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.  

Blog Housekeeping: New titles and entry content amount changes

Right, so I've had this blog a wee while now and I've decided to start doing things a little differently.   It seems there are a few categories of things I seem to talk about quite a lot, eg: songs, photography, films...   So I've decided that from now on I've decided that before an entry's title I'm going to write a category so that people can decide more easily whether or not they're interested in reading it.   To that end, my first entry under the new system has been given the category: blog housekeeping.

Also, I often review the same types of things three at a time.   I'm not going to do that anymore.   It just seems a bit messy.   From now on each item is going to be reviewed in glorious isolation.   This may make some entries pretty short, so I'll try to blog a bit more often to make up for it.  

Peace out!