Is the missus partial to expensive mint liqueurs? Aldi “Russian Wodka” is just a fraction of the price. Add some Fairy liquid for colouring and treat her to a nightcap every night – right after she’s brushed her teeth!
See also: Blogrot Top Tip #1
Archive for the 'Food & Drink' Category
Don’t waste money buying the wife expensive mint chocolate. Just buy her cheap cooking chocolate, give it to her right after she’s brushed her teeth, and tell her you lost the wrapper. She’ll never know, and you get to pocket the difference.
OWWW!!!!!!! Ow!! Ow!! Ow!! Bastard! Bastard! Ow!!!
As you can probably tell, I’ve just hurt my knuckle on a cheese grater. I was only reaching for a knife but the draining board had been booby-trapped by rebel guerrillas.
When I weigh up the pros and cons I think I’d prefer to live in a world without graters. Is the odd bit of narrow-gauge cheese or carrot really worth the risk? I don’t think so. Besides, you can buy it pre-grated in a bag now – essentially you pay someone else danger money to do the grating for you. And they say market forces don’t work! As long as there’s no blood actually in the bag, I’m happy.
Next week: the time I stepped on a plug and envisaged a utopia without electricity.
Toast pops out of toaster. I pick toast up by top edge to carry over to plate. Crust comes off. Toast falls on floor.
At least I had an Easter egg to top me up this morning, otherwise this could have been critical.
I tell you something that can really spoil my day from the get-go: when I’ve just made my first cup of tea in the morning, and invested patience and craftsmanship squeezing the tea-bag to get it just strong enough but not too strong, and I go to put the milk in, and one of those crusty yellow milk flakes falls off the neck of the milk bottle, into my tea, floats around for a bit, then sinks to the bottom just as I try to fish it out.
That can really spoil my day. I struggle to recover from a blow like that.
The “McDonald sandwich” (no, really) at Selfridge’s.
Well what indeed?? Just one pertinent question raised in response to the maroon avocado.
I reckon it’ll just be, like, a pinkish colour, a bit like houmous.
Photo: A smile for the camera, please! by Reciprocity
I felt I ought to write regarding that phrase I used earlier: “a tiny bit of milk”. You see, up where I’m from that has quite a specific meaning, namely: “just a very small quantity of milk”. In fact, you’ll often see it accompanied (as demonstrated earlier today by myself) by the thumb and forefinger held just a hair’s breadth apart, indicating smallness or sparsity.
It does not mean (as you appear to have interpreted it): “please take a tea-bag, wring it out under the tap, and then drop it into a cup of hot milk”. I accept that both phrases use the word “milk”, which perhaps is where the confusion arose. But there, as I think you’ll begin to see on closer examination, the similarity pretty much stops.
Can I take this opportunity to apologise for any distress caused by my vagueness on the milk issue, and to assure you that it will not happen again?
Thank you,
Pig on Wheels.
The tomato spiders are coming! The tomato spiders are coming!
Quick kids, into the basement. Don’t worry about Aunt Lucy, that ole coot’s mad as a grasshopper.
Or something like that.
Photo: The Attack of the Tomato Spiders!!! by bitrot
I’m blogging this whilst making my way through a packet of biscuits. Today’s biscuits of choice are Bahlsen Choco Leibniz, Orange Milk Chocolate Edition. They’re truly a triumph of German engineering, on a par with the VW Golf or the Bosch cordless drill. My only gripe is the slogan on the front of the packet: “More chocolate than a biscuit”. I find it troublingly ambiguous, possibly meaning any of the following:
- Each unit contains proportionally more chocolate content than biscuit content. (In which case it should be “more chocolate than biscuit”, surely? And I’m not entirely sure it’s true either.)
- Each unit contains more chocolate than “a biscuit” – i.e. it is statistically more chocolatey than some notional “standard” biscuit. (But what would such a standard be? Do they have Rich Tea in Germany? What if the standard is a Bourbon biscuit? Perhaps the DIN could be of assistance on this one?)
- A more literary usage: the Choco Leibniz is “more chocolate than a biscuit”, in the sense that Darth Vader was said to be “more machine now than man”. (But surely that would place them in the chocolate aisle in Sainsbury’s, along with the Kit-Kats, Clubs and the like, rather than on the biscuit aisle where I found them?)
- Some fourth, untranslatable meaning that sounds great in German but rubbish in English – a kind of “Vorsprung durch Biscuit”. (In which case, why translate it? Don’t they know that’s what makes Audis appear classy?)
Still, it’s a minor drawback to what is a superb biscuit. If I was given a choice between a life without Choco Leibniz biscuits, and a life as some half-human blubberous mass being levered in through the doors of the Jerry Springer show, I can’t honestly say I’d choose the former.
Biscuit eaters of the world unite! We have nothing to lose but our mobility!
I’ve just had a groundbreaking investigative report published at the excellent NiceCupOfTeaAndASitDown.com. Newsnight, here I come…
It’s about time someone stood up for potato rights. They don’t get enough representation these days.
While we’re at it, it’s high time we did away with other derogatory phrases such as “love spuds”, “having a chip on your shoulder” and “Maris Piper flaps”.
I was in Japan for a week at the beginning of 2003. One day we went out for lunch in a cheap diner-style restaurant in a shopping arcade. While we waited for our food, I noticed a sign on the wall next to us and asked our host, Kuwahara, to translate. He told us it said you should ask the waitress if you wanted more rice.
Being a curious type when it comes to languages, I asked him which symbol represented rice. He hesitated for a moment before pointing out two characters. They looked like this:
(Thanks to this site for the Kanji.)
I told him I was amazed that Japanese has to use two characters to write “rice”. I’d just assume that Japanese, with its complicated and expressive writing system, would cut right to the chase when talking about rice at least. It’s a bit like the old line about eskimos having seven different words for snow.
Kuwahara then indicated the second character and said: “This character means rice, but it is very impolite. We say…” – and at this point he cast a glance around the restaurant and lowered his voice to a whisper – “meshi“. He raised his voice again. “But this is impolite. Very rude.” He then pointed at the preceding character. “This one, we say go. This is polite prefix.”
“Ah, got you,” I said. “So the polite phrase is go-meshi?”
“No,” he replied blankly, as if I’d missed something glaringly obvious. “Not go-meshi. Go-han.”
We were all so thrilled by this – both the pronunciation oddities, and the fact that the legendary Japanese courtesy extended to alternative rude and not-so-rude words for “rice” – that he offered to write it down for us. And so here it is, complete with Kuwahara’s annotations. I count this scrap of fax paper as my most treasured possession from abroad.
