the return of spam poetry

Years ago, I read some work by a woman who was creating poetry from the subject headers of the spam in her email. This morning, I recieved this near-Haiku:

for apartment building
for ostensibly flatulent cowards
piroshki

white trash food!

On account of some sort of annoying dermatitis, I've been endeavouring to keep my diet cow's milk-free, not an easy thing to do for someone who LOVES cheese and yoghurt. Poking about on the internet, I found a recipe for "Bread Machine Peanut Butter Jelly Bread", something which sounded so horribly trashy that I had to try it. It turned out to be absolutely delicious! Here is the recipe:

1 cup water
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1/2 cup peanut butter
1/2 cup jam (jelly) - I used the apple and bramble jam I made during the summer
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar
1 cup wholewheat flour
2 cups bread flour
1.5 teaspoons active yeast

Put everything in the bread machine and set it to "Sweet", 1.5kg, "Light".

The bread ends up quite dense and nutty, sweet but not overly so.

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Finished re-reading Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four. As with Brave New World, I'm surprised at how much of it I had forgotten. I'm also amazed at how much Orwell predicted. Everyone goes on about CCTV cameras being like "Big Brother" but to do so is to miss the point: things are far worse...

2 Minute Hate - Daily Mail, hysterical anti immigrant articles in The Sun, Jeremy Kyle, etc;
The instigation of a lottery to placate the "proles";
Thoughtcrime - the hysterical condemning of ideas. Try denying "man-made global warming" or "multiculturalism";
Doublethink and Minitruth - political spin;
Phony wars and invented enemies - "the war on terror", Iraq, Falklands, etc;
Newspeak - "The War on Terror", "Axis of Evil", "Five A Day";
The training of the population to marginalise and reject the unorthodox and outsider;
Oceania - The alliance between the UK and the USA, complicit in state-approved torture (Guantanamo Bay and "extraordinary renditions");
Prolefeed - Junk television aimed cultural anaesthesis such as... "BIG BROTHER"

I wasn't frightened by this book when I read it at school but it is a terrifying book, moreso when it can be read as a catalogue of what has already been happening.

great literature

I recently downloaded Aldous Huxley's first novel, Crome Yellow for my ebook, more out of curiosity than anything else and with a vague memory of having read (and enjoyed) Brave New World at school. Crome Yellow is an interesting enough first novel but the most interesting thing about it are the suggestions and hints of what would come in Huxley's later and more famous book, which I then decided to re-read after what must be 30 years, leading me to wonder: 1) in what way I had understood the book when I read it at school and; 2) why we had been guided through the text so poorly.

We read Brave New World with Mr Ross - the tiny man on whom Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen must surely have based his sartorial style - a marvellous and enthusiastic English teacher whom I really liked. It is surprising, therefore, that we seem to have skipped over some of the essential elements of the text - such as morality - focussing instead on the social aspects of engineering a society (genetically) to be "perfect". What Huxley does so elegantly in his book is create a complete picture of how this ghastly society operates and then sets about pointing up the flaws with an outsider character. That elegance was lost on me until this re-reading.

Eyes wide open, I now approach another book from school which I haven't read since: Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four.

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The cold spell continues. My beard froze:

2010 - New Year

And NOT a "new decade" as the media pundits keep bleating on incorrectly, driving me to pedantic distraction.

Just got back from Brighton, where I spent the festive season doing nothing much but moaning about everyone banging on about the "new decade"!

Had a lovely time relaxing with Dingo, watching old films, eating things, going for walks and taking photographs such as this:



with my new 20mm f1.7 lens.

Snow everywhere.