Chris Worfolk's Blog

I’ve never walked out of a gig before because it was so bad. That is, until I went to see Tenacious D.

The gig was really late. It was billed as starting at 7pm but when I arrived at 8pm the support act was still on and didn’t disappear until 8:25. This meant it was nearly 9pm by the time Tenacious D took to the stage.

The venue certainly didn’t help. Leeds Academy sell more tickets than they actually have seats for on the balcony with the end result being that a lot of people are standing. Because you face down towards the stage, this means if you’re not right at the front you can’t see anything.

I could barely see Jack Black and when I tried to ask the staff where I could actually see the whole stage, which seemed a fair enough question for the £35 I paid, they physically pushed me away and just said “not there”.

Not that it was a specular spectacle to behold anyway. With the description of a stripped-back acoustic session I expected an atmosphere that felt intimate and low-key. What they actually seemed to mean was that Jack and Kyle simply cannot keep up anymore.

Between every song there would be a few minutes of silence while they tried to get their breath back, had a drink and towelled off their sweating faces. No continuation, no stage presence, it could barely be called a show.

After half an hour I just couldn’t take anymore. Heart-breaking.

What do you do when you slow-cooked a pig’s tongue, have some left over sausages and half a jar of Thai cooking sauce left? You make a Thai gumbo…

For those that are interested, here is what I did. To be honest, it’s a lot less clever than it sounds, and it doesn’t sound that clever. But anyway…

I boiled a pig’s tongue the day before to make it really tender. I also pre-cooked two sausages. I then chopped the sausages thinly, cut slash ripped the tongue into pieces and chopped up a shallot and a red pepper too.

Heat some oil in a wok, then throw in the shallots for a minute or two until they cooked. Then put in 3-4 tea spoons of thai cooking sauce and stir it all together for another minute or two.

Finally throw in the meat and the red pepper along with 400ml of coconut milk, bring it to boil and then let it simmer for a few minutes, just until it gets up to temperature basically.

Last month I went to see Nickelback in Leeds. It was the first time I had been to the Leeds Arena. It was pretty good. Nothing amazing, but it is quite a nice layout.

Nickelback were entertaining live. They weren’t a band where you come away from the show thinking “that was absolutely amazing”, but they were a lot of fun on stage and far less serious than I imagined them to be.

I didn’t get any good photos.

I did finally get a chance to use my massive goth boots to see over everyone’s heads though. Well worth the investment!

We might not have a bed, but at least we have a good doormat.

At the end of November we headed up to the Lutherin church in Headingley for Finnish Christmas carols. We went last year as well, which was arguably better as they had an organist, but it was enjoyable none-the-less and the performance pieces were good too. As ever, the best bit was the food afterward.

I also love how organised they are – at that event they gave out the date for the 2014 event!

Being without a proper internet connection I needed to go mobile for a while. I went to O2 and bought a dongle, but it didn’t work, as they never really do. I don’t know if it is the dongle, O2 or a combination of the both, but they are a mission to get working and usually end up never working at all.

So I went to EE and got a 4G wifi hotspot.

My experiences so far have been really good. You literally just turn it on, it connects to the 4G network and you connect it to as a wifi hotspot. The speeds are really impressive too – 20mb down and 10mb up – way faster than you get on a fixed internet connection in Leeds city centre! Unfortunately the data is quite pricey but as a short term solution it has been wonderful.

I also ordered an Asus 6-in-1 router that lets me connect to the wifi hotspot and then gives me a network port to connect my router in. So my router, which has all my wired devices connected into it, was then connected to the Asus, when then connected to the hotspot. Complicated but it got all my devices online with no connection problems!

For our November meeting of the Sunday Assembly Leeds, we actually held it on a Sunday. We were at a new venue, the Belgrave Music Hall, which is a wonderful gig venue and worked well for the event.

You can see all the photos on Flickr.

Earlier this month we were lucky to have Kate Smurthwaite visit us to present her show The News at Kate: My Professional Opinion. She is a comedian but also does a lot of work with women’s rights and generally telling stupid people that they are stupid.

Here is a good clip of her doing that on The Big Questions:

Her event was really entertaining and I highly recommend going to see Kate’s show if you get the chance.

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In November, I travelled down to Colchester to compete in the District 71 humorous speaking contest finals. I lost in the semi-finals which was pretty disappointing. I was happy with the structure and quality of my speech, but I didn’t get the laughs the other contestants did, so more humour is probably needed. Our short stay at the conference was enjoyable though – unlike the Riviera Renaissance conference everything was in the same hotel which made it a lot nicer.

This is me receiving my certificate of participation.

The purpose of these is to fill time while the votes are being counted.