Cowfish Blog

Bunny and The Bull

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 21:09:15 GMT

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.

I done made a new blog

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 21:02:46 GMT

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…

The Blaggers’ Banquet – The Day Itself

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:13:32 GMT

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!’.

Jealousy

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:47:42 GMT

Shuttle Atlantis – Slow motion launch from stuart on Vimeo.

It seems that my friend Stuart managed to win a place on the NASA tweetup and go over to Florida to watch this week’s shuttle launch. I am not jealous. Oh no. Not me. I am very jealous.

He’s written it up over on his blog. I’m still jealous.

Jimmy Wilds, The Signals, The ITC and BCS

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:49:32 GMT

I had a bit of a weekend. As it’s now (by 23 minutes) Wednesday I suppose I should probably get something down before it becomes even more fadey in my fadey brain than it already is. First up – Saturday: The Lord Mayor’s Parade.

My BCS involvement sometimes gets me into slightly random things, but I think this was the most random – marching in the Lord Mayor’s Parade as part of a group consisting of two BCS members (me and Mike), two BCS HQ staff, the robed senior members of the IT Company (the 100th livery company of The City of London, formerly known as the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists) and a group of Royal Signals soldiers, riding 5 display motorbikes (1 with sidecar, 2 with ladders attached to the pillion for doing headstands on), and a quad bike.

The chap in the picture above is Jimmy Wilds, a retired Signals soldier who rode as a dispatch rider for Winston Churchill during the second world war. For some reason Claire Balding decided to talk to him as we rolled past the Bank of England, rather than me and my green fleece clad BCS chums. You can just about see me at the back of the group turning the corner at 55:20 in the BBC Coverage, before Jimmy’s interview. That almost makes me famous – please join the queue if you wish to touch the hem of my cloak.

And then it rained.

Luckily the BCS fleeces were waterproof, but the lunch stop was miserable, with pouring rain and some dodgy Asda sarnies. Me, Mike and the robed up Information Technologists tried to get into a hotel bar for a restorative, but were turned away (which we suspect may have ramifications for the hotel’s business…). I was blaming the fact that I assumed the staff thought the robes were team colours, but I’m suspecting that bloody mindedness may have had something to do with it. Without brandy the restart wasn’t quite so jolly, but the walk back to London Wall felt much shorter and soon we were tucking into the ICT’s wine cellar and hearing tales of the livery companies.

And then it stopped raining.

It’s very strange waving at thousands of people who have lined the streets despite the rain. It’s especially strange when they are pretty much all ignoring you and instead wowing at the rather impressive sounding motorbikes that are making roaring noises behind you. The bikes did sound really rather nice though.

JoCo and P&S

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 08:09:09 GMT

Last night I went to see Jonathan Coulton and Paul & Storm at the Union Chapel. It’s way too early in the morning for me to put together fully coherent sentences (even if I did just do some proofreading) so I will be brief:

It was rather excellent and the Union Chapel is still my favourite venue in London. It’s not often that an act comes on for an encore, asks the desk to turn off amplification, tells the audience to be really quiet (and to stop making pirate noises for a few minutes) and plays a quiet and beautiful song simply because the acoustics in the venue are so great. I took my camera just in case I got a chance to take some photos and rather than having to be circumspect about shooting I could be quite blatant – if it were the sort of venue or gig were it wouldn’t be allowed then I suspect that half of the audience wouldn’t have been filming and recording it, including the girl at the front with a camera on the stage shooting the gig in time lapse…

I can see Mykreeve and Minifig’s point in their podcast this week that Jonathan Coulton is an artist who is great to see once, but I suspect I may have to go along again next time he’s in town as well.

In other news Daniel Kitson’s playing a couple of shows at the Union Chapel in December. I can’t go, as I’m off to see other comedic things on both nights, but you all should.

The Blagger’s Banquet

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:17:32 GMT

It seems I’ve made myself busy again. In amongst the various engagements that I have entangled myself in for the near future one is sticking out as rather interesting – The Blagger’s Banquet, as kicked off by Niamh from EatLikeAGirl.

In standard fashion I have managed to con my way into the organising of a rather interesting event. The Blagger’s Banquet basically goes down like this:

A bunch of bloggers take over Hawksmoor on Sunday November 15th
We cook a charity meal for 50 covers
?
Profit!

Luckily in this situation step three (actually step 0, but that would fall outside of the scope of a cheap South Park reference and as such I have ignored reality) is defined – blag stuff. The plan is to obtain all the necessary material for the construction of said banquet by means of blagging, as suggested by the name. We’ve been approaching purveyors of food and drink asking for freebie stuff to both serve on the night as well as to auction off afterwards, all in aid of Action Against Hunger (the same guys who were in on NomNomNom) and we now have a list of tasty items that almost constitute a meal (although I think we need a few more veggies to water down the booze and meat combo we currently have going).

I don’t know how much they’ll cost or when they’ll go on sale, but there will be tickets, and there will also be an auction for some rather nice food and drink related items. I’ll stick something up here when either of them appear online. But in the meantime, if any of you nice people have contacts in the consumables industry and you think that they’d want to give us free stuff then please let me know – the more stuff the merrier.

Now to go and beg some fridge space from work…

Sleepy

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:47:45 GMT

This week I have mainly been busy. Busy and tired. However I did manage to fit in another cinema all-nighter to make three weekends in a row where I lost a night of sleep. Last night’s was with the lovely peeps of Geekplanet, who put together an all-night horror movie session along with the Empire in High Wycombe. Of the four films two were excellent (The Thing and American Werewolf in London), one was rubbish (My Bloody Valentine in 3D) and I sat outside during the final one, deciding that having a chat with someone was much more worthwhile than being in the cinema as the magic light flickered on the screen (Saw VI).

To kick the evening off we had a Q&A with Doug Bradley, mainly famous for being the lead Cenobite (aka Pinhead) in the Hellraiser movies. Being someone who has only seen the first in the series and didn’t think that much of it I wasn’t all that interested, but he’s an excellent speaker and a thoroughly nice chap and his book on the development of prosthetic make-up as continuation of masque theatre is now on my to-read list (even if it did sell out its small print run and is only available via his website). Me and the Geekplanet posse had a spot of dinner with him beforehand and there was much in the way of grinning and confused looks when there was a general realisation that we could all add “discussed politics, especially the development of the public persona of the BNP as a sign of voter apathy, with Pinhead from Hellraiser” to our list of lifetime achievements.

Anyways, I’ve spent the day uploading a few photos, having a little bit of a kip and playing Tales of Monkey Island episode 4: The Trial and Execution of Guybrush Threepwood, so in conjunction with my week of Busy I’ve not had a chance to do anything particularly creatively interesting. However, this photo of Mr Bradley is my favourite of the bunch, so I name it my creative thing of the week:

Lorenzo Lamas has a more rubbish hair-do than me

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 01:05:19 GMT

This evening I went to see Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus at Nicko and Joe’s Bad Film Club. I was quite fortunate to see it with Nicko and Joe talking over it, as the visuals combined with small amount of original dialogue that I did hear were enough to cause a minor nosebleed and I can only just imagine the total exsanguination that may have resulted from actually watching the film ‘as it was intended to be viewed’. I hereby request that the universe prevent, in a non-fatal manner, Deborah (formerly Debbie) Gibson from appearing in any further films. I have similar request about Lorenzo Lamas, although I am prepared to relax the fatality clause in his case.

This is the finest scene in the movie. After seeing this you don’t really need to see any of the rest.

However, on further consideration I feel that what this film needs most of all is a sequel. A brief twitter comment from movie companion Ed Whitfield got me thinking and I came up with a simple plot: Shark swims so fast at Wales (speed stated as 500knots in the first film) that on impact with the shoreline he starts burrowing and doesn’t stop until he pops up somewhere outside Paris. Other than that initial premise I have several other ideas for key scenes, including:

The shark biting the Eiffel Tower
The shark eating Le Pont des Arts
The shark skidding down the Champs Élysées and straight through the Arc de Triomphe, crushing some onion sellers
The shark arcing through the sky over an airport just too far outside of Paris to strictly be called a Parisian airport (e.g. Toulouse) but that is still referred to as such, plucking a purple liveried Ryanair jet from the air, and spitting it out with a comedy ‘Do Not Want’ caption under the picture and a grimace on the shark’s strangely expressive face
The post credits sequence of the shark tunnel surrounded by workman as a sign saying ‘Chunnel’ is knocked into the ground by a man with an oversized wooden mallet.

While these ideas are all, obviously, awesome I was still missing a villain. Someone, or something, to fill in for the Giant Octopus of the first film. I think I have an idea, as well as an opening for the film:

SCENE 1</p>
We open on stock footage of the open sea. Preferably somewhere quite exotic. A desert island in the background wouldn’t go amiss. Waves roll gently and we can hear the surf lapping at something. Not sure what. Don’t care what.
CUT TO
COLWYN BAY.
CUT TO
REVELLERS on the beach pulling their cardigans tight around their shoulders as children play football wrapped in 17 layers of wool.
CUT TO
The ocean. This time slightly rougher.
CUT TO
A single BOY, shivering with cold. He wipes a drip from his nose.
CUT TO
The ocean, boiling with an infernal energy. Red light under the water (or just a red filter over the whole picture would do).
CUT TO
The BOY. He points out to sea with a look of shock and fear in his young eyes.
CUT TO
EFFECTS SHOT

The sea opens in a biblical fashion to show our villain, the MEGA SHARK, skimming across the waves towards COLWYN BAY. It opens its mouth and lets out a massive roar.
FX Slowed down motorbike, reversed and with flanger applied.
CUT TO
The BOY. He turns and runs screaming. PULL BACK to show the full (more than 6 extras would do) beach with the REVELLERS running from the now danger filled waters of the IRISH SEA.
CUT TO
EFFECTS SHOT

The MEGA SHARK. He continues to advance on the land, massive jaws biting at the air.
A SERIES OF QUICK CUTS, ACCELERATING IN FREQUENCY.
Cut between the shark (EFFECTS SHOT) and the beach, complete with FLEEING REVELLERS.
CUT TO
The rear of the MEGA SHARK. He hits the beach at speed and breaks through the sea wall, burrowing a tunnel as he goes. DOLLY IN towards the hole until it reaches about 50% frame coverage. Pause and then our title flies out of the MEGA SHARK BURROW.
MEGA SHARK

VS

THE

CERNE

ABBAS

GIANT
JARRING CHORD

CUT TO BLACK

Spaceman

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 08:15:12 GMT

It was Sci-Fi-London last week and through a train of events that is becoming all too common I ended up watching a film that I didn’t think I wanted to and loving it. At last year’s festival it was Caro and Jeunet’s City of Lost Children (which is even more fantastic when seen projected from a 35mm print onto a nice big screen), this year it was Al Reinert’s For All Mankind – footage from the successful moon landing missions (with a few other space mission bits thrown in for continuity) edited together to look like one mission, from waiting to board the module to splashing down in the ocean, with a bit of weightlessness and playing on the moon in between. I sat with my mouth open and a tear in the corner of my eye for all of its 90 minutes and have now got a copy preordered on (rather pointless) BluRay for when the new release comes out on November 16th. It was nominated for a best documentary Oscar in 1989, beaten by Common Threads, and I see why. Incredible footage and a wonderful voiceover from the astronauts held together by a score that mixes Brian Eno with some of the music the astronauts took into space with them. It’s on YouTube if you want to have a watch:

Along with that the new Ares 1-x rocket was finally launched yesterday after some weather related pushbacks and it was a beautiful thing. A new reusable craft built to try and replace the space shuttle (although without the shuttle’s landing ability) for a chunk less cash, it’s been put together and launched in only a couple of years. The launch is now, of course, up on YouTube. The footage from flight control, unfortunately not on YouTube as far as I can see, is even better when you’ve just watched For All Mankind, where you can see how little has changed – there’s not a cigar or pipe in everybody’s mouth these days, but there’s still loads of hugging when things go right and the traditional chopping in half of the new launch director’s tie happened right on cue.

I think I want to be an astronaut again.

Busybusy

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 19:03:50 GMT

It’s been a bit of week, as demonstrated by the fact that apart from a “powernap” at about midday I haven’t slept since Friday night (hooray for Sci-Fi-London and my 2nd consecutive weekend with some kind of all-nighter thing going on. I have another next week…). Anyways, not much in the way of creativity going on outside of work and a quickly knocked up iPhone app for the BCS Young Professionals group. So, in the spirit of putting up something here’s one of my traditional Stormtrooper piccies from the first event of the Sci-Fi-London Oktoberfest – an evening of sci-fi geekery at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich.

I also, to continue my rather scary number of vocal appearances, guested on the GeekPlanetOnline’s flagship show – The Eclectic Podcast 1×17 – In Space Noone Can Hear You Squee! In order to keep my promises I watched Alien 3 at last night’s Aliens and Predators All-Nighter. It was okay.

Allegedly creative

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 20:11:17 GMT

It’s been a busy week this week, so I have little to post online showing my AWESOME CREATIVITY. Anyways, firstly, here’s the podcast that I contributed to. I’m up first to allow proper comedy callback and everything:

I had an idea for something to record for next week’s podcast, but I promptly forgot what it was, so there probably won’t be anything from me next week, but hopefully I’ll have other ideas one day.

Anyways, my proper ‘creative thing’ involved the art of ‘drawing’. Well, actually it’s tracing (and not in the Chasing Amy “you’re just a tracer” sense, just actualy tracing). We’ve recently had a ’social media’ policy come in at work, which includes a rather sensible “Please don’t associate yourself with $company online unless it’s for specific work reasons”. Whle I’m taking a deliberately pedantic take on this, I thought I better sort myself out a new internet avatar, as my old one has me wearing a work hat. So, combine the old photo, a clear plastic sheet, a fat permanent marker and my relative inability to draw, and what do you get?

It’ll do for now.

PCC

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 21:33:30 GMT

I like the Prince Charles Cinema.

iPhone, ho!

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 07:06:37 GMT

Just a quick ‘what creative thing I did this week’ as I don’t really have anything I can post online.

Firstly I put together another podcast segment for The Pod Delusion, this one called ‘Fuck You Moon’, which will be out on Friday if it makes it past guest editor Will Howells’s comedic chopper. However, while I have an mp3 of it hiding on the internet it seems a but unsporting to post it here rather than make you download the whole podcast to hear my wisdom and wit.

Secondly I continued my iPhone app writing domination plans with a slightly more featured version of my SCI-FI-LONDON app. It’s not going to be done in time for Oktoberfest (October 23 and 24 – buy tickets now!) and may not be done in time for next April’s festival, but it has now at least one tab (the podcast one) that has some actual code in it. Even if I did pinch some of that code off of the internet.

I’m becoming less impressed with the iPhone API and Apple’s XCode development environment as I continue my tinkering – I found an undocumented ‘feature’ of the UILabel class yesterday (text labels can resize text in them to have a try at automatically fitting the contents to the size of the label, but that stops working if you allow the label to have multiple lines), got bitten by a bug causing very weird errors (a peril of dynamic method dispatch at runtime) that turned out to be due to me reusing variable names that I didn’t know had already been used, and got bitten by a few things that are quietly not available on the iPhone. And to add insult to injury, my Mighty Mouse is a bit rubbish at detecting whether I’ve done a right or left click. It’s still interesting but I hope that fewer of my problems are due to holes in the documentation and annoying ‘features’ as I go on. Next task – multithreading…

Also, this weekend is the Extra Life charity game-athon that I mentioned a while back. As I suspected might happen, noone’s sponsored me, but I’ll be off to almost my childhood stomping grounds to play games from Friday until Saturday evening. I suspect this means that next week’s creative thing that I will be making is a slumped shape on the official GeekPlanet sofa.

Upcoming Giggage

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 11:13:49 GMT

I’ve just noticed that I’ve got a bunch of gigs booked up before the end of the year and, as seems to often be the case, I will be sitting in the corner on my lonesome for a couple of them. Anyways, if any of you lovely people feel like having someone talk at you at a gig and also maybe see some bands then here is my upcoming schedule:

NOV11Wednesday 11 November 2009
Hundred Reasons Canterbury	Garage London, United Kingdom
NOV13Friday 13 November 2009
Jonathan Coulton Paul and Storm	Union Chapel London, United Kingdom
NOV17Tuesday 17 November 2009
Alice in Chains	HMV Forum Kentish Town, London, United Kingdom
DEC9Wednesday 9 December 2009
A This City, Stars Of The Search Party	O2 Academy Islington London, United Kingdom

A are a really difficult band to search for on the internet.

Context is important when discussing mullets

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 06:34:32 GMT

My threat of being in a third podcast within a week has come true. It’s only one step from here to the 3-4am ‘Trucker Hour’ on Radio Mercury. Oh how I dreamed of being a DJ on Radio Mercury when I was younger. It would have been the perfect disguise so that I could have got into their building and smashed the transmission equipment, saving Sussex from the rubbish they rolled out over the airwaves. Wikipedia says that they introduced Pat Sharp to the world – I say ‘inflicted on’, no matter how great Fun House was.

Proof there that Pat Sharp didn’t always have a mullet. He is a sham mullet owner, a mere mullet come lately, a temporary wig wearer, a hairy deserter when the going got tough. I seem to be more obsessed with Pat Sharp than I thought. I already knew about my mullet obsession, though – self reflection is a dangerous thing.

The Pod Delusion Episode 4: This week: TAM London special report, sceptical comedy, Apple stores, NLP and video games censorship!

That’s my ‘liberal media radio voice’. I think I need to work on a Reverend Dr Ian Paisley voice for more strongly held opinions, if I can find one that isn’t about my right to buy reasonably priced toffee yoghurt. I really like toffee yoghurt.

Yet more podcastery

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 07:23:58 GMT

It seems that liking the sound of my own voice and knowing easily led people is all that is required for me to become a PODCAST LORD! So, there are now two more snippets of me talking random crap out on the internets, and there is a third that will be appearing at the end of the week. So, for your aural pleasure:

Thomyk Episode 44 – Pixies: In which Billy and Thom discuss Michael’s starring plinth appearance while he takes his art around the world. Thom talks for longer than he should do about his recent holiday before Billy and Thom get on to more interesting topics and tell you about the Pixies, why you probably shouldn’t get a Kindle, but maybe get an eReader anyway and then give their opinions on Star Wars.

One More Go 0×01: Matt and Billy are back for your second monthly dose of gaming chatter. On the agenda: Beatles Rock Band and its ridiculously-priced peripherals, the mysteries of people who trade in their consoles for newer versions of the same unit, shocking revelations about Tekken 6 and thoughts on a new round of games.

Matt’s started referring to One More Go as ‘Officially the hairiest gaming podcast on teh interwebs!’. I just had a bit of a shave and feel like a traitor.

Creative things in a week of sickness

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 18:58:56 GMT

This week the main thing I created was whinging noises due to HORRIFIC MAN FLU, the likes of which most people would shrug off, but that I, like the crying child I am, was brought low by. This gave me a chunk of time in which to be ‘creative’, but also little urge to do anything but lie down and place the back of my hand theatrically upon my fevered brow. So, this weekend I’ve tried to make up for my otherwise fairly inactive week and done Things:

Firstly I finished the first episode of Monkey Island Adventures – Launch of The Screaming Narwhal. It was good and I’ve now got the next two episodes, of five, downloaded and ready to play.

Secondly I made my niche art television debut while standing around looking gormless in Leicester Square watching MykReeve play around on the fourth plinth.

Michael was rather entertaining up on his podium, playing music, dancing around and putting on outfits from the various places he’s travelled around the world. His hour is up on the One and Other site for your perusal, if you wish to join in the fun of watching out for me looking cold.

Thirdly I recorded another episode of One More Go with Matt for the GeekPlanet website, which will hopefully be up next week. I apologise in advance for any coughing that Matt wasn’t able to edit out. I was ill and all that.

Fourthly I recorded some more potential podcastery, putting together a five minute segment as a test to see if I can make something that I think is suitable for James O’Malley’s “The Pod Delusion” – I wiffled about being followed by NLP practitioners on Twitter and how marvellous http://www.beatswineflunow.com is. I don’t know if it’ll get submitted or make it to the podcast if it is, but I rather like the sound of my own voice, so something of mine may one day appear on that lovely podcast.

Anyways, none of those really felt like a creative thing that I could really post on the internets, so I went for ‘emergency craft project #1′ and produced this:

Yes, it’s a Batman iPod case, made from scratch (including working out a template) by my own fair hand. It’s definitely a version 1, as it’s made of thinnish card, pritt stick, a page from the Superman strip in Wednesday Comics #2 (which I hope doesn’t magically become worth piles of cash sometime in the near future) and a sheet of lamination film. Yes, the ‘circle’ around the touch wheel is a bit crap, and the screen hole isn’t all that great, but for someone who wasn’t allowed to use scissors when at primary school due to the potential of danger for those around him, it’s not a bad attempt. Although I don’t think I will be turning the making of comic wrapped iPod cases into a business any time soon. Now for some more Monkey Islanding…

Pwetty

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 11:11:42 GMT

I now have a balcony and I intend to use it – the polluted skies of north London are my new canvas.

However, what Dan Germain said at Interesting about sunsets does, of course, also apply to sunrises.

Darf ich Sie tuer?

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 09:17:50 GMT

For various early morning brained reasons I was considering the use of formalised language in German and French this morning. In my youth I was touted to be a linguist, a label that I have since managed to remove, tear up, burn and bury under a pile of tongue tied and stuttering rubble, but I am still fascinated by the French and German use of tu/du/vous/Sie to indicate familiarity as well as plurality when referring to people as “you” – if you know someone or are talking to someone younger/’lower in status’/etc than you then use tu/du and if you are being polite/formal/talking to someone of ‘higher status’ then use vous/Sie.

A few years after I stopped learning German I discovered that the Germans, ever inventive with their language, had a special word to describe the using of du to refer to someone as you – duzen. It was even listed in the random article I was reading with the polite way of asking someone if it was alright to call them “du” – Darf ich Sie duzen – a phrase that I love for its formality while asking someone if you can lower the level of that formality.

It’s not unusual for early morning preparing for work activitivies to get my brain spinning on issues of language – years ago, while walking to the station to go to work, I had a long and one sided conversation with my erstwhile flatmate Dave about how to translate ‘We Will Rock You’ into French. “Nous vous rockerons certainement” was where we got to, ’se rocker’ being a verb that I am both proud of and expect the Academie Français would have me strung up for. So this morning I had a bit of a think of what the equivalent for duzen would be in French – I came up, logically, with Tuer.

Which means ‘to kill’.

Update: Thank you people who have told me the real french word – it is indeed tutoyer.

More Charidee

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 16:57:08 GMT

As I have often said, I don’t like to talk about my various charitable works. As I have also often said, this is because I don’t generally actually do all that much. However, I do have one of those occasional events coming up soon, so I thought I’d let you know.

So, and please don’t laugh, I will be doing a 24 hour computer gaming marathon. This is actually the very opposite of a running marathon, as the only actual horizontal movement I’ll be doing will be from my sofa to the fridge, bathroom or computer gaming device. However, I will be staying awake for 24 hours playing computer games for Extra Life, supporting the Texas Children’s Cancer centre.

My involvement is partly due to Matt, my One More Go co-host, accidentally pinching the name of the charity for the old GeekPlanet gaming podcast (the one that my awesome appearance on destroyed, only for it to be reborn as One More Go) and mainly because he’s doing it as well.

It’s over the weekend of the 17th and 18th of October (3 weeks away) and there will be a webcam and other ways for people to remotely laugh at me and my ’selflessness’ as I sit on a chair and play computer games. If you do want to sponsor me then you can do so over on the charidee website. Think of it less as sponsoring me and more as giving money to charity.

Wodka

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 21:37:55 GMT

Yet again Sunday has rolled around and I’ve had a think as to what I’ve done this week that could be called creative. Unfortunately as a craft project I started tinkering with yesterday fell apart (literally) at the point that I realised that I had no sticky tape I am left with but one thing to choose from.

This week I done made flavoured vodka.

The delicate looking bottles above contain, working from left to right, a chilli and a liquorice vodka. I, of course, didn’t make the vodka itself, but I soaked things in various amounts of vodka to create the two samples above. Vodka-wise I used Russian Standard, as it was more expensive than Smirnoff, but cheaper than everything else. Also it had cyrillic text on the label, which makes it more authentic. It does. Really. So, recipe:

Liquorice Vodka:

1 bag of Henry Goode’s soft eating liquorice (I got mine free at Interesting, but you should probably pay for yours)
350ml of Vodka

Place liquorice in vodka. Leave for an amount of time. Remove liquorice. Drink vodka.

You can probably guess the chilli vodka recipe (I used 3 largeish red chillis, chopped each into 3 or 4 pieces lengthwise).

I left mine for about 2 days for the liquorice and a day for the chilli – while that was fine for the former, the latter became fairly deadly after 5 minutes of steeping and the extra 24 hours and 55 minutes turned it into a dangerous substance which caused my tongue to hurt when I sniff it. The liquorice is an unbridled success and I am sipping at a glass of it, served over ice, as I write. However the chilli is a different story – it tastes of chilli in a excellent way, but the levels of heat surpass anything I expected, especially as I used some fairly mild chillis. I used it yesterday to deglaze a steak pan before making a butter sauce and that worked quite well, so I’m putting it in the ‘food additive’ section of my brain, rather than the ‘get drunk on it’ one. There are only two sections in my brain.

I also experimented with making coffee vodka, sticking a teaspoon of each of the two types of beans I have into glasses and covering each with about 25ml of vodka. I left them for a couple of days and was quite surprised how much coffee flavour (and colour) came out, however was not impressed by the actual flavour, which was generically coffee-like despite the a) quality of the coffees I used and b) total difference in their smells and flavours (one makes a very fruity, grapefruity cup, the other a very tasty but normal tasting coffee). It also didn’t seem to extract all that much caffeine, although after an evening of tasting flavoured vodka I’m expecting that it wouldn’t have mattered if it had. Sleep came fairly swiftly last night.

Anyways, the liquorice vodka is going onto my list of things to make lots of – it’s easy and tastes rather excellent, if you like liquorice. One bit of advice on the ‘brewing’ process for the chilli vodka though, don’t use an old white wine bottle to store it before getting some nice bottles – it looks enough like white wine that someone’s going to pour themselves a glass and then die on the floor clutching at their throat. I didn’t almost do this yesterday, no matter what the rumours suggest.

Pure Talent

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 06:12:59 GMT

Recently my brain has been shutting down a bit, with work being busy and me booking myself up to run around like a loon at all other times. So, I have now decreed that in an attempt to make the aforementioned spongy grey blob earn its overly generous portion of my food powered energy I will try and do something ‘creative’ and stick it up on the internets each week. If possible, something that I don’t normally do so that I learn to do a new thing each week. Which would be nice.

So, number 1 – I perform a cover of a well known song on my ukelele. I also sing:

It’s hard to believe that I used to be a en-cassocked choirboy. For some reason I seem to be switching between brummy and west country in my singing accent. I’m from Sussex…

Beer at the end is Leffe Blonde, courtesy of Vatine. I like housewarming presents. Ta muchly, sir.

Derren Brown: My last post. For now…

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 19:37:02 GMT

So, Derren Brown told everyone how he predicted the lottery. Hooray.

Of course that’s not how he really did it. He didn’t get people to come up with random choices and then average them out to select the numbers of the balls – that’s completely nonsensical and if proven to be true would show significantly more success than years of psychic warfare research and professors trying to get vulnerable undergrads into their beds after fiddling Zener cards (I’m looking at you, Dr Venkman). And his alternate ‘maybe I switched the balls’ ? Also obviously untrue, and not as funny as he seemed to hope.

However, I don’t need to tell you this, lovely intelligent beautiful reader, you have already read my blog and expected Mr Mind Control to give a made up explanation. My problem with last night’s show was simple – I just didn’t think it was a very good show. The format didn’t feel right, the tricks seemed to be retreading old ground and the ‘explanation’ half of the programme felt a bit mean on the people involved. I don’t particularly care how he did the original trick – it looked great and made me think long and hard (and I think I now do know) – but I don’t think he followed it with a particularly good show. However, it’s the first in a new series and I look forward to the rest of the shows getting better.

Before I continue, here’s my thoughts on Derren Brown. I really like his magic, however it is exactly that: magic. As in ‘tricks’. The thing that makes him for me is that he often seems to explain what he’s done, just like last night. However, do you *really* think that he uses NLP to do all of his tricks? He’s a very good magician who shrouds his excellent tricks in a smokescreen of explanation that he chooses carefully to be accepted without question by a majority of his audience. The first stage magicians did tricks and were thought of as true conjurers, dabbling with forces beyond mortal ken, a perception that they played on to create better and better shows. Brown uses NLP and hypnosis as things to wrap around his excellently constructed tricks in the same manner – people these days assume that NLP and hypnotism magically work, just as old audiences believed that conjurers really could summon ghostly shadows across stages. It is an updating of the old disciplines pepped up by an excellent performer to push the right buttons in our modern sensibilities. And I love it.

What has depressed me, though, is not that people seem to be angry at Derren Brown for giving an obviously fake solution (see the paragraph above – he pretty much always does that, but this is the first time [afaik] that he’s made such a big point of saying that he will reveal how he did it, so I can understand the annoyance of those who don’t realise his modus operandi) but that many of them are taking him seriously. Already today I’ve seen someone that I consider to be a fairly switched on guy asking people to help him crowdsource the lottery numbers so as to set up a group who can start making predictions each week using The Brown Method and thus beat the system. I really hope that I’m wrong and that the person in question is really just taking the piss, but I really don’t think so. It depresses me that in a world of rationalism, and even religion, as we have, that people can believe this obviously fake (but still fairly clever trickery – he did get the group to seemingly have the predictions get better each week. But I have theories on how he did that too…) explanation from a self-described trickster. In the end I think that’s one of the factors why I didn’t like the show – while he has always given an alternative explanation as to how he achieves his tricks, this is the first time where us normal people can copy his exact given methodology.

And many will.

And they won’t win the lottery.

Update: One of the comments on LJ has made me think a bit – it seems that ‘deep maths’ is mystifying enough these days that people accept it as an explanation just as much as NLP. Thinking about it that way has made the show look a bit better to me, although still not one I enjoyed. People treating maths as an unknowable depresses me just as much as before.

Mr Brown, redux

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 10:07:27 GMT

Continuing my thinking too much about Derren Brown’s Lottery Numbers trick, I noticed an interesting comment somewhere on my internet trawls yesterday. It basically said:

“He said it’s all about misdirection, how do we know that the lottery numbers trick is the thing that we’re meant to be looking at?”

Bah, now I have to watch the video again looking for the dancing gorilla.

In “how did he do it” news, here’s a nice little YouTube video that seems to suggest that I might be right.