| who does not drink beer |
[19 Aug 2009|09:25am] |
I am trying to collate all the songs which contain a reference to the kind of girlfriend you can get when you are famous (Spotify playlist). This is currently only three, what others are there? So far they are falling into two broad subcategories :
i) girls you can pull when you are not famous are a bit horrible
ii) girls you can pull when you are famous are a bit horrible
Do share your thoughts on this, whether here or via last.fm. This might also be a golden opportunity for you to break out the "unexamined assumption" tag!
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| Cooking | Pasta & Sausages |
[16 Apr 2009|12:33pm] |
Special request cooking! Sort of. This is for ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) choctaw_ridge, with whom I had a chat about how to cook pasta, and infov0re who has more than once sworn that he cannot cook this without me. Thanks to an iPhone and / or flickr, this need no longer be the case!
Anyway, this is a pasta and sausages thing, and it is a highly comforting meal, not least because it makes the pasta always come out right. I have also got a kettle since the last time I did one of these, which has made cooking (also drinking coffee, not pictured) appreciably easier.
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| Cooking | Fish Jambalaya |
[24 Mar 2009|10:04am] |
On Sunday night, I did my first bit of proper cooking in my new flat! I made a fish jambalaya, and the results, as well as fairly extensive instructions on how to get there, are on Flickr. It was pretty great.
I also realised that this is the first time I've done any significant cooking on my own, and that documenting it - despite the fact that this actually delays the cooking more - helps to mitigate this, because it still feels like sharing the process. I still can't cook for fewer than two though, so the kitchen is going to be leftovers city from now on...
Anyway, I hope you enjoy these; I don't do anything more sophisticated than combining readily available ingredients in a big pot, but no-one combines readily available ingredients in a big pot in quite the same way, so I like knowing how other people do this (and assume many on my friends list do also). More to come, no doubt.
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| Attn. meat fans |
[15 Jun 2008|11:12pm] |
My brother makes an awesome cassoulet with cheap ingredients, so while he was in London at the weekend I oppressed him into making this. (actually, he volunteered). In order to remember how to make this, and to absolve myself from any kind of 'helping' responsibilities I took photos at every step of the process and put them on Flickr -
Cassoulet - a set.
If you like cassoulet, proteinous dinners in general and / or saving money, it is worth a look.
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| Grauniad soulmates ad, or, if only I were single |
[06 Jan 2008|09:53pm] |
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"Dirty fingered skip rummager, 30s, seeks hairy legged F who smells of dog. Must have crass SOH & bumbling social graces. Must enjoy paragliding, scale military figurines & weeping uncontrollably into their own sleeves. Ipswich."
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| Work(ish) blog |
[03 Jan 2008|02:35pm] |
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I've been keeping a marketing / branding blog for a few months now at bettercourse.org. I tend to use it for the more abstract things I think about at work that don't necessarily have a place in emails about meetings...
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| Vincennes Review of Books 2007 |
[01 Jan 2008|04:34pm] |
Throughout 2007, I felt like I wasn't reading enough. In the end, I read only slightly less than I did last year - 53 new books as opposed to 56 - although significantly fewer re-reads - 3 as opposed to 8. Reasons for this include getting heavily into spacing out on the Tube on the way home and no longer having access to a fiction library, which means I had fewer ideas about what I wanted to read.
On the plus side, I seem to be reading a lot more that I like; 87% of books I read I rated as good, and only one book was rated as bad. This was, incidentally, Scarlett Thomas' Going Out, which was stinkingly awful.
My aims for the year were to read Don Quixote, Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, Barry Unsworth's Losing Nelson, Nicolas Royle's Antwerp, and Ovid's Metamorphoses. I read all of these except for the Ovid, which I didn't really think about until it was too late in the year to read all 700-ish pages. I also intended to read more history, but given the angst I was having about not reading enough at all, I'm not going to worry unduly about that one.
Don Quixote was a struggle until the second half, by which point people in the book had read the first half of Don Quixote and responded to the protagonists accordingly. I struggle with episodic fiction that is set in a world entirely like ours but without that fiction (I'm looking at you, Doctor Who) and the way Cervantes dealt with this problem felt gleeful.
What I remember the most vividly is the American literature - although I enjoyed them individually in varying degrees, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and Bret Easton Ellis' Lunar Park all felt like they were linked by a shared idea of what the American grotesque is. The dissolution of families as a result of pointless cruelty formed a great deal of all of the narratives; certainly, the Ellison and the Sinclair were the most challenging books I read this year.
Re-reads were Lolita, David Lodge's The Art Of Fiction and Iris Murdoch's The Bell. Lodge was fun, but I'd forgotten how much he wrote about his own novels, which I haven't read. Still, I've read more of what he talks about since I last read it, so it was rewarding from that point of view.
The best book I read this year, as last year, was an American novel - Hemingway's Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises. I read it around March, my marginal note was "Best I read this year" (they're small margins) and it's not been bettered. I've read quite a lot of Hemingway and never quite got on with him; but the damaged narrator and the little bits of tragedy that are never spoken about quite directly were exactly what I was expecting and never found in his other books.
Aims for next year are Ovid's Metamorphoses (again) and reading more from the library at work. Also, re-read at least one F Scott Fitzgerald, probably Tender Is The Night. Anything else I should read this year?
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| PRODUCT IDEA |
[31 Jul 2007|07:16pm] |
My little brother's new Lego set - which is a big police station - has inspired a new product idea. What the world wants is a JACK REACHER Lego set. Available in this set :
- 1 x Jack Reacher
- 1 x sexy lady
- 50 x generic bad guys
- Local cop shop (there are not enough bricks to make the walls all green, so some of the bricks supplied are white to indicate peeling paint; includes 3 x local cops)
- Local motel (LED 'Vacancy' sign never works, authentically)
- Nasty bar (includes 2 x "beer belly" minifigs)
- "Fancy city locations", comprising "fancy city gym" and "fancy city coffee bar". The Reacher figure's shoulders are slightly too big to fit into either of these comfortably.
- Big bad guy's "Jackie Treehorn" style house (this is the most expensive thing in the set)
- Remote barn (Void if placed in same room as any of the above; includes 4 x slavering hounds)
Cross-selling opportunities exist with the "Classic American Cars" set and the "American Government Buildings" set.
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| Ecce Basil |
[22 Apr 2007|07:34pm] |
Yesterday I re-potted our basil plant (shown here with a 7" single for scale), which I bought in Somerfield at some point in late 2005 and which has just become a bit too big for our windowsill. It's the only plant we have in the house and I am infeasibly proud of it; not only because that's a good innings for a supermarket basil plant, but also because I've taken what could be described as "care" of it only sporadically, sometimes failing to water it for weeks at a time.
It's at the bottom of our stairs now, which should have better light than the windowsill -so presumably it is going to go on to greater and better things. I also had to prune it somewhat to get it there, and dried what I'd removed for use in cooking. I'm only slightly ashamed to admit that I felt like I'd broken free of some vast herb-buying scam imposed on me by Western Capitalism.
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| FAO slightlyfoxed, polyphila, others |
[05 Apr 2007|10:20pm] |
As promised, if not asked for -
Fall Out Boy : Sugar, We're Goin' Down
Is this (Wendy Clear) the Blink song we were discussing?. I'm looking at the album now and can only remember there being two "big singles" although this one was on a lot of compilations at that time. This obviously less to you, polyphila - I know that you probably don't need to download anything from this album...
YouTube silliness : PG rated 300!
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