Songs: Bruises

This week I love this song.   It's sweet and a bit different, though it is admittedly a bit hipsterish.   Enjoy!

Clothes: Indian Silk Skirt

I bought myself a really nice skirt a little while ago.   It's silk, handmade and lovely.   It's long and wrap around and also double layered.   One layer of fabric sits on top of a longer one so that you can see both patterns, but if you wanted to you could reverse it so that you could only see one.   I love it because it's really summery, really casual, yet still lovely.  I love the fabric too.   So pretty!  

A Short History of Nearly Everything: Space

"Now, the first thing you are likely to realize is that space is extremely well named and rather dismayingly uneventful.   Our solar system may be the liveliest thing for trillions of miles, but all the visible stuff in it - the Sun, the planets and their moons, the billion or so tumbling rocks of the asteroid belt, comets and other miscellaneous drifting detritus - fills less than a trillionth of the available space.   You also quickly realize that none of the maps you have ever seen of the solar system was drawn remotely to scale.   Most schoolroom charts show the planets coming one after the other at neighbourly intervals - the outer giants actually cast shadows over each other in many illustrations - but this is a necessary deceit to get them all on the same bit of paper.   Neptune in reality isn't just a little bit beyond Jupiter, it's way beyond Jupiter - five times further from Jupiter than Jupiter is from us, so far out that it receives only 3 per cent as much sunlight as Jupiter.

Such are the distances, in fact, that it isn't possible, in any practical terms, to draw the solar system to scale.   Even if you added lots of fold-out pages to your textbooks or used a really long sheet of poster paper, you wouldn't come close.   On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with the Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over 300 metres away and Pluto would be two and a half kilometres away (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn't be able to see it anyway).   On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be 16,000 kilometres away.   Even if you shrank down everything so that Jupiter was as small as the full stop at the end of this sentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over 10 metres away.  

So the solar system is really quite enormous.   By the time we reach Pluto, we have come so far that the Sun - our dear, warm, skin-tanning, life -giving Sun - has shrunk to the size of a pinhead.   It is little more than a bright star.   In such a lonely void you can begin to understand how even the most significant objects - Pluto's moon, for example -  have escaped attention.   In this respect, Pluto has hardly been alone.   Until the Voyager expeditions, Neptune was thought to have two moons; Voyager found six more.   When I was a boy, the solar system was thought to contain thirty moons.   The total is now at least ninety, about a third of which have been found in just the last ten years.   The point to remember, of course, when considering the universe at large is that we don't actually know what's in our own solar system.  

Now the other thing you will notice as we speed past Pluto is that we are speeding past Pluto.   If you check your itinerary, you will see that this is a trip to the edge of our solar system, and I'm afraid we're not there yet.   Pluto may be the last object marked on schoolroom charts, but the solar system doesn't end there.   In fact, it isn't even close to ending there.   We won't get to the solar system's edge until we have passed through the Oort cloud, a vast celestial realm of drifting comets, and we won't reach the Oort cloud for another - I'm so sorry about this - ten thousand years.   Far from marking the edge of the solar system, as those schoolroom maps so cavalierly imply, Pluto is barely one-fifty-thousandth of the way."


A bit out of date now, of course, but still pretty cool.   Science!  :D

Food and Drink: Delicious Teas

In tonight's post I thought I'd share with you some of the delicious teas I've discovered lately.  The first one was brought back from China for me by my flat mate.   It came in a sort of cake form, wrapped in paper and sitting in a beautiful little box.  

Not really knowing what I was meant to do with it, I resorted to scraping the cake with a knife to loosen enough tea for a cup.   It makes a tasty and very delicate green tea.   Yum! 





Next is a brilliant tea I found in a local tea (and antiques) shop called Anteaques.   When I went I promised myself myself I wouldn't end up leaving with a bad of whatever tea I ordered.  Not only did I fail at that resolution, I also finished the bag of tea within two weeks and had to go back for a second.   It's called Festive Fruits.   It's a hibiscus based tea and tastes just like Christmas!   It's all apples, cinnamon, cherries and almonds.   Delicious!   Quite possibly my favorite ever tea!

This next tea is also a hibiscus based one, and came from a tea shop in London.   It's called summer pudding and is also yummy!   It's full of apples and blackberries and tastes just like an English summer day.

This last tea is one that you can find fairly easily.   It's made by a brand called Tea Pigs, which is quite expensive, but worth it, in my opinion.   I've tried a few Tea Pigs teas and my favorite is one called Super Fruit.   It's another hibiscus based tea (are you noticing a pattern here?) and is full of cranberries and blueberries.   It's got a pretty refreshing and delicate flavour and is yummy! 

Songs/Promotion: Nothing is Easy

This is a song called Nothing is Easy by VerseChorusVerse.   As well as being a lovely wee song, it also happens to have a music video filmed by my very clever little brother!  It was nominated for a Limelight award and everything.   *Proud sister face*.

Photography: Lago Maggiore

I love storm lighting.   You know the kind I mean.   Dark and moody clouds but with the sun still managing to sneak through somehow, casting a strange yellow glow over everything.   The kind of light that can last for mere seconds and when it does appear you of course never have a camera with you.   Well, I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time with the right equipment on this occasion, and I managed to get some lovely shots of Lago Maggiore at home just before a storm broke.   Some of them are HDR and some aren't.

                                                                        The HDR

                                                              And the non-HDR ones

 

Songs: Indian Summer

Who could argue with a bit of Stereophonics?   Everybody knows them, everybody likes them and they just keep getting better and better.   This is Indian Summer.   It's a great song with a vast talent for getting stuck in your head.

Film Reviews: Les Misérables

Never having seen Les Mis on stage, I didn't really know what to expect from the film, but I have to say that I really enjoyed it.   It was a big film, with lots of big scenes, big stars and lots of big songs.   I especially enjoyed Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baren Cohen as the nasty innkeepers.   They were hilarious!   Brilliant performances.   But what else could we expect from Helena Bonham Carter?   I enjoyed the little street urchin Gavroche as well.   Real talent there.   Everyone seems to have hated Russell Crowe's singing voice, but I didn't think he was that bad at all!   Not great, but passable.   There have definitely been worse!   Since watching this I've listened to the soundtrack a lot and there are so many brilliant songs in it and most of them really well performed.   My favorites were Eponine's song, On My Own, which is so beautifully sad and poignant, and Do You Hear the People Sing, which is so very stirring.   But there are loads of other good ones besides.   Some of it was a bit over-the-top melodramatic and drawn-out for me, but that's just because the original material is.   Not much the director (who by the way is Tom Hooper who directed one of my all time favorites, The King's Speech) could have done there without changing it dramatically.   And even as a smelly ragged prisoner I still found Hugh Jackman attractive!  

TV Reviews: The Big Bang Theory Season 5

I love The Big Bang Theory.   It's definitely one of my favorite tv shows.  I love the characters and the writing is so clever, and it's full of nerdy geeky jokes which I understand!  It's my staple program to watch in bed when I'm ill.   It never fails to cheer me up.   Season 5 did not disappoint!   It followed on seamlessly from the previous seasons and had the same energy and humour.   Sheldon and Howard's girlfriends Amy and Bernadette are by now well established in their roles and make excellent additions to the group.   The series is dominated by the build up to the big season finale, namely Howard and Bernadette's wedding and Howard's trip to space.   There are plenty of mentions of wedding plans throughout and arguments about Howard going into space.   And of course the big event we've all been waiting for happens as well, which is Leonard and Penny getting back together.  We all knew it would!   We all know it's right!   But once again the course of true love does not run smooth for them.   This isn't a fairy tale.   And perhaps my favorite moment of the series was Sheldon and Amy finally becoming an official couple.   It was so cute and funny.   Of course with a group of such "interesting" personalities there are always going to be interpersonal difficulties and this series deals with quite a lot of them.   Both Sheldon and Amy, and Bernadette and Howard encounter difficulties in their relationships, like Sheldon being selfish and Howard's shady past, but they both get through them.  Sheldon and Leonard also have problems with their friendship for the same reason.   The issue of Raj's loneliness is also dealt with pretty thoroughly too, with him falling for Penny, his phone, a gold digger, then asking his parents for help for help finding a wife, then finally getting a dog from Howard and Bernadette.   Poor Raj.   I also enjoyed a cameo from yet another Star Trek actor, this time Brent Spiner.   It made my inner Trekkie child very happy.   All in all a very strong continuation to a great series, and I can't wait to see Season 6 (Yes, I know it's been out for ages!   I'll get to it!)

Film Reviews: Origin: Spirits of the Past

I got given this anime film for my birthday and watched it with no idea what to expect.   I have to say that I really enjoyed it.  The story isn't particularly original or entertaining, but it's just all so pretty!   The animation is gorgeous.   And there's so much green everywhere!   It's set in a post-apocalyptic future when genetically engineered trees have rebelled against the humans and taken over the planet.   Now the trees are in charge, controlling the water supply, and the humans live in the ruins of their old civilisation.   One day a young boy discovers a young girl from the past in stasis and wakes her up.   She can't cope with the new reality and sets out to try and defeat the trees and restore the planet to how it was in her time, by using a secret machine that her father built.   In the end, however, she learns a bit more about the world's history and changes her mind.   The humans and the trees make peace. 

My favorite landscape was the human city, with people living in spartan shelters with only the bare necessities on top of ancient ruined sky scrapers.   Such a great looking contrast and worked really well.   I love the man-made all mixed up with the natural, and I love how precarious the humans' existence looks.   The forest looked really good too.   The whole thing is just beautiful and has a very beautiful soundtrack as well that complements the animation perfectly.   The beauty of the film more than makes up for the slightly weak storyline.

Songs: Look Around

This week I'd like to share a song by one of my favorite local bands.   As well as being catchy and a bit different, it also pretty much sums up my life view.   These guys are great!   Their whole album is actually really good and they're really good live.   Definitely want to try and see them more often.   Can't find any decent videos, but here's a link to the song anyway.    


http://jenthegents.bandcamp.com/track/look-around  


Portobello and Lost the Groove are also well worth a listen!

Cosmetics:Vineyard Peach Body Butter

This stuff is AWESOME!   Vineyard Peach Body Butter, from The Body Shop.   It's not one of their normal ones, but they do bring it back every other summer or so as a special, under different names.   It's glorious!   Summer in a pot.   I am a fan of The Body Shop body butters in general.   They're really rich and good quality and they last forever, and as well as all that this one also smells amazing.   It is a truth universally acknowledged that peaches are in fact the best things in the entire world ever, and I think I've finally found something that captures how great they are.   It doesn't smell like uber sweet peach flavouring, but like real, juicy, delicious peaches.   Fresh, fruity and sweet.   It does lose something on the skin though, sadly.   It loses a bit of the tang, and smells a bit more like peach flavouring, but nice peach flavouring.   Highly recommended.   It's great stuff!

Songs: A Town Called Malice

This week I have been dancing around my room to this:




I like that it's catchy and fun and good to sing along to, but also that its title is a pun.   Hee hee.   I like puns.

Photography: Summer Flowers

I tried to take some HDR photos of some of the lovely summer flowers in my mum's garden.   Oddly, I found that somehow, no matter what I did, the HDR photos just didn't look as good as the JPEGs.   This hasn't been a one time thing either.   Whenever I've tried to take HDR flower photos they never seem to quite work.   So that being said, here are the JPEG versions.   A touch of summer for you.   All taken with my macro lens.  

 Notice how the fence in the background is hardly noticeable?   I used a wide aperture to throw the background out of focus.   handy trick for hiding unsightly fences!

                                      Irises are so gorgeous.  Such rich colours and textures.

Songs: Carolina Drama

Jack White is one of my favorite musicians ever!    I love him as part of the White Stripes, I love him by himself and I love him in the Raconteurs.   I love his music, I love his voice, I love his look and his clothes, I love the slightly weird vibe he gives off...I just love everything about him!   This one a recent discovery.   Neither catchy or happy, I just love this one for the drama.  

Book Reviews: I Capture the Castle

I Capture the Castle, by Dodie smith (of The Hundred and One Dalmations fame), is the best book I've read in a long time.   While I was reading it I became so completely absorbed in it that I forgot entirely about everything that was going on in my own life.   All that mattered was Cassandra Mortmain, the book's narrator.   I suppose it's basically a 1930s Pride and Prejudice.   A family living in poverty, rich men, sisters, love and heart aches, but it's much more eccentric.   The family live in a crumbling castle.   The father is an author and the family were once well off, but he's got writer's block now and they have no income.   They're selling off the furniture to live.   The stepmother is named Topaz and likes to commune with nature in the nude.  Cassandra wants to be a writer and the book is presented as her diary; her practicing writing.   It's absolutely charmingly written.   Completely realistic and extremely absorbing.   On the cover there's a quote by J. K. Rowling: "This book has one of the most charismatic narrators I've ever met." and I agree with it entirely.   I love Cassandra Mortmain.   She feels like an old friend.   Like a lot of books there are also quite a few references to art, literature, legends, poetry and music that make me think that people back in those days were just much more cultured than we are now, and make me wish I'd had a better education.   Sigh.  

At the time I was quite angry that this book doesn't have a happy ending.   Cassandra is in love with Simon Cotton, her landlord, who her sister, Rose used to be engaged to.   Simon asks her is she wants to come to America with him and she says no, knowing that he is still in love with Rose.   Wise decision, Cassandra, but I wish you could have had your happy ending.  Stephen, the late cook's son, is also madly in love with Cassandra, and at times it looks like Cassandra is going to fall in love with him too, but then she doesn't.   I kind of wish she had.   The line from the book is: "It is part of a follow-my-leader game of second-best we have all been playing . . . it isn't a very good game; the people you play it with are apt to get hurt."   I think we can all relate to this.   Now that I've had some time to think about it, though, the lack of happy ending probably fits better.   It's more realistic, because love isn't like that, and maybe Cassandra is just a bit too young to get her happy ending yet.   I think she will though.  

  

Film Reviews: Pitch Perfect

As previously mentioned, I have a serious Pitch Perfect problem.   I must have watched the DVD about 15 times since I bought it.   It's the best film I've seen in ages.   It's about an angsty girl called Becca who goes to college and joins an a capella group, against her better judgement.   The group is set in its ways and afraid of change.   Obviously Becca saves the day and leads them to victory in the national championship.   How original.   Part of the appeal is obviously the brilliant soundtrack.   I really do love the a capella stuff.  It's gorgeous, and hilarious in parts.   But the songs in the film that aren't sung by the cast and are just part of the score were really well chosen too.   Favorites include Punching in a Dream by The Naked and the Famous, Keep you, by Wild Belle and Open Season, by High Highs.   As well as the musical appeal, it's also hilarious.   Most of the comedy comes from Rebel Wilson, who plays Fat Amy, one of Becca's bandmates.   Since seeing the film I have developed a great admiration for Rebel Wilson.   Most of her lines in the film were improvised, and I have wasted a huge amount of time watching interviews with her on youtube.   She's a funny lady!   Elizabeth Banks and John Michael Higgins also deserve special mention for their brilliantly funny lines as the competition commentators.   All the main characters are really well written too.   Great script.   I will admit it is very girly though.   Probably not one for the gentlemen.   But girly in a strong, feminist type way.   Oh, and it does have a very over-the-top unnecessary vomitting scene, but apart from that, couldn't fault it. 

Film Reviews: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Quite a risky film to make, this one.   Tolkien has a huge number of fans, as does the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy.   There was always going to be a huge amount of pressure on this movie to be good.   It was also a risky decision to split the film into three.   Was it really necessary?   The film follows Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit, who is reluctantly sent off on a quest with 13 dwarves to go and claim back their old kingdom from Smaug the dragon.   They set out, battle trolls and goblins and get help from elves and eagles and wizards.   Personally, I enjoyed the film, but it's far from perfect.   I very much liked the casting choices.   Martin Freeman is a great choice for Bilbo.   He very much looks the part of a hobbit, and is a very believable young version of Ian Holm (Bilbo in the Lord of the Rings).   I liked the dwarves too and how they all have their own distinctive looks and styles.   In the book there wasn't very much character development for them at all.   They were pretty much just The Dwarves.   The film itself looks great too.   Really pretty and detailed, and with some very funny moments.   And i liked the touch of not seeing Smaug in the film.   All we see is one eye.   Keeping what he looks like as a surprise for a later film makes him more scary.   Nice!   I did feel the film was a bit drawn out though.   I could have understood the decision to split the film into two, as so many films seem to be doing, but I think three was a bit much.   There are plenty of bits that could have been cut.   I'm not talking about Radagast the wizard.   I think it was cool how much screen time he got.   I thought Peter Jackson did a really good job of taking a very minor character and really developing him into something the audience could really love.   But there was a lot of time spent messing about in Rivendell with the elves and wizards holding council that was just delaying the story in really getting going.   I doubt the scene would even have been made if the Lord of the Rings hadn't been made first.   Though I must admit it was bloody impressive how they managed to make all the actors look the same age as they did in Lord of the Rings.   I felt there were some really over the top moments as well, like the dwarves throwing plates around Bilbo's kitchen, and somehow I don't think the Great Goblin would be very likely to just say "That'll do it" when someone runs him through with a sword.   Oh, and the Great Goblin's voice just didn't go well with his body either.   No.   Still, despite all this the film works pretty well, and retains a lot of the same magic and magnificence that made us all love the Lord of the Rings films so much, and I remain a big Peter Jackson fan.  

        

The Book of General Ignorance: What Colour is Water?

"The usual answer is that it isn't any colour; it's "clear" or "transparant" and the sea only appears blue because of the reflection of the sky.

Wrong.   Water really is blue.   It's an incredibly faint shade, but it is blue.   You can see this in nature when you look into a deep hole in the snow, or through the thick ice of a frozen waterfall.   If you took a very large, very deep white pool, filled it with water and looked straight down through it, the water would be blue.  

This faint blue tinge does not explain why water sometimes takes on a strikingly blue appearance when we look at it rather than through it.   Reflected colour from the sky obviously plays an important part.  The sea doesn't look particularly blue on an overcast day.  

But not all the light we see is reflected from the surface of the water; some of it is coming from under the surface.   The more impure the water, the more colour it will reflect.

In large bodies of water like seas and lakes the water will usually contain a high concentration of microscopic plants and algae.   Rivers and ponds will have a high concentration of soil and other solids in suspension.  

All these particles reflect and scatter the light as it returns to the surface, creating huge variation in the colours we see.   It explains why you sometimes see a brilliant green Mediterranean sea under a bright blue sky."

Music: Favorite Covers, Part 2

Continuing on from this post, I thought I'd carry on telling you all about a few more of my favorite covers of songs.   First, the Shins version of We Will Become Silhouettes.   It was originally by the Postal Service.   The Shins have slowed it down, used lots of guitar instead of synthetic stuff and made the lyrics more distinct and understandable.   Great job!

Next, The Scissor Sisters version of Comfortably Numb.   It was of course, a Pink Floyd song.   Their version is almost unrecognisable!   It's much faster, more synthetic and sung in their usual falsetto tones.   The only way I could tell it was the same song was the lyrics!   But the way they've done it really suits the psychedelic aspects of the song.   Great stuff!

  




Next Tom Traubert's Blues by Tom Waits.   I suppose it isn't strictly speaking a cover.   More of a re-imagining of a song.   It's sort of very loosely based on Waltzing Matilda, but very different.   The tune is a bit different, the lyrics are different and it's much slower and grittier.   It's wonderful.

Another great one is the My Chemical Romance version of Bob Dylan's Desolation Row.   It was on the Watchmen soundtrack.   It's much faster, rockier and considerably shorter than the original Dylan one.   It works really well, even though they have totally changed the tone of the song.

And, well, because I am slightly obsessed with Pitch Perfect (no really, I have a serious problem!) I'm going to finish off with not one, not two, but three songs from the film.   Kelly Clarkson's Since U Been Gone, Miley Cyrus's Party in the USA, and Bruno Mars's Just the Way You Are.   All three are great!   Obviously the biggest changes are the complete lack of instruments.   A capella awesomeness!   And they've added some totally gorgeous harmonies!   Party in the USA actually sounds like not-a-rubbish song the way they've done it!   Quite a feat! 

Music: Favorite Covers, Part 1

Ok, so most of the time covers of songs are completely pointless and you wonder why the band even bothered.   The original was better!   Leave it alone!   But just occasionally someone comes up with something that's genius.   They either improve the original song, or do something really clever that makes you see the original song in a completely different light.   So without further ado, here are some of my favorite cover songs and the reasons I like them. 


To start us off, I chose William Shatner singing Pulp's Common People.   Mostly because it's hilarious.   But I do also genuinely like his version, even if it's hardly different from the original.   Here it is:

Next, Big Yellow Taxi by Counting Crows.   The original was written by Joni Mitchell, but I like the Counting Crows version better.   It's sadder, with the slower guitar, and I think the song is better suited to a male voice.

Another one I really like is Me First and the Gimme Gimmes version of My Boyfriend's Back.   Me First and the Gimme Gimmes are a great cover band.   They do some awesome versions of loads of songs.   My Boyfriend's Back was originally sung by the Angels.   Me First and the Gimme Gimmes is a lot faster and less whiny and a lot more rocky.   It's got so much more energy.   Love it!

Speaking of Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, their version of Wild World is also very good.   The original Cat Stevens song has got the same treatment: faster, rockier, less whiny.   Awesome! 

Another good one is Michael Cera and Ellen Page's version of Anyone Else but you.   It's on the Juno soundtrack and featured in the film.   It's hard to pin down what I like about this cover.   Not a lot has really changed.   The guitar is pretty much the same, and it's still a duet.   The song has been shortened and the verses rearranged a bit.   I think it must be the voices that make the change for me, which I suppose isn't too surprising, considering what a simple little song it is.   All it really has after all is the guitar and the voices.  

Next, Kid Harpoon's version of First We Take Manhatten.   This was originally recorded by Jennifer Warnes.   I like Kid Harpoon's version more because there's a lot more guitar and a lot less synthetic stuff.   It's also faster and has more energy.   Apologies for not really being able to find a good video for it though!

Next, the kings of cover artists, Walk Off The Earth.   I've blogged about them before.   I really love their cover of Gotye's Somebody I Used to Know.   Gorgeous song.   I'm sure most people have already seen the video I'm about to post, doing the rounds on Teh Interwebz, but what makes it genius is that it's played by five people on one guitar.   Amazing!   The song doesn't sound all that different really, but it really suits all the band members' voices and the harmonies are gorgeous.

Another great one is Kirsty MacColl's Version of A New England.   Not that I don't like the original Billy Bragg version!   I just like what she's done with it.   With her voice and less of the aggressive guitar it sounds softer and a bit more sophisticated.

And finally, Rufus Wainwright's version of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah.   I like it because it's a little bit faster and smoother.   And I love Rufus Wainwright's voice.

That's enough to be getting one with for now!   More soon!

Songs: The Bed Song

I love Amanda Palmer.   I love her punchy clangy piano, aggressive lyrics and awesome attitude.   This is something a little different for her.   This is sweet and sad, multi-layered and complex, but with the same interesting piano.   It's great.

Photography: Beltane

On the last day of April every year the Beltane festival takes place here in Edinburgh.   It's a pagan festival of fore and fertility and marks the beginning of summer.   It's quite a big thing.   Every year people paint themselves with body paint, wear odd costumes, dance, frolic, set fire to things and act out the battle between summer and winter.   It's all a great spectacle and a great chance to take pictures.   Here is their website.   I used an external flash for these.   I suppose the biggest challenge for this shoot was the sheer number of people about.   It was hard to get to the front of the crowd and get a clear shot.   I've found a good technique is not to follow the procession, but to keep ahead of it.   Sadly others have worked out this trick too.   Here are a few of my favorite Beltane photos.   Warning: may contain breasts!

Songs: Marry Me, Marion

This was written by someone I went to school with; a really talented kid.   Good to see he's been keeping up his music at uni.   This is gorgeous.   Beautiful music and great vocals, bold and catchy.   Go listen!


https://soundcloud.com/benbelward/marry-me-marion

Book Reviews: The Long Winter

To continue on with my Laura Ingalls Wilder theme, I have also re-read The Long Winter.   Another amazing book about the life of a pioneer girl.   This is the first one not be set in a new location, as De Smet, where By the Shores of Silver Lake was set, was where the family stopped moving.   As the book opens the family are settled in their claim shanty and it's late summer.   They get warnings about the winter to come being very long and hard, and sure enough, the first blizzard arrives in October.   The townsfolk batten down the hatches, but the blizzards go on and on.   They are underprepared for winter and the trains can't through with coal.   The family get by by burning hay, twisted tightly into sticks, and by eating stored potatoes and bread made from flour ground in the coffee mill.   Eventually though, wheat runs low and the situation becomes desperate.   Almanzo Wilder and Cap Garland decide to try and help.   There's a rumour that somewhere in the area a farmsteader has wheat.   Almanzo and Cap set out, miraculously find him and persuade him to part with some of it, and save the day.   Eventually May comes and the snow melts and the trains start running again.  

Once again, another great book from Laura Ingalls Wilder.   The hardship they came through was amazing.   As usual, the human ingenuity is amazing, and the way they kept their spirits up was so inspiring, not to mention Almanzo and Cap's heroism.   The kindness and love within the family is so nice too.   A really good read.  

Film Reviews: My Fair Lady

I finally got round to watching My Fair Lady recently.   Yes, I know, how on Earth had I gone that long without watching it?   Especially considering how much I like musicals, and Audrey Hepburn, come to that.   Well, I'd seen bits of it before on Youtube, including The Rain in Spain and Wouldn't It Be Loverly, but I'd never bothered to sit down and watch the whole thing.   And I did enjoy it.   Rex Harrison was brilliant, and it was really funny.   Audrey Hepburn as a pretty unconvincing cockney was so annoying though!   I just wanted to slap her whenever she opened her mouth!   My only reaction when she learned the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain was thank fuck for that!   I did enjoy the costumes and the parties though, especially that incredible races hat!

  But the ending is wrong!!   Clearly the right ending is not that she goes back to him, it's that he goes looking for her and apologises!   Silly film makers!   But still, good film.  

Film Reviews: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2

Before I start I would just like to say that I am a huge fan of the Harry Potter books.  the films, not so much, but, being reasonably impressed with part 1, I thought I may as well watch part 2 too.   I was a little skeptical at first.   After all, in part 1 they'd got all the way up to Lord Voldemort taking the Elder Wand from Dumbledore's tomb.   Beyond that point how much story was left really?   The battle for Hogwarts and that was it.   Was the entire film going to be one long battle scene?   But no!   It was actually really well done.   There was quite a bit of story in it.   Snape's memories take up a fair amount of time and do add a lot of substance to the film.   It's feels like a whole, complete film that you can watch without having to watch part 1 at the same time.   The polyjuice potion scene was really well done too - Helena Bonham Carter acting as Hermione, acting like Bellatrix Lestrange was really odd to watch!   Also interesting to see Crabbe's part in the film being filled by Goyle and Goyle's by Zabini instead.   Apparently Jamie Waylett who played Crabbe got sacked for drugs.   Ah well.   And they kept in Mrs Weasley's line!   She says the B word.   I'm glad they kept it in.   It's a great line.   Predicatably enough they gave it a more Hollywood ending though.   Harry snaps the wand rather than putting it back in the tomb.   I can forgive that, because it's the same outcome really.   Doesn't affect the story.   I wasn't that impressed with the final scene though.   The effort at aging the actors seemed a bit half-hearted.   Though I suppose that witches and wizards do live longer than muggles, so maybe they were purposefully aged accordingly?   But all in all, my favorite of the Harry Potter films, and yes, I did cry like a baby!

Songs: Stay Out

I love this song!   The lyrics are just so funny and so relatable: 


He's got a Rolling Stones tee, But he only knows one song, They think they're from the sixties, But they were born in 1991.

Checkered shirts and chino trousers, Is this some kind of uniform? It seems that they think they're gangsters, They've barely started 6th form.

She thinks she's in Barbados, But outside it's minus three


All true!   Exactly what a night out is like!   Catchy tune too.

Baking: My Disney Birthday Party, Part 2: The Cake

As a continuation of this post, I decided to take on the challenge of baking myself a Disney castle cake.   I thought about doing a three tier cake with ice cream cones for turrets, and even after looking around online that still seemed like the best idea.   I decided to rent a set of tins from a local cake shop for the occasion.   No sense in buying tins that big when I wouldn't use them often.   So I bought large amounts of cake ingredients and set about baking three cakes.  

That's where the trouble started.   The baking itself should have been the easy part, but it still went wrong.   I used a simple sponge recipe, and one that I'd used lots before, but for some reason on this scaled up level the big cakes sank.   I have no idea what went wrong!   Maybe you need special recipes for very big cakes?   Something to research and improve anyway.   Luckily though the cakes were solid enough that I could just turn them upside-down and hide the sunken bits.   Next came the piling the cakes on top of each other part.    Easy enough, except that the top two cakes were too wide to leave much space for ice cream cone turrets, so I had to cut them both down to size a bit to make room for them.  Next came the icing.   I'd chosen to do the castle in pale blue, with darker blue turret roofs, and purple decorations.   I decided to use fondant icing, dyed with fondant icing pastes. 

                                        Fondant icing with pastes and edible glitter and stars

                                          The three colours of fondant icing I used.  


Icing the cake went smoothly enough.   The icing for the turret roofs had to be cut into skirt shapes before it could be put onto the ice cream cones, but still, it went well.   I then decided to stack up multiple cones so that the turrets would have walls as well as roofs.   We decided to ice the cones with butter icing, because it would stick well.   So we made and dyed some butter icing.   Annoyingly, because of butter's yellow colour, it's hard to get the exact colour you want, and our butter icing didn't quite match the rest of the cake.  Ah well.   I'm sure no one noticed.

  

So iced turrets were set onto the cake in as castley an arrangement as we could manage.   Next the whole thing was decorated with edible glitter, edible gold stars, flags, doors and drawbridges, windows and purple icing flowers.   Perfect!   Very Disney.   I also bought fountain candles to be like the Disney castle fireworks.   Good effort all round, I feel.