Archive for September, 2007

Leaving on a jet plane

Published by
Dan
at September 30, 2007 in General. 9 Comments

In April we went to visit our friends Greg and Deb in Wisconsin. Although we had been friends for around a year, and spoke with them nearly every week, this was the first time we met face to face. I first came in contact with them by reading Greg’s blog, then I read Deb’s blog, then I started my own blog and they kindly read it. We exchanged a few emails, then started video chatting, and pretty soon they became an important part of mine and Kerry’s lives.

On the plane back from America Kerry and I talked about how much fun we had, how comfortable we felt in their presence, and how much we would miss them.

Fast forward to this evening and this time it’s us waving them off at the airport. Greg and Deb have taken a few days out of their tour of Ireland to spend the weekend with us in England. On the plane back however they are unlikely to be discussing our finer merits as human beings. Instead they’ll be talking about being accused of being spies by a market trader, the scandalous state of British supermarket egg aisles, and our daughter’s tendency to vomit at inopportune moments (we think she’s possibly allergic to Americans).

We had a great time. It all went too quickly. We miss our friends.

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Ten of the many, many, reasons I love my wife

Published by
Dan
at September 26, 2007 in General. 12 Comments

Sure she’s kind, intelligent, and sexy. But what about the small stuff?

  • She can turn the cars round on our pokey drive without scratching them.
  • She knows the name and resume of every actor and actress in the world, ever.
  • She has never beaten me at chess.
  • She still keeps our old love letters in a box under the bed.
  • She stays up to watch “one episode more”.
  • She likes the clouds and the stars.
  • She doesn’t object other people’s carnivore status.
  • She works incredibly hard, and I am proud of what she’s accomplished.
  • She is able to strike up a pleasant social conversation with anyone on earth.
  • She is the sun around which Amy, Evan and I revolve.

Happy Birthday Kerry. We love you.

(can I get some chickens now?)

Nattliv - mensvärk

Published by
Dan
at September 24, 2007 in Mini blog. 1 Comment

Nattliv - mensvärk. Swedish for “Well I didn’t see that coming”.

Too close to home.

Published by
Dan
at September 24, 2007 in General. 10 Comments

A four year old boy was stabbed to death by his father in our small village yesterday.  His fourteen year old sister is currently in a serious condition in hospital after receiving knife wounds to her stomach and face in the same attack.  The father, it seems, did it in order to punish their mother for leaving him and starting a new relationship.
 
The fact that all this happened just ten minutes walk from our front door both amplifies and strangely numbs the horror. The British security services have said they believe that civilization is just four meals away from barbarism. Sometimes it can feel like we’ve missed those meals already.

BBC News Report

In which Avitable lowers me to his level.

Published by
Dan
at September 24, 2007 in Memes. 7 Comments

Avitable is blogging aristocracy. Granted he’s not particularly classy aristocracy, in fact he’s a bit of a Marquess of Bath (eccentric lord who has multiple wives and painted pictures from the Kama Sutra all over the walls of his mansion). Still, depraved wacko or not, he’s got a very popular and rather amusing blog. Very graciously he’s bestowed on me five questions after I responded to his interview me meme:

One of my favorite writers is a chap by the name of Warren Ellis, who also lives in the UK.  Do you know him?

Unfortunately not, although I did enjoy his run on the Hellblazer comic. However we do live next door to Grant Morrison, and Alan Moore delivers our milk.

Is it true that over there, the streets are paved with the bones of orphans left to die? Because that’s what I’ve heard happened when Thatcher was PM.

Thatcher was prime minister throughout my childhood. I remember being completely baffled about how she stayed in power, because as far as I could tell everybody hated her. She must have got votes from somewhere, but I know this for sure - on the day that she dies there’s going to be a long line of people waiting to dance on her grave.

Privatized substandard public transportation and utility companies, three year waiting lists for social housing, the death of the British coal industry; all part of Thatcher’s legacy. I hope she’s very proud.

Since guns are illegal in the UK, what do men carry around to compensate when they have small tallywhackers?

Personally I compensate for my own small tallywhacker through technology: The throbbing tunes emanating from my iPod, the impressive 32 inches of my flat screen TV, and of course the sheer girth of my camera lens.

Have you ever used the word tallywhacker in a sentence before today?

Not that I’m aware of, although I did say bajamawammers last Thursday.

If you were coming to the US to take the kids to Disney, and I offered my guest rooms for you to stay, what would be the single thing of which you would be the most afraid when coming to my house?

As I mentioned previously, Avitable is the Marquess of Bath of the blogging world. As such I anticipate his home is decorated in a similar manner. Except instead of just the scenes from the Kama Sutra, Avitable’s walls are no doubt festooned with hookers, dwarfs, kumquats , goats, firetrucks, food blenders, and all manner of other sexually degenerate images.

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I know I’ve done this before, but if anyone fancies having me ask them some questions then just let me know in the comments section and I’ll fire some off at you.

The ice cream man cometh

Published by
Dan
at September 22, 2007 in Interesting stuff. 10 Comments

iceweek.jpgThe world of ice cream isn’t all sprinkles and sauce, it has a dark side too. In 1984 the Scottish city of Glasgow saw horrendous violence during its infamous ice cream wars. The fighting was not just about ice cream sales, the ice cream vans were used as fronts to sell stolen goods and drugs. Rival gangs fought over turf and control of the market. Van drivers who resisted becoming involved were intimidated and punished.

Eighteen year old driver Andrew “Fat Boy” Doyle refused to sell drugs on his round, and as a result the flat in which he lived was set alight in the early hours of the morning. Andrew, along with his father, sister, two brothers, and 18 month old nephew were all killed in the blaze.

In 2002 in Melbourne Australia 46 year old Mr Whippy salesman Francesco Mangione was feuding with his cousin and rival ice cream vendor Denis Giunta over trade routes. Mangione snuck into Giunta’s house and stabbed him 55 times with a home made sword as Giunta stepped out of the shower. Giunta’s wife, who was asleep was awoken by her husband’s screaming, only escaped the same fate by jumping out of the window.

All over the world there are stories of ice cream men slashing tires, hitting each other with baseball bats, or just ending up with their decapitated heads on their bicycle seats. It’s a dangerous world out there. So remember, next time you send your kid out to get you a cone, make sure you send them in a flack jacket.

Vanilla ice

Published by
Dan
at September 22, 2007 in General. 13 Comments

This post is dedicated to Mr Whit Honea, a man who believes that vanilla ice cream can not be exciting. BEHOLD!:

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iceweek.jpgI was reminded of this magnificent creation by a friend on Monday whilst discussing the ice cream of our youth. Forget sprinkles and cadbury’s flakes, the canonball took ice cream adornment to a whole new level. The lolly (or “ice pop” for the colonials) represented the barrel of the gun, the bubblegum the canonball. Some say the ice cream signified the pointless futility of war and the cone the media’s role in demonizing the enemy, but perhaps that is taking things a little too far.

The canonball was the hight of the ice cream man’s art, the pinnacle of all his achievements. For the consumer too it was a challenge. To buy a canonball was to commit to a race against time. Could you eat the lolly before the ice cream melted? Could you eat the ice cream before the cone went soggy and the bubblegum fell out? The tension was heart stopping.

Alas, like that other triumph of 70’s engineering, the Concorde, the cannonball is no longer to be found in service. We are all the poorer for it’s passing.

A tale of two shops

Published by
Dan
at September 20, 2007 in General. 8 Comments

iceweek.jpgPopular culture is littered with stories of two people overcoming the class divide in order to carve out a future together. Whether it’s uptown girls living in white bread worlds, Richard Gere romancing his pretty woman or rich kid Andrew McCarthy falling for pretty in pink Molly Ringwald, we are consistently told that love can bridge all boundaries.

Which is a pile of crap of course. We all know that Duckie should have got the girl, Julia Roberts would have given Gere syphilis, and putty faced Billy Joel would never have attracted his model wife Christie Brinkley without his millions.

It’s not just in the world of romance where the distinction between the wrong and the right side of the tracks can cause division. Huddersfield has two different ice cream shops of note: Dixon’s and Longley Farm. Both manufacture their own product, both claim to use only natural ingredients, and both have had a strong presence in the area for over twenty years. But that’s where the similarities end.

Longley Farm is situated in Holmfirth, an area so white and middle class that even the drunks stick out their little finger when taking a swig from their bottles. Dixon’s on the other hand is in Lockwood, a socially deprived inner city area with a high population of people of Pakistani decent. Both stores are always teeming with customers; Longley Farm full of ladies who lunch and yummy mummies, and Dixon’s with Asian elders on the way back from mosque and snotty nosed street urchins.

Longley Farm are perhaps best known for making yogurts and cottage cheese, their ice cream is a sideline sold only at their factory shop. Dixon’s on the other hand only make ice cream. Longley Farm has a wide and varied range of different flavors, from the mundane (mint choc chip), through the exotic (mango), to the just plain weird (stem ginger). Dixon’s make vanilla ice cream, and that’s it. They pore scorn on the high falutin pistachio, raspberry ripple, and rum and raisin. Even chocolate and strawberry is considered a little uppity. No, vanilla is what they’ve got and so it’s what you’ll get, with a Cadbury’s flake stuck in it if you’re lucky.

And because they both make such great ice cream I’d be hard pressed to choose a favorite. The range of choice at Longley is countered by the extremely reasonable prices at Dixon’s. In the end though I’d probably have to come down on the side of the latter purely because it was their fleet of ice cream vans that served the streets of my youth. The taste of Dixon’s ice cream awakens old echos of jangly ice cream van chimes, hurrying down the cobbled roads of Cliff Road, a shiny coin clutched in one sweaty fist and my parent’s hand in the other.

Don’t stop

Published by
Dan
at September 20, 2007 in Mini blog. 0 Comments

Don’t stop. Red vs green on the mean streets.

I hereby officially designate this to be International Ice Cream Week.

Published by
Dan
at September 19, 2007 in General. 11 Comments

Prompted by yesterday’s post regarding my cacky ice cream maker I came to realize that it was about time that Amy and I indulged in our own bit of ice cream creativity.

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Incidentally, as well as being International Ice Cream Week today is international talk like a pirate day. Arrrr, ice cream me hearties; or something to that effect.

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