Tag Archives: reality TV

Dr Strangelove Comes to Life

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Angel Musician

I’ve just been reading an article on the best nine foods to stockpile if we want to survive WW3.

I’m not exactly sure that this is helpful as, with computers, AI, hybrid warfare and all the other modern horrors, we are probably going to have to faceup to  life without water and electricity. Burning the furniture and using the contents of the water butt are short term fixes but after that I’m not sure where we go.

Rice, it seems, will last a long time, but without water and fuel it’s going to be a bit crunchy. Powdered milk will also be pretty useless without water. I note that tea does not make the list. I’m not sure they have thought this through. Why do you need powdered milk when you have no tea to put it in?

Rufford Abbey, I believe

Honey is recommended too. Not for its nutritional qualities, just for its ability to last a long time. That is, I suspect, of more interest to archaeologists than nutritionists. But never fear, peanut butter is also on the list. It never goes off, according to the list, although after a few years the flavour may suffer. If you eat peanut butter for years I suspect your heart will give out long before the flavour becomes an issue.

I can’t remember most of the rest, though tinned food did feature heavily. Yes, “tinned food” seems to be a food item. I wonder if this journalist is known for their work on details. At least it means we can eat cold baked beans as we see the sun setting on civilisation.

Oliver Cromwell’s House

We laughed, once, at a friend who stocked up on pulses and turned their cellar into a nuclear bunker, we criticised the government for Protect and Survive, and we all secretly thought that Dr Strangelove was over the top, but who’s laughing now?

The good news is that the price of gold is rising again, as it always does in times of global fear, so the billionaires who run the world are unlikely to be feeling the pinch. In fact, with their bunkers and cupboards full of peanut butter, they may actually be doing quite well.

Russian Cannon – taken as a trophy in he Crimean War, now at Ely Cathedral

This, of course, brings me to my next suggestion, that Trump, Putin and all the rest should form teams of three and be set loose in some sort of reality TV programme in the jungle. They can fight it out without risking nuclear war or putting up the price of groceries.

Each nation is allowed to field its President/Prime Minister and two prominent politicians. My money is on the Ukraine team – Zelensky and the Klitschko brothers.

Random photos move on to March in various years.

Goose poem – Anderby Creek

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An Almost Perfect Day

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Aconites are out

It was Valentine’s day yesterday. After 34 years of marriage the romantic gloss may have worn a little thin (I will be waiting a week until prices go down before I buy flowers, for instance) but I always spend the day reflecting on how lucky I am.

When that day is Wednesday, it’s even better, because we get to spend the day together. Well, apart from the times I was napping or reading, and the times she nipped out to the shops and did a few household things,. Not actually sure what the things were, but they were noisy and I know better than to complain that it’s difficult to concentrate on reading with her making all that noise. It only leads to discussions comparing our relative contributions in the field of housework. Mine are, to be honest, negligeable, which is why I tend towards silence.

We had our traditional Valentine’s day meal – steak, oven chips, onion rings, mushrooms and grilled tomatoes. We also had pepper sauce and sweetcorn – o0ne because I was tempted whilst ordering the groceries and the other because we had half a tin left in the fridge from the weekend’s fried rice.

As are the snowdrops

Julia cooked, because she does steak better than I do. It’s edible when I do it, but the smell of burning fat does tend to fill the house. That’s why I do a lot of casseroles and roasting. I am not really to be trusted with a frying pan.

Having said that, I did produce some fine pancakes on Tuesday. They arrived in a packet and just needed heating. I used a couple of dry frying pans for that and soon had two plates of pancakes ready with maple syrup and lemon juice. We have maple syrup available as Julia uses it in making one of her array of exotic vegetarian recipes. I prefer Golden Syrup but it tends to lead to stickiness and weight gain due to my childlike love of syrup sandwiches. I really should learn to have pancakes with lemon and ditch all the liquid sugar, but it’s just too tempting.

Cormorant on the duck pond

Meanwhile there were several romantic films on TV, including something new by the BBC, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (if adultery is actually romantic), Notting Hill and, on one of the later channels, Naked Attraction. It’s an odd mix, and one that will provide plenty of material for future academics.

I have linked to Naked Attraction because some of my readers may not be familiar with it. You are to be congratulated on this as it is, along with ll forms of reality TV and “scripted reality”, “the museum of social decay”, as Gary Oldman says.

It’s always difficult knowing where to post links. I have the same problem with footnotes in poetry. They are quite popular in Haibun, but I always worry about them. Do I appear condescending if I add a note? Do I appear “difficult” if I don’t?

However, it’s a good thing I did look up Gary Oldman, because I actually wrote “Gary Olsen” first, He was a great actor but he didn’t say anything about reality TV.

The Pond at Arnot Hill Park, Arnold, Notts

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Parsnips, Migrants and Social Media Influencers

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So, what did I learn this week?

I learnt that we might be short of parsnips for Christmas. It is due to inclement weather at planting time and through the growing stages. Or, in other words, all year. This is a refreshing change from it being the fault of Covid or the war in Ukraine. I also learnt that glasshouse producers are shutting down production because they can’t afford to heat and light the crops. If I was producing something that needed lots of electricity I like to think that I would have solar power or a windmill by now. Half of me says that if they haven’t already thought of that they deserve to go out of business, so they probably did.  You have to wonder if this has more to do with restricting supply to make the supermarkets pay more. I’m ambivalent on that.

I like cheap food and I like the ability to buy food out of season. I also like being able to eat tomatoes and cucumber with my lunch, as it cuts down on bread and gives me a selection of nutrients. On the other hand, I could eat carrot sticks. Or eat less. Supermarkets do take the mickey when they are buying from farmers and I would like to have a planet left to leave to my kids. If this means cutting down on hothouse crops, going seasonal and paying more for food then it’s a price worth paying.

Vegetables – Carsington Water

I also found out that in the UK we are losing food due to labour shortages. I may get a bit political from here. I voted to stay in the EU. It isn’t perfect, but I think life inside the EU is marginally better than life outside it. Most of this can’t be quantified, but food lost by labour shortages can be.

I’m also intrigued by the fact that we have more job vacancies in the UK than we have unemployed people. I’m sure there will never be a perfect solution but it does strike me that we could improve on the way we are doing things now. The trouble is that if you have vacancies for rocket scientists and are only capable of educating social media influencers there will always be a mismatch. On the other hand, if you need people to work in fields picking fruit and veg, even a social media influencer should have the brain cells for that. They may not have the motivation, but being paid piecework will sort that out.

Also, as a radical solution, if people have the drive to travel half-way round the world and cross the Channel in a rubber boat, they would probably welcome the chance to work. We could even set up an exchange system. We will take refugees and export social media influencers. I know which I’d rather have.  Scripted reality TV shows may find itself a little short of self-publicising airheads but that’s one labour shortage I’d be happy to see. I loved the Gary Oldman quote inn that link, describing reality TV as “the museum of social decay”. Oh yes!

Photo by Lisa Fotios on Pexels.com

Dredging the Gene Pool and other things

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I’m currently typing as First Dates Hotel plays on TV. If you feel any worries about the future of the human race this is the programme for you – it will confirm all your fears about idiots breeding and the gene pool going down the plughole. Looking on the bright side, if we need to lose a few million people to save the world I would start with anyone who has ever been on a scripted reality TV show. They are probably lovely people, but I’m not feeling in a generous mood.

I went to an NHS course this afternoon and am feeling in an evil mood. It lived up to my expectations, which were low. Three hours could have been condensed into about twenty minutes, and the quality of information was patchy, as was the quality of instructor. One was very good. One was not. We have another three hours of it next week. I’m not looking forward to it.

To be honest, I attended better courses when we were on the farm. This is particularly noticeable in the case of asking questions, when the two presenters seemed unable to answer anything that wasn’t on their list to talk about.

Back to the original subject – do you think that watching reality TV, or even having it in the background, can cause a loss of brainpower? It certainly feels like I’ve had something drain from me during the time it was on. Of course, it might just have been the will to live.

Parcels, Plants and Popinjays

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It was a reasonable day at work. We didn’t have many parcels to do and the ones we had were easy to pack and went to simple addresses.

We had several customers and a sprinkling of phone calls plus a couple of late orders.

You couldn’t really ask for more.

Until early afternoon. I’d just spent half an hour loading details and photographs onto eBay when I pressed the wrong button and, as you’ve probably already guessed, wiped it all.

So I had to plod through it all again. It’s not a good feeling doing it twice. Unfortunately, and I really hate to admit this, my last act on Monday afternoon had been to wipe it off too. In other words, I ended up doing it three times.

There must be a way to stop losing my work like this, but I still can’t work out how to do it. I’m adding new pieces to old listings so it isn’t as straightforward as starting from scratch.

I don’t feel bad about making mistakes, but I do feel bad about making the same one several times.

Things became more light-hearted when I started answering comments. I noted, whilst doing this, that I had made a couple of typos when adding tags. Writing THree Little Birds isn’t particularly amusing, but mis-spelling foraging as faraging did bring a smile to my face.

Foraging is, as you know, collecting wild plants for food. Faraging, possibly derived from the name Farage, is a word just begging for a meaning. It has several if you check it up but they are all made up by people like me. Well, like me but without the sparkling wit…

Faraging should, I think, be a word that indicates the ability to build a career on a single issue and a dash of personality, but free of the taint of actual ability, a bit like a modern reality TV star, and I think we all know my view of them.

There is a Seventeenth Century quote which I used to use in my re-enactment days – “Loud voices and empty words. So quoth the popinjay.”

It could do with some rewriting, but I think it conveys the general idea.

I’m going to start using it in that context and see if it catches on.

If it does, and I become rich and famous as a result, it will be a prime example of faraging, and I will become a noted farager.

There are many examples of names being used this way – Boycott, Quisling and Adonis are other examples. These are known as eponyms, which I should have known really, as I have seen the word eponymous often enough. It’s strange how some things pass you by.

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Streptocarpus grown from leaf cuttings

The photos are two of the four streptocarpus plants Julia has grown from leaf cuttings. She did it a few years ago to prove she could. As you can see, she succeeded.

A Quick Post (Again)

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Sorry, I’ve been neglecting my reading quite shamefully over the last few months. I do feel bad about it, and will try to visit everyone over the next week or two.

I’m also sorry that I’ve been neglecting the blog and have become very ill-disciplined about it. I will try to do better. The truth is that with winter approaching and a few decent things on TV, I have been watching more TV and doing less writing than I should be doing. I also thought that I ought to spend some time with Julia as I’ve been neglecting her too. I’m not sure she appreciates this – she mostly tells me off for talking instead of watching the TV.

It’s true, I do talk a lot whilst watching TV, but if I didn’t how would I communicate my views that politicians are idiots and most of the writers of TV programmes aren’t smart enough to be politicians?

I’d have to bottle it up and that would cause stress. That would be a bad thing because stress is a killer.

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with the song still in them.” as Thoreau is often, inaccurately, said to have said.  Be that as it may, I prefer the inaccurate quote. I may go to the grave with a song still in me, but I won’t be going to the grave with any unsaid criticisms of politicians or scriptwriters.

As for the pressing matters of the day – my camera is wearing out, my computer at work (despite the presence of things my home computer lacks) has no card reader, my car insurance company is trying to raise my premium by 25% from an already overpriced base (and using weasel words to do it, despite their bulldog logo) and it’s Julia’s birthday next week and I haven’t a clue what to buy her.

Even if I did, I would still have the problem of a Christmas present. I hate this time of year. I’m tempted to wrap up my car insurance policy and tell her I’ve bought her a year’s worth of taxi service, but as I already provide that she probably won’t think much of it as a present.

As a further apology, sorry this is a short post but I’m off to watch Lord Sugar abuse another bunch of idiots on The Apprentice.

This confirms all I’ve ever thought about Sugar, the honours system, Karen Brady, reality TV and the sort of idiots who go on reality TV.

They are a complete bunch of something Julia would tell me off for saying if I wrote it here.

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Tomorrow’s Breakfast – Overnight Oats

Julia has been very organised today and has already make overnight oats for breakfast. Because it’s going to be near freezing overnight and cold porridge, straight from the fridge, is just what you need on a winter morning.

I would try the slow cooker, but last time I tried cooking as we slept I woke up in a panic, thinking the house was on fire.

In which I have some Brilliant Ideas

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I dropped Julia at work this morning then went to the jewellers.

We didn’t talk about jewellery much, but we did set the world to rights and form the idea for a new TV programme.

The programme will take place in two shops in Nottingham and feature two groups of miserable old men sitting round moaning about how things used to be better. We already have one shop with three miserable old sods (even though one is quite young, he moans with the best of us) and have another shop and group of old gits in mind for the second one. We’re going to pitch it to a successful producer we know and see what happens.

People like antiques, reality shows and grumpy old men so I think it has legs as an idea. Personally, I’ll be looking for some advertising and a book spin-off. If Scarlett Moffatt can do it I’m sure I can, though, looking at her profile, I may need a new middle name. Karloff seems good. It has the right ring to it and you can see why William Henry Pratt adopted it as a stage name.

We were talking of the things that used to worry us, like Russia invading Afghanistan. Do you remember that – we all thought how stupid they were for trying – it rarely ends well for the invader.

Now we worry about recycling and financing kids through college.

We also spoke of the good old days and a local dealer who just bought a forgery of a rare coin, losing £2,000 on the deal. It was offered to him, gleaming and uncirculated, in the middle of a parcel of average worn coins. There’s a place where enthusiasm for coins, and the love of profit muffles the alarm bells that should be ringing.

How, he should have asked, did such a remarkably well-preserved coin end up in a batch of worn silver? It takes remarkably little wear to downgrade a coin in the eyes of a collector. Terms such as bag marks and cabinet wear are used to denote the sort of damage that can be done to a coin even before it is circulated. Bag marks are the marks that occur during manufacture and packing into bags. Cabinet wear is the light scuffing that occurs when a coin moves in a cabinet as you open and close the drawers. That is how fussy they are.

Anyway, he didn’t ask, he paid the money, and he can’t get the seller on the phone number he supplied, which gives me an idea for the next TV programme – CSI Coin Shop.

Stranger things have caught on…