May 2006
You are currently browsing the articles from United By Yucca written in the month of May 2006.
This from the Guardian NewsBlog:
According to campaigners, The Da Vinci code will be the 68th film since 1960 to feature an evil albino. It is an incredible statistic - when you consider how few albinos actually make it to the silver screen, the proportion of them shown as intent on murder and destruction must be remarkably high. How did this happen?
More to the point, who’s been counting them?
The problem is, Albinos (especially those with big facial scarring) make excellent villains. Back in the days of career advisors in schools (do they still have them?) I imagine being a teenage albino would provoke only one response.
“You should look for a career in arch villainy. If at all possible, find a hero and become his nemesis - otherwise just go for general henchman type jobs.”
At least there is a career path for the
melatonin challenged. Us ‘tannies’ have to fight our way to the top of a very crowded career heap in such jobs as
policeman,
dentist and
bear baiter.
.
.
.
Da Vinci Code
Written by exmonkey on May 19th, 2006 with 2 comments.
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Because I can use this as a way of gettin the last word….
- Football is evil. It is one of those absolutes in the world. Sky is blue, sea is wet, football is evil.
- Elite remains one of the best computer games ever. The PC emulator on this appalling webpage (run by one of the creators of Elite) does work. But I recomend getting a BBC micro, model B with floppy drive for a real taste of gaming genius.
- I still do not have a satifactory answer to the question - Why do men noisily spit when using public urinals? (At the risk of being self referencing - here is a previous post about the most bizarre conversation I ever had in a pub toilet)
Written by exmonkey on May 18th, 2006 with 4 comments.
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The only thing that we’ve managed to harvest from our allotment is radishes.
All first time allomenteers grow radishes. Why? Because they grow quickly, require little attention and look quite cool.
Quite cool that is until you try and eat them. It’s then you realise (as I did) that you don’t like radishes, cannot give radishes away and know of no recipes that use radishes as an ingredient other than as a garnish.
I went to the BBC website and tired to find a radish recipe. (see results here) All I got was a number of salads that have radish in them.
So why does radish exist? Answers on a postcard.
(nice picture of an american radish…)
Written by exmonkey on May 18th, 2006 with 7 comments.
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I have to admit, I haven’t seen a single red ant since I was 13 years old - that is, since I got the allotment.
I thought they’d died out, but they haven’t - they are alive and thriving in South East London.
Their activities seem to be centred around my broad bean plants at present. They are making sure that the tips of the plants are covered in aphid (i think the plural of aphid is aphid…).
I have been reliably informed that instant coffee will deter the ants from returning to the plants. It would certainly stop me from coming back - I’ll post any results after the weekend.
Written by exmonkey on May 17th, 2006 with 4 comments.
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I comment on television quite a lot. I do other stuff. It just sounds like I watch a lot of TV, and I guess I do, but not lockin-fat-bloke-call-the-fire-brigade-to-extract-him-from-the-flat-through-a-hole-in-the-wall to much.
I have just seen yet another advert that portrays men as a)stupid and b)football mad.
Here’s my issue. I don’t like football. I am not stupid. I do not sit in my underwear in a pool of my own filth living on pot noodle whenever my wife is away. I’ve never even had a pot noodle.
Why are there so many adverts that portray men as imbeciles, incapable of buttoning their own shirts, who can be rendered impotent just by waving cup final tickets in front of them.
Another classic advert in this mold is the (I think) Old El Paso stir in powder stuff.
The man is cooking. The woman, his soon to be ex, is talking on the phone to her girlfriend saying something like - ‘He’s cooking tonight, I’ll probably die of food poisoning”. She asks him what’s for dinner.
He says (and again I paraphrase) “I’m making sweet pepper and onion fajitas with pan fried chicken in a rich mexican spicey sauce”
She eats the powder chicken onion stuff and stops criticizing him for a couple of minutes.
The thing is, this advert was trying to tell us a couple of things.
- That chopping up some chicken, pepper and onion, throwing them in a pan, putting in some powder and stiring (in slow motion) is cooking
- With Old El Paso powder stuff, you can fool your wife/girlfriend into thinking that you are not a useless footy mad man-blob and maybe she’ll think you’re sexy or something.
So men can’t cook, operate washing machines (I mean come on - they are about the simplest thing in the world to operate, compared to say, an Ericsson mobile phone) or think beyond the World Cup. I dispair.
The worst thing about these terrible stereotypes is that there are just enough men for whom all this is true, to perpetuate the myth.
(Note- even as I type this another advert comes on - father+child eating cereal out of football shaped bowls?????)
Written by exmonkey on May 16th, 2006 with 2 comments.
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I won’t try and be eloquent about this (DitDotDat does it better here: snooze 24) but it’s worth watching the video it’s quite amusing when the BBC fuck up.
Video on the BBC
Written by exmonkey on May 16th, 2006 with 2 comments.
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Well, thanks to some extreme digging from Stephen and some early morning allotment visits by me, we now have the main crop potatoes in the ground.
It has taken longer than anticipated to clear the section of the plot we ear-marked for spuds due to the huge amount of ‘horse tail‘.
Before Christmas, some old geezer came up to me and started giving me unasked for advice. One of the things he said (and he said a lot) was - “Do you know what horse tail looks like?”
I should have taken this as a warning that he knew something about our plot that I didn’t. He pulled out a small shrivelled root and said, “This is horse tail - but don’t worry about it. It doesn’t take any of the soil nutrients.” So I didn’t worry.
At that time I foolishly thought that horsetail (or mares tail as it is also called) would be a bit like some kind of grass or something. There wasn’t anything to see in December anyway.
How wrong I was. I have since discovered that horsetail is a prehistoric plant that can grow from the tiniest section of root and is almost impossible to erradicate (especially if you don’t want to use chemicals). The roots, which are now like spaghetti (and the soil is like a thin smearing of bolognese sauce) go down 2 metres and cannot be fully removed.
So we have spent an extra 2 weeks painstakingly removing a huge mess of deep rooted weeds from a relatively small section of plot - plus watching horse tail coming up all over the rest of the plot.
I have it on (relatively) good authority, that if you continually cut the tops off horse tail it will eventually die. After two years. Clearing the ground nicely for the bind weed.
Anyway…. Here’s a list of what’s growing so far:
Garlic, onions, challottes, broad beans, runner beans, sweetcorn, mixed leaf salad, early (new) potatoes, main crop potatoes, spinach, carrots, purple sprouting broccolii, tomatos (two varieties), basil, coriander, chillis, sweet peppers, thyme, parsley, courgettes, squash, radish and jerusalem artichoke. Oh yes, and horse tail.
Written by exmonkey on May 16th, 2006 with 3 comments.
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Sorry, I couldn’t think of a better title.
I get more depressed the closer the world cup comes. I apologise to all owners of these flags who are intelligent, left wing vegetarians, but whenever I see St Georges cross stuck to a car, hanging from a bedroom window or pasted on the side of a van, I just think - there goes a white, racist, football thug. Anyway, I digress.
There is an advert on at the moment, one of the many that is trying to cash in on our inevitable 1st round departure from the world cup. This particular ad (and I can’t remember what it’s selling) ends with 3 blokes standing on the pavement outside Stanstead airport complete with suitcases. The voice-over is saying something about winning tickets to the world cup final. A forth bloke appears waving tickets. The three others are ecstatic. They leap in the air, hug, look heaven-ward (surely only God can bestow such bounty) and generally go Whoooop.
Here’s the thing. Up until the fourth guy arrived, they had no idea they had won tickets to the world cup. So why were they standing there, with luggage, in stanstead airport? Are there many small groups of soon to be disappointed, dim witted football supporters waiting at departure points across the UK?
At least it keeps them out of my local pub.
Written by exmonkey on May 13th, 2006 with 5 comments.
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I should prefix this by stating that I intend this as a rebalancing of the scales. There are a lot of negative posts about becoming a father, a lot that resort to the worst kind of clichés and some that pile on the sentimentality.
This is also, in a way, a post that I hope will cheer Carlos up. He has a 5 day old baby at home and is probably going through the same stuff that I did early on.
Milo is a year old. This has gone by quickly, a lot quicker than I would have anticipated. These are the things I have found out about being a new parent.
- People are NEVER, EVER satisfied.
When you’re single, they* say “When are you going to get a girlfriend?”
When you’re in a relation ship - “When are you going to get married?”
When you marry, some say “So now you’re married, you can forget doing X, Y and Z” others say (of course), “When are you going to have kids?”
When you have a child, “When are you going to have another?”
And so on. Repeat until dead.
Although I suspect, when you die, some bloke will say “When are you going to get reincarnated?”
- My life did not end, nor did I have to give up all of my friends and interests - although I have had to make some adjustments
- After the first 4 weeks, things don’t seem quite so frantic. It’s amazing how quickly you can readjust to having a new baby in the house.
- Nappies aren’t that bad. They have never really been an issue. We use a washable nappy system and get on fine. If anything, I find it more difficult to use disposables now.
- We sleep really well, as does Milo. We put him t bed at 8pm and wake him up at 7am.It’s all about consistency and routine.
- We have never given Milo anything prepared from a tin or can. Everything he eats comes from ingredients. Remember ingredients? I won’t pretend that this doesn’t take time, but at one year old he eats pretty much everything we do now, so it’s less of a hardship
- We have managed on just one pushchair. To all those who need a different chair for each activity/day of the week, I say - the manufactures saw you coming. But well done you for supporting china’s burgeoning economy.
All in all, having Milo has been a positive, educational experience. He is a bright, healthy, happy boy - and although he still looks a lot like me, I’m sure (if he’s lucky) he’ll grow out of it.
To all the naysayers and doom merchants consider this: Maybe the boring married people you know were boring before they got married, and maybe all the people who complain endlessly about how shit their lives are having had kids had fairly shit lives to begin with.
And maybe these people who can never find anything good to say about life changing events, just because they have already been through it and they can’t think of anything they enjoyed about it, are miserable, joyless areholes who need to be a little more open to the possibility that other people can have different, positive experiences from the same events.
*you know, them.
Written by exmonkey on May 12th, 2006 with 7 comments.
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I think I’ve sussed it out.
Blair’s government have embarked on a top secret, long term plan to get Britain’s couples to spend more quality time together.
How are they to acheive this? Through the TV schedules. In a series of carefully planned slashes to the collective pool of TV programming originality, the government has, over the last 10 years, engineered a TV schedule that no sane man (or woman) could ever watch.
Only the criminally insane, morons and chavs can possibly derive any enjoyment from the constant stream of makeover, property and reallity programming.
The upshot of all this is a steady decline in the birthrate of the above groups, and an increase in the more diserning parts of the general public.
Will it succeed longterm? One can only hope.
Written by exmonkey on May 11th, 2006 with 1 comment.
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