eskimo pie
!!!!!!!!!!
21 December 2004
console yrself with the new bleep pop
“console yrself with the new bleep pop”
this wz the headline in metro – so i don’t actually know what the “new bleep pop” is exactly, as i couldn’t read over the fellow bus traveller’s shoulder w/o making a weirdo of myself… what i cd see of the first para is that it’s something to do w.computer games, hence this post is here to celebrate the tremendous pun on CONSOLE hurrah!
pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør in FT /New York London Paris Munich • No Comments
20 December 2004
THE DADDINO FAMILY TREASURY OF CHRISTMASES PAST Christmas 1978
THE DADDINO FAMILY TREASURY OF CHRISTMASES PAST
Christmas 1978
It never occurred to me that Lobster & Shrimp Fra Diovolo might not constitute a “real” Christmas dinner. It also never occurred to me that it was an especially Italian-American thing, either — if anything, it seemed appropriately “fancy.” But I never really paid much attention to Christmas dinner anyway, it being an unwanted interruption of my toy ecstasy when I just as easily have taken a plate upstairs to my room. I bet I liked it, though (the shrimp, anyway): along with predilections towards thick-framed glasses and melodic yawning, I inherited from my dad an appetite for really spicy foods, something I know I got from consciously imitating him. Of course, I could never keep up. At five or so, I tried one of his breakfast grapefruits, finding it a completely impenetrable eating experience now matter how much liquid sugar I put on the damned thing. Much later, on a mid-eighties trip to Washington D.C., he and his future wife took me to my first Indian restaurant; for me, it was an obstacle course of taste-bud death-by-misadventure and rivers of mucous — him, no problem. Getting back to Christmas, there were a couple times when I stayed with the adults long during the dessert trying to finish an espresso, just like the adults at the table were having. Yeah, I would finish it, but taste-wise, I couldn’t see the point of it. Much too bitter. There was a grand upshot, though. A little later (but still a kid), emboldened by the times I had espresso, I would take every opportunity during my day camp’s “Parents’ Day” to ostentatiously take some free coffee at the industrial urns placed at strategic locations throughout the grounds, thereby freaking out both parents and counselors. That was fun, a little. Probably nobody would blink now if they saw such a thing.
Judging from yesterday’s picture, this year’s Christmas table seated at least thirteen, and some subsequent Christmases probably had even more when even more folks from my mom’s side of the family joined in. Yet to my parents’ (and grandparents’) credit, we never had a separate “children’s table” at special occasions, at least as far as I can remember.
Michael in Blog 7 • No Comments
CILLA BLACK – “Anyone Who Had A Heart”
“Anyone who had a heart would love me too”. When Cilla Black sings it, this is not a request. Dynamic to be sure, but this song requires its singer not to lose the vulnerability when they turn up the volume, and Cilla never pulls that off. Her demand to be loved is almost bullying in its stridency. And the British public listened, making this the best-selling single by a British woman and making Cilla Black a star.
And there’s the trouble. On paper the story of the hat-check girl turned pop star is wonderful, in the real world it ends up at Blind Date, which of course as a sensitive boy I despised. (And even now I’ve sluiced out most of the virginal bile that prompted such hate, the thought of the program makes me wince). It’s terribly unfair on the Cilla of ’64 to hold the Cilla of ’89 up as prosecution evidence, but I can’t help it. Playing this song I don’t just hear a young woman with a remarkable ability to shift voices, I hear Cilla Black accessing her own future, the full-on parts a preview of the prime-time caw that blighted my Saturdays.
Tom in Popular • 28 Comments
THE BACHELORS – “Diane”
An unwitting example of how quickly things change, the cod-country yokelry of “Diane” would have blended perfectly into 1962′s list of No.1s, but now seems quaint and entirely out of place. Innocuous enough, though, even charming if you catch it on a good day. The group’s website describes them as “the original Irish boy band”. It’s a witty and canny claim, as it’s not hard to imagine Louis Walsh running his eye over this, though no doubt his boys would have erred on the ponderous side. At least the Bachelors keep things light.
Tom in Popular • 11 Comments
Who is Jonathan Creek
Who is Jonathan Creek
During the recent FT server move, a massive and improbable system error generated this oddity on our new “essays” blog. Somehow it also managed to be published BACK IN TIME.
Alan in Do You See • No Comments
THE SEARCHERS – “Needles And Pins”
That slight increase in tempo on “she will see just how to say please – and get down on her knees” – the sudden enthusiasm in “hurtin’ her! hurtin’ her!” – in this song there’s a hint of whitened knuckles, tightened expressions, a savage quality that’s surprising and discomforting. At the same time the band are playing with a lightness and control that makes the surges of quickened anger that bit more effective – and the sounds they’re drawing out of their guitars are nothing short of lovely. How can something so delicate be so bitter?
Tom in Popular • 5 Comments
THE ADVENT CALENDAR OF CHRISTMAS FILMS 20: Home Alone
aka Edvard Munch?s The Scream in film form. How much of a selling point was the cute moppet, head in hands, yelling. This is an idiosyncratic gesture considering the plot of the film. Certainly being left behind leaves Mac in a tough spot, but even when the burglars turn up he always has the upper hand. Be it laying down his little dainty man traps made of matchbox cars, or organising a timed to precision splatting of Joe Pesci, panic is well outside his arsenal of emotions.
The joy of being the master of your own destiny is implicit in the Home Alone films (perhaps more so in the less simple but more magical Home Alone 2: Lost In New York). Indeed whilst the title has become short-hand for horrific tales of child neglect, this comes straight from the school of the “kids are smarter than the adults” world of fiction. And at the heart that funny looking kid, Macauley Culkin, happily taking centre stage without a coterie of friends or family. Perhaps as a metaphor for the lonely child at Christmas Culkin gives hope to the increasingly small family sizes these days. Every era deserves the child star it gets. The early nineties got Culkin to show that it was okay to panic before you sorted everything out.
Pete Baran in Blog 7 • No Comments
the grebt pie debate (additional notes)
once again it is the outlier position producing the cherishable facts: a stout defence by the unpeeled-hard-boiled-egg=a-pie faction impelled sistrah becky to argue that, in that case, a PYRAMID must be a pie (providingof course the tomb remained unbroached) —> this may or may not be the case but it dimly stirred a memory i couldn’t access till this morning, which is that suet-wrapped meat pudding we used to have WAY TOO OFTEN at my second school was known as BOILED MUMMY!!
ANNALS OF KID SCIENCE
ANNALS OF KID SCIENCE
overheard, small sister (7?) and brother (8?) sitting together on a bus
(the brother is the older one)
b: there IS no largest number!
s: yes there is!*
b: there could be a number that started at the beginning of this bus and went all the way to the back**!!
s: HOW!!??
[generally inaudible, though some of it involves the brother's disparagement of the sister's maths teacher's method, qualifications and intelligence, all of which are hotly defended]
s: (…) like 12 divided by 100!
b (triumphant and gleeful): you can’t DIVIDE 12 by a 100 hahahaha (etc)
*i tend to side with the sister here: assuming the universe is geometrically closed, and that there is a lower-limit granularity to the size of objects, then there is an upper limit to the number of possible “things”, and thus an upper limit to the number of possible relationships between those things… there will thus be numbers which are just too big to have a use, hence since use = value, there are values which don’t exist (this is not a proof so much as an indication obviously)
**we are on No.73 ie a v. long bendybus – so there was potential for the discussion to invoke the very curvature of space which allows for the possibility of geometrical closure!! ie what if the bendy bus was so bendy that its back curled round to touch its front??
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