Sunday, November 21, 2004

Winter hibernation

As winter sets in, all my energies coil inwards and I'm loathe to leave the warm confines of my house. My two favourite places to hibernate when the weather turns cold are my bedroom and my kitchen. Here's what we cooked up in the spice kitchen this weekend:

Foodie links:

+ "Today I tried this recipe: Tuna Casserole. Ingredients: 1 large casserole dish. Place the casserole dish in a cold oven. Place a chair facing the oven and sit in it forever. Think about how hungry you are. When night falls, do not turn on the light. How can the eater recognize that the food denied him is a tuna casserole and not some other dish?" More Jean-Paul Sartre recipes in the Jean-Paul Sartre Cookbook.

+ Let them eat cake. "They don't diet and they don't spend hours panting round the gym. So how can French women put away as much ice-cream, rich pastries and steak frites as they want and yet stay so slim?" It's all to with lingerie, Brie and cigarettes, apparently.

+ Breathe more, lose weight. It's all to do with carbon atoms, apparently.

Bloated links (hey, it's cold, who wants to go out!):

+ XFM's School of Rock. Get voting now for Britain's best school rock band. There's some formidable talent here that bodes extremely well for the future of British music. My favourite? Outl4w's cover of 999's 'Black Flowers For The Bride', fronted by 11 year old Rob.

+ Ronald Trahan Associates, PR firm working for Roche Pharmaceutical, issued the following statement for World AIDS Day: "With World AIDS Day fast approaching, I wanted to get in touch with some story ideas surrounding this event. This year's event is even more exciting given that we are celebrating 20 years of AIDS..." Huh? Via Holymoly.

+ How to steal Wi-Fi. And how to keep the neighbors from stealing yours. Step one: Lose the guilt.

+ Hack your way out of writer’s block. My favourites are:

  • Write from a persona - Lend your voice to a writing personality who isn’t you. Doesn’t have to be a pirate or anything - just try seeing your topic from someone else’s perspective, style, and interest.
  • Get away from the computer, write someplace new - If you’ve been staring at the screen and nothing is happening, walk away. Shut down the computer. Take one pen and one notebook, and go somewhere new.
  • Write the middle - Stop whining over a perfect lead, and write the next part or the part after that.

Whenever I'm stuck in a creative rut, I dig out my copy of Brian Eno's A Year With Swollen Appendices. It's a "year in the life of" diary and Eno's overactive mind and hyperactive creative life is an inspiration. Quite simply, he never stopped creating: from devising the perfect oyster sauce for his stir-fry and creating a computer simulation program, to designing art in Photoshop and writing a film score.

+ I think "being too busy" is the curse of many modern relationships.

+ How to get podcasts onto your iPod; how to get podcasts onto other players.

+ Slim CRT televisions are on their way. About time. The picture quality of CRTs beat LCDs and plasmas hands down.

+ "The lime says: I'm modern, I'm sophisticated, I'm so over lemons. It's a kind of green pod encapsulation of taking six months off work and trekking across Vietnam, without having to leave the kitchen. And it only costs 24p." Jacques Peretti's eulogy to the not-so-humble lime.

+ "The reach and power of telecommunications and computers have enabled everyone to spread evidence of their ignorance farther and faster than ever before. For proof, look at the recent emergence of blogs." Evidence indeed.

+ "Straight male seeks Bush supporter for fair, physical fight." Classified ad on Craigslist, NYC.

+ "Most pirates know in advance if the ship and its cargo is worth an attack, because they use state of the art equipment to monitor Inmarsat communications and even fax transmissions listing every single cargo item. Quite a substantial portion of Inmarsat reception units that are being sold in Germany or the United States are channelled to those regions where they are of invaluable service to modern age pirates." The modern high-tech pirates.

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