121 episodes later...

So Lost ended this week. Many of you didn’t have the stamina to hold out for a full six seasons. Come to think of it, I know for a fact that most of you couldn’t even get to the end of the first episode.

I’ve brought it up before in conversation and the response was so universal that I can quote the whole thing word for word. In this reconstruction, the part of me will be played by me, and Joe will play the rest of you.

Me - “So, have you watched Lost?”
Joe - “Never really got into it.”
Me - “Oh you should, it’s awesome.”
Joe - “I watched some of the first season.”
Me - “And?”
Joe - “I got a bit sick of it.”
Me - “Really. Which part of it did you get sick of?”
Joe - “The I-don’t know-what-the-hell-is-going-on part.”
Me - “You just need to stick with it,
Joe - “I don’t think so.”
Me - “Go on, give it a go.”
Joe - “No.”
Me - “I’ll lend you the first season.”
Joe - “Go away please.”

And that’s pretty much how the conversation goes every time.

Well, the whole thing is over now, so if you want to know what happened in the five-and-a-half seasons that you missed, it went like this...

(umm...spoiler alert, I guess)

Oceanic 815 crashes on the ‘island’. There are others on the island already. These others are called ‘The Others”. Some of them are anyway, any others are just other Others. The survivors find a hatch half-way through the first season and in the end, they blow the door off, but nobody gets to find out what’s inside until the second season begins. Meanwhile, there’s a scary cloud killing things.

At the bottom of the hatch is a Dharma Initiative computer station. There’s a mad Scotsman inside, pushing a button on an Acorn Electron every 108 minutes to stop…well the point of the season is that we don’t know what will happen if the button doesn’t get pressed. In the finale, they don’t press the button and the whole station implodes. In the meantime, we find out about the Dharma Initiative.

Season three has the best intro out of all of the others. It looks like a normal day in suburbia but it turns out that these new people are the feared Others and the plane exploding in the sky is Oceanic 815. We spend this season finding out about the Others and eventually there’s a big battle.

In season four, everyone is confused because the flashbacks are now showing the future. Takes a bit of getting used to. The survivors have to face peril when a boat full of mercenaries turns up. At the end of the season, some of the main characters make it off the island…and the flash-forwards make some degree of sense. However, the island disappears in a flash of light, like Paul Daniels.

Season five is where it gets really confusing. Those who got off the island have to convince the world that they are the only survivors from the crash whilst the rest bounce around in time for a while. They eventually settle in the 1974 and end up working for the Dharma Initiative. Everyone else finds a way to meet them there. The finale ends with our heroes nuking the island.

In the final season, they all find themselves on the island in contemporary times. Turns out, the ex-cripple isn’t the ex-cripple anymore. He’s the scary cloud and he must be stopped or…you don’t want to know. Well, they stop him anyway, so we never find out what could have happened, but that doesn’t matter.

Nothing matters.

None of it mattered because everybody dies eventually and they all meet up in a church in purgatory.

The End.

I can’t deny it. It was a bit of a let-down, but at least now it’s over and thanks to my handy guide, all of you naysayers never need to watch it.
A ‘thank you’ would be nice …

The News - Full of Potential...

My major distraction this week has been Google Reader.

It’s essentially a feed manager, meaning that instead of visiting all of your favourite websites, you can have all of the news sent to the same place. That wouldn’t be so bad except for the fact that it’s not enough just to add your favourite websites. You have to click the tab marked ‘browse for stuff’ and check out the bundles.

A bundle is a list of feeds organised by topic and they’ve got a bundle for everything from Bible to Board Games. Of course, when the label happens to be ‘Funny’ or ‘Fun’, you can’t help but add these, if only to satisfy your cynicism.

After about 45 minutes sorting through Humor, I opened up Humour. After another hour, I decided that the internet isn’t as funny as it thinks it is, but by then, it was bedtime.

So that was a day.

Once that first period of infomania has subsided, you see that it’s hard enough to track news on the websites you actually like, so you unsubscribe from all of the bundles and you start from scratch.

I decided to be a grown-up about it and added the Times news, The Guardian world news, the NME news and the Evening Standard entertainment news.

To get a broad spectrum.

Before I started reading any news, I renamed the feeds and organised them in an intricate folder system. That took a good fifteen minutes after which I decided that I’d worked hard enough on the news and it was time to take a break.

I checked out xkcd.com to see if it was still as funny as I remembered it. It was the same as always, it made me laugh even though I didn’t understand it. Try it out sometime, xkcd, it’s a ‘webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.’ (That’s right, I’m on wikipedia).

About an hour later, I had another look at my news feed. 125 new posts had been added and it left me wondering if I really gave a damn about the news. I marked everything read, just to give myself a false sense of achievement, and played Boxhead - The Zombie Wars on crazymonkeygames.com.

If you’re looking for a really entertaining way to waste your time, the latest instalment in the Boxhead series is the way to go.

You play a sort of Lego man who has to survive for as long as possible while waves of Lego zombies attack from all corners. You have the usual access to many weapons, unlocking more powerful ones as your score goes up, but they’ve added a few new toys.

In The Zombie Wars, if you’re fast enough, you can build a fortress around your Lego man with the new range of gun turrets and watch wave after wave get torn up in a rain of rancid blood while you point at the screen, laughing. The drawback to this is that by the time you have to face a zombie, they are now so powerful that your Lego man gets wiped out in no time.

It’s hard to resist hitting the retry button out of sheer vengeance.

So there you have it.

The News - full of potential, but not as much fun as reading comics or killing zombies.

Paulie’s Scamorza and Pesto Pizza

Okay, I’m officially a genius. I’ve just made the greatest pizza in the world and now it doesn’t exist anymore. Because I ate it. I barely had enough time to take a picture, such was my pizza-lust.

Since I’m such a kind and generous person, I’m going to share the recipe with you.
This is dead easy and should feed two people...or one really greedy person.

Dough
First you want pizza dough. You'll need...
225g flour
1 ½ tsp dried yeast
1 tsp salt

-Put about 150ml of lukewarm water into a jug and add a teaspoon of sugar. Then sprinkle the yeast over the water and stir it up to buggery.
-Leave that somewhere warm and watch a bit of telly for about 15 minutes while the yeast activates.
-Sift the flour and salt onto a clean worktop. Make a well in the middle and pour in your yeast juice.
-Start stirring the flour into the liquid with a fork, gradually working your way towards the edges. Don’t bother with a mixing bowl - this is much easier.
-You should end up with a nice ball of dough. Put your ball into a lightly oiled bowl and cover with a damp tea-towel and leave it somewhere warm, then go and watch some more telly. Make sure you memorise what size it is because you’ll need to know when it’s twice as big. That should take an hour, hour and a half.

Pesto
At some stage, you’ll want to make some pesto. This isn’t an exact science, and it’s mainly trial and error. You’ll need...
A couple of handfuls of basil leaves.
A lump of parmesan.
Olive oil.
Some toasted pine nuts. (this’ll take about 5 minutes in a dry frying pan.)

You can probably mess about with graters and a mortar and pestle, but who has time for that?

-Obliterate the parmesan in the food processor.
-Take the ground up parmesan out and keep it aside.
-Fill the food processor with the basil, pine nuts, a slosh of olive oil and some of the cheese.
-Wazz it up.
-If it’s too dry, add more olive oil.
-If it’s not cheesy enough…add more cheese.

As long as you get the texture right, you’re laughing. It has to be…like pesto. If you don’t know what pesto looks like, you probably shouldn’t attempt this.

You might as well start preheating your oven to 200°C now.

Back to the dough.
-Once it’s twice the size, slap it onto your worktop and beat the crap out of it. You need to get rid of the larger bubbles otherwise the pizza won’t cook evenly.
-Knead the dough and roll it until it’s roughly circular and about ¼ inch thick.
-Dump the pesto in the middle and spread it evenly with a spoon.
-Now cut your scamorza into thin slices and cover the pizza as evenly as you can. Scamorza is similar to mozzarella, but smoked and a little bit cheesier. If you can’t find it, just use mozzarella.
-You can add other toppings if you wish. I only had a frankfurter in the fridge so I sliced that up and spread it over the cheese.
-Bung it in the oven.
-Watch some more telly.
-After about 10-12 minutes. take it out, slosh a little olive oil over the top, slice it up, and then don’t let anyone else have any.

Bon appetit!

What Sunk the Vasa?

On the island of Djurgården, in Stockholm, there’s a strange building. Three masts stick out from the top of the roof as if they expect to one day take the whole thing out for a spin on the Baltic.

This is Vasamuseet, or the Vasa museum, and the final resting place of one of history’s greatest nautical follies.

In the early 17th century, the Swedish navy consisted of some relatively small ships which didn’t exactly fill their enemies with fear. King Gustav II Adolf wanted to show Poland who the masters of the sea were so he ordered the construction of a fleet of large warships, the Vasa being the first.

She was built between 1626 and 1628 and was designed to be the 17th century equivalent of a floating Death Star. With 48 massive cannons and plenty of biblical and mythological imagery carved into the hull, little doubt remained as to the intention.

If the King wanted to send a message to his foes, it wouldn’t be written in a sentence, just one enormous full stop blasting through the side of their ship.

When the day arrived to send her out to sea, the King was out of the country and nobody wanted to be the first to suggest postponing it - he needed that boat out there yesterday and he wasn’t interested in structural problems.

With the first gust of wind, the ship heeled (that’s ‘tipped over’ to us landlubbers) dramatically to the side.

Teething problems, surely.

The crew managed to right her before another gust sent it rocking again. This time, they wouldn’t be so lucky.

Water poured into the open gun ports and by that stage, it was game over for the Vasa.

The pride of the Swedish Navy sank to the bottom of the sea less than a nautical mile from where she was launched, killing somewhere between 30 and 50 people and there she stayed for over 300 years.

The ship was raised in 1961 and towed to harbour where efforts were made to restore it. Now, in 2010, you can go to the Vasa Museum and see the leviathan for yourself in most of it’s glory.

Various exhibits dotted around the ship tell the whole story from it’s construction to it’s preservation and if you didn’t give a damn walking into the museum, you’ll find, after an hour or two, it’s the only thing you can think of.

So what sunk the Vasa?

It was Physics.

Not enough ballast was placed in the hull to counter balance the weight of cannons on the upper deck. She was simply too bad-ass for nature to allow her to sail.

DIY Record Label

What do you do when your record shop goes bust?
Well, you buy the lease, obviously!

That's the kind of business acumen which led Kenny Anderson, better known to his fans as King Creosote, to realise that maybe running a record store wasn't for him. It was during this wayward venture that he discovered a lot of frustrated musicians within an ass' roar of each other.

So it was that Fence Records was born.

Based in the fishing village of Anstruther in Fife, Fence Records, or the Fence Collective, refers to itself as 'a micro-indie record label' but in reality, it's a family of great musicians recording, producing and distributing their own work, mainly from the back room of the local pub, the Ship Tavern.

Kenny's brother, Gordon, learned the hardships of the recording industry in his previous life as founder-member of folktronica sensation, The Beta Band, which dissolved in 2004 under a debt of £1m to EMI.

There had to be another way to make music.

Fence's DIY approach has found a modest kind of success. This isn't a multi-million pound enterprise, rather a group of people who love to make music without ego and share an audience-first philosophy.

But is this music any good?

With acts such as James Yorkston, The Pictish Trail, Rozi Plain and Withered Hand, not to mention King Creosote himself, the list is solid gold. The pervading theme is 'folk' but you can expect a healthy peppering of electronica and a few more rocky numbers. In short, Fence have a little something for everyone.

This is probably the closest you can get to what is often called the 'folk revival' - assuming, of course, you believe folk went anywhere in the first place.

The very first Away Game, on the island of Eigg in the Inner Hebrides, is scheduled for the weekend of the 24th of September. There are only 150 camping tickets available and they go on sale on the 24th of May on fencerecords.com. It's only 90 quid a ticket and if it's anything like the seventh annual Home Game, back in March, it's sure to be an intimate little festival like nothing you've ever seen before.

Unbridled Joy

Album Review
Fang Island - Fang Island

We’re always looking for something new to listen to, and these guys are so new, you can only expect the worst. But Brooklyn based poptimists, Fang Island are a different kind of creature.

Their self-titled debut was released under Sergeant House back in February and since then, they’ve been showered with praise from all corners.

The main reason for this is that it’s impossible to get to the end of this album without feeling a tremendous sense of unbridled joy and I’m only talking about the first listen.

The band set out to capture the essence of fun and the excitement of ’Everyone High-Fiving Everyone’ and in this, they definitely succeed.

Their sound, supposedly influenced by 90’s rock bands like The Smashing Pumpkins and Weezer, is more of a Power-pop revival of eighties cheer but without that awful cheesiness.

Expect guitar riffs that stick in your head ALL DAY and sparse yet infectious lyrics that are wrought with no-nonsense mirth.

You can listen to the whole album on their website before you decide that you simply MUST have it immediately. Do it quickly though, before everyone else gets there first and it loses it’s appeal.

A Feeble Compensation

"What's going on here?", you might ask. Well, at this early stage, that’s a question with many answers.

1. Perhaps I’m in the throes of another passing fancy


2. Maybe a million monkeys with a million laptops wrote this by accident.


3. Or permaybehaps it’s a good idea.

Still, that doesn’t answer the question. Ostensibly, I’m writing the same email to everyone I know. It’s an attempt to compensate for my lack of contact with you all and although it’s not the same as a personal email, it’s the best I can do.

If you’ve ever received an email from me, (and you probably wouldn’t be here if you haven’t) you’ll know what to expect but if you’ve never had the pleasure, you can expect great declarations of enthusiasm for the things I like, scathing denunciations of the things I don’t mixed in with a little self-deprecation and mild humour that isn’t funny at all.

For professional reasons, I’ll try to avoid swearing unless it’s absolutely necessary.

What you needn’t expect are as follows…

1. Diary entries from the point of view of my cat - even if she’s a very fine cat, nobody cares about other people’s animals.


2. Theories on giant lizards. (I think I’m over that now.)


3. Blatant lies.


4. The pitiful sight of me whining about the lack of comments.


5. Details of my normal-as-hell life.


6. Undeserved endorsement or other breaches of integrity.


7. Long swathes of bullshit that go on for pages and pages and never seem to stop or indeed go anywhere.


8. Infuriating spelling mistakes and grammatical atrocities. (but nobody’s perfect)


9. Long, empty weeks without anything…unless I’ve been decapitated or otherwise incapacitated.

My mission statement is to deliver a regular stream of new and exciting information so that you, my trusted friends, are never bored. All I ask in return is that you keep me up to date with anything interesting that you happen to come across so that I can type some drivel and claim it as my own idea.

That just about wraps it up, hopefully you’ll enjoy it.