Things I did not know

A Voyage of Discovery on the paths of the internet.

On the minibus to work yesterday, there was a trailer for a Radio2 show (“The Class of 2006”) about breakthrough acts of 2006. It mentioned Jose Gonzalez, who was catapulted to fame by the Sony Bravia advert with the bouncy balls in San Francisco. I’d always liked the track, but never bothered to find out who it was. Armed with this new information however, and a quick trip to the BBC website to check the spelling, I hit Google to see what I can find out about him. He has his own website of course (who doesn’t these days?) and an album “Veneer”, which is rather good and now on my iPod.

Also up at the top end of the search results was a link about those iconic adverts themselves (which also have their own website). I’d always assumed both ads (the Balls one in SF, and the Paint one in, as it turns out, Glasgow) were largely CGI. The technology is pretty much good enough to fool our eyes these days, so we increasingly use some sort of “sensibility check” to decide what is real and what is not. Pouring a gazillion balls down the hill towards central SF, and drowning a tower block in multicoloured paint both seemed to be fairly daft things to do in reality, so I’d assumed that while the backgrounds where real, the brightly coloured effects were digital. But I was wrong, it turns out Sony did in fact throw half a million rubber balls down the unmistakeable hills of San Francisco, and “blow up” a tower block with several tonnes of paint. The behind the scenes shorts on the website are worth a look. I think they had a whole lot of fun filming such crazy stunts.

Whenever I go home (and especially at Christmas) I get asked all sorts of obscure questions because I have a reputation of knowing pretty much everything. Not all of them I can answer of course, I don't know everything, but in the spirit of trying I usually go away and find out. Something I wasn't directly asked, but a discussion which caused me to seek to fill another gap in my knowledge was one on "Glace Cherries". I’d always assumed these were cherries that had been de-stoned and sweetened a little. However the consensus of opinion of those much more experienced in cooking and such (my Mum, my Nan, and my Great Aunt) was that “Glace” was some sort of fancy synonym for “fake”, and that they were gelatine or something similar. While I was in the mood for digging around the internet I decided to check. Turns out I was right - they are real cherries, preserved, soaked in syrup and dyed, so now I know a bunch of stuff about the process of making them and their history (at least in the US).

Boxing Day

Or, "Boxing up the leftover turkey Day" as it's full title must surely be.

I'm been talked into taking a portion of said leftover turkey back to York. It was actually a reasonably good one - mother splashed out on a free-range organic one, and it would appear this does genuinely make a real difference to the quality of the meat .It's not really surprising, but it's nice to be able to confirm that Mother Nature is much better at building a good turkey than the production line barns are. Hopefully the turkey had a significantly better quality of life too. I'm not one of these people who feel it's wrong to eat animals, or rear them with the express purpose of killing and eating them, however I do feel that we should avoid subjecting them to unnecessary cruelty during their short lives. Most animals seem to feel pain and distress, and whatever your beliefs on their levels of self awareness, you can't argue this is a good thing.

There'll be more turkey tonight however, as we make the traditional return trip to my grandma's (only a few meters down the road), something we've been doing as long as I can remember. Then it's back home for me (for despite me calling this 'home', my flat is really the place I associate with the word now) and back to the grind tomorrow. No rest for the wicked.

Christmas Cheer

Christmas is always entertaining in our house. My family are all rather eccentric and varying degrees of forgetful.

It's a relationship that works better in principle than practice - we all get on very well when we're not actually in a room together. However, bring us together, and we've got very little to actually say to each other.

Christmas wouldn't be Christmas in our house without at least one appliance based disaster (this year, the microwave burnt out while cooking the sprouts, last year it was the dishwasher) plus more faux-pas from nutty family members than I can count. Without several pages of background you probably wouldn't really get them (and no doubt you've got to be there really). Suffice to say, I'm entertained and despairing in equal measure for the entire holiday period.

Highlights of my present pile this morning are probably "Why don't penguin's feet freeze?" The 2nd compilation of "Last Word" letters from New Scientist and an electric can opener (the height of laziness I'm sure) with an integrated knife sharpener.

Merry Christmas to you all

Wrapping Day

It's not Christmas Eve, it's "Wrapping Day". This means I spend the whole day wrapping Christmas presents (a task I consider a complete waste of time - what's wrong with just a bag or box? It's not like anyone spends time admiring the paper, they just want to get rid of it) while trying to avoid the cheesy Christmas songs and other faux-cheer.

Tomorrow is Christmas Day of course, where I genuinely wish I could just sleep all afternoon like some of the older guests. Every year we have the issue of how to entertain them - they can't really walk far, they don't like watching anything that's on TV, and they don't drink. They're not really into party games We sit around and miserably reminisce about some golden years, and occasionally snooze (if we're old enough to get away with it). If we're really lucky some holiday photos or similar will be brought out for our viewing displeasure.

It's not that I dislike Christmas, I just dislike the the empty rituals that are so confused with it.
The sending of Christmas Cards is a classic example. Now, the sending of a card in itself is not shallow - Christmas is the perfect time to remember and send greetings and good wishes to friends and family. However, sending cards to people you don't know, or don't really like very much, is just an empty gesture, done only because it's what you do at Christmas.

Bah Humbug!