Liar.TV

Simon Edwards says (9:39 a.m.):

Luke Skywalker runs into Darth Vader.  Both draw their lightsabres, and begin to circle one another, preparing to fight.

Simon Edwards says (9:39 a.m.):

“Luke, I know what you’re getting for Christmas…”  Vader taunts.

Carl Harris says (9:40 a.m.):

heard it

Simon Edwards says (9:40 a.m.):

And then Luke cuts his head off

Simon Edwards says (9:40 a.m.):

And chickens fly out

Simon Edwards says (9:40 a.m.):

And they dance the macarena in mid air

Simon Edwards says (9:41 a.m.):

“Heeyyyyy… macarena!”

I have my own brilliant tried and test chilli tomato sauce recipe.  It’s delicious.  Dad gets a bottle every Christmas, he treats it like gold and makes it last a whole year, which makes me feel guilty because it’s pretty easy to churn out:

Simon’s Chilli Tomato Sauce

Seems to make two sauce bottles worth, so save up two glass sauce bottles, or buy some I suppose.  Should be glass though, so you don’t have to worry about melting plastic.

You should get a funnel as well so you don’t spill shit everywhere.

Ingredients:

• 1.75 kg tomatoes, chopped
• 0.5 kg green apples, peeled, cored, and chopped
• 1 red capsicum, chopped
• 3 onions, chopped
• 3 cloves garlic, sliced / minced / whatever who cares
• 20 chillis chopped (and then add an extra 0 – 3 jars of minced chilli on top, depending on how hot you want it.  Or chop more chillis.  I just find this easier than dealing with loads of chopped chillis.  I recommend just sticking with the 20 chillis for your first go, it may be hot enough for you.)
• 1 1/2 cups brown sugar
• 1 tbsp salt
• 1 tbsp cumin
• 1 tsp ground cloves
• 1/2 tsp allspice
• 1/2 tsp curry powder
• Ground black pepper
• 2 cups malt vinegar

Instructions

1. So, you whack it all in a nice big pot, a stock pot if you’ve got one should be plenty big enough.  Give it a bit of a stir once you’ve got the malt vinegar in there, and then put the pot on the stove.
2. Bring it to the boil, then drop the heat to a nice simmer, and then let it simmer for two(ish) hours.  Stir it obsessively, whenever you can be arsed, so it doesn’t start burning and sticking on the bottom.
3. Now, while you wait for the sauce to boil down, you need to get those bottles sterilised somehow.  There are all sorts of ways, none of which I have been bothered to learn.  What works for me is to take the lids off the bottles, and whack them in the oven at 120 degrees celcius for an hour.  When they’re nice and cooked I assume all the germs are dead, so I take them out and sit them upright on a wooden chopping board.  Get your funnel and lids out alongside the bottles and ready to rock.  I put my funnel and lids in boiling water first, it depends on how much you want to worry about germs.  Haven’t had anything go bad on me yet so who knows how important it is…
4. Now go back to the sauce and take a look at it.  I hope you’ve been stirring it obsessively.  Give it another stir just in case.  Feels good doesn’t it?  That’s because you’re an awesome cook.  Don’t feel like you need to boil the sauce for the exact full two hours, I kind of made that duration up and if it looks like it’s getting too thick then maybe it’s time to stop.  Deciding when to stop is the artistic part of it.  I get a different consistency each time, because I’m a bit useless and always forget to note what time I started the boil.
5. Once the sauce reaches a good consistency, you need to turn the heat off, let it cool a little bit, and then either push it through a sieve or preferably give it a whizz in a food processer.  If you don’t have a food processor then the sieve option isn’t actually that hard, because everything is so soft now.  Just tip it in batches into a sieve over another big bowl, then stir and rub it through the sieve with a spoon.  You should now have a tasty puree.
6. Now, tip the puree back into your great big pot, and bring it to the boil on the stove for another two minutes or so.  Bubble bubble.
7. Right, battle stations.  Cram the funnel into one of the bottles, and start tipping sauce into it.  The bottle won’t explode… hopefully… Once it’s nearly overflowing, stop pouring, move the funnel to the next bottle, cap the bottle you just filled, and then go again. You might need somebody to hold the bottle and funnel for you, I go it solo, just tipping towards the centre of the funnel and hoping for the best.
8. If you have too much sauce for your bottles, whack any leftover in a jug or bowl and put it in the fridge.  You’ll probably eat it soon anyway.
9. Make sure your bottles are tightly capped.  Don’t worry if there is sauce on the outside of the bottle, leave it for now because you won’t be able to wash it off until the bottles cool down a bit.  Leave the bottles to cool until you can pick them up, then wipe them off with a wet cloth and stick them in your cupboard.

You’re done, you can age them for a while or crank one open straight away and get into it.  Make sure you keep open bottles in the fridge, I don’t want anybody complaining that my recipe gave them botulism.

Actual footage from the scene earlier today.

The egg couldn’t have got across the road of its own volition, that’s all I’m saying. I believe the first egg can be traced back to one laid by those chickens who made the first historical migration from Asia across large expanses of asphalt to get to the other side in the early 9th century BCE.

The first pictures of chickens in Europe are found on Corinthian pottery of the 7th century BCE, and if you look carefully on most of them, you can see the chicken’s head snapping back, and to the left. This clearly suggests there was a second chicken crowing from the grassy knoll. Humpty’s whereabouts at the time were unknown and his later suicide in front of all the King’s horses and all the King’s men is still considered suspicious.

However if I’m being reasonable I would have to say that the first chicken probably hatched from an egg laid by either a Red or Grey Junglefow as a result of interbreeding between the two in India, possibly during or after an E-fuelled free love rave in Goa. While interspecies breedings between the Red and Grey Junglefowl are usually sterile, in this case their funky proto-chicken spunk beat the odds and produced the very first viable chicken egg.

So as far as I’m concerned the egg came first, followed by the chicken that hatched from it, then the omelette, and then eleven secret herbs and spices. Delicious. I rest my case.

On the flight back from Auckland last night, I overheard a conversation from the seat behind me.  A slightly older guy, in his early 40′s perhaps, had just been up to Auckland for a 21st, and said that everybody had stayed very sober.

I nearly wept when he proudly proclaimed that half the alcohol didn’t get drunk and had to be taken back the next day!  He said it was a great statement for young people.

I felt like turning round and smacking him.

I dreamt about a 17 year old school girl last night.

She has just finished school, it was her end of year school ball where I met her.  I had been out for few drinks, was wandering home past the hall where the ball was where I ran into her.  She had been ditched by her ball date because he was crook from drinking too much, and I helped her out by giving her my coat to keep her warm.  We got to talking and she turned out to be a really smart, interesting, and switched on girl.  I played my best seduction cards and she seemed quite taken with me, but things ended with her being somewhat reluctantly dragged off to an after ball party by some friends, without me getting her number.  I had no idea where the party was so couldn’t even go find her. I slumped down on the hall steps, lit a cigarette, and pondered my loss.  She wouldn’t be the first really cool girl I had met that had slipped through my fingers somehow.

I woke up.  Damn it!  What a downer note to end a dream on!  I didn’t even get a chance to salvage it before I woke up! I got up, took a leak, and went back to bed.

Almost immediately I fell into a second dream about the same girl.  The second dream consisted of her coming back to ball venue to come see me again, having snuck away from the party.  I was overjoyed to see her, and we kissed.  We found a cot in one of the back rooms of the hall, and despite feeling a little bad about seducing and ‘taking advantage’ of a 17 year old, we had our wicked way together.  She was really great.  Hell, I was really great.  We had chemistry.  Dream chemistry.

I woke up again.  Damn it, I thought, what a great dream, she seemed like a really nice girl, such a shame to leave things there.

I fell back asleep again, and bizarrely enough went straight back into a third dream about the same girl.  In the dream we had been asleep, it was now morning.  She didn’t have school that day, and I called into work to tell them I was working from home.  Many hours of intense passion and conversation later, as dusk began to settle in, we discovered that we had fallen head over heels for each other.  We had each found somebody we connected with physically, emotionally, and intellectually.  It was beautiful.  But what now?  She had finished school, but I was still a disgusting older perve, and her parents were clearly going to hate me for seducing their highly intelligent and talented teenage girl.

I woke up once again, this time for good.  I opened my eyes, and I stared at the ceiling for ages, deep in thought.  I had lived an alternate life in my dream, and fallen passionately in love with a girl who didn’t exist.

My fiancee Jo, lying in bed next to me, was a little mystified.  She could tell I was vaguely spoked,  and wanted to know what I was thinking about.  But how do you explain to your fiancee you’re also in love with a literal dream woman who doesn’t exist?  You don’t.  In the dream, Jo didn’t exist; I was somebody else.

So I told her nothing.

If you’ve ever looked at the lyrics to Black Hole Sun, they are quite nonsensical.

It’s usual in a situation like this for an over-pretentious song writer to make claims about its meaning and hidden depths.  But bucking this trend, Chris Cornell said at the time, “It’s just sort of a surreal dreamscape, a weird, play-with-the-title kind of song…lyrically it’s probably the closest to me just playing with words for words’ sake, of anything I’ve written… I have no idea how you’d begin to take that one literally.”

And in another interview with Chris: “It’s funny because hits are usually sort of congruent, sort of an identifiable lyric idea, and that song pretty much had none… I sure didn’t have an understanding of it after I wrote it… There was no real idea to get across.”

Having read that, he’s certainly gone up in my estimation.  It takes a lot of honesty to admit your #1 hit track is a load of old cobblers.  It’s just like Marbo, it’s the vibe.

None of which changes the fact that Black Hole Sun is a track best taken in small doses.  Hell, I loved it when I was 14, but I think Considine hit it bang on the head with his narrative above. 

Black Hole Sun is 15 years old now.  Simon is 29, and avoiding work on a Friday in ways that can only be described as quite talented.  Give that man a raise.

Thing’s I’ve learnt this week:

A standard variety, non-glowing pickle

• Men can lactate. Yes, that’s right.  They can.  Ben Stiller really could have milked Robert De Niro in Meet the Parents (“I have nipples, Greg, could you milk me?”).  Quite a mental image right there.  I hope it’s not rude of me to say so but I really can’t imagine De Niro producing good milk.
• The egg came before the chicken. The first chicken probably hatched from an egg laid by either a Red or Grey Junglefow as a result of interbreeding between the two in India.  So that’s that argument settled once and for all.
• The plural of vagina is vaginae. Go ahead, say it.  Vaginae.  Makes you feel dirty doesn’t it?  But we all have them ladies.  Nothing to be ashamed of.
• Jesus is my friend. And he’ll zap you any way he can.  Zap!  This sort of thing makes me feel bad to be an atheist.
• With two forks and a charge, a pickle will emit light. Unfortunately this only really works in America, where the standard mains voltage is 120 volts.  Try this on a 240 volt mains supply (the standard for the rest of the world) and if you’re lucky you’ll blow a fuse.  If you’re unlucky you’ll be peeling that pickle and most of your face off the walls.

Simon says: I want coffeeee…

Karl says: Todd has already left the building for coffee!

Simon says: I know.

Karl says: I saw him evac 5 mins ago in the foyer!!!

Simon says: You and I are meeting him there

Simon says: Let’s go go go go go go go go go go go…

Karl says: What?

Simon says: NOW.

Karl says: Negative, I’m taking fire

Karl says: I’m pinned down

Karl says: You’ll have to leave me

Simon says: No!

Karl says: I’m staying here till my ammo runs out

Karl says: Then it’s ‘fix bayonets’

Karl says: I’ll never forget how much I love the coffee

Karl says: Goodbye friend

At the end of 2005, in protest over a disappointing year in Wellington (I was dumped, got a new job which I hated, and basically repeatedly struck out on life for 12 months), I deliberately set out to have what will hopefully remain my saddest New Year’s Eve ever:

9:40 am: Stagger out of bed at my parents’ house. I know I have to pick Alana up from the airport at 10:10.  I wander into the lounge and wonder out loud why Mum isn’t at work. “It’s Saturday,” she explains.  How confusing.  I realise I have lost all track of time due to chronic alcohol abuse.

10:20 am: Pick my friend Alana up from the airport. I am ten minutes late in order to impress her with how much of a bastard I am.  I tell her it’s because the traffic was bad.  She believes me.  Traffic in Gisborne?!  Sucker!  Back home for a cup of tea and two of slices of toast.

11:30 am: I leave for Tolaga Bay in the car with Alana in the passenger seat. I decide to torture Alana with a full and lurid account of my love life since the dawn of time.  This is a deliberately sadistic social experiment on my part, but she handles it with surprising aplomb.  How disappointing.

12:30 pm I drop Alana in Tolaga Bay with the beach party crowd.  There are impassioned pleas from my friends for me to stay and party, but I am resolute in my conviction that antisocial is the new cool.  My friend Nigel squirts water from his drink bottle through the car window as I leave.  This is both incredibly funny and original.

2:30 pm: I arrive back in Gisborne.  I read, watch MTV for an hour, then carry out internet research on the Gorillaz.  I am looking to be in good shape for the big unevent.  Mentally, I am preparing myself for the least exciting New Years ever.  I am an apathetic athlete in training for the Boredom Olympics.  The lack of excitement in the air is palpable.

7:30 pm: After pointedly ignoring my phone for several hours I notice I have several squillion missed calls from my cousin Callum.  I ring him back.  After a great deal of argument where I attempt and fail to defend the validity of my ‘protest’ against 2005 as whole, I apparently give in and agree to come round and spend some time with friends.

9:30 pm: Two hours have passed.  Callum calls to ask where I am.  I promise I will be there shortly.  Honest.  I hang up and settle back into the sofa with my book.

10:30 pm: Callum rings again to ask where I am.  Resistance is futile.  I finally give in and drive round.

11:40 pm: I am accidentally having rather a good time at Callum’s, despite remaining completely teetotal.  Glancing at my watch however I notice with panic that I am in serious danger of spending New Year’s Eve having a good time with friends – exactly what my protest was supposed to avoid.  I make a rude and hasty departure.

11:57 pm: I arrive home.  It’s nearly midnight!  I am terrified I’ll somehow be co-opted into a countdown or accidentally catch a glimpse of some fireworks.  Quick, diversionary tactics!  A documentary on some crazy backwater Australian town is on the Sky Documentary Channel, so I crank it up on the headphones and attempt to shut out all other stimuli.  This doesn’t turn out to be as hard as I had thought because the documentary is actually rather strangely compelling.  Backwater Australians are all retards, apparently.

12:30 am: For the first time I notice it is after midnight.  Yes!  New Year’s Eve has been successfully avoided.  I decide to watch Red Dwarf episodes on DVD to celebrate my lack of celebration.  While I am watching several “Happy New Year” text messages arrive.  I ignore them.

1:30 am: I head to bed, read for a while, and pass out some time around 2 am.

Yes!  Mission accomplished!  Take that 2005, I’ve kicked you right in the balls.  You won’t be messing with me again.

What?  Well, I did warn you it was going to be boring.

You ever seen a spider monkey on fire? I have. We were bush scrubbing in Brazil, had to burn that shit back and lay concrete to pave the way for the New World. It was early morning when we set torch to tinder before we realised that the trees above were half swarming with spider monkeys.

The air was flooded with screaming as the flames began to reach them. The first to die plummeted straight down from the trees, smelly wretched burning meteors spiralling through the air and burrowing their way into the jungle soil. As the flames rose higher they began to hurl themselves from the upper branches in flaming cartwheels, hot flesh and hair and fat flying in every direction as they screamed and died.

It was the single most beautiful thing I have ever seen.