Children, this is a reading and comprehension test for ya.
First read the passage.
Now answer the questions:
1) Is dancing allowed?
Answer at the bottom of the page.
A) No. You need a license and there are regulations.
AAAAAAAAAAAARGH!
What about “the true flavour of Old Havana” ? FFS
Rant rant etc.
India is a world away from Britain. I went with Jenny in 1996 and really had my eyes opened. In India you don’t just get to live, you have to do it actively. You are alive because of the choices you made that day - you didn’t get in the cab with the driver whose brother runs a tea shop that drugs its tourist customers, you chose the bus whose steering wheel stayed on all the way around the mountain pass and which didn’t get washed away when crossing the flooded bridge.
Our morning train from Delhi was delayed 8 hours. When we got to the platform it was like a scene out of Indiana Jones, complete with crates of chickens. When the train arrived, customers would watch for their reserved carriage and grab it as it passed. I will never forget the chaos of the guy hanging onto the side of the train with all his bags hanging off him, ploughing through the front line of waiting customers, scattering men, women and chickens across the platform.
The main issue when you visit India has to be the … uh … infrastructure. No toilet paper, and toilets that block instantly if you use your own. Even as a left-hander you quickly learn the discipline of eating with your right.
Shit on the streets. Food stalls, beggars, bodies, and a filthy river rubbing along one another in the constant steaming heat.
When you look at the clean, sometimes well-maintained world we live in, the trains that are usually less than 30 minutes late, the way we don’t need to know where our food comes from or where our waste goes to, it’s easy to get a sense of superiority. OBviously we must be much smarter people, the argument goes, because we have sorted out sanitation, electricity, transport, road maintenance… while THOSE people must be either stupid or lazy, since they haven’t managed to sort themselves out in all that time since independence.
Well, today we had 50-75mm of rain and the inhabitants of the University of York were forbidden from flushing, since the storm drains were overflowing into the sewers and the sewers were overloaded. Many people are stranded without their homes. A man drowned in sewage-filled water.
We really are only a few days’ rain away from finding out where our waste goes, and being all too keen to know where our food is going to come from.
In India’s Monsoon, parts of the west coast get over 30mm per day
This is the moment when you pass through a door and your colleague is just crossing the car-park. If you enter the door now, the door will spring shut mere seconds before the colleague reaches it, and he or she will have to fumble for his or her passkey or re-type the entry code. If you hold the door, the colleague will feel obliged to make one of those jiggling runs that uses minimal extra effort for a minimal increase in speed and a large increase in lookingstupidness. Thus you are faced with Sophie’s Choice*:
1) Hold the door, inconvenience yourself and embarrass the colleague. Try not to be amused by the colleague’s feeble attempt to run, especially if in high heels. Alternatively, try not to be crushed like a little worm if, horror of horrors, high-heeled colleague simply doesn’t run, but takes her time sauntering toward the door making you feel like a mere grubby peon in her presence and making it look like you only held the door in the furtive hope of some sordid contact with her heavenly radiance.
2) Do not hold the door, and live with the nagging doubt that your colleague thinks you are an extremely self-centered and non-team-orientatated person. Continue to live with having to face same colleague when he or she enters the office merely seconds after you sit at your desk. A delay whose shortness simply underlines the triviality of the gains for which you are prepared to sacrifice basic civility, even human decency.
Alternatives are:
3) To wait until colleague is almost at the door, then enter yourself, flinging the door wide so that the colleague may catch it before the latch closes. This method is susceptible to problems with timing, with eye-hand coordination, and with the possibility that you will stumble and wind up trapped in the closing door, your colleague having the upper hand as he or she chooses whether or not to come to your aid.
4) The Safe Option: wait in your car until you are sure everyone is inside. In case of emerging early by accident, feign having left your phone in the car and return forthwith. Hope your phone doesn’t ring on the way back to the car.
* with fewer Nazis.
So anyway I found myself singing more bits of That Song. They went:
Such a lone-ly girl
I think it’s time for you to look and see
That the way you think
No longer seems to work on them and me‘Cos your ways are quite disgusting,
And they amount to nothing!
What am I sup-posed to think of you———?
Then it’s into the Jim’ll Fix It middle 8.
Top choon.
The Purple Room was reminiscent of two things: (1) Carol Smillie and the early days of Changing Rooms when they would spend £500 on a room and end up with a Baroque fantasia in paint effects, stencils, voile and metal; and (2) Jonah and the whale. The walls were a bold lilac, two having a suede or sandy effect and three having a metallic purple sheen reminiscent of uncooked beef left out in the sun. One wall had both effects.
We collated our colour cards and tried to visualize the room in various colour schemes. But it was impossible not to see the inside-of-a-whale-ness permeating the room. In the end I said let’s just paint it a neutral tone, then look at getting adventurous. I found a mostly-empty tin of Magnolia in the loft but decided that was like admitting defeat at the outset (also hedging against the possibility that once non-purple, we would not actually be bothered to paint it a better colour). Rummaging a little more in my now-spectacularly ordered (if somewhat packed) loft, turned up a tin of “Wild Orchid”. We painted it on.
“It’s magnolia isn’t it?” said Rachael.
I nodded.
With two walls Wild Orchid and two purple, the room was neutral enough for us to start thinking about actual colour schemes. Sticking swatches to the walls and talking at length had us ending up with the Crown Colours Of The World range. We chose a couple of colours from the Nepal range, and bought a tin of Nepal Soft in case Nepal Medium was too bold and brought the room down. I liberally applied it with a roller to the Wild Orchid wall.
“It’s magnolia isn’t it?” said Rachael.
I nodded.
We reasoned that probably all our friends had their places painted exactly the same actual colour, only one was “Norse Ocean Mist 57″, one “Panna Cotta Pale”, one “Summer Nirvana”, one “Warm Parchment”, one “Just Magnolia” (from the “Post-ironic Retro” range)…
[email to Wrapid where I et at lunchtime today. ]
Hi,
I just ate in your York store, loved the concept and the branding but the food was not up to scratch. I nearly wrote on the “now you’ve eaten tell us if we can be beaten” wall but it was so full of positive messages (apparently mostly from teenage girls) that I didn’t want to be the curmudgeonly one! Love the idea of that wall though!
My girlfriend and I had chicken fajita wraps. Our expectations had been raised by “The best Mexican food north of Cancun” (a bold claim unlikely to get support from anyone from L.A. or New York) and the use of the words “world gourmet” on the branding. The experience fell somewhat short of the expectation.
The filling had settled at one end of the wrap, leaving us the joyless task of munching through half the wrap getting only baked tortilla, an experience reminiscent of cracker-eating contests.
When we started to reach the filling, the experience began with limpid steamed chicken and mysterious ooze, and eventually led on to some acceptably spicy filling containing some flavour. This was NOT gourmet food and was a far cry from the best Mexican food north of the River Ouse[1], let alone of Cancun[2].
I hope that these problems are local to York and are only temporary due to the recently-opened store. I will be back as my interest was piqued by the pizza wraps on offer. I hope it’s a better experience!
Regards,
Steve Carter
[1] For better Mexican food in York, See:
[2] Go to New York or L.A. Visit Chipotle. Then re-assess your claims regarding “gourmet” and “best”.
Book of the week is Second Lives, all about virtual worlds. My ears pricked up as I rate myself as “high risk” with regard to addiction to fantasy realms.
I was sceptical, as a veteran of the ’90s fetish for Virtual Reality and the dot-com bubble of the Turn of the Linoleum I have learned that technology is usually 10% innovation and 90% exaggeration. However, the opening paragraphs sounded like a good read, talking about the impact on real lives of these virtual universes, and how some virtual environments are richer than China and more populous than Australia.
But the bubble of credibility burst when the reader told us: “Virtual worlds are even being used to plan domination of the real world. The US military is building a model of the real world, half scale, in virtual reality to practice military exercises.”
Half scale relative to what, may I ask? There is no meaningful interpretation of this! Unless they mean the computer it’s running on is the size of a hemisphere.
When I was in TESCO and said to Rachael “Hell is here” she thought I had gone all Buffy The Vampire Slayer. She asked whether I’d found a hellmouth right below the store.
The mouth of hell is not like a cave mouth. It’s like the mouth of a ravenous beast.
If you want to feel Hell’s molars closing around your ears, just go to TESCO the day before a bank holiday, or B&Q on the first day of sunshine, or most towns on a Saturday night.
Anywhere you can get a tuna panini, don’t be surprised if you can smell Satan’s breath. When you order a tomato and mozarella panini, don’t be surprised if they microwave it and serve you with something that looks like a panini but is in fact made of steamed bread containing a superheated tomato sliver. Look around you. The blank faces barely conceal the empty misery of the poor bovine creatures grazing here. This is a warning. You do not heed it. The scalding pain and the absence of nourishing flavour is a glimpse into the searing, numbing misery of the fiery pit.
Tiny gym swimming pools less than 25m long at peak times. I did the rough sums once and each person in our local gym pool had 5 square metres. It would only have taken a few more people to make a passable impression of Dante’s third ditch.
Traffic when everybody wants to be before the people they are after. I think car rear view mirrors should be as large as windscreens, with a small rectangular hole cut out through which to look forwards. That way people would see all the people they were already in front of and feel much better about themselves.
Hell can smell a bank holiday and you can hear the sound of its great lungs inhaling the fumes on any route to the coast. This is one of Hell’s best opportunities to recruit.
I always said that I’d quit salsa if I got to the stage of having a salsa magazine in the house because then it was becoming a ‘hobby’ rather than a pastime. Fast forward and I have £100 worth of salsa books, £300 worth of salsa percussion and am considering installing a wooden floor and full height mirror to serve as a mini dance studio. But it’s OK, I don’t have any salsa magazines. Apart from the PDF that I downloaded in order to research one of the more esoteric parts of the wikipedia page on salsa.