Scoville Units Unite

Reading various sources, mainly SciFiNow, has revealed a slew of remakes on the way, the ones worth pointing out are:

Orphanage, 2 years old and being remade because a section of the movie liking audience are too xenophobic to cope with subtitles and foreign dialogue. Fuck, em if they wish to miss this fine film out of their own pig-headedness and ignorance that’s their problem.

They Live, yes. The question is who can replace Roddy Piper and Keith David?

He-man. He-man is being remade, fantastic! I remember this as one of the first films I saw at the cinema. It was opening night at the ABC, where Yates etc is now.

I decided to do something with the pile of cookbooks we have acquired and made a couple of new dishes.

Quesedillas

One of the great starters we had in Mexico was quesedillas. These generally had chicken, cheese and salsa in them. Cooked on a hotplate, basically a Mexican version of Cheese on toast. Having checked out cookbook and online all the recipes were talking about deep frying them! Eurgh, deep fried cheese, healthy. Looking in a charity shop I spotted 2 Mexican cookbooks, one of which had a photo which looked correct and recipe for making in frying pan. Snapped up and made as starter next time we had Mexican.

They were really nice, although first ones were a tad soggy with me being over eager with the Olive Oil. We made guacamole too, although I dislike it. Next on list in the salsa sauce, which I believe a couple of our compares know how to make.

Curry

Ok, I make curry, and quite a good one if I say so myself. We always use a bought in sauce though. A cheap Indian cookbook showed how to make a sauce from scratch. When the continental market was here, one stall had garam masala powder. Having got this we had almost everything we needed. Only cumin and turmeric missing. We also needed coriander, and we had seeds which was an ok substitute. I used a curry powder which contained cumin and gave it a bash. I think I used not enough onion and too much water. Trying it when almost done it was too thin and not sweet enough. As I was rushed we threw in some flour and half a teaspoon on sugar. I will actually check to see what we need to add to rectify these two problems but in a rush these worked. The next day I checked a local shop and picked up the missing spices and some coriander from Dronley so next time I will give it a bash with the actual ingredients.

We have the pile there and I intend to have a scan through for new recipes and ingredients before we next make our 6weekly trip to a supermarket. So far that’s three new recipes this year, proper curry from scratch. quesedillas and guacamole.

Having trawled through old e-mails clearing up my inbox I came across the lyrics to a couple of songs. These were Tramp the Dirt Down and The Day That Thatcher Dies.

At 83 it can’t be long now surely? One of the days where I smiled most was reading that her dementia was so bad that she thinks her racist piece of shit husband was still alive. Having to be re-told every day that the person you love most in the world is dead is the best punishment she could possibly receive. It is the only small comfort in the knowledge that she is still depriving the rest of the human race of the oxygen she continues to use.

Costello said it best

Because there’s one thing I know, I’d like to live
Long enough to savour
That’s when they finally put you in the ground
I’ll stand on your grave and tramp the dirt down

With the weather finally clearing we managed to get out on the bikes at the weekend.

The route map is:

Route for February 15th

It was a pretty hard slog for two main reasons, lack of fitness and the gears not working correctly on bike. I was able to switch from 2 to 1 but not up again, when I fiddled around a bit the chain came off. This meant I was stuck on the second set of gears which was fine for a gradual climb, flat and downhill but meant I was stuffed when trying to climb a steeper gradient on way back. So we had to call it off a bit earlier than intended.

Still 2 miles with over 200feet of climbing is alright for a first proper ride. The first ride we went on was round Clatto so was pretty flat only rising 60ft over a longer distance than the 200ft climb on Sunday.

Route for January 25th

I am due the first service anyway but was waiting until I had been out more than once, that’s definitely something to be seen to.

Reports from the weekend have a certain tanned celebrity and his acolytes handing out autographed pictures to kids in Glasgow.

Laughing so hard.

Trying and failing to find any way to describe the ridiculousness of this all whilst masking their identity and making it political…

Some other things have been taking up part of my time over the past two months, cowboy builders, craft fairs, work on other sites so I have a wee bit of a backlog of things to post. These include:

• At least 3, possibly 4 vodka reviews
• Spicy burger reviews, with pics, woo blog living up to name at last
• Milk review to be written

The latest 3/£5 Grouchos acquisition to be watched was Happy Endings.

At times it could be a bit of a slog at over 2 hours long, but it was well worth it in the end. It had a really unusual style. The introduction had the screen split in halves with textual detail of who was who and hints and explanation to plots at the side, this happened at sporadic points throughout the film and is how it finished with a where are they now? section, which lately has only been used in really cheesy comedies. The other bizarre style change was during some of the sex scenes when the camera rotates so that both characters are vertical, quite strange.

The movie is comprised of three main plots, a brother and stepsister make up the real anchor of the story. One arc is about the stepsister, a second about the life of the stepbrother and a third which eventually interlinks with both of them. I was quite amazed by Lisa Kudrows acting. After seeing some of the other Friends actors films I wasn’t expecting much (yes Jennifer Anniston I am looking at you, Office Space and Derailed are your only decent attempts at acting and one of those you are a really minor character). She is superb in this. Steve Coogan plays basically a really weak Alan Partridge. Basically the same what I think is important, other people can get hurt but I’ll say what I feel, having a partner means he has to scramble afterwards to clean up the mess but it wasn’t a real departure from Partridge. That’s not to say he is bad or typecast, far from it just that you could see hints of his main character there.

I looked at it with Kudrow and Coogan and thought the main genre of the movie would be the comedy aspect but it really wasn’t. There were funny parts but no laugh out loud moments that I can remember.

Well worth watching.

Well, I had decided to give Skins one more go before giving up. Episode 3 had been an improvement on 1 and 2 (not hard to be honest) especially with the chilli love. Episode 4 started off pretty well and at one point I heard two lines of dialogue and realised holy crap. Effy and Pandora were talking and they said (paraphrasing):

1. Our mums and dads fuck us up
2. they don’t mean to
1. but they do

It’s the opening lines from the first verse of Philip Larkin – This be the verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

Well, they needed to redeem themselves and they did so. You finally saw some characters settling into a group and some good interactions between people, although it’s still nowhere near as good as series 1 and 2. There is still a hell of a long way to go to even become as good as the worst episodes of season 1 and 2 so it’s earned a reprieve for a few more episodes. Hopefully the end of the season will be amazing and the early episodes will justify themselves on a rewatch with things you miss or don’t think are important on a first watch.

Having neglected to post up more details for further weeks, other films watched in January which I haven’t posted about included:

Underworld 1 and 2 in preparation for the third.
Hallam Foe
TransAmerica
Transformers (original, obviously)
Smart People

February saw Milk, which was amazing and I will write a review at a later date.

Yesterday I was walking up from Morningside to Marchmont and saw a fancy booze shop. Saw Blackwoods vodka in window, ooooh! Unfortunately it was £19! Outrageous but also, I later found out, discontinued. Crossed road and spotted Oddbins. Cogs started wheelin’ so I popped in.

Spotted a lone Reyka vodka reduced to £16.19.

How many bottles of that do you have?
I’ll just check, replies the salesman.

Six says he.

I’ll have 2 please. I was already overloaded with bags unfortunately and still had about a mile to walk.

I was so tempted though.

One was cracked open in celebration. They also stocked an Uluvka box set which was really cool. Really nice bottle, nice glasses, no idea what it tastes like so I wasn’t risking £50 on it.