| Monday, December 15, 2003 |
 | P.S Ouch.
I heard somewhere that people break their little toes all the time, and then the toe heals without anyone particularly noticing. The reasoning, I suppose, is that since people do not use their little toes much, they just get on with the business of healing in a calm and solitary fashion.
If this is true, I think I may have broken my little toe. If not, it still bloody hurts.
You know that red mist thing where you find yourself punching some inoffensive article of furniture for no better reason than that you have just banged into it? Well, there is a door in my flat that will be thinking extremely carefully about being corporeal again in a hurry.
Pity the door. But pity me more, for I am not that far from thirty and still express my annoyance with things I have just walked into by hitting them.
(0) comments
| |
| Sunday, December 14, 2003 |
| Robert Plant, possibly our greatest living grammarian, observed quite correctly that sometimes words have two meanings. "To cleave" means both to break apart and to adhere, which is one of the most lovely bits of poetry the language has to offer. And "Red Dawn" is both the operation that apprehended Saddam Hussein and the film that defeated Communism.
First, it's good to see Saddam captured. Hopefully this will lead to a cessation of boistrousness and acts of ungentlemanly conduct in Iraq forthwith, although I do wish the Americans would stop shaving off beards. It's like a fetish - they did it to the Camp X-Ray detainees as well. Still, the Ba'ath party in Iraq was at least secular. There will follow a lot of interrogation about where the weapons of mass destruction are, no doubt.
Second, dude. I've never seen "Red Dawn", but by God I want to. For the moment, I am having to content myself with the discussion boards on the IMDB, which are I suspect far better than the movie itself. So far my favourite comment must be this, on the possibility of an attack by the USSR on the US through land invasions from Cuba and Canada:
Had they hit Europe the US would have aided and Russia would be slowly knawed down. A good book series to read in the Ender's Shadow books. It's science fiction but it gives a good inside on war strategies and tactics. Especially Shadow of the Hegemon and Shadow Puppets (the latest of the series).
Bless. Given that an earlier writer cited Mel Gibson's "The Patriot" as a historical source, this is at least a step up.
Pinko's [sic] hate this film, because it is a direct hit. The USSR did indeed invade the US in the 1980s, and where indeed opposed by Patrick Swayze.
This could have happened. Oh yes.
(0) comments
| |
| Tuesday, December 02, 2003 |
| Yates' Wines Lodge, Milton Keynes.
This is pretty hardcore. Even the photo seems intended to convey an air of drab, grey despair. The bouncers will let your mate in at 11:30 for a can of red bull.
Speaking of horrific mass-produced blights on an already blighted landscape, I may be mistaken but I believe as I hurtled late up Oxford Street last week that the Oxford Street Muji appears to have been replaced by another sub-Top Shop clothes store. Although I understand the logic of this - given the establishment of Muji on Tottenham Court Road, offering consumers the choice between shopping for minimalist Japanese consumer goods on perpendicular to a west-east axis and doing exactly the same perpendicular to a north-south axis does seem a choice too far. Nonetheless, did we really need another purveyor of strappy tops to a grateful nation?
Sorry, no idea what I was thinking when I typed that. Of course we do.
Also, a McDonalds, which surprised me as it seemed to have a different branding approach to the others (I’ve been thinking a lot about marketing recently; forgive me). Possibly merely as a result of London’s archaic laws regarding not painting over the 19th century marble, the letters are in their traditional yellow, but on a white background, making them seem unobtrusive and neurasthenic against the pus-in-a-wound glare of the traditional yellow on red. Which unpleasant image reminded me in turn of this article on McDonalds’ new healthy range.
There will be a brief pause while I gather my outrage. I realise that, as a westerner who takes a train to work, uses a computer, sits in an office that manages with remarkable style to be simultaneously centrally heated and air conditioned, I am so part of the problem. Nonetheless, there is something astonishing yet about the sheer venality of fast food. Slabs of pure energy, prepared in factories, larded with chemicals, portered globally in refrigerated transports and wrapped in layer after layer of waxed, plasticised paper, it’s like watching a man smashing another in the knee with a hockey stick just to watch him fall down. Ah well.
Anyway, healthy eating, a fairly laughable phrase it seems – it isn’t that McDonalds is unhealthy, although I have no doubt that that much sodium can’t be good. It is that there is too much of it, pre-pulped to slide down the meaty maw of its consumers more easily (hold a fast food hamburger in your mouth and wait for it to disintegrate. It’s practically predigested. It reminds me of the turkey-weight of Thanksgiving – a bloated celebration of the power to devour). So, although reducing the salt or fat content is good, presumably not filling people with beef is better. Not much of a business model, mind.
However, what really did for me was the new, healthier chicken nuggets (never eat any part of an animal that doesn’t exist, say I). These are white meat, as opposed to a processed mix of white and dark meat, like the old nuggets. For fuck’s sake. Why would one compact white and dark meat into a single blob in the first place? It goes against nature. Which perhaps answers the question. McDonald’s is the worst combination of science and eating you can get without actually eating Heinz Wolff.
On a more cultured note, is this the best recipe for tartare sauce ever?
(0) comments
| |
| |
|
Venusberg.org finds Blogger very attractive...
|
|
|
elsewhere:
Interconnected
Plasticbag
Oh Skylab
Barcablog
Orbyn
moreover:
Brainsluice
Mo Morgan
Mothninja
Tajmahal
Wherever y'are
Prandial Post
thereafter:
Toby Kay
McCargow
Blogadoon
LinkMachineGo
Methylsalicylate
Hammersley
Joeblog
Grayblog
the Collective
Nick Jordan
Kooky Mojo
Betty Woo
Moth
Mr. Thomas G
the author:
danATvenusberg.org
and finally...
the archives
|
