Stuff

and it’s mainly for the chorus: “Vamos a aclarar el panorama, hay pinguinos en la cama…” and the rest of the rhyming-dictionary-3rd-rate-singer-songwriting…

Just for the record: Fantastic meal in La Matera again with Victor, Jana and family last night. Picked up Sita’s fancy new business cards. Tidied the house a bit and now I’m off for web designery… ooh and I’m at 1070 at the scrabble. 4 off my all time best. This can’t last… More meaningful posts soonish. Cheers : )

I briefly made it into the 1000s again in Scrabble at the weekend (I’m back at 950 now…) I’m enjoying the 3 minutes per side games most. It’s like table tennis without the exercise. Although, apparently the harder you think, you more calories you burn… Anyroad, to celebrate here’s a few handy tips:

If you’re starting, make sure the vowels in the word aren’t adjacent to the double letter score spaces on the board. Your opponent is more likely to score highly if (s)he can put a high scoring consonant on those squares. Eg if they’ve got a J, X, Q, Z, etc. they’re in fine form. Ex 1,2

When starting, see if you can reach the double letter scores with your word. Can you rearrange the word so the highest scorer is on a double letter score?

If you’re starting and your tiles are rubbish, change some of them. Often your scrabble partner will change theirs too. And if not, I don’t see a huge advantage in starting except for the double word score. Hopefully, you’ll have a longer word to start the game which means a more enjoyable board ready for bingos, instead of the dreaded X-shape made of 3 letter words. Which starts off ok, then gets harder and harder. Ej 5:

It’s all about the bingos (7 letter words). Playing low-scoring words is fine as long as it’s strategic and heading towards getting a rack more likely to get you a bingo. RETAINS has the letters you should aim to keep until you have a bingo.

That’s all for now, the best ones are on the back of the lid of most scrabble boxes. And to protect your marriage, invest in a good scrabble word dictionary.

Simplicity, that’s the name of the game when it comes to seafood and mushrooms, reckons I. Butter, salt, garlic and robert’s yer father’s brother… And a litre or so of lighter fluid for that slightly chemical edge, naturally…

Another weekend of gastronomic thrills and spills. Friday night we went to Lunico, the new Italian restaurant on Ave. Mexico. V.v. good food there. And the wine was a Zinfandel/Shiraz concoction from Chile just perfect for washing down the bovine chunks. The Greek-Italian owner charmed the socks off Sita with his mediterranean shmoozing. “Oh yes, not just anyone orders the Zinfandel/Shiraz and medium rare steak… bla bla bla”. Anyroad, the next day I ran errands in the morning, watched Mexico bow out of the world cup gracefully. The flag for the car I bought didn’t seem to help them… Then José came round for a sophisticated dinner evening (portabellas’n’burgers, since you ask) and we watched a film “Benjamin Smoke”, a documentary based on an extremely odd geezer in Atlanta. (see the review iFrame for more info soon). The lightening was strobelike most of the night, but I won’t foist another video on you just yet… Have a picture of a lime with droplets of the previous night’s precipitation instead:

You know when you’ve been tango’d

Today I nipped into Santa Tere for tacos and DVDs in the morning since the England match was only on Sky and chilled with a Sunday paper in a cafe on Chapultepec (They had Nacho Libre but the quality wasn’t great so I passed, shall wait for it to come out in the cinema methinks). Came home then went to Centro Magno to watch “The Squid and the Whale”. Which was brilliant. Review presently. then fired up the barby again and grilled the life out of some onions, shrimp and zucchini courgettes. Delicious.

If you’re wondering what I’ll be eating tomorrow, well, my usual chocolate chip croissants for breakfast, followed by a slap-up meal in La Matera in the evening. Just for the record, the plan to eat in an Argentine restaurant was formulated before Mexico’s defeat at their hands on Saturday…

All the local businesses are into the World Cup too even allowing for the time difference: Translation: “Enjoy the World Cup Here! Free beer with every breakfast ordered”

EDIT: Just putting the brief film reviews up here as well as in the iFrame:

25-6-06 The Squid and the Whale (2006)
Or the less intriguingly titled Spanish version: Historias de Famila (Family Stories). Philip Larkin would approve of this gripping film about a family falling apart and the effects on the kids. Has some great comic/cringeful moments and recreates 80s New York just like it looked in Ghostbusters. Great performances and oddly heartwarming. Thoroughly recommended.

24-6-06 Benjamin Smoke (2000)
Banjos are my anti-drug… Innovatively shot, but ultimately hollow documentary about an Atlanta-based transvestite and his unique take on music.

3-6-06 X-Men: The Final Battle (2006)
An appropriately dazzling climax to the (undersold) trilogy. Centred around some relatively high concept sci-fi about minority relationships, but buoyed by spectacular effects and snappy dialogue. Vinnie Jones is brilliantly cast as a mutant whose superpower is smashing through walls. Recommended if you’re into this kind of thing… Reminded me of a recent Onion infographic about how TV series were trying to increase ratings: ‘LOST: A crate of radioactive vegetables washes up on shore giving all characters superpowers.”

22-6-06 The Break-Up (2006)
Your enjoyment of this film will depend heavily on your tolerance for Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Anniston. I thought my threshold was pretty low, but I laughed out loud several times at this well-observed comedy. Starts off as High Fidelity then goes into War of the Roses ‘Lite”. Not a suitable ‘date movie” by any length of the imagination…

I finally got round to checking out my web stats today. They’re an odd bunch them anonymous googlers… Here’re my top 5 keywords that arrived at these here pages:

1: “this is how i got those pesky cats to stop crapping in my yard”
2: “it has been brought to management’s attention that some”
3: “mexican swearwords”
4: “cockeral sounds”
5: “pendejadas”

Hope they all found what they were looking for… Anyroad, as promised here’s the full set of photos from yesterday. and below a nifty little video autoproduced by the latest version of Picassa and hosted by our friends at YouTube. It’s Javier the barman mixing a Batanga for Sita in the Capilla cantina in Tequila. She’d worked hard for it…

I just went to get some photocopying done and they asked if I wanted it “Engargolado”. This is a Mexicanismo according to the RAE (Spanish version of the Oxford dictionary) meaning “bound with a plastic spiral ring thing” (see photo). I asked what the origin was and she said she didn’t know but it probably comes from “gargola”, a gargoyle. Now maybe it’s because of my life-long fascination with Ghostbusters, but I think that’s a great image, a gargoyle’s claws holding together your document for you. I’m presuming that’s the origin, but I’m about to start work and I can’t be trolling around the internet for hunky-punk related info… Photos from another successful trip to Tequila coming soon : )

And for phrase of the week (these are going to be almost all from José): Ay, el equipo de México, jugaron como nunca y perdieron como siempre… Which doesn’t really survive translation well as: Ay, the Mexico team, they played like never and lost as ever. If you can do better than that, feel free to comment a translation : ) Hasta pronto…

Not feeling at all inspired for bloggery of late. Not even the What I Had For Breakfast type posts (Leftover pizza, pepperoni / hawaiian, for the record). Right now I’m designing/printing fliers for the web designery to try a bit of door-to-door sales drummingupping. I was going to start today but I forgot to have a shower & shave and don’t think if I turn up unannounced at people’s businesses I’d inspire too much confidence. So that can wait till Friday mayhaps, cos tomorrow we’re going to Tequila again. I’m hoping for lots of rain clouds to provide a different perspective from the last cloudless photos I took.

Tonight, I’m being taken (against my wishes) to the cinema to watch the lastest Jennifer Anniston travesty. Wish me luck… Normal service, etc, etc… soonish : )

Am now officially knackered after my 3am drain unblocking, computer unplugging, sandwich eating antics last night… Couldn’t sleep even with gentle music in my earphones and my eyes covered by the sheets… So apparently, the rainy season has started…

Just going through my early morning RSS feeds, the following stood out from boingboing and TCAL x 2 respectively:

and Hitler Cats and Peugeot Parking Game

Here’s the latest thing keeping me from blogging, the design of it, not their services… Last night I met up with Chiva for a few pints to see how things were going. Lovely bloke, and nice to catch up. I also got recognised on the bus. “¿Eres inglés?” someone asked me and it turned out he was one of the Portico regulars from 8 yrs ago (since closed down) I was getting off the bus so I gave him my card. I hope he gets in touch because apparently he still knows Adriana and Raul from there and it’d be grand to see them again.

I’m going to find a meme to post just for the sake of posting summink… The traffic through the blog was at an all time low yesterday, must be a glitch in the matrix. Mememos…

Last Road Trip– That’ll be the adventure that was Los Angeles to Guadalajara via Arizona, Guaymas, and Mazatlan. With no air conditioning. Lovely though, recommend it to anyone who has the funds to pay for luxurious toll roads.

Last Bad Advice– When I was experiencing my gastric unpleasantness, Jose (kindly, and with the best will in the world) offered the following recipe:

Fill a normal sized glass with 1/3 soy sauce (best quality available, so that it really does have soya in it, Kikoman for example), and 2/3 of mineral water. Stir, and drink the whole thing down in small gulps. It will clean your stomach and always works very well

Maybe it would have worked but I’m going to consider it bad advice since instinctively it sounds like an unholy thing to drink while sick or otherwise.

Last Movie I Saw in a Theater Cinema, dammit… Anyroad, it was X-Men 3 and despite the critical panning it’s received is top notch entertainment. You will believe a man can make Strontium claws come out of his wrists…

Last TV Show Watched Probably Dr.Phil through no fault of my own… or The Surreal Life.

Last TV Show I Enjoyed Watching Lost. Lostity lost. Lost. LOST. LOOOOOOST…

Last Book I Tried to Read Tried? As in tried but was too tired, or didn’t speak the language or found the book too full of half-baked symbology and Opus Deity to perservere with? Right now I’m reading the Kite Runner and it’s dead good. An Afghan rite of passage. Santa Cruz just got a mention to top it all.

Last Thing I Left Home Without My keys 2 days ago. I got home and banged the door, rang the landline, the cell phone and screamed up a storm but it appeared Sita wasn’t home. So I broke in and half an hour later, Sita saunters down the stairs…

Last Take Out Meal BigMac and a vanilla millshake. The two cornerstones of the nutrition pyramid. My lame excuse? I had to break a 500 peso note. And I like big macs…

Last Celebration Mexico’s win last Sunday. Hopefully to be repeated tomorrow.

Last Item Loaned Out and Haven’t Gotten Back The only thing that springs to mind is my Day Today videos. About 5 years ago. To Stuart. Ya git. Generally I don’t expect things back and just give them away. Such is my nomadic lifestyle.

Last New Word Added to Vocabulary Fulguration- “The act or process of flashing like lightning”. I’m all about the vocabulary. www.kith.org/journals/neology/ is a grand site to subscribe to if you’re up for it.

Last New Word of a Foreign Language Learned Good question. Aside from hairdressing terms, none spring to mind from the last few days. I looked up the origin of “anfitrion” the other day, though. It means ‘host’ and seemed such an odd word for a common word that it might have an interesting description, sure enough it comes from a king of Thebes who was famous for his hospitality. Good to know… Ooh, here’s one: “Sabadazo” from the word for Saturday “Sabado”, it’s when you get arrested and put in a cell, but because it’s the weekend there’s no judge so you have to wait 48 hrs instead of 24. Courtesy of Jose again…

Last T-Shirt Acquired We won one at the music quiz t’other week, but Sita’s adopted it. So before that my Pocilga Beat one that Fernando gave me.

Last Package Received Probably Homeland Security sending back my application for Parole or somesuch because they changed the photo regulations without telling anyone. Or that book I won t’other day.

Last Web Site Visited www.divinesalon.com.mx, for all your Mexican beauty product needs…

Last Injury Overzealous scratching of mozzie bites led to my foot looking like the bloke’s skin in V for Venganza. Other than that I’m unbreakable.

Last Run In with the Law Getting pulled over by the Mexican police when Jose was driving, and having to bribe our way out of it.

Last Place I’d Want to Live Bridgwater, Somerset, UK.

Last Physical Fight Does getting punched outside Henry’s 12 yrs ago count? Yes? Then that one.

Last Magazine Read Q (UK music magazine) thoughfully imported by Sarah. Thanks again.

Last Thing I Broke Honestly can’t remember. Our car’s air conditioning?

Last Thing I Fixed Sita’s pedometer. Briefly. Before it breaking again…

Last Thing That Made Me Laugh This from the Onion “Devastated By U.S. World Cup Team’s First-Round Loss, Nation Grinds To Halt“

The new Google Earth version has all the topographical info and the occasional 3D building. It’s like travelling the world all over again. Absolutely breathtaking,. It’s like air travel without the horrors of immigration awaiting you at the other end. They’ve still got to improve the resolution of Kingston, mind. maybe when the population hits 4 figures they’ll upgrade it…

This just in from London’s premier ecologically-minded design agency, Sprout, aka Bert’s Big Green Business: Binvention is now on sale and apparently in a range of hues.

“Gets your recycling sorted” ain’t a bad tagline. Don’t think it’s bin done before. Looks like an offer too good to refuse. Can‘t think of any more crap puns. It wouldn’t be of huge use here in Mexico, as recycling of cans as part of household waste is something only done by the extremely conscientious. If you’re dead set on saving the world, your best bet is to collect your cans, in a Binvention or otherwise, then leave it next to the rubbish which gets collected 3 times a week. Either it’ll get taken away by the dustmen and shoved in landfill or it might just get picked up by someone collecting cans to sell to metal yards for a few pesos. Interesting that household waste is the only thing that doesn’t get recycled. Everything else seems to get fixed and live forever womble style, fridges, tvs, cars, furniture etc…

Anyroad, here’s Bert’s junk email in full:

Our binvention is now on sale!
We have Limited Edition batch of binventions in red, green, dark turquoise and plain aluminium and you can get yours here: http://www.sproutdesign.co.uk/buy_a_binvention.htm or return the order-form we’ve attached. They are also available for collection from our studio in Hoxton and you can arrange a time by replying to this email.

Competition Winner and Results
Thank you for your votes and wonderful comments – in all we had over 300 votes! Our lucky winner was Saara Renvall, from Imu Design in Finland. She said ‘I never win anything! This was a GREAT surprise!” see all of the results here: http://www.sproutdesign.co.uk/competition_results.htm

Binvention shortlisted for the Grand Designs Magazine Awards
Our recycling bin is up for an Award in the ‘eco product’ category.

Eco Design Summer Fair
The Eco-Design Summer Fair returns this year with a host of British-designed, ethically manufactured and
fairly-traded products. We’ll be there selling bins so come find us — it is on Sunday 18th June in Islington. More details here: http://www.ecodesignfair.co.uk/

Do you need sprouting?
Sprout Design is an award winning innovation and design consultancy and our main business is product, packaging and furniture design. Our designs are characterised by being clever, friendly and easy to use – we put people first. We’ve also got experience designing websites, leaflets, books, posters, cards etc. We’re currently available for work, so please have a think about whether you or anyone you know might be needing anything and get in touch at info [at] sproutdesign.co.uk

Click the pic above for the photos from today celebrating the Mexico’s victory. We joined in for a bit then retired for an aerial view courtesy of Starbucks. Then a swift pint and on to Centro Magno for X-Men 3 (really enjoyed it), then Chili’s…

I’ve a few video clips too I might post later. A bientot, mes lecteurs.

EDIT: Some Web 2.0 site asked for permission to use some of my Minerva photos, help yourself I said:

Eat my goal… Classic Alan Partridge:

We’re off to the Minerva to shout a bit and have a coffee to celebrate.

Well the plan was to go to La Fuente cantina @ 8am (when the England vs Paraguay match starts over here), but I didn’t make it after a latish night sampling the wares of Sacromonte (new top 5 Guadalajara restaurant) and a few drinks at the bar opposite. i can’t remember its name, but its logo is the same as Enron’s (a slanted E) and finished off with Dr.Who (Cheap and cheerful cross between The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, The Matrix, The 5th Element and er, Dr. Who). A well nice evening all round. So I watched the match at home, good first half, dull second half… but we won… Then I spent an hour or so pestering people around the world on Skype and now I have to do stuff: Sort out the divine salon . com .mx website, source a Sopranos DVD set and a few other minor errands. Sita’s got the camera cos she’s off with her professor friend and a gaggle of reporters interviewing tequileros in the countryside. It’s harder to motivate myself to go out if I don’t have my camera on me, but I’ve got a few new podcasts to keep me busy. Found a great kareoke program too, more of which later. Comment if you’d like me to post my rendition of The Bangles’ Eternal Flame… Darlin’

Instead of full blown reviews, check out the ‘Consumed’ iFrame to the right (bottom IE users) in 10 minutes or so… Righty, a la chamba…

Friday’s Ocio is usually Guadalajara’s events listing, new reestaurants, gigs, exhibitions, etc. This week an article caught my eye on home chemistry and DIY. It’s gearing up for a thunderstorm right now and hopefully I won’t ever have to mix up this concoction:

Tiempo de lluvias, tiempo de frescura. Pero no todo es felicidad, porque algunas veces las goteras invaden nuestras casas y entonces llega el tema de impermeabilizar. Si no se cuenta con mucho presupuesto la solución más recomendable es la cal. La fórmula es simple: 70 litros de agua, tres jabones Lirio y un kilogramo de alumbre. Acto seguido, hay que hervir los jabones y el alumbre de manera separada en un gal’n de agua. Luego se diluye la cal en los 70 litros de agua., y después se revuelve con el alumbre y la cal. La mezcla se aplica sobre el techo (dos o tres manos mínimo) con una escoba y listo. La cubierta lo protegerá por lo menos seis meses.

(translation:) The rainy season, a season for freshness. But it’s not happiness all the way… because sometimes the rain gets into our homes and that’s where the whole waterproofing issue comes up. If you don’t have much in the way of a budget then the best solution is lime (calcium). The formula is simple: 70 litres of water, 3 Lirio soaps and a kilo of alum. First thing to do is boil up the soaps and the alum separately in a gallon of water. Then dilute the lime with the 70 litres of water and then mix it together with the alum. The mixture is applied to the roof (A minimum of 2 or 3 pairs of hands will be needed) with a mop and Bob’s your uncle. The covering will protect it for at least 6 months.

I worry most about the thousands of “roof dogs” across this vast metropolis though…

They need to get this bloke: Things That Make Me Angry on Room 101 asap.

Just saw an ad for the new(ish) Dr. Who series on megacable (People & Arts), tomorrow at 10pm… Shall have to interrupt whatever I’m doing, grab a cushion and watch that one. We’re also about to embark on The Sopranos season 6 too. Saw the first one yesterday and it was like it never went away shall try and buy the Official Box Pack down at San Juan de Dios maana.

We went to the cinema this evening to see Good Night and Good Luck, but it wasn’t on till 10pm so we thought bugger that and went for a coffee and are about to play online boggle… Yeah, that’s living alright…

Just got another freelance job, audio editing some tracks to remove vocals and transpose them a couple of tones down. I think there’s plenty of freeware that’ll do just that. Ka-ching!