Irish Brexit comedy

A very funny Irish comic I came across recently, talking about Brexit from the Irish point of view, amusing, sad and prophetic at the same time. It's funny how people in the UK hardly ever talk about this anymore, it's joined the list of dinner party no-no's along with religion and politics, as usual the Brits are paranoid about causing "offence"! Personally, I feel it's more appropriate than ever to dredge it all up again, we need a strong and united Europe right now and currently the prevailing wind is blowing in the opposite direction, especially with the incompetent Foreign Secretary we have, soon to be incompetent Prime Minister. Flush the Tories out of power ASAP and have a second referendum within 3 years, this kind of bold, pivotal move is what we need right now IMO or we'll fall even further down the economic league tables in terms of standards of living and social services provision, Scotland will be off and we'll have gained absolutely zip-all except blue passports and empty supermarket shelves.

Saturday Smile

Supposedly seen in Cheltenham (appropriate!)

 

Kerb life II

Back in 2021 I blogged about some road workings that had installed plastic kerb stones and noticed the kerb on this busy corner had already suffered some minor damage. I speculated at the time about how long they'd last and whether or not they might be a false economy (see picture on the left). Well, 18 months later (picture on the right) and it looks like there's been quite a bit of damage, the plastic seems to have been completely smashed in four or five places and is looking a bit sorry for itself. 

I wonder how much longer it'll be before the road has to be closed for a week so that these smashed kerb stones can be replaced (hopefully by more robust ones!), then again, knowing our council the patch of grass behind the kerb is probably ear-marked for a new housing estate and they're planning to trash the whole area, we shall see..

 

Safe and sound

I'm really hoping this is a real advert (you never know with photoshop these days!) supposedly seen in NYC, but if it isn't, it's still very good so well done colonial brothers and sisters and vive la révolution!

 

Sticks and stones..

Recently seen on the interwebs, a word-cloud built from the words people most readily think about when contemplating our likely next Prime Minister, Liz Truss. As you can see it's hardly inspiring although I'm relieved to see that "pork" scores the same as "competent" (both of which are less than "clueless" and "twat"), gotta keep the sausage lobby on-side! 

 

Use them or lose them..

Sign seen outside a pub in my home town (been in the same spot since the 17th century), amusing and plucky in a classic "British" kind of way but also smacks of desperation. I fear things are going to get worse before they get better and local (small) businesses will need a lot of support from customers, government and suppliers to survive this oncoming "Winter of discontent". 

Friday Smirk

J&M pointing out the rationalists position on prayer, i.e. that, much like masturbation, it only benefits the person doing it and not the person they're thinking of...

 

Midweek Mirth

I'm always up for a humorous Venn...

 

Philosophy for our times

 

More fiction is written using Excel than Word..

Short back and sides

I was out walking this lunchtime, my usual midday exercise, and came across this little stone sign. I'd never noticed it before and must have passed the spot a hundred times! Anyway, I reckon that because the grass is so short and, basically dead because of the hot Summer, the sign was way more exposed than normal, in previous years I bet it would have been obscured by tall grass. Anyway, it made me think about what one of these old fashioned stone mileage signs would be called, "milestone" I guess, I wonder how old this one is and whereabouts in the centre of London 31 miles would actually be, time for some Googling!

 

Tuesday Titter

14 year old boy working in the marketing department?

 

Broken Britain

I wonder if the tourist board will be putting something like this on the front of it's brochures for next year? Come to Britain, swim in shitty water, pay more than anywhere else for public transport (if it's running), don't get ill whatever you do and sorry if you get mugged but there's no lawyers to hear your case any more.. "Broken Britain", catchy..

 

Sunday Walk

Had a nice walk alongside the Thames this afternoon with the family, it was a lovely day, sunny but not too hot although the grass down by TVP Nature Reserve was tinder dry still.

 

Grapefruity

I tried a new beer while making dinner last night, a collaboration between two of my favourite breweries, Elusive (up the road from me in Finchampstead) and Verdant, Falmouth Cornwall. The beer called "Trust The Diagram" in an IPA in a West coast style and is delicious, tons of grapefruit flavours with a citrus core, a lip smacking bitter finish that makes you want another sip, I've got another can in the fridge so may just crack it open later this evening with some cheese, yum!

 

Celebrations

 

We're in a celebratory mood at our house this week, like many families up and down the country and after much stress and anxiety, the A-Level results for my Daughter came in on Thursday morning and we were all pleased that she completely smashed it! She'll be attending UCL (University College London) from September and I'm super proud of her, the Champers is on me this weekend!

Scandalous

I'm not sure what's worse, the fact that water companies dump raw sewage into our seas or the fact that we, as a society, allow them to do it. This is a picture of the beach at Swanage, Dorset yesterday, it's time that this ceased and the buggers were re-nationalised IMO.

 

Friday Smirk

J&M on the thorny subject of religious violence and why Islam is probably the most violent religion at the moment (it hasn't always been) I think the best way to understand it is not to think of these religiously inspired attacks as a desire to protect God or even protect the sensibilities of Muslims, it's really all about scoring browny points! Like a cheap TV game show, many religious people believe that if you score enough points during your life by doing things that you believe are "the will of your God" then you get eternal life, virgins, paradise etc. in the next life. I guess the number of points you get for beheading a blasphemer is large, whereas helping the poor not so much, mysterious ways indeed.

 

Frumpy curtain twitchers?

So there's a hullabaloo going on in the media at the moment about the Prime Minister of Finland, Sanna Marin. A leaked video (above) shows her dancing at a party with friends and people are saying that her movements are "unbecoming of a Prime Minister" in case you don't know she is the lady wearing the black top with white jeans. Personally I think she looks great, and is obviously into her music, at least she's up to speed with what most normal younger people actually enjoy doing, i.e. dancing, going to festivals and generally having a good time, in fact truth be told I know quite a few older people who enjoy that stuff too! 

Anyway, those frumpy curtain twitchers who are moaning about this should try having a Prime Minister who breaks the law, fathers illegitimate children, lies, cheats, lines the pockets of his mates and threatens to have people beaten up, then perhaps a few raunchy dance moves might not seem that bad?

2022 be like..

(from a real health-check web form) erm, run that one by me again??

 

Sunday park band

We went to Forbury Gardens (park) in Reading on Sunday afternoon to listen to one of our friends play in a band. The venue was the actual band-stand in the middle of the park and a fine concert it was too, particularly as we managed to locate ourselves in seats under a large oak tree in the shade next to the ice-cream stand! 

Anyway, just behind where we were sitting was a large cross monument (see picture above) and I didn't know what it was, when we got home I did a bit of Googling and found out that it's a memorial cross to King Henry the first, Fourth son of William the Conquerer he became king of England in 1100 and reigned for thirty five years. The reason it's in Reading is because he's buried here (although his entrails are buried in France!!)  somewhere under the ruins of Reading Abby (which you can just see in the background of the picture) and apparently there's an attempt going on to locate his remains (spurred on by the discovery of Richard III in Leicester) interesting stuff! I'm not sure how old the monument is, it doesn't look that old, but there's also a plaque nearby that confirms the link with Henry (see picture below)

 

Our collective waters have broken..

So our recent hot, sunny spell finally broke.. Unfortunately it decided to do it while I was on my daily walk (soaked!) as per the little video of an instant gutter torrent I shot at lunchtime today (above) Anyway, nice to see a bit of rain (a very rare sentence in the UK indeed!) Still, I think that's enough now to sustain at least another week of sunshine ("think of the poor gardeners".. I hear echoing in the ether) surely?

 

Monday Mirth

Just realised who Liz Truss reminds me of...

 

LCBF

I attended the London Craft Beer Festival (LBCF) last Friday. I managed managed to wangle things in order to get over to Wapping (East London) for the afternoon session, and most excellent it was too! Queues weren't too bad and I only had a slight wait to gain entry to the venue (the queues at these events are legendary) Once in I had a quick walk around to get my barings and then quaffed a tasty lager from Bristol's Lost and Grounded, I needed something cold as the temperature outside was pushing 35 degrees! Anyway, thirst quenched I grabed a bite to eat as it was midday and then worked my way around a few of the more well known brewers stations mainly sampling beers that I hadn't tried before, I mostly went for IPA's but mixed it up a little with a couple of dark beers. The tasting glass that you got when entering the building was a sensible size, roughly 150ml not too small so that you got a decent taster but not too big either as I can imagine that the temptation to overdo things would be strong with many as the ticket price included as much beer as you wanted!

It was an interesting venue, mostly indoor with the lower floor comprising a series of vaulted cellars (providing shelter from the heat outside!) and the upper floors large open spaces and separate rooms, ideal for a festival like this as many of the brewers converted individual cellars or rooms into their own "pub" like spaces and the general feeling was buzzy but not overly crowded, I shot a little video from the lower floor (see below) to try to capture the sense of the place.

Most of the big names of the British craft scene were there with a few notable exceptions, I was looking forward to trying a Beak (Sussex) brew or two but although they advertised as attending they weren't there (or I couldn't find them!) I also missed Burning Sky, Elusive and Vibrant Forest all of whom produce some great beer from  the South East of England, still, I can't complain there were more producers there than I could possibly get round in the four hours available so I had to be quite selective! 

Best beer of the show for me was the first barrel aged stout by Double Barrelled (a Reading based firm) called "Reach" a deliciously boozy engine oil of a beer (see picture below)! The most outrageous drink of the day was a pastry stout by Amundsen called "Black Forest Glaze with Toasted Coconut Swirl", the name says it all really, and the best IPA was by far the Citra-Mosaic Time Hops beer from Siren so flavoursome and aromatic, a real treat. 

Anyway, we hit the road at around 3:30pm and headed back to Waterloo via Tower Bridge and the Jubilee line making it home just in time to meet my Wife and Daughter in town for a quick Thai Yellow Curry and rice to bookend a long (and very warm!) day of interesting taste experiences!

All in all a good day out, lot's of walking (around 10k!) but an enjoyable event, well organised and featuring some great producers, can't wait for next year now!

 

Satanic Attack

A sad day indeed for freedom of conscience and speech, a religious retard, of the Islamic variety, stormed a stage in New York where Salman Rushdie was speaking and stabbed him multiple times. Rushdie is in hospital now on a ventilator with very serious injuries, hopefully he'll pull through. What can you say about things like this? It's very easy to become enraged and to wish for vengence but in many ways that's what the fascist organisations that encourage these kinds of things exactly want, they want a war of civilisations, they long for this world to end in a ocean of blood, as their pathetically inadequate "holy books" demand. Their idea of a happy life is one spent on your knees wishing for the next, a totally asinine and irrational way of thinking. 

There isn't much we can do as individuals about random murderous attacks like this, the solution is, as always, education, our kids need to understand the value of the freedoms we enjoy and to treasure and defend them above all else. When I heard this news this morning I went onto Amazon and ordered a copy of the Satanic Verses, probably not a book I'd normally buy or read but I'm damn sure I will now!

 

Friday Smirk

Well, I certainly feel triggered now..

 

Time Hops - Documentary

A documentary by the Craft Beer Channel talking about the Time Hops project..

Simcoe

Now to the final "Time Hops" beer, an absolute belter championing the Simcoe hop. It's based on one of the most famous craft beers of all time, in fact, probably one of the most famous beers full stop. From the Russian River brewery in Santa Rosa, California came "Pliny the Elder" a West Coast style double IPA, in fact, one of the first DIPA's to hit the market and possibly the best. Pliny is a masterclass in flavour and balance, you would never guess that it was a brooding 8% monster of a beer it's so well balanced that it goes down like a 4% dishwater pint but oh my, the flavours and aromas just leap out of the glass, pine, citrus, dank weed, resinous, pithy, unctious malty goodness, it's impossible not to want another sip. The Time Hops version is a pretty good emulation of Pliny, it's got the requisite pine and dank vibes and there is grapefruit pith in abundance and as you can see from the photo they pretty much nailed the colour and clarity of the original beer. A real treat, if you see a can of this for sale, buy it without hesitation and savour a true classic.

 

Centennial

The third beer in the Siren "Time Hops" series features the hop "Centennial", another of the classic "C" hop that helped create the modern craft beer scene. It was the star hop in a beer called "Racer 5" made by Bear Republic Brewing in Sonoma, California back in 1999 and won awards, helping to cement a new category of (American) IPA as the central pillar for this new wave of emerging producers. The hop gives the beer a nice pithy grapefruit character and when used in a West Coast style also imparts a resinous bitternes that keeps you coming back for more, highly adictive! Don't get me wrong, I liked this beer and the West Coast style that it exemplifies, given a particular time and place it's just the job! However, my palette leans more toward the East Coast hazy styles these days (less bitterness etc.) and so this one was my least favourite of the four (at least for now!).

 

Midweek Mirth

Saw this on the interwebs the other day, one of those "funny but sad" moments.

 

Citra-Mosaic

The second beer in the "Time Hops" series is called "Citra-Mosaic", two main hops in this one (as per the name) and this time Siren were trying to recreate an American beer by the Alchemist brewery in Vermont called "Focal Banger". This beer emerged into the world in 2013 and was a revelation. Not only was it utterly saturated in hop flavour (due to the massive quantities of dry-hopping going on in the process) but also, importantly, hazy! Until then the pervasive wisdom was that if a beer was hazy then there was something wrong with it, not so, in fact often quite the opposite. After the success of Focal Banger people started to embrace hazy beers and these days they are commonplace, but back in 2013 it caused quite a stir and much angst among traditional beer drinkers. I visited the home of the Alchemist brewery back in July on my trip around Vermont and sampled this beer (among others) at source, it was fab. This particular version of it was also great, probably my favourite of the series, smooth, hazy and full of wonderful hop flavours from the classic Citra-Mosaic combo. 

 

Cascade

 

So here's the first of the "Time Hops" series from Siren, it features the hop Cascade (obvs) and is modelled on a beer first produced by the Sierra Nevada Brewing company back in 1980. The head brewer of that company was experimenting in his home brewing with the newly available cascade hop and was loving the green, resinous citrus flavours it bought to the beer. The hop was used in the first couple of beers that SNB produced commercially and even though by todays standards those beers weren't particularly heavily hopped they were a hit, people loved the new aromatics and flavours in their pale ale in particular (released in 1981) The beer is more malt forward than most pale ales these days and quite dark in colour but so well balanced, the whole flower Cascade used late in the boil and as a dry hop (rarely done in the 1980's) really shines and made this beer a huge success, the rest is history, a whole new style and wave of brewing had begun!

Time Hops

My local craft brewery (Siren) have been busy this last month or so executing a beery project called "Time Hops". The idea is that they revisited pivotal beers in the history of modern craft beer with a particular emphasis on the revolutionary American hops that made those beers special. There are four beers in the series but five hops showcased, these are, Cascade, Citra-Mosaic, Centennial and Simcoe (Citra and Mosaic invariably go together) The project was officially launched at the end of July at an investor only event held at Reading University Student Union and followed up by a public festival at the same venue the next day and wider release following that. I attended the investor event and managed to snag an early taste of the four beers, there were a couple of real corkers in there, but each one deserves a more detailed analysis so I'll be assessing each beer and explaining the history of it in separate posts this week starting with Cascade and working my way left to right thru Citra-Mosaic, Centennial and finishing with Simcoe.

 

Number ones?

I happened to be walking past our local sewage works the other day and noticed that the four large identical tanks onsite there were suitably numbered 1-4, the tank in the picture is number one. Then I noticed that there were a few letters before the numbers and on closer inspection I mused that these letters must be an abbreviation for something, I wondered what it could be? (see closeup below)

Tee he...

 

Caption Competition

I would humbly offer, "Small bore, plus cannon"

 

Kitchen perspective

This map represents the best perspective of our universe in around 1100 CE, note the UK and Ireland is top left and Jerusalem is dead centre of the map (predictably for the authors and the era). It's perhaps not what's on this map that's interesting it's more what's missing! This is essentially a map of Europe and its fringes, however, Europe occupies only 10 million square kilometers and is the second smallest continent. The missing bits of this map represent the remaining 130 million square km of land, ergo, the best view of our planet in those days was missing not only space and the entire known Universe but also 92% of the surface area of our own local planet, and therefore the majority of the flora, fauna, people, cultures inhabiting those places. 

It always slightly baffles me that many millions of people still hold with the view that the best way to think about our morality and cultural grounding is through the lens of a particular peoples that lived in the Middle East way before 1100 CE and who wrote down how they saw things over centuries in various stories and narratives which were often later edited, translated, lost, ignored and aggregated into the many so called "holy books" that emerged from the late Bronze age onwards, all contradictory and all containing many omissions, logical falacies and factual errors. The peoples that authored those stories had much less perspective on our universe than even the people that made this map, which is hardly any at all! To me, religions and other backward looking traditions that take this view are doing something that's akin to taking holiday advice from someone who's never left their own kitchen i.e. likely to end in dissapointment and almost certainly lost luggage!

Friday Smirk

Religion, the ultimate expression of cancel culture..

 

Knobbly Archaeology

It's facinating what a dry spell reveals sometimes. In the picture above we can see an old Roman road, Ermine Street, which went from London (Bishopsgate) all the way up to Lincon and then onto York, both important Roman settlements back in the day. It's amazing to think that things built so long ago can still have an influence on the landscape today, just takes a bit of sunshine to make them visible (just like me and my knobbly knees then!)

 

Harmful hobbies

 

So I see that the Church of England has "declared" that gay sex is still a "sin". The leader of that organisation Justin Welby confirmed this during a recent meeting of 650 bishops attending a conference in Lambeth, London. It's clear to most people (with at least half a brain) that this decision is a political one, the conservative countries represented at the conference won't tolerate any movement on this issue and these (mainly third-world) countries such as Nigeria, Uganda, Somalia etc. are simply too important to the existance of his church (numerically) that Welby can't afford to alienate them! He did however throw the more progressive consituents in the UK a bone and said he would not "punish" those who performed same-sex marriages.

All of this would just be tomorrows fish and chip wrapping for most people in the UK until you realise that this homophobic cabal is the established religion of this country with the Queen at it's head. It's top clerics sit (as of right) in our Parliament (the only other country that allows this is Iran!) and we hand over state-funded schools to this cult to run. It's time we changed things.

Church members need to realise that what they believe amounts to no more than a "hobby", it's nice for them, provides social cohesion, something to do on a Sunday morning and perhaps some degree of support in times of stress, however for the rest of us the whole thing could dissapear tomorrow and we wouldn't notice or care. For the most part non-religious people such as myself are completely fine with anyone believing what ever they want, we're also fine with folk joining clubs of like-minded people and following the rules of that club as long as it doesn't do harm. Unfortunately, when establishment institutions cling onto medieval attitudes around things like homosexuality and support ridiculous practices such as "gay conversion therepy" it DOES do harm, a lot of it, primarily to vulnerable people and has done for centuries, enough is enough!

It's time to cut these organisations loose, set them free, allow them to make their own little rules and dogmas free from the public gaze! Decouple all religions from the machinary of the state, come to some arrangement over all that money, property and land they've stolen requisitioned from people down the ages and make all schools fully inclusive and secular! Everyone needs a hobby and religious people should be free to follow their own interests free from the shackles and constraints of the modern zeitgeist, all we ask in return is that religious people stop insisting that everyone adopt the same hobby as them, or even worse insist that the parochial rules of their little clubs become somehow entwined in the laws of our land and enforced upon all of us!

Cloud based AI Data Lakes

I think the technology industry, particularly the computer software contingent of it has to be the leader in the field of making up new words for things (or ideas) that already exist! Typically things that have had some small improvement or change to them eventually hit the radar of marketing teams such that they get hyper-excited about the possibility of "launching" something (seemingly) new! In reality the only thing that's really being "launched" are the new words they've invented with which to relabel it and possibly a few meaningless Powerpoint slides with which to warp the existent thing into something that resembles the made up words that are supposed to describe it in the first place, in old fashioned terminology, a case of the "tail wagging the dog"! The underpinnings of this behaviour are complex but usually sit within broader cycles of actual innovation and feed off them like some kind of biological parasite, sucking new ideas dry and discarding their empty husks before moving onto the next wave.

Actual disruptive and innovative things come along once in a blue moon, and when they do they're mostly ignored or positively shunned, since the parasitic overlords of these industries don't usually have the expertise or knowledge to recognise them or understand their potential! The way innovative things eventually become mainstream in my experience is that technically competent people discover them first, they recognise potential and become early-adopters, word spreads and eventually a critical mass of geeks are using the new thing. At this point the money men (another species of parasite!) figure out something is going on, they wade in, buying everything in sight and vastly inflating valuations for the entire eco-system around the new thing. Only then does the parasitic layer in the industry finally realise that there's a new band-waggon in town and desperately engage their marketing people to try to invent ways to make it seem that what they were doing all along is in fact some derivation of the new (then valuable) thing, most fail but some manage to drum up some new revenue off the back of someone else's innovation. Eventually the road-show moves on and the excitement (and funding) fades at which point the whole cycle repeats. Along the way, many firms disappear and many new ones are born around the inevitable next wave.

I think the trick to investing in tech is to be able to recognise those firms and people who are honest about innovation, who don't fake it! It doesn't have to be totally revolutionary necessarily but there has to be a concrete evolution or step-change in whatever field they are operating in, something that can a) be quantified and b) be copied and morphed by the parasitic underbelly into revenue. If these two things are true, then you may well have a lucrative hype-cycle on your hands.

Dry

Looking at the fields near my house.. It's dry as a very dry thing out there!

 

Tuesday Titter

Venables: Football’s coming home

Hoddle: Football’s coming home

Wilkinson: Football’s coming home

Keegan: Football’s coming home

Taylor: Football’s coming home

Eriksson: Football’s coming home

McClaren: Football’s coming home

Capello: Football’s coming home

Pearce: Football’s coming home

Hodgson: Football’s coming home

Allardyce: Football’s coming home

Southgate: Football’s coming home

Wiegman: FFS Hold my beer