The Edge Of Madness

This will be a series of posts just writing down a few of my recipes, so I don't lose them.

Been on a bit of a cooking run at the moment, since I'm working from home most of the time.

I normally only cook for one (since Lana can't eat most of my stuff), so scale however you want.

Ingredients:

• 150grams Chicken. Sliced and diced
• Olive Oil
• 2 cloves of garlic. Diced fine
• 3-4 small red chillis. Diced fine
• 3 large red chillis. Seeded and sliced
• 1 onion. Diced large
• 3-4 spring onions. Sliced
• Some white pepper
• 1 tablespoon light soy sauce
• 1 tablespoon of fish sauce
• 1 tablespoon of oyster sauce
• 1/2 teaspoon of sugar
• Some basil

Heat up oil in wok. Toss in garlic & chillis for a few seconds. Toss in everything else except basil. Keep tossing until chicken is cooked. Turn off heat, Toss some basil in, stir around. Put on rice and eat.

So I finally got off my arse and used the trial lesson voucher that Lana got me for my birthday.

Hired a Mini from a car club I'm a member of. I'm a big fan of the car club. Normally I'd ride up, but I still haven't got luggage on Floyd, so it's annoying getting changed at the other end. Nice drive up.

I've also finally got used to driving a manual, and now I'm loving it. I am revving a little too much sometimes though, bit of wheel spin. I've also got the hang of switching from 2nd to 3rd, which has made my life easier

Back to the flying. Bit of rigmarole as they hadn't written the expiry date on the certificate and it had expired. But since they hadn't written it in they honoured it.

Up we went, good fun, after 5 minutes, I'm turning the plan. Can't remember the technical terms, but banking and turning sound good. I had a tendency to keep pulling up & also watching the controls more than the actual ground. Prob from playing too many computer games.

Also I tended to turn a little too hard to start with. But hey, you've got to work out what you can and can't do.

Plane was a Piper Archer. Old plane, and too small to fit me.

Also I didn't really get on with the instructor.

So I'm still debating taking lessons. There's another school an hour away (all schools are an hour away) in Surrey I'm going to check out. Newer planes.

I think the goal of being able to fly your own plane by yourself is more important to me than lessons. But you have to do one to do the other.

Again, me commenting on search terms used to get to my blog.

can you see me know asshole shirt

Unless a lightbulb pops up behind your head when you have an idea, or you ran down the street in towel shouting "Eureka". No, can't see you know.

sperm donation ethically wrong

Depends. If you're just randomly donating sperm to strangers on the street, or posting it through people's letterboxes, then I can see that's wrong.

how much sperm can i hold

In your mouth? In your hands? Or in your balls? And why the frig do you need to know this?

I Don't Have Any Change T-Shirt

Yep, that's going to stop homeless guys bugging you. Great plan.

need to wear what kind of shirt to take photo for cabin crew

Huh? People refuse to get photographed by people wearing bad shirts? Man, I want to know what type of shirt you normally wear for people to refuse to let you photograph them.

average porkstar rates

While I'm fairly certain you were searching for pornstar rates, just had me thinking what would be the average rates for someone to shag a pig?

get someone's shirt out

Pull it out?

Stay tuned for the next update in a couple of weeks.

BTW, I'm getting a whole bunch more search traffic headed my way due to that whole t-shirt thing.

Few highlights.

Invasion continues to suck. But I finally worked out the "Volgans" are meant to be the Russians.

Dan Dare came back and the first few stories were passable, then back to suckville.

Mach 1 is really, really bad.

Judge Dredd continues to shine. I was thinking about this, it's one the few stories where characters are fairly realistic (yes a futuristic city with a hard as nails Judge is a little out there, but it's actually believable) and well written.

Harlem Heroes was passable, but you can see within the story the brilliance that "Mean Team" will be. Harlem Heroes finished up, with a new story Inferno. This was okay, as long as you totally ignored the plot and just enjoyed the artwork.

Shako. This was crap. It's about a intelligent polar bear who swallows a capsul containing some top secret poison gas the CIA is making. Then the CIA trying to hunt him down, but he kills everyone after him. Then the Russians get involved. Bah, pure crap. The biggest problem was it was impossible to have any empathy for any of the characters. The bear was killing innocents, the CIA wanted the nerve gas. Just a mess.

The other great introduction to the series is "Thargs Future Shocks". Starting from around issue 22. These are one off stories, that do two things. Give new writers & artists a chance to prove themselves and pack a quick twist punch. No hugely memorable stories, but fairly good.

A sneaky addition as well is the cover doesn't reflect any of the comic stories, but instead is a brief couple of paragraph story on the letters page. Prob to help sell copies, but I'd prefer the artwork of one of the stories on the front.

And finally from Prog 36, they finally put the credit of the Writer, Artist and Letterer on each comic. And while it's a bastard thing to say, 30 years later, apart from John Wagner (Judge Dredd), I've never heard of the other writers again. Most of the artists though, I've read many, many comics with their style (Bellardini, Gibson & Ezquerra).

EDIT: Well I looked up who wrote Mach 1. Amazingly it was Pat Mills, whose work on Slaine, Nemesis the Warlock and ABC Warriors I loved. And who also wrote Invasion, which again I do not like. And Shako, which sucked. Fuck, thankfully he gets better as the years roll on

So as I said I've got about the first 1100 issues of 2000AD, the comic.

This is going to be one of those running reviews as I read through them. It started in Feb 1977, and came out at the rate of 1 per week.

I remember reading a couple as a kid, and the only comic I ever regularly bought was Best of 2000AD Monthly, which was a collection of the stories from the weekly comic.

To start with, the major stories so far are Invasion, Dan Dare, Harlem Heroes, Mach 1, Flesh, and Judge Dredd.

One of the annoying things is that there is no mention on each seperate story as to Artist & Writer. Annoying.

Invasion is a story set in Britain in 1999 (22 years in the future). England has been invaded by a fictional Asian country (where all the members are actually white Europeans). England lost in 48 hours, and one man, a former lorry driver is the head of the resistance. He starts off with a double barrel shotgun, before moving onto a pump action shotgun. And yep, he mows down wave upon wave of Volgan invaders. Pure pulp, but with some interesting bits. One funny bit was a small background image of a sign talking about the Channel Tunnel. This was a few years before it was offically even planned out, which was interesting. But the worst part of this story is the main character, a former lorry driver is now an unbeatable resistance fighter, with reflexes of a snake.

Dan Dare is crap. But the artwork is brilliant. And I recongnised it as Belardinelli, who later did the artwork to one of my favourite series, Ace Truck Co. More on that in the coming months when I get to it. Dan Dare is pretty much a Buck Rogers type comic.

Harlem Heroes is interesting. It's about a type of basket ball they play with jetpacks. Not brilliant, but not crap.

Mach 1 is the worst strip I have ever read. I'm having to force myself to read it. It suffers badly from superman syndrome. The main character is a sort of super secret agent, that has been augmented by biotech. As such he is 50 times faster than any man, almost indestructible, and has a computer in his head working out possible plans of attack. No empathy at all for a character with no enemies.

Flesh is set in the future and the past. And is fairly interesting. 23rd century and they've got time travel. So they've got back in time to harvest Dinosaurs for meat. Pretty cool, it's a western style set in the past. And they kill off lots of characters.

Finally Judge Dredd, who appeared in the second issue. What can I say? I've never been a huge Judge Dredd fan, but the vision described here is brilliant. After one issue you've got a sense of the size of the city, the problems facing the judges, and what a judge can and can't do. And while Judge Dredd is almost a superman, he's not. He misses, he makes mistakes, he collapses from exhaustion.

What's also interesting is reading the letters page. There was an interesting letter there talking about environmental damage especially to the ozone layer, and how we had to start being green....and this was in 1977.

I'm going through them at the rate of about 1 every 20 minutes or so, so don't expect a speedy review. The stories I'm looking forward to coming across are Nemesis the Warlock, Ace Trucking Co, Strontium Dog, Sam Slade Robo Hunter & ABC Warriors. I'll prob post up some short reviews as I go through story arcs.