valuable lessons about the sleeping patterns of insects, and the sexuality of giraffes.

It rained most of today, which has caused the (already quite mushy) bolognaise sauce to form a little pool of brown soup. The Pork Steak looks slightly darker, while the sausages and Kangaroo Steak remain mostly unchanged.

Before my loyal assistant MeatGirl and I went back inside after taking tonights photos, we decided to hunt down and photograph the other sausage, the one about a metre from the plate. This is what we found:

It is some kind of carnivorous bug.

Bug-experts reading this, I need your help once more – what is that? It looked a lot like a centipede or a millipede or some kind of small bug with lots of legs, but I’ve never heard of millipedes eating meat before. Perhaps it’s a kilopede?

MeatGirl theorised that it wasn’t actually eating the meat, it was just climbing over it on its nightly stroll, but we took photos of it for about 10 minutes (that’s the clearest one we could get) and it didn’t seem to be going anywhere.

Perhaps red sausages are the equivalent of couches in the bug world?

There are several flies just hanging out on the side of the plate. I suspect that this plate has become the equivalent of a pub, or coffee club, it's the place that flies go to socialise.

As mentioned, the rain/cold weather caused a much lower bug turnout than usual, but when we were taking the night-time shots, we discovered that the ants had started to go crazy on the remaining sausages:

I especially made the other images in this post a bit smaller than usual, so I could put include this one in all its glory. Check out all its glory.

Those ants are going to town – my prediction was that the ants wouldn’t really start on the sausages until the skin began to fray naturally, but by the looks of it, the ants have grown impatient and actually started to bite their way through the outer layer themselves. MeatGirl hopes that the ants will actually hollow out the sausages, leaving just the skin – this would be incredibly cool, but I don’t think it’s likely.

As you can tell from the photos, the bolognaise sauce is starting to look quite disgusting – I’d like to claim that this experiment has put me off spaghetti bolognaise, but thus far it hasn’t affected me at all. I had a bowl for dinner tonight, and it was delicious.

Looking at ant photos has had an effect, however – whenever a piece of my clothing brushes against my skin, I jump, and instinctively start brushing off imaginary ants. I have heard this is a symptom of insanity, on the list right after “putting a plate of meat in your back yard and taking photos of its decomposition.”

Today’s stats:

Weather – wet – it’s rained on and off all day, here in “Sunny Queensland”. If this keeps up, the meat will remain moist and appealing to insects for a while yet. Does rain dampen smell?

Number of meats – 9 – I considered increasing this to 9.5, because one of the sausages is still near the plate, but I was also considering knocking half a point off becaues half of the bolognaise is gone, so it all evens out.

Stench – 0.1 – the strong Cheerio smell that was apparent yesterday has faded. I couldn’t distinctly smell anything at all, but I thought I sensed the hint of a faint whiff of something, so I’m counting that as one tenth of a point.
Stench radius – 0 – I might have just imagined it.

Individual meats:

Kangaroo Steak:

Toughness – 9/10 – no change. Due to the rain, the steak felt slightly greasy, almost slimey while I was poking it with the Poking Stick.
Popularity – 2.5/10 - slightly more popular than yesterday; there were 3 or 4 flies, instead of 1 or 2. Still no interest from the ants. I wonder if poor Kanga will ever be popular.
Appeal – 9/10 – the fact that it hasn’t changed in appearance or toughness should probably be off-putting, but I’m seeing it as a sign that this meat is invincible, and increasing its appeal. If I were starving to death, this would now probably be the first meat I turn to.

Pork Steak:

Toughness – 8/10 – the squishing noise has gone away again, so I’m restoring this to its original toughness rating of 8.
Popularity – 3/10 – more flies are congregating on the Pork Steak, but the ants suddenly don’t seem interested. I think the ants were mostly eating the Pork Steak that got stolen*. No change.
Appeal – 6/10 – Other than being slightly darker on the outside, the Pork Steak doesn’t seem to have changed much. As yesterday, cut away the outside, and I’d eat the middle to survive.

*MeatGirl wanted to know if I was including the fact that two of the three Pork Steaks have been stolen in the popularity – I’m not. This is popularity among insects, not meat-thieves.

Dad’s Spaghetti Bolognaise:

Toughness – 0.5/10 – the hardened crust that was apparent yesterday has gone, probably due to the rain, and so the Poking Stick once again doesn’t meet any resistance.  I did discover that certain parts of this sauce are made of big clumps of mince – these parts have started to harden up, and can now be rolled around separately, so half a point for those.
Popularity – 4/10 – again, most likely due to the cold weather, there were only a handful of flies apparent when I took the daytime shot. I remembered to use the zoom this time, so while it may look like the same number of flies, in yesterday’s photo I’d already scared most of them off.
Appeal – 2.5/10 – remembering that “0/10” means that I would rather die than eat this, this is an alarmingly low number. A combination of the fact that the parts of the sauce is reminding me far too much of maggots and the newly-discovered hard mince balls is reinforcing the bolognaise as the least appealing meat by far.

Casual Grouping of Saveloy:

Toughness – 8/10 – perhaps due to the rain, or the cold, or simply from being outside for two days, the sausages are no longer springy at all, and offer the same level of resistance as the pork steak.
Popularity – 6/10 – a handful of flies seem to be interested, the ants are suddenly all over the saveloy, and a strange type of beetle that I’ve never seen before make this the most popular meat. I’m not going above 7.5/10 until I get maggots.
Appeal – 8.5/10 – Down from yesterday, but still pretty appealing – I’ve convinced myself that a few minutes in the microwave would restore these sausages to their cheerful, springy selves again. I would wash the ants off first.

I’ll leave you with an extra-wide “Head with meat” photo, which shows off not only myself and the plate, but the Poking Stick and the escaped sausage as well:

I am wearing makeup in this photo, for reasons completely unrelated to meat.

Tomorrow: Exciting developments!