Wow, I wish somebody would foil-wrap my house when I was out. It might brighten it up a bit. Heh, imagine that, a foil-plated house with just a virginal brown Luke Skywalker landspeeder bed floating pretty in the middle of it all.
Ah well, the good feeling couldn’t last. My previous post, about being picked up by MetaFilter, just got hit by 155 meaningless spam entries (and a few about a penis bird). My delete finger is sore, and I’m starting to get an inkling of why celebrities moan about getting too much attention.
Back into anonymity you go!
(Please, no comments unless they’re relevant or at least ego-flattering. Spam will be deleted, whatever the cost to my sanity)
Heh, I finally got Mefied! I thought there must be a reason why I was suddenly getting so many helpful comments on building an MP3 bed.
Only damn problem now is… Metafilter membership is still closed. I’ve been trying to sign up for a few months now, unsuccesfully (actually, I probably have an account hanging around from a couple of years back, but damned if I can remember the login details). Somebody from Metafilter please give me an account. Pretty please.
Doh! Foolish me. Of course, the
bed’s not a racing car. It’s Luke Skywalker’s landspeeder. I should’ve spotted
that straight away. The brown finish. The Curved protuberances at the back. The
manner in which you half lie, half sit in it. The way it floats a couple of inches
off the ground. I mentioned this to Gill and she said "yes, in the shop they
called it the Star Wars bed”. ("The Shop" is 20th
Century Style and "they" are Linda & Jim at -
who were very helpful and have some other extremely cool [and tempting] stuff).
Anyway. Also on the bed front, I had an idea. As I mentioned, this LW/MW radio
is a bit crappy. It’s also rather worn out - half of the silver finish has rubbed
off. Nice as it would be to keep it, clunky knobs and all, it would also be nice
to replace it. I was thinking of just a simple FM radio, but it was Gill who set
me to thinking, saying that we could have a car stereo in there, and MP3 player.
I went for a run at 6am today, and my thoughts leapt one stage further. If it’s
going to be an MP3 player, it might as well be a decent MP3 player. One
that I have some control over. Not just some crappy car stereo where I drip-feed
my MP3 collection onto CDs. I want to get at my whole library, use playlists,
that kind of thing. So why not have a PC built into the bed.
Of course, it would have to be no ordinary PC. The screen would be embedded where
the radio is now, and it would have to be a tiny retro green-CRT display, about
the size of an ATM screen. And it would display information about the current
track in DOS-prompt style (although some green visualisations might be nice).
And it would have two or three knobs, on-off/volume, on-off/screen brigthness,
and forwards-backwards through the playlist, something like that. Plus another
way of getting at more detailed controls (infra-red keyboard?)
All of which throws up far more questions than answers. How the hell would I build
such a machine? Given the level of customisation, I imagine it would have to run
Linux, although it would be nice if it could share my iTunes library. How would
I wire the controls up to the software functions. Where would I get the parts
for such a lo-fi machine (without a fan - don’t want that keeping me awake at
night). etc etc etc. It would have to be damned cheap too, especially given how
much we just spent on the bed.
Hey, wouldn’t it be neat though. Having a bed with wireless networking built-in.
(Gill’s already worried about the idea of a bed which runs off the mains).
Electronics/PC-building/software hacking geniuses, please apply here.
Oh dear, isn’t shopping a dangerous thing.
Gill just went down the junk/antique-shop road in town, looking for some radiators for our new conversion. Ended up in a 70s retro store. We just bought a bed frame.
It has to be seen to be believed - covered in tan suede, it has a huge headboard which looks like a car dashboard. Built into it are two racing-car-style seat backs. In between them is a built-in radio (LW/MW only, sadly, but I’m sure I could get under the bonnet and soup it up. A bit of Nitrous Oxide should do the trick). At either end, the board curves around to make two side-tables, each with its own light. At least one of the tables (I didn’t see the other one - the bed wasn’t assembled) has a mirror surface in the middle. There’s also a loudspeaker (for the radio… which is LOUD) and a little round pot (for storing your 50 John Player Specials?) on either side of the bed. Underneath are a couple of sliding-doored cabinets.
But words cannot do it justice. It’s being delivered here in the next few days. Party attendees will no doubt get a guided tour, and me even be allowed a quick spin under careful supervision.
The bed was built by a guy in South Wales in the 1970s. He only ever made six of them, and died in a car crash (not in this bed) shortly afterwards.
Hey, today is Handsel Monday! Let’s celebrate.
On this day of the year, it’s traditional to give gifts (it’s “an occasion for universal tipping”). My tip to you is this snippet of knowledge. Now go out and spread joy among humankind.
Lola and I had lunch at Kumquat Mae (which I only just realised is a very bad pun, on a par with most hairdressers names), the Veggie restaurant on Abbeydale Road. I’d wanted to go there for the last couple of years, but somehow never made it until now. I wish I’d visited earlier.
I wasn’t going to have a starter, but ordered a bruschetta anyway, as I thought Lola might fancy something bready to fill her up. It was rather soggy with tomato juice, but none the worse for it. One slice of very nutty bread, griddled and dipped in olive oil, covered in tapenade and then heaped with loads and loads of chopped tomato. Alongside was a salad of lettuce and loads more tomato. It all tasted scrummy and really fresh.
For the main course, I had stuffed aubergine. A veggie staple-type food, which could easily have been really boring, but in this case was loaded with flavour. The stuffing was a ratatouille-type mix of meditteranean vegetables, but with sultanas and some nutty bits (I think ground nuts plus almond slices) in it, and tasty as hell (I’m not normally a big fan of ratatouille). It came with courgettes, new potatoes, carrots (cooked to perfection), green beans and salad of lettuce, tomato and olives. Lola nicked all of my green beans, and had a fair few potatoes and bits of aubergine as well.
I wasn’t going to have a dessert but… my willpower is so non-existent. Plum and pear crumble it was then, with cream. The crumble topping was very sweet, but none the worse for it. Absolute 110% comfort food, Lola and I ended up fighting over the last pieces. Gorgeous.
I had a complementary glass of white wine to go with the meal. It turned out that (I think) the guy who gave me the wine made it himself. It was gorgeous stuff… I don’t know what to compare it to, because I’m not an expert and it was fairly unlike most other wine’s I’d tried, but I asked him for more details and he said it was “just a basic vin de table” and then reeled of a list of grapes, before going into a rant about Gallo wines and the fact that they were riddled with chemicals and Gallo were a bunch of money grabbing bastards, something like that. I asked him if I could get some of the wine, and he took my phone number, told me it’d probably be the end of January. So I look forward to it.
Here’s a job for you: Laptop Archaeologist. Tracking the ebb and flow of entire civilizations through the detritus left under their laptop keyboards.
It feels almost a shame when some of the esoteric but highly rewarding things that I’m fanatical about suddenly become public goods. Damn, now everybody knows the secret. Even worse when it’s something as widely-knocked as the Guardian’s British blog awards who are spreading the word.
All the same, many congratulations to Belle de Jour: Diary of a London Call Girl for picking up the gong as the best written British blog, and to Stuart Hughes: Beyond Northern Iraq for an honorable mention in the same category.