Unchained Recipes

First World Problems: People eat shit and more often than not it's their first choice. They could eat less shitty stuff seeing as how one man's shit is another man's pancake, but where do I begin? Ultimately it's a matter of taste, life style and affordability. These are not easy things to balance or criticize. So it was a rainy day yesterday and being bored on the hot new venture Mastodon I decided to carry out a few experimental recipes just to see what the outcomes might be. 

First up there was leek, onion, bacon and Coca-Cola soup. Truthfully not as brown as I imagined nor as sweet. Leeks are a powerful force in the world of vegetables and can neutralize harsh chemicals and small animals due to an electrical charge they emit mostly at a molecular level. If there ever was a "Soup-Off" TV show this soup would get a slimy handshake from the sincere millionaire presenter 8 days a week. Industrial giant and destroyer of worlds; Coca-Cola I salute you.

Next was Dr Pepper Chicken Korma. At least half a chicken had to die to fill this pot. A fact that leaves me uneasy and the chicken a whole lot worse. As the rain beat down against our leaky window panes I said a short prayer, "thank you God for the millimetre, Amen." Again the mystery that is Dr Pepper added an enigmatic and fruity je ne sais quoi to the dish and left the spellchecker befuddled. The curry consisted of Dr P, a jar of spicy gunge, onions, peppers (mixed), chicken bits and some E numbers (nobody mentions these anymore). Served with slow boiled rice it was surprisingly OK.

"I've been aware of time going by, they say in the end it's the wink of an eye," Jackson Browne, The Pretender.

Moonshot

Experts everywhere are of the opinion that there's never been a better time in human history to pack up and head for the moon*. It offers peace, quiet and serenity if you can put up with a smattering of Chinese space junk that's been abandoned there. See Zoopla for details of some attractive property that's on offer for the curious buyer. Get in there before somebody else finds gold whilst raking through otherwise worthless mineral samples.

*Photo of Artemis 1 and the USA's moon taken from a Canberra.

Lord of the Bins

Spotted in an Aberdeen street and digitally captured by my phone one Sunday night. No idea what's actually going on but it's an interesting photo. 

Into the Distance

However or wherever you travel you're always headed into the distance. A place you never quite get to. Perhaps it's home to you or a strange and unknown destination or nothing more than some fleeting visit that will be quickly overtaken by other experiences. Being there may change you, harden you, kill you. You're not really there though, you're not anywhere. We're all moving along on this abstract cosmic cycle. Tiresome at times, wonderful at others. One thing after another. Feet planted firmly onto the quicksand of travel.

Most Painful

 

So what or where is the most painful place to get a tattoo? I've little or no lived experience of these things but rumour has it that it's Dunfermline.

If you think that this image is NSFW you might well be correct but whatever it looks like to you I can assure you it's 100% pure AI.

Treacherous Cretins

Frank Zappa Treacherous Cretins.  Pau, France 1979.

40+ years on and I probably should try to do my own (pretty sketchy) version based on today's "popular" everyday events, dumb-fuckery and dangerous circumstances and call it Venomous Morons or something. A homage and tribute to some of our various Short Kings.

Short Kings

                  

Not really sure of what to make of this.

Cat: No Filter

Here's an unfiltered geriatric cat adopting a sitting freeze position which he managed to maintain for pretty much three hours. Most of this time he was purring and to all intents and purposes staring into space, happy with his lot. Frozen insomnia. I guess we've all been there.

The Elusive Melody

If there's a fuss then I don't know why: So I joined up to the Mastodon community and nothing really happened other than I thought I'd fallen into some sort of twenty year backwards time warp. Twitter seemed to encourage a pile in or a pile on to take place. "You have to be here" tweeted those in the know. Maybe all those escapees from Twitter don't actually know what they're doing or maybe they're just attention seekers wanting to make a point about this Musk fellow. Perhaps I just joined the wrong wing of the community (?), the Toot Community it appears to be called for no obvious reason. Sometimes social media is pretty disappointing regardless of the ownership or the platform. I wonder who might be at fault there?

Nihilists for Nothing

What Scottish people might say and might mean: "Yes" but with a slight tinge of "No really",  a pinch of "can't quite be bothered", a smidgen of "dinnae ken" and a spoonful of "aye, that'll be right". For politicians it doesn't really matter which political gravy train they're riding on, none of them ever get to their predicted destination, but that's not how they'd describe the experience. The somewhat jaded onlookers have little choice other than to look on ever bewildered.

Roll Up for Glasto!

Roll up and get your Glastonbury 2023 tickets here, or not as the case may be. We live with the constant threat of disappointment, it's 2022 after all, the year of further shit happening. Losing out on this virtual queue is a pretty common experience as it turns out. Staring into the barrel of a 20 second countdown style void that judders along for 72 minutes is a cruel and slow form of torture for the elderly. Then the ugly truth emerges. It's all sold out and you might die without ever getting there. The promise was real but now it's gone. Now it's over for us. We retreat in abject failure and will, in due course think again, fingers at the ready.

Here but not Created

Studio Diary: A worthwhile day was spent in the recording studio yesterday. As ever I'm learning all the time. 9v power cables generate a lot of unwanted noise, you may need to do away with them. My memory is unreliable. The abilities to count and concentrate are not linked. Click tracks only work up to a point, writing two rhythms into a song doesn't help. Auto-tune is everywhere, just embrace it's use at least in limited areas. A loud and dirty guitar sound leads to loud and dirty guitar music. The rule of "three takes for a guitar part/solo" holds up even after all these years. 

There is always a song that says, "you need a 12 string guitar for this". Every so often you should have the inside of your head scooped out like a boiled egg, this may sound bad or disturbing but it will help you in the long run. In a sensible world (?) petrol sold near to the refinery where it was refined should be cheaper in price than at places that are further away from the refinery. Glastonbury tickets go on sale tomorrow, we have two personal registration numbers; one has 9 digits, the other has 10. Hmm.

Uncanny Valley

 

Parking this here due to my own personal forgetfulness and self doubt as once again I must enter the valley. I'm clearly not a robot or some auto-tuned voice but sometimes I wish I was (just a bit). 

"Uncanny Valley" is a hypothesis that AI style human replicas that appear almost but not exactly like real humans elicit feelings of eeriness and revulsion, among some observers but not all. 

"Masahiro Mori's original hypothesis states that as the appearance of a robot is made more human, some observers' emotional response to the robot becomes increasingly positive and empathetic until it reaches a point beyond which the response quickly becomes strong revulsion. However, as the robot's appearance continues to become less distinguishable from a human being, the emotional response becomes positive once again and approaches human-to-human empathy levels." 

Pleasure and Happiness

The new old urbanism: A wet Wednesday evening. Shoppers are queuing to buy tat in glossy shops where the label and bag logo mean more than the contents. Few things are "nice", they're just the shiny bright totems and charms that beckon the beholder into some pretend place of pleasure and temporary satisfaction. Like candlesticks and crosses in a gilded chapel, they suggest the great beyond, the supernatural and a wider horizon but the payoff never arrives. In the end they lead nowhere as the lights dim and the candle's wax cools into chilled drips that cling to their holders. The inner light has failed.  Nobody is going anywhere and the fun of existence is sucked into some black hole of continuous credit and hypnotic greed. So suck up some more snake oil and don't bother to review your life or purpose. The open road that led back to simplicity has closed it's black and yellow barriers. 

Anyway, it's hard not to wander around a mall and not feel you'll be picked up on CCTV as a bad egg, a misfit, walking in circles, going up and down escalators and not taking part in the shopping spree. Staring into windows isn't enough, you deserve to be ejected back out into the rain where you belong. Security sees you and the fingers point. If you want to stay then get in the line for a bubble tea, jewelry for a loved one's gift, some impossibly designed trainers or a perfume that will transport you to some exotic location where Jonny Depp might be waiting. Shopping breaks even more promises than religion or politics and nobody holds it to account as it just rolls on 24 hours a day, in the flesh, on line, over the phone, through TV. We seem to have the wisps of pleasure but never get to the heart of happiness.

Halloween Pumpkin Ideas

Withering testimony and reality check from a pumpkin impersonator: 

"I had considered spending the day disguised as a pumpkin and completing several low key local journeys by train in order to ascertain the quality and integrity of my hastily put together costume. The purpose of the test being to measure how convinced my fellow travelers might be that I was indeed a person who might have morphed into a pumpkin and also how the October weather might impact on my apparel. After a few sharply taken selfies I saw that I was looking more like the elephant man than anything else so I decided to stay at home with my original head wedged in a book. The pumpkin part of my head came away easily leaving only a few red marks on my neck. I then discarded the pumpkin. An unpleasant smell also remains in the air so don't try this at home. It was then that I discovered the wolf hidden in the large flower vase..."

Clearly none of this is a good idea.

Seasonal Greetings

The day before the 31st. This pumpkin has already expired, one of the many that just didn't make the big day. Pulled too soon from the warm earth, sold into a type of modern slavery and exploitation, hacked and chiseled into an unpumpkinlike form with little significance to the history of the fruit. Then only briefly and sporadically illuminated by a cheap tea light candle and finally ignored and discarded as a collapsing, mouldy husk. October may be the cruelest of months ... if you're ever reincarnated as a pumpkin.

Medieval Times

The clocks go back tonight. Nobody really knows why. We just do what we're told. It's something to do with farmers, school children and cyclists I think. They need less gloomy conditions and a grey safety curtain to perform their duties. Maybe the butchers, the bakers and those very busy candlestick makers or the remains of the Holy Roman Empire need it too. Perhaps it saves us money. 

The universe is trapped in time's own endless mystery, while we tinker in the margins. In the end our struggle is ongoing and quite pointless, always against the oncoming darkness and some unnamed threat.

Strange Fruit

The leaves are rotting and tumbling from the tree but those stubborn pears remain. A long summer in the pale sun, drying out and fattening up hasn't improved the quality of the crop. Tough, sour and tasteless they remain, a strange and peculiar fruit, hanging like unfortunately and unjustly sentenced criminals in the October gloom. They have two states now, on the tree or on the ground. There is no redemption or resurrection here, they are in some temporary limbo before they settle down into their winter home, the dreaded brown garden bin.

Thank You for not Smoking

Itchy ankles. A closed and closeted world that doesn't exist. Burning things and puffing smoke. Clubs and societies with devotees who have very small eyes. Those mysterious groups that seem to operate in shadows and half light but really do nothing. Setting up and off intruder alarms. A cruel smile. Loud triumphant music played on brass instruments on a damp day. Card games under a spotlight. The kind of subjects that a bad artist might paint. People who are more like dogs than people but don't realise it. Locked doors that nobody bothers to try to open. Flickering neon signs with letters missing, mostly the vowels. Imitations of life. Bricked up windows. Using the word spectacles when you could just say glasses. Weird drinking habits. Dining from cold plates. Ugh. These are the things that haunt us.

"So what is it you're so angry about?"

"I honestly don't know, I've just always been angry."

Tuesday Ruby

"Goodbye Tuesday Ruby, who is gonna hang a name on you? And when you change with every new day, still I'm gonna miss you." Jagger/Richards.

"Tuesday's dram is still only an imagined thing that, on a Tuesday morning doesn't exist, it's only an idea or a desire that will come to be at the right time later on in the day. All good things are worth waiting for and should be realised at the best time possible, say in the early part of the evening when the mind is still sharp."  Robert Burns. The Crest of the Broken Wave.