Making the Prequel of the Sequel

There’s a lot of film remakes being made. For those who might have missed them the first time. Made by directors who are unaware that you are allowed to rent the same film twice at your video store (or are we any further down the road to calling it the Blu-Ray store?).

There is though a case for keeping media productions up to date. All those films in which a character says to a distanced nearest-and-dearest, ‘Where have you been? You don’t write, you don’t call anymore’, could drop the line. Change it to something like: ‘Where have you and your avatar been? You don’t email, you don’t tweet, you don’t skype anymore’. (CLICK ON 'Read more' LINK, BELOW)

The Coming of Age for Baby Sweetcorn

Baby sweetcorn only really burned itself into the national conscience in Britain in the late 1990s, perhaps as late as 2003, November 17th. Around the time that the British isles became acquainted with the café latte. Applications for the infantile vegetable sprung up almost immediately. Young girls could treat their Barbie Dolls to a Barbie-size KFC meal. Instead of corn on the cob, they could use the miniaturised version, with diddy French Fries (or Monaco Fries, Monaco being a small principality of France), and a much smaller bird species than the chicken, perhaps a hummingbird. Fingernail licking good. (CLICK ON 'Read more' LINK, BELOW)

Track of the Week

Gandhi and the All-Day Breakfast

Try telling it to the youth of today and they won’t believe you – you never used to be able to order breakfast from a café in the afternoon.

Now it is possible to order a fried breakfast at specially designated cafes that proudly advertise ‘All-Day Breakfast’. So how was the Draconian curfew broken? Anyone familiar with the film ‘Gandhi’ might have drawn inspiration. Gandhi wouldn’t have put up with it, albeit in a non-violent way. He encouraged self-sufficiency among the Indian people by spinning their clothes on a spinning wheel, the charkha. The message he sent out, effectively, was: if you won’t cook my breakfast, I’ll cook it myself. Gandhi would have similarly encouraged the disenfranchised British who got up a bit late to get down the caff to take up their own frying pans. In defiance. The charkha was such a powerful symbol that its depiction later made it onto the Indian flag. Imagine the Union Jack: the Cross of St George, the Saltire of Scotland, whatever it is of Wales but not their dragon because it would have mucked up the design of the flag, and a frying pan plonked in the middle? (CLICK ON 'Read more' LINK, BELOW)

Potato Woman, Maris Piper

The odds were stacked against Maris Piper. The best chipper has to be the King Edward and there you’re competing against someone very well connected. Little potatoes – nice idea as a summer salad tuber, but you’re taking on the Establishment again. Jersey Royals. The aristocracy has almost cornered the foodstuffs market. There’s the Earl of Sandwich with his refined butties; Earl Grey who successfully combined a tea with a deodorant. (CLICK ON 'Read more' LINK, BELOW)

Track of the Week

Stoat Toasties

Zoos, museums, airports. What do these locations have in common? They are all places that make us crave wanting to pay a minimum of £5.20 for a cappuccino, or £12 for a soggy panini made from bread that is the latest pioneering foray into exotic bread types by Mother’s Pride. All foodstuffs that say shut up we don’t have to be organic (see ‘Know Your Organic Paraguayan Melons’, May 2011; and ‘That’s Organic Peanuts!’, July 2011, in the blog archive for more on organic stuff) to cost this much.

In the airports, caterers are able to pass on the costs of delivery hold-ups in their snacks if they make their deliveries through the check-out desks. (CLICK ON 'Read more' LINK, BELOW)