RAVE - In the shade, at Muir Woods

This has been an unusually hot week in San Francisco. The kind of heat where you have to turn the air conditioning so high in the car that everyone complains they can't hear my music playing.

Er, wrong. They complain about my music AND the noise of the aircon.

What's a swimming-pool-less family to do when it gets this hot?

Turn the aircon up and ignore the complaints, switch to the Chill channel on Sirius, and head on over to Muir Woods.

While John Muir's namesake is normally damp and stinky, this weekend it was cool, dark and sweet smelling.

Of course, we still had to contend with tourists. My good friend George decided he wanted a tree to hug him, rather than the other way around (that's him, stood inside a giant redwood). 

Who said there was already enough "old growth" in the park?

RANT - Mickey Mouse Breakfast

What an insight this blog is giving you to the International food scene. 

Just a couple of days ago I was telling you about bear-repelling vegetables, now I have another item, again from BBC News, about repellent bread!

Today's shocking news comes from the UK, where a food production company was ordered to pay nearly £17,000 ($25,000) after a man found a dead mouse in a loaf of bread as he made sandwiches for his children.

The customer had already used some slices when he came across the mouse. He had purchased the loaf online, through a Tesco branch in Bicester (that's Bister, not Bi-Sester).

He said "Initially I thought it was where the dough had not mixed properly prior to baking. As I looked closer I saw that the object had fur on it”.

Premier Foods, which makes Hovis bread, Branston pickle and Bisto gravy, admitted to having failed to maintain acceptable standards at its British Bakeries site in London.

News that the manufacturer recommended using Branston pickle and Bisto gravy to bring out the full flavor of the mouse remain unconfirmed.

REVIEW - The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett

This was one of two recent cases where I read the book while also watching the movie, or at least in this instance, the book and the TV mini-series.

Both started at somewhat of a snail's pace, which is kind of forgivable ... there are lots of characters and intertwining stories to set up.

Growing up in England I saw a lot of this kind of stuff growing up ... whether it was Robin Hood, Lancelot, King Arthur, and yet I'd never heard of a King Steven. So, Pillars told a typical story, but not a real one.

Having said that, once I realized the family and royal angst was nowhere near as interesting as learning how a medieval village functioned, how a cathedral was financed, designed and built, how local politics, religion and superstition combined to help one village compete for attention and developmental assistance against nearby villages.

While I didn't object to the sex and violence, it was a bit gratuitous, clearly added just to pep it all up a bit, in a way never needed by the classics.

Can't believe I just said that :)

RANT - Lost in Translation

News today of a woman who repelled a black bear with a plant from her garden underscores the danger to Americans living in remote areas and not able to use the correct English (or in this case, French words).

This story, from BBC news, tells of a woman living in Montana, who earlier today encountered a bear in her garden (Americans call that a 'yard', but I'll leave that alone for now). 

The bear was making a move on the woman's dog, and when she tried to intervene, the bear bit her leg! So, what else is a plucky Montanan woman supposed to do: she grabbed a COURGETTE (and this is where it gets tricky for Americans) from her garden / yard, and threw it at the bear, which then ran off.

Like thousands of other European words that my new country-folk mangle and mis-use ('Chaise Lounge' anyone?), instead of using the word passed down since Medieval times, they use zucchini rather than the perfectly acceptable "courgette". They of course might explore the conundrum of why they ignored one European word already in common use, and picked a less well known Italian word, but by then the bear would have finished the job.

It reminds me of an old friend in Denver who would almost choke himself trying to say "croissant", and instead copy his fellow Coloradans by saying "croy-sant".

The story concludes by saying "Authorities were still attempting to track down the bear on Thursday". Apparently (and this is still awaiting confirmation) the bear had strayed over from Canada, where they speak French as well as English, knew what a courgette was, and was hanging around waiting for the aubergine (aka eggplant, in America), and melon (squash, in America) to complete his salad.

A final word of warning: if you read in an American paper that someone was "driving their sedan on the pavement and encountered an Asian woman waving a walker", it does not mean someone was in an Elizabethan horse-drawn carriage being pulled along the sidewalk and met someone of indeterminate origin, but clearly not white, arm in arm with another person who was helping her walk.

RANT - Advertising

I can't believe it's been this long, armed with a blank blogging canvas and an internet connection, and I haven't yet vented against one of life's most despicable intrusions.

To go some way to making up for this lapse, here's my partial list of advertising tactics that get my goat.

1. The way American advertisers describe a good price as "A SAVINGS OF 50%". A savings? That's no typo, it's just an affectation. How does "a" (singular) go with "savings" (plural)? Only in an addled advertiser's head, that's how.

2. The way that American advertisers lazily use "European" when they can't properly describe anything that makes their product special. As if by magic, a dull, featureless sofa is "European-inspired", and a crushingly dull Chevy glitters with a "European-styled" interior.

3. The way American companies can't advertise jack without including a bargain price. Does no-one buy anything based on quality, or features, or beauty? To have a company talk about a life-enhancing medical compound, proven effective in 99% of cases, guaranteed to alleviate whatever it is that's affecting you, and then, the all-too-predictable parting shot "and available for just 99 cents, while stocks last". If it's the right drug for me, and it's going to cure me of whatever it is I suffer from, why the hell do I care if it's on some kind of special offer? 

4. And having mentioned "guarantee", when is a guarantee not really a guarantee at all? When an American advertiser issues it, that's when. Here, it's a get out of jail free card. You can claim whatever you like, make extravagant claims about "guaranteed results", knowing that the vast majority of customers will never complete the course of treatment (for example), and whether they do or not most will have lost the receipt, or never get around to returning the product for their "guaranteed money back".

5. CNN is the worst offender in this next category, and it concerns broadcasters who can't just play their freaking material. OK, so several stations insist on having their logo permanently on screen, and some logos are more intrusive than others. Many channels use annoying animations or swoosh in and swoosh out with an ad for some other program in their exciting, all new lineup. Most news programs like to have a ticker-tape news or financial market strip running across the screen as an annoying but apparently essential addition to whatever the newscaster is covering. But CNN, oh CNN, you insist on having everything: the ever-present and larger than life logo, two (count 'em) streaming lines, top and bottom of the screen, the swoosh in and out, the pop-ups, the pop-outs, all to mask the fact that the news is better covered by the BBC or NPR.

6. In order to show I haven't just thrown this list together, and echoing that "all new line-up" mantra from advertisers like CNN, I groaned last night when I saw Burger King touting its "All new" breakfast line-up. Gimme a sugar-frosted, deep-fried break. Are they trying to tell me nothing I could have bought last week, should I have been desperate enough to try a Burger King breakfast, is available this week? Because that's what "all new" means. BK Bullshit! 

7. My final gripe concerns the unavoidable measures taken to mug web surfers with pop-ups that ask them to 'Digg' something, 'Like' it, rank it, hype it, pump it up and pimp it. Anything but get straight to the target material. Shabby. 

RAVE - Les Nubians, at Yoshi's Oakland

I wasn't expecting much from the food element of the evening.

When we last visited Yoshi's in Oakland, we marveled at the performance space, and how Dwele used it, but were under-whelmed by the sushi space, and how the chef and staff wasted it.

But while the food was a little better last night (aided by our choices of the Toro Toro tuna,  spicy dragon roll, and much more), the overall organization lets them down - the farting around over where you actually sit for the show (they're supposed to organize that while you're having your dinner, but never do it swiftly or without a reminder or two), the fact that a 10pm show never starts until closer to 11. That's OK and you expect it with other live music events, but at Yoshi's it's hard to pace yourself dinner-wise - people end up eating too early and standing around in a long line waiting to get into the performance space, or end up eating too late and bringing their plates of sushi or whatever into the show.

Wikipedia tells me (and I know this is lazy of me to just quote Le Wiki): Les Nubians is an R'nB Grammy-nominated duo composed of sisters Hélène and Célia Faussart from Paris*. In 1985 the sisters moved with their parents to Chad. (Last night, the local announcer introduced them as hailing from Senegal, but I didn't think everyone wanted to hear me stand up and challenge that with a wikipedia entry). Seven years later, they returned to Bordeaux* and began singing a cappella, producing poetry slams in Bordeaux and Paris, and singing background vocals for various artists worldwide. Their debut album Princesses Nubiennes was released in 1998.

They have become one of the most successful French-language musical groups in the US. Best known for their Billboard R'nB Top Ten Single "Makeda" and Grammy nominated song "Je Veux D'la Musique" from their second album One Step Forward. Les Nubians were the 1999 Soul Train Lady of Soul Award winners for Best New Artist, Group or Duo and received two NAACP Image Awards nominations in 2000.

I need to edit that Wiki entry to add "and they got 4 thumbs up from Pavey and Philip last night".

* In typically western-Atlantic style, the Wikipedia entry lists their homes as "Paris, France" (gimme a break, as if anything this sophisticated would come out of Paris, Texas) and "Bordeaux, France" (again, where else on earth do they end their city names with 'eaux')

RANT - George Michael

Where oh where do I start?

First, the news that George Michael is going to prison, for driving (and crashing) his car while under the influence of drugs.

I don't know if I already wrote elsewhere, but because Georgie Porgie ran his Range Rover into a photo developing kiosk, there were rumors that Wham! were re-uniting. Apparently, Andrew Ridgeley is so down on his luck that he was working as an assistant manager in that photo kiosk!

Anyhow, Lawrence's observation on George's sentence is "So, they're sending George Michael to prison. Isn't that like sending Vanessa Feltz (the UK's equivalent of Kirstie Alley) to a chocolate factory?"

Which brings me to my second GM rant: why has he wasted the past 14 years sticking stuff up his nose and hanging around public toilets rather than writing and recording decent music? His last single was released in 1996, for heaven's sake!

Now, I've never been a real fan of the tubby Mediterranean crooner, but (like my view of Michael Jackson), I have to admit one or two of his songs were catchy and commercial. I even have to admit that I saw him live in Denver in 1990-something, back when he could fit through the doors of the Coliseum.

When someone as prolific and magnetic (publicity-wise) retires (voluntarily or otherwise), I wonder what they do every day? I know he lives in a mansion in Hampstead, north London, but you can only spend so much of your day on the old XBox.

I'm going to stop some way short of saying "Come on George, let's hear some new songs, and when you get out, get on tour", but it'd be nice if he got a legal hobby.

RAVE - Cliff-Diving World Championship

The last time I looked down from a really high diving platform was in Weston-super-Mare (my home town) public, open-air swimming pool. Needless to say, I chickened out and climbed back down to the pool-side.

When you're from England, you have to say "open air" whenever something isn't "indoors", just to remind people that occasionally the biting rain stops, the sun comes out, and the frost thaws from whatever you're sitting on, running across, or (as in this case) diving off.

I've seen the cliff divers near Acapulco, and this cliff-diving championship looks just as scary.

I posted this for a few reasons:

1. It's scary (I know, I already said that)

2. A British diver won this leg of the competition, in Hawaii, and the video shows his dive

3. It reveals a very useful tip: if you find yourself needing to dive from this height, make sure you enter the water feet-first

Other safety tips (like: what to do when being charged by a grizzly bear, how to change the channel when your wife is watching Top Chef, etc.) will appear in later posts.

RAVE - Four Lions

The funniest film ever about jihadists in the UK. 

I know there's not much competition for the prize, but that doesn't take anything away from this dangerously funny look at wannabe martyrs in England.

It doesn't just make you feel awkward about laughing at people planning to murder the innocent - "Let's bomb Boots (the UK's equivalent of Walgreens); they sell condoms that make you want to bang white girls!", but also makes you feel awkward about feeling sad when they accidentally blow themselves up. 

Clumsily put, I know, but don't let that put you off. It'll be hard enough to get hold of a copy of this, and when you do, it'll be even harder following the plot - the broad north-east English accents and obscure colloquialisms will make the dialog hard for most people to follow.

But persevere. It's definitely worth it.

RAVE - Mesrine: L'Ennemie Public No.1

This is part 2 of the biopic of 60s and 70s French gangster, Jacques Mesrine (pronounced May-reen). Amo and I saw Part 1 a couple days ago, and we nearly saw it again today!

It turns out both films were showing at Sundance Kabuki today, and as the first minutes of today's film rolled by, we realized we were sat watching the same Part 1 we'd already seen.

We hot-tailed it into the correct theater, and watched the second half of this excellent story.

While this half was just as tight and suspenseful as the first, just as well acted, it lacked the breakneck speed and non-stop action that kept us so involved the other day.

Vincent Cassel put on 50 pounds to portray Mesrine in his late 30s and 40s, which puts his dedication as well as his acting right up there with De Niro.

RAVE - Fish

What, Fish in general? No, the Bay Area's favorite fish 'n chip shop, which happens to be the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge, in Sausalito.

Today was a particularly bad day to make the hop, as it's Labor Day weekend, AND it turned out to be the weekend of the Sausalito Art Festival. Therefore it took over an hour to do make a trip that should have taken 15 or 20 minutes.

Fish is a piece of work though - fish 'n chips at steak 'n frites prices, never enough tables, long lines, cash only - they do everything they can to keep customers away.

But once you're there, sitting in the sun gazing into the marina, with mouthfuls of the crispest battered fish, arguably the best fries in or near San Francisco, you can see why it draws local and tourist alike.

And of you're wondering whether a fish 'n chip place deserves a review, glowing or otherwise, you need to be there on a day like today.

RAVE - The Financial Lives of The Poets, by Jess Walter

The title completely threw me. 

As I tucked into what I thought was going to be an insight into Wordsworth's and Keats' attempts to trade manuscripts on very early versions of eBay, it turned out to be a potentially miserable account of a laid off journalist's adulterous wife, impending house foreclosure and experimentation with drug dealing. 

What saved it from bringing a downer on the whole vacation was that it was really funny. 

As my English tutor would have asked, "Who'd've thunk it, eh?"

RAVE - God's Middle Finger, by Richard Grant

English journalist Richard Grant fulfills a lifelong ambition to explore the last refuge of native Americans like Sitting Bull, Mexican revolutionaries like Pancho Villa, train robbers, and more recent drug cartels.

While reading this book, I kept thinking of that scene in Blazing Saddles where scheming railroad speculator Harvey Korman (played by the fabulous Hedley Lamarr) advertises for the nastiest criminals on earth to come work on the railroad 'protection' team). The long line of applicants included gangsters, Hell's Angels, Klansmen, terrorists of assorted persuasion, and all-around evil bastards. Apparently, when Lamarr was finished with them, they all settled in the Sierra Madre.

It's not the long-gone history of the place that scares me off, but the fact that Mexico's largest revenue earner, illegal drugs, are grown, processed, stored, and shipped from this region just south of their biggest market, the USA. 

The murder rate in most of the dusty villages is 2-5 times that of America's most dangerous neighbourhoods. Local males are driven by crude machismo, greed, and the burning need to "honour" a murdered relative by murdering the murderer and/or his relatives. 

Aside from the constant murder, maiming and rape, Grant tells of hard-as-nails horsemen who use scorpions to sting their knees to dull the pain of repeated falls.

The irony that all of this plays out against a backdrop of bedrock Catholicism and so-called Christian family values is not lost on me, and is worthy of Bill Maher's testiest tirades. How strange that the otherwise divine Felicia should have recommended the book to me.

Takeaway: don't visit the Sierra Madre in northern Mexico. Ever!

RAVE - A History of the World in 6 Glasses, by Tom Standage

Certainly not Divine, but nonetheless unusual was the recommendation from someone who doesn't drink alcohol, doesn't like coffee, and eschews "unhealthy" drinks like Coke (yes, that's you, Amo).

This history was much better than the bulky and pretentious Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond, and also better than anything I've read by Stephen Ambrose.

It describes how beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and Coca Cola have shaped civilizations from Egyptian times (where hieroglyphics clearly show people sipping beer through long straws, to prevent them gulping all the bits of grain and other stuff that went into their Tutankhamen Light) right up to that curse on Communism, Coke.

A great read, and ample proof that teetotallers like Amo are missing out on life ;)

RAVE - Bust a Move ... and an Ankle?

I don't know whether it's invigoratingly original, or desperately depressing, but my great friend Bill and I have been trading ideas on how 2 aging lotharios can make some extra green, legally.

My stream is technical, marketing-driven. Bill's is more free-form. If he sees something on TV that looks easy, or it's currently being done badly, he thinks "we could do that!".

His latest thread is born out of music. Bill contends that if a band on Letterman or Leno sounds like tom cats being neutered with rusty pliers, then we can do much better. Not neuter cats, of course, but make noise for audiences that no know no better.

At least Bill can play the guitar. The last musical instrument I learned was the harmonica, at school. 

But forget about the music. Bill has already worked out our image.

He doesn't remember who's bodies he stole for the image, but it looks like he pasted our faces on Bros, for those of you who might remember Matt and Luke Bros, who briefly occupied the UK charts in 1988.

Forget that he looks like an effeminate Richard Branson, and I look like someone out of breath from trying to get his jeans buttoned. Look at the vitality. The passion. Doesn't it make you wish you were back in the 80s?

Now, all we need is a name*. And some musical talent.




* Throbbing Gristle has already been taken.

RAVE - Amazon Walk

It's somewhat ironic that Ed Stafford became the first person to walk the length of the Amazon, from its source to the sea, while I was lounging around in Tuscany.

Of course, he didn't complete the whole walk while I was on holiday. He started on 2nd April 2008 and finished on 9th August 2010. He was walking for EIGHT HUNDRED AND FIFTY NINE DAYS! That's equivalent to over 600 holidays in Tuscany, but that's such a bad comparison I should be banned from blogging for even mentioning it.

Perhaps the only downside is that all of the credit will go to Stafford, much as Edmund Hillary is credited as the first man to scale Everest, when no doubt dozens of Nepalese guides had done it before, and local guide Tensing accompanied him on his particular ascent. Accompanying Stafford on most of his walk was Gadiel "Cho" Sanchez, a Peruvian forestry worked who joined Stafford in August 2008 - five months into the expedition.

This is a magnificent accomplishment for both men, and I look forward to the book, the documentary, and the tee-shirt.

The only downside is that "Ed Stafford" doesn't sound as swashbuckling as "Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes", that other prolific British adventurer and long-distance trekker.

RAVE - Mesrine: L'Instinct de Mort

I don't prefer foreign-language films to English-language, but the foreign-language films we see are usually special ones, and by "special" I mean outstanding.

Amo and I donned berets and dark glasses and saw Mesrine: Killer Instinct (or, L'Instinct de Mort as they say in Montmartre), and it was sensational.

The basic story, of a small-time criminal who escalates to Public Enemy No. 1, is based on the true story of Jacques Mesrine, and is better made, more intense, and MUCH more exciting than Johnny Depp's Dillinger equivalent.

Vincent Cassels is a great actor, and is teamed with a group of equally convincing French unknowns, except for one Monsieur Depardieu, looking heavier, nastier, and weirder than I've ever seen him.

The story starts in 1960 with Mesrine in the French Army in Algiers. This is where he learns his basic moves, and quickly puts them into use back in civilian Paris, working for the 'boss' Guido (Gerard Depardieu). The violent action is intense throughout, as Mesrine plies his trade from France, to Canada, and then into the USA. 

This is where part 1 of the 2-part film ends. We're hoping to see part 2 this holiday weekend, and I'm really looking forward to it.