Season's Greetings

Office work this morning, then some driving around London at which time I will switch into festive mode until the weekend.

smoke fairies

I was in the office today although the car park was surprisingly empty. I guess most people were en route to shops or relatives. Last night the local M&S car park was completely full at 22:30 and stayed that way until around midnight. The adjacent Tesco was open 24 hours in any case.

Whilst I've been driving for the last few days, my CD of choice has been the Smoke Fairies, which evokes a mysterious and strangely compelling soundtrack to the driving experience. It fitted perfectly with some of my recent driving scenes of 'London streets', 'twisty evening lanes' and 'empty midnight motorway'. Yet these British musicians have somehow been absorbing the vibes of the Mississippi delta. Mournful ballads with a folk edge but rooted in blues with slide guitar swagger.

Here's one of their songs: with a Christmas theme, as sung at the recent Barbican concert.

round robin 2008

Like most of us, I receive a few of those round robin letters, from varied sources including embedded in cards, as letters and also in various electronic formats.

Amongst today's was one which had used photopaper to create a card and included the letter portion as a series of bullet points a la PowerPoint on the inside left.

Sterling work. So to mine, I suppose...

Dear friend,

Its been a truly eventful and groundbreaking year and there are any number of incredible and positive items which I am about to flaunt. You'll be amazed at how we managed to pack so much into this truly award winning year.

After that January domestic bust-up and the little incident with the police, we vowed to turn over a new leaf, but of course kept our fingers crossed. I resorted to staying out until four or five every morning and the rest of the household got an even stronger reputation for being out of control.

That was until the money ran out during the casino vacation in February, but some of the gang helped us out with a loan although they are getting quite nasty now that the money is due.

We did sell the house for a knock down price to recoup part of the debts - in some kind of 'sell to let' scheme so we could still live in it, but I sort of sensed that putting the money into those Northern Rock Hedge Funds was a bad idea. It turns out that the whole thing was a scam in any case so we don't even qualify for compensation.

Luckily we'd already paid for the May safari to South Africa and carried on with it in any case. Amazingly, on the very first day, I was robbed on the way into the hotel but fortunately they missed my camera which I'd already left in a taxi by accident! How we laughed!

The very next evening the taxi driver returned the camera to the hotel and only asked for £200 by way of compensation. So I'm including a few dozen of the more whimsical photographs of wildlife as we toured around. Most of it is at quite a distance but I'm sure you will get the idea.

Whilst we were away, it turned out that the weather in the UK was quite bad, and we returned to see the new tide marks inside the property up to about half a metre. The house sitter had checked in regularly and been feeding Mimsi the cat but somehow all the fish had escaped from the fishtank. Or at least that what we were told. And Mimsi is seeing a pet psychotherapist now because she gets jumpy every time we turn on a tap.

I should mention Pixi-Trix and the recent performance of Armageddon at the local hall. She played Liv Tyler's part of Grace Stamper and we managed to get local man Johnny Depp as the other main star. Although Johnny lives in France, he keeps a small place quite near to us, just around the corner from Kate Moss and the others. Some of the special effects were quite stunning and the drilling of the space rocks to plant the explosive holds a special place in my heart.

Of course, the Guardian gave the show five stars, although the Times was a bit snooty and only gave it a muted review, saying the prawn vol-au-vents were the best thing about the evening. I have a certain pride in being the person that defrosted them.

That takes us neatly to the sporting achievements. As usual, we collected a fair number of cups and trophies from the usual sources; We've a whole cabinet of model yacht racing awards now and Branston continues to win body board trophies and can remove the parole tag from next month. He's already talking about going back to Turkey for another stint on the farm.

And its good news on the medication front too! It appears that the tricyclics were from a quite old prescription and although I'd bought a lot on the cheap from the internet, when they finally ran out the supplier I'd been using had gone out of business. The NHS then suggested something else and the new tablets are supposed to reduce the extrapyramidal side-effects of antipsychotic drugs or something. I know they have cut down on the blurred vision anyway.

But thats enough about us. I hope you are having a similarly interesting time and that these modest achievements don't overshadow those of your own.

Season's Greetings and remember there's always someone worse off than yourself.

cathedral

A festive weekend. Cathedral. Carols. A reading from Dylan Thomas about Christmas. Even some machine generated snow as we left the Cathedral.

...Bring out the tall tales now that we told by the fire as the gaslight bubbled like a diver. Ghosts whooed like owls in the long nights when I dared not look over my shoulder; animals lurked in the cubbyhole under the stairs and the gas meter ticked. And I remember that we went singing carols once, when there wasn't the shaving of a moon to light the flying streets.

At the end of a long road was a drive that led to a large house, and we stumbled up the darkness of the drive that night, each one of us afraid, each one holding a stone in his hand in case, and all of us too brave to say a word. The wind through the trees made noises as of old and unpleasant and maybe webfooted men wheezing in caves. We reached the black bulk of the house. "What shall we give them? Hark the Herald?"

"No," Jack said, "Good King Wencelas. I'll count three." One, two three, and we began to sing, our voices high and seemingly distant in the snow-felted darkness round the house that was occupied by nobody we knew.

We stood close together, near the dark door. Good King Wencelas looked out On the Feast of Stephen . . . And then a small, dry voice, like the voice of someone who has not spoken for a long time, joined our singing: a small, dry, eggshell voice from the other side of the door: a small dry voice through the keyhole. And when we stopped running we were outside our house; the front room was lovely; balloons floated under the hot-water-bottle-gulping gas; everything was good again and shone over the town.

"Perhaps it was a ghost," Jim said. "Perhaps it was trolls," Dan said, who was always reading.

"Let's go in and see if there's any jelly left," Jack said. And we did that...

full

All my recent blog pix seem to be night-time.

I shall leave London full of tourist shoppers this weekend and head for somewhere with daylight, space on the pavement and carols.

xmas party games

Survivors of rashbre central's previous seasonal festivities will know that there's a certain point when the silly hats and party games make an appearance.

Not the Nintendo / X-Box360 / Playstation variety, but games involving old wrapping paper, sticky tape, fruit and the like. For the convenience of others, here's a few sure fire winners, which can be played at everything from amateur through to full Pro standard.

Required items: Wrapping paper, sticky tape, magazines, newspapers, highlighter pen, pins

1) Guess the name : Yes - simply providing the guests with paper hats or pin on labels which they can't see with the name of a sleb (celebrity) on it. They have to guess with the Yes/No answers. Classed as an icebreaker. Marilyn Monroe, George Bush, Frankenstein, Albert Einstein, Babe Ruth, Jason Bourne, 007, Mickey Mouse, Madonna, Britney Spears, Beyonce. You get the idea.
2) Dress the person : Kinetic Game, two teams: 2-5 minutes. Select someone to be dressed using either old wrapping paper or a couple of recent magazines or newspapers.
3) Kipper racing : multiple teams. needs a long clear indoor space. cut or tear a largish fish shape from a sheet of wrapping paper or anything similar to hand. Add detail such as a hole for the eye, maybe a dorsal fin. Lie them flat on the floor and give other team members further sheets of paper/magazines to use to create air currents to propel the fish from a start line to a distant improvised finishing line.
4) Tell a tale : Pre select some groups of 7 unusual words from a magazine or newspaper article. Hand them to each team and and ask each team member in turn to tell a story using the seven words. Other teams have to try to guess the words.
(Example words from random article today : luckier; heterosexual; chevrolet; banana; promoted; quitter; eggs. and from another page: emissions; cruise; leisurely; overcome; scoop; howling; endurance...you get the idea.)
5) Pass the orange : Why wait until after the dinner has finished to play this game? goes great with coffee.
6) Pictionary: drawing fast pictures based upon words. The boxed set is best for this one.
7) GrEEn GlaSS dOOr : The person in charge suggests playing this and that everyone else can try to be selected to go through the green glass door by suggesting appropriate pairs of things. Things that get in are a pOOl but no water; glaSS but no picture; MiRRor but no reflection (ie the first thing needs a double letter in it.. Play till last person gets it)
8) GGD variants : Play GGD (7) where instead of double letters, each sentence said by the next person has to start with a vowel "...and blah blah bla; ...or blah blah blah ...obviously" and another variant vowel/then consonant and another variant is start with next letter of alphabet.
9) Alphabet Game : Choose topic (Animals, Cars, Candy Bars, Popstars, Drinks). Start at A and round robin through to Z.
10) Stirring the Mush : Announce you are stirring the mush and (eg stand up, sit down, scratch your ear etc). Then start stirring the mush by any hand/body gesture you like. The invite someone to copy. the trick is thay have to do what you did BEFORE you started stirring the mush (eg scratch ear etc). Tell them whether they have passed or not then select next 'victim'. Repeat until all have worked it out.
11) Erect-a-pup : More newspaper for this two in -oner. Part one. Teams. who can make the longest tube in 2 minutes from rolled up paper? Sounds easy. Just watch what happens. Part Two. Now, in another three minutes make a model life sized puppy out of tubes of newspaper. Warning that some puppies will have 3, 5 legs at the end of this.

I think thats enough to get started. No animals harmed in the testing of these entertainments. You'll have to email me for the (ahem) rules of the frying pan and wooden spoon game...and don't forget charades!

Technorati Tags: rashbre, Xmas, party, games, party+games, icebreakers, holiday, christmas, festive, silly, crackers, seasonal, fun, charades, party+animals, erect-a-pup, stir, mush

not my part of town

Yesterday's venue involved some complex logistics known only to me.

I'd had enough lemsib to ward off the worst of my colb and we'd assembled into a moderately noisy group before heading through traffic to a predetermined restaurant.

I'd managed to park rather close to the venue, but there was apparently some problem with the quality of the yellow lines, so I had to move after I'd dropped my car-full in an adjacent dark Gotham-style alley.

I drove to the end of the dark walled road expecting to find a way out but instead there were locked gates. A long reverse between bollards and crazily parked cars and I was back onto a main street and sucked into a vortex of local road systems which somehow took me vast distances from the restaurant.

I eventually found what I thought was the restaurant road again, but was actually another similar looking stretch in another part of town. I parked the car and started the interesting and lengthy walk back to where everyone was sipping their drinks.

The trick was to sidle in nonchalantly as if everything was as I'd planned it. As I reached for my coca cola, they still asked the inevitable "Where have you been?"

zattoo

Keeping yesterday's television theme running, zattoo provides UK freesat and a few euro channels direct to the Mac (or PC). Quite good quality and free at the moment.

Streams live television (after a few ads for gambling etc).

Worth a play.

betamaxmas retro telly

Warning.

This is addictive.

US Television from 1988 on an analogue signal, complete with snow and bad reception.

All the favorites in color (of sorts- NTSC - Never Twice the Same Color).

There's a TV remote and a guide to the channels, as well as a good sprinkling of 1988 advertising.

Click thru at your peril.

Or enjoy.

hallelujah midi karaoke backing track

Since X Factor, I've been getting hits over the last few days for "Hallelujah midi". I don't have such a thing.

or didn't.

Here's a pub casio karaoke style midi hack of the tune for anyone who wants to mess around with it in Garageband or similar and the above screenshot shows my suggested revised instrument settings.

Budding guitarists would want to mute the sunburst telecaster which I have currently set to stun. I've also added some glittery pads to the end part for further amusement.

Here's my Garage Band rendering of the tune. Jeff Buckley's version need not fear.
hallelujah backing track

beware of tricky pigeons

Vicious pigeons intercept Matthew Robins' flyboy in a dream.
Not the twisted Barbican episode, but it needs to be shared.

blue and white lights

Switched on modest outdoor lights this afternoon. Low energy LED still give the impression of an impromptu helicopter landing zone. I hope Santa will find it okay. We've already had two reconnaissance runs with different sleighs around this area.

The tree looks a little like a hostage at the moment, still in its nylon netting.

I know better than to attempt to trim it my way.