Oh Dear Delia.............!

I like salt. Salt is good, it makes my food taste of, well, salt I suppose, but it's better than no salt which is a miserable thing. Take salt out of most food and it will taste of shit. I hasten to add that I'm not referring here to processed food, which probably has far too much of the stuff, but instead I mean home made food. This is where Delia comes in. Looks like the old dear has incurred the wrath of dietary fascists who stalk this land. Her crime? Publishing recipes using, er................ processed food............. ?

Shit! There goes that arguement...............

Anyway, Caitlin Moran has written a very good article in The Times which provides a spot on overview of Delia's 'Shock! Horror!' defection from preparing wholesome sunday lunches and fondant fancies in favour of rattling together dishes with the aid of frozen, tinned and packet ingredients. It's aimed squarely at people who convince themselves that they have no time to cook, an absurdity in itself, but we shall pop back to that in a moment.

It all reminds me of a show that was on tv years ago, usually broadcast in five minute bursts in the early hours of Saturday or Sunday morning, the name of which I forget, which involved various unkempt student types demonstrating ad-hoc post-pub gastronomical delights to a nation of sozzled sots. This time however, instead of 'Gregg and Hannah' showing you how to throw together a vegetarian spag bol, or 'Fat Gaz' letting you in on his secret techniques for making 'Fried Egg in Tomato Ketchup', it's Delia chucking tinned mince, pre grated cheese and freeze-dried mash into the mix and making cottage pie. Oh well, I suppose peeling a few spuds, boiling them and then mashing them will take all night, won't it? Fresh mince is fairly cheap and takes minutes to brown off in a pan, and frankly, if you can't be arsed grating some cheddar, then you truly are a useless c**t. The difference beteen making the dish with fresh ingredients and with ready ingredients is maybe an hour. You haven't got an hour to spare of an evening? C'mon!!

It's not all bad though, this chap reckons Delias 'chuck' isn't nearly as bad as the foodies (see the quote from Giles Coren in the Caitlin Moran article: "Like having a pig piss in your throat") and the nutritionists are making out. Or maybe he's just in the pay of the likes of Knorr, Campbells and John West..................

Of course, I'm one to talk. My diet isn't great and relies on jars and tins to a degree, but what gets me is that there are people out there who are even lazier than I am. people who won't cut and cook some chicken, won't fry off some beef mince, won't boil a spud or grate some cheese....................

Contrary to poular belief, you can make decent food in jig time, using fresh ingredients. I know this, for I have done it. All that stops me from doing it more often is a lack of imagination and a palate that calls a halt to proceedings at the merest whiff of 'green stuff'.

I have no fear of salt, not as long as tomatoes and broccoli stalk the earth..............

George Carlin Said What?

Now, I have to confess to being more of a Bill Hicks fan, but George Carlin has been spitting in the face of the establishment for long enough to gain some degree of respect from me. Imagine my surprise when I was sent Two chain emails containing this screed, attributed to Mr Carlin.

George Carlin's Solution to Save Gasoline


Bush wants us to cut the amount of gas we use..... The best way to stop using so much gas is to deport 11 million illegal immigrants!
That would be 11 million less people using our gas. The price of gas would come down.....
Bring our troops home from Iraq to guard the Border...
When they catch an illegal immigrant crossing the border, hand him a canteen, rifle and some ammo and ship him to Iraq ...
Tell him if he wants to come to America then he must serve a tour in the military.....
Give him a soldier's pay while he's there and tax him on it....
After his tour, he will be allowed to become a citizen since he defended this country......
He will also be registered to be taxed and be a legal patriot......
This option will probably deter illegal immigration and provide a solution for the troops in Iraq and the aliens trying to make a better life for themselves......
If they refuse to serve, ship them to Iraq anyway, without the canteen, rifle or ammo.....
Problem solved.....
I gotta agree with George!

Carlin of course denies authorship, regarding such tracts as being too embarrassingly unfunny to even think about laying claim to them, but theres something odd and sneaky about this. Is this about attempting to associate Carlin, a well known 'pinko' with the American right? Not sure, it seems to happen to a variety of people. John Cleese for instance, Denis Leary too. Whilst one supposes it's flattering to be recognised and to know that someone out there has decided to attribute their comedy stylings to you (rather than the other way about), surely there comes a point where Carlin is thinking "there are millions of people out there who know my name not for my political satire and wit, but for a handful of dreary, laboured, clod-hoppingly obvious chain e-mails that have been sent to every single workerbee in the hive under my name..................Bummer!"

The best/worst part of getting such fatuous nonsense at work is that the subject always comes up for discussion, at which point the sport is to figure out which one of your colleagues is most ignorant about immigration and which ones really just don't like Pakistani's. Idiot Bingo I call it. Great fun for all the family...............House!

Anyway, heres some Carlin in the late seventies. Lot's of creative swearing......

Put Down The Camera And Move Away Slowly.........

Well, the old digital compact that started me out on my photographic adventures has finally been superseded. It's not broken as such, but the battery cover won't close properly anymore and needs to be held in place by sellotape. Not ideal, especially the way it chews batteries. It shall get it's final outing at Ibrox Park on Wednesday night, in the vain hope that Thistle can put one over the Jolly Old Hun. This leaves me with a slight quandry. My new camera is 300 quids worth and a little bulky for random use. It also makes me look like a terrorist on a recce run. Or at least what The Sun reckons a terrorist on a recce run looks like.

There I was, standing in Adeel on Friday night, waiting for my curry and absently perusing the pages of said daily tabloid. Theres a big article in it about a group of men, of mid-eastern origin, filming and photographing on the platform of a small railway station in the south side of Glasgow. The station attendant approached them and they scarpered. Fair enough, cause for some concern and all very suspicious but what annoyed me most was the ramping up of the fear factor, not just via the city-wide map of possible terror targets, but also via two different columns. One by a Sun hack recounting the time he got off the subway and saw someone with a digital camera standing on the steps leading out of the platform, the other by John Smeaton exhorting all to be vigilant and report anyone who looks a bit suspicious with their photography equipment. This is all fine and well, but lets be brutally fucking honest here, how many people are going to start reporting just anyone whose actions happen not to fit their particular frame of reference for what is normal behaviour? Surely a dangerous trend to start, considering the fact that the general tone was of the 'What sort of weirdo takes photos in the Underground/railway station/street anyway?' variety.

How do you explain that you wanted to take a shot of the train leaving the station and it's tail lights as they fade into the darkness of the tunnel?

I guess you don't..............

This is where I get twitchy. Very few people take cameras out when they see something interesting in the street. It is slightly eccentric behaviour I suppose, but no more eccentric than shouting at random passers by that they're "a pair of poofs" and that they"suck each others cocks". Just the latest in a very long list of deranged and retarded behaviour I witness every day in the street. After a while one yearns to stumble across a someone taking photographs of buildings and stuff.

I'm of the belief that more people should carry a camera. It's made me more observant, it's given me a new set of eyes almost. I'd even go as far as to say it's allowed me to express myself more concisely as a writer of mediocre short fiction............

Alas, I think I shall have to be more wary of what I do with a camera now, limit my use of it to the speedway, the football and the park where people have a frame of reference for what you're doing. What I hope doesn't happen is that hundreds of people decide to retrospectively report their sightings of people taking photos in 'odd places'. That would just be fucking chaos.

"Yes officer, it was about eight years ago when me and the wife were on holiday in Largs. There was a guy taking photos of the ferry and the slipway one day. It was very strange. Do you think he was in Al Queda?"

I think most of the sightings reported will be of me to be honest. Can't wait to see what my Photo-fit looks like........