THE ORGAN I FOUND is a Yamaha PSV19. Whoever they employed to plunk in the preset tunes was a mediocre nonEnglishspeaking person who had little feeling for the music and none at all for the lyrics (which, of course we tend to sing kind of subliminally on top as the song plays on. Well I do ...) Their rendition of Jinglebells - potentially the funkiest of Xmas tunes - is beyond tacky. Yesterday and Silent Night aren't much better. Ave Maria's OK. But Yamaha's own-brand Hey Jude is simply beyond the pale. I left said synthesizer plunking away as I speak. My threats to torture the neighbours with these at top volume highest (or, if I really hated them slowest-tempo) renditions were merely jokes. Though I did have some rafter-shaking cyder-drunken fun with learning to make the device work yesterday ...
I was a fugitive from justice yet again last night. What has my subconscious mind been doing that I should be every night on the run in ancient castles (cue: Enid Blyton) and clutching a bottle of Baileys (where did that come from? Maybe in the dream I'd hoisted the booze from a shop without paying for it ?...)
Yesterday's rendition of stew I rated a disaster at the time. The baby potatoes that I thought wonderfully cute and chucked in just chopping in three - I put far too many of them in. The lamb cooked so thoroughly it fell to pieces just leaving bones behind. And my Rajah extra hot chili powder, one teaspoon of ... well yesterday night that seemed exclusively to have spiced my baby potatoes to a blistering degree ... I forced self to eat a bowlfull of little else but these. So by today a more appropriate and less potatoey concoction remained and the spicing was wonderful. So I don't know whether I'd truly done anything "wrong" bar not giving it time to "mull" ...
Five on Kirrin Island Again is now safely in the hands of the Turkish lady in my corner shop who specifically asked if I had anything she could borrow to help her English. I did explain it was for ten year-old kids in the 1940s but that I had read it two nights before so she's tackling it quite possibly as we speak. The lady on the other till, who appears "Chinese" is actually from Kyrgyzstan and reads mysterious Cyryllic-type newspapers from time to time. Turks and Kyrgyz can understand one another because the language is similar. Even the Brazilian girl who sometimes gives my cyder for free seems to understand their speech. They've got a pan-Turkic federation going on in there ....
Big Brother's cussing our screens yet again. So far I've lost merely an hour of my life to this strange schlock. It's their seventh summer series, I do believe (not counting "celebrity" special editions). So far the house is only full of women. Which is bound to fascinate the tabloid press.
However tasteless the depths the present series descends to (as it's surely bound to do) they can never exceed the sheer bad taste of Endemol (the show's global producers') latest Dutch offering which they're calling Big Donor. It's a reality show where three transplant patients compete on daily near-live television for a new kidney ... People across the world were up in arms (including me) until the whole thing was revealed as a TV hoax ...
Thanks for all your messages. I've met some great people in the last few days especially since I struck out in a deliberately Aussie direction ...
(As I said before. I've so many relations Down Under it always kind of bemused me that I never met any Aussies online ...)
Here's a link you might want to click on. It's at:
http://velharias-traquitanas2.blogspot.com/ and has some amazing desert photos. I mean really amazing. The text is in Portuguese but you know what they say about a picture and 1000 words ...
Yeah, I was rather appalled at the donor show myself and am still unsure if it was any good, even as a hoax. Vincent said that 18,000 donor forms were downloaded since the show aired so I guess it has done some good. It just feel much too tasteless to me.
ReplyDeleteAbout the potatoes taking on most of the chilli: potatoes are a bit of a flavour sponge. If you ever cook a soup or such and it's too salty, the trick is to add a peeled whole potato and it sucks up some of the salt while cooking.
My friend Mary used to work for Endemol, she's a KLM flight attendant now, jetting all over the world.
i love those keyboards with music that sounds like the robot twiki from buck rogers (bidibidibidi). the big donor show was a big phoney-or show, but my conspiracy meter is going haywire thinking this may have been a cover-up or just a nice attention-seeking ploy... like jacko and lisa marie presley getting hitched... plllease.
ReplyDeleteo dear
ReplyDeleteA good stew cannot become a truly good stew until it's stewed a good bit. No? ;—)
ReplyDeleteThere was a post state-side about "The Big Donor Show." It's an interesting blog to read in general. I would think you would quite like it. In fact, I'm not so certain I didn't come across it while link stalking after you! Just in case I haven't, here it is.
http://doctoranonymous.blogspot.com/2007/05/big-donor-show.html
Cheers, WS
Curry usually tastes better the day after, when it's had time to - oh, I wish my brain would work - rest/absorb flavour/mature - isn't there one word for that?
ReplyDelete"mull" was the word I'd use, Liz
ReplyDeletemull ... that's right, innit?