One hundred idiots make idiotic plans and carry them out. All but one justly fail. The hundredth idiot, whose plan succeeded through pure luck, is immediately convinced he's a genius.
Iain M. Banks
I've had the prawns in the freezer for ages and couldn't decide what to do with them. This is what i came up with. Turned out way beyond my expectations. I meant to take a photo but this happened before i could.
Serves 2. Or me when hungry.
1tbsp Olive Oil
1 Large onion diced
3 Large cloves of garlic thinly sliced
2tsp Paprika
1tsp heaped Garam Masala
1tsp dried thyme
1tsp dried chilli flakes
200-250g Tiger Prawns (frozen)
3-4 Ripe Vine Tomatoes seeded and diced
400ml chicken stock (hot)
1tbsp tomato puree
Fresh basil finely chopped (thai basil even better of you've got it)
Method:
Soften the onion on a medium/low heat and season with salt and pepper. Just as the onion starts to brown, turn the heat right down and add the chilli, garam masala, paprika and thyme. Fry for two minutes and then add the garlic and fry gently for a further minute. Turn back up to a medium heat and add the prawns. Stir thoroughly to coat them in the onions and spices. As they start to colour add the tomatoes. Fry for 3 minutes, stirring regularly, until the prawns are almost cooked. Pour in the stock, bring to the boil then turn down to a low heat. Stir in the tomato puree and the basil and simmer for a minute or two to let the flavours combine. Serve with whatever you like.
This post is one of countless thousands generated in the last few weeks about the changes to facebook's privacy settings. Generally, the tone of these has ranged from "concerned" to "haylp haylp somebody sayve me" with the occasional "we're all going to die" thrown in to make the soup of hysteria a little bit spicier. This post is going to be more "DUH!"
The hand-wringing has generally centred around the feeling that at first Facebook was a wonderful benign entity that allowed people particpate in the manifold joys of social networking and now that it's got us all hooked, it has suddenly morphed in to some evil cackling renegade that wants to sell our babies to ICI for recycling. This anger comes about because people thought that because all the content came from the users this wouldn't be possible - if people stopped trusting facebook, they would go somewhere else and the world would spin serenely on.
This is about as naive as the Incas thinking that the Spanish weren't just interested in all the yellow shiny stuff they had lying around.
Whatever its origins, Facebook is a company. A company that has had *MAHOOOOOOSIVE* injections of VC money. A company that has to run an insanely huge infrastructure, serving a gazillion page impressions a second or people start to panic that the world is ending. I'm too lazy to find out, but i bet the amount of energy used to keep everyone up to date on their current rank in Farmville is roughly equivalent to a medium-sized european town. The costs involved are staggering.
In order to recoup the investment and pay its bills, Facebook has to make money (see? i worked this out all on my own). It'll probably never be able to charge directly for its service, so it must make money out of the one thing it has in spades: our personal information. The equation is simple. Sell as much of the info as it can without alienating the majority of its users. Because of the shear number of users Facebook has a monopoly of sorts. It is the only place you can have the kind of interactions you want with *all* the people you want. Monopolies are always bad for the consumer.
So you may think that i am adding my tiny, irrelevant voice to the growing clamour saying that people should delete their facebook accounts, that they shouldn't stand for this treatment etc etc yawn. I am not. Facebook is useful. That is why it is successful. In a few small and boring ways it enhances my life signficantly. Mostly it tells me when parties are on. It also points out when a friend has discovered a new band i might like. It allows me to keep in occasional contact with people who live in other countries who i might not otherwise talk to from year to year. Useful. But if it wants my detailed personal info it can fuck off. All Facebook knows about me is what i am happy for it to know. It knows my name, that i live in london and that i like some obscure bands. It can probably infer a few more things, but nothing particularly interesting or marketable. I don't use apps and whenever i hear about a change to the privacy settings i set them as tight as possible. The key point here is that if you don't want the whole world to know something about you DON'T PUT IT ON THE FUCKING INTERNET. And, if you do DON'T WHINE WHEN THEY TRY TO SELL IT TO ADVERTISERS. Don't expect *anyone* online to have your best interests at heart. They might, they might not. You don't know.
Ultimately, it is for governments to legislate what companies are allowed to do with our data online. The idea that the market will somehow keep us all safe is ridiculous. The market doesn't care a flake of sick about you. The market wants as much of your paycheck as it can get for the least amount of effort/investment. This may sound worryingly communist to some of you, but it is self-evident.
The current controversy around privacy on Facebook is potentially a very good thing. It is perhaps where we become more enlightened consumers, more aware of the deal we are making between ourselves and the companies who's services we use.
Don't stop using a service that makes your life better. Just make sure the price you're paying is not too high.
Last week someone sent me a video that inadvertently reminded me of one of the oddest nights that London, in all its infinte silliness, has ever provided me with. With the benefit of 2 years of hindsight I now realise the tale says quite a lot about London and why I love it and why i still haven't gotten sick of living here about 5 yrs after I thought I would. Telling it might also involve talking a bit about race, class and sexuality, every self-respecting Englishman's most feared topics, so I shall try my utmost not to offend, but I'm not making any guarantees.
The snooker club that N and I used to go to in Brixton closed - a casualty of the smoking ban and a couple of illegal poker games getting out of hand. After a few weeks of our cue arms rusting up we decided something had to be done and I consulted the internet for a replacement. As the pint glass flies, the nearest, google-indexed club was in West Norwood so we hopped on the bus one evening. We walked down an alleyway and up some stairs and were confronted by a very locked door and an iron bar-covered window with no-one behind it. After some knocking, buzzing and quite a bit of "well this isn't happening then" a straggly-haired and monumentally grumpy middle-aged woman appeared, cradling an evil-looking jack russell and demanded we explain ourselves. on being told we wanted to play snooker she said
"well we're open, but you can't play snooker cos it's roller-disco night"
N and I said nothing as were clearly in the presence of an weapons-grade lunatic. Roller-disco night? in a snooker club? W...T.......F?
"you can play pool tho."
as this seemed to be the best offer we were likely to get, we said that sounded fine. Without making any sudden movements.
We were let in to an open plan, low-polystyrene-ceilinged, dingy and totally empty bar where some extremely desultry pies sat behind filthiest glass counter you have ever seen. I got a cue, paid a deposit (mostly to show that yes I did have a wallet and I was willing to use it) and negotiated the fee. We were then directed to the pool tables, separated from the main part of the club by some more semi-opaque is-it-*really*-glass? glass with a stern warning to replace the table cover when we were done, rattling in our ears. Our ears were already rattling, because somewhere in the place, the most stupidly tinny music - tinny to the point of un-identifiability - was being played. very loudly. It could have been Coldplay or a Brahms Concerto. If Brahms wrote concertos. I imagine he did.
Anyway, as we got to the pool area, we got our first look into the main snooker hall. It was immediately apparent that all the tables had indeed been moved to one end of the moderately large, lino-floored space. This was further evidence of a serious madness somewhere at work in the place. You don't move snooker tables. For starters they're huge and monstrously heavy, but mostly you don't do it cos it completely fucks them up. They take hours of rebalancing by people with thick glasses and spirit levels. No one who cared much about snooker would have performed such an act vandalism. Though admittedly that does leave about 95% of the UK population, I wouldn't have expected it to include the owners of a snooker club.
Looking in, we also located the source of the music, which was a DJ playing on some worryingly antiquated equipment through a soundsystem that had long since had every bass frequency pummelled out of it by inconsiderately played ragga. Close up, it was possible to discern that the music was in fact some pretty standard off-the-shelf, medium-insipid r&b. But only cos the predominant identifiable sound was the evil that is the vocoder.
We pulled the cover off the pool table which, other than a damp patch in one corner, didn't look too bad. If you've ever played pool in a pub, you've probably played on worse. After a bit of baize-brushing we got down to play. Almost immediately a buzzer sounded somewhere and the main door was opened by a humungous black guy. Think Marcellus Wallis in Pulp Fiction. Only carrying roller boots. Not blades, boots. Proper, 80's rollerboots. Not saying a word to the proprietress he moved to the middle of the bar and began stripping off his Evisu shell suit and limbering up. Over the next hour or so he was joined by about another 25 or so properly hard-looking Jamaicans, similarly equipped and attired, all of whom, when they noticed N and I, regarded us with undiguised contempt.
We weren't much concerned about this. For many years N and I were customers at a Brixton speakeasy that was gradually taken over by West Indian crack dealers. Eventually we were the only white people who went, but we were tolerated, partly cos the guy who ran it, a wonderful wise Jamaican guy, had become our good friend and vouched for us, partly because we were there first but mostly because we weren't intimidated by them and also as a couple of skinny white guys we weren't any sort of threat to them either. The only problem they ever really had with us, apart from not being able to beat us at pool, was the lingering suspicion that we must be gay. And to your average red-blooded yardie, gay is a about as bad a thing as you can be. Even the most enlightened and liberal of them, some of whom I would happily call friends, would no more tolerate a "batty man" than they would a paedophile. This prejudice is cultural, rather than religious, for though it has its roots in evangelical christianity, these were not men who's christian faith in anyway guided their actions. It is something they grew up with, are surrounded by and when pressed are completely unable to justify. N and I teased them mercilessly about it as in many other respects these were nice, reasonable, clever guys but they were completely unable to equate their homophobia with the racism they regularly suffered.
I mention all of this because once the assembled company at the snooker club had got themselves changed, they very closely resembled a monstrous hybrid of the casts of Fame and Starlight Express and looked, frankly, as camp as a caravan site the size of Florida.
This effect was heightened by a display of stretching and posing that wouldn't have looked out of place at a regional ice dance championship. Now don't suspect that we had stumbled across some underground persecuted gay sub-minority of black culture, forced to practise their art away from an un-understanding world. A couple of spectacularly bored-looking girlfriends had been bought along to witness, but certainly not to participate in, the show. There was an undercurrent of aggressive alpha male competition firmly suffusing the entire atmosphere. And as someone who would categorise themselves firmly as a beta male, I can taste one part of that shit in a million.
At this point we did begin to get a bit concerned because the main event seemed to be about to start and it was now clear what this was going to involve. And the sheer incongruity of that was going to make us laugh. A lot. An outbreak of totally un-ironic disco pointing a few minutes earlier had already provoked some serious giggles we had risked major internal injuries to suppress. Laughing at any of these guys was going to get us properly beaten up, at the very least.
Then, I had to take a shot that required me to put my hand in the wet patch on the table. After I'd safely missed it and took my hand away I was overjoyed to discover that the wet patch was urine. Dog urine specifically. That was it. It was really time to go. Leaving the cover off the table, to allow it to dry out, we went to pay our bill and make our escape.
The lady at the counter had sunk to new depths of grumpiness,
"you've left the cover off" "yes. you see...the thing is...I think your dog might have had a little accident on the table...so we left it off to..." "it wasn't him. he's housetrained." "ok...but there's definitely wee on the table" "it can't have been him. he's 18 months old."
There is no arguing with logic like that. We paid up and left meekly. As we walked out another party of rollers was entering. One of them took the trouble to give me a stiff thud to the shoulder with his own as we passed each other on the stairs. At the time it annoyed me, but looking back, he was right. We weren't welcome. Not because we were white, or middle-class or anything like that - though it probably didn't help. We weren't rollerbooters. And people have the right do the thing makes them happy in private, without being sneered at or mocked. As long as it's not at anyone else's expense of course. And that is a lesson that London tries to teach me all the time and occasionally on nights like that I remember to listen. An infinite variety of peccadilloes and pastimes are available and participated in all the time in the capital, a sizeable chunk of which we have no knowledge of or interest in, but London gives us the chance to experience them anyway and consequently broaden our horizons. Even long after we're safely tucked up in our own predilictions and prejudices.
All that having been said, once you're up on youtube, you are pretty much fair game so watch the video that inspired this post. *ALL* the way through. The end is hilarious.
It's the work of garfunkel and oates who are a couple of jobbing actresses united by a sense of a humour. Their Worst song medley is also worth a listen. enjoy.
I have become transfixed by a spectacle of such hideousness that i am now unable to go bed for fear of missing the next gawp-worthy atrocity. I feel like a cctv operator forced to stare at a fog bound motorway across which someone has constructed particularly spikey brick wall. I'd always assumed the Grammys would be an essentially harmless musical circle-jerk: dull speeches, robotic, monochrome versions of the year's most inoffensive hits and a few quick cuts as members of linkin park are forcibly removed by security. Internet, i have been hopelessly naive. They are actually trying to destroy the fabric of music.
Where do you start? The announcer sounds like a live version of my bank's automated phone system, calling out the names of musical luminaries with all the passion of an autistic belgian accountant. Then there's the insistence on shoe-horning wildly dissonant artists into blood-curdling collaborations: Justin Timberlake dragging Al Green down to his level? ghastly. not painful enough for you? how about Stevie Wonder accompanied by the Jonas Brothers? i had to break one of my own fingers just to get through that one. I was still reeling from the vindictive cluelessness that led to Coldplay being nominated for best rock album when they ACTUALLY FUCKING WON IT! Rock? Coldplay? Awesome. Seriously, well done guys. The stage set for Katy Perry's shambolic rendition of her record executive erection maintenance device consisted of various giant plastic versions of pretty much every type of fruit. except oranges. that's a subtle as the evening has got so far.
Then there's the sheer, crushing, stilted ineptitude of the whole thing. OK the Rock is never going win a prize for Best Reading of an Autocue on a Large Translucent Plastic Island, so perhaps don't make him do a two and a half minute comedy routine containing precisely one joke. don't let mily cyrus sing live, particularly not alongside someone who can actually sing. when introducing ESTELLE, singing ESTELLE'S song American Boy with Kanye West rapping away alongside, try say, introducing ESTELLE the person who's song it is rather than the idiot with Thriller hair and a god delusion.
There has been one good bit, Radiohead playing with a marching band. but you could see the embarrassment seeping through Thom Yorke's spasmodic, "i actually have talent so don't care" dancing.
I expect my pointless self-congratulatory schmaltz to at least be effectively stage managed even if the music itself is cock. that the Grammys couldn't even manage that frankly comes as a bit of a shock. and we're expecting the music industry to sort out such complex issues as copyright and file-sharing? not to mention nurturing the next generation of genuine artists? dear christ.
I'm looking forward to next year's ceremony already. if they can top this they might actually generate some kind of musical black hole, sucking the entire monstrous edifice into itself, crushing it to the size of a higgs boson and then hurling it across the dimensions never to be seen again. and i wouldn't want to miss that.
yes it is time. we have now reached the 3 weeks of the british summer where the sun breaks through and the rest of the british public, when pushed, would say that they thought cricket was really rather jolly and wasn't it a nice day out with the kids and isn't Pimm's lovely. as opposed to the rest of the time when the focus groups consistently come back with: boring, incomprehensible, elitist and rained off.
So what are the england team doing to cash in on this fleeting ambivalence? yes they're carrying on their relentless search for top-class mediocrity and "the right areas" against the South Africans. so thank god for Roots Manuva who, in releasing this video has probably done more for English cricket than Wisden has managed in 10 years. tune too.
the other event happening around now, is the annual UK Drug Policy Commission Report. This is the yearly reminder to the government that they would generally cause a lot less pain for all of us if they just gave the fuck up, had some Pimm's on the terrace and watched the cricket. i was pleased to note that so eye-stabbingly obvious are the conclusions of this report that the bbc have simply recycled last year's article with a couple of powerpoint slides tacked on the end. i expect next year's to just read: drug. policy. pointless.
hello - yes, still here. more or less anyway, but it takes something pretty awe-inspiring to drive me to the keyboard these days. in fact, this video thoroughly justifies me not posting all the weak shit i would doubtless have sent your way since september.
dj format should be absolutely my cup of my tea: clever, old school, uk hip hop with plenty of up to date references and samples, great beats and no guns, hos, obscure types of brandy or attempts by the rapper to make comparisons between themselves and god (yes kanye - you can still fuck off - daft punk sample or not).
but tho i love Music for the Mature B-Boy, i've never had it on quite as heavy rotation as you might expect and i haven't sought out too much of his other stuff (tho i have now got this on order). it'd certainly never occured to me to wonder what the videos for the tracks were like. so, during a mid morning musical wilf i was frankly stunned to find this:
i've already sent this to most ppl i know but it makes me smile so much i felt i needed to share the joy. and it's good to know that bungle hasn't rested on his laurels after the success of rainbow.
it's the work of ruben fleischer, about whom i can do no more (cos i know piss all about film) than to direct you to his rather excellent website. where you will find several squillion brilliant films and photos to amuse yourseves with.
happy new thing to you all. see you in... well, march probably.
I am a idiot. I am, however, convinced that I am absolutely brilliant, despite all evidence to the contrary. I stumble through life with the help of my altogether lovelier lover H and my endearingly psychotic cat, Jah.
