Fidel Gastro’s

I remember watching a Louie Theroux show about a ‘charm teacher’ and how he could teach you how to seduce a wench without having to bash her on the head with a wrench. The wench wrench in fact.

Given my natural charm and a lack of wrenches, the only thing I learnt was about the use of ‘oronyms‘; the way of saying one thing which can be subliminally (or not) heard as something else. A bit classier than the Robin Van Persie classic “No” means “Yes”, he taught Louie the more subtle and less statutory examples over the 40 min program stretched for an hour.

He started with the classic…

“Have you considered this new direction”

“I have hair in the wrong places”

and then moved swiftly on to

“What about this position, [pause], below me”

fi dollar?

“Sweet jesus - we’ve got 30 people trapped in debris”

34 cheese related deaths last year including 2 drownings in vats of Laughing Cow.

“I really need to see Hotblack Dixon”

On what? On toast?

“And behold - Sauron’s penetrating gaze!”

Is he? I thought that was Sam with Frodo

A Tolkien Black

We all love New directions. New is the new old. Classic is the old New. Old is the classic new. When Coke released New Coke in the mid 80’s people got in a right fizzy tizzy - especially the Southerners who loved Coca-Cola so much they referred to all soft drinks as ‘coke’.

“What’s that? Hamburger. And this? Hamburger. Orange hamburger.”

How did it go so wrong? Pepsi had proved that Taste is everything and consumer tests proved that Coke’s comeback kid, New Coke, tasted better - but the people were revolting. 77 days later Coke capitulated, consoled consumers and came out with Coke Classic - leaving New Coke to slowly wind down, ending up off the shelves in US by 1998. (It is still being sold on Yap, one of the four Federated States of Micronesia, if you do want to try it).
Yet the most telling thing was the statement by Coca Cola CMO, Sergio Zyman, years later…

“New Coke was a success because it revitalized the brand and reattached the public to Coke”

“I love Black Coke”

Coke proved that if you change a beloved product (either name or taste) as an act of ‘corporate reblanding’, receive a Daily Mail incited public outcry and then surrender lamely to pressure like Gallas’n'Toure, everyone is a winner. Since New Coke, in the UK alone, we’ve had the Choco-Krispies debacle of ‘98 and more recently the Pasta Hut madness of summer ‘08.

In ‘98 Kelloggs changed the cereal Coco Pops to Choco Krispies and the public went ape. I feel sorry for poor Kelloggs - submitting their $50m investment in repackaging and brand repositioning to the public vote; at the end of the affair they could have rebranded it originally to PooPoo Plops given the impact it had. Everyone was talking about it and passionately arguing the case for the reversion to Coco Pops. “The song doesn’t work any more”, “they aren’t crispy, more sort of..pop-py”, “the EU is putting a unwanted H into Coco”, “I like monkeys”.

“I’d rather have a bowl of PooPoo Plops”

And now we have Pizza Hut pointlessly rebranding all their stores as Pasta Hut. They should’ve just renamed themselves Panama Hat, (their logo is a hat to start with) and started selling high-class headwear and the all-you-can-eat plastic cheese’n'dough suicide bombs. You even go to their website and they have a online poll to decide if the name stays - so deliberate it hurts my cheese filled arteries. Ultimately the longer it stays as Pasta Hut, it means the less people care about them, and therefore the more likely their Ad Agency will be back on the streets turning tricks by Christmas.

You can also see their ‘rebranding’ happening even in politics. Zyman from Coke always saw the Presidential Election as the ultimate marketing campaign. I’m sure McCain was rubbing his hands when Obama selected Biden as his running mate. Obama / Biden….Osama Biden…Osama Bin Laden. Let’s rebrand the black guy in people’s heads - look he has a bomb on him right now.

Wheelie Bin Laden. With stuff that should be recycled.

Position. Reposition. Position. Internet poll. Win. Lose. Repeat. In the end we are the wheelie bin laden with marketing messages and brand positionings. We have no choices - Coke is it. Obey your thirst. Tall, Grande, Venti. Blah Blah Blah. Milk is now CowJuice Lite. Blah. You are our core demographic for ‘09. That Class AA core demographic of douchebag assholes with no taste but eager brains who can be convinced that their earning power gives them choice but in fact they never had any in the first place and all their purchases are being controlled by every bigger a-holes in the marketing department for Harpers and Queen and GQ magazine. That same demographic who are all collectively married to the Alien Queen of Sheba hive-mind demanding bigger, greener lawns, more LV purses dammit and skimmed panda milk in their lattes for breakfast.

On that note - anyone For Coffee?

-y

Have you noticed that the London Lite has actually created new pretendjobs? Menial jobs that never existed before. The ‘Free Paper Hander-Outer’. The ‘Free Paper Clearer-Upper’.  It’s like in Japan where you can reduce unemployment by applying a Adam Smith-on-meth mentality to all jobs - subdivide endlessly. ‘I am the man that helps get 10 Yen, and only 10 Yen coins from Train Ticket Vending Machines.’ ‘I am the man who covers the same coin vertical but for Soda Machines’. Or in your local Subway - ‘I am the Cheese man’. ‘I am the Olive, Chili and Gherkin woman’. ‘I am the same sandwich no matter what you chose - I taste the same. You have no choice’

Occasionally I wish the Hander-Outer and the Clearer-Upper were the same person for each individual paper. Making them hunt down each and every copy they gave out, I want them to feel the futility of their overlords mission statement, the nothingness of the advertising message that paid for the paper, the hours of target audiencing and AdAgency masturbation which merely limpwristedly stroked the cerebellum of a drone-like zombie office worker for the ten minutes it took to digest the un-news and panic mongering of the day and then discard and repeat; I want them to scream ‘THIS IS AN ILLUSION’ and then quit to head up Offline Marketing for the Subway Group.

‘This week with 30% fewer syllables. and 20 per cent more hot pop goss.’

I also believe the London Lite is a black ops side project for the Guardian. By seeing the piles of free papers on train seats at the end of the day headed straight for the furnace, your Recycle heartstring is tugged. Recycle to heal the planet. Recycle to save your soul. Recycle to save pelicans. Pelicans are recycling for us. Lies. I hate Pelicans and I hate recycling. Yet, resistance is futile. After a solid Sunday morning of paper-based lifestyle lecturing, I feel pre-programmed to take my copy of the Guardian, which has spent a few hours explaining how to recycle my own hope, and recycle it. But I am recycling the very oracle which teaches me to recycle, oh sweet irony. It feels like taking a copy of one of Jamie Oliver’s books and cooking it.

And how the wannabe-hip local councils try - oh they try. From asking you to take your plastics to the tip with your dad on the Saturday morning (no SMTV and that saucy Cat Deeley for you my boy), to teaching you to tirelessly self-sort baked bean tins with an eBay-bought electromagnet, through to your balancing a mountain of assorted crap and unread Timeouts in the precious green boxes.

(Anyway are the green boxes recyclable? If you put a green box in a green box what happens? Does it create anti-recycle? Does it create a liberal wormhole straight to the Features Editor of the Guardian’s backyard wormery? Or does God reach through the wormhole and slap you in the face saying - ‘it didn’t help the dinosaurs, you think it will help you humans? You, you are the worms of my wormery’.)

Worm. Wormer. Wormery.

Yet the only way to make sure we even attempt to recycle is to offer us the laziest option possible. Just dump everything into the magical green box and one of their generic Indian unpaid illegals will come to sort it for you, take it to the nearest port, and ship it to India to be buried in the Fairtrade approved landfill behind the Taj Mahal.

Next thing you know you’ll be in Jodphur on a carbon-offset yoga retreat and a lurid leperous local will smack you in the face with an empty cardboard box of farm grown savoy cabbage with your name and N1 address on it which washed up in his backyard. The same cardboard box you thought you’d seen the last of 2 months ago after a ‘locally sourced’ dinner party with Constance and William where you decided to microfinance a human methane powered powerplant in East Angola or East Anglia, but you can’t remember which because you were like, totally messed up dude, on organic anti-depressants, and a $35 bottle of Pinot Noir you drank in or maybe out of the toilet, but you really can’t remember which as you were between not eating courses and making yourself vomit with those handsome bamboo chopsticks you brought back from that amazing ‘05 holiday to Xi’an.

(Anyway on the subject of previously lesser known dark green vegetables - what the jeep is Purple Sprouting? The name is a verb! And the verb can’t be done by that noun! Purple sprouting what?! Purple sprouting new appendages? Purple sprouting indigo? WTF? Ok -I’m done.)

Be careful of this purple sprouting.

So my recycling point is this. Let’s actually do even less, make even less effort, and leverage the true underbelly of society to clear up after us. No, not Foxton Estate agents - their moral betters and slightly less odiously odorous brothers, yes that’s right - tramps.  And no, not an army of MySpace camgirls but our happy hungry homeless homies. Forget the option of blasting ourselves into subspace in 100 years time and letting the cuter but gayer cousin of Jonny 5 tidy up our crud – let’s get the real life Oscar the Grouchs out of their trashcans and cleaning our streets for us. This is happening already in the US, where the key fact is they still have the old deposit system for cans and bottles getting a few cents back for each used item.  (It’s a bit like the current housing market. You buy a house, you enjoy it for a period of time, and then are treated like diseased scum trying to even get 1% of the value back for it.)

But I’ve seen the Web 2.0 inspired ‘trampreneurs’ in San Francisco leaping on this business opportunity. After reading a 150 slide PowerPoint from Bain they found in a dustbin about the unrealised Short Term value in the deposit funded garbage market, it seems they are all set to beat their Q4 targets for crap collecting and revenue growth.  You see them wheeling around these crazy homemade rubbish sorting vehicles much like the official council sorting vans but on crack.

This years tramp race will feature a Le-Mans start

Yet these are also their homes, kitchens, toilets, dog on string kennels as well as the mobile advanced waste processing centres at heart.  Where once an avuncular old lady with a shopping trolley full of empty soda cans was the norm - now the alt.aunty ante is upped and these tramps trundle the thoroughfares, wheeling contraptions looking like the DIY effort of the dropped-on-headlove child of Mad Max and ‘Pig Pen’. Here you have now a city which recycles itself using the power of 5 cent deposits and the cider-fueled brains of the modern day, undiscovered and unwashed Thomas Edisons.

He said that he loved me.

My next proposal is to supply all these tramps with uniformly bright green uniforms to make it look like an ‘Official Government Program’ for potential 3rd party sponsors or just a piece of Trinny and Susanna fashion charity

“Yes - the green nylon and tight waist really accentuates that terrible, terrible smell of yours”.

The other upside is allowing the City PR department to invest $500m in outsourced IT infrastructure to digitally remove the tramps when creating promotional videos of the city to broadcast on Al-Jazeera Travel +1. Using green screen technology, all the undesirables can be CGI replaced with luscious monkey puzzle trees, cast members of Sex in the City or 23 year old dotcom millionaires - all wandering around pushing Heath Robinson-esque garbage mobiles around parks and city wastelands.

Furthermore taking our greenclad grunts, we can simplify the art of making the next self-referential, horror blockbuster; you just CGI the tramps into zombies and you don’t even really need actors, a script or even CGI. Just edit hours of CCTV footage of the shuffling, dead-eyed, tramp undead being politely ignored and ‘opposite-side of the street’ed by silently disgusted and petrified civilians. See the horror in a mother’s eyes as her son gets too close to the inappropriately cute zombie dog-on-string. See a young girl’s terror she sees a krusty old man wearing her last seasons bargains from Primark. Quietly gag as you notice them sorting and touching your empty Fiji water bottles. Instead of human brains, they consume our detritus. We shed our skins and they gather it. They are the snake eating our tail.  Today we are the free London newspaper. Tomorrow they are the 80% recycled woodpulp.

The dead have risen and are offering fashion advice.

That’s what she said.

The cheap sexual innuendo. The thing of beauty, grace, depth and length. Something that you can just slip in without fear of it blowing up in your face and once you start you can’t help but raise an eyebrow and smirk at everything mildly in-your-endo-y said at work.

‘I came across this document earlier’

‘Do you have any time this morning to fill me in?’

‘I’m not sure I can pull it off - it just looks too hard.’

I think she said all of that.

While doubling her entendre in the office must be rife I can’t imagine the number of opportunities of jamming one in when working in a restaurant or kitchen. The temptation must be huge given you are surrounded by choppers, big pieces of meat, stuffing birds, boning roasts, is this portion more than a mouthful, and if I write any more filth like this I’ll get fired so I’ll just stop there.

But while we are on the topic of eateries and given the El Bulli was voted best restaurant in the world with it’s ‘1 year in advance’ booking policy, and the Fat Duck came close second with their combined science ‘liquid nitrogen egg and bacon ice cream’ concoctions - I wanted to look at how my restaurant ‘Fidel Gastro’s’ would set itself apart from the Hakkasan’s and Claridges of this world and get number 1 next year.

1. Serve extremely marginal cuts of meat.

Enough with the current cowardly attempts at awful offal, rabbits’ ears, squirrel guts and half-pig’s heads in todays meateries. On the menu at Fidel’s, for breakfast, lunch and dinner I’ll be serving bits of animals that even they didn’t know they had. Gerbil tonsils, stoat anuses, cow lips and even vestigial tails will be offered in a variety of sauces and marinades while philtrums, perineums and prostates will be house specials on Wednesdays and Friday every week.

“I got to eat ice-cream for a week after the operation”

2. Get Real Mad Science

Heston can take his GCSE bunsen burner, litmus paper and test-tube set he got for Christmas and watch in awe as I go Doc Brown on the principles of molecular gastronomy. I’ll make chips cooked in a CERN borrowed particle accelerator which will burn holes in the plate, lamb curries with a radioactive half-life of 2 years, and ice-creams which are super-cooled to 0 Kelvin and have their own magnetic field. The specialty will be Schrödinger’s casserole which is served covered and is apparently both tasty and horrible at the same time until you take the lid off. And then it’s tasty as it costs £150 without side dishes or gratuity.

You have to cross the streams when making meringue.

3. Cook things that aren’t real.

In certain Chinatown dimsumeries you can eat steamed ‘Duck Tongues’. Do these even exist? Duck knows. Anyway Fidel Gastro’s will take this further and serve gastronomic creations based on fictional characters, all for equally made-up prices.

‘Waiter - what is the breakfast option?’
‘Today sir this is an omelet made with Yoshi eggs with fried 1-up mushrooms on the side’
‘um the Yoshi - is that like a quail?’
‘No - that is the small green dinosaur that Mario rides around while trying to save the Princess’
‘But - isn’t that just a video g….’
‘It costs £400′
‘I’ll take 2′

Recently decriminalised in MarioLand

4. Offer Pointless Sensory Experiences

Today you can dine in the dark with blind waiters serving your meal in pitch blackness to enhance your taste senses, a bit like Spider-man’s heightened sense of flies and waterspouts. Meanwhile Saturday night at Fidel’s is Descriptive Eating night. For £500 a head, you can get a seat at the top table and have your whole meal described to you by a part-time member of the American Amateur Dramatics Association of London. No smells will pass your nostrils nor food your lips yet the evening will be an aural pleasure dome to titillate your tinnitus-tormented earholes.

‘a succulent piece of wobbly pork belly is barely contained on the prongs on the fork as you admire it’s golden colour. You look closer. Is that a little curly hair you see resting on your next mouthful? Why yes - it’s one of Pedro the Puerto Rican sous-chefs pubes. Oh well - you eat it anyway yum yum mmmh tasty. SIKE DUDE, just kidding - he’s actually Mexican.’

“But the emperor is eating nothing at all!”

6. Ridiculous exclusivity

Patrick Bateman devoted his life to getting a table at the exclusive Dorsia and resorted to lying and chainsaws just to speak to the maître d’. Fidel’s door policy will be so stringent and the booking procedure so tangled and torturous even Lindsay Lohan doing a naked backwards crab walk wouldn’t get in.

Insert some generic Lindsay Lohan fire-crotch crabs joke.

To even get to speak to the automated phone menu you have to complete a modern day 12 labours of Hercules involving milking Camilla Parker-Bowles, acing Guitar Hero II on expert and licking your elbow, all completed 2 years in advance and even if you do get a table it will be the one outside next to the garbage cans and a loud American couple.

Why all this madness? At the end of the day I just want people, when asked ‘How the hell did you get a table at Fidel’s?’, to say…

‘It was the hardest thing I ever had to do’

and then I could respond.

‘That’s what she…’

I’ll stop there. I’m being totally childish now.

Your eyes slowly open. Vague outlines of your darkened room surround you. You look at your clock, see it’s 4am, wonder why you are awake and then feel the pressure in your bladder. Ah. Wee waits for no man.

Deciding you can’t hold it, you stumble to the bathroom, reach for the light switch and you suddenly have a decision point

a) Don’t turn the lights on and therefore avoid the sequence of blinding yourself and then walking back into your bedroom and into the side of the bed as your nightvision has been compromised. You then wee in the dark, fail to hear the ’splish splash’ of wee into water and realise you’ve just wee’ed into your dressing gown.

b) Turn the lights on, get partially blinded for a moment but then wizz with Washington sniper-esqe accuracy, walk back into your darkened bedroom, trip over a pile of washing and smash your shin straight into the side of the bed. Drop the f-bomb repeatedly.

I’m weeing into my dressing gown right now

But yet there is an option c. ‘What is this option C?’ I hear you cry. Well I call it option P in this case; you actually close one eye before turning the lights on, giving you full laser-aim (with slight depth-perception issues ) but then when you have finished and go back into the dark bedroom - open the closed eye and close the open eye. Your previously closed eye still has full nightvision and you can navigate the assault course that is my bedroom and back to bed. AMAZING.

What’s with all the wee talk and can I ever keep this blog SFW? Well wee gives me an easy segue into the Nintendo Wii and it’s white block of fun the Wiimote, and probably not ever really safe for work in the foreseeable future. Anyway while this site is blocked by most financial institutions I’ll just say ‘poo party, poo party’ and head back to the video game discussion.

For years we’ve had the video game controller. An electronic interface between the complicated fragility of the human hand and a fat mustachioed Italian plumber, translating small thumbs movements into the balletic motions of spikey blue hedgehog. But the Wiimote looks to change this - allowing a simple block of white plastic to physically represent the movements of the tennis racket, the golf club, the steering wheel and many more.

Master baiter

The multi-purposeness of the wiimote means this single controller can be used for almost infinite purposes and possibilities. Yet I still long for the days when every type of game had it’s own specialist controller and I could enjoy Sega Bass Fishing with a mock-fishing rod, Point Blank with a replica Glock 19 light gun, Gran Turismo with a proper steering wheel and Samba de Amigo with a pair of electronic maracas.

Assembling this motley crew of plastic peripherals meant you also had the comedy surreality of driving your rally car with the dance mat (moonwalk to reverse out of a ditch) and play Super Street Fighter II with the fishing rod. That one never really worked properly but your trash talking was gold ‘YEAH I’m reeling you in BITCH!’

At the moment Guitar Hero II is leading a revival of custom controllers and with the announced ‘ROCKBAND’ featuring two guitars, a drum kit and microphone, we are hopefully going to see a golden age of extremely marginal and niche ’simulators’ with replica devices to plug into your Xbox 360. So without further ado - here is my proposed list of future games in the ‘Hero’ series.

Slash after chess club on Tuesdays

Super Guitar Hero II - Backstage edition

Taking a leaf out of Mötley Crüe’s book, this expansion pack comes with limited edition clip-on TV sensor to detect the ‘plasma screen out of the hotel window into the swimming pool’ special move and a pair of infra-red inflatable girldolls to re-enact various groupie love multiplayer levels. Getting the bowl of blue m&m’s gets you indestructibility for your whole turn (which I believe Nikki Sixx achieved in real life).

It ain’t no fun if the homies can’t get none.

Sitar Hero

Regionalised for the sub-continent and endorsed by Ravi Shanker, Pataks and Shilpa Shetty; Sitar Hero is bundled with a plastic USB Sitar and features with a final level involving playing the entire soundtrack to the 60 hour Hindu epic ‘The Mahabharata’. Obligitory pointless dancing and sword waving subgames are unlockable.

Master of Poppadoms.

Baby Sitar Hero

Poor excuse for a baby sitar pun. I won’t even start.

Qatar Hero II

Christ - what am I thinking, I don’t even though how I can write a joke about an Arab video game simulator without possibly invoking some kind of bounty on my head. It rhymes - that’s all, um ok let’s see - it’s a video game simulator of playing as the worst team in Fifa 94 on the MegaDrive and comes with a wired shoe controller to throw at something when you lose 9-0 for the tenth time. Bonus points for throwing the controller at the telly and it misses and hits your mum.

I’m going to whip the soles of their feet at half-time

Hiro from Heroes Hero

PS3 exclusive, the joypad is in the shape of Hiro’s chubby face and when the plot of the game gets itself into a cul-de-sac of nonsense, scrunch his face and use his ‘time-travelling’ special move as a get-out-of jail free/deus-ex-machina plot device to somehow explain the next episode in the series.

“This is a dude who, 700 years ago, totally ravaged China, and who, we were told, 2 hours ago, totally ravaged Oshman’s Sporting Goods. “

Beer-o Hero

Abomination game where a sensor in your pint glass controller measures your drinking rate in the ‘chin-a-pint’ level and if you manage to get 6 ‘Stella’ bonus stars, and your opponent spills your beer - it can be used as a weapon in the ‘bar brawl’ stages. Final boss is the toilet where you have to aim your drunken pee not onto your feet and avoid waking up praying to the porcelain god. Also has Dance Dance Revolution, Sing Star Karaoke and Sega Rally mini-games to renact a full drunken night out.

There we have it - we went from wee to wii and back again; just count yourselves lucky Nintendo didn’t call it the Pü - I can’t imagine what I’d have ended up writing.

An unfortunate missing page in the middle of the Daily Mail means that I am confused whether it is really a magnet, if Lindsay Lohan loves hers, and whether one can get such a device installed in one’s car.

(Note this photo does not mean I am one nor do I require one.)

Woh - a hiatus of a ‘Dave Chappelle walking away from a $50m dollar third season contract, going mental and discovering himself in Africa’-type proportion. Well at least without the $50m dollar contract and having gone to Africa. Instead I’ve fallen into the evil clutches of Facebook-addiction, trying to avoid micro-updating my status with things like ‘Cian is thinking about going to the bog’, ‘Cian is on the bog’, ‘Cian is not finding any toilet paper left’, ‘Cian is ashamed of himself’… etc etc, and having just got back from 3 weeks in California trying to Vince Chase it Entourage style and failing.

Lindsay Lohan is your friend. She was also your housemate, classmate and fellow program participant. You hooked up. You had to take a course of antibiotics afterwards.

My biggest achievement in my time in LA/SF - apart from several hotel room ‘incidents’, not getting into LA bars along with Jesse Metcalfe, meeting and getting an autograph from an Adult Video Star, discovering ghost-riding the whip, hiring a Dodge Charger from Fox ‘Penitentiary’ Rentals which smelt like it had probably been used as a drug mule/drive-by accessory and visiting A&F enough to make sure I’m bedecked in identical polo shirts for the next 4 months - was busting out the secret menu at the baddest burger boutique bringing buns and beef beyond BK’s basic botulism burgers. The one, the only, yes it’s our family owned friend in the West Coast - ‘In-n-out burger.’

Beauty

and the beast

In-n-out’s restaurants are total idyllic 1950’s throwbacks and their main menu has a Sting-like zen simplicity which presents you with 3 options: hamburger, cheeseburger, double-double (2x patty and 2x selma and 2 x cheese) and optional ‘do you want fries’.

But what In-n-Out offers beyond this is the unbridled joy of seeing reasonable cheerful and well-paid staff peeling real potatoes and putting them through a chipper, hand leafing lettuce into great sheets of icebergy joy, getting unfrozen mince and squishing them into hamburger patties and blending milkshakes with real ice-cream rather than using paint and some by-product of the petroleum industry. And the food is still fast and still cheap and is a real burger for $3 rather than a greasy mess of frozen hoofs and testicles with a side order of freeze-dried reformed potato powder served by a 15 year old girl whose forced to clean the grease-traps with a toothbrush at 1am for $3 an hour with her greasy general manager secret-filming her directly to Youtube for kicks.

Ronald be big pimpin’, spending cheese.

But lurking behind this moral goodness and Jade Goody level of simplicity is a hidden layer of complex customisation; beyond the 3 burger options is an entirely non-disclosed list of commands to pimp your patty. Well at least non-disclosed in the restaurant as a quick look online at their website gives you a limited idea of what other options you have and a cheeky glance at the wikipedia entry for ‘In-n-out secret menu’ opens your eyes to a world of X by Y’s, 2×4’s, four by fours, flying dutchmans, protein-style, fries ‘well’, various permutations of the words ‘grilled, raw, chopped, whole, onions’, neopolitans and my favourite ‘ANIMAL STYLE’.

Animal style for the fries means you get chopped grilled onions, cheese and relish on your fries and if you animal style your 2×4 (which is 2 patties and 4 slices of cheese) they’ll fry the meat with mustard, and add more spread, lettuce, pickles and grilled onions. Genius.

Lovely Pair of buns. (I’m sorry - totally lame I know).

But what if other industries took this approach of only offering 3 product variants and then an entirely secret ordering system to allow those in-the-know to get the item they are needing. Say if Ford only sold the Ford Automobile which is a basic 4 door and you have to go into the dealership, look shiftily at the other customers and whisper - ‘and I’ll have that as a 4×4 animal style’ and a cheeky wink later and you’re off driving some tricked-out gas-guzzling bull-barred SUV into the sunset.

My mind only boggles at what a ’standard pair of men’s suit trousers’ animal-style in Saville Row would end up missing, if you’d get slapped for asking for animal-style missionary position from the missus and if an animal-style generic lager will end up being a pint of Stella and a ruck. The possibilities are endless and would be waiting for instant documentation onto the primary US government Intel source - Wikipedia.
Animal-style - it’s the choice for a dyspeptic generation.

Beck is your friend. He was also your housemate, classmate and fellow program participant. You hooked up and went to In-n-out together. He wrote ‘Loser’ shortly after this about you.

A Bi-curious bi-cyclist by way of Bicester. A little rhyme to warm your Friday. But what of all this blatant cyclism? I once had a bike. It was stolen. Painful experience yet it’s most likely your recently thieved prize warhorse will end up on sale in East London within the hour. If you buy a bike from a busker in Brick Lane it’s probably hotter than the hottest January since records began but yet karma and the cycle of theft of cycles will get you in the end.

Fuck tha karma police

Apparently when you buy a bike from a tramp, who surely hasn’t himself recently purchased a Specialised Stumpjumper with aluminum frame and lightweight front shocks, you shouldn’t be too surprised when two weeks later it disappears in a puff of chav-fulled smoke. Those tramps will get you in the end with either advanced satellite GPS tracking or painting the tires with red paint and following the trail with a bolt-cutter. The Recycle of Cycles.

CEO of Evans Cycles

Why are we talking of recycling? Because this blog is now officially carbon-neutral; I’m going to recycle old articles in order to save the ozone layer. How? Because last week, scientists in the Daily Mail reported that original content has more carbon dioxide than old content by up to 93.5%. (Much like research by Apple Inc that uncompressed .wav music files are much heavier than compressed mp3s so now iTunes has made the internet lighter and therefore cheaper).

1’s fit more easily down the internet pipes than 0’s because they are thinner.

So what is first in the Green Box for council collection outside my flat in Islington you ask? The fabled Chicken Doner.

Whilst in Birmingham on a stag do I discovered that the kebab had been replaced by the burrito as a late-night alcohol absorber. However according to local Internet sources there is no such thing as a Chicken Doner. The sliced dog-on-stick is, in fact, the Chicken Shawarma.

Open with chili sauce. No onions.

Back in 2003 a quick poll of the local deviants came up with these alternatives for the term Chicken Doner.

A friend at school who used to give his chickens away to local charities.
Chicken Doner

That famous footballing chicken
Chickedona

That Crime fighting duo
Chick ‘n’ Donna

Realising your friend is a master of a marginal martial art
‘Chi-Ken’ Don!? Ahhh.

A non-sensicle question/answer.
“Chickendon?”
“Nah”

A really weird Venutian joke.
Ch? Ik En D? On naaa!

An non-existent type of kebab
Chicken Doner

A comedy prostitute
Cheeky End Donna

Feeling ill at a race circuit
Sick in Donington

A eastern european hotelier
Czech Inn Donna

Asking your brazilian friend Chee if he’s wished to participate in a weapon based martial art
“Chee, Kendo?”
“nah.”

Or what you say if someone claims there’s a boogy man under the bed
“CHECK UNDER NOW”

An advert for a hitman advertising in a magazine for dog’s.
Cheap - Can Do Owner.

What you do if you find Barbie’s husband and wants to discover who it belongs to
Check Ken’s Owner

On that note I guess I’ll see you in the Sultan’s Delight at 2am tomorrow night - Shawarma’s on me! Any more uses for the maligned term in comments please.

Did anyone eat one of these? The McRib? The thing didn’t have a bone it in. And was reaaally minging. (Oops - two links already, I don’t normally do that but oh well just remember to come back once you’ve had a cheeky click.)

I quite like sampling the local MackyD’s specialty sandwich when on holiday, the McTeriyaki in Japan, the McFalafel in Eygpt and the McKroket in Holland which is an off-menu order in Amsterdam. Yes - the fabled McKroket which when I ordered it I got the look of ‘I’m dujtch and even I thinjk yjou’re crazjy’ from the 3 star. ‘What is it?’ I hear you all cry - well it’s kind of hard to describe without a schmoke and a pancake but I’ll try.

Stop, drop and roll

Sooooo yeah, it’s kind of like, yeah, a pea and mushed up meat stew yo, sort of like a mix of baby food and beige acrylic paint which is like somehow then breaded and then kinda deep fried in creosote. Yeah. It’s put between two hamburger buns (no sesame seeds here) and served lukewarm. MMMMMH this IS a tasty burger. Yet it turns out this localisation isn’t just limited to Japan, Egypt and Holland but you’ll also find the Maharaja Mac in India, the Bulgogi Burger in Korea, the McHuevo in Urugay, the KiwiBurger (with obligatory beetroot) in NZ and many more. Hamburglar’s terrorist network must be truly international.

McKroket. Survives any nuclear winter.

So why am I here? Existentialistically? God knows. But He was on my side just then as I spelt ‘existentialistically’ right the first time. But on the topic of the McRib? And why did I spell it McCrib? Well to be honest it was a bad twist on the word ‘Crib’ as I am currently in the process of buying my first flat (whammy) and Crib is current ’street’ parlance for home or place of residence. Word. Actually I’ve learned recently that the word ’sick’ is now a synonym for ‘ill’ and ‘ill’ was Beastie Boys for ‘bad’ and ‘bad’ was Jacko for ‘Good’ so ’sick’ is good. And ‘Bare’ is very. So if Winnie got naked and caught the flu then he’d be a bare sick sick bare bear. Wow.

Like Ma Bell I’ve got the Ill Constipation

You are probably asking where this is going now, I originally started this as an article on how to get my new flat featured on MTV Cribs (e.g. deck my flat with stuff made by companies that don’t make that stuff - ‘Yo this is my ballin’ ass dessertspoon, 2 million dollars each, handmade by Apple Inc by Steve Jobs out of moon rocks or some shit. Straight ballin’ man and see this, all my toothpaste ain’t minty fresh- it’s flavoured with vintage Cristal and made by Louis Roederer. They had to change they whole factory. Each tube is a half mil. I clean my sneakers with it. Ballin‘) but got distracted by Ronald McD, Major McCheese, Hamburglar and the purple jelly motherfucker Grimace. I bet you their CheeseBurger Crib gets on MTV before mine.

“Now get out of my house before I call the cops”

After watching ‘This Film is Not Yet Rated’, and waiting for The Office US s3e14 to download, I’ve decided to have a rant and a vaguely serious one for once. It’s not about the fact that Ironman is the only superhero with an alcoholic alter-ego but on the non-functional US film rating system all the way from G to NC-17.

The film ‘This Film is Not Yet Rated’ covers the cult-like organization, the MPAA, and it’s effect on the film industry. Claiming not to be a censorship body but instead just offering guidelines for parents, the MPAA is effectively a collusion between the studios and the Church to ensure that both their profits and sensibilities are never to be offended.

Catholicism Wow
The problem that any film-maker faces is that if the MPAA rates a film NC-17 (over 18’s only), because of slightly lesbianity, they will get no publicity, nor marketing and no cinemas will show their film. They are then forced to cut the film to an R (Restricted: under 18’s need an over 18 with them) or film the movie with R in mind, which means a 2 year old can see multiple exploding heads and full boobs so long as they with their 18 year old weed-dealing brother.

The film was then interjected with filmmakers stating that everyone should be able to see what they are making and their art house film littered with side boobs and pubes should be passed as an R without cuts.

However I think there should be actual age restrictions in terms of what people can and can’t see and the problem is not with the MPAA giving films NC-17’s, but with cinemas and studios not showing or promoting NC-17’s. From their financial and marketing point of view there are as many under-18’s as over-18’s and all films should be able to be seen by anyone to pay off the $200m production costs.

Barely Legal

In the UK we have three ratings which have age restrictions (12,15,18) and the fact that Apocalypto is rated 18 doesn’t mean that is only shown in 3 cinemas in Guildford to a grand total of 6 people. Additionally the BBFC is much more critical on violence and especially ‘head butting’ in fear of schoolyard copycats rather than counting the number of pelvic thrusts, or the seconds focused on the ‘O’ face of the female lead and then slapping a NC-17 on the film. Sex versus violence means 90% of US films that arrive in the UK to be rated are already cut to an ‘R’ rating; a few exceptions include American Psycho where the BBFC put the bicep-kissing threesome back into the film but still we are viewing inappropriately censored work.

I’ve got three tickets

We therefore have to rely on our liberal European friends and the occasional US rebel (Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream went ‘unrated’ and was barely shown in the US on theatrical release) for appropriate adult entertainment and I’m not meaning porn but cerebellum-fusing cinema.
If the US culture and studio economics meant they could have mainstream promoted films which were for over 18’s only, it would allow filmakers to make films with real adults, not the MPAA’s view of children, in mind, and not expose 100 million US teens to the sort of violence and inappropriateness which ends up with kids shooting up their schools.
Allegedly.

We have four traditional senses of taste. Sweet, sour, bitter and Reiss. We also have a fifth, umami, which is the taste of ’savoury meaty deliciousness’; about as close a translation to the Japanese word that us poor fat-tongued Western devils can manage.

The Japanese discovered umami in the 60’s using a battery of pHD students, a 12″ slab of tofu, an original copy of Zelda on the NES, 1 pair of rubber gloves, 14 feet of inner tubing, an brunette ladies wig, some kind of miniature trebuchet, a Cadbury’s creme egg, a small sample of Kendo Nagasaki’s sweat and a 2nd hand George Foreman grill.

‘..in Nagasaki they love …’

They then televised the experimental proceedings in a Banzai-style game show where half the students ended up with severe facial growths and a date with Peaches Geldolf and the other half exploded, showering the crowd with savoury meaty deliciousness. The fallout was blamed for the attacks that followed on Tokyo by Godzilla, his umami receptors going wild.

After Godzilla was dispatched by Matthew Broderick research continued in earnest. This newly discovered Umami zone, the alledged U-Spot (not a real biological location - THE U-SPOT IS A MYTH EVERYONE - A MYTH ), is stimulated by glutamates and hence the erstwhile enjoyment of MSG by our oriental cousins and accidental occidentals. In fact MSG has been front cover Glutamate of the Month for the last 5 years straight. Yum yum mild hand tremors.

‘MSG lives in the mansion with me’

So all good for umami. She’s got his stimulators in a shaker and newly found recognition in the cookery arena. But what she lacks currently is the emotional metaphor. People can be sweet, sour and bitter and in the case of Captain Haddock, even salty. But I’m still waiting to describe someone as being a bit umami this morning because their train was late. What is this emotion of savoury meaty deliciousness? Is it vacant moodiness, angry frustration, sweaty fear or even wild-eyed drunkeness? I cannot say.

Captain Ad-hoc

So my plea is for these eggheads to discover more tastes and if this is not possible then I want to have synesthesia for a few hours, have all my senses miswired and taste colours and smell textures. I want to confirm that blue feels like Smurf and freshly grilled hamburgers have that whiff of triangles.

And then get really drunk and discover that abomination tastes of that savoury meaty deliciousness that only umami can sound like.