Scoville Units Unite

Russian Standard

Russian Standard has been heavily advertised in the media lately*. Tesco for a while were punting it at £25 for 2 litres which is pretty good. It has quite a nice flavour to it so I try to make sure I have a bottle in (although I don’t just now).

Volume: 1L
Alcohol: 40%
Cost: £12.50
Cheapest spotted: £12.50/litre Tesco deal.

Normally:
Cost per nip (25ml): 44p
Cost per proper nip (35ml): 62p

* Although I had bought my first bottle of it months before that campaign, trendsetter that I am etc etc.

SKYY Vodka

SKYY has been my favourite vodka for a while now. The other half brought me back a bottle from New York and it was gorgeous. Was a bit of a nightmare to find locally though, online it was costing £22 for a 70cl!

On the recent holiday to Mexico I made sure to grab 2 litre bottles on the way back, especially at £7 each.

The odour is amazing and it is so smooth, I normally add a mixer but can happily drink this straight.

Volume: 1L
Alcohol: 40%
Cost: £7
Cheapest spotted: £15 for 70CL in Threshers, Glasgow

Normally:
Cost per nip (25ml): 53p
Cost per proper nip (35ml): 75p

Smirnoff Black

I picked up a bottle of Smirnoff Black a while back and finally popped it open. They market it as:

Crafted in small batches, using a copper pot-still, a centuries-old distillation method, smirnoff black recaptures the rounded, lasting, uncompromising smootness once savoured by the people and the czars of old Russia.

It was ok, a bit smoother than normal Smirnoff with the same odour. Probably wouldn’t buy again as it’s expensive for what you get and there are better ones for less.

Volume: 70CL
Alcohol: 40%
Cost: £20
Cheapest spotted: £18.29

Cost per nip (25ml): 71p
Cost per proper nip (35ml): £1

I intend to post some short reviews of books and movies and the like.

To start that off I nicked this meme from someones blog

• 1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
• 2) Italicize those you intend to read.
• 3) Underline the books you love.
• 4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
• 5) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve only read 6 and force books upon them

Here is the list. With no underlines as it doesn’s seem to be

• 1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
• 2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
• 3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
• 4 The Harry Potter Series – JK Rowling
• 5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
• 6 The Bible
• 7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
• 8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
• 9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
• 10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
• 11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
• 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
• 13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
• 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
• 15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
• 16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
• 17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
• 18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
• 19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
• 20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
• 21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
• 22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
• 23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
• 24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
• 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
• 26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
• 27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• 28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
• 29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
• 30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
• 31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
• 32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
• 33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
• 34 Emma – Jane Austen
• 35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
• 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
• 37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
• 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
• 39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
• 40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
• 41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
• 42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
• 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• 44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
• 45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
• 46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
• 47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
• 48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
• 49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
• 50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
• 51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
• 52 Dune – Frank Herbert
• 53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
• 54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
• 55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
• 56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
• 57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
• 58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
• 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
• 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• 61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
• 62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
• 63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
• 64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
• 65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
• 66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
• 67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
• 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
• 69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
• 70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
• 71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
• 72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
• 73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
• 74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
• 75 Ulysses – James Joyce
• 76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
• 77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
• 78 Germinal – Emile Zola
• 79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
• 80 Possession – AS Byatt
• 81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
• 82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
• 83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
• 84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
• 85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
• 86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
• 87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
• 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
• 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• 90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
• 91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
• 92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
• 93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
• 94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
• 95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
• 96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
• 97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
• 98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
• 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
• 100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

swearing in a foreign language is the blog of a friend of mine.

His most interesting post so far was assisted by me. Whoops, forgot I was filming and moved to take a portrait shot.

He likes obscure bands. I’m sure his blog won’t suck.

After playing around for a while I finally started a blog. Part of the delay was finding a decent domain name. Most variations of my name are gone and I didn’t want one with my middle name too. Was pleasantly surprised to see agraham.org free, especially as most “alan graham” variants were gone. I thought this would be long gone.

What will be here?

Random stuff, links, reviews, politics, rants, silly double meanings and food. No idea yet, a mish mash of everything.

Why the name?

Scoville units are the standard way to measure the hotness of spicy food.

Most hot food sold in the UK has Jalapeños in it. These measure around 2,500-5,000 on this scale. The sauces I use for cooking contain hotter chillies than that. In Mexico I managed to get some Serrano and Habanero peppers. These are 10-23K and 100K-580K respectively. I used to regularly eat paninis with Scotch Bonnets in them (about 100K).

I like spicy food.

Units Unite is a nice play on words and also hints at the random politics I will be posting too.

I will look at themes, plug-ins etc over the next few days so this will change a lot.