I went to see Phil's new band - Friends of Batman play at The Grapes last night. I have to say that it was probably the most fun I've ever had at a gig in a long while; the songs were good, and I barely stopped laughing thoughout. Phil, or Thera-man as he is known on the stage, plays the Theramin, adorned in smoking jacket and cravet. I've a couple of videos from my mobile. The sound quality is really very poor I'm afraid, you can't really hear the music over the distortion and the sounds of Thera-Man doing his thing. Here's a theramin solo, and here's There-Man busting out some mass ju-ju like a jackal on acid.
Car Crash
A HA HA HA HA HA HA! AAAH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! Normally a child crashing a carwouldn't make me laugh, but the fact that this guy gave a 14 year kid the keys to his new $50,000 Mustang made me laugh.
DEA shoots himself in the foot. LITERALLY!
A HA HA HA HA HA HA! AAAH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! Normally someone shooting themself with a gun in a classroom of children wouldn't make me laugh, but the fact that this was a DEA agent given children a lecture on how guns are dangerous cracks me up. I like the way he carried on and then picked up an even bigger gun and all the kids were shouting "PUT IT DOWN". Classic.Labels: guns, humour, utter twat, video
Body Count
Here is a list of operas that I have seen on the stage and a brief synposis of each:La Voix Humaine: She dies
Peter Grimes: He dies
Lulu: She dies
Tristan and Isolde: They both die
Billy Budd: He dies
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: She dies
Wozzeck: He dies
Tosca: They both die
The Ring: Everyone and everything dies
Duke Bluebeard's Castle: She gets locked up by a mental
Erwartung: She is a mental
The Midsummer Marriage: They get married!
Getting to Birmingham
I went to Birmingham yesterday, and it was much harder than it should have been. I'm not sure how far away it is, 100 miles maybe? So the obviously choice is to go by train, as it is usually trouble free, and it plonks you right in the centre of town (albeit at the worst station in the country). The thing is, I was going to the opera, one of those five and a half hour long Wagner epics, so it wouldn't finish until after the last train back to Sheffield (which was 9:30pm or something ridiculous). So, I thought: I really really don't want to have to drive into the centre of Birmingham, so I'll look for a Park & Ride. The thing is, all I could find on the internet was press releases telling you how great their park and ride is, but nothing actually telling me how to make use of this allegedly excellent service.So I bit the bullet and went by car. Two and a half hours it took me, 45 minutes of which was spent in traffic that was virtually at a standstill on the roads into the centre surrounded by hundreds of other equally polluting cars. I think a better plan, and I really really wish I'd thought of this yesterday, would have been to park at the NEC/Airport and get the train in from Birmingham International. There's bound to be a huge car park there, it probably won't cost any more to park than in the centre (£12 for the 8/9 hours I was there), and is only a 10-15 minute train journey into town. Given that on a couple of occasions I've done something similar when going to London (parking at Luton Airport Parkway and getting the train in from there) I can't believe I didn't think of it.
So, anyway, once you get there, it's a decent enough place these days, especially if you want to shop, as you basically have the equivalent of both Meadowhall and Sheffield town centre all in the same location.
Omelette
Making a perfect omelette is fairly hard. Not everyone realises this, they thing that if you put eggs in a hot pan and they congeal they have made an omelette. They have not, they have made congealed eggs.1) Get a decent cast iron non-stick omelet pan. This is essential. A Le Crueset pan will set you back £30 and is about as good an investment as you can make in the kitchen.
2) Get some chickens. OK, most of us skip this step, but the (organic) eggs do need to be really fresh.
3) Break 3 eggs into a bowl, add a tablespoon of water and beat together. Don't over do it. Season as desired, I usually add a small amount of salt, occasionally I'll add pepper too.
4) Put a small amount of olive oil in your pan. This is to help stop the butter burning by raising its smoking point.
5) Put on high heat and add a knob of butter (unsalted butter makes the seasoning in step 3 easier).
5) When the butter has stopped fizzing and is on the cusp of turning a rich brown colour (you will soon learn when it's about to turn) add the eggs.
6) Give the eggs a slight stir with the back of a metal fork for a few seconds to even everything out.
7) As the eggs start to set around the edges of the pan, just drawn the edges inwards towards the centre of the pan with the back of your fork, allowing the liquid egg to flow back out to fill its place. Keep doing this for around 30 seconds, using the back of the fork to keep everything even if required.
8) After about a minute, or whenever it is still a bit runny on top but set on the bottom, run you fork under the half of the ommellette nearest you and fold the thing in half.
9) Tilt the pan away from you and push the half moon towards the back of the pan.
10) Fold the other half back towards you.
11) Take off the heat.
12) Hold a warmed plate upside down over the pan, and invert the two so that the omelette falls onto the plate with the seam on the bottom.
13) That's it. One fluffy omelette with a slighty runny centre.
Once you've perfected that then you can start thinking about adding extras or making stuffed omelettes or summat.
Interesting fact: It is literally impossible to make an omelette when drunk. I've tried a few times and every single time it's just come out as scrambled eggs.
New Site!
So yeah, I've re-done my website! I was a bit bored with the old design, it was looking a bit tired and I've been wanting to change it for a while. Problem is, I'm no web designer. But then one lunch time I followed a link from Dave Kemp's blog to this blog and thought hey, that's really cool. I took a closer look and saw that it was designed by this guy who has quite a few freely available templates, and hey presto! I'm not 100% set on this design yet, so it might change, but let me know what you think, or if you prefer any of the other templates on that guy's site.
Timetable for Sustainability
"Look at that." said a man holding up a pack of two Sea Bass fillets, "Six Pounds. It's disgusting, charging those sorts of prices for fish." To emphasise his point he threw the fish back on to the shelf. That'll show them, he probably thought. I was in Marks & Spencers picking up some (wild, pole and line caught, sustainably harvested, Marine Stewardship Council approved) Haddock fillets to make fish cakes for my tea."No..." I said to him, only internally so as not to create a scene, "No, it is you that is disgusting. You and your selfish sense of entitlement, expecting all manner of fish to be provided to you at prices that you can personally afford, without any regard to the fact that to do so would literally destroy the planet."
I had earlier in the day been wondering to myself why nobody cares about the harm we're doing to the planet and why most people are stubbornly refusing to do anything about it. This haggard old cockmonger neatly encapsulated the answer. A sense of bloody entitlement to cheap goods and to balls with the social, economic and environmental consequences.
Let's not kid ourselves, there's no such thing as a bargain. We all pay in the end. If you find a really cheap pair of jogging bottoms, know that they were produced by a child in a sweatshop in China. If you pick up a chicken for £1.99, know that it was kept in appalling conditions and pumped full of chemicals, and is about nutritious as a sack of pus. Know that if you buy cheap carrots in Tesco, the only reason they are cheap is that Tesco made the farmer sell them for next to nothing, and laughed when he said he would take them to a different customer, because Tesco know full well that they've driven out the competition.
We are all responsible for purchasing acts that if you think about it for one second are immoral.
So what am I saying? Switch tomorrow to a carbon neutral vegan lifestyle? No, that would be impractical. Most people would last a day at the most before falling of the wagon and into a McDonalds. But how about this, how about we all set ourselves a schedule for becoming more responsible sustainable consumers? How about, say once a month, we each pick a purchasing or lifestyle choice that we know to be harmful either socially or environmentally, and resolve to remove that habit. One month, maybe resolve to never buy clothes that were clearly produced in a sweat shop. Another month resolve to ensure that all the light bulbs in your house are energy efficient. Another month, you could resolve to fix that small problem with the insulation around the back door that is letting so much heat escape. Another month, start buying only free range meat. The list of possibilities is endless, and each month you would be taking a small step towards reducing the harm you are doing to the planet.
Wouldn't that be nice?
Democracy and Sex
You remember that Viktor Yushchenko bloke? He's the one that looks like he had terrible acne as a teenager and was shot in the face with a blunderbuss and then had his face set on fire. He is the current President of Ukraine. You know why he's the current president of Ukraine? Because the Bush government, in a break from spreading democracy by dropping bombs on people, spread democracy by paying for election monitoring of the 2004 Ukrainian elections. The exit polling revealed that the declared result was a massive electoral fraud, leading to the "October Revolution" where the votes were overturned and Yushenko was eventually delivered the presidency.You may remember watching it all on the news and thinking well democracy is great and everything, but what is up with that guys face? It looks like it was vomited onto his head by a cat.
What you probably don't know is that the same month, exit polling in the US presidential elections showed up similar disparities that couldn't be explained away by any kind of a margin of error. So where was the Blue Revolution? Why wasn't Bush forced to stand down by baying crowds forcing a recount and the subsequent election of John Kerry as president? Why is nobody in the mainstream media talking about the fact that US presidential election in 2004 was as blatantly rigged as the one in 2000?
Part of the problem is I think down to the news media and the public's relationship with it. The fact is that editors know most people have really short attention spans, and in order to get a story across they first have to hook in the reader by coming up with a decent headline. Then, in the initial paragraph, they have to try and capture the readers attention further, perhaps by concocting a whimsical yet overwrought description of one of the people in the story, and following it up with an unnecessary reference to George W Bush bombing women and children. Some news sites and papers then try and hold your attention for the duration of the story by dotting their articles with the occasional highlighted quote that bears little connection to the actual story but that they think might interest you and keep you reading.
Noel Edmunds is a Prick
Their job is harder when talking about political stories. We're all human after all and more often than not we want to read stories that excite and amuse us rather than read about what is important to us. We're weak. Given the a choice of an article about David Cameron's latest policy initiative or a story about how The Queen was overheard saying that she thinks that Noel Edmunds is a prick, which would you go for?
It's a point highlighted well in the BBC Touch page the Chris Riley recently put online. In it he does a side by side comparison of what BBC News Online are currently highlighting as the most important stories and what the public are actually reading. As I type, the BBC's top headline is Briton 'planned massive explosions' and the most read article's headline is Pupil 'filmed sex with teacher'. See? All you need to do is stick the word "Sex" in your headline and you double your readership.
Pouring Piss out of a Boot
It's not just the news media at fault. You have to question why both Al Gore and John Kerry capitulated so soon when they both probably knew damn well that they were the real winners of the vote. Why did they do that? Why did they agree to hand over their country to such a pathetic excuse for a human being, a man so stupid he wouldn't know how to pour piss out of a boot even if the instructions were printed on the sole, when they both knew that it wasn't what the majority of the people in the country wanted?
Were they scared of being branded sore losers, or worse: a little bit loony? It's not inconceivable, given that most people would just look at the headline "Kerry Says Bush Rigged Election" and conclude that Kerry was an idiot. Even if they did start reading the article, most would probably just look at it and go "What! This is four pages long! I'm not reading all that!" and just go away with their first impression, that the sore loser Democrats are whining about the fact that nasty evil Bush won.
Chowing Down on Cock
Of course, it's also the fault of the electorate. Most of them have jobs, most of them have a roof over their heads, most of them have food on the table. Beyond that, most don't care. Maybe they'll get a bit angry every now and again, but angry enough to actually do something? Yeah, right. The US is the same as the UK, both countries' electorate tolerate an extraordinary amount from their respective leaders. Our own dear Tony Blair has been chowing down on Bush's cock so hard for the past few years, that he has followed Bush into a policy of war and hate, of killing of women and children, of eroding civil liberties and do we do anything? Do we bollocks. What does that say about us?
Hacking the Vote
The thing is, most people probably think that to steal an election will take a vast conspiracy that would be too large to hide. Or else people think it is only the kind of thing that happens in more "lawless" parts of the world where the electorate can be directly intimidated. But it isn't like that at all, it's actually rather easy and the expansion of electronic voting is making it more so. There's quite an interesting article here about how you could hack the US election. It's seven pages long, but well worth a read.
So, tomorrow, the US go to the polls in mid term elections and all the polls suggest that the Democrats will win both Congress and the Senate. If that doesn't happen, be suspicious. If the exit polls say that the Democrats were the clear winners and it turns out they're not, be even more suspicious. But whatever you do, don't expect any kind of a Blue Revolution.
Perfection
I've always been a bit interested in Molecular Gastronomy. I'm sure cooking is much easier when you understand the physical and chemical process that is going on in the pan. So, I was interested to hear that Heston Blumenthal of Sardine on Toast Sorbet fame had his own prime time TV show (Tuesdays 8PM BBC2). I was even more interested to learn that the series, called Perfection, would at some stage focus on how to make the perfect risotto. Now, obviously whatever risotto he makes won't be good as what I can make, that should really go without saying. Plus, if you read my post on risotto from a couple of weeks back, you already know yourself how to make the perfect risotto. However, one of the things that frustrated me when writing that post was the dearth of information on the internets about the science behind it all. I wanted to be able to tell you precisely what was happening to the rice as you were cooking it and adding ladels of stock. But the fact is I don't know, and I couldn't find out, so I look forward to finding out what Blumenthal has to say on the topic.I got hold of a copy of the first episode and it's quite cool. He made bangers and mash followed by treacle tart and ice cream. We learnt that to make perfect ice cream you need liquid nitrogen. However, because liquid nitrogen is not easy to come by, he suggested using dry ice instead (because the shelves at Tesco have plenty of that stuff!). I'm not normally one to buy "tie in" books, but I saw that the book to accompany the series was only a tenner on Amazon, so I bought it.
Bond is Back
Right, there's a new Bond film out next week, and as usual I'm excited. I don't know why, for as long as I've been old enough to view films on the big screen with a criticial eye, as opposed to just enjoying the experience no matter what rubbish is thrown on screen (as was probably the case when my dad took me to see Octopussy many moons ago) I have always gotten myself hyper-excited about the prospect of a new Bond film. I have also always left the cinema thinking Well, that was a bit shit.It's the internet buzz that does it. With each new film, sites like Ain't it Cool have set reports that tell you how great it's going to look, script reviews telling you that "This time, there's a darker edge to Bond, he's going back to his roots." and everytime you sit there and think: well, no. This is about as dark as the Teletubbies explaining to pre school children how the sun works. You get your big budget opening sequence. Fine, I'm OK with that, they've been a bit unimaginative in recent years, but fine. Then Bond meets M where she feeds him a load of exposition, probably something about a bloke who for some reason is building a large space net the size of the moon and the British Government wants to know why. Then Q gives Bond some gadgets (an invisible car? fuck the fuck off...) and Bond goes off on an adventure where he'll meet a heroine, a femme fetale, and a bunch of red shirts. Along the way, there'll be a sleight of hand where you think the baddies have finally captured him but oh no, it's just the CIA and/or Felix dropping by to say Hiya!. Finally Bond will be captured by the actual Bond Villaintm and before a final showdown Bond will be told of the bad guy's plan to steal the moon and sell it to the Chinese or something. Bond will save the day and end the film on a witty retort ("I thought Christmas only comes once a year." Seriously, fuck the fuck off you smug bastard).
You leave the cinema and wipe the torrid experience from your mind so succesfully that the next year you think it is a good idea to buy it on DVD. You watch it once and then leave it to gather dust on your shelf alongside other pre Roger Moore Bond films which you still occasionally watch and enjoy (Lazenby was a good Bond, and I'd be prepared to fight anybody that disagrees with me).
It. Happens. Every. Time.
And you know what? It's happening again. I've read the internet buzz, watched the video podcasts, they're rebooting Bond! It's Bond Year Zero! Craig is unlike any Bond you've seen before! We're going back to the original Bond! Ooh, that sounds exciting! Well you know what? I've just gone to IMDB to find out who wrote the screenplay, because a screenplay is the bedrock of any film, without a decent screenplay, it doesn't matter how good a director you have, your film will suck seven kinds of balls. So who is writing this supposedly great "new" Bond film? A writing duo who's previous credits include The World is Not Enough, Die Another Die and oh my fucking god Johnny English. OK, I thought, let's just ignore everything I just said about a quality sreenplay being the bedrock of a decent film, maybe they have a director that can polish the piece of shit that the script undoubtedly is. Pray tell, oh wise IMDB, who is directing this "new" Bond film? Martin Campbell, a man whose previous directorial outings include Vertical Limit, Zorro, and yes, Goldeneye. Right. This film will be awful. It won't be a film about a British Spy, it will be a film about a man who goes round the world dodging explosions, fucking beautiful women, shooting bad guys, all with nod and a wink.
And yet I'm still really looking forward to it. What the hell is wrong with me?
Yeah, whatever
Listen, I know I said 7 days of sensible posts, but I worked late this evening, and then have only just got back from the pub. So how the cock do you expect me to write something sensible? YOU CAN'T! So listen, I'll just say this. Noel Edmunds is not only a devious despicabale murderer, having tried to KILL not only Mike Smiths but Sarah Greens, he is also responsible for our ASBO culture. Take that, so called Noel Edmunsons! You twatting cock shitter!
Asinine Shit
I don't really write anything worthwhile on this blog anymore, do I? It is mostly just asinine shit. I like writing, so I will hearby publicly commit myself to seven days of posts on topics that I find interesting. No Jimmy Saville related posts, no boring reviews of things that nobody will ever use, and no slander against the stupid twatting cock face that is Noel Edmunds (starting... now). I just need to find something interesting to write about.
Mini Blog
I come across a number of interesting, fun, clever, stupid links on my travels around the internet, but can never be arsed to blog them as it's too much effort. However, Friend Feed has aleviated nearly all of that hassle. So, subscribe to this feed and you'll get all the links that I think worthy of your attention. It will be just like old times, when this blog was nothing but a repository of links to other sites. Anything else I post on the internet, like new photos will also show up in the feed.
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Link Blog
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