loose lips sink ships

who does not drink beer

2009-08-19T08:27:08Z

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!

shawty five of those calls was to me

2009-05-31T08:24:34Z

It has recently become clear to me that not everyone in the world - not even everyone on my friends list - has seen autotune the news. If this is you, watch autotune the news!

Cooking | Pasta & Sausages

2009-04-16T11:33:03Z

Courgettes and onions
Originally uploaded by Alexandra Mitchell

Special request cooking! Sort of. This is for 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.

Cooking | Fish Jambalaya

2009-03-24T10:04:50Z

Now cut them up
Originally uploaded by Alexandra Mitchell

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.

Attn. meat fans

2008-06-15T22:37:56Z

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.

Grauniad soulmates ad, or, if only I were single

2008-01-06T21:53:34Z

"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."

Work(ish) blog

2008-01-03T14:44:46Z

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...

Vincennes Review of Books 2007

2008-01-01T16:33:42Z

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?

Achewood

2007-09-03T22:44:19Z

Attention, Potter Fans!

It's all in the mouseover.

Comics today

2007-08-22T18:18:23Z

The comics I read seem better than usual today. This could be because of a sudden spike in quality or because I am starving hungry and therefore impressionable.

A stern warning from dieselsweeties.

A brilliant product idea from Penny Arcade.

If you don't like Dinosaur Comics, maybe stick with the above two.

Comic

2007-08-07T18:35:54Z

This contains all the elements that make me like Wondermark, including but not limited to poor punctuation for comic effect.

PRODUCT IDEA

2007-07-31T18:36:10Z

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.

my lunch hour

2007-07-18T12:02:38Z

I'm currently reading The Long Tail, which is proving to be quite frustrating. This might be partly because much is made, at the start of the book, of the fact that more or less everything was discussed extensively in the author's blog. Whilst this is relevant to the central (and interesting) point of the book, it is also very easy to blame the writing style on the fact that it was argued online first - every point that's made seems to be made four or five times, every time something generic is mentioned at least two sub-examples are given. I'm on page 100 and, by this point, neither I, anyone else on page 100, nor anyone who is functionally internet-literate, need to be told that iTunes is an example of an online music store.

That's also symptomatic of a wider problem that I have with it - it seems to talk about the internet in slightly more starry-eyed terms than is entirely necessary. Maybe that's because I'm (just) of a generation that takes all of this for granted, but the relentless "sights! sounds! subcultures!" tone does get wearing extremely quickly.

There is also a lot less in the way of working through implications than I'd like -as I've obviously not finished it, I don't know if this is the case throughout but it has been so far. As an example, the section I've just read is about how getting (your / the artists on your label's) music listened to works online, an aside to which was a label looking at demographics (specifically age/gender) of the listeners of one of their artists, and adjusting their marketing accordingly. This was quite interesting, but it seemed inconsistent -after almost half a book of argument about how everyone is a niche audience on their own (these kids! with their iPod MP3 players, made by Apple! and their BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file sharing communications protocol!) - to go on to talk about dividing a market up like that as though the changing ways in which media are consumed has had no effect at all on how the marketing does or should work. I'm aware that it's meant to be an book on economics rather than marketing, but there is also a really interesting point to be made about what happens when people who would not formerly have communicated with each other, do, and what that does to traditional ideas of market segmentation and the efficacy of such.

If you are not already reading Dinosaur comics

2007-05-24T20:37:07Z

Start here.

In a complete change of subject, the basil plant died. This weekend, I get to buy another and start the whole cycle again!

Ecce Basil

2007-04-22T18:34:49Z

Basil Plant II
Originally uploaded by Ms Bracken.

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.

A lovely and soothing Flash game

2007-04-19T21:46:37Z

Dots and gentle music.

polyphila, I'm sorry if this breaks your PhD.

FAO slightlyfoxed, polyphila, others

2007-04-05T21:30:46Z

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!

FAO Klaxons

2007-03-27T19:57:13Z

David Malki is ambivalent towards you.

FAO fonts fans

2007-03-27T19:55:35Z

rstevens hearts you.

…哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈!

2007-02-15T12:11:51Z

Dilbert in Chinese on ftchinese.com. I find looking through these curiously hypnotic - where has an exclamation point been added where there was none before? Where has an exclamation point been removed where previously there was one?

More webcomic

2007-02-08T23:27:46Z

Specifically Wondermark.

Vincennes Review of Books 2006

2007-01-01T16:26:06Z

My overall aim for 2006 was to read less, but better. Going by a very imprecise scale (looking at everything I read in 2005 and everything I read in 2006 and rating each one as good, bad or indifferent) I appear to have achieved the first aim quite well and the second, less so. I read 2/3 as many books in 2006 as 2005. However, I rated 75% of these as 'Good' compared to 80% in 2005. Broadly speaking, the proportion of books rated 'Indifferent' increased at the expense of those rated 'Good', with books rated 'Bad' showing an only marginal increase of 2%.

More specifically, my three aims were to read more American novels, more Victorian novels and The Remembrance of Things Past. Most of the Victorians I read (Edith Wharton, Henry James) were also American, so I probably did better at that aim than the Victorian one. I also did finish the Proust, which was (in the end) worthwhile. The Captive and The Fugitive were entirely superb. I'm not sure I entirely understood the whole project, really; so much of it felt like a writing exercise rather than a novel, and whilst it was a very lovely writing exercise I kept feeling like it could or should be more than that. That's what The Captive and The Fugitive turned out to be, for me -lovely, resonant pieces of writing about a relationship going horribly, horribly wrong.

I was surprised - in the good way - by my two 'catch-up' novels that I should have read at eighteen and didn't until 2006 - Middlemarch and Lord Of The Flies. The former, I had been put off for some years having tried and failed to read The Mill On The Floss at fifteen. I was expecting it to move a lot more slowly than it did (and mainly consist of dull angst about whether to marry the young, rich and attractive peer or the old, boring and poor clergyman), and was also surprised by how entertaining it was; a book I'd expected to be something of a chore turned out to be one I'd actively look forward to reading every morning.

My liking of Lord Of The Flies was partly conditioned by all the Jennings books I'd been re-reading, and partly the fact that the vast majority of the books I had to read in high school were appallingly poor meaning I'd been put off by its reputation as a Book That Is Read For GCSEs. I also thought that I knew the ending, and in fact didn't, so that was quite a bonus in the last few pages.

As mentioned above, I re-read some of the Jennings books, which were just as joyous as I remembered. Also re-read A Room With A View, which was more tightly written and much, much funnier than I remembered.

The best book I read this year was, I think The Grapes Of Wrath - I enjoyed Steinbeck's 'fun' novels (Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat specifically) a great deal as a teenager but had always been somewhat loath to read his more serious work. Re-reading The Black Prince (Iris Murdoch) also made me especially happy -when I last read it I had a gauche teenage crush and... over-related to aspects of it.

The actual worst book I read - from every point of view - was Headcrusher (Alexander Garros and Aleksei Evdokimov). I had expected it to be a funny office comedy with some murders (that is exactly the kind of book I enjoy) but it turned out to be entirely witless, poorly written and larded with casual racism. I was also made very angry indeed by jPod, which was startlingly lazy. Really, Douglas Coupland makes it very difficult for me not to break into all caps, I'm trying not to do that in this post but essentially, well done, you have filled ten pages with numbers, that is a good day's work done how about going back to bed now.

In 2007 I want to read:

Don Quixote

Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace

Barry Unsworth's Losing Nelson

Nicolas Royle's Antwerp, and

Ovid's Metamorphoses

Also, more non-fiction (especially history, double-especially history not about Nazis) in the latter half of the year, because it seems that my tolerance for literary fiction is in direct proportion to the length of the days and by November I have entirely lost patience with my novel full of flowery metaphors and want to read something that is chock full o' facts.

i'm on my own in the office today

2006-12-22T09:37:20Z

"Anthony and Lena Colagrande of Baldwin Harbor, N.Y., for example, already had the big glass case outside with the dancing Christmas figurines, and the tin soldiers, candy canes and angels when they bought their first inflatable, a six-foot polar bear, a few years ago. They now have 25 inflatables of all kinds.

'Every year, I just buy more and more stuff' said Mr. Colagrande."

I find every sentence in this inexplicably hilarious.

solstice

2006-12-21T23:43:49Z

I've just realised it all gets better after today! hurrah.

Tagged

2006-12-21T22:35:42Z

By the hand of baddidodo

1. Take the nearest book and go to page 123.
2. Go to the fifth sentence of the page.
3. Copy down the next three sentences and tag three people.

It is A Life In Letters: F Scott Fitzgerald, and the sentence is "Thanking you for writing me about my book so kindly + for sending me yours". FYI, the F Scott book was The Great Gatsby and the letter was to Van Wyck Brooks, who had sent The Pilgrimage Of Henry James.

I am tagging the first three people on my friends page who have not complained about this meme. They are ultraruby, blahflowers and nicecupoftea. Naturally, if you are one of these people you do not have to answer if you do not feel like it.