UK Watercooler Seven: Watercooler Heaven!

I deserved to be sick after all the nummy food I ate at H's dinner party.

It's not for weight reasons (though that is getting alarming) but more for generaly health. I'm also walking up stairs more, and going to make sure that I walk down to the river and back every day at lunchtime.

It's only five days. If I *do* actually feel any better, than I might consider doing it for all of Lent. If I don't, well, it can't do me or my liver any harm.

Fuck, man. Diet? That's already detox.

I won't have time to eat much lunch because I have to go into town to drop off my *four* rolls of wedding photos at the developers. So I'm eating chocolate now.

Diet Coke is full of unpleasant chemicals, but then again so is everything else.

(I am ignoring this talk of cake and doughnuts. You guys are sodding MEAN. Would it kill you to be supportive? I'm going to go and have some green tea now.)

(xpost: both the weekend in general and the wedding. And the FAP of course)

Cool. And I'm glad someone else uses film cameras too :)

What Kate said - admittedly, I think it's still not proved one way or another whether aspartame does odd things to your brain, but I'm guessing that cutting down will probably be good for me.

(has anybody tried that Coffee Pepsi? It sounds like a horrible idea for a drink, even moreso than Pepsi Blue)

Aspartame is carcinogenic. Allegedly only in high quantities. I don't know what a 'high' quantity is. Anyway, I don't drink diet or straight coke. I smoke though! Clever me!

Good luck w/multidetox, Kate!

I read a magazine interview recently with that hypnotist chappie, Paul McKenna. He said that the key to making yourself stop eating (or over-eating, rather) was an extremely simple mid trick - every time you really fancy a slice of cake or pizza or whatever, just imagine it in your mind's eye being covered with slimy wriggly worms (or something equally disgusting). It will put you off it, and if you do it often enough your mind will forge a permanent link between that particular foodstuff and the disgusting-ness, therefore you will go off it with no real effort at all.

I tried doing this with chocolate, and it actually worked for me. Very quickly, too.

The warehouse office have already eaten all the chocolate I took them on Friday, which is a good excuse to visit again when I'm passing *this* Friday.

(I'm going to Wales this time, so it's rather less of a detour to visit them)

xpost: Here, CJ, have a chocolate.

Works both ways.

(xpost)

FP did you meet your phone-flirt?

Oh oh oh I forgot to say also I have developed PALPATATIONS and an IRREGULAR HEARTBEAT. Hooray!

I did indeed.

Spoke to her on the phone again this morning, and she said I have to come back and visit again soon. Because they've already eaten all the chocolate.

Anyway, the Worm Lady says worms are great, but I'm a vegetarian and I can't.

I am drinking lots of water. First cup of green tea without honey tastes like pond water. Ugh. I have to keep reminding myself it's the only caffeine I'll get today.

kate i am v supportive of detox, hurrah! cake and all that is just full of refined sugar crap anyway. gurt solid slabs of bitter cocoa are where it's at. also after like 2 days of eating nothing but veggies i always feel superpowered, so you will too.

hey fp, good to see you friday. rest of the night sounded cool too, i am a bit jealous of the pizzaness but i had purple food to make up for it.

i have given in and joined myspace.

I should have invited a random ILXor to the wedding as my guest, seeing as I'd said I was taking one but didn't.

Also, I think the high cocoa content chocolate thing is something I should go back to. Stop eating rubbish pick and mix chocolate (despite the crazy Scandinavian illustrations!) and eat 70% dark chocolate which is actually GOOD for your BRANE apparently, according to that book that H had.

beetroot is better than worms for eating, beanz, but it would make a rubbish toy.

What is risotto - or, rather how is it made? (insert stupid web meme here?) And what is potch?

Approx. 1 litre/2 pints stock
1 tablespoon olive oil
3 finely chopped shallots or 2 medium onions
1/2 a head of celery, finely chopped (discard any tough outer sticks)
Maldon sea salt and black pepper
2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
400g/14oz risotto rice
100ml/3fl oz dry white wine
70g/2oz butter
85-100g/3-3 1/2oz freshly grated Parmesan cheese

Heat the stock. Then in a separate pan heat the olive oil, add the shallot or onion, celery and a pinch of salt, and sweat the vegetables for about 3 minutes. Add the garlic and after another 2 minutes, when the vegetables have softened, add the rice. Turn up the heat now. At this crucial point you can't leave the pan, and anyway, this is the best bit.

While slowly stirring, continuously, you are beginning to fry the rice. You don't want any colour at any point (so remember, you're in control, and if the temperature seems too high, turn it down a bit). You must keep the rice moving.

After 2 or 3 minutes it will begin to look translucent as it absorbs all the flavours of your base (it may crackle at this point, that's fine). Add the wine, keeping on stirring as it hits the pan - it will smell fantastic! It will sizzle around the rice, evaporating any harsh alcohol flavours and leaving the rice with a tasty essence.

Once the wine seems to have cooked into the rice, add your first ladle of hot stock and a pinch of salt (add small amounts of salt to taste while you are adding the stock). Turn down the heat to a highish simmer (the reason we don't want to boil the hell out of it is because, if we do, the outside of the rice will be cooked and fluffy and the inside will be raw).

Keep adding ladlefuls of stock, stirring and allowing each ladleful to be absorbed before adding the next. This will take about 15 minutes. Taste the rice - is it cooked? Carry on adding stock until the rice is soft but with a slight bite. Check seasoning.

Remove from the heat and add the butter and the Parmesan, saving a little of the latter to go on top if you like. Stir gently. Eat it as soon as possible while it retains its moist texture.

x-post YAY! Will hvae to try that.

potch is mashed potato but with chunks of turnip/swede/parsnip/carrot etc in. i bet it would be nummy if you used beetroot.

xpost thanks cj!

xpost

fuck topiary! one of the ppl on the german trip as we went past a garden of trees that had all been shorn into hideous little stunted things, next to their tall stretchy brethren waving in the breeze: "oh, i love trees! i love it when they've been cut down like that!" everyone else: "..." a bit later, someone else: "wow, look at all those flowers!" person 1: "oh, i hate flowers. i just... HATE flowers." wtf... dude, they're FLOWERS! how can you hate flowers? what are you, a 13 year old boy? (no, she is a 40-something year old woman.) this was the same woman who called a hotel in frankfurt and said (in faux-posh haughty voice): "hello... um.... hello... er... do you, er... um. SPEAKA DI EENGLEESH?" and another hotel in munich and said "hello.. er... yes. DO - YOU - SPEAK - er... ANGLAISE?" i mean, i recognise the "if you say it slower and louder they'll understand, don't, like, bother to learn a tiny bit of the language of the country you're going to or anything, fuck 'em, we're doing them a favour by deigning to visit their poxy hole" stereotype who talks to anyone whose first language isn't english as if they're THICK, from off comedy programmes and whatnot, but i seriously did not think these people actually existed outside fawlty towers. i was ready to fucking smack her. SO. RUDE. SO. ARROGANT. SO. PATRONISING. and she insisted on nominating herself spokesperson for the group whenever we were ordering food or booking into a hotel or whatever. i did my best to try and make a point of saying some stuff in german when making my own order or whatever, and in general HELLO talking to people like they are PEOPLE, not SLOW MACHINES (bull & gate band anyone?), but i was just so, so embarrassed to be with her. reinforcing all the bad things about brits abroad :( apart from the fact that it's TOTALLY FUCKING IGNORANT, if i was those hotel/restaurant staff, i would've spat in our food and given us shitty rooms for that. ugh, ugh, ugh. then she called me a weirdo for not liking will young, which coming from her i took as the highest compliment imaginable. maybe i should head to the annoying co-workers thread.

Though topiary is great. Haven't you ever read Greene Knowe? It's not the same as wee shorn bretheren, it's like box and yew cut to look like ANIMALS and it's great.

This woman sounds awful, though. Blimey.

I'd take up topiary if I had the space.

yeh flower-hataz i know! i just. don't. get it. check 'em out, all wavey and yellow and red and purple and stuff, and all LOOK at ME! i'm on DISPLAY! like peacocks.

yeh, i've seen topiary cut into animal shapes and stuff, but i think i prefer it when the trees are left to just do their own thing. damn, i need a tree to climb. there better be some on sunday!

the woman was AWFUL. she was only there from sun night thank god (oh, the tales i have brought back of Huey's Normal People! is this the real world? if so it is a piece of PISS to live in but i can't take the interminable faffery, not to mention the conversation... ahem ahem where are those 5-syllable words, everyone apart from ken? (and thanks ken...)) and at first i thought i liked her cos at least she's a bit sparky and she moves fast and you can bat insults back and forth with her pretty good and she takes as good as she gives, but the more i spent time with her the more i realised she was AWFUL. she was a replacement for one who went home the week before for various reasons (who also couldn't cope with the talking-to-foreigners thing but at least she wasn't arrogant about it, she just didn't know how to do it, she isn't much good at talking to me either so maybe it's just a general thing). actually most of the people were ok, as people go, i guess. it was just impossible to have (what i'd think of as) a normal conversation with them, eg the second night there we started talking about joining the euro (and i thought "hooray! here we go") and someone said they thought we should because of all the messing about changing money, someone else said they thought we shouldn't because they liked having different money for places and it kept it interesting and individual, and that was the cue for woman-who-went-home to say "oooh! aren't WE political today!" and the conversation died and went back to dancing around borderline racism in a chinese restaurant :( tho there was one person who totally saved my trip by being INTERESTED IN THE WORLD AROUND HER and WANTING TO TALK ABOUT IT. also i read 'the system of the world' while i was there, that helped too.

I mean, flowerbeds, pruning trees, hybrids etc. - where do you stand on that?

There, you got two for the price of one.

If you want to get picky, the entire European landscape is completely man-made.

Oh, and Pash, I got to listen to your unfinished song at the weekend (funny, the TISSP one didn't come through, bah, my MP3 player must hate him)

I really, really liked it, it was lovely. I kinda like the abruptness of the ending - perhaps you could play with that idea, create the sound of a tape being eaten, or a record skipping to go along with it? I like happy accidents like that. Are you going to leave it instrumental, or do you want to put vocals on it?

Thanks! Made my day, that did..

The idea is to write a topline on the synthesiser for the 1st and 3rd sections of the acoustic guitar part, I've just got to set the monosynth on top of the string machine and work one out. I dunno though. I have this idea for a vocal/song oriented project, and the guitar part was a bit I was thinking about pulling out to use for that. The chord at the end that gets cut off leads into this sub-baroque pipe organ section that I'm quite pleased with. I just have to import the pipe organ part into cubase.

I'll see if I can get it up online for the weekend.

I'm YSI-ing a bunch of .wav samples of analogue synthesiser oscillators to this synthesiser nut I know in the states - basically 3-semitone across a 5 oct keyboard raw waveforms for importing into someone's sampler. Any use to anyone?

i am rolling over like a kitten

horticultural

Well, on Sunday we shall do some perambulations of some splendiferous horticultural intricacies surrounding the architectural evirons of the edifice that is Penshurst Place.

Dude, dis-pro-por-tion-ate-ly. Just because it was the right word for the sentence doesn't mean points off!

also i read 'the system of the world' while i was there, that helped too.

I am roffling at this because I can see on my bookcase that the book is also The Size of The World, so the paragraph reads like "How were the people? Well, I'd always meant to read War & Peace!"

(as in this apols for terrible picture, it was the first suitable one that gis dragged up)

er yeah, that about sums it up! but i'd been trying to read it for about a month and even though i was enjoying it had only got 100 pages in (this is almost entirely the fault of ilx), but this ten days was PERFECT for immersing myself in it. saturday night everyone else went out to a restaurant in town and i lay in the bath reading that with clem snide and thee more shallows on the stereo (all hotel rooms to have cd player as well as bloodyfucking tv: u&k). it was blissful and felt like the most luxurious saturday night i'd had in a looong time. damncool, now i need to read the preceding two.

yo kit, start talking about stuff you know about!

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14241/14241-h/images/illus233.jpg

http://www.yvonnegilbert.com/cardprnt/womdg600.jpg

Though I have noted how much more pleasurable an experience ILX is when I no longer read the Mod boards.

We have had a thread about favourite mythical creatures, I think.

I know we've had threads about mythical creatures and D&D beasts and the like. Because I recall having an argument about what made the difference between a dragon and a wyvern. Also, it may have had Rocs on it.

In fact, I think I may have started it? (Either me or FP?)

The thing about topiary is that it seems a bit more forced to me than even a garden. Wilderness everywhere wouldn't be great for all sorts of reasons, but I guess in my earlier post I was just wondering out loud if/where there's a line between lovely nature in its natural loveliness – but a bit tidied up – and forcing nature into unnatural forms. Topiary and bonsai trees etc are over the line in my head, somehow. It's like when I'm wandering around some stately home or something, and there are lots of formal gardens, and I'm thinking more about the people who built the gardens and the social history of that sort of thing than admiring the pretty blooms or whatever. I always look for the back door into the unsculpted grounds behind the gardens. I know there's hardly anwhere that looks like it did during the iron age though, except the moors etc.

Anyway, back to wyverns

time for a new thread?

UK Watercooler Eight: Don't Hate Kate!

Lamest troll ever. Do you want a cookie?