Last year I, for some reason, decided to listen to the whole album.  And now I’m into it again.  I don’t think they were ever popular in the UK.  Everyone knows “Summer Breeze”, but only as an Isley Brothers song.  Well, these guys did it first. But this is my favourite song from the album:

Enjoy.

A New-Found Pleasure (And this probably says an awful lot about me:)

Lying in bed after a night playing musical theatre reeds, getting sleepy, one light on, glass of rosé wine, reading Foundation by Isaac Asimov. Learning about the efforts of the people of the planet Terminus to re-establish technology after the fall of the Galactic Empire. Enjoying the author’s projections about what technology will be like thousands of years into the future (atomic power and ultrawave; I guess mobile phones were already a thing of the past).

But mostly, being grateful that I’m no longer reading a popular teenage book about sexy vampires that was, I must say, the worst book I’ve ever finished. (What a miscalculation, should really have given up. And why are there so many sequels, eh?)

Anyway, I escaped that catastrophe with my intelligence roughly in tact, and now I’ve got my yellowed copy of Asimov that I bought for 25p at the Deptford Market and my wine and my bed. Happy times.

Even though everyone I knew went on and on and ON about how wonderful it was, and my husband borrowed people’s iPhones whenever he could, just to get a few minutes of Angry-Bird-Time in, I still didn’t get it. Even when my sister spent most of Christmas break playing it on her computer, again, I found it nonsensical.

I played Cut the Rope instead.  Until I got bored with it.  Then I bought Plants vs. Zombies.  Which is an amazing game, but the new version crashes on my iPod touch.  PopCap should get a strongly-worded letter from me about that.  But I can’t really be bothered.

In manner of protest, I tried again with Angry Birds.

I get it now.  I’m obsessed.  I don’t know what I didn’t see in it before.  Throwing birds at pigs in houses made of wood and glass and stone – that makes total sense.

The pigs deserve it.  They’re ugly and if you don’t destroy them, they grin evilly.  I hate that. But it’s a shame that the birds have to die to take them out.  I’m a vegetarian, so I don’t normally kill birds or pigs.  Maybe that’s why I didn’t realise how much fun those things could be at first.

Well, I know now.  Those things are very fun.

Actually, so are you.  Sooner or later, we all will.  This doesn’t get discussed as much as I think it should, and then we get old and it’s a surprise.

With that in mind, I’m trying to at least start to think about preparing for it.  I’ve read this entire series  already, but I’m reading it again now.  It is very helpful for gaining a bit of perspective on life and learning how to be a better person.

It isn’t easy.  I have a long, long, long way to go. But this book is very good.  Everything by Eknath Easwaran that I’ve read so far is incredibly good, and I highly recommend him.

Did I just put a downer on your day?  Sorry about that.  But go read this book and maybe it won’t seem quite so bad.

Congratulations Will and Kate!

I got married last year, too.  I got excited about that.  As a by-product of having a British husband, I now live in a country that Rick Santorum (NSFW) can never possibly be in charge of.

Now that is worth celebrating.  I choose to do so with my Will and Kate commemorative mug that I picked up in May of last year for half price at Sainsbury’s.

God save the Queen.

I really struggle with dark mornings, and I have ever since I started working “sociable” hours (9-5). I don’t mind getting up in the dark for something fun like an early flight, but to get up and get dressed and brave the cold and dark for work is too much for me sometimes.

In that respect, I have really picked the wrong country to emigrate to.  Britain is as far north as Canada.  What was I thinking?

Thankfully, to help me out, Britain made George Harrison.  And in 1970, George Harrison made the album All Things Must Pass.  And on All Things Must Pass, on the second disc, is a happy little track about the hippies that used to hang out in front of the Apple Records office on Savile Row in London, hoping for a rare glimpse of Beatle.

I think that must have been me in a previous life.

Now that the Apple office isn’t there anymore and the band has broken up (yeah, and obviously lots more stuff has happened) “Apple Scruffs” is like a shout-out to all of us that are still hard-core Beatles fans.  And that’s what gets me out of bed in the morning, the sound of harmonica and guitar and George singing to his fans.  (To me.)

It’s a decent enough song, and Donna Summer’s version of it is, in my opinion, the best.  But I think I can give a few pointers to prevent this situation happening to anyone else.

1. Consult the weather forecast before holding an outdoor event.  Presumably that’s how the cake came to be outside in the first place.  A quick look at the 3-day forecast could have resulted in a change of venue, maybe somewhere indoors.  Or somewhere with a pavilion.
2. If the event must occur outdoors, invest in Tupperware.  I know Tupperware makes plastic boxes that are the perfect size and shape for a cake.  This way, even if it does rain unexpectedly, the cake ‘s sweet green icing is protected from flowing down.  But maybe this wasn’t a special-event-induced cake casualty.  Maybe someone just left a cake out in the rain.  Which leads me to number 3…
3. Get some more considerate house mates.  You’ve just baked a cake and then someone leaves it out in the rain?  That’s really not very nice.  But I suppose it could have been a mistake…
4. Once the cake is finished, put a sign on it saying “Please do not put outdoors.”  That way, at least everyone has been warned that putting a cake outside might not be a good idea.  But most importantly:
5. Don’t bake a cake and then immediately destroy the recipe.  Anything could happen to the finished cake.  At the very least, you’ll eat it and then want another one.  I would say that, on general principle, I do the opposite – bake a cake, then store the recipe in a safe place for future use.

It’s a good thing that MacArthur Park is in California.  Where I live, the song would have gone like this:

Someone left the milk out of the fridge
I don’t think I can survive it
‘Cause it took so long to buy it
And I’ll never have those Nectar points again….

It is far better than I would have expected.  My husband calls it, “Jonathan Creek with fighting.”  I prefer to think of it as, “Jonathan Creek, with fighting, and Jude Law’s a bit gorgeous, isn’t he?”  I don’t think I’ve liked him this much since Gattaca.

There are many other reasons to like this film, of course.  I especially like the Victorian setting, especially the Victorian London setting. Although I still take issue with the fact that, at the end of the film, some characters run from Westminster to the under-construction Tower Bridge in what seems like a couple of minutes.  That distance is way too far, even underground.

My other favourite thing about it is the soundtrack.  The main theme gets stuck in my head for days afterwards, but, in a good way.

Oh yeah, and I saw the sequel the other night.  This isn’t immediately obvious from the previews, but Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law are the bro-mance of the century. Go watch it and it will be immediately obvious what I’m talking about.

As good as the film are, though, I haven’t read the books.  Perhaps I’ll add that as an item on my person action plan (I’ve been at work waaay too long this week).

The Sims 2 Deluxe

In 2008 I had gall stones and eventually had to have my gall bladder removed.  I was studying in university at the time, but couldn’t regularly attend classes for over a month.  My life at the time therefore consisted of lying in bed, remaining as still as possible, and trying not to go insane.

Re: that last one, this game was key.  I had already played The Sims until I was bored with it, but the next instalment was so much more satisfying! It took a little while to get used to, and then I was completely absorbed.  I designed all the characters to look like celebrities or people I knew, and then I made them do everything.  (Everything. Some of the stuff Sims can get up to!  Unbelievable.)

Of course there’s a The Sims 3, which I do have, and will discuss at a later date.  But this version is special to me because it was my entire life for a few weeks, and I may owe my sanity to it.

Summary: Live out fantasies through computer people.

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The Neverending Story (1984)

The theme music alone is enough to make me love this film.  I didn’t see it until I was a teenager.  In fact, I missed most of the classic Eighties’ films the first time around, but was fortunate enough to discover a few as a young adult.

I don’t know if this is really what you’d call a ‘good’ film, but it is entertaining.  The kid flies around on a furry dragon and there’s a giant turtle with a cold.  And all of the music is super-80s-fantastic.

When my VHS copy was destroyed in a flood, I replaced it with the DVD, because this film must always be at my disposal. I’ve read the book, too, but that is “another story and will be told another time.”

Summary: Kid’s fantasy film.  Good for weekends with popcorn and blankets.