While watching a film with Jen last week:
J: Is that a tortoise?
R: Yes.
J: I didn't know tortoises have tails.
R: Well they do.
J: Well I didn't think they'd stuck one on just for the film!
Immaculate misconception
Talking of pub lunches, yesterday Stense and I paid one of our occasional visits to our favourite second-hand bookshop in Llangollen, followed by lunch at a nearby pub. The food was excellent, and delightfully light in the salad department.
Now, as you might already appreciate, I'm not one for religious mumbo-jumbo and all that crap, but half way through my omlette and chips, the strangest thing happened: I experienced a holy vision!
Until now, I have poured scorn on people who claim to have seen the face of someone else on some floorboards, but yesterday my scepticism was rent asunder like a temple curtain: I saw the Virgin Mary eating a vegetarian lasagne!
It must have been the Guinness. It took me almost two seconds to realise my mistake.
A freak alignment had taken place: Stense had inadvertently positioned herself in such a way that a brass plate on the wall behind her appeared to form a halo around her head. She looked for all the world like one of those totally cool religious icons you get in some of the more ostentatious sects of the Christian religion (St Herman be praised!).
I absolutely insisted Stense let me take a photograph for posterity. Compare and contrast:
I'll bet this is how Lourdes got started. This could give a major boost to the Llangollen tourist industry.
Toss the salad
Hey, forget about boring old Wimbledon Fortnight, I'll tell you what's a really great British institution:
The pub lunch.
British pub lunches are, on the whole, pretty damn fantastic—particularly when accompanied by a pint or two of our world-beating, unchilled, unfizzy ale. Wonderful!
And they're such good value for money too: a few quid for some unpretentious, tasty, wholesome grub—can't say fairer than that, can you? I wouldn't want to eat pub lunches every day, but they're great as an occasional treat.
If anything, pub grub seems to have got even better over the last few years. I think we have the TV chefs to thank for that: we're more interested in quality food these days, and the publicans have risen to the challenge. Very well done indeed!
But I fear we're in danger of taking things a bit too far:
It started with the menus. In the good old days, you could order plain old chicken in a basket from the laminated menu at your table. Nowadays, there's the inevitable Specials Board, offering you pan fried chicken (well, what else are you going to fry it in?) and marmosets of lamb with saffron and broccoli spears, or some such bollocks. Do us a favour!
Then came the family-friendly pubs, where stressed-out parents can tuck into their vegetarian chillis and get pissed on their half pints of lager shandy, while their little brats use the pub as a bloody playground. Next (thanks, presumably, to the influx of kids) came the Health Nazis, with their "Oh, you can't smoke in here, there are people eating". Remember where you are folks: you're in a bloody pub.
But worst of all is the salad.
Don't get me wrong, I like salad. I like salad a lot. I like it in sandwiches, and I even like it as a main course (occasionally). But what I most definitely do not like is being given salad with my fish and chips.
SALAD DOES NOT GO WITH FISH AND CHIPS! IN FACT, SALAD DOES NOT GO WITH ANYTHING HOT (WITH THE POSSIBLE EXCEPTION OF LASAGNE)!
And they have to put the totally unnecessary salad in those stupid little bowls, don't they? WHERE DID THEY COME FROM? And have you noticed how some pubs have started putting the salad bowls on your plate, rather than to the side of your plate (where you can conveniently ignore them)? You know what that means, don't you, boys and girls? That's right:
FEWER CHIPS!
The sneaky bastards!
Have you ever stopped to analyse a pub salad? I have. Do you know what the main costituent of a pub salad is?
Cress!
WHAT SORT OF PERSON IN THEIR RIGHT MIND EATS CRESS IN ANYTHING BUT AN EGG SANDWICH?
And then there are the onions, and that weird purple stuff that you're not sure what to do with, and the lettuce with the ragged edges. WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY ALL ABOUT?
And while I'm at it, WHAT SORT OF TWISTED PERVERT PUTS GRATED CARROT IN A SALAD? AND HAVE YOU EVER TRIED EATING BLOODY WATERCRESS WITH A KNIFE AND FORK? IT CAN'T BE DONE!
Whatever you do, don't get me started on those godawful mixed vegetables with their NASTY, NASTY LITTLE CORNS ON THE COB!
Such a pretty house, such a pretty garden
BBC: Radiohead's album scoops accolade
Radiohead's album OK Computer has been named the best of the past 20 years by US music magazine Spin.
A very satisfactory result. OK Computer is undoubtedly one of the great albums of the last 20 years—although, for what it's worth, my favourite Radiohead album happens to be Amnesiac.
Actually, I have a theory about OK Computer. It's rather profound. Do you want to hear it?
I think OK Computer is about mowing the lawn.
I came up with this theory last year as I was mowing the lawn while listening to OK Computer on my personal minidisk player. I can't explain why it's about mowing the lawn, it just is—although I will say that the bit in Paranoid Android where Thom Yorke sings:
Rain down, rain down
Come on rain down on me
From a great height
From a great height… height…
Rain down, rain down
Come on rain down on me
From a great height
From a great height… height…
Rain down, rain down
Come on rain down on me
is a bit of a dead giveaway. Thom Yorke doesn't want to be mowing the lawn either.
No one knows who they were, or what they were doing
I hate the summer solstice. I hate it for two reasons:
- it means that summer is already on its way out, even though it hasn't even got going yet;
- it means that a whole pile of new age idiots, and people with made-up religions (is there any other kind?) will be up at the crack of dawn to clamber over England's most famous ancient monument:
Guardian: Thousands celebrate solstice at Stonehenge
An estimated 21,000 people today gathered at Stonehenge to watch the sun rise above the ancient monument on the longest day of the year…
Before dawn, King Arthur Pendragon, 51, the head battle chieftain of the British Council of Druids, led a troop of warriors—all anthropology students from the University of East London—in a dance honouring mother nature, whose effigy was held aloft and illuminated by fiery torches.
That's right, some bloke who thinks he's King Arthur and a bunch of bloody anthropology students have been titting around at Stonehenge. I bet they were carrying bloody crystals too, and feeling each other's auras.
I wouldn't mind (well, no, actually I would), but the so-called Druidic religion was invented by a bunch of misguided Victorians who fell hook, line and sinker for the invented poems of the invented ancient Gaelic bard Ossian (real name, James Macpherson). The real druids died out in Roman times (with a lot of help, it has to be said, from the Romans). We don't know much about them (other than what Tacitus wrote, and he was hardly impartial), but one thing we do know for absolute certain is that they didn't bloody well build Stonehenge—that was waaaaaaaaay before their time.
So what gives these modern-day impostor-druids and other assorted weirdos the right to descend en masse on one of our most iconic landmarks and act the goat?
Answer me that.
Medieval
Did you hear about the weird religious cult in a land to the east, whose members were convinced that one of their initiates was possessed by a demon? In a bizarre ritual, they bound the young woman to a religious totem pole, and left her gagged in a cold room without food or water for three days. They were, they said, trying to drive out evil spirits.
The young woman died from asphyxiation.
No, this wasn't something that happened centuries ago, before people knew any better. It happened last week in Romania. The young woman suffered from schizophrenia. The cult was the Romanian Orthodox Church.
When questioned, the priest responsible stated:
God has performed a miracle for her, finally Irina is delivered from evil… I don't understand why journalists are making such a fuss about this.
At the Cheese Shop, part 2
"Hello, I'd like to buy some of your strongest cheddar, please."
"Well, we've got this stuff from the Isle of Mull. It's got a real kick to it."
"You mean it has a kick like a Mull?"
"…?"
See also:
Meet me in the crowd, people, people
Right, I'm off to Old Trafford Cricket Ground to see REM. If anyone else is going, I'll be in the corner, in the spot… light.
Postscript: Excellent concert, despite the pair of pissheads behind us who knew all of the words, but none of the tunes (I had to have a word with them). The Zutons were great in support too.
Erm… excuse me, this is total bollocks, isn't it?
BBC: New model 'permits time travel'
If you went back in time and met your teenage parents, you could not split them up and prevent your birth—even if you wanted to, a new quantum model has stated.
Researchers speculate that time travel can occur within a kind of feedback loop where backwards movement is possible, but only in a way that is "complementary" to the present.
In other words, you can pop back in time and have a look around, but you cannot do anything that will alter the present you left behind.
Hands up who thinks this explains anything.
The present you leave behind includes a (continuous) past where you didn't go back in time. So, as of, say, a week last Thursday, you had never gone back in time. So how come this past that you go back to doesn't have to be "complementary" with a week last Thursday too? But, to be complimentary with a week last Thursday's history, you can't have gone back in time… HANG ON, WHY AM I EVEN DISCUSSING THIS NONSENSE?
Of course, we know the real reason why the BBC chose to publish this silly story today: it's the end-of-series, Dalek™-laden grand finale of Dr Who tomorrow.
Can't wait! See you behind the sofa!
Brogging
BBC: Microsoft censors Chinese blogs
Chinese bloggers posting their thoughts via Microsoft's net service face restrictions on what they can write. Weblog entries on some parts of Microsoft's MSN site in China using words such as "freedom", "democracy" and "demonstration" are being blocked.
But those canny Chinese bloggers have already thought of a get-around. Instead of writing the word freedom, they're going to write French.