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Fair exchange
Have begged off extensive Guy Fawkes celebrations (yes I know am in North America don't ask) in order to write.** I'm going to do Yuletide! This is less momentous than it seems as I suspect no one on my flist will care much about/for the stuff I am offering or requesting. Erm although I'm gonna offer for 24 Hour Party People for sheer ROFTLCOPTER value, just to see if I will actually be asked to write horrifying Tony Wilson/Rob Gretton slash.***

It's kind of nuts how many of these are for canons by people I know, though! You are all so talented, fuck, you are The Next Wave(tm). Next year someone should nom effing Captive Prince.

** And also because I'm just not physically up for it orz

*** What is more likely to happen is that I will be stumped by a request along the lines of "Joy Division ensemble crack comedy"++ (tho actually that would be doable as Sumner and Hook would hold down the lulz fort).

++ "

jantalaimon, IS THAT YOU?!?"

Buffy Season Two Episode Twenty
Ah, this is a refreshing change of pace, a thoroughly mediocre episode. There was a nice exchange, though:

"You you you. What about me? It's one thing to be dating the lame unpopular guy. It's another to be dating the creature from the blue lagoon."

"Black lagoon. The creature from the blue lagoon was Brooke Shields."

( Cordelia watch )

The rest of the episode involved so-what monster transformations, a boring villain with obvious motivation you could see miles away, and some correct but boringly done swipes at jock privilege and date rape, almost no emotional resonance. Felt like hack TV, really. But it did get me thinking even more about the Cordy role, which is the most problematic, and about the show's neglecting to give the school an underlying social fabric. Buffy The Vampire Slayer isn't about the school's social fabric, so the neglect isn't debilitating, but I wish Whedon and his colleagues had nonetheless given the fabric more thought, worked out a deep social background they could draw on. So under the cut we go for speculations and wishful thinking.

( Cordy and the missing social landscape )

( An Artist Of Style )

( The social canvas reimagined )

Current Music: Shangri-Las "Give Him A Great Big Kiss"

Hurray! S and I last night booked a trip to Copenhagen early in December.

Hurroo! I've just found out that yr passport needs to be valid for three months, and mine runs out in February so I'll need to get a new one.

Question: I go away on the 4th December, do you reckon that will be enough time to get a renewal through? The website says three weeks, but postal strike and Christmas post ect. I'd rather not have to go to the passport office.

Also, does 'growing a beard' constitute enough of a change of appearance to mean I need to get my photo countersigned? And if so, who wants to do it? The list of people who can seems fairly arbitrary to me. Journalist? Licensee of public house? What makes these people more reliable than me when it comes to saying "Yeah, that's him"?

Timescale:

Saturday: get form and photos.
Sunday: Fill form in.
Monday: go to post office and get it checked and sent at lunchtime.

Gives it just over three weeks to arrive. Hmm.

Cool guys don't look at explosions
Sometimes we all get anxious - if time is money then it explains how time and money can get wrapped into a sort of unified field theory of worry which then starts pulling in everything else, however outlandish. And London, being not half so stony-hearted as some have made her out to be, tries her best to cheer you up, pulling aside the curtain so you catch sight of side-streets you've never seen before in all the times you've gone down that road, but you're so convinced that you're in a hurry that you mark them for future investigation, so she makes them more and more enticing until finally you crack and trot down there and suddenly, even though it looks like a normal enough little street, the light and the birdsong and the breeze all come together and counteract that knot of troubles and everything's alright again. And you carry on along your way, lighter of spirit, and accomplish your missions and find time to drop in on the British Museum too, where while looking for something else entirely you find a statue of the Remover of Obstacles which contains at least enough of his essence to convey the appropriate sentiment of "Hey, we got this! Relax." And you know that something will turn up - it always does.

Went for another walk later on, to take in the fireworks - and I've no idea what most modern Britons are celebrating these days, whether it's an expression of anarchist tendencies which I can hardly begrudge even if they have chosen an iffy figurehead, or if they just like blowing sh1t up. Personally, commemorating the defeat and brutal execution of the seventeenth century's answer to al Qaeda still works for me, but whatever it's nominally about, the lights, and the bangs, and the smell of gunpowder in the air..it's magical in itself. And this year there was no magic in the air on Hallowe'en, in spite of all the witches and vampires on the streets, but it's stupid to be purist about these things, for the nature of the magical is not to be constrained by formulae - if it were just another science then what would be the point?

In spite of not having to fit myself around a working day at present, I still find myself fitting more or less to a standard diurnal schedule - most of the time. Last night was one of the exceptions, charging drunkenly around Youtube looking for gems I half-remembered or never caught, like this Whipping Boy video, and making the sad discovery that 'Stranger Than Fiction' by Destroy All Monsters is not half so good as I remember. I also watched '£45 zombie movie' Colin; obviously the same thing that made me keen to see it (zombie Al!) is the thing which most hampers my suspension of disbelief, but even so it has some haunting moments. I worry, though, that telling the story from the zombie's point of view, making the zombie-killers such unsympathetic characters, will be very counterproductive come the zombie apocalypse.

Other items of interest:
- Grant Morrison and Stephen Fry are pitching something for BBC Scotland.
- A rather entertaining drubbing of Florence & the Machine.
- "Presenter Lauren Laverne has signed up to write a series of novels for teenage girls." Anyone else remember when that news would have been terribly exciting?

Current Mood: quixotic
Current Music: Rammlied - Rammstein

tonight i shall mostly be appreciating of...
... the ballet* my deahs

I ironed a clean white T-shirt and everything. I think the last person to use the iron was

epicharmus when he was over for Tom's wedding!

*The Rite of Spring!

Best Song of 2003: Heat #4
Dizzee, Outkast, Xtina, Sean Paul and the Lil' Jon posse all through. I'm superbusy today so without further ado, on to heat #4!

( Rules reminder - SIX TICKS only. )

( Sippin' on coke and rum, I'm like, 'so what, I'm drunk?' )

Extra tick for this heat goes to

koganbot.

SAUSAGE
I was informed YESTERDAY by

katstevens that this week is National Sausage Week.

pink_weasel has covered this ground, but DEAR SAUSAGE PROMOTERS - get 1x ability to PROMOTE YR SAUSAGE! I could have been eating sausages ALL WEEK if only I had known.

For lunch I shall be hitting up "Banger Bros" (um?!) and I hope you will also all use your best endeavours to consume SAUSAGE. Salami etc all counts. Well, I say it counts and seeing as teh SAUSAGE PEOPLE have made no dissenting noise, my rules apply. W00.

Today I like:
♥ Caffe Nero free 10th coffee
♥ SWISS ROLL (M&S have to call it a 'sponge roll', lol, if you will)
♥ This Yudu screenprinting whatsit - would I like one of these? Have I ever screenprinted anything in my life?! Well perhaps not, but I am sure that I *would*...
♥ Pam is setting up a Handmade Holiday Christmas Craft Fair on Dec 5 - I plan to attend with a few pennies to spare!
♥ SAUSAGE.

Words for sausage: sausage, saucisson, banger, wurst, salchicha, ソーセージ, oh no!! The Dutch word for sausage is really actually worst... argh! And apparently, this is the Greek: λουκάνικο. Latin for sausage is probably 'eheu'. Who says my journal does not teach you all about cultures.

of kindly ghosts
though i've been back now and then, it's a lifetime since i spent full true friend-time with rob and his semi-random housemates in far shepherds bush -- i remember a nice party at his where i teased cath h abt the ugly guy who was dogging her -- and half a lifetime since i last escaped the crush of carnival in lovely gentle steph's weird-shaped ladbroke grove flat: rob's more than 20 years dead now, and cath got married and steph ended up i know not where -- she fled london for the crusty nomad trail and we lost touch -- so the nice thing about an evening spent at entirely practical friend-time things (helping

piratemoggy move house) in that potentially haunted zone is that the lost and the vanished didn't feel needy any more, so much as amused and supportive

update: er obviously this wasn't the ONLY nice thing, bcz i was with

piratemoggy and

triffidfarmer and

friedslice and

hoshuteki, which is the definition of nice all round, but yes: ghosts being ghosts, it is nice when they agree with you about the living...

Another Year In America November 5, 2009: It rains when you're here and it rains when you're gone
Taylor Taylor Taylor Taylor Taylor Taylor. Fearless re-released in a Platinum Edition with six bonus tracks, the least good one ("Jump Then Fall") being the single, but all six chart.

( Lady GaGa )

( Taylor Swift )

( Taylor Swift )

( Taylor Swift )

( Taylor Swift )

( Taylor Swift )

( 50 Cent )

( Taylor Swift )

( Justin Bieber )

( I fell in love with you before the second show )

( Washing the eyes of the men who have died )

Current Music: Taylor Swift "Come In With The Rain"

I need a new printer as mine has decided to start only printing half of any page and leaving the rest blank, which is rubbish when you print recipes. I don't want to print photos or anything fancy, just pages of text and occasionally maybe maps telling me how to get places, although my phone does good mapping now so that's going to be decreasingly common. I really don't need colour.

In Rymans at lunchtime I saw a laser printer for £69.99. Would this be a better long term bet than a £30 inkjet? Would it be more likely to last longer, and is it cheaper per page to laser print than ink jet print?

Cor, Afghanistan's a mess isn't it? I don't really know what to think of it all. Following the rogue policeman killings yesterday, the Daily YouKnowWhat asks "What sort of war is this?" on its front page. That's a pretty stupid question isn't it? It's a war in which the baddies try to kill the goodies. That's pretty much what happens in wars, there aren't any nice ones. In fact, for all the talk of how horrific the death toll is, in over eight years of conflict in Afghanistan British casualties are lower than they were in the 74 days of the Falklands War. Not, obviously, that they're insignificant or not to be regretted, but ~30 deaths per year in such a huge conflict isn't that high is it?

Not that I know what to do about it of course. The Taliban are very nasty people of course, and their indulgence of Al-Qaeda clearly makes the world a less safe place. I don't know though, if a war against the Taliban is actually winnable - they're making hard work of it for sure - let alone if it's actually the right thing to do. But just pulling all the troops out seems wrong too somehow - it's leaving the place in a hell of a mess. Perhaps I'll stand for Parliament on a ticket of not really knowing what to do about it all. I'm sure David Cameron hasn't really got a clue, but at least I'm honest about it.

Round-up
* Rumours of the original Sugababes line-up getting back together have been quoshed, but would Keisha, Siobhan and Mutya benefit from the addition of Little Boots as 'the blonde one'? Er...

* You have until tomorrow (Friday) lunchtime to vote in Heat #3 of 2003 (and to pick your best new track to earn an extra tick in Heat #4). It's pretty close at the moment for 4th/5th place!

* New Roisin Murphy single is definitely on the WTF side of things musically (i.e. it sounds like Art Of Noise) and lyrically (err well yes um, best not sing it in front of your Mum, like). Also it features an even more ridiculous guitar solo than 'Russian Roulette'.

SOUP which is not tomato (!)
So, last night I made brilliant, simple pumpkin soup! It was delicious and filling and very sweet. If I'd had some bacon, I would have added that for a bit of a contrast, but as I didn't, fried bread it is. CROUTONS, if you will.

HERE IS HOW TO MAKE:

Get a munchkin from Sainsburys. These are baby pumpkins and so adorable argajgragrhkgjakr. It says do not store in the fridge, but if you have mice and you leave the munchkin out, the little fuckers will eat it. So you might as well put it in the fridge. Also get an onion and make sure you have some olive oil. Some bolst hot curry powder is good here too. And do not forget vegetable stock.

This is the annoying bit: peel and chop up your munchkin (munchkin!). This is irritating. I got better results going against the grain and can report back that leaving odd bits that the peeler can't reach unpeeled has no real effect. This takes the longest so I did it first..

Then, chop up yr onion and fry it in some olive oil. When they go all nice and caramelised after a few minutes on medium, add your chopped pumpkin and some curry powder. I used a tablespoon full. FRY for 10mins or so. When the pumpkin has gone a bit soft, add some vegetable stock and boil for a bit. The stock disappeared quite quickly for me so you might want to add more at some point. When the pumpkin is super soft and you are getting to a fairy thick mix, take soup OUT of pan, WHIZZ IT with MULTIWHIZZTHING, then put it back in the pan. You have a big thick mix, so add some MORE vegetable stock until it looks more like your favoured expectation of how thick a soup should look. Get it to that consistency, heat it up and then why don't you just EAT IT?

You can also fry up some pumpkin seeds and some bread cubes in a pan if you want to be FANCY.

Anyway, what I like about this recipe is that it is easy (apart from hassle chopping up munchkins that do NOT want to be chopped) and doesn't involve roasting the pumpkin, which takes AGES and involves heating up the oven which takes ages and feh bah nergh.

Another thing I did last night was start another attempt at making UNDERWEAR. It was all going well until I realised I had twisted the GUSSET, and upon realising you have a TWISTED GUSSET, you need to stop and have a sit down, don't you?

If I leave this blank my theme displays (No subject), which is fugly and pointless and I hate life
Reasons to be cheerful:

I enjoyed the concept and practice of "Charioke", a 12 hour sponsored karaoke marathon, although I'm glad I was only in attendance as a "charioke admirer" so I could leave early when the heat, crowding and the two girls who screeched their way through every song started getting to me (not anyone we know, I hasten to add). I liked it when mrs_leroy_brown and demiabeille rocked out. Next time, though, the event should be a karaoke endurance test where you have to keep going for as long as you possibly can, and the last group still singing gets to keep all the money for its chosen cause. I can't think of a better way than that to decide how best to allocate scarce funds for the alleviation of human suffering.

One group who were using the karaoke pod we were in seemed to be raising funds for the Labour Party! They had a sign with some rhetoric about "singing together" and "securing Britain's economic recovery".

I think this is the clinching proof that Labour has lost its way. Shall we raise money to help Peruvian kids with AIDS eat more organic food (may not represent actual aims of a charity)? Or shall we raise money for ourselves, to spend convincing people that we are securing Britain's economic recovery (after years of running up debt from PFI and failed PPP schemes, and ignoring corporate tax loopholes, and not regulating the banks properly).

I have a free ticket to Ant Lib Weekender, a "celebration and convention" where people convene to celebrate the music of Adam Ant And His Ants. Does anyone want to be my +1? Bring a starting pistol and a car battery.

Reasons not to be cheerful:

I am still a loser.

Question:

Why is it not OK to say "I don't want to date a fat woman", but it's completely acceptable to say "I don't want to date a man who's shorter than me"? Show your working.

(Obviously I would not endorse the former statement. I like fat girls. As the old civil engineering saying goes, the bigger the hill, the tighter the tunnel.)

EDIT: Here is the article which inspired this question. In it, a woman meets a man at a party who doesn't want to date fat women (and expresses it an obnoxious way). Then, she tells her single (and apparently fat) friend about how eligible the man is, then when the friend gets excited, she then comes out with:

“I hate having to say this but I’m only saying this because I wanna be honest with you and I love you bu—”

“He doesn’t date fat girls, does he?” she answered in a dead-pan tone.

Why did the author mention this obnoxious man to her friend at all, unless she just wanted to have a nice passive-agressive jab at her fat friend's self-esteem? Oh, he was "tall, seemingly East Indian in descent, fair appearance, educated, good job and spoke three languages" - so obviously a tall, rich man is too important not to mention, even if he's an arsehole?

The main message of the article is that the thin writer likes to make her fat friend feel bad about herself. A misogynist is a man who hates women as much as etc. etc.

fought my way to front of class, to get the best view of her painfully specific tag radio
Recently, I have been reminded that Busted's What I Go To School For exists in the world. This has given me a new idea for a Spotify playlist - requited love for a teacher. Current tracklisting is :
Busted – What I Go To School For
Gym Class Heroes – Scandalous Scholastics
so not a lot, and last.fm isn't helping me. But I am sure there are more, which is why I made an open playlist. Can you help me with this project?

Cat mentality
I made chicken stock last night, and when it was finished I got the bits of chicken off the carcasses thinking they'd make a tasty cat dinner tonight. Apparently not, noses have been turned up. Stoopid animals.

Kuhn 22: Botany versus Cookery
What I posted on girlboymusic's tumblr thread after she'd claimed that "PUMPKIN IS NOT A VEGETABLE. IT'S A FRUIT. SCIENCE." Relevant to Kuhn's idea of incommensurability; the point I always make with the botany-cookery distinction is that one can easily hold both nomenclatures in mind simultaneously, despite their being incommensurable; so knowing one paradigm doesn't make a competing paradigm incomprehensible:

Well, there are different nomenclatures here for different purposes. E.g., in cuisine - and in grocery stores - tomatoes are vegetables not fruits, while in botany tomatoes are fruits, but "vegetable" is not a relevant botanical category (or "vegetable" is a synonym for "plant," but "fruit-vegetable" isn't the relevant division). And in cooking, mushrooms are vegetables, despite not even being a plant in biology; and peanuts are nuts, not peas; and nuts are nuts, not fruits or seeds.

Of course, pumpkins are weird in relation to cooking anyway, since they mainly sell as decoration, and I'd bet the vast majority of their ingestion is when they're sugared up and in pies. But as for pumpkin's basic taste, it's categorized as a squash (as is its plant in botany, Cucurbita pepo), and the part of the squash you eat is a fruit in botany, but it's a vegetable when you eat it. American Heritage Dictionary's def'n of squash: "1. Any of various plants of the genus Cucurbita, having fleshy edible fruit with a hard rind. 2. The fruit of such a plant, used as a vegetable."

Current Music: Kelly Clarkson "Gone"

it's the risk i take for the chemistry
W3stf13ld's perverse design concept means that the easiest way to get up to the first floor, where the F0yl3s cavern lurketh, I must go through D3b3nh4ms. This means a) I can nick a quick spritz of Christina Aguilera's surprisingly good perfume* and b) I have to negotiate the lanes of Beauty Specialists trying to sell me stuff.

Beauty merchandising obvs. works on this principle:
1. Here are some beautiful people, aren't they beautiful!
2. God, they are so beautiful, you are hideous and must HIDE YOUR SHAME.
3. If you buy this, you might get away without making people shrivel and die at a glimpse of yr visage.

This is all canon. However, there are certain things that work on a billboard or telly or in a magazine but very much NOT IRL. Coming up to someone and essentially saying 'Jesus, you're a grotesque mutant' generally puts them off sufficiently that they might not hear the 'let me help you' that follows. For instance:

Womang: Hi, sorry, just a minute of your time: do you ever get your eyebrows threaded?
Me: No -sorry, I'm just trying to get back to work.
Womang: Why not?
Me: What?
Womang: Why don't you get your eyebrows threaded?
Me: Wha ...because ...I'm poor?
Womang: Well you should consider it.
Me: *walks away brushing fringe over obviously substandard brows*

My eyebrows are, if I'm honest, unkempt but tbh I think they may be going for the wrong market here: OBVIOUSLY I am not going to get my eyebrows threaded, I clearly don't give a sh1t and still consider occasionally shaving my monobrow to be acceptable levels of maintenance.

*Popstar perfumes, by allurability:
1. JLo
2. Christina Aguilera
3. Britney
....
11. Paris Hilton
....
....
....
1067. Avril Lavigne.

Current Mood: urgh, work
Current Music: alexandra burke- bad boys

a wasp is in love with my hair
arrived in my bedroom as i got up, buzzed intimately round me as i stumbled round grabbing my clothes, vanished as i moved to bathroom to wash and dress -- so i thought i had given it the slip except when i looked in the mirror there it was sitting on my head! would not go out of the window into the cold, preferring to nuzzle me

obviously i am warm and smell nice but TAKE A HINT D00D

it is still probably lurking in the bathroom, my tiny stripy stalker

update: ASLMAD :(

I Love The Nineties
I didn't know this before, but

kevandotorg pointed out the remarkable amount of old comedy programmes that Channel 4 has on its Channel 4 On Demand site, and gosh he's right! Look, here is Sean's Show and Vic Reeves' Big Night Out and all of Adam And Joe and 135 episodes of Whose Line Is It Anyway!

I wonder if I have the energy to go and revisit all of this or whether it's better left in the past. Says the person who walked to work this morning listening to The Family Cat and World Of Twist.

Vampire Weekend UK Tour Pre-sale link
http://www.seetickets.com/gat/event.asp?n|showname=coming&showname=vampire+weekend&e%7Cpromoter=372&orderby=date&filler1=gigsandtours&filler2=vampireweekend

this is the link to the Vampire Weekend Pre-Sale for their Feb 2010 Tour of the UK.

(i have nabbed links to other concerts from links on random websites, so I am Doing My Bit and returning the favour)

Buffy Season Two Episode Nineteen
This entry will be hurried and sloppy because I want to get my thoughts down before my memory of the episode fades utterly, and I have to be somewhere in an hour, so corrections and additions will come when I get back, but HOLY AMAZING COW! How did they pull this off? I was sure at the start that (1) this episode was yet more time-killing while the series waited to take care of Angel in the season finale; (2) so, like the previous episode, it wouldn't have much to do with the story arc that we've been intermittently getting since Episode Thirteen; (3) ghost of a dead boy from the Fifties is almost guaranteed hokum; and (4) in fact, My So-Called Life, the gold standard for teens on TV as far as I'm concerned, had already fumbled and flubbed their attempt at Ghost Boy From The '50s several years earlier. So anyway, as this was going along, I was saying to myself, "OK, they haven't made any wrong moves yet, I'm actually taken by the mystery here, but still, it seems wrong that they've forgotten their ongoing task." And then, man, did they pull one on me, not just relating the story to the arc but nailing it to the themes and to poor Buffy's emotions, or nailing Buffy's emotions to this story, leading us by the nose and whomping us with the connection but, owing to strong dialogue and acting, getting me to absolutely buy into and feel as profound a tale that fundamentally was constructed out of a spare and worked-over melodramatic scene with sentimental paperback psychology layered on top of it. I guess people's lives as they're told often are melodrama and sentiment, even if as lived they're much deeper, but smart drama can suggest a world of thoughts and feelings beyond the simplicities of the story. This episode is about whether Buffy Can Find A Way To Forgive Herself. Also, I don't actually get the plot logic of the conclusion, though that's no matter since we're pushing for emotional "logic" here anyway, but now we go down under the cut.

( How does James get his ending? )

( EDIT Gellar as actress )

( EDIT Cordelia watch )

Current Music: The Flamingos "I Only Have Eyes For You"

A Sandwich Story (Pts I & II)
I've uploaded two photos of recent sandwich experiences.

Bob Bob Ricard, Soho, W1. Cut sandwiches, 12:30am. Attractively presented, but pretty disappointing for the price.

Sapporo Ichiban, Catford, SE6. "Fashion sandwiches", part of the sushi set. They are made to look like cut sandwiches, but they are SUSHI. Food science is alive and well in Catford.

In a sense there is nothing that is not a sandwich.

Current Mood: life admin
Current Music: "Cheer", by Neung Phak

sometimes I think about videogames and I do not know what to do with how much they mean to me.