Well, that was unexpected.
Red Ed stood up for working-class people, promising to tax the rich and break big businesses strangle hold on the media. And the people of England said “no thanks”.
I eventually came down on the side of no for the Scottish independence referendum, mostly because without Scotland Labour would be crippled and we would end up with a Tory majority government. What a waste of time that turned out to be.
It’s a shame to see not a single independent won a seat on the British mainland.
On the plus side though, my buffet went quite well. Freshly baked bread, crisps, twice-baked potatoes, Sniff’s favourite meatballs (a Moomin recipe), chicken wings and Devil’s food cake meant that we were able to eat solidly from 10pm to 4am and still have plenty for breakfast.
I am sure that that like myself, when you want to look up some song lyrics, you instantly head off to Lyrics Burger. After all, it is the number one place to go for song lyrics in my opinion. Well, you will be pleased to know that it is now even better!
First and foremost it is now responsive, and looks great on a mobile device.
But there are lots more exciting changes both over and under the hood too. The URLs have all changed to nicer, cleaner ones. All the old ones will still work of course and redirect to the new location. We have also made the design cleaner (thought it was already full of semantic HTML5 goodness), improved the adherence to HTML standards, and added open graph tags so it is now even easier to share!
What was this book about?
I was told it was about the bombing of Dresden, but most of the story was about a guy called Billy Pilgrim who could travel through time and spent some of his life living in a zoo on an alien planet.
You would think that you would get some sense from the linear story telling. However, when you can travel backwards and forwards through time, that quickly becomes irrelevant. It’s enough to drive a man to suicide. So it goes.
Success, for once the end result actually looked like the book. The dish is tasty but fiddly. You are supposed to put the meatballs inside the pitta but in reality you need to cut them up before they will fit in, and then try and cram everything else in with them.
This one came from the One Put 30 Minute Meals book and was actually fairly close to hitting the 30 minute mark. Excluding the time it took to make the dough for the pittas, but it assumes you have just bought those. After all, who makes their own pittas and then uses a quick-food recipe book…
Rabbit stew from River Cottage Every Day gets the thumbs down from me I am afraid. The end result was a rather bland and tasteless tomato-y liquid with some tough rabbit that was difficult to get off the bone. Slow cooker next time I think…
Don’t get your hopes up, this is not the long-awaited gory details of myself and Yvonne Mcgruder in the back of a beaten up Ford Fiesta. It’s the title of Richard Branson’s autobiography.
It’s a short and sweet book – I got through the whole thing in a day. He is one crazy bastard. When he isn’t almost killing himself on boats or hot air balloons, which he is a lot, he is getting arrested (though only in his younger days) and indulging in free love. Though he also appreciates keeping an alcohol-free clear head when he needs to.
The length means you don’t get the intricate detail that something like the Steve Jobs biography goes into, but does keep it moving. Virgin is a company that has been so close to going under so many times. I’ve read quite a few other books of other businessmen and none of them have such a track record of death-dodging than Virgin. Of course, it could be that Branson is just more honest. He talks openly about marijuana, sex and criminal activity, but maybe everyone else is up to it too. I can’t see Alan Sugar with a spliff but who really knows.
It’s also quite dated now. Virgin has done a lot since 1998 when the book came out and it feels like half a story. It doesn’t offer business insight in the same way that Like a Virgin does, but it does make for an entertaining read.
Anyone who does not want to fly combat missions is sane enough to fly combat missions. That is the ironic narrative of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, a novel set during the Second World War.
I found it really slow going at first. Funny, but slow moving. It follows the life of Yossarian, as well as a large cast of other characters, as they attempt to survive through the war. As the story goes on it opens up into a dark, satirical and ultimately very funny story. If you have that kind of sense of humour. Which I do.
The impossible but simultaneously inevitable situations that Milo Minderbinder finds himself in, the idea of someone being promoted just so their name would be Major Major and Captain Black’s endless series of loyalty oaths are just absurd enough to be ridiculous and yet somehow plausible in the crazy world we live in.
Breaded fish fillets are a good dish to represent Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage Every Day philosophy – it’s pretty simple and could potentially be done every day. Despite the simplicity, I managed to mess it up.
The breading worked really well. We used brown grouper of the fillet though, which now seems a bit of a waste because it is such a nice fish on its own. I also failed to adjust the cooking time for the fact that we were using a thicker fillet, so they had to go back in the pan for a few more minutes.
Another problem was that the fish had not been de-scaled. I didn’t even think to de-scale it as you would expect it to be done already when you buy a fillet.
All was well in the end though, especially with even more soy sauce mash.
April saw the first game day for the 2015 flag season. We played two games, one of which we won and one of which we lost. The win was particularly good as last year, the first year Leeds Samurai existed, the team didn’t quite manage to win any (though many of them were very close), so a great result for the team.
Also, I think I look very “snazzy” in my new jersey.
This was the first competitive game I’ve attended so it was a bit of a shock to the system. It took probably most of the first half for me to get into it and everything to stop moving so fast. It should be better going forward as I and the other new players adjust.
Wharf Chambers is a new venue located where the Common Place used to be. It’s a members-only club, though membership is just £1 and we just went in. With a good reason of course, we were there for a gig. We got there just in time to see one of the warm-up bands, Secateurs.
They were very good. At first they were just irritatingly loud but as our ears adjusted I began to really enjoy their set.
Cut Out Shapes put on the usual high standard of performance, even doing an encore of a song they claimed they did not know how the play.
