Favourite Album Villagers - Becoming A Jackal Lovely melancholy pop rock.Great melodies, funny words. Melodramatic and sentimental, but in a good way.
Favourite Video Game Limbo Super creepy and beautifully simple side scrolling platform puzzle game. We tried to buy this for my nephew's birthday, but he had grown up. Loser.
Favourite Animated Movie Tangled Not a great story, but hugely impressive character animation. Favourite Animated ShortMarcel the Shell With Shoes On
Featuring the apparently genuine, unfiltered voice of Jenny Slate.
Favourite Movie Trailer Kooky
By Jakob Dvorsky who made the excellent online game Samorost, and Jan Sverak who made the excellent movie Kolya. Actually, I don't remember if Kolya was excellent, but I did buy the soundtrack when it came out, and I used to put a track from it on mix tapes. Do you have one?
Why isn't this movie out on DVD yet?
Favourite Movie on DVD A Serious Man
Dark and funny Cohen Brothers movie. Like a Woody Allen film from the olden days when he was good.
Favourite TV on DVD Sherlock
By Stephen Moffet who is in charge of Doctor Who, and Mark Gatiss who was one of the League of Gentlemen.Contemporary dramas based on the original books. Only three episodes. :( But they're making three more. :)
Favourite PodcastWiretap Funny, and dry, and Canadian. Like Canada Dry, but even funnier than that. Favourite Comic BookAcme Novelty Library #20 I don't actually own this yet, but I know it will be my favourite comic book of the year. Chris Ware is a bald nerdy genius.
Favourite Food Roasted Brussels Sprouts Slice in half, drizzle with olive oil, season, and roast for 20 minutes at 400 F (200 C). Throw on sliced garlic 5 minutes before they're done.
Favourite Hike Muir Beach Coastal Trail So much variety, not too much incline, and just the right amount of imitation British pub at the end. Favourite Bar The Philosophers Club Need a place to hide from the relentless California Sunday afternoon sun? This is the place. We stayed so long the bartender started buying us drinks.
Favourite BeerMikeller 1000 IBU Very bitter and very sweet. Is that even possible? I don't know anything about beer, but I like pretty labels. Favourite SweetsChimes Ginger Chews. They're all natural, whatever that means. Perfect for your post-lunch walk around the salt flats. We tried all the flavours. Mango is the best.
Favourite Blog Uncle Eddies Theory Corner. Uncle Eddie has theories about all kinds of things. His blog is a horrible design mess - everything clashing with everything else and text overlapping the pictures, but it's still my favourite.
Not to be confused with Uncle Eddies Vegan Cookies.
On Friday we went to George Lucas' Skywalker Ranch to watch the final sound mix of the Megamind DVD short film. We were given a tour of the recording stage and mixing rooms, the foley stuidio, and the fantastic screening theater, where I took this photo of my knee.
Did you finish yet? I know it's early in the month, but it's a very slim book. And next month's is a fatty, so let's get this one over with.
Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel is about a writer who talks to another writer about some writing he has written. You can't get much more self-referential than that. It deals with the Holocaust via symbolism and metaphor. A lot of it is a fable about a donkey and a monkey who sit and talk in long-winded allegory, like a Beckett play.
I enjoyed reading it, but I preferred his previous book - Life of Pi. This one seemed too contrived to me. I think I only got to the end of it because it is so short.
If you have no intention of reading this book or you don't care about spoilers, here is a fantastic drawing of the final scene.
Next month we will be reading Seeing Things by the lovely Oliver Postgate.
Do you have any used long sleeve button-down shirts that you would like taken off your hands and incorporated into a fantastic work of art? You do? Then give them to us and we will pass them on to our friend Angie.
I like to drive to work on Interstate 280. It is much prettier than 101, and on the way home you go past this funny house
and this funny pointy guy.
That's Father Junipero Serra, an 18th century Spanish Monk who went around California building Missions and enslaving the native population for Jesus.
Opinions are divided as to what exactly he is pointing at. Some say it is due west in a gesture to the future. Some say it is at a fleeing Indian who has mistakenly chosen freedom over conversion to Catholicism at gunpoint. Some say it is at the freeway.
Father Junipero's first Mission was in San Diego, and just down the road someone built the Mission Brewery.
where they make this rather nice IPA.
It tastes... like an IPA. And it looks great - sunset orange with a thick head of foam.
Monks are well known for their beer.
In the middle ages, Franciscan monks had to fast for extended periods. But beer is not food, it's drink, so the monks got brewing. And drinking. Some were putting away 10 pints a day. And there was more left over, so they opened pubs. For Buddhist monks, drinking is a sin. Although they built this temple entirely out of recycled beer bottles.
A few years ago in Cambodia a Buddhist monk was found on a doorstep, passed out and covered in mud, after having run naked through the streets of Phnom Penh following a heavy night of drinking rice wine laced with toads. It was claimed that the monk was drinking the alcohol-toad mix as medicine to treat an unspecified illness.
The same thing happened last week to Charlie Sheen. After police found him naked and apparently intoxicated in his trashed New York Plaza hotel suite, his publicist stated - "What we are able to determine is that Charlie had an adverse allergic reaction to some medication and was taken to the hospital. Everything else is speculation."
Neither Sheen nor the monk faced criminal charges.
The prettiest bit of i280 is when you go over the Crystal Springs Reservoir, which is piped in from Yosemite. It's especially nice on the way home when the sun is setting and the fog is rolling in over the Santa Cruz mountains.
like the foam on top of a Mission IPA.
Many endangered species live around the reservoir, including the San Mateo Thornmint.
And the Woolly Sunflower.
Fortunately the reservoir is off limits to drunk monks and Charlie Sheen and everyone else, just in case they have an allergic reaction to their medication and trash the place.
Not-very-fun fact: The famous Franziskaner beer drinking monk logo was designed by Ludwig Hohlwein -
who was the lead poster designer for the Nazis from 1933 to 1945.
This year for Halloween I made no costume as usual. But I did remember to pull out the spooky candle holders.
I prepared a traditional spooky mediterranean stew with tomato-zucchini fritters, cashew-cucumber dip, hummus, dolmas, olives, and spooky spinach bolani.
We felt a mysterious presence all through dinner. As if someone was watching us.
Previously on Favourite Beer of the Week - I made a pie and the oven declined to cook it, so I drank a beer instead.
This week the oven persisted with it's belligerence, so we had it taken care of.
Sasha loves the new oven very much.
So I was finally able to cook the pie
and it was the perfect pie at 1 o' clock in the morning when we got home from the Megamind wrap party in need of a tasty snack to soak up the whiskey while we watched the last two episodes of "Ivor the Engine."
Do you remember "Ivor the Engine"? It's still great. So much better than that "Thomas the Tank Engine."
Look at him. What an idiot. Not even the magic voice of Ringo Starr could make him cool.
"Ivor the Engine" was written and narrated by Oliver Postgate, who had the nicest voice in the world in all of history ever.
He created about 2 minutes of animation a day.
I do a little less than a second a day. In 3D.
Postgate and Firmin then made "Noggin the Nog"
"Pingwings"
"Pogles Wood"
"Clangers"
and "Bagpuss."
We watched all of Bagpuss this year. I like it even more now than I did as a kid, because now it's all covered in nostalgia.
This bottle of Sam Smith's Yorkshire Stingo looks like it was designed for the nostalgic.
It's like Granny Gravesclothes' Tea - ...There, dark raftered pubs Are filled with white-clothed ones from tennis-clubs, And the boy puking his heart out in the Gents Just missed them, as the pensioner paid A halfpenny more for Granny Graveclothes' Tea To taste old age...
The Stingo tasted of old age to me - a bit sour.
"Nostalgia" is the yearning for an idealized past. It was originally described as a medical condition. Fortunately the cure is pretty cheap - "The Complete Ivor the Engine" on DVD - only £3.93 + international shipping.
If you fancy a non-nostalgic beer, I recommend the G Schneider & Sohn Weizenbock on tap at Monks Kettle. Except they don't have it right now because I drank the end of the barrel last Saturday.
Oliver Postgate's memoir "Seeing Things" will be December's Book of the Month. Order yours today!
