Culinary ballet

Hello again you lovely people.
Well, maybe not all of you. Maybe you're not all lovely. Maybe there's only 3 or 4 of you, maybe there's... yeah, I've seen my readership stats. There's about 3 or 4 of you.

Hi! It's been a while, so let's break into this gently.

I thought today that we'd discuss ballet. Now I'm not gifted with toes that twinkle, much as I'd like to believe, but I think we all have the spirit of ballet in us, and it's unleashed whenever we're in a small kitchen.
Picture the scene. You're cooking something, someone comes in to do one of the following:
Ask how long it is 'til dinner
Get a drink
Have a chat
"Help"
ACTUALLY help
Look like they're helping so there's less chance of them being on dish duty

Now picture that it's not a big kitchen. That you've sensibly got room for one person working the stove and one at the worktop if NOBODY MOVES. But you need a pan now and they need a knife.
Oh dear.
What follows is quite extraordinary. You will either collide and argue or slide around each other perfectly in synch, tracing a quite beautiful path in an attempt to reduce undesired physical contact. Or to increase it, whatever floats your boat. You'll twirl, sidestep, maybe a little piroutte but you'll barely notice it.
Cooking can be, at times, a quite complicated and beautiful thing, even before you've decided on what you're going to eat.

Everyone's a winner

Luck and religion, I reckon, go pretty much hand in hand. They're both completely nebulous concepts, you can neither see nor interact directly with luck or your chosen deity(ies), but they're terrifically powerful concepts that, for many of us, are a tremendous source of strength.
Let's look at this in depth:
Religion normally centres around the worship of one of more figures which are the personification of certain concepts. Like Christianity, God isn't any one thing, he's a combination of 3, each of which kind of represent all that's good about humanity. Luck tends to be given an idea of a physcial form, too, in the form of the Lady.
Religion rarely works when you appeal to it directly. Luck is much the same.
Religion is far more powerful is you receive something that appears to be as a direct result of your worship when you're really in need. If you pray for an ailing relative and they recover, it's miraculous, but if you pray that it won't rain on the day of your trip to the beach, it's just a nice coincidence. Likewise with luck, getting a free coke from the vending machine's pretty groovy, but having your number come up on your last stack of chips on the roulette wheel is amazing.
Luck and religion are only really efective if you believe. Faith is key. If you don't truly believe, it's easy to pass off good fortune or apparent divine intervention as coincidence.
Being overly reliant and vocal on the subject of luck or religion is an instant ticket into and out of some social circles.
A whole lot of people have made a whole lot of money out of capitalising on people's needs in this area.
Both have prayers. Gamblers will offer up bargains and pleas, as will the most devout worshipper in times of crisis.

Is luck, fortune, fate, whatever you call it a kind of religion in itself? One with no concept of an afterlife, one eternally devoted to the now, to the fragile balance of hope and limitless despair?
This one's really been interesting me, lately.

The Fear

I fear a lot of things. Awkward social interactions (if I think someone's going to be annoyed with me, if they've a history of being annoyed with me, if I think things are going to go badly quite quickly and so on), fire, the people I care about getting hurt, my bank balance... normal stuff. But fear is a primal reaction, isn't it? It's something we've had for years that's mean to trigger a fight or flight response and while it's possible to overcome your fear, so stare it down and make it something you don't fear any more, it's a little difficult depending on what degree of brown it may or may not inflict upon your trousers.
So why are we also afraid of really stupid things?
Triskeidekaphobia makes me wonder how neurotic we've become as a species that some people actively fear the number 13. I mean, that's in the same realm as burning people for witchcraft because they're old and have a cat, in a way. It's a superstitious throwback to an old time, surely it shouldn't dominate your life.
Phobophobia is confusing. That sounds like a perpetual motion mechanism to me. Being scared of phobias... it's like that speech about having nothing to fear but fear itself.
I wonder if there's a fear of facing your fears? A fear of not actually having any phobias? When society advances, will we have words for fear of new things? Cyborgs? Clones?

My own fears are, I feel, largely rational, but there are some very odd ones:
Butterflies - I've never been able to understand this. The way they flap in your faces freaks me the hell out. I've woken up as a child with a spider crawling on my FACE and I'm not scared of them. It was a little traumatic, too.
Pob - I can't explain this, either, but I'm probably more terrified of him than anything else. Google it, it's a puppet from an old channel 4 TV show that used to spit at the TV screen. It's by the people who made Rosie and Jim, the Teletubbies and in the night garden and every character in that night garden show has his eyes... ugh...
Rotten food - I think this relates back to a time when I didn't realise that my milk had expired, then tried to drink it 2 years ago. This one makes sense, my body should realise that this is bad food and that it shouldn't be eaten, but for it to actively make my skin crawl...

And yet we're sort of obsessed with fear. We have horror movies depicting horrible, horrible ways to die, we have theme park rides that have health warnings, we tell ghost stories and are fascinated with the odd, the strange and the surreal. I've done it myself, I've actively gone seeking things that scare me a little. Is it some desensitisation mechanism? Do we need that little rush every so often to feel more alive? Maybe we need that primal connection at times.
I hope someone, somewhere decides to start a university course on "weird shit that people do", because I'm sure this goes beyond the realm of psychology. I really am.

Someone's in the kitchen with Bio

I cook sometimes. I'm not very good at it, but I keep trying. I thought that this might be an interesting place to host a few of my recipies. I REALLY wouldn't recommend trying these unless you're very desperate.

Bachelor Chow

You're gonna need:
Instant noodles. Spaghetti or regular noodles won't work, you need that packet of flavour powder.
2 Tomatoes
Half an onion (diced)
1 can of tuna
Soy sauce to taste
Strong cheese

Put the cheese in the bottom of a bowl, add the noodles then cover the whole thing in the flavour packet. Add water and microwave. This'll take, like, 5 minutes, so this is a good time to start on the other ingredients. Cut the tomatoes up a bit, open the tuna, then dump everything on the noodles once they're cooked.
If you're quick, you can have this cooked in less than 8 minutes. It's pretty filling, too!

Origin:

During my first weekend of living in my second new flat, I had a little free time before work started. I also had a kitchen full of various foods, a need of lunch but no desire for any food in particular.

Pasta El Diablo

You're gonna need:
A LOT of pasta. Seriously.
Strong cheese
2 tomatoes
Half an onion (diced or in rings, it's all good)
Garlic to taste
Ham
Plain flour
Milk
Anything in the cupboards/fridge that you kinda want to get rid of but don't want to eat.
A sense of adventure. Or alcohol.

Boil the water for the pasta. It should give you time to do everything else. Cut up the tomatoes and onions, shred a nice amount of ham. When the water boils, dump in the pasta and add a fair amount of flour and a good amount of milk to another pan. Get that heating and drop in the cheese in small bits (it melts faster that way). This is your base, a pretty bog standard cheese sauce. From now on, summon up all your courage and dump in anything else you like (into the sauce, I mean), but bear this in mind:
Don't add tomatoes until 2 minutes before the pasta is about to finish. If you do, they'll boil away to nothing and be tasteless.
If you like strong onions, add them with the tomato. Otherwise, about 5 minutes before the pasta is done will do.
Never, ever stop stirring that sucker or you'll get a ring of burned cheese sauce around your pan. This is, however, entirely edible but an acquired taste.

Origin:
I wanted pasta. I had no sauce. I also decided that I needed some nutrition, so added everything in my salad drawer to the pan.

Dire Risotto

You're gonna need:
Rice
Mild cheese
Onion
Mushrooms
Peppers
Courgette
Chicken slices
1 can of tuna
2 tomatoes
2 sticks of celery
Milk
Plain flour

So what I did was cook the rice and add everything to the cheese sauce again, adding the tuna and chicken at the end. I'm now halfway through the initial run of this dish.
I'm starting to feel a little bit funny. I really, REALLY wouldn't recommend this one to anybody. It seems like it might be pretty healthy, though.

Origin:
God only knows.

Exp

People seem to like giving advice to children. It's like the song says, they're our future, teach them well and let them lead the way. The problem I have is that the advice we give to our kids is always useful, yes, it's stuff you need to know, but it's never the really PRACTICAL stuff. The stuff you have to learn through life experience.
I reckon I should start making a list. A list of things that, if I ever have kids, I will tell my child on their 16th birthday. I think there's alesson here for all of us:

If something's genuinely fun to do but it's a job, don't expect to get paid much for it.
If it's tedious or unpleasant to do, you might get paid a lot for it. You're not forced to.
Find things that are both cheap and fun to do, then do them a lot. I take drinking pints of bad coke in pubs and laughing at nothing in particular, for preference.
Work is work. Social time is social time. Personal time is personal time. If you're going to mix them, only mix them with their immediate neighbour and only one at a time (make friends at work, spend your personal time with good personal friends, but don't work when it's time to be yourself and don't mix your personal friends with your work friends as they'll not likely have much in common).
Once you hit 18, meet as many people as possible. Talking to strangers for some reason becomes alright after you've hit a certain age.
Sometimes you'll grow up and not notice it at all and sometimes you'll wake up, feel completely different and never look back.
Never buy a drink that has more than 3 colours in it.
Never buy a drink that has more than 8 colours on the label's logo.
Make as many mistakes as you can while you're young enough to get away with them and to recover from the results.
If it seems like kind of a bad idea, it might not be. If it GENUINELY seems like a bad idea, if you kow deep down that it's a stupid thing to do, it most certainly is.
Do things that scare you. It's unpleasant, but it'll make you a lot wiser and staying in your comfort zone is a great way to never develop.
Don't worry about the little things, but don't ignore them or they turn into the big things. Prioritisation is the key thing.
Be careful about trusting anyone who really seems to want to be your friend. Like, to the extent that they're almost being aggressive about it. They're trying to sell you something.
Likewise, don't trust anyone who starts a conversation with you when you're walking down the street. They're DEFINITELY trying to sell you something. Or trying to mug you.
People who actually look very strange normally aren't as strange as people who look entirely normal apart from one or two very slight things.
Cheese is a reasonable thing to add to anything.
Do something embarassing on occasion.
Find the people that matter in life and make every effort to keep in touch with them no matter what. There's little worse than finding a good friend and then one day having to say goodbye.
Reinvent yourself a few times until you find a style that you're comfortable with, regardless of what other people think of it.
Try new things whenever you can.
And finally, no matter what happens in life, there's always going to be a cup of tea, a bed and a new day around the corner.

E2M3

I don't really know where to go from here.
I've been lucky in a lot of ways. I've always known where I am and where I need to be next. Either the next year of school, college, university, getting a job, whatever, life has been a series of clear goals, nicely laid out.
But now I'm here, I've done everything I wanted to when I was a kid and I've just realised that, really, I've largely done everything I intended to by this point. I've got a car, the social life's sorted out, I lost a bunch of weight, got a job, have a bunch of little adventures planned, so... now what?
Is that it? Game over? But no, that's not right somehow. Life, to me, has what I always thought of as chapters. You're born, you spend most of the first few years learning to walk and talk and such. Then someone plunges you into school and you have to start interacting with strangers, all your life goals change and suddenly the old rules don't quite apply in the same way. It's funny how your entire life can suddenly change in 5 minutes, but still be so very familiar.

There are a lot of different opinions on the afterlife. Most seem to think it's a place where you go and just stop caring about things. I always personally wanted it to be like a holodeck, this big open area where you got whatever you wanted. But part of me hopes that when I die, I'll see the end credits. That my theme tune will play, I'll see the people responsible for making this little adventure, I'll see all the important people involved and then I'll maybe get my score. Someone will stand there at a podium and bring up a screen showing all the things I was meant to have completed, all the little bonus objectives, then I'll get a score or a grade or something. Maybe some xbox live achievements. Perhaps there'll be a new game+ option. Maybe I'll finally get to see the great celestial punchline, because I really do hope that someone, somewhere is finding this whole life business to be amusing.
As I sit here, for the first time with no idea what the future holds, I'm feeling more content than I ever have. Maybe I thrive on a vague sense of confusion. Maybe too many goals are a bad thing and we should just, occasionally, improvise our way through life. It's nice to sit back sometimes and not worry that you're not acheiving much, but you're not failing to acheive anything, either.
I will say one thing about life and goals, though. I've probably learned more (and most of it's had IMMENSE practical value) by going out of an evening than I have in university. It's funny how you can spend 4 years in an educational institution, spend your days researching and wind up being so very naive. But then, I suppose I'm just naturally easy going and gullible like that.
At least, that's what folk tell me.

Man, I'm turning into an old fart. Next blog, I'm just going to talk about booze, cartoons and girls. Lower the tone a bit, even out the average some.


Some day, I will build a time machine. It will be large and shiny and silver and look a little like a dodgem car. I will buy a shiny silver suit and I will visit the past. Approximately 7 months in the past from this date. I will find myself sitting and writing my first entry to this site and thinking "Hey, alliterative blog tags, there's a fun idea!".
I will punch myself over and over until I'm incapable of PRONOUNCING the word "tags". Although I suppose I was stronger back then, so I might just end up having my ass kicked by myself, which would be embarassing.

Now with bonus content!

So if you know what the Witchrule newsletter is and have access to one, you might notice that the first thing featured on the front page mentions Mesmo and Liberty Lad.
You may also notice that this story does not, in fact, feature in the publication.

It will instead feature on my blog, because I quite liked how it turned out and damn it, someone is going to read this thing. Prepare yourself for another terrible voyage into my poor attempts at fiction!
-
The battles between Liberty Lad and his arch nemesis Mesmo were well known to all the citizens of the free world. Wherever Mesmo would try to commit some heinous act of supervilliany, dashing, dependable double L would be right behind him, shining teeth and immaculate hair. Mesmo would always get away, of course. He'd always be one step ahead, have one last cunning trick that let him escape. Maybe he'd reveal a girl tied to a bomb, maybe he'd have a cunningly hidden escape capsule, but there was always some little twist that kept the eternal chase going. And if he ever was caught, you always got the impression that he'd planned it that way all the time to lull people into a false sense of security, to build some delicious suspense. Mesmo was a showman at heart.
The people loved it. They ate it up. Liberty Lad merchanise flew off the shelves faster than it could be produced and it made for fantastic television.
But here was where it ended. In a dark alley, just around the back of the business district of Neomegatropolis, largest and most economically significant of the world's supercities. Mesmo had been plotting some scheme or other to deploy his prototype mind control emitter on one of the larger skyscrapers but a freak storm had knocked out the power to half the city. Beaten before he'd had a chance to begin, Mesmo fled, knowing too well that the spandex clad people's hero would be right behind him. He never expected Liberty Lad to be waiting at the bottom of the fire escape. A brief but desperate chase ensued, but one was a trained athlete and the other a man of science and late night scheming.
Thunder rumbled ominously as a steady rain fell upon the pair. A proud figure soaked to the skin but still retaining an air of dignity and confidence stood over his weak, gaunt foe, laid shivering on his back, rain streaming from his cape and drumming off of his steel skullcap.
"So this is how it ends, old friend. I'd hoped we could fight on more honourable terms, but if defeating you once and for all means ending your reign of terror in the gutter, so be it." said Liberty Lad, his powerful voice echoing down the alley.
"In the gutter, Liberty? You're going to kill me like a dog in... wait... seriously, you're going to KILL me?"
Liberty Lad frowned and looked to the sky thoughtfully for a moment.
"I must do what I can to ensure the safety of humankind. If that means removing one bad apple from the barrel, then unfortunately I have no choice, much as it pains me to do so."
"But couldn't you just hand me over to the authorities?"
Liberty Lad's stern expression, his square jaw and steely gaze were replaced with a look of irritation.
"Look, Mesmo, I would. I've tried, God knows I've tried, but have you seen what happens to the places that imprison you? You remember the giant robots, right? And the plutonium mole tank? And the Cardiff incident? People won't even talk about that one, y'know. If I could find a place that'd be willing to hold you then I wouldn't do this, you know I wouldn't, but they won't."
He reached for his utility belt and pulled out a pistol, styled to look like a weapon from an 80s sci-fi show. It even had a lightning bolt on the side.
"So that's it? 15 years of running through underground complexes, over mountains, beneath oceans and you're just going to break out the Liberty Laser? You're better than that." said mesmo. People who didn't know of his great (yet terrible) deeds might have thought a note of panic was present in his voice.
"Give me one good reason why I shouldn't."
Mesmo looked at him with a sneer.
"Do you know what happens to superheroes that completely defeat the bad guy?"
Liberty retaliated with a look of vague confusion.
"Nnnoooo..."
"No. You don't. That's because nobody does. That's because it doesn't happen. Have you stopped to think about what'd happen if I were to ever be completely vanquished?"
Liberty drew himself up to his full height, his features again conveying a sense of absolute confidence and pride.
"The people would rejoice! There would be a national holiday with parades and balloons and-"
"You always were simple. Yes, the people would celebrate, but then what? How much work is there for a superhero who has nobody to fight?"
"There... there's always going to be another villain..."
"No. It's impractical, it's expensive and it's thankless work, Liberty. You ever try buying nerve gas on the black market? It's a flaming king's ransom. And don't even get me started on trying to buy insurance when your job title is "megalomaniac". Just don't."
"So I'd be out of work?"
"Yeah, you would. And you're not trained to do ANYTHING, are you? Just to sit there, look pretty and punch me in the head whenever we meet."
Liberty sat down heavily in the rain, his face stricken with panic. Mesmo saw his opening.
"And then what happens? Nobody tries to steal the giant diamond when I'm gone. Nobody threatens the megacorporations with death rays if I die. No. All the companies, the law enforcement agencies, the people, they all grow overconfident and cocky. They leave themselves open. Petty crime goes on the rise, eventually leading to organised crime, political and social corruption. And you know who they'll blame, right?"
"Oh God..."
"They'll blame Liberty Lad. They'll blame the guy who's sat in his apartment eating Doritos and watching TV all day because superheroes can't handle regular crimes. Because when you use super strength to punch a regular criminal, he stays down and he stays dead. They'll turn on you, Liberty. You can't fight them all. You can't fight any of them."
The broken, beaten, spandex-clad crusader began sobbing.
"It's true! It's so true, I'm worthless! There's got to be another way, I can't live like that!"
"But there is. And it's one you're good at, too."
Mesmo paused for effect.
"You could let me go."
"... what?"
"Let me go. Let me live to fight another day. Let me shake up those dullards, darken their days with a nefarious sceheme by me, brighten up their mundane little lives with a display of mindless heroism from you. It's a parasitic relationship, sure, but it'll keep us aboard the gravy train for the rest of our lives."
Exhausted from the effort and mildly afraid of the laser pistol still pointed at his head, Mesmo's head dropped back against the concrete slab he was sat on. He felt his counsciousness slip away as the cold, pounding rain beat down on him.
Some time later, he awoke in a bed with nurses surrounding him. He discovered that he'd been admitted to the most reputable medical facility in the city and that the bill was to be covered by Neomegatropolis' law enforcement orgnisation.

From then on, the fights between the pair became ever more spectacular, but unknown to the public, they hardly ever actually hurt each other. Parades and awards ceremonies were held, but any rewards got converted to mysterious blank checks, sent to remote locations, often within the operating territory of known arms dealers. The circle of life carried on.
After all, Liberty Lad may not have been the sharpest pencil in the box, but he knew a free lunch when he saw it.