Aquarionics

This was my weekend, were dashes are interactions with transport nodes and commas are walking.

Friday:

Work – Kings Cross – Cambridge, LARP LARP LARP - Sleep

Saturday:

Cambridge Station – Kings Cross – Manor House – Seven Sisters – Walthamstow Central, Home, Walthamstow Central – London Liverpool Street – Kings Cross, St Pancras – Bedford – Old Flat, Letting Agent, Lunch, Station – St Pancras – Piccadilly Circus – Charring Cross – Paddock Wood, Tea, Birthday Present – Charring Cross – Oxford Circus – Liverpool Street – Walthamstow Central, Home.

(Strange routes though London caused by closure of bits of Northern and Victoria lines)

Sunday:

Stayed at home and played on computer games. Went nowhere.

Today, I did this:

I made pancakes.

I used to be terrible at pancakes – Ben always made them – but this is how you make pancakes:

Fail. Lots.

You need a decent sized frying pan – non-stick – a ladle and some batter. The batter is made out of some flour, a few splashes of milk, some eggs, optionally cinnamon, vanilla extract and sugar. The amounts of these vary from person to person, but I usually start with about 300g flour, a few eggs, and add milk and whisk until it’s fairly thin (liquid rather than sludge).

Heat your frying pan lots. Add a very small amount of oil. Ladle some batter into the middle of the frying-pan and marble-madness the pan until it stops spreading easily (this should, ideally, be almost exactly as it reaches the edges of the pan, if not, adjust amount in ladle or your expectations). Allow to cook for a little while as the shiny un-cooked batter parts turn into duller cooked batter parts as far as they are going to, and then flip.

To flip a pancake, either:

1. Remove the pan from the heat. Make a rapid movement down with the pan, whilst pushing it slightly away from you, so that the pancake has a “spin” on it as it exits the pan. Then catch it in the middle of the frying pan, not the edge. Or…
2. Get someone else to do (I) Or…

1. Use the slice. You coward.

   Retrieve the pancake from the floor/ceiling/wall/cat, and/or leave it in the pan for a half a minute to a minute to brown on the other side. Place on a plate underneath another plate to keep them warm. This doesn’t work terribly well, so eat them soon.

   Terrible hardship.

   Always, and this is important, remember three important lessons:

2. The cook who doesn’t reserve some pancakes doesn’t get any pancakes
3. The first three pancakes you make on any day will be useless.

1. If a teflon pan catches fire, it’s not non-stick anymore. In fact, it is a Stick pan.

   These lessons have been hard earned, learn from my failures.

Okay, so, Every single american I know is smart, aware of other cultures, and not a victim of selective editing.

However:

Via M, New housemate

I have found a new way of expanding upon your musical tastes, and it goes like this:

Stage One, Lose your iPod.

This sounds like a bad thing, I admit, but to be entirely honest this was the easiest part of the entire enterprise. There I was, sitting in a pub somewhere in Soho (The John Snow, London Pub Fans. No relation to the news reader) and the iPod fell from the iPocket of my iJacket. Obviously I had, at the time, no idea of its latest desperate bid for freedom, and discovered nothing of the plan for an hour or so, on the tube home, when I discovered nothing of the iPod. Headphones? Yes. Desire to listen to loud bangy music? Check. iPod? Nope.

I was… distraught. Unhappy. It’s not that music is a large part of my life, or that I spend almost all my existence with a background soundtrack of music or other people (Currently listening to: One More Won’t Kill Me, by the Hedrons, the iTunes store free single of the week), except in the ways that it, you know, is. My iPod was lost, my iPod was gone, alas and a lack of music. I walked home to the sounds of the Underground, Walthamstow High Street on a Sunday evening, and the quiet of a sleeping flat.

When you order an iPod from the Apple store, they ask if you want something engraved on the reverse. Being something of a creative soul, I spent hours – literally – wracking my brain for a pithy two line quote to go on the back of my music store. /dev/music was good, but too geeky. “If music be the food of love, play carbonara” too Shakespearian, any Divine Comedy lyric too long. Bored of the entire enterprise, I eventually just fed it my email address.

Very few times in my existence will I be more thankful for my lack of creative endeavour on demand, as the Pod was picked up by – amazingly – an honest soul, who is also an aspiring DJ, and emailed me to let me know he’d found the little black box of magic. Picking it up, it wasn’t working, so he’d plugged it in at home, and iTunes had – in its helpful way – erased it and replaced it with his music, which is what it contained when it got back into my hot little hands yesterday. Hours upon hours of new music to listen to, until eventually I marked down the stuff I liked, plugged it into my laptop, and got my music back on it once again.

It is good to sometimes be reminded that parts of humanity are worth the effort.

Women are funnier than men verses Men are funnier than women

Culture Wars! Round X! FIGHT!

(Different people are funny in different ways. News at 11)