Ah, New York. What is the definitive flavour of such a multifaceted and vibrant city? A glistening slice of Pepperoni pizza from Lombardis? A pastrami-laden bagel from the Westway Diner on 9th? Or is it, perhaps, the taste of stodgy pastry, cold potatoes and a few scant morsels of greyish mechanically recovered meat, bundled together into the conveniently portable form of a Cornish Pasty?
Of course it is the latter. For a true taste of NYC, the knowledgeable modern gastrosexual-about-town knows not to bother with all the faff of transatlantic flights, currency exchanges and hilarious cultural misunderstandings when you mention your intention to "pop out for a fag", but simply to head to their nearest shabbily-appointed corner shop or 24-hour garage and pick up a Ginster's "New York Style" Steak and Cheese Pasty. Cleverly exploiting the often-overlooked culinary and cultural affinity between New York and Cornwall, this superlative example of modern global fusion cookery manages to send the consumer into heady international raptures; with each mouthful you will feel as if you are out on the town amidst the glamourous neon-drenched bustle of Times Square.
If you are down and in need of cheering yourself up, you could try putting The Avalanches' excellent debut album Since I Left You on the stereo in one room of your house, and the soundtrack to the film Lost in Translation on in another, and then rapidly bouncing back and forth between rooms on a space hopper while pouring Red Bull down your neck and emitting loud, shrill childlike noises. Or you could simply listen to this implausibly likeable song from american electro band Passion Pit's debut EP Chunk of Change and achieve largely the same effect, but with less potential for personal injury.
In an ideal world we would all go out drinking on Friday and Saturday nights, wake up around midday the next day and head to the pub for a leisurely roast meat/newspaper session. Thanks to the incompetence or disinterest of the creator this is far from an ideal world. In many important ways it sucks, and one of the times this is most noticeable is when you have to spend time in the office environment the morning after a spree.
I would dearly love to take the weekend drinking path, but frequently find it strewn with obstacles. Generally obstacles that my wife has booked in and which involve me driving somewhere, precluding any kind of liver abuse. Just going to the pub and drinking beer fails to rank as a worthwhile social activity, and is also kind of awkward with a young child in tow. As such any drinking that is to be done in the correct fashion, eg. aimlessly, uselessly and regretfully, is chased into the social wilderness of the middle of the week. It is also pretty much the only time you can hope to find a pub quiz.
I therefore find myself blameless, an innocent victim swept along the tide of events by the inevitable march of history. It all starts innocently enough, with vague intentions of leaving after a couple, but I do find beer very moreish. There is also the danger of the round trap. Let me explain the round trap. Say you are meeting a group of three other drinkers, their names are not important. You are the second to arrive, being well-mannered yet not a loser. Your loser friend is already at the bar and you go to greet him. He offers you a drink. You accept. God is in his Heaven and all is right with the world. Shortly afterwards another friend arrives and offers you a drink, basking in the safe glow of your barely touched glasses. You thank him for his empty offer but decline and he sorts himself out. Drinking and laughter ensue.
And then you notice the relative state of the drinks in front of your party. You are reaching dreg levels, your sad friend is close behind you whilst your smug friend is about half way down. You briefly consider slowing right down, hoping smugface will overtake you and fall into the round trap. But he is in full flow about Buddhism or The Wire or something and, besides, that beer is very moreish. You polish it off, and make the offer of another drink, which is gleefully and unsurprisingly accepted. As you stand up in rocks your last friend, almost as if he had planned it. (He wouldn’t have, would he? Skulk out in the cold and dark just to not have to buy a round? No, the idea is absurd).
The end result of all these passive/aggressive machinations is that you are 4 drinks down and have only seen 2 drinks benefit (and late friend has ordered a gin and tonic, typically). Your only option is to stick it out for another two drinks, and hope smug and late don’t wimp out of their commitments. By this point you are four pints down, and have entered the Bizarro World stage of the evening.
“Stupid Humans eat a healthy nutritious meal before going to bed at a reasonable hour! Here at 11pm on a Wednesday night world we eat fried chicken and go to dubious establishments with late licences, before falling asleep on last train home!”
Eventually you make it home, waking up your wife, cats and child in the process which means you start the next day with a negative balance of goodwill. You also start it with a wounded disbelief at why your alarm clock is going off when it’s clearly still the middle of the night. That is, of course, if you manage to avoid the vicious circle of waking up too early, then worrying that you’ve woken up too early and being unable to get back to sleep due to this worry (and the fact that you have the first line of Leggy Blonde by Flight of the Conchords stuck in your head). However it happens, it happens that the healing embrace of sleep is replaced by the unforgiving slap of so-called reality.
At first it doesn’t seem too bad. Despite previous experience you think that this time, somehow, you’ve gotten away with it. It’s not until you’re safely ensconced at your desk that Har-Garr the Morning After Beast strikes with his full might. A hangover, when carefully nurtured and indulged with enough ginger beer and time spent on the sofa can, like giving birth, be a joyous experience. Stick it in front of a computer with nothing but the prospect of 8 hours of spreadsheets to look forward to and it becomes more akin to a breach birth whilst stuck in an elevator with only Zach from Saved by the Bell to assist.
You eventually make it, bloody and bruised, to lunch time and yet again taking a distinctly Humean approach to experience you decide that a big pile of junk food will be just the ticket for sorting you out. You are wrong, as you will shortly discover. The combination of too much greasy food and a ravaged digestive system is total annihilation, and I have yet to experience a workplace bathroom in which the inevitable results are entirely free of some kind of trauma.
And so the clocks refuse to move, your head refuse to stop pounding and your work refuses to just do itself for a change. It’s hell, nor are you out of it. Until you are, of course. The birth analogy is once again useful here because when you make it to the end of the day you solemnly vow to never do it again, but time smudges the horror and buffs the benefits and eventually there you are again, quietly sobbing into our keyboard whilst praying that none of your co-workers notice the congealed kebab stench.
Now, a confession. Though I have used ‘you’ throughout the piece I could just have easily used ‘I’ for, you see, I too have experienced the thrilling high and crippling lows of being drunk on a Tuesday night. It is not worth it. If you simply must drink alcohol outside the permitted time zones my advice is this, do it during the day at work, that way you can sober up by the time you go to bed and avoid the hangover completely.
Yes, we have recorded a podcast! In this first-ever episode of Unified Review Theory, join your hosts Neill and James as we continue our ongoing mission to Review Everything. Only this time, you know, by TALKING. In this packed episode, we take it back to the 90's with a review of beloved time-travel TV series Quantum Leap, and get in touch with our highland roots with a frank and full discussion of the Cameron Family Motto.
We will put it on iTunes and stuff if we ever figure out how. Also, if we ever record another.
Your thoughts, comments and feedback would be very welcome, as would be suggestions of stuff for us to review in future episodes! Just leave comments below, or on our Facebook page.
Imagine waking gently from a deep, long, sleep. You push yourself up from between cool and crisp white linen sheets and let your mind slowly settle. What has woken you up? Not a noise - the house is blissfully quiet, the only sound being the gentle lapping of the waves on the beach outside. The light? It's true, warm sunlight is streaming in through the windows and across the bed. But that's not it. No, it's - a smell. A wonderful, rich, delicious smell. Someone downstairs is making waffles.
That is the dream that waffles represent, and it is a dream that is heartbreakingly poignant when one's real wake-up routine involves a regular 4am leap out of bed into a pitch-black and freezing-cold house to deal with a screaming baby who has the runs. So poignant, in fact, that it can lead one to doing odd, otherwise inexplicable things. Like, for instance, buying 'Toaster Waffles'.
The actual review: they're not aggressively unpleasant. They do taste vaguely waffle-ish, which is probably the best one could hope for. There's a certain degree of sogginess that is unexpected in something that is, after all, cooked in a toaster. But they possess one unexpectedly winning quality: the smell. Not only do they make your house smell like someone has actually been making proper waffles, but that smell then lingers with an astonishing degree of persistence and causes pleasant olfactory tingles of waffliness whenever you walk into the kitchen for the rest of the day. My wife suggests that the ideal solution would be to simply toast a couple every morning and then chuck them in the bin. But I think she underestimates my desire to eat soggy toaster waffles.
A very handy book for a new father, as it gives me at least some of the answers to the barrage of questions I will no doubt be subjected to in a few years time ("what is wind? Who build the moon? Why don't trains have legs?" etc), however I think once again I have fallen victim to my inability to do anything other than start a book then read it in numerical order by page until I reach the end. This is probably more of a dipper. Several elements are repeated, mainly trying to make you comprehend how big or amazing things are (If you put every zero in a row it would reach to Sevenoaks, it was as if a cat had suddenly learnt how to conduct hostage negotiations overnight). The whole book is basically one big "Isn't it neat". And it is is fact neat. Although the next time a scientist tells you he knows something laugh in his face.
One of the advantages of being self-employed and working from home is that I am able to play lots of really loud hip-hop, and rap along at the top of my lungs in an excruciatingly awkward thirtysomething-white-man fashion. In a more conventional office workplace this would be somewhat embarrassing, if not entirely inappropriate, but in the comfort and privacy of my own studio I am free to really let rip. There is, however, one significant problem with the practise. As a guilt-ridden middle-class liberal of impeccable credentials, there is.... a particular word that I am literally unable to say. Even in the privacy of my own studio, where there is no-one around to hear or be offended. And, unfortunately, it is a word that is used a lot in a lot of rap songs. I mean, really a lot. You know the one, it begins with 'N'.
This has caused me minor consternation for years, as when happily rapping along to The Roots or Nas in my pleasantly ridiculous fashion, I am forced to either simply skip over the word, performing a self-imposed mental version of a radio DJ pressing their cough button, or substitute a random incoherent mumble for the offending N-word. Either of these take a certain amount of memory and concentration, which are not exactly my core competencies anyway, and generally end up messing up my otherwise formidable Flow. Even worse are the rare occasions when I fluff the procedure and the word slips out, causing me to spend the rest of the afternoon in the throes of a crippling liberal guilt attack and worrying that my subscription to the Guardian will be revoked.
As you can see, this is a major problem for me. I would go further, in fact, and describe it as a major social problem for our times. However, it is a problem which I am happy to say I have totally solved. And all it takes is the easy substitution of the word 'ninja' for, you know, the other word. This is perfect, as:
a) it sounds almost the same anyway so the lyrics still flow perfectly b) it renders even the hardest-to-excuse examples of gangsta rap into songs about ninjas. And I don't know about you, but I find that pretty amusing.
fig. 1.1 - The Wu-Tang Clan, Shame on a [Ninja]
fig 1.2 - Geto Boys, Damn it feels Good to be a Gangsta (Ninja)
fig 1.3 - Gangstarr, The Militia (Ninjafied Version)
My only regret is that this is without question the single greatest idea I will ever have in my life, and yet it is one that will almost certainly never make me any money. But that's it, my gift to the world and to future generations. You can thank me later.
9/10
The Originals:
Gangstarr, The Milita. Greatest video of all time? Very possibly yes.
Geto Boys, Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta. Doesn't it, though?
I am unable to give an accurate review of the subjective experience of teething, as it was quite a long time ago and I don't really remember all the details. But I would imagine I didn't particularly enjoy it. What I can give you is an all-too-comprehensive account of the experience from the other side, as the parent of a teething one-year-old. Essentially, in layman's terms for those of you who are fortunate enough to not yet have spawned offspring of your own: it involves a lot of being awake when you would prefer not to be awake. One's nights become a soul-destroying routine of being wrenched from pleasant dreams1 to spend several hours going through a futile cycle of milk bottles, teething gel, Calpol and "oh just leave him, he'll surely stop crying sooner or later". (He doesn't). Of course, when you do finally manage to successfully get the screaming ratbag back off to sleep, the mind then chooses just that moment to rebel and experience a perversely ill-timed bout of insomnia, and you end up lying in bed for hours in the middle of the night worrying and wondering about topics as diverse as whether the kid's okay, the global economic crisis and its likely impact on your mortgage, and whether this would be an appropriate time to get up and have that leftover ham in a nice sandwich with maybe a glass of milk.
I once heard about a scientific study which found that the impact of small-baby-enforced insomnia on one's mental acuity and intelligence levels was functionally equivalent to experiencing a mild but significant form of brain damage, and the only thing I can say about that is "well, duh." I do feel it gives one a peculiar insight into one's own parents. Have you ever wondered why your Mum and Dad were so weird? Well, it's because you, by the sheer fact of your existence and basic needs as a human infant, systematically destroyed their mental stability, judgement and decision-making abilities to the point where wearing corduroy trousers with bicycle clips seemed like a good idea. Are you happy now?
2/10
1 Tonight's, since you asked: with the assistance of Marvel supervillains and Thor adversaries the 'Wrecking Crew', I was helping that woman out of the first couple of series of Teachers move her new soapmaking business' stock of Bath Bombs out of her old premises and onto a nice new canal narrowboat HQ, and everyone present was very impressed that I could carry the whole sofa on my back with no assistance.
I hate to come off as the predictably cynical misanthrope that, well, I am, but New Year's resolutions really are a load of absolute shit. Whether to "lose weight", "stop smoking" or "try not to have more than two bottles of gin before the milkman's been, except on Saturdays obviously, everyone's allowed Saturdays off, right? Right?", they are equally futile. It is entirely inexplicable why people persist in the delusion that their catastrophic character flaws, stubbornly resistant to any attempt at change for the rest of their lives, will somehow be magically rendered soluble by the fact that the last digit on the calendar has changed incrementally. If anything, the start of January is the worst possible time for embarking on any attempt at self-improvement, as it's cold out, everything's pretty fucking depressing and you're probably hungover anyway.
New Year's resolutions can be useful and constructive, but the key is to set achievable goals. If you aim too high you only end up failing, depressing yourself, and reverting to your destructive behaviours harder than ever, the only winner in the whole ghastly feedback loop of self-annihilation being Paul McKenna and his ever-growing empire of fraudulent "I Can Get You Off the Pipe" style self-help books. As such, I have decided this year to set the following - entirely realistic - resolutions for myself in 2009:
Learn all the (correct) words to the theme tune of Rawhide.
Train my one-year old son to say "Daddy" and give a sharp military salute.
It was so close. I almost didn’t start watching Lost at all. How nearly identical things might have been. The thought of a glossy drama about a bunch of whiny Americans trapped on an island didn’t strike me as my thing. However, having recently finished Robinson Crusoe, and also just returned from being stranded in the Pacific for a number of months following an ill-thought out mutiny attempt, I was in a desert island kind of place mentally, so thought I’d give it a try. However, as a backup plan I also played Scrabble with the wife, so if it was crap I hadn’t wasted the evening.
Jack, heroic
Luckily it takes very little of my mental power to beat Debbie, so I was able to follow the initially formulaic and lacklustre plot. That was until the polar bear appeared. A momentous polar bear, it marked the moment when American TV decided to embrace its slightly insane side. Or at least, when one show did, and then was quite successful and slavishly copied by everyone else. As well as the increasingly intricate and ludicrous mysteries the show also had an innovative structure whereby interspersed with all the running around the jungle you get a little flashback story about one of the characters and the crazy things they got up to back when they had different hairstyles. This meant that you got a good mix of ongoing developing stories, and self contained little vignettes, something you don’t see so much these days.
And all was well and good and Boon died and that was even better. However, when it came to the second series the makers took the controversial decision to make it just really dull. The running around the jungle that was innovative and ground breaking in the first series now looked tired. Every other episode seemed to focus on Dr Jack, an actor with a face so dull it couldn’t really be said to have even one expression. When the momentum seemed to dip either they’d find another hatch or Sawyer would take his top off again and look angry.
Jack, scared
When this dampishSmallville of a season reached its end the shock news came through that free telly people would no longer be showing it, and it seemed like a natural time to give up on the whole thing. I believe a number of people went through a similar testing of the faith, but most of them failed like the disappointing idiots that they are. However, I was able to start viewing the third series in the format that fits it best, badly recorded video tapes. The first three episodes probably contained more excitement than a whole season of Britain from the Air.
The third series on DVD, along with the American Office series 3, got us through the hard first few months of parenthood, whilst the fourth series got us through the slightly less hard but no less lethargic recent couple of weeks. And whilst one of the most fun parts of it, discussing it with co-workers the next morning, has been Lost, at least I have the comfort of knowing I have seen series 4 whilst Neill hasn’t.
Jack, perplexed by the baffling metaphysical inconsistencies of his universe
Admittedly the whole thing is little more than ‘what’s in the box?’, ‘oh, it was a monkey in a hat, that’s slightly disappointing. But look, here’s another box. What could be in this?’ etc. Etc. But as ScoobyDoo knows, mysteries are cool and distracting and help you fill up the wasted hours being working and sleeping. And that’s what Lost does. And if strange magical islands don’t rock your world there is an incredible assortment of humorously bad accents to laugh at, many of them inexplicably done by people who hail from the very area that the accent belongs to.
In this ongoing project (estimated completion date – 2106) Government appointed arbiters of taste Neill and James Cameron, and their descendents, will review everything in the world, and give it a score out of ten.
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