URTwitter

NEILL says:

As should be now be apparent, there is a lot of Stuff in the world, and the business of systematically reviewing it all and assigning marks out of 10 is time-consuming, difficult and highly dangerous. A top URT think-tank of scientists, mathematicians and cheese connoisseurs was recently convened to assess the situation, and its findings are summarised in the following formula.

x(S+N)
_________
U

S represents the amount of Stuff in the world.
N represents New Stuff.
x is the rate of increase in the amount of Stuff.
U is the rate at which Unified Review Theory is actually managing to Review Stuff.

The implications are clear and terrifying. Not only is Unified Review Theory not currently making any significant progress in reviewing the Stuff backlog, but the exponential increase in Stuff means that we are actually, in real terms, moving backwards.

Clearly this situation cannot be allowed to stand. To increase our efficiency and Stuff Turnover Rate we are pleased to announce the introduction of URT on Twitter, whereby your faithful reviewers Neill and James will continue to review everything, but in manageable and convenient 140-character chunks.

You can follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/urtheory

Unified Review Theory - Reviewing Stuff For Today's Busy Lifestyle!

Watchmen

(film)



JAMES says

Better than I thought it would be.

7.3/10

Going to the Cinema on your own

(Solitary Pursuit)



JAMES says

I have no idea why this should be such an issue. You wouldn’t think twice about watching television or your neighbours on your own, so why should the larger screen size (not in all cases, I can think of some cinemas and friends TVs that have roughly comparable dimensions) mean that instantly it is unsafe to venture on your own. Like a pub or restaurant cinemas are designated social areas, and to venture into one on your own is basically admitting that you have no actual friends and might as well start having rambling conversations with the pharmacist as your only human contact.

I admit it is preferable to watch something with someone else, if only for the chance to critically evaluate/lazily mock afterwards. However, this isn’t always possible. Like most heterosexual people I am married to someone who doesn’t exactly share my tastes in films and whilst the majority of times when we go to the cinema (which due to our young child is approximately once every economic cycle) we can find some happy medium, there are some adventures into the hard core of geekery which she is too girly to wish to accompany me on.

I do have actual friends (or Facebook friends, which are close enough), but the majority of them have yet to fall for the lure of Suburban life and insist on visiting the capitals overpriced fleapits. So it’s just me, facing down my failure in the form of a disinterested ticket seller. And while I’m here, did you know that teenagers get a discount on their tickets? Why don’t we just give them subsidised glue and say goodbye to society while we’re at it?

Of course I am the only one in the place on my own. Having no one to go for a drink with beforehand I am of course in time to see all the adverts, enduring the looks of all the happy couples who regard me as they enter, before finding a pair of seats at a safe distance and starting to chat. Then they start to laugh! Like it’s Fun! Don’t they know they’re interfering with my enjoyment of the advert with the guy and the car and stuff. I console myself with my popcorn, too large for one so that if I were to at it all myself my flesh would dehydrate and shrivel like a Nazi.

And I have no one to play the Trailers game with. Which is probably for the best as I’m rubbish at it.

The movie itself is fine as, like death, you are always on your own watching a film. But then after the explosive climax you are thrown back into your own existence, and the silence of the solitary man is deafening. And of course due to the length of films these days by the time you get home your wife is in bed, and doesn’t thank you for your lengthy discussion on how you missed the squid but actually the new ending makes more sense philosophically. Luckily, that is where the internet comes into its own, and you are no longer forced to spill your critical seed on the ground.

Cinema-going, like bridge and sex, is at its finest with at least 3 other people.

3.4/10

Brighton Restaurant Reviews

by JAMES

Oki-Nami

I am going to come clean straight away. The reason why I am going to review these restaurants is in the hope that word gets around that I might be reviewing a place and then maybe the serving staff would give me some goddamn respect. Hence the picture. There, that’s my face, remember it well waiters of England. It would be nice to get some kind of return for all this (admittedly minimal) effort I’m putting in.

Anyway, with interests fully declared, Oki-Nami. It’s a Japanese restaurant, as you may have guessed, in Brighton, and its fab. It is the ideal luncheon venue in that it is cheap, cheerful and with quite quick service. My companion and I both dined from the special lunch menu (we were there at lunch time, by the way), and were both very happy. The staff were pleasant and affable, maybe having recognised me, and the building was a lovely regency affair with twisty staircases. Any excess waiting was softened by the chopstick wrappers which doubled as origami patterns. My companion D had the very last tempura vegetables whilst I had pork belly (and is it just me, or is the pigs tummy the only thing they seem to be serving anywhere these days) with noodles.

For afters I had Japanese Millionaire’s Shortbread, though the only oriental element seemed to be some green ginger, and D had green tea ice cream which was refreshing but disappointingly not Tempuraed as promised. All washed down with plum wine and sake, enough to make me fairly giddy in the afternoon. My only criticism (apart from my other criticisms), was that there was a baby seated on the table behind us who uncannily mimicked both the looks and actions of our own child whom we had fled to the South Coast to escape from.

7.6/10

Alexander’s Gastronomy

It might undermine my apparent objectivity but we did appear to visit the two best restaurants in Brighton. Even if you were resident there you might not be aware of Alexander’s, located as it is off the main drag up and in the basement of one of the little hotels on the Old Steine. It is definitely worth the trip, as it is probably the finest restaurant I have ever dined in. It might be due to the fact that this is one of the first times I overcame my natural thriftiness and chose not to dine in a restaurant of the sort described above.

Or it might be all the booze we drunk.

Whatever the reason, it was great. There was a distinct lack of atmosphere caused by the remaining tables being filled by couples who seemed to have looked upon the place as a neutral location where they could sit and scowl in silence all night. But the waiter chap was friendly, and the toilets where Bali themed and reached through a secret passage, which I think is important. But most of all there is the food, the sort of food you wish could be conjured into reality by the sheer power of your memory, as memory could only ever be a cold reflection of the majesty of the process of eating.

I would warn you, though, don’t go if you’re a vegetarian. From the mighty amuse-bouche of pancetta on black pudding it was a big meaty fishy treat. I had my first ever lobster bisque as a starter, but it was the mains that really shone. Excellent ingredients cooked excellently seems to be the secret. My main was really three, a superb goose breast, a hare confit and some stuff which I never quite worked out what it was but tasted fine. As a special bonus I also got to eat my companion’s crackling as she had misread the menu. Eating other people’s food always gives it a little touch of specialness, which pushed this pork belly (see!) into the pork stratosphere.

The wine list was magnificent (we went for a sparkling wine from nearby Ditchling), the music was so good I begun to get paranoid that the guy had just nicked my iPod and put it on shuffle and the waiter (who turned out to actually be Alexander in the end) was very welcoming and enthusiastic when explaining the food. Also, by lasting three hours it solved our dilemma of what to do after dinner. We went to bed and watched TV.
Finally, a tip. Pretend you’re staying at the nearby Sea Spray hotel and get 10% of the bill (or actually do stay there, it’s great and has an Elvis themed room).

9.5/10

Delifrance

As if to punish us for such fine food, our final meal on the train home was straight from the anus of Satan. Due to my usual underestimation of how long it takes to travel by foot between locations and my insistence on having a hot cookies and cream milkshake (big mistake) we were unable to have fish and chips on the beach. My companion D was not best pleased as we ended up in East Croydon at 3pm still unlunched, so we decided to use our 10 minutes between trains to check out the culinary options available to us.

There weren’t many, but on a platform side Delifrance there were some surprisingly inviting looking Croque Monsuiers. Sure they were expensive, costing about as much as our tempura/pork tummy noodles the day before, but they were ham sandwiches with melty cheese on them, what could go wrong? The fact that they had a consistency more akin to bodily fluids than actual food, and a taste that could only have been reached by several months of consultancy, focus groups and hours spent in the lab trying to come up with the flavours most likely to cause someone to pull a face combining disdain and disgust.

I wonder if the whole thing is a cunning French satire on fast food?

Yuk.

0.5/10

Ginsters New York Style Steak and Cheese Pasty

(Pasty)



NEILL says:

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.

No wait, hang on.

It's a fucking CORNISH PASTY.


4/10

Sleepyhead

by Passion Pit
(Song)



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.

I cannot decide these things for you.

7/10

Mid-Week Drinking and it’s Inevitable Consequences

(Mistake)



JAMES says:

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.

A cautionary tale

3.3/10

Unified Review Theory - the PODCAST

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.

Just click the above image , or follow this link:

http://www.archive.org/download/NeillandJamesCameronUnifiedReviewTheory-Podcast01_0/URT_podcast_00196kbps.mp3

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.

Enjoy!

McVities Toaster Waffles

(Low-effort 'convenience' foodstuff)



NEILL says:

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.

7/10

A Short History of Nearly Everything

by Bill Bryson
(Book)



JAMES says:

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.

5.8/10