Black Ink

The branch of Sainsburys local to my work is selling mass produced “wall art” for a fiver a pop. It’s fucking hideous sub-pikea horrorshow stuff.

(Naturally I have bought some. Helpfully, it comes with a large sheet of cardboard. Now all I need is a can of spray paint, and an idea.)

Also inspired by my trip to Sainos: Porn Words

I had a chicken and tomato sandwich for lunch. But this wasn’t just any chicken and tomato sandwich, no. This was “Juicy Pieces of Sunblush ® tomato in a light mayonnaise with succulent slices of chicken, vine ripened tomatoes, spinach and basil on malted bread with seeds”. My sandwich is now being described in the breathy pre-orgasmic tones of an M&S add.

Let’s strip the porn words from that sentence, shall we?

“Juicy pieces of Sunblush ® tomato in a light mayonnaise with succulent slices of chicken, vine ripened tomatoes, spinach and basil on malted bread with seeds”

Or: “Tomato in mayonnaise with chicken, spinach and basil on bread”

One of these accurately describes the sensation what I had. Would you like to guess which? (And frankly, that’s generous.)

Porn Words: Pointless bits of linguistic padding designed to make you feel that an orgasm is in the offing.

What did you want to be when you grew up?

(OK, my first answer is “a lawyer” but let’s pretend that that’s not true, shall we?)

I have just bought Australian Wine from a German website, to be shipped to the UK, and paid in dollars.

On the bright side, I paid in dollars, so it was cheap.

Running a little late here, so a couple of very short reviews for last week’s stuff.

This week’s book(s): Still Life / Havock Junction / Shrike all by Joe Donelly

Donelly does a sort of celtic horror – the stories are generally set in Scotland, and rooted in (heavily fictionalised) myths and legends about ancient Druids and witchcraft. I still think his first book, Bane, that I read many years ago, is his best, but these three did manage to keep me nicely entertained for a week or so. While his books have common elements – he’s particularly fond of slapping a love story into them, and his works do tend to be written from a default position of of Decent Man looking after Capable-But-Still-In-Need-Of-Rescuing Woman – the books are different enough not not feel entirely like you’ve read the same thing from him before.

I would heartily recommend Bane to anyone, and of these three, I think Still Life was the strongest.

This week’s music: A to Z of Classical Music by Various Artists

Nope, still can’t do it. I do like this stuff, but it completely fails to command even a fraction of my attention. Were I buy classical music in a serious manner, I’d need to buy it, and sit doing nothing but listening to it. Which isn’t unreasonable, except that that’s not how I listen to music – I’m almost always doing something else with music playing, but I do like to be aware of the music, and with this, I’m just not – I might as well be sitting silence. Once in a blue moon, I’ll lie in bed and just listen, but even then, I want something that’s not going to let me drift into thinking about other stuff. I feel like a bit of a philistine, but there you go. Anyway, I’ve always got the jazz collection to prove that I do in fact listen to music for grown ups when the mood takes me.

Can anyone recommend me a place to get 120 film developed, or even just a guide as to how much I should pay? My local shop are charging me around the 20 quid mark for a roll of 16, plus a set of 6×4 prints and a digital copy.

And while I’m paying it as a one off, if this is the regular price, then I don’t expect I’ll be doing it terribly often, since that’s about the same price as I paid for the bloody camera.

(Anyone saying “learn to print your own” will be laughed at. While I wouldn’t mind, I think my housemates might object to my turning our toilet into a darkroom.)