In the tradition of the best viral/memes/whatever the latest buzzword is for things your friends post and you post it too:
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11th March 2026 - "Brownies"
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In the tradition of the best viral/memes/whatever the latest buzzword is for things your friends post and you post it too:
Just got back from a lovely trip to the border county. Well, one of the border counties anyway. Of England. Turns out that a week is nowhere near long enough to even scratch the surface, especially as we could easily have spent 5 days building sandcastles in a Canutine attempt to withstand the tide.
I won’t have time to write all about it now, but our itinerary was as follows, and I shall aim to expand over the next day or so:
Ok, so the first and the last aren’t in Northumbria, but I consider them to be part of the trip!
It is a lovely place – more or less my first visit to the county, and I’m almost certain we’ll be going back next year for another go. The beaches are awesome too!
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull – trailer
Promise it’s not Rick Astley! Least it wasn’t when I watched it.
When I was growing up, we had a bit of family joke. Us youngsters would ask “what’s for supper?”, and be told that it was “wait and see pie”.
This happened so often, that “wait and see” pie actually became a specific meal – a steak and veg pie with a suet crust. It is one of my favourite dishes now, and while the exact recipe is a closely guarded secret, it is along these lines:
Wait and See pie
Serves approx 4-6
This is a two stage process – first you cook it on the hob, then transfer it into the oven, so it’s best to use a casserole dish that can do both. I guess you could transfer the filling into a casserole instead.
Ingredients:
Filling:
Pastry:
Method:
Notes
You can’t make the pastry in advance, as the self-raising magic starts as soon as the mixture gets wet. However, it’s so quick to make, this doesn’t really matter.
Was struck by two fairly random quotes in the media yesterday.
Good advertising creates a problem and its solution.
and
Doubt is not the opposite of faith. Certainty is the opposite of faith.
I know it’s still in beta, but Firefox 3 is looking really really nice.
Really fast, funky drop-down preview/autocomplete thingy in the location bar, nice styling and look and feel. Lovely.
Give it a whirl from Mozilla: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html
PS It seems to co-exist fairly happily with FireFox 2 under Windows.
I really should implement comments. 🙂
Anyway, some early responses from friends. I’ve edited for brevity/anonynmity as I haven’t asked them if they mind!!
H says:
- Life on Mars = yes
also
- The West Wing
- 6 Feet Under
Both remarkable pieces of programming. I am currently on series 2 of 6 Feet Under and series 3 of West Wing, and they’re gripping, still. The DVD box set thing is just the job for telly IMO – I can’t get organised to watch things at a particular time, but having a few box sets on the go is fine.
I probably would have put West Wing on my ‘possible’ list, but I’ve never seen an episode. Similarly 6 Feet Under caught my eye, but I haven’t quite manage to catch it yet.
When I commuted to Leeds every day, one of my co-passengers had a video iPod type whatsit, and he was making his way through Enterprise, squeezing in about an episode and a half each day. He’d done the full West Wing as I recall, and spoke very highly of it. If I was still having 70 minutes on the train each day, I would be very tempted to adopt a similar approach.
With some further reflection I might add
although I’m unconvinced this would survive more than one or two watches. I also wonder if Ghost Whisperer might be worth investigating?
Anyway, back to my friends; C tells me I’m very wrong about Lost
. Over to them:
Personally, now I’m part way through [Lost] Series 4 (of the total 6) I’m really looking forward to rewatching from the start to see how much they’d tied together from the very start. It feels really joined up at the minute, with things from the first few episodes onwards still being explained.
Others you’re missing are definitely Murder One, at least the first couple of series of 24. X-files is one I’m not sure I’d want to watch back-to-back, but wouldn’t want it lost. Buffy is a definite yes.
Murder One is not even on my radar – not sure I’ve ever heard of it! Although I never got into X-files, I would probably agree it should be saved for posterity. 24? Series 1 was very good, it’s true – but even that ended up being a bit too much like hard work for my liking (so much so I didn’t even start any of the later ones). I can’t see that I’d particularly look to watch it again.
Utterly unrelated, I wonder if Red Dwarf deserves an honourable mention?
A month or two ago I happened across the last ever episode of Friends being re-broadcast on some channel or other. Actually I only caught the last 5 minutes – and it’s not an episode I’ve seen in it’s entirety. All very emotional.
Anyway, voice over lady announces at the end that we needn’t be sad, because, starting the next evening, the whole lot would be shown again from the very first episode!
OO-oo
thought I. How exciting – I could watch every single Friends episode, in order!
Then reality hit – quite aside from the practicalities, do I really want to spend the next half a year of my life watching an episode of Friends every night?? I don’t think so.
But it has got me to pondering some of the truly great TV series of our time. The ones that would survive a dedicated onslaught of watching. The ones you could pass on to your children. The ones that you wish you’d seen every single episode, from start to finish, ideally in order. What would be on my list?
I haven’t yet settled on a definitive list, but mine would look something like (in no particular order)
Other contenders would include All Creatures Great and Small, possibly Buffy, maybe Heroes (didn’t see enough to make up my mind), and Smallville has a look in. Life on Mars is close, but I’m not sure it would take two viewings. Similarly Doctor Who and Torchwood pass the “watch every episode” criterion with flying colours, but I’m not sure they would really take more than a viewing each.)
Definitely off the list is Lost – and a few others I don’t have time to write because parental responsibility calls!!
Just a quick note – I’ve recently discovered The Ethical Superstore (http://www.ethicalsuperstore.com/), who have supplied all my Easter Eggs this year.
What an efficient organization – ordered the items, paid no more than I would have done at the supermarket (except for the postage, of course), and they arrived the next day! They offer bulk discounts too.
I’d already decided that I am going to have a Fairtrade Easter this year, but it’s not always easy to track down Fairtrade items. But this site has a really good range of ethical goods (by which they mean “eco”, organic, and/or fairtrade) – and they invite you to offset the carbon cost of the delivery with a donation.
So a full marks recommendation from me.
I almost had my poorest Lent performance ever last night (Ash Wednesday). We were having slightly-late pancakes, and one of the youth had brought Nutella (YUM!!), so I carefully covered my pancake with Nutella and squirty cream, rolled it up, and was about to tuck in when I remembered that chocolate is my Lent this year.
I’m not desperately good at Lent, but 19 hours would be a new all-time low for failure time. To be fair, when I break my Lent it’s usually because I forget, rather than a deliberate choice, but still…
One year I gave up tea and coffee, and expected to feel healthy and virtuous. Instead of which I felt like cr*p; major headache, shaking hands, general grumpiness. At the time I was quite disturbed by the extent of my caffeine addiction… these days I’m philosophical about the fact there are worse things I could be addicted to.
Lent itself is a strange beast. It’s a remembrance of the 40 days Jesus spent fasting in the wilderness after his baptism, and also the 40 years the Israelites wandered in the desert. It starts 40 days before Easter, on Ash Wednesday. Except it’s not really 40 days, ‘cos that only takes you to Palm Sunday (the Sunday before Easter). Turns out that Sundays aren’t in Lent (due to these being a standing day of celebration), which means the 40 days takes you up to Holy Saturday (the day before Easter Day). The Roman Catholics actually only manage 38 days, as they stop on Maundy Thursday.
My household is divided on whether, if you’ve given something up for Lent, you should be allowed it on Sundays. This is technically correct, but my other half feels this is not in keeping with the spirit of the thing – it’s no sacrifice to only give up something for 6 days (even if you do so for 6 weeks in a row). This is a valid point, but I might say that by the time you’ve not had something for 6 weeks, you’ve forgotten what it was like, so it’s not difficult anymore. Whereas if you have it every Sunday, it reminds you of just how nice it is, making of consistent difficulty throughout Lent.
The whole notion of sacrifice is counter-cultural these days, but I think that self-control and willpower are important characteristics – and that they’re like muscles: use it or lose it.
Anyway, I was pondering some things that one could give up, outside the obvious
chocolate/sweets/alcohol/tea/coffee thing:
The trendy thing in church circles these days is to take something up for Lent. I guess you are implicitly giving up some time in order to do this, but it is a more
positive approach. So common things to take up:
Churches seem to run lent courses quite often too – a 6 week study on something or other.
All in all I like Lent. It’s an opportunity to deny yourself something for a fixed (and fairly short) period of time, and generally be a bit more reflective about life.