Daisy: In the end, our relationship was just like a sandwich toaster. You know, you just forget you’ve got one. And it just sits there on the top of the cupboard collecting a layer of greasy fudge. And even if you do see it you just assume it’s broken, you think if it’s working I’d be using it all the time, but you don’t and it just sits there. Then one day, you get an overwhelming desire for toasted sandwiches, you know? And you get it down and it works, and you can’t believe it, you know? And then you make every kind of toasted sandwich there is, you have toasted sandwich parties. You make Marmite and cheese, chocolate and…
Tim: Pilchards.
Daisy: Banana and…
Bilbo: Acorns.
Daisy: Acorns. And then as quickly as the desire comes, it just goes. And then you put the toasted sandwich maker away. And, you know what?
Tim: What?
Daisy: You don’t miss it.
Bilbo: So what you’re saying is ‘Don’t hide the toasted sandwich maker away, use him regularly and you’ll get the most out of him’.
Tim: No, she’s saying ‘Chuck your boyfriend, have a sandwich’.
[Spaced episode 5 - Chaos]

I have recultivated an obsession. It is one that festers deep in my soul, occasionally bursting forth with dangerous consequences. There are injuries, weight gains, more injuries and shortages of cheese in my local corner shop. I have realised that I own a Breville sandwich toaster.

Some toasted sandwiches, earlier

My love of the toasted sandwich can be traced back to a single incident in my childhood. Having been raised on cheese on toast (for a certain US based reader, please notice the ‘on’ – a very important preposition) I had often heard of the fabled ‘toasted sandwich’ and assumed it to be a sandwich made with toasted bread. As a lover of melty cheese this seemed to be inadequate, as the toast would have to be super heated to melt the cheese which would then run out the sides – a far from an ideal situation. One day I had been left in the care of my now-departed step-grandmother, a lady of strong food based opinions forged in the 40s and 50s and never changed (the list of food items that she had never tried but was sure she wouldn’t like was quite fearsome in its length and variety), and she decided that toasted sandwiches were the order of the day. Digging around in the depths of the cupboards she unearthed a strange circular device with long handles that looked more like an instrument of torture than a cooking implement. She buttered the inside, used it to slice a circle out of the centre of a cheese sandwich and then dumped it on the gas. A few minutes later a toasted (fried?) disc of bread, sealed at the edges and filled with molten cheese was placed in front of me.

I never looked back.

The key difference between the US style “grilled cheese” and the excellence of the Brevilled sandwich is this sealing process. A grilled sandwich can easily leak, with cheesy goodness (or marmite, jam, peanut butter, bolognese, acorns or whatever filling you have selected) coming out of the sides of the sarnie not only as you munch away, but also as you cook. The sandwich toasting machines of which I am fond seal the edges, making a bready pocket that is more akin to a pasty than a traditional sandwich.

Part two of the joy of the toasted sarnie is getting the outside of the bread right, and to this I turn happily to the US method – frying. To combine the best of both worlds, sealed edges and crispy exterior that’s better than toast (if such a thing is possible. It is) the buttering of my grandmother and my more middle class application of olive oil is important. Rather than the normal light toasting that a dry sandwich undergoes you instead end up with a gentle frying, greasing up your toast at the same time as not turning it into a fried slice – crispness without drowning in fat.

While the circular toaster is a great thing, especially if one is in a forest with nothing but a camp stove, a loaf of bread and bag of cheese for company, the now traditional electric square toasting machine has its benefits. First up – you use all of your bread. The circle-from-square off cut crusts from the circular machine may keep you going as a snack while you await your sandwich’s cooking, but I prefer the anticipation of a whole sandwich than mild sating that second class bread crusts can provide. Also, in the forest situation mentioned above, if one discards the crust it could attract bears, which puts a damper on both the camping and sandwich making experiences. Secondly – you get more sandwiches. They may be smaller sandwiches, and the extra bread may end up being crimped by the toaster’s pocket sealing edges, but you get two triangular delights rather than one sub-Adamski flying saucer. There are places in the world for both kinds, though: a bolognese sauce and cheese toasted sandwich is an excellent thing, but the square toaster generally doesn’t allow you to get enough sauce in to make it worthwhile, as the pocket impressions are seldom all that deep; whereas a toasted cheese, ham and marmite sandwich with enough cheese to fill the circular pocket could a) cause serious burns if not treated with care and b) may actually be too much cheese, or at least too much cheese to justify the addition of the tiny percentage by total volume of ham and marmite. Also, the square toaster requires electricity and a portable generator, when shipped to the woods, will happily make enough noise to scare off any wandering bears.

So, long live the toastie, whatever you put in it. Cheese, ham, ham and cheese – the possibilities are endless.

 

I like scotch eggs. From the gourmet end of the Scotch Malt Whisky Society’s warm ham hock scotch egg with picalilli to a Ginsters scotch egg bar, I love the entire range of pig wrapped chicken precursor. At the end of last year I saw that the Qype folks (ta muchly Neil) had organised a scotch egg tasting event at The Coach and Horses in Clerkenwell and enthusiastically jumped on the chance.

I’ve not been to the Coach and Horses before, having confused it with the nearby Gunmaker’s, and it seemed rather nice, with a landlord who knows how to look after his beer, a cheery head chef and a very decent whisky selection for a pub. Henry the chef also has a bit of a thing about charcuterie, leading to a section of the cellar being kept aside for hanging maturing meats – a couple of platters of these appeared at the end of the evening and they’re pretty good.

Part of the pub’s schtick is to try and cook more traditional british fare and to further this aim they added the scotch egg to their menu. There’s a bit of conjecture over where the name came from, with Fortnum and Mason’s claiming they invented the dish and others pointing out that ’scotching’ is a term for wrapping things in meat anyway, but it’s generally accepted that it has become a much maligned bit of fast food in recent times. Times are changing, however, and our scotch egg tasting turned out to be a lesson in how to make them ‘properly’.

Firstly, Henry prepared the meaty wrapping – pork mince (made from shoulder and belly) was mixed with the traditional pork pie seasonings: mace, cayenne and sage, as well as some mustard, to fulfil Henry’s craving for it, and some cooked shallot for ’sausageness’. This was smooshed up and left to rest while we prepared our eggs.

Donning latex gloves we grabbed an egg each and swiftly discovered that the sous-chef had gone slightly too far with the ’soft boiled’ instruction, leaving smashed piles of barely cooked egg all over the table. A quick run upstairs later and we had another batch of more solid, but still runny, eggs. Shells removed, we grabbed a small handful of mince each (about 50g per egg) and started making porky sushi. We spread the meat out quite thinly onto a sheet of clingfilm, placed the egg in the middle and then used the clingfilm to bring the meat around the egg to make a ball.

We then moved onto the breadcrumbing, using the Coach and Horses chosen double crumbing – meaty ball into flour, then beaten egg, then finely ground panko breadcrumbs, back into the egg and then into some regular chunkily crispy panko crumbs before being placed on a tray ready to cook.

The eggs then disappeared for a bit to be first deep fried until golden and then finished off for 10-15 minutes in the oven. When they reappeared they were more prickly than the average service station version, with panko crumbs very golden and crunchy. They tasted really very good, with the eggs just slightly runny and the meat actually tasting of meat rather than the uniform salty greyness that you get from Budgens. The meat was quite loose in texture though and Henry recommended leaving the uncooked scotch eggs to chill for a while before cooking to allow them to firm up a bit.

Anyways, the scotch eggs are good and they’re a standard on the menu. I think they’re up there, but maybe not quite as good, as those made by Andy of Eat My Pies (although that’s a hard decision to make, especially as I didn’t try one made by the C&H staff), but they kick the (still rather good) SMWS one to the kerb. I still have a place in my life for the ghetto scotch egg, but it’s nice to know that there’s somewhere else that appreciates that they needn’t all be like that.

You can find organiser Neil’s write-up over on his blog with a bunch of links to others.

 

The iPad announcement has come and there wasn’t much to surprise out at the front – 10″ish screen, running iPhone OS, new look and feel for a bunch of apps… Basically a big iPod Touch/iPhone with optional 3G. It’s a very shiny thing but I suspect that I won’t get one, despite lusting after it with deeply repressed fanboy-ness, as I don’t think I’d use it.

Anyways, there was interesting stuff. Other than it containing a new chip, Apple’s A4, which I’d not heard of before, Steve Jobs mentioned the iTunes Book Store (or whatever they will christen it) and a few bits and pieces that have been floating around have come together. He acknowledged that Amazon have led the way with the Kindle Store, but if my hopes aren’t dashed things will hopefully get better from here on in.

The first piece of info that I heard through the various rumour sites and also via last night’s McGraw-Hill info leak was that Apple have been working with the publishers to get ebooks out there. So far so Amazon. However, one thing that popped up, which I can’t find a source for other than Kosso on Twitter (Update: from the Engadget feed – The Steve said it at 10:57), is that Apple are going to use ePub as their ebook format. This opens up a number of possibilities depending on decisions that are made:

1) What DRM will they be using? While Adobe have a fairly tight grip on the DRM’d ePub market with Digital Editions, Apple do like doing things on their own. However, with the gradual decrease of DRM on iTunes music is there a chance that they might do the same thing here? Could Apple get behind a movement to get DRMless ebooks?

2) If we end up with no DRM or an industry standard will they allow transfer of books to non-Apple devices? If I could buy books from the Apple store and stick them on my Sony Reader then I would be a happy man. Especially if it didn’t require Digital Editions.

3) What are they going to charge? Unfortunately this does seem to be the place where things will fall down – the rumour mill suggests that they’ll be pricing at US hardback prices – $13-15 rather than Amazon’s $10 for new releases. This is still more pricey than the physical equivalents, but if they come down to be closer, like mp3s have (they generally still cost more than discounted older CDs) then this will lower the resistance to buy at least on my part.

It also looks interesting on the unit cost side. Based on the US prices (with added VAT and ‘You live in the UK’ tax) I reckon we’ll see the lowest model clock in at between £400 and £450 ($500+VAT is about £360 at the moment), and my overly precise guess is £429 – Apple like their £x29s. I suspect that the 3g models will be bumped by a bit over £100 (maybe £120 – the $139 premium works out at about £95), although they’re keeping quiet about when those might appear.

So, we get a moderately flexible device with a colour screen and ok battery life for $499. The Kindle DX, with a similar sized screen, currently clocks in at $489 – only $10 cheaper. If Apple get their bookstore running nicely then I suspect that Kindle sales might start feeling the pinch, although that’s a very big if – taking on Amazon could be a foolish move. I’ll be interested to see how Apple’s relationship with Google continues as the latter starts eating the book market with the Google Books settlement inexorably rolling closer…

In an ideal world Apple would put up a DRM free ePub store with a similar or better to Amazon range of titles available worldwide, with no restrictions on getting them onto a compatible reading device. I suspect that we won’t get this, with custom DRM wrapped around the epub and no support outside of Apple devices for a good while, if not forever. I can only hope that their experience with iTunes music informs their decisions more than the movie store.

Update: It seems that I’m not the only pessimistic one – Defective By Design have a petition up asking for Apple to stop DRMing everything. I’ve signed up, not that I think it’ll do much good.

With that, there’s the sort-of-opposite opinion – that this is a great day for open software. With Apple’s continued restriction of on platform software they are forcing people to the cloud, says Yehuda Katz. Annoyingly I like to work offline, as I kinda agree.

 

I have become scared. There is now preamble, bear with me.

I noticed today on macrumors.com, a site that I have become increasingly obsessed with as I have become addicted to the sweet drops that drip from Apple’s still milky udder, that the CEO of McGraw-Hill had broken a piece of news that most thought would be saved until tomorrow’s Apple show and tell about their much rumoured (and now pretty fucking certain) release of a tablet computer – it would be using a version of iPhone OS. Now, this isn’t particularly news to anyone keeping an eye on the way the tides were moving, with Charlie Stross predicting it 6 months ago and despite my frantic scrunched-up-eyes-wishing even me knowing that they weren’t going to stick a full version of Mac OS X on it, but the macrumors comments page quickly devolved into murmurings of how Terry McGraw would not hear the ninja who would disembowel him and that stealing The Steve’s thunder is a very easy way to get yourself dropped from the corporate Christmas card list. Being someone who works in an industry where McGraw-Hill are the #3 player (and that my lot are #4 in, although quite a chunk behind) I immediately went on a mild defensive. ‘Terry McGraw shits out companies like Apple for breakfast’, I thought to myself. ‘His publishing empire buys and sells commodities more pricey than Steve Jobs’s offal for mere shits and giggles’, my whisky fuelled imagination continued. ‘Fuck you, Apple, you fly-by-night metal and/or white box merchant, publishing and financial data looks down on you with the contempt you deserve’, I finished. I then went, of course, and performed the correct penance for taking the holy name of Steve in vain and while I bandaged my wounds I had a quick look on Google Finance.

• McGraw-Hill – Market capitalisation: $10.78billion
• My anonymous employer – Market capitalisation: ~$3bilion
• Apple – Market capitalization: $185.49billion

My industry isn’t even in the same league. I am humbled and scared by the scary amount of cash that final number actually signifies – Apple as a single company are worth more than pretty much my entire market segment. We are mere dust under Steve’s loafer, but ants to Apple’s Burj al-Arab. May I never doubt you again, oh mighty Steve and your empire of Gap clad stormtroopers.

So, tomorrow at 6pm GMT the show and tell will start and something will be revealed by a man who will probably be wearing a roll-neck sweater. My feverish fanboy-ness is newly forged, so I will most probably be at work tapping away at the refresh key as I flick between ‘live update’ websites awaiting the news from the holy mountain. But at the back of that excitement for a product that I not only do not need but that will also be backordered until it is almost obsolete is a lingering doubt. An annoyance. A disappointment that the Apple Store at White City will most probably be jammed and that I won’t be able to get my Mac there to be fixed . It’s currently backing up the 115GB of randomness that I’ve managed to fill it with so far ready for me to hand it to a ‘Genius’ to get them to remove the copy of Doolittle by the Pixies that currently has decided that it likes being in my iMac more than it does not, jamming up the CD drive. The Steve sorely tests my patience with one hand and strums my inquisitiveness with his other. Oh, you tease.

 

Shift Run Stop is a rather excellent podcast who don’t talk about games as much as their C64 oriented title might suggest. I have no problem with this other than that they got the name before I thought of it. It is a very good name. Anyways, they’ve been putting up snippets of video showing bits of their next episode (despite there not being a video of the main eps) and this one contains one of the best stories I have ever heard:

Chris Cleave from shiftrunstop on Vimeo.

It makes me think that I really should have put a tent up on my balcony when it was snowing the other week so that I could have a ready made igloo for when I woke up in the morning. I could have worked from home from an igloo. That would have been awesome.

 

I went to Paperchase today and bought myself a nice big sheet of white card. I was given approving looks by the various customers (I suspect that they don’t get that many Metallica hat wearing bearded men trying to delicately manoeuvre a large piece of card around while pleading with the cashier to be careful not to crease it. She wasn’t all that careful) and I have put it to good use in building my ghetto photo studio mk2 – overhead lights, a chair, a piece of card, my camera and a tripod. The above piccy is my only real success (you can see the background getting darker in my other attempts), but with cow-orkers in the US at the moment to mule me back a polariser and the ready availability of clip-on lamps for cheap in my local Roberto Dyasi I see ghetto studio mk2 working even better than mk1. This time I’ve got an A0 piece of card…

 

I might claim that this post is more for me to mark what I’ve been doing recently, but I suspect it’d be a lie and I’m merely an attention seeker with this being another demonstration of my ‘condition’. I MUST BE LOVED!

Ahem.

I recently tried my hand at editing the OneMoreGo podcast and failed quite spectacularly. As such, fellow bearded gamer Matt tutted and Got It Done, meaning that it appeared yesterday, only a week late. I think I rant in it a bit, but can’t remember as it was a whole two weeks ago that we recorded it. Here it is:

I also managed to get some more bits on the Pod Delusion, although I suspect that this means that James needed to fill in about 3 minutes to get it up to length. My most recent rant asking photographers to be ‘nice’ may appear at some time in the future, but for now here’s the episode from last week with me (it now seems…I’m sure this wasn’t my attention) calling for Tony Robinson to harass homeopaths. I reckon that should be homeopathists, it’s a much better word.

And now I go to protest about photographers’ rights. I’m not sure that assembling in Trafalgar Square is all that controversial (the Canary Wharf flash mob the other week was a bit more subversive) but I’ll go along and add my large mass to the en masse to make the crowd one Billy bigger. I might even try some of this ‘journalism’ thing that I’ve heard talk of. It sounds exciting.

 

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it on here before, but I have a strange amount of respect for David Icke. Now, don’t mistake respect for belief in any of the crazier end of what he says (there’s a lot of ‘just, like, be nice to everyone and stuff’ in his talks these days, from what I’ve seen), but I do respect him. It comes down to two distinct points:

1. He absolutely believes in what he’s talking about
2. He’s not really doing any harm

Taken on their own neither of those really garner my respect: there are lot of people who really believe in what they’re doing from shit artists to genocidal fuckheads and most people drift through their lives without doing any harm, but taken together he’s a strange figure who just sits in the corner telling those who are interested about his slightly strange view on the world before shaking a few hands and drifting off quietly into the night.

I saw a bit of documentary about him a couple of years back and the days of being the son of god and a lizard overlord obsessive are behind him. There are hints of lizards still present, but the documentary seems to suggest that he’s more interested in his message of peace and love these days, although it also showed his wife/manager knows what the crowd are after and deftly manoeuvring him back round to what the crowd had come to see. He’s a slightly comical figure and seems to know it, but still churns out books and does ridiculously punishing talking tours where he seems to play to packed out houses, with (I guess) a proportion of the crowd just there to see a formerly well respected personality talk crazy. That’s sort of where I’d be if I went, which makes me think.

Thoughts of The Icke don’t often cross my mind often these days, although every now and again I wish that I had something that I could go and evangelise about with the same level of lack of harm attached. Telling people how great eBooks are doesn’t really come close and the paper publishing market probably wouldn’t agree (yet…) on the harm element. However, I got an email from the folks over at the Brixton Academy today letting me know that due to popular demand another date had been added to see Icke talk. And when I say talk, I really mean it – the day runs from 11am to 9:30pm. Even with breaks that’s going to be a long day of fairly crazy talk and at £35 it’s about £3.18 per hour, which is top value for such high quality crazy. Add to that the date – September 11 – and all of a sudden you get an event that could kick off in unexpected ways.

If anything the date has put me off – I like the idea of a guy with crazy ideas going around and telling everyone his message of peace, love, mind expansion and lizard conspiracies, but if you start dropping serious and potential controversy causing reality into the mix then it stops being quite so fun. So, for now the chance of seeing David Icke lecture animatedly about the secret rulers of the world will sit in the back of my head for another day. Long may he continue.

It seems a chunk of his talk is online…time for some watching.

 

I’m posting this for two reasons:

1. I might forget how to do it
2. The guides I found online are rubbish

So, due to my new found love of hearing my voice online, aka podcasting, I’ve been looking into ways for me to record things. At the moment the lovely Matt records our (now bi-weekly) podcast and handles all the editing, but being the friendly soul that I am (and knowing that the boy wonder is a busy chap) I’ve been trying to work out how I could do the recording bit (as being a filthy lover of The Steve as I am now I’ve got GarageBand which does editing for you. Or something. I hear). However, I decided that the recording MUST BE DONE PROPERLY! so I’ve been tinkering around (although not particularly effectively as it turns out) and have now found out how to do the PROPERLY! bit.

The challenge: using only GarageBand and software freely available on the interwebs, record Matt’s voice (via Skype) onto one track in Garageband and my own into another, as well as monitoring the Skype call as usual (ie. only hearing Matt in my earpiece).

The online guides I found said that I’d need a USB headset, or AudioHijack Pro (which looks like it would have done most of this for me for a few quids), or other such things, but after a bit of tinkering today (after I bought a USB mic [a nice one though]) I found it can all be done nice and easily with only one download.

In case the mentions of the Holy Steve and GarageBand weren’t enough, this is for Macs. My shiny iMac is running Mac OS X 10.6.2 so, in traditional disclaimery fashion, YMMV¹.

Part 1: Soundflower

If you don’t have it already then you can grab Soundflower from the Cycling ‘74 website – it’s an application that creates synthetic sound sources made up of inputs from multiple other sound sources for ease of routing sound between applications. I thought it was a bit rubbish when I first started playing with it, but now I’ve got this working it’s my new best friend.

Load up Soundflowerbed (which is what it calls itself) and load up ‘Audio Setup…’ from the top bar menu that appears (its icon is a silhouette of a pretty flower. Aaah):

In there you need to create an Aggregate Source by clicking the little + button at the bottom of the left listbox and then select Soundflower (2ch) and whatever audio input you are using for your side of the Skype call (in this case my Built-in Mic).

Part 2: Skype

Fire up Skype, go to Preferences in the Skype menu and choose the Audio section. In there you’ll need to set the Audio Output to be Soundflower (2ch) and the input to be whatever your audio input is:

Part 3: GarageBand

Load Garageband and choose a new Voice project, as that sets us up nicely with 2 tracks ready to go, and when its loaded go to the Preferences menu, the Audio/Midi section and set your Audio Input to be your Aggregate Device.

When that’s done, select track one and set it to use input from Stereo 1/2 of the aggregate device and then set track two to Stereo 3/4. If you don’t have two stereo devices (as far as I know Skype is always stereo, but my USB mic is only mono [but very nice]) then you may have to twiddle around with the mono channels or a combination of mono and stereo. Once you’ve selected things, make sure both channels are set up to record and then hit the record button. Now when you speak you’ll get picked up in one channel and when you dial Skype the audio from there will go into the other channel.

Part 4: Monitoring

But Oh Noes! You can’t hear the other person! If you click on the Soundflower menu and then on Built-in Output under Soundflower (2ch) it will redirect the Soundflower (2ch) audio (Skype) to you standard output.

If you put headphones in then this won’t even cause a feedback loop that will cause the universe to end. Which is a good thing.

This all seems entirely obvious and simple now that I’ve done it. Hopefully it will one day be of vague use to someone else. Or me tomorrow morning when I’ve forgotten it.

---

1. I think that’s the first time I’ve actually written YMMV, which I’ve always avoided as I always mistake it for YHWH. I thought I’d share that.</p>  

It’s bastard cold outside, but it does look rather nice. I suspect that this means we are about to be plunged into a neverending winter, where trains will be frozen in their sheds, roads covered with frictionless ice and airplanes will fall from the sky, crushing people as they trudge through the drifts towards the safe haven that is the local library.

Or it could just be a little chilly. I like the view from my balcony.

Best viewed on black.

 

The christmas period isn’t just a time for me to sit on my arse and work as a food and drink processing plant. I also participate in present giving and, more importantly as far as this post is concerned, done made stuff.

Other than the small stack of posts before this one, I’ve also done a bit of podcasting:

One More Go Episode 4:

(we’re doing about an hour every couple of weeks from now on, so the days of the mammoth two and half hour podcasts are done. For now…)

Pod Delusion New Year Awards Special:

(I did the bit about the year’s best disease. It’s swine flu, just to make sure that there’s no suspense)

I also did a roundup of my festive boozing over on t’Booze Blog and spent the last 3 days doing a lot of logging into work to make things not be broken any more. I don’t have a link to that, though.

I’ve got a Billy’s Decade of Gaming article sitting on the tip of my brain, ready for writing, although I have the problem that I’m very lazy, which does make such things difficult. I should probably at least do a 2009 in gaming, as well as get this half edited review of Tales of Monkey Island Episode 5 over to GeekPlanetOnline.com to go with the one of Ep 4. It’s all go…

Despite all that, I still found time to watch Lesbian Vampire Killers this afternoon. Dont judge me. It was free, so at least I don’t have the stain of paying for it on my conscience. Scarily, it wasnt all that bad. It’s no Ninja The Protector, but what is? Anyways, I’m now following up my intellectual start the filmic year with Underworld: Evolution, which seems to mainly be Kate Beckinsale in a wet leather trousers competition. I’ve seen worse things.

 

Along with Goodreads and Listal I have the wonder of Last.fm to track my music related activities. I like lists and numbers, they make me happy. There’s a cut here as there’s a pile of music and videos after it.

( Read the rest of this entry » ) 

And another list – this time books. Not a great year for reading, with only 45 works of traditional fiction, 22 graphic novels (excluding my weekly comic stack) and 4 non-fiction. Within that I read 12 ebooks, most of which I paid something for (Baen are awesome, especially if you are addicted to Honor Harrington books like I am), 1 eComic (Surrogates on my iPhone) and 1 mp3 audiobook (The excellent David Sedaris’s ‘When you are engulfed in flames’, read by the man himself). I also had 1 ‘enhanced’ book on my iPhone, The Death of Bunny Munro, with text and a reading by Nick Cave synchronised, as well as offering videos of him reading (complete with waved hands). So, a bit of a year of mixed media.

One thing it does show is one of my pet peeves – when I show people my ebook one of the first comments from many is ‘Oh, I could never give up real books’. As the numbers above show, even a ebook fanatic like myself hasn’t given them up, far from it. It’s not an all or nothing thing – you can still read whatever you want, wherever you want, but ebooks are just another choice. </soapbox>

Anyways, other than the Honor Harrington series, with which David Weber has ensnared me to read rather good pulpy military sci-fi (he really seems to like beating up his characters), there are a few books that I really liked this year:

• 1974 – David Peace
• The Eye: A Natural History – Simon Ings
• When you are engulfed in flames – David Sedaris
• More Trees to Climb – Ben Moor
• The Surrogates – Robert Venditti & Brett Weldele
• The Napoleon of Notting Hill – GK Chesterton
• The Lies of Locke Lamora – Scott Lynch
• Harker Book One: The Book of Solomon – Roger Gibson and Vince Danks

As with my previous post, I’m going to choose three faves: Harker as my favourite graphic novel, The Eye as my favourite non-fiction and When You Are Engulfed in Flames as my favourite fiction, even if it is semi factual essays.

If anyone wants a lend of anything on the list below, please let me know. You will be enrolling yourself in the “Billy’s offsite storage scheme” by which I leave a chunk of my book collection with other people, but you will get to read books. It’s a trade off…

And now the not-so-long-as-the-one-of-films list, in the order Goodreads has told me (which is sort of chronological-ish) tweaked to be slightly less unreadable:

( Read the rest of this entry » ) 

And thus the yearly lists begin – to start with: my films (as I just wrote a bit of XSL to pull them out of the broken RSS feed that Listal provides). A good year for film watching this year with 31 in the cinema (of which 10 were at film festivals and 3 at Bad Film Club), 30 from the TV (showing that I’m getting some use out of using my PS3 as a PVR), 17 on borrowed/bought DVDs and 41 rented (which after removing non-Lovefilm ones means I’m paying about £4 each for that subscription. Must watch more movies to make it more worthwhile).

As for film of the year, there are a bunch of contenders:

• The Wrestler
• Let The Right One In
• The Mother of Invention
• Moon
• For All Mankind (even though it’s 30 years old…)
• The Good, The Bad, The Weird
• Bunny and The Bull
• Sherlock Holmes

It’s a difficult choice, so I’ll go for 3 – Let The Right One In, for normal film you might get to see, For All Mankind, for random documentary that’s just been rereleased (and almost made me cry) and The Mother of Invention, for awesome movie that you probably will never be able to see (but should if you have the chance).

Worst of the year is quite easy – The Spirit. Randomly confused plot with visuals that occasionally carried it, but overall just horrible. I couldn’t really concentrate on what was going on and I spent most of the time thinking of other things. Acting dire, script dire – Frank Millar should stick to writing comics, which he does very well.

Here’s the big list, in order of watching:

( Read the rest of this entry » ) 

I like it when people send me text messages saying “Ed is ill, want to come to that gig I mentioned the other day?”. Monday was meant to be my last night off before the Christmas run of minimal sleep and too much beer, but it was a gig I couldn’t really pass up – a 6music recording at the Maida Vale studios of Gary Numan and Little Boots.

I was standing just to the left of the photographer when he took this

I was well aware of the existence of Mr Numan, even if I didn’t consciously know any of his songs other than Cars, and I’d seen Little Boots on her first appearance on Jools Holland and had been rather impressed by her shiny flashing machine and rather good tunes. However, I had no real idea what to expect from the recording, with talks of a collaboration as well as having seen clips of the studio on the web before. It turned out to be a largish room that was big enough for 1/3rd of it to contain about 60 people there to listen and the other 2/3rds to house two bands worth of gear, a bunch of camera men and a big dolly track with a couple of blokes zooming around on another camera.

Anyways, me and the “King of random but awesome tickets”, Mr Reeve, stood by the taped line of Do-No-Cross at the front and watched the show. Little Boots (aka Victoria Hesketh) and her band wandered out to play three songs, including a solo effort on the piano that hadn’t been recorded before, as well as the obligatory interview before being replaced Numan and chums. There may have been more eyeliner in the crowd than in front of the cameras, but that was probably more due to years of experience leading Numan’s band to go for subtlety than anything else. They too played three songs, although we had a couple of retakes as the guitarist had issues, as did somebody on the recording desk. Mr Numan’s interview was quite interesting, especially his potential flip-flop from talking about his appreciation for those who used his music as the backing for rapping to saying that while he felt the success of covers was more flattering than that of his original takes there were better uses of his music than “sampling 8 bars and talking over it”. There was a theory that he might have been talking about the Sugababes though…I don’t envy whoever edits that bit.

Then came the much vaunted collaboration. I suspect that someone needs to look up what that word means, because Little Boots singing a couple of shorter verses in “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” with the volume turned down didn’t real feel like a collaboration, although when Numan’s band went away and he joined in with Little Boots and band things seemed to work better. They played Little Boots’s “Stuck on Repeat”, with Numan adding his wobby vocals across it and finished off with a cover of The Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs“.

All in all – rather good. Little Boots and friends can knock out her tracks live rather well and Gary Numan is Gary Numan, even if he did apologise for being slightly restrained in his performance as his parents might watch. They’re going to put out the whole gig (edited to remove the traditional MAGIC OF TELEVISION! stoppy starty gaps) next year on the mysterious Red Button (which means I’ll probably never see it) but they’ve got Venus in Furs up on the 6music website (it wasn’t quite so dark as that video has been fiddled to show. It’s like they’re professionals at making videos or something). It was rather a good night. I may also now have a Little Boots album.

 

It’s a bit after the fact, but a couple of weekends ago I nipped down to Canterbury to see my brother’s band, Black Sun Down (website out of date), play in a battle of the bands competition. I’ve only seen them once before and they’ve recently hooked up with a new drummer so it felt like an opportune time. They also asked me to go down to take photos and drink heavily with the pirate society (which as far as I can tell promotes the drinking of rum, wearing of bandanas and shouting of ARRR, and little else), so I couldn’t really say no.

I turned up at the Darwin College Origins Bar, down in lovely Canterbury, to be confronted with one of the most unlikely venues I’ve seen for a while. However, with assistance from Adam, bassist in BSD, the organisers managed to construct a decent sounding stage on the raised area by the fire escape and the bands began to play.

The penultimate band

First up was one of the judges, not eligible for the prize but acting as warm-up, singing and playing guitar on some of her own songs, to quite good effect. There weren’t many of us there apart from the bands and she filled the time nicely, and her guitar was lovely. Next up were some shouty chaps who reminded me of the early iterations of my first college band – playing punk covers and the obligatory bits of blues to cover the cracks. After them were a very promising band, fronted by a guy who borrowed the judge’s guitar (this may be important, remember it), and backed by a bassist, a keyboard player and the keyboard player’s Mac. If they get a drummer (or better drum tracks) and practise I suspect they will be rather good. Following them were a ska-y band, whose members gradually removed their shirts. They were rather good, and the only other band on the bill apart from Black Sun Down who play outside of the university – they knew how to work the crowd and had a small pile of fans sitting on tables near the front who were very appreciative. The penultimate band were last year’s winners – purveyors of Radiohead covers and angst they epitomised the archetypal student band. They weren’t bad, but a late minute drummer substitution (as their normal drummer had forgotten his anniversary and was off making it up to his girlfriend) and the singer’s ego filling 90% of the stage chopped off a chunk of their impressiveness. And finally BSD – they’ve come on leaps and bounds since I last saw them. My brother is no longer yodelling, Joe still is a scary guitarist, Adam doesn’t hide as much as before and is quickly becoming a very good bassist and new drummer, Chris, is rather good – there aren’t many bands who can play at a university battle of the bands and get away with an extended drum solo… They rounded out the night in style, even if you discount my bias.

Predictably, the second band of the night won (the ones who were leant a guitar by the judge?) but this was as expected. I was knackered so avoided the pirate society, which turned out to be a top plan as the pub they were in was full and only girls in tight tops and my brother (who was being auctioned for charity) were allowed in, and I even managed to blag a bed for the night.

Next day we tried to grab a few shots for band’s website, as my last set all feature the previous drummer, and we got a few in the end. I rather like the one below – it tickles my cheese detecting sense.

 

It’s not every day that someone I know, even if it’s a “look there’s Mike, we seem to turn up at a lot of the same things and people occasionally think I’m him” kind of way (describing someone as ‘a big bloke with a beard’ covers a lot of bases), puts out the first evidence of the TV program they’re developing AND it has Sean Pertwee in:

SLINGERS from Mike Sizemore on Vimeo.

Mr Sizemore has been working on this for a bit and while I’ve heard and read about it I’ve never really quite had any clue what it was going to be like – I certainly didn’t envision it looking quite like this. I may not be keen on the MIGHTY PERTWEE’s voiceover and a few of the effects, and I think it’s a bit confusing for a 4 minute sizzle reel, but I do rather like it overall, more for the atmosphere and little bits of character that pop up than anything else – they hint at what it might turn into. From the two crooks tweaking each other as they set up their bit of the caper to GUN, who I’m fairly sure will become a bit of a favourite of many people if the show gets made, it looks like it might appeal. Good luck to Mike and the posse – it’d be nice to see this flesh out into a the series he has been planning and it’d be disappointing not to get it at least as far as a pilot (which will hopefully shoot next year).

However, my normal criticism of pretty much every futuristic TV program and film stands – the guns just don’t feel right…

 

A couple of weeks ago the nice people who gave me a ticket to a screening of Eden Lake last year (and tried very hard to give me a ticket to see 500 Days of Summer, which I wanted to see but repeatedly was booked up during screenings of) got me into a rather shiny tiny cinema out the back of a hotel in Soho and showed me Bunny and The Bull.  As they were so nice I thought I’d better write something.

Anyways, my elation at being a special person soon disappeared when I discovered that I knew a chunk of the crowd due to Mike Atherton putting together a film watching posse. Pre-show drinks were bought from the posh bar as hotel guests looked in mild bemusement as a bunch of slightly damp bloggers milled around until we were pointed at a door and the cinema beyond. It was a nice cinema, about the same size as the ICA, with a good sized screen and the most lurid lime green leather(ette?) seats I’ve seen for ages. Luckily the lighting was low, but it still looked like we were sitting on green Opal Fruits.

Before the film. writer/director Paul King, director of The Mighty Boosh, and co-star Simon Farnaby, whose hair I had always assumed to be a wig, appeared to say hello and give a little background. It seems that Simon has a slightly strange family and that some bits of the film had been lifted from his stories, including the basis of his own character. Having seen the film I am hoping for his sake that they weren’t anywhere as near as weird.

At its heart the film is a simple buddy travel movie – guy discovers that the woman of his dreams thinks of him as a friend, is devastated, goes on a trip around Europe with his best mate. However, as one might expect from a man with a hand in The Boosh, it’s not quite that simple. It’s quite difficult to describe, with cardboard sets, strange mixings of past and present (most of the film is told as a flashback), a large stuffed bear, broken down cars, Captain Crab’s vegetarian option, a series of interesting museums, a mechanical bull and the drinking of dog milk. It’s beautiful to look at, from its Wallace and Gromit feeling titles to the not entirely unpredicted ending, and the soundtrack (by Ralfe Band, whose website I rather like and whose album Attic Thieves is now, thanks to emusic, playing in background) adds to the general surreality of the whole experience. Surprisingly, for someone who likes The Mighty Boosh as much as I, it is the inclusion of them in cameos that are two of the weaker points in the movie. Rich Fulcher and Richard Ayoade pop up quietly and well, but Julian Barrett and Noel Fielding, especially the latter, definitely jar against the rest of the film and dropped me out of the narrative. I rather liked Barrett’s bit, although it did feel like it was from The Boosh rather than this film, but Noel Fielding’s 5 minutes, with one of his normal not entirely right accents, grated and I was happy when he disappeared and the film started its surprisingly delicate wrapping up. The model work and sets deserves a special mention – from the clockwork theme park, to the bull, to Stephen’s flat (where a lot of the film takes place) it all fits in perfectly with the world and looks fantastic. Combining that look with a distinctive directing style that joins disparate scenes together elegantly and you can see that while Paul King might have started with The Mighty Boosh, he certainly hasn’t stopped there.

It’s surreal, almost too deliberately so on occasion, and the story is something we’ve seen before, but it’s a well crafted, beautiful and, most importantly, funny film that does what the director wants it to. It drops its spell on a few occasions, but generally keeps you happily immersed from beginning to end – I really enjoyed it and came out smiling to myself. I may even be tempted to see it again at the cinema, if anyone’s interested (it comes out tomorrow), especially if it appears at the Prince Charles – I reckon the red fluffy seats will compliment it better than the lime green.

 

As I mentioned in my last post, I may have bought a new domain to stick up a blog about booze. Well, I done made a blog and posted on it:

Billy’s Booze Blog

I suspect that it may mainly feature articles about whisky, but I’ve got a couple of cans of Zywiec in the fridge, so there’s a chance I might be tempted to write about other things.

I did have a can of Red Stripe, but that was given to someone as a present…

 

Sunday rolled around, as it often does, and after my day of walking on Saturday I had an even greater test – The Blaggers’ Banquet (I’m still not sure about that apostrophe).

As someone with an empty Sunday I turned up at Hawksmoor at a worryingly early 11:30am (although that was 30 minutes late due to a long coffee queue at the rather excellent Market Coffee House, the best coffee place round Spitalfields) to help set up the bar, my assigned place for the night. After a few moments of examining root vegetables I was whisked off to act in my standard role of fetcher and carrier, picking up beer from the George and Vulture and then working with Dan to get things iced up and organised for the evening. One of the bonuses of working in the ‘chilling’ team was that you can’t do a lot while things are getting cold, so I turned my hand to a bit of parsnip peeling (killing that bonus), for the excellent parsnip crisps that appeared during the banquet, before being a general dogsbody.

Wow. I really do have an impressive gut.

As the sky turned dark more helpers appeared and our first important bar staff duty rolled in – tasting the wine. Denise TheWineSleuth was the first of our sommeliers to arrive and I happily slurped at the wine with her, making appropriate faces and comments. It seems that I was the only person on the team to like the Chardonnay, as my untutored white wine palate tends to the woody, but there was a general agreement on the excellence of the Portugese red (although there were allegations of favouritism after last week’s wine blogging conference in Portugal…).

Wine wasn’t really the responsibility of my team, so we got on with the setting up of our menu – beer, cider, soft drinks and cocktails. On the beer side we were heavily loaded, with London Pride and Martson’s Pedigree on the more traditional end, and Daas Witte, and Curious Brew Brut and Admiral Porter (the latter of which I may have obtained a few bottles of, and might be drinking one of at the moment). The Witte was a solid bottled wheat beer, with maybe a touch too much in the way of floaty yeast if the bottle caps and necks were anything to go by, and the Brut was a crisp lager produced using the same yeast as the british sparkling wine that greeted out guests. As a fan of dark beers the porter stood out for me – an easy to drink dark beer with quite a lot of fizz. I suspect it might work better if not quite so fizzy, but it worked surprisingly well for a beer style that is normally known and appreciated for its flat murkiness.

Cocktail-wise we put together a fairly simple list, using up the Sipsmith Gin and Vodka that were blagged, as well as the Fevertree tonic (which definitely makes a better G&T than Schweppes but still tastes Wrong to someone as indoctrinated as I), some Bramley & Gage quince liqueur, some of the Raspberry and Apple juice that we got from a company I can’t remember the name of and a bottle of vermouth that was picked up from the Tesco over the road by a generous barperson (although based on the number of martinis that didn’t get across the bar I suspect enlightened self interest played a part). As the board in the photo above (drawn by my fair hand) says, along with the obvious beverages (although I would like to point out that our martini contruction skills became rather excellent within moments of the bar opening and constructions involving twists, olives, shakes and stirs flowed until blindness started setting in for both punters and staff) we also put out a Cornish ‘Champagne’ cocktail, with a sugar cube and dash of quince liqueur added to a glass of the Chapel Down fizz, and the mysterious Blagger-tini, as invented by the lovely Mel Seasons and including secret ingredient X – Galliano Balsamico, part of a case of special boozeb;agged by Huw, bossman of Hawksmoor. I can reveal that that the Blagger-tini consisted of Vodka, raspberry and apple juice, and Galliano Balsamico. Exact proportions I leave as an exercise to the reader, but as the Galliano isn’t meant to be available in the shops yet it may be difficult to experiment.

Along with the boozing I also managed to blag some music, in the form of Julian and Steph of Georgia Wonder. I’ve known Julian for a while on Twitter (and I thank him yet again for his introducing me to The Old Coffee House, purveyors of Brodie’s beer, in Soho after the Amplified conference earlier this year) and saw them play a small gig in Chiswick earlier this year (where I ended up getting very drunk and saying little else than ‘Mastodon are, like, really great. You know Mastodon, right?’ to Georgia Wonder’s occasional 3rd man and Mastodon fan, Dev of Little London) and despite not being a ‘background music’ kind of band decided that the banquet sounded silly enough that they’d like to come and have a play. They serenaded the mostly chatting crowd as they arrived, and may have played around slightly to see if people were actually listening – the assistant manager of Hawksmoor may not have noticed the very long version of one song, but he did notice a repeat. When the punters sat down for dinner Julian and Steph left them to dinnery chatting and ran off for pastures new. They’ve got a new EP out Real Soon Now (which I may have bought a few copies of to help fund the release) and are rather good.

Food appeared, food was eaten. Happy punters availed themselves of our services and became happier still. The barstaff sampled drinks, for quality control reasons, and we also became happier. Jelly boobs from Bompas and Parr were wheeled out and much amusement was had in their extraction – the nipples had been made from a specially formulated jelly that was harder than the main body of the boob, but was annoyingly just as susceptible to melting when we immersed them in warm water to try and release them from their moulds. They were also covered in 24ct gold sprinkles though, for that extra element of class.

Anyways, after the boobs (and a rather excellent chocolate brownie and chocolate truffles) came coffee, courtesy of my heroes at Square Mile, and cheese. I was especially impressed with the cheese and while I may have said differently on the night, favouring the Gorwydd Caerphilly, the cheddar (Barber’s 1833) was rather spectacular.

Then came the normal closing down fun of a gradual chivvying of people through the door and cleaning. Much as I love being a barman I always forget the amount of work that is left after the punters are thrown into the street. Glasses were run through the glass washer, leftovers were moved around the restaurant and drunk people were rearranged from corner to corner. I ended up running away at about 1am, realising through the martini haze that all the tubes were now shut and eventually jumping into a cab. My driver was grateful to get a decent fair on a Sunday night and thus let me tell him my life story. What a nice chap.

So, the inaugural Blaggers’ Banquet is now done. However, Action Against Hunger needs the cashes and we are not done yet. On top of the meal (which ended up being a full house after a few final days of frantic ticket selling) there is also an ongoing selection of auctions, with new bits and bobs going up each day. As of writing the available lots are a visit from a chocolate van and a 3lb pork pie. 3 pounds. That’s a pie. Bid early, bid often!

Now, lets see if Niamh is silly enough to try and organise something again next year…

The bar team were me, Mel Seasons, Dan, Ben Bush, Tim Hayward and Elly
There’s a pile of stuff available on Twitter, probably including a pointer at this post, under the hashtag of #blaggersbanquet. Someone else currently beats us on Google, but that can’t be for long…
Photos are by Mark of Food by Mark, used under the CC Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivative Works license, apart from the rubbish one of the cheese, which is all mine.
I also seem to have bought a domain for writing a booze blog on. This is what happens when you talk to food bloggers when drunk. They didn’t even have to point and do a ‘one of us!’.