Posts from August 2009
31
Aug 09
Food Science Day 4: Live Blog
8:25pm Om nom nom, they expanded and were covered in melted Mars bars and stuffed with ice cream and and… I think we are too drunk and too full to say any more tonight. More photos to come, not sure about scientific content of the day but food and drink was had by all. Hooray!
7.20pm Final science of the day, Cis is seeing how much choux pastry wll expand. Diameter buns from 1cm to 10cm have been piped onto the baking tray. Will they expand or will they POP!!!!
6.10 pmLawks – Meg is making a giant Kit Kat. Melted chocolate can be very messy! Oh and Cis and Moggy have turned up talking about doing something with Choux pastry. I keep saying Choux puns aren’t necessary but…
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Food Science Day, The Return…
We interrupt the normal FreakyTrigger service for the return of Food Science Day, a day – in honour of FT poster Liz Daplyn – when we do science upon food. Now our definition of science may be flakier than the average, we honour physics, chemistry and biology though we also privilege puns as the highest form of science. We also drink a fair bit while at it. Coming from my flat this time I cannot as yet give you a thorough list of all the science that is to be done. However as a taster I can promise you Mars Bhaji’s, Jalepeno Grigio and an assortment of eggs from various nations – the Scotch Egg’s time is up.
There will be live blogging, and tweeting (follow @pb14) on the thread above. Who knows, we may not even die…
(While you wait here is the reverse engineered Mars Bar from Mars Planets from a previous food science day).
30
Aug 09
JIM DIAMOND – “I Should Have Known Better”
This song marks a minor turning point in Popular: it’s the very last which I had absolutely no memory of ever hearing when I started the project. Plenty of later ones are forgettable – even more forgettable than poor Jim – but this is my final “here be dragons”.
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28
Aug 09
Like A Motorway
French film “Home” starts with a happy family playing hockey on a strip of tarmac. This slowly reveals itself to be a motorway (Autoroute), and their house is right next to it. So we have house, motorway, idyllic field. Happy family. THEN, the motorway is opened. Noise gets to be too much. Motorway is dangerous and seems to be polluting. Its all very strange. But that’s OK because we are never supposed to think of this as real, teh motorway is a METAPHOR.
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CHAKA KHAN – “I Feel For You”
Asked to describe the I Feel For You album, Wikipedia offers “Genre: Funk, Hip Hop, Electronic dance music, soul, Rhythm and blues, Pop”. By a remarkable coincidence that is the exact genre of this single, too – a time-shifting stylistic summit meeting that offers nothing less than a Grand Unified Theory of black American pop over the past two decades.
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27
Aug 09
What? In the Park???
As you are no doubt very much aware, here at Freaky Trigger we are:
A. very much in favour of the pub
B. quite partial to a festival every now and then
So, hey, what could POSSIBLY GO WRONG with Pub In The Park? I, I don’t really know where to start…
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Confusing Them With Mountains
Well, here it is – my essay on the “Decade in Pop” for Pitchfork. The last time I read it through, which was also about the 50th time, I thought it was pretty good, but I’ve lost all distance.
The angle I took was to write it for people who are already open to the idea of pop being good – not necessarily wedded, but not the kind of dudes who go mental at the idea of “Ignition (Remix)” placing higher on a list than a Decemberists record.
I’ve made a Spotify Playlist which tells the same story, though in more chronological order. As always with Spotify, a few annoying omissions, but most of it’s there.
Thanks to everyone who I consulted on this, often via the medium of cryptic Twitter questions. Special thanks to @girlboymusic aka Erika for helping crystalise the idea of ‘transparency’ I’d been groping towards, and to Redcommieapples on LiveJournal for giving the piece its REAL SECRET TITLE (as seen above).
26
Aug 09
You’re Having A Turkish
Part of me finds the cockney rhyming slang cash machine a perfectly intriguing and fun idea. I can’t say I would pay £1.50 commission to use one, especially as the photo below seems to give away most of the gags. But since when have PIN number or screen had a rhyming slang. And as suck the Huckleberry Finn and Charlie Sheen seem to fluff the whole point of rhyming slang is not to provide the word that rhymes.
Now if they were to add a GAMBLE button to a cash machine…
25
Aug 09
A Touch of Heat Makes It Cooler
Easy easy ice cream.
The Demand: Ginger Chilli Ice Cream
The solution: Add some chilli to some Ginger Ice Cream to make:
Pete’s Three Chilli And Ginger Ice Cream
Ideal on a hot sunny day because
a) Its ice cream, it cools you down
b) It has chilli’s in, so every now an then you get an intense mouth burning hit which goes away almost instantly due to the cool dairy ice cream.
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WHAM! – “Freedom”
Just as with “Careless Whisper”, “Freedom” finds George Michael working his way through a form: the upbeat, Tamla-style soul stomper. A fine thing to be doing, except this is almost twice as long as many Motown hits and it doesn’t use the extra space to any great effect. The cascading “I don’t want your / I don’t want your” vocals and guitar work at the end are sheer embellishment.
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