Shazzerooneypoos will be pleased - it's by a director whose work she's consistently enjoyed at film club on every occasion that we've had one of his pieces showing.
This week, usual time, usual place:
Hope to see everyone at the appointed.
Wednesday, March 07, 2012
Film Club Presents
After last Sunday's rather disappointing "Jude", we have what I hope will be a rather more engaging offering this coming Sunday evening.
Shazzerooneypoos will be pleased - it's by a director whose work she's consistently enjoyed at film club on every occasion that we've had one of his pieces showing.
This week, usual time, usual place:
Pedro Almodovar's 2002 comedy/drama "Hable con Ella" or "Talk to Her".
Hope to see everyone at the appointed.
Shazzerooneypoos will be pleased - it's by a director whose work she's consistently enjoyed at film club on every occasion that we've had one of his pieces showing.
This week, usual time, usual place:
Hope to see everyone at the appointed.
Great Line
Heard on Radio 4 this morning, made me laugh out loud over the chipolatas and eggs that I was munching as a late breakfast/brunch.
I might paraphrase some of the dialogue slightly - but the almost poignant punchline has everything....
"What's that - and what's that horrible noise?"
"It's a clarinet. I'm learning it. I'm not playing it. . .I'm blowing into it with hope."
I might paraphrase some of the dialogue slightly - but the almost poignant punchline has everything....
"What's that - and what's that horrible noise?"
"It's a clarinet. I'm learning it. I'm not playing it. . .I'm blowing into it with hope."
*********
from the series "HR", series 3 Episode: "Gambled", BBC radio 4
Tuesday, March 06, 2012
Dangly Food
Mrs the Millbrooker took me out for a very exciting trip to Morrison's at Liskeard on Sunday. We know how to live down here, you know. Always something hugely entertaining like a supermarket shopping expedition to maintain that long-lost illusion of a rock'n'roll lifestyle.
"Get on with it!" I hear the cry from the cheap seats. And I do understand that this hasn't been vastly scintillating so far - but bear with me.
I enjoyed a rummage at the wet-fish counter and spotted something I've not eaten for a while and haven't cooked in nearly twenty years - best try some of that then.
I've loved octopus since I very first tried it about 35 years ago on a family holiday to the Greek mainland. Plain grilled (or preferably barbecued) with a freshly made egg and lemon sauce - wonderful.
But, with it still being late winter / very early spring, I thought I'd do a slightly more hearty version.
Sweat down a large chopped onion, set the onion aside in an oven-proof casserole.
Stir fry the octopus, chopped into bite-ish sized chunks for about 10 minutes (it will release plenty of its own liquor).
Season while it cooks with lots of freshly ground black pepper.
Add it to the onion along with all the remaining liquor, stir and mix together.
Add a couple of chopped tomatoes, a large bay leaf and a little pinch of salt.
Pour over a large glass of dry white wine.
Cover and stick in the oven at Gas 6 for about an hour.
Now how simple is that? And it's one of the least expensive things you'll find on the fish counter - our one, skinned, sac and tentacles separated, and cleaned in front of us, was just over £3.50 total and we'll get four servings out of it. Yummy Yummy Yum.
"Get on with it!" I hear the cry from the cheap seats. And I do understand that this hasn't been vastly scintillating so far - but bear with me.
I enjoyed a rummage at the wet-fish counter and spotted something I've not eaten for a while and haven't cooked in nearly twenty years - best try some of that then.
But, with it still being late winter / very early spring, I thought I'd do a slightly more hearty version.
Sweat down a large chopped onion, set the onion aside in an oven-proof casserole.
Stir fry the octopus, chopped into bite-ish sized chunks for about 10 minutes (it will release plenty of its own liquor).
Season while it cooks with lots of freshly ground black pepper.
Add a couple of chopped tomatoes, a large bay leaf and a little pinch of salt.
Pour over a large glass of dry white wine.
Cover and stick in the oven at Gas 6 for about an hour.
Saturday, March 03, 2012
Aw
My thanks to Tooty McBadass for posting this on his Facebook page, dedicated to his lovely partner.
I dedicate my posting of it to no one in particular.
I dedicate my posting of it to no one in particular.
This Google Privacy Thing
Right, with a certain level of mild hypocrisy seeing as I write this blog on one of Google's major data collecting sites (AKA Blogger or Blogspot), it's about time to try and do something to avoid the internet's dominant player from collecting / collating / distributing all that personal information.
As it was once put - "If your getting something for free, you're not a customer. You're the product." So, dear Google search engine with your marvellous algorithms and massively invasive cookies, you have to go.
There's an informative set of suggestions of how to avoid the GoogleMonster in this article - some are more fiddly to accomplish than others, but the simplest thing to do is just to stop using the world's biggest search engine and use a different one.
It might take a little bit of getting used to, but at Millbrooker Towers we're trying out DuckDuckGo which we've made into the default search engine; so even when we're using Google Chrome as the browser, if we put a search term "easy mandolin chords" for example into the browser search bar, it's DuckDuckGo that does the job, leaving no trail of what we've looked for so Google can't sell the information to advertisers in order that we get bombarded with crap.
Idiot's guide to changing default search engine to DuckDuckGo for Google Chrome users:
Go to www.duckduckgo.com
Bottom right of screen, click "Chrome" and follow the pop up instructions.
Whole thing takes about a minute.
Meantime, if we find we don't really get on with DuckDuckGo, which is entirely possible, there are a myriad other search engines which don't have Google's invasive non-privacy policies. We'll just try another.
Happy hunting.
As it was once put - "If your getting something for free, you're not a customer. You're the product." So, dear Google search engine with your marvellous algorithms and massively invasive cookies, you have to go.
There's an informative set of suggestions of how to avoid the GoogleMonster in this article - some are more fiddly to accomplish than others, but the simplest thing to do is just to stop using the world's biggest search engine and use a different one.
Idiot's guide to changing default search engine to DuckDuckGo for Google Chrome users:
Go to www.duckduckgo.com
Bottom right of screen, click "Chrome" and follow the pop up instructions.
Whole thing takes about a minute.
Meantime, if we find we don't really get on with DuckDuckGo, which is entirely possible, there are a myriad other search engines which don't have Google's invasive non-privacy policies. We'll just try another.
Happy hunting.
Friday, March 02, 2012
Approaching Normality
Well, good people of blogging land, I've been conspicuous by my absence for a couple of weeks (or slightly more, perhaps). I would offer apologies, but I somehow feel that it might have been a blessed relief for the erudite and intelligent readers of these pages.
That accounts for two of you then.
On with some mild drivelling...
I've been quiet in my electronic scribblings because my eyes have been giving me a hard time again. Arse.
The iritis flared up a couple of weeks back and it's only now that I've got enough vision back to spend a short time messing about at the computer screen. Normality in terms of eyesight is slowly returning (what passes for normality in my case, anyway) and so here I am.
"What news?" I hear the cry from the cheap seats.
Very little to report - I've not been able to get out much, but I have been loading lots of CDs into our new wonder-toy (see post below this one). A couple of blasts from the past have become Facebook friends - good to hear from you again Kevin, and Naomi (she formerly of Terry Tinsel and the Spangle Boyz fame - or is that infamy?). Not met either of them in 25 or even 30 years - there's a lot of catching up to do.
Just for its own ridiculously over-the-top and utterly fabulous entertainment value - here's my old friend from all those years ago doing what she did then under the moniker "Suzi Sequin" as I vaguely recall.
...she's in the star-spangled jacket on the left.
So - back to what I was wittering on about before I got distracted by glam-rock revivalists, the old eyes are getting back to a state which allows me to read a bit and to venture out in daylight for short periods. So with luck, more nonsense and drivellings will follow as I find things to write about.
Until next (not-too-far-away) time . . .
That accounts for two of you then.
On with some mild drivelling...
The iritis flared up a couple of weeks back and it's only now that I've got enough vision back to spend a short time messing about at the computer screen. Normality in terms of eyesight is slowly returning (what passes for normality in my case, anyway) and so here I am.
"What news?" I hear the cry from the cheap seats.
Very little to report - I've not been able to get out much, but I have been loading lots of CDs into our new wonder-toy (see post below this one). A couple of blasts from the past have become Facebook friends - good to hear from you again Kevin, and Naomi (she formerly of Terry Tinsel and the Spangle Boyz fame - or is that infamy?). Not met either of them in 25 or even 30 years - there's a lot of catching up to do.
Just for its own ridiculously over-the-top and utterly fabulous entertainment value - here's my old friend from all those years ago doing what she did then under the moniker "Suzi Sequin" as I vaguely recall.
So - back to what I was wittering on about before I got distracted by glam-rock revivalists, the old eyes are getting back to a state which allows me to read a bit and to venture out in daylight for short periods. So with luck, more nonsense and drivellings will follow as I find things to write about.
Until next (not-too-far-away) time . . .
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Of Brennans and Cocktails
Casting my mind back to a week or two before Christmas, which now seems like casting my mind back to pre-Roman times but is less than two months gone, I remember Mrs The Millbrooker and I deciding that we would treat ourselves to a present between us. Rather than splurging huge amounts on each other on our own, if you get what I'm trying to say.
The object of our desire was a heavily advertised system for digitally storing CDs as MP3 files, with the option to compress the data to varying degrees or even to leave the file completely uncompressed. We have quite a lot of orchestral and other classical CDs (the fantastic 1952-1853 complete Beethoven symphonies conducted by Herbert von Karajan box set, for example, is a recent addition to the collection), and you don't want to be losing anything from the top or bottom end on recordings like that; so the ability to transfer to a hard drive without compression was important.
So, I took it upon myself to read up about and, eventually, buy one of the much vaunted Brennan JB7 audio jobbers.
I ordered online. Four or five days later the order hadn't been acknowledged. Ah well - these things do happen; perhaps I'd made a mistake - with my eyesight it's remarkably easy to press the wrong key or fail to see a tick-box on screen to finalise a transaction.
I emailed the Brennan people and they emailed back - nope, they had no record of my order. I tried again, using GooglePay (Brennan's preferred method). I got an immediate response from GooglePay confirming all was well.
Two days later, no acknowledgement from Brennan. Another email. Another response that there was no record of my purchase. I checked with the credit card company - no transaction showed. Ok - I really want one of these things. I'll try again. This time I rang them.
The very nice young lady on the other end of the line took my order, took close on £500 from my credit card account and a few days later a box arrived at Millbrooker Towers to much excitement.
I unpacked the expensive little blue machine, pulled out a couple of CDs from the rack and began the process of loading our 350(ish) CD collection almost immediately.
Mrs The Millbrooker left me to it and headed off for a short Parish Council committee meeting. In the half to three quarters of an hour that she was out, the Brennan was tried, found wanting and was back in its box. And there was a very grumpy and disappointed Millbrooker. It wouldn't read a single CD. After three attempts to buy the bloody thing, they'd sent me faulty one. Arse.
Using the "three strikes and you're out" rule (two failed purchase attempts and a faulty machine = three), the Millbrooker-Brennan JB7 relationship was at an abrupt end.
The machine has been returned, most of the money refunded - the Brennan people are trying to hang onto the £10 postage/packing which is against Office of Fair Trading rules, so we'll get that back or plop them into as much shite as I can muster through formal complaints procedures.
To summarise about a Brennan JB7 - the company's online systems don't work, the machine itself might not work when you get it; they try to rip you off if you return the machine as faulty. Feel free to buy one, but don't say I didn't warn you.
On with the narrative . . .
Mrs The Millbrooker did cheering me up by investigating possible, less well advertised, alternatives online. She found several possibilities, the most interesting of which for our purposes looked to be the Cocktail X10. Available from here. should yo want to buy one and let me have a very small commission at the same time.
And a few days, and one short visit to Plymouth's Richer Sounds shop, later we became the proud owners of another few hundred pounds' worth of little metal box.
It does all the that the JB7 does and plenty more. For less money than the Brennan product (they have to pay for all that advertising somehow), you get double the memory (a whole terabyte - that's 1000GB). Enough memory, indeed, to store and playback 1300 CDs without any compression whatsoever.
You get the ability to create your own categories of music, as few or as many as you wish. We're trying to keep it simple with "Orchestral", "Chamber", "Folk", "Rock" and so on, but it's getting difficult with some of the more obscure or esoteric parts of the Millbrooker Towers music collection.
With a suitable dongle it also connects to internet radio and can play music streaming from a computer connected to the same wifi network. 'Tis almost magic.
Not to mention the read out is much clearer and contains more information than the JB7.
The seemingly off-kilter text in the shot above is because the CD title and Artist listing are scrolling from right to left as they're too long to be displayed completely. The big blue musical notation can be replaced with a photo or some cover art, but we've not around to that and probably won't bother.
So, in my self-appointed guise of consumer champion, should be thinking of buying a Brennan JB7 I'll strongly recommend that you think twice and consider instead a Cocktail X10. So far, it's been a terrific piece of kit.
Only 290 odd CDs left to load into it . . .ho hum . . .
The object of our desire was a heavily advertised system for digitally storing CDs as MP3 files, with the option to compress the data to varying degrees or even to leave the file completely uncompressed. We have quite a lot of orchestral and other classical CDs (the fantastic 1952-1853 complete Beethoven symphonies conducted by Herbert von Karajan box set, for example, is a recent addition to the collection), and you don't want to be losing anything from the top or bottom end on recordings like that; so the ability to transfer to a hard drive without compression was important.
So, I took it upon myself to read up about and, eventually, buy one of the much vaunted Brennan JB7 audio jobbers.
I emailed the Brennan people and they emailed back - nope, they had no record of my order. I tried again, using GooglePay (Brennan's preferred method). I got an immediate response from GooglePay confirming all was well.
Two days later, no acknowledgement from Brennan. Another email. Another response that there was no record of my purchase. I checked with the credit card company - no transaction showed. Ok - I really want one of these things. I'll try again. This time I rang them.
The very nice young lady on the other end of the line took my order, took close on £500 from my credit card account and a few days later a box arrived at Millbrooker Towers to much excitement.
Mrs The Millbrooker left me to it and headed off for a short Parish Council committee meeting. In the half to three quarters of an hour that she was out, the Brennan was tried, found wanting and was back in its box. And there was a very grumpy and disappointed Millbrooker. It wouldn't read a single CD. After three attempts to buy the bloody thing, they'd sent me faulty one. Arse.
Using the "three strikes and you're out" rule (two failed purchase attempts and a faulty machine = three), the Millbrooker-Brennan JB7 relationship was at an abrupt end.
The machine has been returned, most of the money refunded - the Brennan people are trying to hang onto the £10 postage/packing which is against Office of Fair Trading rules, so we'll get that back or plop them into as much shite as I can muster through formal complaints procedures.
To summarise about a Brennan JB7 - the company's online systems don't work, the machine itself might not work when you get it; they try to rip you off if you return the machine as faulty. Feel free to buy one, but don't say I didn't warn you.
On with the narrative . . .
Mrs The Millbrooker did cheering me up by investigating possible, less well advertised, alternatives online. She found several possibilities, the most interesting of which for our purposes looked to be the Cocktail X10. Available from here. should yo want to buy one and let me have a very small commission at the same time.
And a few days, and one short visit to Plymouth's Richer Sounds shop, later we became the proud owners of another few hundred pounds' worth of little metal box.
You get the ability to create your own categories of music, as few or as many as you wish. We're trying to keep it simple with "Orchestral", "Chamber", "Folk", "Rock" and so on, but it's getting difficult with some of the more obscure or esoteric parts of the Millbrooker Towers music collection.
With a suitable dongle it also connects to internet radio and can play music streaming from a computer connected to the same wifi network. 'Tis almost magic.
Not to mention the read out is much clearer and contains more information than the JB7.
So, in my self-appointed guise of consumer champion, should be thinking of buying a Brennan JB7 I'll strongly recommend that you think twice and consider instead a Cocktail X10. So far, it's been a terrific piece of kit.
Only 290 odd CDs left to load into it . . .ho hum . . .
Friday, February 17, 2012
Film Club Presents
Will it be another masterpiece, a lesson in how to make great cinema? Or will it be one of those, "ah well - it only took a couple of hours . . ." evenings?
The time to find out will the usual one, and the place will be rather usual as well.
This week's presentation will be Aleksandr Sokurov's 2005 Solntse or The Sun.
Sounded good in the reviews, we shall find out for ourselves ....
The time to find out will the usual one, and the place will be rather usual as well.
This week's presentation will be Aleksandr Sokurov's 2005 Solntse or The Sun.
Sounded good in the reviews, we shall find out for ourselves ....
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
No Explanation Required
I'm grateful to Brian for posting this on his Facebook page.
I'm sure there was no self interest whatsoever (Brian plays tea-chest bass in the rather excellent Dr Thud's Remedy).
I'm sure there was no self interest whatsoever (Brian plays tea-chest bass in the rather excellent Dr Thud's Remedy).
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