Make my day...

Possibly my favourite video clip of all time, the expression on his face at 00:15!! It's obvs this made his day and it's lovely!

Best View

Best pub view in Newcastle? (Free Trade Inn - great beer too!)

 

March of time

 

I remember when I was a teenager (17) living through the first flushes of independence, I went on a lad's holiday to Cornwall. There were a few of us and we drove our own cars (bangers) down to the coast from the South East of England and stayed in fields and campsites in tents. It was brilliant, we were all just discovering pubs, beer, girls and that wonderful feeling that we could wake up in the morning and just go wherever the hell we wanted! Part of the landscape of that trip was listening to BBC radio one in the morning (not that we saw too much of the mornings!) and more specifically listening to Steve Wright (in the morning) we loved it, the mix of current music, quizzes, stupid sound effects and silly character sketches it seemed like it was tailored perfectly to our infantile sense of humour, and it probably was! Anyway I hear (with sadness) that today was the last ever Steve Wright show on BBC radio two (I guess it comes to us all eventually!), I must listen to it, although I feel like it's going to make me feel very, very old.

Rich and moreish

Tried this beer last weekend, it's a collaboration between Siren and Brew York. The colour is misleading,  you'd think it was a porter or a stout (i.e. being black) but it's not, it's an IPA! Anyway if you make a beer with the right combination of roasted malts and punchy American hops you get something that's fruity and hoppy on the nose and yet rich and moreish on the palette, a really nice style.

 

Friday Smirk

J&M illustrating the problem with proselytising religions like Islam and Christianity, the combination of confidence and ignorance is lethal.

 

Uplifting

Typically good xkcd cartoon explaining how the Bernoulli principal works, all solid science of course.. 

 

Midweek Mirth

Saw this Larson cartoon today, it just reminded me of the current Tory Government, and pretty much everything they do and say..

 

Dino revenge

The moment a NASA spacecraft was deliberately slammed into asteroid "Dimorphos" in order to see if such an impact could slightly alter the trajectory of the rock. This experiment was done to better understand what we might need to do if one of these space rocks was headed toward Earth and calculated to hit us in what might be a city or civilization ending event! The mission was a great success yielding much important data on the collision and it's effects. An asteroid (bigger than this one) was what did the dinosaurs in so you could say that this kinda makes us even?

Planning for the worst

This is a picture taken by a Danish F16 flying over the Baltic sea, it shows what a hole in an undersea gas pipe looks like at the surface. The pipeline in question is the much publicised Nord Stream 1 which apparently has two leaks at the moment, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline (which isn't operational) also has a leak. This number of leaks in close proximity to two separate pipelines is too much for coincidence, the Russians have almost certainly sabotaged it (link in Swedish). I don't think we should be surprised at this, the most likely thing that Putin will do next is to turn off all gas supplies to the West, I expect he's just waiting for the first cold front to sweep in from the Arctic to do it. The only thing we can do is to prepare for this worst case scenario, ensure that emergency supplies and suitable support is in place for vulnerable people over the Winter, we don't want to have pensioners surviving Covid just to die of hypothermia in their own houses, unable to heat or feed themselves during a cold snap! We're in a sorry state of affairs at the moment and, based on their past record, I have zero confidence in this Government to have the competence to get us through it all unscathed. You have to ask how on earth we got to this point with hardly a vote cast!

 

Monday Mirth

Amusing metric at the "Disgusting Food Museum" (in Malmo)..

 

Prophetic?

This is what Rishi Sunak predicted would happen if the neo-Thatcherite Liz Truss plan (a completely batty increase in borrowing/spending paired with a decrease in taxes) was implemented, so far it would appear that he's not far wrong. Sunak wasn't a great choice for PM, but, he would have been far better than Truss in my opinion. This is what happens when leaders are selected by a tiny minority of people who spend most of their time closeted away at the 19th hole of their leafy golf clubs confirming each other's biases.

 

Shroom

Puffball mushrooms seem to be favouring our garden this year?

 

Empty-nesters

We dropped my daughter off at her new home (for the next 3 years) on Saturday, she's going to UCL in London and yesterday was the main day of "dropping off" new students. Since parking is a nightmare in that part of town we were allocated a specific time slot outside the halls of residence where she's based and we had to stick rigidly to it! A miserly 30 minutes is all you get in which to transport all "stuff" from car to room and say your goodbyes etc. However, we made the most of it, arriving a few minutes early and by moving our car to an NCP car park nearby after the allotted time! Anyway we had plenty of time to help her sort all her things out and after that we all went for some well deserved lunch! Anyway, it wasn't long before we had to scoot, so we wished her well and off we went! 

Officially "empty-nesters" now (yippee!)

 

Friday Smirk

A new J&M cartoon, pointing out that our prejudices and biases are often invisible to us. 

 

Midweek Mirth

Excellent stuff from Private Eye..

 

Steady Growth

 

I remember, not too long ago, that there were probably only a dozen places in London where you could get a pint of decent craft beer and even then only a sniff of the then hyped up new releases of styles and hops emerging from the USA. I first started to take notice of this emerging scene around 2012 but it had been "brewing" (excuse the pun) for a few years before that. Some would claim that Meantime (in Greenwich) was the first real "craft" brewery in the UK, they started in 1999 but were quite mainstream in their outlook and the styles they made, other contenders would include Brewdog (2006) and Thornbridge (2005) although there's clearly a debate to be had around definitions here. Anyway, regardless of who was first, London was the place most of these beers showed up for the first time and were available to actually buy and try. 

I remember trying my first "Punk IPA" from Brewdog back in 2012 it was a revelation, the hop forward style and aggressive bitterness was new, fresh and intriguing, so much so that I even blogged about it (rare at the time)! Getting hold of these beers however was a different story, it was difficult, I recall taking a trip up to London just to go to the Brewdog bar in Campden about a year or so after it opened and that was the closest place to where I live (40 miles away!) that I knew of at the time where you could try craft beers. Fast forward 10 years and there are five (good) craft breweries within a ten mile radius of my house, I can buy great craft in the supermarket and there are over 300 locations in London alone that sell and/or serve this kind of beer. 

The big question now is "what happens next"? There's no doubt that the early founders of this scene have generally done well, Brewdog is a billion dollar business at this point (lucky I invested early!) and I've even seen beer from my local craft brewery (Siren) based in Berkshire available in places as far afield as California! But, can this growth be sustained? Covid certainly slowed things down somewhat, several newly formed breweries and bars closed and there's been a slight contraction of the industry in the last couple of years. I suspect the impending energy cost crunch will further weed out the "unfit" producers and outlets I fear the craft beer industry is , for the most part, still in its Darwinian phase. On the positive side though, when you look at overall consumption, then this segment of the market has only just scratched the surface and there are still plenty of new outlets opening up every month. The scene is spreading out over the country like the root system of a young tree, there are still places in the UK where you struggle to find craft (like here for example) but hopefully, eventually, it will permeate every nook and cranny of the land and you'll be able to find a decent pint wherever you find yourself.

Victimless crime..

Women in Iran are currently reeling from the death of one of their own. Mahsa Amini, 22 died on Friday after spending 3 days in a coma after being arrested by the so called "morality police" for "breaking hijab laws" (it's a shame protecting Iranian Women's lives isn't considered as "moral" by the "morality police" as childishly guarding the perceived "property" of men, a truly Abrahamic  religious perspective if ever there was one). Spontaneous protests of hijab burning and cutting of hair have broken out across the country and protestors have been seen sporting signs saying "death to the dictator" referring to the "spiritual leader" (whatever that means) of that country Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. 

It's sad to see unnecessary death anywhere, especially when the person is so young and the crime is victimless! Those liberals here in the UK who defend the compulsory wearing of these kinds of garments under the supposed shield of "culture" or "freedom of choice" really have no clue. The lived reality of millions bears out the truth of these archaic laws, that they are hated and the symbols of them, like the hijab, are the modern equivalent of medieval chastity belts, i.e. nothing at all to do with the freedom, modesty or wellbeing of the women that are forced to endure them and everything to do with the desired control that powerful men and the religious institutions that prop them up wish to exert over them.

 

Tropical and Dank

Big shout-out for this brew. It's a collaboration between Verdant and Beak and for those people who read this blog you'll know that they're two of my most favoured breweries in the country at the moment. The prospect of the best bits of these two master's of haze was too tantalizing to pass up so I purchased a couple of cans of "It Is Forbidden" as soon as I heard it was available. 

I'm glad to say it doesn't disappoint,  haze for days, thick, creamy and multi-layered, flavour-wise. This particular beer features a hop from the USA that's so new it doesn't even have a name yet and is currently simply called "HBC586" tropical and dank is how I would describe it and the flavours are so forward (read in-your-face) that they almost hide completely the 8% ABV that this double IPA features, a real treat, great stuff!

A trip down memory drain..

I cracked open one of these this evening as lubrication while I'm making dinner for the family. It's a beer made by one of my favourite (and frequently cited on this blog) breweries, Verdant in Cornwall. Called "300 Laps of your garden" it's a hazy pale ale made with Azacca, Mosaic and Nelson Sauvin hops (probably all in my top 5 hop varieties) and is completely lush. The name stems from when this brew was conceived, i.e. during the first lock-down and the whole "Captain Tom" thing, so heart warming at the time but the ending was so sadly depressing, anyway, it's a great brew, if you ever see it in your local bottle shop buy it immediately!

 

WWII Aircraft

I've noticed something odd over the last couple of days. Pretty much at the same time of day a couple of Spitfires (or perhaps a Hurricane and a Spitfire judging by the hazy outline of the wingtips) fly over our town. I would bet that some part of the Queens funeral proceedings involves a fly past and these guys are practicing something, anyway, it's a wonderful sight (and noise) as they fly over. Yesterday I managed to grab a quick picture (above) it's a bit grainy as I only had my phone and about 10 seconds to react, anyway, watch out for WWII aircraft in our near futures!