Futtocks
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Posts posted by Futtocks
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My Nait 2 amp which has just returned from a well earned refurb at the Naim factory after 25 years of unbroken service. In all those years it's the only time it's been switched off apart from when we moved house.
The people at Naim have done a brilliant job. It sounds fantastic.
Good aftersales care, good electronics, good company, even if they did carry on using DIN sockets long after everyone else had gone RCA.
Any upgrades, or was it just a straight refurb?
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Proper glossy Eighties rock. Jean Beauvoir (The Plasmatics and countless other bands) plus, oddly. the guy who played keyboards on Nena's '99 Red Balloons'. And sundry other herberts with less notable CVs.
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Slow roast silverside of beef tonight. Cheapest beef joint in the supermarket.I seasoned it with salt & pepper, then slowly brought the internal temperature up to about 50-55 degrees centigrade (oven set to about 90-100 degrees) and held it there for an hour or two. The cooking time was about 4 hours in total. This was all a bit seat-of-the-pants, as I don't have specialist equipment and my electric oven cycles off and on, but close is pretty much good enough, as long as you have a thermometer that keeps you aware of what's going on in there (most ovens' dials are a bit inaccurate).A joint of meat cooked this way releases virtually no juices, so if you want gravy, you'll have to make it from other sources/sauces (see what I did there?). A fair amount of juice comes out when you carve it, though. Deep red inside, but tender.I also took a couple of peeled whole shallots, oiled them and put them in the roasting pan underneath the joint (which was on a rack), to catch what little juice was released. After the full cooking time, they kept their structure but were very tasty. Next time, I think I'll cut them in half and see how they come out.Then, I seared the meat in a hot pan with salted butter and a couple of thyme sprigs. It was served up with the shallots, mashed potatoes and peas.On the side, horseradish. In the mouth, delish!And, of course, I bought enough meat for coldcuts in sandwiches tomorrow!
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One of the best, if not the best, concert films ever made.
'The Last Waltz' could have been better, but Scorsese had to continually kill the momentum with badly-lit, coked-up band reminiscences.
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25 days now without a B&H
Other Scandinavian hi-fi manufacturers are available.
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I forgot to say, the terrible yacht rock theme tune from 'Hard Ticket' is my current earworm. It is bouncing around the inside of my skull like a tasered gerbil.
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They sampled some interesting whiskies on Channel 4's 'Sunday Brunch' today, including Octomore from Bruichladdich, which has been picking up world awards despite being only 5 years old.
There are some interesting things and experiments going on in today's world of whisky!
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I went to see Nils Lofgren in 78 at Sheffield City Hall.
Tom Petty was supporting him and was known to hardly anyone. He blew Lofgren away....
One of the Memsahib's fav acts.... she still drools over TP
My sister bought 'Damn the Torpedoes' because she thought Tom looked pretty hot on the cover photo. She went off him a bit when she saw a photo of him in profile, with the 'schnozzle rudder' in full view.
Whatever; I inherited the LP and have loved the album ever since.
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Dam the Torpedos.... fabulous album....
I forgot to mention, I also queued up 'The Boys of Summer' by Don Henley. God almighty, it takes me back...Written by Mike Campbell of the Heartbreakers, just to tie things together. -
Judee Sill - Heart Food (from the 'Abracadabra' reissue)
Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers - Damn the Torpedoes (Disc 1 of the 2010 reissue)
I finished off with a really stunning vinyl rip of 'Son of a Preacher Man' from Dusty Springfield. Amazing that a song recorded in that hard right/hard left stereo from the early, gimmicky days of the technology* could still sound so natural. But her voice sounds so very real.
*like some of the early Beatles albums, with various instruments shoved to the sides of the soundstage.
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I may have hit Peak Cheese - the cinematic oeuvre of Andy Sidaris!
If you're too young to know about it, this was exactly what the Eighties was like. Things go BANG, breasts go BOING, cars go ZOOM, dialogue is dumber than dirt, hairstyles are huge and if the pace starts to flag, he throws another handful of Playboy centerfolds at the plot.
Plus, you get unexpected names on the way down (or sometimes up) starring in them, like Erik (ChiPs) Estrada, Noriyuki (The Karate Kid) Morita and Danny (Machete) Trejo.
And, in 'Hard Ticket to Hawaii', there's an assassin with a skateboard and a blow-up sex doll, who gets killed in mid-air with a rocket launcher. The stupidity, it hurts!
I sense that some of you don't believe me. Here's the scene in question. SFW, as even the doll is clothed.
Please not that at no point do I state that this is the most stupid bit of the film.
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I just discovered that the Jonestown massacre happened the day after the Star Wars Holiday Special was broadcast. One can't help thinking there's some sort of connection. Hang your head in shame, George Lucas!
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I may have hit Peak Cheese - the cinematic oeuvre of Andy Sidaris!
If you're too young to know about it, this was exactly what the Eighties was like. Things go BANG, breasts go BOING, cars go ZOOM, dialogue is dumber than dirt, hairstyles are huge and if the pace starts to flag, he throws another handful of Playboy centerfolds at the plot.
Plus, you get unexpected names on the way down (or sometimes up) starring in them, like Erik (ChiPs) Estrada, Noriyuki (The Karate Kid) Morita and Danny (Machete) Trejo.
And, in 'Hard Ticket to Hawaii', there's an assassin with a skateboard and a blow-up sex doll, who gets killed in mid-air with a rocket launcher. The stupidity, it hurts!
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Teenage Cave Man (1958), aka Prehistoric World, aka Out of the Darkness, aka Land of Prehistoric Women
Laughing at this is as easy as provoking a RU troll. It is, after all, directed by the King of Cheepnis Roger Corman. But what the hell, right?
I can sum it up in one sentence: Robert (the Man from U.N.C.L.E.) Vaughn looks neither like a teenager or a caveman.
But there's actually a real twist! Not a great one, and one that makes the dinosaur (a crocodile with a big fin glued to its back) footage, which was nicked from another movie, make no sense whatsoever.
Not actually the worst film ever made (as claimed by Vaughn), but it takes something pretty stinky for a guy like Roger Corman to claim he never directed it (he did).
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I'm looking forward to the new episodes of the X-Files.
I'm a bit worried about them. I enjoyed the early series a lot, although the later ones lost me a bit, as I wasn't religiously watching every week at that point.
I just hope they're good.
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Mentos advert.
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In my ongoing trawl through cinema's glorious gutters, this evening saw 'The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik-Yak' appear on my TV screen.If you think the title is bad, then it is obvious you haven't seen the film. The titular female lead is played (with all the subtlety of a Chopper Harris tackle) by Tawny Kitaen, star of the Tom Hanks flick Bachelor Party and several Whitesnake videos. She was, at the time, married to the lead singer, who obviously included the "wearing fancy knickers and pouting in all me videos, like" clause to the pre-nup.The film's plot splits into three parts:1. A bad attempt at Romancing the Stone. Kitaen delivers the Basil Exposition and meets her greasy alpha-male leading man.2. A slightly less bad attempt at Indiana Jones. Having met her inevitable beau, Gwendoline has a couple of dull adventures in jungles and deserts with various menacing critters'n'savages. No R.O.U.S action, though. Then they discover the hidden city and...3. Breasts! Great Caesar's ghost, so many breasts! As Michael Caine once said of Zulus, "farzands of 'em". There was a bit of story going on at this point about an underground city and a lost Amazon civilisation but a. it was drivel and b. there were breasts getting in the way of my brain cells. In short, breasts.Did I mention the breasts?Here's a collector's item - Ms Kitaen in the last part of the film wearing (some) clothes.
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I cooked a couple of beef back ribs in the slow cooker, with shallots, tomato, garlic, some generic bouquet garni, a splash of red wine and about a tablespoon of Cumberland sauce (the latter because the jar was there, rather than being part of any particular recipe). The smells were good, the taste even better!
Served with sweet potato chips and marrowfat peas.
£2.66 for two ribs is not to be sniffed at either.
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I saw a bit of 'Beowulf'. Having read the original story more than once, I have no idea where ITV found this plot.
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Diana Rigg was in the crowd during filming for Sporting Life.
Rugby League World once published a photo of Diana at a Rugby League match. It was at Headingley, I think. Of course she looked gorgeous, and LPL would go up a lot in my estimation (hint hint) if they posted it on this site.
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To be fair though, when the Pension system was designed, Age Pensioners only ever had 2 possible variations: change address or die. It also didn't have to "talk" to any other systems - there were no Income or Assets Tests so there was no link to the Tax Office. Pensioners rarely left the country back then so there was no link to Immigration.
On top of that I think they used COBOL in the 70s and 80s, which didn't change very often and had a big advantage that lots of huge US users had already found any bugs in it before the AUS Govt installed it.
The second time in his life that my grandad went to hospital was in the Nineties. They informed him, much to his amusement, that he didn't exist. The first time he'd been to hospital was before the NHS was created, along with all their medical records.
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Perhaps it just feels like that.
Imagine how long it must feel in an AFL state. The poor devils...
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I remember that. I started with Windows 2.
It can't have been universally true though. I worked in Social Security Dept in 1989 and we must have had Age Pensioners over 90 then so there was some way of entering DOB pre 1900
That was probably back in the day when software was written by people who had taken Computer Studies in school, as opposed to shiny-suited spivs who'd sell you someone else's half-checked coding and blithely assure you that nothing could possibly go wrong.
Uninteresting Trivial Facts
in Any Other Business / Any Other Sports
Posted
Scottish tennis players are in four finals at the Australian Open! Current tally - won 2, lost 1. Andy Murray is the last to play, tomorrow morning.