My girlfriend is bringing her work laptop home from work today for the weekend. Why is she lugging it all the way home with her?
So that tomorrow morning I can check that Danny's flight is on time, using the wireless broadband from the comfort of my own bed. Excellent
Off to Engerland.
What a world traveller I am. A jet setting playboy of the highest order.
Since I'm hanging out with nerds and my cohort of laziness, I imagine I'll blog at least once. I said the same thing when I went to Malaysia and look how well that worked out. No seriously, go look. I'm not going to tell you.
BBC2's new schedule features 2 cooking shows in consecutive 8:30pm slots. They couldn't be more different. On Monday we have Nigella Express, Nigella Lawson's show that claims to show you how to cook very quick and easy recipes. Now, Nigella is no trained chef but her 'sexy' style has won her a lot of fans.
On Tuesday Heston Bluhmental's show, In Search of Perfection, takes classic dishes and uses the latest in gastronomic science to try and elevate them to the highest possible level that you can achieve in a home kitchen.
Now, on paper I'd expect Nigella's show to be more suitable for the LazyView reader, the concept of very quick easy recipes to make when you've got very little time is just what I need on a day to day basis. However, there is one major flaw, and it's not Nigella's ridiculously over the top flirting to the camera or her conveniently ethnically diverse "friends" who pop over for a surprise Sunday lunch. (although who does that? Who randomly pops over at the last minute and expects to get given a roast?) No. The problem is a combination of finances and a complete detachment from normal life.
In her last show Nigella got a phone call from 'the girls' who were going to pop over that evening for a drink. Nigella fancied a quiet night in but, of course, being the perfect hostess she says "sure, come over!" and because she's cooking the express way she hops in a taxi to her butcher and buys what must have been about £30 worth of lamb loin. Excuse me? I'm lazy, but I wouldn't get a taxi to the fucking butcher! (and I'm sorry to say if you pop over for a snack with your wine, you won't be getting prime cuts of lamb on a salad either... I might make an awesome cake though). Once she gets the lamb home she puts it together with a few bits and pieces she finds in her walk in pantry, which is organised geographically so if you want some south east asian flavours you just walk down to that section. I've seriously seen less well stocked specialist delis.
So yeah Nigella, it is easy to throw a meal for 4 together in a few minutes if you're going to throw £60 worth of ingredients and taxi fares at the problem but your average Joe like me considers a tin of tomatoes or some butter to be a store cupboard staple, not a packet of north african spicy sausages!
Heston on the other hand is one of the best and most creative chefs in the world. His restaurant, The Fat Duck, has been in the top 2 in the world for the past 6 years. Along with Ferran Adrià at El Bulli he is generally seen as at the forefront of experimental cooking. In his show he spends 6 months experimenting in his lab and traveling to the best restaurants and food science centres of the world, trying to perfect a series of what seem to be the most mundane of dishes, this week he tackled the mighty burger. Easy? Well, have you tried getting the perfect bite sized bun? Making cheese slices at home? Perfecting the blend of meat for your burger? I doubt it. Last week he spent a lot of time trying to achieve an oven temperature of 350 degrees c (gas mark 25) ina way that people could achieve at home. He was trying to replicate the heat of a Tandoor oven.
Heston's recipes are intensely complicated and the product of tens of hours of research, I doubt anyone will actually ever make them at home BUT you do learn a huge amount from them. Not only the science but little tips of the trade. eg. Star anise has a chemical in it that reacts with caremelising onions to produce a chemical that give you the Umami (meaty) flavour, in a similar way to monosodium glutamate, so if you put star anise in with the frying onions when you make your bolognese sauce it'll taste meatier.
LazyView verdict: Heston wins by miles.
Heston's show is brilliant, interesting to people who like cooking or science and despite his lofty credentials and the fact he's cooking at a level that most people will never even eat let alone be able to cook to he's totally in touch with real life. Watch his show and you'll learn something. Nigella's show is smug, annoying and completely out of touch with a normal person's reality. As a lazy person her show professionally offends me. Avoid.
Next week my fellow lazyblogger, Danny, is flying over from the Good Ol' USofA for a week. Excited Reader: "That sounds great! What are you going to do?"
Er. A very good question. Between us two of us we have the organisational motivation of a sloth recently tasked with shipping himself to the Abbatoir de Sloth, Paris where, upon arrival, he will be skinned alive and prepared to be made into a series of unpronouncable French delicacies.
I have already done a huge amount of things to prepare though. I thought before I started writing this blog that I'd done hardly anything, but in fact I've done loads, or at least I've facilitated loads.
I have told other people who know Danny and are stupid enough to want to see him whilst he is in the country that he is coming over. Well, some of them anyway I probably forgot a lot of them. Some of them are even coming to visit.
I've booked tickets to a football match... well, I say I booked them. Technically I faffed around like a bufoon trying to sort something out until a crack team of my friends kindly dived in to save the situation. (this is meant to be a football analogy, not a comment related to any recent drownings).
I've also arranged a party for the Saturday night he arrives. It's my girlfriend's birthday around that time, and we haven't had a housewarming party so we figured that was enough excuses to have one. Well, I told some people it was happening but have only just put some details on the interweb so that people actually knew when and where they were coming. Facebook Events FTW! I also ordered a lot of booze on the internet, using the excellent Majestic home delivery service that I think I've recommended here before, which arrived last night. I also started drinking it last night but hopefully there'll be some left by Saturday.
I got the guy who organises our weekly Sunday afternoon 6 a-side football to upgrade our booking to the double size pitch so Danny can join in.
I've arranged an evening in the pub with some other internet nerds in London.
I've even thought of two whole cities other than London that we could visit whilst he's here.
I'm exhausted! To be fair to Danny, he's been busy too. He's packed a shirt and a pair of jeans already.
My current car is a 10 year old Toyota 4Runner with 137,000 miles on it. To say it's a little used would be like saying I'm a little addicted to internet porn. Recently I decided to buy a new car. I'm going to tell you the 5 part saga of what turned out to be an epic quest. A battle between good and evil. Between right and wrong. Between two epic forces of laziness. Between me and a Car Dealership.
A few weeks ago, in a town not too far away I took a Saturday trip to a car dealership. I've been looking for a car for awhile so I knew exactly what I wanted. A Nissan 350z. The only question was the color.
Well, like all the other car dealerships I had been too, they didn't have many cars on the lot (that weren't SUVs. Shockingly SUV sales aren't too strong these days). I was approached by seemingly affable Sales Guy (aren't they all) about 2 minutes after I got on the lot. After the initial chit-chat and introductions I cut right to the chase and laid out what I wanted. Sales Guy knew I was not to be toyed around with. Sales Guy said to me, "If I can find you the car you want, will you buy today?" I said, "I'm ready to buy today." Sales Guy ran some fancy inventory searches, using this strange device called a Computer, on other Nissan dealerships in this area of the country. He found one that matched my specifications! Touring package, San Marino Blue, grey and black leather interior. In Georgia! That's not too far away. They "contacted the dealership to make sure the car was available" and it was, so we moved forward.
Now it was time to talk numbers. He gave me the list price, I told him my price and said that was it, I wasn't negiotiating. He said back, "If I can get this price, do we have a deal?" He's a very quizzical Sales Guy. I said yes and shook his hand. Lo and behold, they matched the price and after some discussion and arm wrestling, we agreed on the financing. I put some money down to secure transport and to lock me into the deal so I wouldn't get buyers remorse and try to back out of the deal.
All seemed great. In a few days I would have a brand new car. I didn't realize at the time I had made a deal with the devil.
Those brilliantly ingenious Japanese have done it again, they've come up with brilliant new gadget for your car. Next time you or one of your pesky offspring are caught short on a long car journey there'll be need to stop for a 'comfort break' at an expensive service station where you'll be tempted into joining the RAC, buying a meat and pastry product or a cheap 80s music compilation performed by cover artists. No. Now you can relieve yourself in your backseat with the in car toilet.
THAT is the question.
Whether 'tis nobler in the stomach to suffer
The pangs and rumbles of outrageous hunger,
Or to take arms against a sea of chocolates,
And by eating, end them. To die, to eat;
"How do I make such a choice?" I hear absolutely no one ask. Well I'm gonna tell you. And you're gonna like it. And if you don't, maybe you'll comment about it in the comments section and I can call you a testicle sniffer and things will be great.
People have accused us in the past of being lazy because we actually do stuff. But being lazy isn't about not doing stuff, it's about doing stuff the lazy way. Being lazy is about going with the flow. Taking the path of least resistance. And giving in is the path of least resistance. This article and the undeniable science behind it back that up. The more you resist something the more you must have it. You have to give in at the start. Never try to resist. Resistance is futile blah blah blah Borgy Borg Borg. A lazy person would already know this, not resist, and therefore not stuff their face with 40% more chocolate.
Of course, according to science, in the area of food, men are immune to this phenomenon owing to the fact that we're not fucking crazy. I'm going to guess in the area of sex we're highly susceptible though.
I've often tried to figure out when being lazy pays off the most. We all know laziness always pays off immediately, but when do people have the most need of being lazy? The answer: When they're sleeping or immediately after they wake up. Nothing sucks more than having to complete a task seconds, or minutes, after you've woken up.
Finally someone has come up with a device to help people be lazy when they need it the most.
Introducing this!
And there it is. A gun rack for your bed. Lazy rednecks rejoice. No longer will you have to reach ALL the way UNDER the bed before you can unload on that intruder. No longer will you only be able to rack your guns in your truck or the gun safe. Just slap that cannon on the side of your bed, by golly. Nothing bad can happen there.
An article I read today on the BBC website tells how some companies are trying to use the techniques being developed in massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) to develop business practices. The idea is that online gamers are brilliant at remote collaboration and these practices can help with collaboration within companies.
"Hi, I'm Mike38, I'm new to the deployment team. Could someone run me through the procedure for deploying a new system?"
"stfu n00b!"
I am nerdy enough to like the idea of projects being quests, being rewarded for achievements with 'online gold'. I'm sure we could work something out in terms of Promotions/Leveling-up too. Maybe it would make work more fun, or maybe it'd be one of those MMO's crippled by tedious grinding. (this is where you have to perform boring repetitive tasks to advance, I don't really know, I'm too lazy to play MMOs they seem to take up too much of your life).
ps. Congratulations also go to English sport in a week where our sportsmen have been too lazy to win anything.
1. why can't we speed on roads?
Why not indeed! How on earth this matched us I have no idea.
2. www
Unbelievable. I know I wrote an article on it but we must be so far down the rankings on that.
3. Subway salads what kind of salad?
All of them! It doesn't cost any more.
4. what is the chance of getting stuck in elevator
I don't know the answer to this, can anyone help?
5. english lazy bastards
Well, 1/3 right, and apparently I'm the least lazy blogger on this site.
Time to launch a new feature on the blog. Ostensibly to replace the now completely useless Kevin Harrington Award because you filthy whores won't post comments. This new feature isn't directly related to laziness, but depending on what horrors and oddities I experience in daily life it certainly could be.
So without further delay, I proudly present to you: Things That Ain't Right.
We're going to kick it off with a link to nature. Many things in nature aren't right. Hermaphrodites, 2 legged dogs, flesh eating bacteria, and spiders just to name a few. This one ranks fairly high on the list. That's right, it's a fish living in a tree. Above the water. For 6 months.
Shocking. And industrious. Which makes it extra shocking for me. That fish is decidedly not lazy. I hate that fish for being such a hard worker. The implications of this are far reaching. Do we need to change the rules for the old swimming pool game 'Marco Polo'? Will rednecks start throwing fishing lines into trees? Will I need to worry about preventing fish poop from getting on my freshly washed car?
This is the equivalent of a lion living the ocean, a dog living in a Korean restaurant, or me living in a health food shop. That shit just ain't right.
Yesterday my girlfriend and I stumbled upon a channel called Dave. Just Dave, with a little Dave ident logo in the corner. We couldn't quite believe there was a channel called Dave. They were showing Alan Partridge re-runs last night. The series with him working at Radio Norwich. Very funny. "I've been working like a Japanese prisoner of war. But a happy one."
I love the idea that there are some people sitting in a meeting and someone says, "Now onto what we're going to call UKTV G2 when we rebrand it. Has anyone got an idea for a name?" "Dave!" replies some wag, some people laugh, most groan and then to everyone's surprise, not least the wag, someone in charge says "I love it! That's decided then, the only other thing we have on the agenda is a notice from Doris the cleaner about the toilets on the second floor..."
I'm sure that really it took weeks of meetings but I hope that's what happened. Anyway it's a channel aimed at people like me, so it's good that I think the name is great. More details at Dave's website here.
ps. if anyone from UKTV stumbles upon this, The Barefoot Contessa on UKTV Food is really, really shit, most disappointing when I fancy watching a food type show and that's all that's on. (It seems to be on every time I look at UKTV Food, it's on as often as Friends on E4). You must be able to find something better?
Just cheat. A Mexican Presidential candidate in the Berlin marathon won his age group, by missing out 9 miles of the 26 mile race distance. Good lazy work! Unfortunately he was caught because he didn't look sweaty enough.
There is a show on TV at the moment called Take on the Takeaway where top chefs try and cook a takeaway style dish that's quicker, cheaper and tastier than the equivalent takeaway. Genuinely lazy watchers will realise it's slightly misleading because the 'speed' part of the test doesn't take into account either the shopping time or the cleaning up time.
Still, cooking can be quick and easy, you can get supermarkets to deliver your shopping to your house and you can stick your dirty dishes in your dishwasher, if you are lucky enough to have one. Or in my case just leave them for my girlfriend to do. So maybe I'll add some easy/quick recipes on here, but I'll try and include the useful lazy info like how much special shopping you need to do and how much washing up needs doing. 
With winter closing in it's getting darker and colder in the evenings and even though I don't have a very sweet tooth I've found I've wanted more sweet stuff to eat, so yesterday I decided to make a cake. Mmmm. Cake.
Basic Victoria Sponge
Shopping difficulty: Store cupboard stuff you can find in every supermarket and most local shops.
Amount of washing up: You need quite a few bowls and a cake tin.
Time from start to eating: 30 mins if you use the oven, 15 mins if you use the microwave
Equipment: You need something to bake it in if you are using the oven, and some bowls to mix stuff in.
Cost: Less than £1
Ingredients
4 Oz Self Raising Flour
4 Oz Caster Sugar
4 Oz Unsalted butter
2 Eggs
This is a scaleable recipe. You have equal quantities of flour, sugar and butter, and for every 2 ounces of each of those you use, you use 1 egg. The cake I made had 4Oz of butter, flour and caster sugar and 2 eggs. an 8Oz cake would use 4 eggs. Flour should be self raising, or add a level tsp of baking powder per 2 Oz of flour.
You can either cook this in the oven or in the microwave. The oven is much nicer, but the microwave is much quicker. If you are using the oven preheat it to 180C/350F/Gas 4 before you start mixing. (thanks to the interweb for the conversion)
Weigh your sugar, flour and butter out, stick them all in a bowl, add your eggs and cream it all together. The butter should have markings on the packet to help you guestimate the correct weight. This means stir them hard with a spoon until it looks creamy, you can use an electric mixer but it's more washing up and this doesn't take long, I reckon it's less hassle beating by hand than washing up the mixer. If you leave your butter out of the fridge to soften first it's much easier I normally don't bother. Some recipes say to mix the flour, sugar and butter together first, then add the eggs but I don't bother. Once it's all creamed together scrape the mixture into a cake tin, or a nice big microwave safe dish.
Bake in the oven for 20 minutes or microwave on high for about 4 minutes. The cooking time in the oven is the same for any size of cake. In the microwave it's going to depend on the power of your microwave and how big the cake is.
Easy.
I melted some fancy chocolate to put on mine, but you can cover it with anything. Just stuck some posh chocolate in a bowl above some boiling water (in a jug, no need to wash that up if it's only had boiling water in) added a bit of butter and icing sugar and poured it on the cake. Mmmm.
No! It's not dead! It's just resting while hooked up to a lot of machines. We've got a respirator pumping away, an IV half filled with morphine, and a heart monitor beeping steadily away. We're just very lazy at this point. And I'm very tired.
We're still dedicated to bringing you words of questionable wisdom and low entertainment value.
I just discovered a bizarre but great site. Blogger have a site called Blogger Play where you can see a continuous stream of images that people are uploading onto their blogs. If something takes your fancy you can click into their blog and see what they are writing about. You can waste hours on this I reckon.
Yesterday I spotted my girlfriend using a Firefox plugin called Morning Coffee. It's actually very handy, you can set it up so that at the click of a button it opens all the sites you want to read in your 'morning coffee' break (yeah right). You can even set it so that it opens different sites on different days. I've just got it set up to open the sites I read every day at the touch of a button. Woo.
is dead. Sometimes deadlines are meant to be missed and we missed the hell out of this one. We fell 14 short of our target of a post a day, that's just over 50%. Our percentage is so bad it's worse than Ronan O'Gara's kicking percentage in the RWC (probably, I can't be bothered to look).
The archive sidebar will be a lasting memorial to our shame. That is all.
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