Read it in the voice of Harley Morenstein AKA Sauce-boss! Back to the matter in hand, mediocre hot sauce. I'm not a connoisseur, apparently I have no idea how to spell the word connoisseur! Anyway I am not one, I am but a fan of spicy liquids. Where does this perverse tendency burst forth from? I hear you whisper. Perhaps from my lineage...as previously mentioned I am descended from a race of volcano dwelling tree folks. Ah we would feast upon the magma or lava, there is a difference despite the words being used interchangeably, regularly, in day to day speech. And I know what you're thinking how do tree folk survive in the extreme heat of their chosen volcano habitat? Well we would clad ourselves in confidence thus allowing us to do pretty much anything. I'm obviously being ridiculous as confidence does not give you the ability to do anything, competence does.
It's liquid rock!
Yeah so back to the spicy not so great sauce. I was having a casual shop in Sainsburys for my weekly supplies. My diet consists of mainly fruit and veg with a little bread/pasta/rice for good measure. There was a time when I viewed carbohydrates as the bane of my existence. I don't remember the last time I had sugar, urgh I've become one of those guys! I spot a hot sauce for sale in the reduced produce bit, £1.50 or thereabouts. I am a fan and owing to my phaseleresque tendency to try things I've never tried before, I convince myself to pop it in my trolley. I say convince I basically saw it and immediately put it in my trolley. This tendency was mentioned before, here. Shop done and I'm home time to workout and onwards to lunch! Now I decide to douse my salad in the new hot sauce. It's terrible, it's like ketchup without a kick. I despair before remembering I have an ingredient that adds heat without adding flavour...1,000,000 scoville concentrated pepper extract!
See the neck of the bottle?
Now that blackness is pretty much the colour that the extract is. Well I suppose it's more of a deep, dark red. I add a drop or two and shake the bottle with vigour. I am clad in confidence, based on the previous underwhelming experience of the sauce. It was misplaced I end up having to wash it off several pieces as my mouth, lips, eyes etc. can take nay more!
That's the little label that came with the bottle you can purchase it here if you'd really like. Looks like it was a originally a restaurant that sells a signature sauce.
I should explain the choice of video at the beginning. I love this song! It's upbeat but has an underlying melancholic quality.
I had heard this on MTV many, many years ago and forgotten the name of the song. During a chance MSN conversation with a lovely young lady named Georgia, sweet Georgia, I asked for a song suggestion. She insisted I listen to Hi Tack - Say Say Say. I ignored her suggestion and wandered off into the aether of the internet. Days, perhaps weeks, passed and I asked for another song suggestion. She suggested the same song. This time I found it and was pleasantly surprised! Managed to backtrack and find the original from Georgia's suggestion. Some background on Georgia: Crazy mad swimming skills...that's all I know about Georgia! Just looked her up and she's an ecologist at some kind of environmental concern. Environmental it's the worst kind of mental. Not really the worst kind of mental just a joke I repeat every time I hear, see or smell any word ending in mental. For example fundamental, experimental, instrumental. Oh and I've just remembered that Linda McCartney is in it as well! I had no idea who she was and now I know much more.
I was summoned to a meeting this past weekend. Now I've been involved in any number of projects that never really got off the ground. But this one actually looks like it might. There was a lot of talk of what we'd need. I was extremely out of my depth. I rarely write something with a focus. I let my mind loose and this blog with it's soul destroying word count is the result. But having a crack at fiction has been fun thus far. I get carried away very easily. So I've written a few thousand words already but it was fun! And I suppose that's the point. I write because it's fun :-D Oh and I may have to cease my unceasing effusion of cool stuff I saw online. The meeting descended into a round of subtledildo. Search #subtledildo to see what all the fuss is about.
Incidentally I was reminded of a tale from my final year at university. I may return one day, actually I've been back every year since for one reason or other. Anyway a lovely red haired lady, we first met in the Somerset countryside. I had just skinned my knee prior to a four day process that involved a lot of kneeling. I have the best luck...in the world! She had posted a picture of her alarm clock in her work handbag. Reminds
me of the time I popped off to purchase a pillow in between lectures.
My brother had specifically requested a memory foam pillow for his 16th,
peculiarity clearly runs in the family. I arrive at the last lecture of
the day with a big bag full of pillow. Oddly enough I was notorious for
dozing off in the odd lecture and now I'd arrived prepared with my new
fancy pillow! Click here to reminisce about my redheadedness
Here's a vid of a blacksmith making Thor's hammer!
Starting with a classic, can't go wrong right? Wrong, that is rather difficult to understand but I'll assume you're all rather clever. Why wrong, mostly because this song has become associated with the ever popular spinning member gif. If you are unfamiliar with the rotating meat I am referring to then I urge you NOT to google it. Sooner or later it'll likely enter your life and you will be forever scarred/giggly/curious.
So after a month of furious dieting, I get pretty furious when I am calorie restricted, I have lost around 6.5kg. That's just over a stone or 14 pounds. Which puts me back at the weight I was this time last year and the same weight I was in 2007! Do you get my circular reference yet?
Just as the fat is rendering off my physique I get an offer I can rarely refuse, all you can eat buffet! This was offered to me by my fellow crafstman Swapnal. One of a few socially accepted situations for eating more than what is considered civilised/ necessary/ humanly possible. Naturally I headed online to my all you can eat go to guy, Furious Pete. He's a competitive eater who holds the world record for eating a 12 inch pizza in the fastest time, anyone care to guess? 43 seconds. Yep and what makes it more impressive is that you have to use a knife and fork, only eat one slice at a time and whatever is on your fork has to go in your mouth. Oh and he's super ripped.
His advice is to get value for money. Aim to eat three times the cost of the buffet e.g. £20 buffet = £60 worth of food consumed. Eat meat is pretty much the order of the day and high end seafood. Now this sits well with me as I'm planning on only eating protein. But the buffet plan runs out of steam and I'm sat with all this buffet wisdom and nothing to do with it. Like the majority of facts rattling around in my sponge-like brain.
I did have the joy of sitting in several carparks for several hours, this past week. Well that's to do with my current occupation, still steeped in secrecy so I'll leave y'all to draw your own conclusions. Whilst sat in one of the car parks I noticed a lady wearing a cardigan, clutching a fistful of it around the collar bone area. Not so strange as bag straps rest around that area and are notorious for slipping off shoulders. The strange bit is that she was speaking to her hand. As she approached I observed that she was in fact speaking to a puppy that was wrapped in her cardigan around the collar bone area! I also saw a lady who was part of the housekeeping team at Lincoln County, I think here name was Moira. She once told me about how she likes to add whey protein to hot chocolate. I've tried that and it just goes all lumpy and terrible.
I also had the chance to sample Morrison's fresh ground coffee, it's truly terrible. Weak and lukewarm. Maybe I just like overly strong coffee. Then again I once had an espresso that's right not expresso but espresso. A truth that was revealed to me by a co worker by the name of Chris. Back to that one time I tried and espresso, it was terrible. But terribly strong not terrible full stop. The acquaintance I was frequenting the establishment with commented that their dad drinks espresso and asked me why I'd gotten espresso? My answer was because I'd never had one before. I did the same with root beer once whilst attempting my one and only eating challenge to date. It's like fizzy deep heat, not my cup of tea. I guess I owe my tendency to try things I never have from Senor Phaseler Yeah so don't bother with Morrison's coffee is what I'm saying.
And now onto the controversy with Frank's Redhot sauce. I knew from previous...observation? I'd read the bottle. I knew it was high in salt and sugar. Strange I know that a hot sauce would be high in sugar! But it is made from peppers and so it makes sense that there's a fair bit of sugar in the concentrated sauce. Somehow or other I end up looking up the product on Amazon. They sell it in bigger bottles and they also have the option to purchase a 3.78 litre bottle. Scale often defeats me so imagine your classic 2.272 litre bottle of milk or 4 pinter in old money. This bottle of hot sauce is 66% bigger! I know statistics make everything way more exciting (!)
1000 words?
Not sure if you can see the label, click pic to enlarge. Says there zero sugar! Now this does not tally with my previous observation. So after a few days of not reading the bottle I've got kicking about the house I read it, lo and behold there's loads of sugar present, at least according to the label. Now I'd been off the hot sauce because of all the salt and sugar. But this confusion left me wanting some spiciness in my life. So I decide to get it out of my system and douse my salad in red hot. Made it a whole lot more interesting. Now I know you all trust me to the ends of the earth but seeing is believing, right? Wrong! Anyone seen swordfish? The film not the animal.
Click to make enormous!
You know this is my desk for sure. For one my centuries old phone is in the background, still works btw. Likely mentioned that the calender runs out, as in when you try and scroll past the 31st of December 2014 it won't let you. It's Y2K all over again! Albeit on a very local level. You may have spotted the scuffed coaster, JD coasters boi! I get JD freebies on account of being awesome. Passport holder, keyrings, calenders, ice cube bags, spice rub, basting brush, signage, cocktail mixer and so on! There is also the egg on top of the reflective ting to the left of the picture. The reflective thins is a another freebie I got from 3M the egg is hewn from onyx. My broskis theory is that if you can get it hatch then you'll get an actual onix.
Cropped and zoomed for your viewing pleasure.
You can see my centuries old phone! Yeah so what's the deal Franks!?!? Why the sugar in your super market stuff? But not in the mahoosive bottles available on amazon!!?!! I think it's a fifo stock management thing but I did briefly go all conspiracy theory an think it was a ploy to keep the UK hooked in a diet that was way too high in sugar. Well now you know...
My dear old dad has exited the country en route to the land of my ancestors, Magrathea. If you get that reference then there is a very special place in my heart for you :-D I am of course descended from people who lived in the vicinity of the Indus valley. Before departing I was asked what I considered success. I gave a generally woolly answer, not a fan of answering such big questions. Something along the lines of it's different for different people. Cash = success, perhaps. I think I landed on leaving the world better than you found it.
Ooh and my old, old dog. Long time readers will be familiar with the living legend that is Tim the Labrador. He featured in my first few blog posts and I recently asked my brother how old he was. Tim lives with me but I am terrible at remembering how old anyone is. He's thirteen, fourteen on the 18th of March next year. Now for some reason or other I thought he was only eleven. Thirteen is ruddy old for a labrador! According to a calculator that makes him 86. In another two years and four months he'd be 100!
He's being have, get it? You can read the older stuff about my awesomely old dog here and here.
Around this time for the past few years I get a bit of a louder shout from life, universe and everything.
2012 my little brother went to uni
2013 I became ruptured two discs and became pretty much paralysed from the waist down
2014 more people moving away, death and cancer.
The death was in a friends family, tragically young. The cancer has nothing to do with anyone I know. Well there is a lovely young lady who is kicking hodgkins lymphoma's ass right now. I know her in so much as I spoke to her whilst representing my house, Johnson, in the the interhouse netball tournie. I sprained my ankle for the millionth time during that tournie. She writes a blog! The cancer that surprised me this time was Furious Pete's. The fella I mentioned earlier. Turns out he had a cancerous testicle, he had it removed and it appears that it hadn't spread so the outlook is promising. His message subsequently was to seek out help if you need it. Don't wait. So this is me repeating that sound advice. Tell someone, call someone, do something.
He says it much better than I do.
So as not to end of such a sombre note here is a fantastic disneyfied cake to fulfil your cake gif needs.
Yesterday, as much as the day doesn't exist it did happen. Have I lost you yet?
Got up at 4am, caught the train at 7am got to work at 8am. I then spent
45 minutes sat on top of my suitcase, I carry my sleeping bag in a
suitcase because I've lost my sleeping bag bag. Steph our superb delivery agent swung by to take the piss and drop off our Friday delivery.
Set off from work met up at spoons for a civilised drink. Mandy drove us! Reminiscent of my first week in the job when she drove us across town a few times :-D Some time
passed and we headed off to Ribs 'n' Bibs. Where we'd liberally coated
the table in our stock catchphrases/expressions. I then proceeded to
deliver an extraordinarily moving speech only pausing to write Pen 15 on
Sarah's
hand. I chose to write in board marker, partly because that's all we
had and partly because it should wash/wipe off quite easily. That said
the Pen 15 was refreshed on a regular basis, awesome!
It's all
sounding rather run of the mill am I right? But now comes the bucket of
50 wings which have to be consumed in 25 minutes. So I go flying out the
gates chomping like a mad man. If one of the photos is anything to go
by I eat wings with my eyes closed! As time progresses my face is slowly
accrues a liberal layer of sauce, whilst the bib remains strangely
clean.
In the end I managed to battle through 43 of the bad
boys. That's 86%, but this is an all or nothing challenge and now my
sad, sad face adorns the wall of shame :( :D.
But that's not
all that happened, we discussed an enormous variety of topics: adoption,
incarceration, cycling whilst under the influence, Marc's dedication towards becoming hench n gay, secret asians etc. The night kind of petered out after that. I also managed to pull off the five question con on Fish! Been meaning to try it forever and was presented with an opportunity too good to turn down :-D
Swapnal and I went in search of Mark,
who was sporting a mankini + bib combo that was too...I honestly don't
know how to describe it. But we walked in to a club stood around for a bit
and decided we were in the wrong place and walked out again. Upon
finding the right entrance the queue is look rather ridiculous, ain't
nobody got time for that! So we grab a pizza and walk back to Eastbourne
St. On the way we receive some abuse from some lovely young men
shouting from a car :D
Get in, watch 2 Fast 2 Furious and then I
decide to read a bit of Double Cross before dozing off. As I am reading
about the exploits of Dusko Popov in America, Swapnal's new flatmate
Vicky gets in from a night out. Of course she confuses me for Swapnal,
as you all know we are identical in everyway so it's to be expected :P
That said thoroughly nice girl who chatted to be for about an hour.
