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[19 Apr 2012|03:30pm] |
Oh, Robin Ince. Saw Happiness Through Science yesterday- full of digressions, overran, contained traces of rant. Amazing stuff. Favourite couple of lines: (on the possible contents of Infinite Monkey Cage's BBC-proposed title, Top Geek) "We painted it red, to make it more Freudian"; (on Schroedinger's Capitalism) "You've collapsed the waveform of western civilisation!"; also, the concept that observational comedy inevitably changes the object being observed.
This entry was originally posted at http://shark-hat.dreamwidth.org/167459.html. Comment here or there.
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| Malice Aforethought! |
[12 Apr 2012|01:52pm] |
I had lunch at the Good Pub Guide's 2011 pub of the year, the Tempest Arms, yesterday, and ![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) sigmonster didn't. Heeheehee.
(Actually, it was disappointing- it was perfectly OK, but I must have been into half-a-dozen just as nice that haven't won anything (and I'm not even a pub person), and surely a Pub! Of! The! Year! shouldn't just have bitter, stout and IPA on the hand-pulls? Surely you shouldn't order a medium plain steak and get a well done pepper steak? Ah well, it got us out of the snow, anyway.)
Also saw Love's Labours Lost yesterday, with a nice early-thirties, Noel Coward-ish setting. It's one of the very talky ones, where the aristocrats have some big fat chunks of clever wordplay to put across and the rustics have malapropisms, but most of the cast managed to make them interesting (the male lead, Berowne, was probably the best) and they'd put in enough physical comedy that it was a fun evening.
This entry was originally posted at http://shark-hat.dreamwidth.org/167084.html. Comment here or there.
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[31 Mar 2012|10:30am] |
An alarm has been going off in an empty house on my road since Thursday- I just rang up the estate agents who are trying to let it, and the Environmental Health are going to come and cut the wires later. Thank goodness.
(It makes me slightly wonder what would happen if someone did break into mine while I was away, given that none of my neighbours have keys or anything. I guess I should tell the next-doors my mobile number next time I ask them to water the plants.)
This entry was originally posted at http://shark-hat.dreamwidth.org/166245.html. Comment here or there.
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| I have not managed to watch this video all the way through yet |
[26 Feb 2012|01:57pm] |
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In fact I'm not sure it actually exists. What rational broadcasting system would introduce an A-versus-B challenge on its children's slot by having A and B explaining that they've been friends ever since they were eggs, and illustrate this with a clip of two eggs (with eyes) kissing, with "Lovin' You" playing in the background, and then crushing themselves?
(NB video also features giggling puppeteers, an apple made from bacon fat, caster sugar and the broken dreams of a Chilean bean farmer, competitive toilet-roll-unrolling, and very unconvincing caveman wigs. I think I must have hallucinated it.)
"Dear Points of View, I think the license fee is far too low. I would gladly sell my house and all its contents to pay for the BBC. Aaaaargh! *falls out of window*"
*watches some more*
oh god bungalow reference, oh god sausages, they are trying to kill me, send floppy-haired geordie detectives at once.
This entry was originally posted at http://shark-hat.dreamwidth.org/164712.html. Comment here or there.
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[20 Feb 2012|09:59pm] |
It's the small things about a house that can really annoy you, isn't it, I mused this evening as I fished a clean sock out of the compost bucket for the nth time.
(My kitchen is too bloody small; there's no room on the worktop for the bucket, and the only place on the floor I've found where I don't keep kicking it over as I move around is in front of the washing machine; thus...)
This entry was originally posted at http://shark-hat.dreamwidth.org/164429.html. Comment here or there.
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| I just want to sing, sing, SING! |
[13 Feb 2012|02:15pm] |
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Aargh, my security settings ate my entry.
A. and I have muttered occasionally about having a Musical Episodes evening, and yesterday this came up again because I played him "Land of the Luvvies" {*}. Anyway, I said, "TV tropes must have an entry for this", I said, and so it does (Warning! TV Tropes link!). It doesn't yet have "Land of the Luvvies" listed, or "Can We Sing For a Whole Episode?" from Little Howard's Big Question, but it does have our other usual thoughts, "When Janet Met Jonny" from Two Pints of Lager, the Scrubs episode, and "Once More With Feeling", of course.
Red Dwarf's "Blue" would probably be out, because although the Arnold Rimmer song is amazing, it is actually just the one song in the episode. Whereas Flight of the Conchords, say, would be out because the whole thing is musical, so a Musical Episode isn't a departure from the norm. I'm dithering about the Mighty Boosh episodes with bands in- if they usually have a song or two, and then there's an ep with half a dozen, is that a musical ep? Let's say yes. (On that note, are there any Monty Python series episodes with more than one song in them?)
I reckon it might be slightly cheating to specially look up episodes of shows you've never watched, so that means the Star Trek, Xena, Simpsons, Futurama and South Park episodes listed on the page would be ok (I haven't watched the whole run of any of those, and I don't happen to have caught the musical episodes, but I could have done)- except it would be difficult to track them down without knowing episode names.
Anyway. There's plenty of musical episodes available for a marathon. Now, what order to show them in...?
{*} From The Legend of Dick and Dom. Mwahahaha.
This entry was originally posted at http://shark-hat.dreamwidth.org/164165.html. Comment here or there.
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| Abroad thoughts from home |
[06 Feb 2012|08:58pm] |
Friday: Porridge for breakfast at Leeds-Bradford airport, Berthillion ice-cream for supper in the Rue St-Louis En L'Isle.
My 18-years-ago A-level French is actually comprehensible to French people! (Who mostly switched to English at once).
I was asked what I was eating twice in one day. "Croque monsieur" was much easier to explain than "buckwheat pancake with tomato, potatoes, bacon, and a fried egg on top and spamchicken gizzards".
Paris looks ridiculouly like London, only more sort of French.
Mmm, patisserie.
I got so Louvred out. Did you know they have four Rembrandt self-portraits? That's just showing off. The Winged Victory of Samothrace was cool, so was suddenly bumping into a Holbein in a side room, so were some animal studies by some painter I'd never heard of. The Grand Salon of Napoleon III: Not understatement. When they said "A salon, and make it grand!" in the Second Empire, they meant "Fucking Grand, OK?"
Notre-Dame is really small.
I was staying in an undistinguished suburb near the business district. My hotel was on the high street. Within two blocks, among the key-cutters and pharmacy and banks and small supermarkets, were two greengrocers, two butchers, a charcuterie-traiteur and a plain traiteur, (who ready-make food on the premises for you to to take home and cook), a cheese shop, a wine shop, a chocolatier, four bistros, three bakery-patisseries and two artisan bakery-patisseries. Vive la cuisine.
The Marais and the Quartier Latin are nice antidotes to the homogenous boulevards thing.
Mmm, real French bread.
The Kindle did work brilliantly, I didn't miss toting half-a-dozen real books at all. Fanfic downloaded from AO3 was very useful for subway rides. (Speaking of which: I went on the metro and three separate sorts of suburban railway- what they call trams, which didn't seem to run along roads as you would expect trams to do but hey; the RER, which are the cool double-decker ones; and the SNCF's own suburban lines. Next trip I shall have to try for the Grandes-Lignes and a few buses.)
I like Pisarro more than I thought. My favorite things in the Musee D'Orsay were a toss-up between a Manet still life and the Art Nouveau living-room, though.
I have a nasty foreign cold and some nice foreign chocolates. I expect the cold will last longer.
This entry was originally posted at http://shark-hat.dreamwidth.org/163585.html. Comment here or there.
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[02 Feb 2012|05:33pm] |
I saw Robin Ince and Michael Legge's Righteous Anger, Pointless Ire show earlier in the week, and it was great, and started and finished late, and the sound was too loud, and they hadn't done it for months and had sort of forgotten how it went (Michael had a notebook with their top ten things they were angry about in Edinburgh, and Robin went "Yeah, no, I'm not cross about that any more"), and someone volunteered a grumble about poorly bound map books and Robin went from 0-incandescent in about 2 seconds, and Michael reminisced about being walked to school by soldiers, and yes, it was great. (I didn't manage to mention my death-grudge against BLOODY ARCHITECTS and their BLOODY ATRIUMS, but it was cathartic none the less.)
This entry was originally posted at http://shark-hat.dreamwidth.org/163501.html. Comment here or there.
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| Four things but I'm calling it a post anyway |
[29 Jan 2012|10:42pm] |
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Finally got round to seeing the second Sherlock Holmes film; throwaway fun, my major quibble being that Mycroft is anything but blind to society's rules, so is he deliberately trying to offend Mary, or what? OOC, I think.
http://www.manybooks.net/ for free ebooks- I like the format a bit better than Gutenberg, and it has a few more recent ones (eg the Lark Rise series).
Did anybody see the film of the Beatles on their 1964 America trip on BBC4 last night? Poor kids.
I'm watching an ep of Are You Smarter Than A Ten Year Old from before Xmas, and Dom has just quoted from a Reeves and Mortimer sketch. [1] My brain! I mean, yes, it's not surprising that they would be fans, lots of us of that generation are... but I still squeaked with glee.
[1] Specifically, "You can't give a baby booze!"
This entry was originally posted at http://shark-hat.dreamwidth.org/162775.html. Comment here or there.
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[18 Jan 2012|10:06pm] |
Marmalade results:
I have marmalade on my nose from licking the pan. It's SO NICE. Never buying marmalade again.
(I want to make other kinds now! Lemon and grapefruit! Kumquat and citron! Blood orange and gin!... The trouble is I only eat about one jar of marmalade a year and I now have nine pots of it. Although several of them will be Christmas presents.)
It was genuinely easy, because I have a dishwasher for sterilising the jars- I might well do tiny batches of different kinds in future, actually.
This entry was originally posted at http://shark-hat.dreamwidth.org/162318.html. Comment here or there.
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[18 Jan 2012|08:22pm] |
Halfway through making marmalade (boiled oranges whole for 3 hrs yesterday; today, scraped out pith and cut up peel [v. easy]; boiled up pulp and pips [v. easy] and squeezed them in cloth to extract pectin [middling tricky, finished item will be cloudy]; put peel, pectin extract, sugar into water from boiling oranges and bring to boil [v.easy, except for stirring enough-but-not-too-much].)
I'm steering between several recipes, I think I'll boil it slowly for 15 mins and then bring up to setting temp and pot up.
Will report on results.
This entry was originally posted at http://shark-hat.dreamwidth.org/162072.html. Comment here or there.
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[07 Jan 2012|11:01am] |
What with having bought a bunch of stuff from Go Faster Stripe and having had Chrimble presents, I seem to have about 30 hours of comedy to watch. It feels exhausting to contemplate, maybe I'll make popcorn and put Deathly Hallows on?
This entry was originally posted at http://shark-hat.dreamwidth.org/161915.html. Comment here or there.
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[04 Jan 2012|11:30pm] |
I didn't mention when it was on how much I liked Holy Flying Circus, did I? Well it was excellent. And these two Yuletide fics based on it are both excellent as well.
This entry was originally posted at http://shark-hat.dreamwidth.org/161351.html. Comment here or there.
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[01 Jan 2012|09:40pm] |
Sherlock spoilers: loved it until two minutes before the end...
( Read more... )
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