A Brazilian employee at the EBI was observed dipping his remaining chips in the custard of his apple/rhubarb-crumble-with-custard pudding and started quite a debate, some real-life comments in the poll below. So I ask you:
Month: September 2006
A weird coincidence, and marmalade
Last night, during a wine reception, they were playing a Sinatra CD (which is a helluva lot better than the Gypsy Kings CD they were playing during the poster section. My Way and Hotel California will never sound the same again…) and one of the songs was “Something Stupid”. It was the same song (and probably the same CD) that was playing during breakfast this morning. Weird.
In other news, I have discovered marmalade. Good stuff!
The dildoes are just dildoes
Bush takes honours in World Stupidity Awards
U.S. President George Bush is a big winner in this year's World Stupidity Awards, joining the likes of the entire petroleum industry and Vice President Dick Cheney as the recipients of top honours.
Bush was nominated in several categories, including Stupidest Statement of the Year and Most Out of Touch with Reality in the awards roundup which was created to “salute achievement in ignorance and stupidity.”
But the big winner, taking home the prize for the flagship category Stupidest Man of the Year, was District Judge Donald Thompson.
Known as the “Oklahoma Penis Pump Judge,” Thompson operated a powerful penis pump underneath his robes — while court was in session — during at least three trials. He was convicted on June 29 of four counts of felony indecent exposure.
The awards, now in their fourth year, were created by Canadian actor, director and journalist Albert Nerenberg who worked with the philosophy that “we're all stupid, some of us just need to have it pointed out.”
He first came up with the idea four years ago while working on a documentary on the subject of stupidity. As a publicity stunt for the film, a mock event called the World Stupidity Awards was held. The event garnered international coverage from mainstream media such as the BBC, and Nerenberg realized he was onto something.
Now in its fourth year, the awards show has continued to garner attention, with nominations submitted online and a panel of judges deciding the winners. Nerenberg hopes it will eventually become an annual television special.
In addition to Bush and Thompson, there are other worthy winners this year.
Harry Whittington won the Stupidest Statement of the Year award, for apologizing after Vice-President Dick Cheney shot him during a hunting outing.
“My family and I are deeply sorry for all that Vice President Cheney and his family have had to go through this past week,” Whittington said at the time, still weak and visibly bruised from the birdshot that Cheney peppered him with.
Whittington beat out Mel Gibson's statement: “What do you think you're looking at, sugar tits?” which he made to a female sergeant following his arrest for drunk driving.
Not to be outdone, Cheney took his own award, winning the “Dumbest Moment of the Year” award for the act of shooting Whittington.
The petroleum industry took honours for reckless endangerment of the planet, and Fox News was recognized for having “Best Furthered Ignorance,” in the world.
Basic Instinct 2, starring Sharon Stone, beat out Little Man and The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, among others, to take the title of Stupidest Movie of the Year.
Stupidest Trend of the Year was won cleanly by “Killing people for God.”
Bush took honours in the category of “Stupidest Statement by George W. Bush.” The president's televised statement to FEMA director Michael Brown during the Hurricane Katrina devastation: “Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job,” won easily.
Bush also won for being Most out of Touch with Reality.
The Middle East won the Lifetime Achievement Award for Stupidity.
Nick Flynn won the award for Making a Stupid Situation Stupider by tripping on his shoelaces, falling down a set of stairs and smashing three antique Chinese vases in a museum. He then criticized the museum for not taking better care of the precious artifacts
Nerenberg is currently finishing off Escape to Canada, a documentary about Americans fleeing their country. Nerenberg is also a series for Discovery Channel about the science of sexual attraction called Why Is It Sexy?
Not the hamster!
THE Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond was in a critical condition last night after a high-speed crash while filming for the BBC motoring show.
It is understood that Hammond, 36, had just broken the British land speed record of 300.3mph and was in the process of slowing down the jet-powered Vampire vehicle, with the aid of a parachute, when it overturned. He had to be cut from the wreckage. He was airlifted from the disused Elvington airfield in North Yorkshire to Leeds General Infirmary, which has a specialist neurological unit.
Dave Ogden, a firemen involved in the rescue, said that the presenter had been wearing a helmet and fireproof racing suit. He said that Hammond was able to talk to us for a small period while being cut from the car, despite being in quite a lot of distress.
Michael Harvey, editor of Top Gear magazine, told BBC News 24: This wasnt a high-performance car, this wasnt a road car, this was a rocket-powered dragster which bears absolutely no relation to the kind of cars which are the main fodder of the Top Gear programme this was a car that clearly contained its own risks.
The Vampire is the same car in which the British record of 300.3mph was set at Elvington, by Colin Fallows, 54, from Northampton, in 2000. Mr Fallows failed to beat his own record in July.
The BBC confirmed that the accident had taken place during filming for Top Gear, but a spokesman said that he had little further information about the circumstances of the crash. Our attention is on Richard at this stage, he added.
Hammond has presented the BBC motoring show, alongside Jeremy Clarkson and James May, since 2002. He is known to his co-presenters as Hamster, owing to his diminutive height of 5ft 7in.
Last night Jeremy Clarkson said he was waiting for news about his colleagues condition: My fingers are crossed and Im hoping to get up there. We are all massively concerned. Mr May was said by his agent to be absolutely devastated by news of the crash.
In an interview earlier this year, Hammond said: I think I wanted to be on Top Gear from a fairly young age because I loved cars and I wanted to do something on telly because I loved TV. I know that Im ridiculously lucky.
He presented the Sky One show Brainiac until earlier this month, and has also presented Time Commanders and Petrolheads. He lives near Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, with his wife Amanda, 35, and their two young daughters, Isabella, 5, and Willow, 2.
Richard Noble, who led the team which broke the sound barrier in the Nevada desert in 1997, and still holds the world land-speed record, explained the dangers involved in jet-car driving. I dont know what happened but one thing I can say is that its nothing like driving an everyday car or even a high performance one, he said.
You can never have enough experience because the speed-to-weight ratios are so different. Its almost as if your instincts and mind are too slow for the speed youre going. Theres a much greater power-to-weight ratio, so drivers have to keep everything co-ordinated, which is not easy.
Noble led the ThrustSSC Project. Driver Andy Green reached 763 mph, beating Nobles record of 633mph.
Notes from the eSAHM
I am in Nottingham today, attending the eSciences All Hands Meeting until thursday. It's an interesting meeting, though the scope of it is not really my thing. Any conference that can gather archeologists, astronomers, social scientists, computer scientists and biologists under one roof is bound to be a bit ecclectic. There's some interesting tidbits, but most of it I find uninteresting. I'm here to give a demo on PRIDE/OLS, so basically I'm losing 3 days of useful work time to give a 25 minute presentation and waving the flag a lot. Ah well, thems the breaks.
Getting here was interesting. Taking the train is still a novel experience, especially when it's not a route I'm used to. I'm always worried I'm on the wrong train (this is especially confusing when the trains are identified by their final destination and it's not always obvious you need to take the Norwich train to get off at Ely to then take the Liverpool train to get off at Nottingham). Still, I made it in one piece on time, though at one point I had to disturb a One employee who was busy oogling a rather bust-enhanced page 3 girl.
The hotel I'm staying in is ok, but you'd think I'd be used to differences in classifications and ratings between Canada and the UK. You'd think a 4-star hotel would be a bit more posh than having plastic cups in the loo and small, lumpy beds. Still, it's clean and the food is good.
Speaking of, you'd think I'd know better by now to steer clear of the full english fry-up. But no. I'm stupid that way. I went a bit overboard with the bacon this morning and my body is now voicing a rather harsh opinion that this was indeed a very foolish thing to do. I'm going to be drinking a lot of green tea today to try and bring my GI system back in line. For now, I just hope that my subsonic gas releases aren't disrupting the keynote speakers.
In other news, we're seeing the light at the end of the wedding prep tunnel. We finally heard from our cake decorator last night, and the last things to do are getting Katy's hair cut, the music and the final fittings for the suit hire. yay!
Yet another weekend update
In two weeks and a day, I will get married. This is starting to scare the living crap out of me. Not for the decision or the act, but for the fact that I want everything to go well! I have nightmares that our guests will not enjoy the food or the music or will call us cheap bastards for not having a live band or an open bar. This is what I get for reading those bridal magazines.
The last details are starting to fall into place, thank god. We met with the catering chef from Chilford last friday night. He's a lovely man, and is even more paranoid about allergies than I am, which is saying a lot. In a sense though, I'm really happy about that. Even though he can't guarantee that the food will be 100% allergy friendly (mostly because a lot of stuff if subcontracted out), I know that he's going to try his damndest to accomodate everybody. He's going to make a special menu for one of our guests who is lactose intolerant and has IBS. I mean, yay! We didn't expect them to go that extra mile, but they are. Chalk one up for good customer relations! At first, he was worried that we'd have too much food, then later, not enough. In the end, it's going to work out that we're going to have canapes with the toast round, then a buffet, then cake (provided by our cake decorator), then another buffet serving around 7pm.
All in all, we hope to be eating and drinking from 2:30 to 10pm. This makes us happy :)
In other news, Katy's dad has been here since last thursday doing the finishing touches on the painting we'd started over the summer. We hired a stairwell access scaffold tower so we was able to paint the walls in the stairwell, do the bathroom in total and finish off all the woodwork with gloss. The apartment looks really nice, but smells of paint :) The good thing is that the cat is not covered in paint, even though he was trying his damndest to help out. The last bit we want to do this year is to paint our cupboard downstairs and get some shelving done (though that will have to wait until after the wedding).
I'm going to Nottingham for a meeting from tuesday to thursday. I so can't be arsed. I'm leaving for 3 days to give a 25 minute powerpoint presentation and demo. Joy. Ah well, after that, there's only one ore week before people start arriving :D
I can't wait.
[recipe] Hungarian Goulash
INGREDIENTS:
* 1 kg beef brisket, cut into 1-inch chunks
* salt and freshly ground black pepper
* tabasco sauce, to taste
* 2 tbsp all-purpose flour
* 3 tbsp olive oil, divided use
* 5 medium sweet onions, sliced and separated into rings
* 1/2 cup sweet red wine
* 1 cup oxo cube broth
* 1 tin chopped tomatoes with juice
* 4 tsp cup sweet Hungarian paprika (see Note)
* 1 cup sour cream
PREPARATION:
Place beef chunks in a large bowl. Sprinkle liberally with salt and freshly ground pepper. Toss with the flour.
Heat a heavy Dutch oven over medium high heat and add 1 tablespoon of the olive oil. Swirl to coat the bottom of the pan. Place beef chunks in a single layer and brown on two sides. Season with tabasco. You will probably need to do this in batches. Do not crowd the meat or it will boil instead of brown. Remove browned beef chunks to a bowl.
Reduce heat to medium-low. To the drippings in the Dutch oven, add the remaining 2 tablespoons of olive oil, onion rings and onions. Toss to coat with the olive oil. Cover tightly and sweat the vegetables, stirring occasionally, until onions are limp but not browned.
Add red wine to the vegetables and cook 2 minutes. Add broth and paprika. Return beef to the pan. Stir until well-combined. Cover tightly, reduce heat, and simmer on low heat for 1-1/2 to 2 hours, stirring occasionally, until beef is fork-tender.
Remove Dutch oven from heat and wait for boiling to subside. Taste and add additional salt if necessary. Stir in sour cream until completely incorporated into the gravy.
Serve Hungarian gulash over hot buttered noodles with chopped parsley or over plain basmati rice.
Well that's just stupid!
Mums in burger backlash over healthy eating
TWO mums are organising junk food runs to a South Yorkshire school – because they don't agree with its healthy eating policy.
Julie Critchlow and Sam Walker deliver fish and chips, pies, and burgers to hungry kids at Rawmarsh Comprehensive every day. They say they have started the food runs because pupils are turning their noses up at the 'low fat rubbish' served up at the school and they are angry at a recent ruling by headteacher John Lambert that pupils can't leave at lunchtime to visit the local chippy – and should eat pasta, salads and sandwiches.
[Low fat rubbish? you're overweight and your kid is probably spherical.]
The two mums say demand is so great they have had to start using an old supermarket trolley for their lunchtime deliveries. Sam, of Monkwood Road, Rawmarsh, said: “This is all down to that Jamie Oliver. Well I don't like him or what he stands for – he is forcing our kids to be more picky about their food.”
[No he's not, he's forcing them not to die of a coronary at 23 you dumbass.]
Julie, also of Monkwood Road, added: “Kids need a bit of fat in their diet – there is nothing wrong with burgers and chips. At school they only get chips once a week if they are lucky.
“The school have objected to what we are doing and they have even threatened to call in the police. But we will carry on – the kids just won't eat the food they are given at school.”
But the two mums have angered local healthy eating campaigners who say they are trying to sabotage the school's new healthy menus. Rotherham Council healthy eating campaigner Jill Adams said: “What these two women are doing is shameful. I don't believe they think they are doing the right thing by the kids.
“There have been numerous studies which show that children are not only healthier if they cut junk food out of their diet, but they learn better as well.
“We fought hard to get Turkey Twizzlers, chips and other fatty food off the menu and now we have some parents campaigning against healthy food – it is staggering.”
Headteacher John Lambert said: “All the freshly prepared food now served complies with the government's healthy eating guidelines, and I can't imagine why the children want to go elsewhere.
“The food that these two parents are handing out is not part of that healthy eating diet and on top of that I have to question the morality of delivering it.”
More pissed off than I should be
I think I've now fixed all that was broken when my friggin ISP got hacked. I have to say that I am not impressed with their tech support. Getting hacked is bad enough, but that's forgivable. Losing all the backups at the same time, less so. Needing to migrate every user account to a new box, you're starting to suck ass. Then we get to the realms of the truly incompetent: creating my account twice, giving me two sets of DNS server information to update my domain name registration. When asked which one to use, giving me the wrong set.
Finally, everything seems to be back up, with all the content found and only one JPG file lost to the ethers. I can live with that. What pisses me off though, really really badly, is that I lost over two years of access logs!
Now I'm not really vain generally, but I liked to be able to see how my website progressed over time. At it's busiest, I was going over 10GB of bandwidth a month! Craptacular.