How to open a bottle of wine with your shoe

This is absolute genius. How to open a bottle of wine using only your shoe.

It's my wife's birthday today.

WTF? I've got a wife?!

I hate the term "foodies"

In many ways I guess I could be accused of having a lot of the attributes of a foody.

1. I have been to a farmers market and bought food there.
2. I have grown my own (pitifully small) amount of food.
3. I watch lots of cooking shows, and shout at the screen at the ineptness and retardedness of the contestants when they try and open a tin with a massive kitchen knife or serve cheap Asda smoked salmon to Raymond Blanc.
   
4. I read the Guardian.
5. I do a lot of cooking, and eating, and generally like food a lot.
6. And wine. And beer. And scrumpy. And recently whisky. And Gin. I'm becoming a drinky.
   

No wait, back to foodies. Yeah, I hate the term. Really, really hate it. Generally I hate the idea of people defining themselves with a single term as if your generalised assumptions based on that word are enough to define them.

I like people who are share a lot of the aspects of being a foody with foodies, but who don't describe themselves that way. People who can come round for food, drinks, cook for me, have a great time, share recipes, talk cooking tips. Slag off stupid reality cooking show contestants who serve Raymond Blanc a packet of cheap Asda smoked salmon. That's all fantastic.

But if someone comes up and says "oh yes, we're both huge foodies!" (and it's always a couple!) I just think, "oh fuck off." It's the smug bragging thing that you know is coming next. Not some friendly chat about food or eating, it's one of those competitive conversations where whatever you've done they've done it more or better or gone to a better restaurant or BEEN MORE TEDIOUS.

Having a dinner party tonight. They aren't dead Guardian, although hopefully the formal monstrosities you describe are.

Hoodies on the other hand, are legends. And I fancy a drinky.

And gutted "Blancety Blanc" couple went out of The Restaurant. :-(

Wine Wine Wine Wine

A few weeks ago the wife and I (wife?! WTF?!) went back into education. Yeah. We got a flyer through the door for a wine course run by the local council adult education place. I've heard really good things about the place, my cousin teaches jewellery making there, and we love wine so we thought sod it we'll sign up.

School would have been so much better if it involved sitting around in small groups drinking wine and chatting about it (rather than sitting around in small groups in parks in the evenings after school drinking terrible cheap cider and chatting about how horrible it was).

It's been really great actually learning stuff, just for the fun of learning it. I'm quite surprised how much more I am getting out of the course already. Much more than I thought I would.

I have a top tip for you, a total bargain garnacha from Tesco. £3.54 and tastes like it should cost at least twice that. Most of us on the course scored it higher than the £8 Rioja we tasted it against. http://tinyurl.com/yh2sfz7

Christmas comes early

HA! I have fallen victim to a cunning marketing ploy. I have been considering getting a PS3 for ages and ages and this morning I got an e-mail from Amazon about their new PS3 250Gb bundles. Console + 3 games (inc. FIFA 10) + HDMI cable for £284... sounded like a bargain and having looked around at other offerings it is indeed a very bargainous bargain.

SO I have bought one and it's coming tomorrow before 1pm. HA! IN YOUR FACE CREDIT CRUNCH.

Do I need a PS3? No of course not. I just want one, it's coming tomorrow. Woo!

I hate being ill

I've been off sick for the last two days with a cold. Being ill is rubbish. Days off work are fantastic if you can do something good with your time, go away somewhere, do something fun or whatever but when you are basically stuck in bed feeling too shit to do anything other than watch daytime TV they suck. I'd rather be at work.

Daytime TV is particularly terrible. On sky we've got approximately 600 million channels to choose from, most of which have nothing good on at any time of the day. During the daytime even the decent channels have nothing good on. I blame the stupid watershed, surely all the kids are at school during the day so they could put good TV on then?

Probably the main problem with daytime TV is the adverts. I've got so used to watching everything via Sky+, so I've recorded it and can fast forward any adverts or boring bits. Actually having to watch a program live with 15 mins of adverts an hour is hell. And they literally time every one of the 600 million channels to have their ads at the same time. It's horrendous.

My wife (Wife?! WTF?) said yesterday that when she rules the world she'll ban adverts, I dunno how the TV companies will fund themselves (in her world, that's up to them) but possibly through product placement. Last night's Chuck (Chuck vs The Broken Heart) featured another of their amazingly blatent segments of Subway product placement. Maybe that's the future. Ah... quite fancy a subway now.

Huh? I thought this blog was dead?

Hey everyone. Yeah, this blog was dead but I was inspired to start posting on it again today. The thing I got inspired by is rather lame. This blog post that was retweeted by Neil Gaiman on Twitter. ANYWAY.

The main reason we stopped posting, I think, was obviously because we were too lazy to bother. We also got busy doing other stuff. Stuff that would have been really interesting to blog about actually. Is that ironic?

That said the reason underlying both those was that almost from the start we were really struggling with the "lazy" theme of the blog. Did every blog post really have to be moving the manifesto for success through laziness forward? Probably not, in fact with hindsight I can't work out why we would even bother with that. Sounds a bit like trying too hard to me. I reckon if I am blogging on here in future it'll be tedious stories about the boring crap that I'm doing in my life, just like 99.99% of other blogs. Although, I guess it will always be implicitly to do with the lazy theme because I am intrinsically lazy.

So the stuff I was busy doing was organising a gig, which happened to be at the end of the reception to my wedding. Which in itself needed a bit of organising. It was awesome. I'm married now which is weird. I got a nice watch out of it though, and a nice squeaky clean bank account. None of that filthy money stuff messing the account up. Just pure virginal clean emptiness. Well not quite virginal because it did used to be rammed full of cold hard cash.

This weekend I'm off for a stag do, my fourth of the year. Previous trips this year have involved Edinburgh (virtual golf and TPs), South Wales (canyoning and metal), Munich (my own one, giant beers, sausages and going to bed early). This time it's Bath for Home Brew, Curry and It's a Knock Out.

I'll probably update about it on twitter (see feed on the left). Oh yeah, Twitter, another reason for not blogging. Why say something in 500 words when you can say it in 14o characters. As you can see, it's taught me to be brief.