brokenenglish

Ultimate Bloody Mary

Fri, 25 May 2007 21:09:21 +0000

A lifetime of turning to a proper Bloody Mary once the sun has gone over the yard arm has evolved a Bloody Mary recipe as follows:

Materials & Ingredients:

Highball glass - 6 inches or more high
Ice - 3 lumps minimum
Vodka - any brand as long as at least 37.5 percent proof (UK)
Tomato juice - best is handmade or Big Tom
Tabasco sauce
Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce
Fresh squeezed lemon
Milled pepper
Milled rock salt
Swizzle stick or stick of fresh celery or (clean) index finger

Method:

Drop ice into glass
Top up with vodka to quarter of glass depth
Fill up to just below top of glass with tomato juice (shake it up first)
Squeeze in ¼ to ½ of the lemon
Add 3-4 drops Tabasco and repeat
Add a few slurps Worcestershire sauce
Add some ground rock salt - not too much not too little
Add some ground fresh pepper
Stir with skewer/swizzle stick/celery stick/finger
Taste and adjust for impact/heat

Notes:

Use ice even if all or any other main ingredients are frozen.
Lemon and salt are fundamental (garlic salt can also be used, but easy with it).
Measures given are for serious alcoholics with depraved senses of taste and smell - reduce according to (lack of) experience.
Celery is a somewhat distracting embellishment, inappropriate for hard drinkers but appealing to vegetarians. Stick or finger is better.
Enjoy it with all necessary caution. Change to something else after 2/3 glasses.

Technorati Tags: cocktails, foodanddrink, vodka, Bloody_Mary,

Blog Block and how to beat it

Fri, 25 May 2007 16:52:40 +0000

I’ve never been what you might call a frantic blogger, unfulfilled if posting less than five insightful stories every day, being altogether more intermittent in my blog work as in so many other of my life tasks, but never has so much time passed by as the thirteen blogless months between the increasingly puerile Finnish vid below and this moment, now.

Artic Cool

Fri, 21 Apr 2006 17:13:38 +0000

1980s music video from Finland - the ultimate in slick?

Technorati Tags: video, Finland, Googlevideo, theworstmusicvideo_EVER,

Pandora, Mogwai and Rankin

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 20:40:13 +0000

The scintillatingly brilliant Pandora - where you create personal ‘radio stations’ by putting in the name of a song or a musician you dig, and Pandora chooses an endless stream of music based round your selection from the huge archive built up by the Music Genome Project, plus a lot more as well, seems a very Web 2.0 application, although using Flash rather than AJ AX, not that I think the latter is fundamental to the Web 2.0 idea, unlike some.

What I’m especially grateful to Pandora for already is reminding me how ideal the wonderful Mogwai are for writing to while you listen. Until Scottish scribbler Ian Rankin of Rebus fame highlighed this fact somewhere or other, I had not been able to write anything more challenging than an I.O.U. while any music was on, (spoken radio was of course even worse), but like Rankin I find Mogwai just perfect for everything this side of poetry. Thought I’d share this, while putting in the plug for Pandora, with which (or whom) I have nothing to do, beyond the obligations of admiration.

Technorati Tags: Pandora, Mogwai, IanRankin, music, Web2.0, AJAX, Flash

Notes from the Underground # 1066

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 19:45:14 +0000

It was being put about that gorgeous people-person and newt-lover Mayor Livingstone is Xmas-gifting us London tube vermin with an extra carriage on all Jubilee Line trains. Yay! But what’s this…?

From the Transport for London site:

Weird fixes 2: Cannot read Adobe CS Help

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 15:49:18 +0000

This applies to Adobe Help Center and Adobe Bridge Center in Adobe Creative Suite 2:

Problem: cannot read (or can hardly read) Adobe Help files or Bridge Center due to weird fonts.

Weird fixes 1: Cannot access Visual Studio help

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 15:00:01 +0000

Apparently this applies to either Visual Studio 2003 or 2005, and can happen either out of the blue, (i.e. after its been running happily for some time) or immediately after installation.

Problem: when you try to access Visual Studio help and/or MSDN Library you get a ‘Server not found’ or similar message.

Cuppa Charlie

Sat, 22 Oct 2005 19:34:02 +0000

Thanks Advertising/Design Goodness and Ad Agency Ruf Lanz Werbeagentur, Zurich

Technorati Tags: advertisements, prince_charles, images

Tory Sudoku: the Winter Ashes

Sat, 22 Oct 2005 16:48:54 +0000

The Tory leadership contest is making the usually gloomy transition from autumn to winter almost as enjoyable as the English cricket team made the summer: when somebody said the Tory contest provided a welcome break from Sudoku, they hit the nail on the head.

Digest::MD5 Problems

Sat, 22 Oct 2005 13:53:24 +0000

Out of the blue (it seemed) I started to have problems with my Movable Type installation, with the error messages appearing in connection with the marvellous Markdown plugin and when trying to update a template or rebuild the site all indicating the MT application was not able to access the Digest::MD5 Perl module.

Via support consultation with our great hosting company Openhosting, it turned out that the server on which brokenenglish is hosted was recently upgraded, and some problems connected with Perl module compatibility were being experienced.

Trawling the Movable Type Support Forums and googling around, I eventually located a Digest::MD5 package put together back in 2001 by Ben Trott of Ben and Mena, Movable Type’s illustrious founders and owners. After unpacking this, I uploaded just the Perl directory inside it into my MT > extlib > Digest directory within the MT installation, which (obviously) already existed inside extlib, and only contained a single MD5.pm file. After uploading the Perl dir from Ben Trott’s archive, this was added inside the Digest dir, and itself contained a second md5.pm file. Once done, eveything returned to normal with my Movable Type installation.

This rather garbled report may help others experiencing a similar error, which appears to be fairly widespread.

Technorati Tags: movabletype, software, plugins, md5, perl

Jerusalem, England

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 11:01:26 +0000

Of the many good things made possible in the wake of England’s awesome and unequivocal thrashing of the whingeing Aussie poofters at the Oval, few would be more welcome than the adoption of William Blake’s Jerusalem as the National Anthem of a renascent England - an idea eloquently promoted by the deafening crowd throughout the five days of glory down in London SE11.

Amoxil, Dogs, Thongs and Googletestad

Wed, 24 Aug 2005 13:32:15 +0000

Is the Human Condition, as of the past 48 hours, at long last laid bare in the latest Wordtracker keywords? Its a daunting thought.

Lucida Grande

Wed, 10 Aug 2005 10:39:19 +0000

Lucida Grande is the default style sheet font on many (most?) of the coolest and hottest of cutting-edge websites. A random sample currently includes Jeffrey Zeldman’s A List Apart, Dave Shea’s Mezzoblue, quite a number of the official CSS Zen Garden entries, Mike Pick’s minor reworking of the ubiquitous and influential Kubrick template for Wordpress, and just about any site designed by anyone with a Mac, not least the Apple site itself.

England Win!

Sun, 07 Aug 2005 13:10:07 +0000

With the most exciing finish to a test match ever, England beat the Aussies by 2 runs.

Flintoff, Pietersen, Harmison all amazing, Vaughan a great captain (pity about the batting) and even Geraint Butterfingers Jones getting that final tensest-ever wicket, this somehow makes it all worth it. Just seeing Ponting’s face at the end…

Now its Old Trafford on Thursday, and the chance of greatness beckons….its been a long long time.

Another Empire Pay Back?

Wed, 03 Aug 2005 16:40:07 +0000

Ageing hippie Christopher Hitchins talks good sense on Fox News about English leniency being partly to blame for recent Anglo-Muslim extremism. He interestingly mentions break up of British Empire and the Partition of India as a possibly deeper cause of (Pakistani) Islamist resentment than the similarly-aged and British-engineered creation of Israel. More organic food for thought in this exhausting period of English reassessment.