So, to catch up on my posts-per-week goal, provide something for Reddit to peruse, and give me an easy blog post, here’s a recipe for y’alls.

So as mentioned at the end of June, my woman’s been staying with me this month, and she’s some sort of low-carb prodigy. So I’ve had a delightful month converting my normal diet to shed the carbs she can’t eat (did you know carrots are off-limits? How about goddamn tomatoes?).  So I decided to make her one of those meatloaf cakes you occasionally see. And down below you’ll see it in all its delicious glory. But you who know of low carb might be wondering how the mashed potato crust (the sworn arch-nemesis of low-carb diets) is helping this in its low-carbing.

Well, the fact that it’s actually cauliflower might help a little with that wondering. But enough of that, it’s recipe time.

You will need:
1kg (2lbs) of minced (ground) beef
100g of pork scratchings/pork rinds
3 eggs
Tomato ketchup
Your favourite hot sauce (I used her sriracha)
350g of cauliflower
Some cream (say 200ml of double cream?)
Onion powder, garlic powder and paprika
Some butter

ALSO!
Two 9 inch cake tins
Foil-lined baking tray
Some way to steam vegetables (I use a saucepan of salted water, with a colander in it, and the saucepan lid on top of that. You could use a steamer.)
Food processor
Large mixing bowl
Oven

Cookin’ Time!

• Preheat your oven to whatever, I don’t know. 200*C? 450*F? 2690 Kelvins? Just put it to your normal temperature you cook things at.
• Throw the pork scratchings into your blender, and buzz them until they take on the texture of breadcrumbs. Since you can’t throw breadcrumbs or smashed crackers or whatever into a low-carb dish, ground up pigskin is awesome!
• Start steaming your cauliflower at this point. You want it to be horribly, disintegratingly soft. If it falls apart when you look at it, it’s done.
• Transfer your pigcrumbs to your mixing bowl, and squish together with your cowmeat, eggs and some hot sauce to taste. Mash together until it resembles meatloaf. I meant to add some paprika to my recipe at this point, but I plain forgot. Add paprika. Paprika is hella tasty.
• Grease your cake tins with butter, and split the meatloaf mix between them. You might not need to grease them, but it’s a cake, and my reptillian brain is telling me cake tins need greasing, damnit.
• Put the cake tins in the oven. They’ll need about 20 minutes to be done enough, more or less, they’ll be finished off later.
• Hopefully your cauliflower is done by now. Let it dry just a little, so it’s damp but not wet.
• Rinse out your blender, then throw in the cauliflower and blend on high until it turns into paste. Add the cream, season with garlic and onion powders, and blend until it’s the consistancy of cake frosting/icing. It can be a little moister, since it won’t run when you cook it, and cook it you will need to.
• When the meat cakes are done, plop one onto the baking tray, liberally top it with ketchup, then drop the other on top. Make sure the ketchup doesn’t spill out the sides.
• Eat that delicious jelly-like meatloaf runoff that accumulates in the cake tins. That runoff is always tastier than the meatloaf. It’s like raw cookie dough or cake mix that way, only meaty and fatty.
• Frost the cake with your cauliflower icing. It’ll work just like regular icing if you’ve done it right.
• Return the cake to the oven for 10 minutes. Or, if you follow my recipe exactly how I did it, turn down the temperature and leave it there for two hours as your girlfriend struggles to get home with the trains.
• Decorate with hot sauce and/or ketchup. You see that cute steak picture on top? Done with massive blobs of sriracha. It looks cute, but I took a bite of that piece, and was incapacitated with stomach cramps for an hour. Go easy on the nuclear-hot Chinese hot sauce!
• Cut and serve, will last two meals for two hungry people.

That’s about it. Done for now. Bye!

This would be the point where I’d apologise for my weekly post being late, if that wasn’t just a restriction I’d put on myself to make sure I was regularly writing. Or if I thought people checked the blog when I hadn’t linked it on Facebook. Or if I wasn’t busy fending off monkeys with a broom and twenty pounds of raw chicken. But within those paramaters, I’m sorry this post is late.

Fortunately, a nice easy concept dropped into my lap on Facebook last night, and basically wrote itself. In so far as you couldn’t comment on it without making at least three seperate jokes. Let’s get it linked first.

I can’t link to the source of the image, as it could have come from any one of eleventy billion different Tumblrs. So, thanks to Tumblr then?

There we go, look to the left. And of course, it’s a list of things assembled by an ill-informed Christian fundamentalist who doesn’t know what things are, worrying how the kids and their hippedy-hop music are making Baby Jesus cry. And we have the usual whipping boys – other religions, sexytimes, Satanism, Harry Potter, and… well… we also have a few more interesting ones.

For the purposes of this list, let’s imagine we’re living in the world we live in, where people are only capable of things I know are possible. So what should I avoid doing if I want to avoid becoming demonically possessed?

Necromancy? Well, that’s unfortunate. There’s nothing I like more than going down to a graveyard of an evening, and binding the souls of the departed to their decaying corpses in a mockery of life. Next these lunatic Bible-bashers will stop me building ghoulish monstrosities of bone and rotting sinew, and swooping over the houses on my skeletal dragon. The only way to stop them is to turn into a giant wolfman and rend them with my lupine talons… hang on, what? Lycanthropy isn’t allowed? Damnit!

OK, those have to be the silliest examples on the list. I could just stay in and watch Blade Runner right? It’s not like cyberpunk culture is on the list, right? Wait, it is? Fair enough then. What about watching the Scream series, or some MST3K? No no no, because postmodernism is the path to the Devil, of course. Maybe I’ll work on my body, and become more limber by practising yoga. Surely such exercise isn’t going to bind demonic forces to my form… ahhh, well spotted, Silly List.

Then we get a bit more esoteric. I didn’t even know what Rosicrucianism was until I found this list, and it sounds quite interesting. So I think I’ll go back and read up about their ancient secrets, which will make the Baby Jesus cry. Damn you list, for prompting me to read up on ancient mystical societies!

How about some levitation? I do love hovering above my garden while using my astral projection to talk to people hundreds of miles away about Freemasonry. Certainly more productive than fire-walking, which is just combining “walking briskly” with “burning coals”, and is therefore INHERENTLY SINFUL.

It’s a long list, and there’s plenty of things I could rattle off, since the list is full of nonsensical things no sane person could hope to find objectionable.

Twilight?

…god damnit..

So I’m reminded how common spam is by 98% of the comments to the site being filtered out as terrible marketing. I am not unprepared, it’s not 1997, and I’m no longer replying to spam emails saying “i’m not interessted pleese stop sending me emails!!!1″. But what I am short of is easy content for the website while the missus is visiting. And also: the old website statistics where I used to pull nonsense search strings out of thin air to marvel at.

So, entirely cribbed from the section of the Apropos of Nothing podcast, here’s some ludicrious spam comments I’ve recieved. I had some utter beauties lined up, but I’ve put off doing this article so long that WordPress started pruning them. Fortunately, I get more all the time, and could do another article right away with the ones I still have. So let’s see what we have…

Just Plain Nonsense

“When I examine approve, some twenty-eight eld, perhaps regularize thirty-four period when we prime met, when I await rearmost to her and those far-off days, the relation looked inessential, but it really wasn’t. I perhaps was the archetypal man-not the� solon”

It’s perhaps not best writing practise to open with a piece where my response is “erm… alright, carry on, Captain Spambot”. This is one of the least-focussed ones I’ve had, barring the strings of nonsense characters I’ve been seeing since before I hit puberty.

Speaking of which, the obligatory porn spam!

“I opened my mouth and closed it, shaking my head No Papa, I make a well-placed bite and the acquaintance of two lovely ladies in her posture, crossed her legs, and renewed her efforts to pay closer A yawning chasm”

Prefixed, of course, by a link to the sale of portable vulvas.

Got A Bit Lost

So it’s not hard to see why my breakdown of air fare taxes might attract spam about planes. That said…

“I’m worried about the Turkish Airlines flight out of Istanbul, having been burned by them already (twice). I’m also worried about making my connecting flight in Frankfurt. I let my wife know that if all goes well, she won’t hear from me until I call from Washington Dulles around 4pm, as there won’t be time to email before that.”

Because the perfect way to make me buy a hat made out of viagra, clearly, is to make me think an American businessman commuting to Istanbul doesn’t know when his flight gets in.

“We are a bunch of volunteers and opening a brand new scheme in our community. Your website offered us with useful info to work on. You’ve done an impressive activity and our whole community will be grateful to you.”

A heartwarming tale of how a community banded together around… me saying that an alien species in a children’s cartoon series didn’t make sound evolutionary sense. You’re welcome, Alien X Is Dumb In The Community people.

…Smack Talk? What?

“What I wouldnt give to have a debate with you about this. You just say so many things that arrive from nowhere that Im fairly sure Id have a fair shot. Your weblog is terrific visually, I mean people wont be bored. But others who can see past the videos and the layout wont be so impressed with your generic understanding of this topic.”

This being posted on my discussion on geocaches, accompanied by pictorial evidence of me hunting down a geocache. I’m not exactly dropping off geocaches underwater halfway up a volcano, but I know enough that I didn’t really need to compensate with all those videos and the slick layout, that absolutely did not appear on the article or my website.

Unless they thought the later video of me vomiting up fruit was particularly erudite. I know the missus hasn’t stopped watching that video since I uploaded it.

“what do you think of talking about something more interesting”

I think I bent your mother over a jQuery function and 0 auto -50px’d her margins, you demented hunk of webcode.

I’m terrible at smack talk.

The Best Ever Piece Of Spam

““Ka-Pow!!!” The word WONDERBUM went across the butt and (naturally) I put the ‘Kapow” in the front.They were white ‘y’ front style and he would wear them to creckit – made be laugh loads to read thru the creckit whites “Wonderbum”.. Thanks for the memory envoking post – I am loving these shorts though – are you selling them? P”

Join us next week, when Less Is More starts producing pairs of girlshorts that are nowhere near as cool as this suggestion.

No real article this week, as my woman’s in town and I haven’t had time to write. Fortunately, content for the website takes all sorts of forms…

(WARNING: Vomit alert!)

So last year I went to America, as I may have mentioned, and I started my journey in New York. I’ve always fancied giving the big city a look, and it was a good start to an epic holiday. But the best thing I got out of it was a story.

Because Hurricane Irene swept through the day after I showed up.

It was an interesting situation to get stuck in, but it has at least fuelled me with anecdotes for the last nine months. And to wrestle them into some sort of narrative, here’s what I learned as the heavens opened.

Fox News is dumb as fuck

Seriously, seriously, unhelpfully stupid. I had inklings of its Republican bias, veneer of news over its entertainment centre, and the exploits of Bill O’Reilley, just from lingering on the internet. But then it got turned on in the lobby of the hotel I was in.

Apparently CNN, with its coverage of evacuation areas, fatalities, course of travel, and generally useful information was not suitable for the needs of the American public. So Fox News got to the stuff that mattered – a bunch of manchildren in suits taking the piss out of each other. For half an hour straight. Then they cut to a reporter in the field, who talked to someone on a bike in a flood zone, took the piss out of them, took the piss out of the team in the studio, then had the piss taken out of him by them in turn.

At this point, I turned to some fluff that was down the side of my seat for information.

British Weather Is A Pussy

I had to buy an umbrella on the first day of the hurricane, because it was raining just that hard.

I’ve never needed an umbrella before in my life.

I’m British.

It really was that wet.

Also 90mph wind or something.

Turns Out It Does Sleep Sometimes

So I’ve had years of hearing about New York, The City That Never Sleeps. And to be fair, it was fairly restless when I visited Time Square at 3am. But when there’s 90mph wind going on, nobody wants to open anything. The Empire State Building shut its doors behind me, preventing latecomers from getting a stunning view of a fuckton of clouds. Central Park stopped anyone from entering their massive field for 48 hours. People who booked a trip up the Statue of Liberty, having booked tickets over three months in advance, were very pissed off when the entire island shut down.

Well, I didn’t suffer with the last bit, I went past it on a speedboat. Much better pictures that way.

Torches Are Really Uncommon

Have you ever had to buy a torch on a quick deadline in an unfamiliar city? It’s really quite hard. Where the hell do you look? It’s really not easy, even in the heart of Manhatten. Moreso when there’s a hurricane coming, and risks of power outages.Thankfully, as I blindly stumbled around looking for someone with some torches left, I didn’t think about how I might be deprived of precious internets.

I Am Really Bad At Panic Buying

• Three kinds of pretzels
• Four litres of Mountain Dew
• Three massive bags of crisps
• A huge box of Graham Crackers
• A can of Four Loko
• A sixpack
• Three random sandwiches from the nearby deli
• Absolutely no water whatsoever

I Got Off Lightly

Come the Tuesday, I was able to get on a coach and get the hell out of Dodge with nary a pair of soiled boxers. But it could have been worse. People in North Carolina died. And dinner plans with the wonderful Mr Chefelf were abandoned when his house got flooded, his brand new car got drowned and washed away, and his power got taken out for the week. So yeah, my touristy ass could suck it up.

ADDENDUM: Later on in the trip, as I was eating breakfast in another state, Fox News was on again. And for the entire meal, the only thing they reported on was former president George “bomb the towelheads” Bush playing a charity golf game. A short interview, and a long section of him knocking balls around. Hard hitting journalism!

So those Americans, huh? Seems like any blogger of a particular bent (ie, British and frantically ripping off 2003-era Yahtzee as hard as possible) find the folk of the western continent a fine source of comedy, with their shoveling burgers into their mouths and blowing up Middle Eastern countries to steal their oil. It’s a fine source of comedy, much beloved of blog posts made under this URL for many years.

Only, I’m a bit less inclined to think that these days. For a start, I grew the fuck up a bit. Then, I visited America for two weeks, stumbling around the east coast a bit before cooking myself in Arizona. I then lurched home in a long-distance relationship with a woman I’d met there. So at this point, I’m a lot further in bed with American culture. Quite literally, in some cases. Meow!

So, with said aforementioned woman coming over in a fortnight, and with another trip over to the sandy deathhole well documented, my thoughts turn to my adolescent prejudices about the US of A, and how well they stack up. And how well they make for a good blog post. What did I think, and what have I learned?

The President Is An Idiot

Turns out, that only really counted with a Republican president. And while I get that Obama’s not the godlike figure America made him out to be, and might as well be as shady as every other damn politician, he’s a damn sight better than the clown troupe gathering under the sign of the elephant. I’m reminded of the Silly Party vs. Sensible Party sketch Monty Python did, only it’s the Slightly Bad Party vs. the Saturday Morning Cartoon Villain Party. Just as pointlessly cruel, just as disorganised and hopeless.

lol, politics.

Low-carb Diets (Atkins/Keto)? WTF?

Back in the days before I know what a PHP include tag was, when CSS was the noise a water snake made, and when Photoshop was where you got your film developed, Less Is More was a much worse website. On this terrible website, I made a post about how stupid the Atkins diet was. I made many fat American jokes, and drew a pair of fangs onto Dr. Atkins. It wasn’t high-brow material.

And really, without knowing better, it made sense. A diet where you ate nothing but meat, and bread was an enemy? What the fuck? That sounds like the kind of diet you make up when you’ve tried the “eat three beetles and a celery stick every hour” diet, and have just said “fuck it”. Also, pandering to fat American jokes.

So a wry eyebrow was raised when my woman told me she was on a hybrid of Atkins and keto. And that wry eyebrow got wiped off my face when she lost 15% of her body weight in eight months. And she’s still going. Turns out, even the wackiest diet will work if you goddamn stick to it. And a diet geared to burn off fat because there’s nothing else to burn, while remaining delicious, helps with the sticking to it part.

Your Beer Is Terrible

To be fair, this is still slightly true. My first exposure to beer was Budweiser… and I don’t need to carry on. Piss-weak, piss-flavoured, suitable only for the ignorant. The finest produce of America. No British beer would be so pale and pathetic!

Well, until you remember that we make Carling, which is basically the same beer, with “redneck” subbed out for “football hooligan”. And god help me, I drank that piss all through my student years. Then I grew up, and discovered real beer with flavours.

And it turns out even America isn’t that fond of its Buds, Millers and Coors. Everyone I met on my trip ‘cross America made it a priority to get the Brit to the best American breweries on hand, to drink beer that was more eclectic, flavourful, and enjoyable than many English brews.

Notably, when I went to Canada to see your friend and mine, Heccubus, he went for “get the Brit blind drunk on something that tasted like ginger beer”, so draw what conclusions you want from there.

Massive Portions, Massive People

Well, of course. Fat American jokes are par for the course with wry British humour. Both figuratively and literally, it’s a very easy target to hit. And powering through my favourite YouTube channels doesn’t paint a flattering picture why. Big fat, big portions, big people, ho ho ho!

Wellll… this one’s a bit awkward, but it’s fair to say my stout figure was definitely better masked in many places in America than it is in England. But in many other places… it wasn’t. Turns out that four thousand miles and better McDonalds advertising doesn’t automatically turn everyone into the people from WALL-E.

As for portions… I could have done with seeing less people who were incredibly generous with their cooking, if I wanted to reinforce some stereotypes. And even the portions in restaurants weren’t that big. In fact, my average meal size for the trip dropped about a pound when the Heart Attack Grill in Arizona closed a week or two before I got there. I was looking forward to a four layer burger deep-fried in lard. At this point, 17 year-old Andy would be checking to see if I was wearing a cowboy hat.

Massive hurricanes do not sweep through New York

Well, it was very surprising when it happened while I was there!

So I’m taking a trip to America in September, because despite visiting Arizona twice now, I clearly can’t get enough of endless arid desert and horse-boiling temperatures.

I left booking the tickets way too late, and instead of some nice, cheap and direct flights, I’m spending a fortune to dither around with connections for way too long. And when I finally booked my tickets, I made the mistake of looking to see what the hell I was paying for. Listed in no order apart from  what scanned best, here’s where my hard earned money’s gone:

Base Fare (includes U.S. Tax)

OK, this one’s not particularly funny. Turns out you really need to pay money to fly on a plane, and the government does like money. No big surprises, fair game. But apparently, taxes aren’t as all-encompassing as you think they are. For example, let’s jump straight at the elephant in the room…

U.S. September 11th Security Fee

Yes, those fine folks who work at Delta are working hard to keep you safe from rampaging September 11ths that might try and assail your flight. Nothing ruins a good flight like a hoarde of September 11ths throwing milk everywhere and hitting the flight attendants with in-flight magazines. And such a bargain at £5!

OK, super serious now. What else am I paying for?

United Kingdom Passenger Service Charge

Well, I suppose it makes sense that both ends of the international flight ask for a little funding to grease the wheels. Fair enough, I’m OK with kicking some funds back home so I can get back home when I’m done. What’s next?

United Kingdom Air Passenger Duty

Erm… alright, apparently we need to be charged twice. For UK passenger duty? I’d be quite happy to wave the charge, and just spend the flight maintaining a stiff upper lip and not mentioning the war to any Germans on the flight. Or saluting the Union Jack, or drinking tea or whatever the cool stereotypes of Brits are these days.

Carrier-imposed International Surcharge

So Delta are charging me extra because it’s an international flight? Fair enough, I suppose. But I wonder if they missed the part where they’d already charged me for taking an international flight… by selling me an international flight. It’s not quite paying for the same thing twice, but it’s definitely like having 10% added to your restaurant bill because of the You Ate Food Tax.

Passenger Facilities Charge

However, we do have plenty of room for being charged twice. What facilities are there that aren’t covered in the base fare? Is this stealthily charging for food and branded napkins? The American version of Ryanair’s toilet fees? Is there a sex dungeon built into a 747? Who the hell knows?

Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service Fee

“I have some plants and animals, Mr TSA Man!”
“Let’s take a look then… yep, they seem to be healthy.”
“Why thank you very much for taking a look at them!”
“My pleasure, it’s just a part of the job to keep tabs on the health of your goats and swiss cheese plants. Nothing else going on at this airport. No planes or anything. Oh no.”

U.S. Custom User Fee

I’d be quite fine with the Default User Settings Fee if it’s a bit cheaper, you don’t need to do anything special for me.

U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Fee

And now they seem to have gotten confused. Perhaps the part where I booked a return flight got lost, and Delta thinks I’m staying behind and becoming an American citizen. Well, I can’t afford the eighteen billion dollars I’ll need to get health insurance, and I’m not interested in a diet of 90% corn products, so I’ll pass, and be delighted to take a few hundred pounds back.

It’s the Jubilee bank holiday weekend here in Britain, and the entire country is luxuriating in the glorious weather to celebrate the sixtieth year of the Queens ascension to the throne. Even I, misanthrope though I might appear, have departed my dingy abode to party in the streets and oh who am I kidding? It’s raining, I remain at best apathetic about the Queen, and my contribution to the jubilation was eating some scones on Friday, and eating some roast pig tomorrow.

What I was hoping to do with my four day weekend was spend some time trampling around the countryside looking behind trees and in hedges, in a way designed to provoke curiosity from the watching yokels. When questioned, I would tell them “I’m geocaching! Look!” and wave a tupperware box in their face until they left me alone.

Since I’m not doing that, and it’s raining like an Old Testament god has hit the Reset button, I thought I’d write about it instead. Otherwise, I’ll just spend all day playing Amorphous Plus or something.

Geocaching can be boiled down a few ways.

• Treasure hunting with GPS units
• Rambling with mission objectives
• The hidden object finding minigames in Grand Theft Auto / Saints Row, only in real life
• Spending half an hour looking at a hedge trying to work out if the clue you have is stupid and badly-written, if you’re stupid and got it wrong, or if you’re looking at the wrong bloody hedge entirely

Here’s the listing on the website. If you click that image, you might just see the stuff I mentioned – a name, some co-ordinates, and a description. The little icon by the name suggests it’s a bog-standard find-a-box cache – no puzzles, multi-stage caches, webcams or what-have-you. You also have a size readout (Small is sandwich-box size) and a difficulty and  terrain measurement. Both are 1.5, which means it’s basically a flat pavement where you’ll stumble over the cache just by visiting the co-ordinates. A flat 5 and 5 usually suggests it’s hidden in the Fortress of Solitude, or in Dr Evil’s volcano base surrounded by magma elementals.

Or, y’know, just up a mountain, or underwater, or on the International Space Station. Whatever.

There’s also the hint, which is usually encoded in ROT13, and intended to be translated at the cache if you’re having trouble. That comes way too close to puzzle solving for my latently-ADD mind, so I just click Decode as soon as I visit the cache listing.

Armed with this knowledge, I plug the co-ordinates into my satnav unit, hop on my bike, and set out for the cache. I’m not posting a map, you can search the Geocaching website if you’re desperate to have a map of near-where-I-live. Eventually, I come to this point.

See if you can find the location of the cache in this picture. Hint: if you looked at the pictures above it, it’s kinda obvious.

So now we’ve found the cache, what’s inside it? Listed clockwise from the top left:

• The lid of the cache. Helpfully labelled “Geocache”, just in case you didn’t get the memo. Or were wondering what this box was, inside a tree stump you were intently searching through.
• A piece of paper explaining Geocaching, which basically says “don’t move this fucking box, damnit”.
• A Playmobil figure attached to a dogtag. More on this in the Appendix to this article.
• The cache itself, including a pencil, and some toys you can take if you swap them for something cooler. I don’t do this, because I’m one of only about thirty geocachers in the world who doesn’t go caching with his damn kids.
• The log book. You sign this to prove you’ve actually found the cache, and aren’t just the hiking version of a comment spammer going “FIRST!!!1″

Back on the internet! It’s a nice long form. There’s a drop down for saying you found it, where you can also say you didn’t find it, that it’s full of water and a dog ate it, or just that you’re leaving a friendly note. You can describe your experiences finding the cache, or just write “TFTC” (thanks for the cache, of course), if the idea of typing scares you. You can also post your find to Facebook, like I do to annoy all my friends, and post about the Trackables you’re carrying around (again, more in the Appendix). And then you’re done, have visited somewhere interesting, and get a smiley face on your Geocaching profile.

Maybe not such a fun sounding hobby? It does require an odd confluence of likes to enjoy – the love of hiking and the great outdoors of the Scout-type person, with the secret object finding and 100% completionist tendencies of the video gamer.

As a bonus, it’s a hobby you can interweave with just about anything else you do. Go hiking anyway? Find a route with caches and go nuts! Got a business meeting in London? There’s at least a thousand caches there. Visiting a friend on the other side of the country? Visiting another country? Going on a scientific mission to Antarctica? Are you a fucking astronaut? The only reason there isn’t a geocache on the moon is that NASA gave that  up when Russia stopped playing the international penis-measuring game.

So yeah, you may or may not want a go, but at least I have something I can link to when people ask “wtf is a geocache” when I list twenty of the buggers after a hard afternoon’s trampling through mud.

APPENDIX: TRACKABLES

The part I most enjoy about geocaching is moving around trackables. There’s two sorts: tracking bugs, which are dogtags with tracking codes you can strap to anything, and geocoins, which are awesome pre-made coins with tracking codes on them. You move them around between caches, and try and complete the owner-set mission. I’ve handled bugs that have come from New Zealand, and sent out ones of my own that have made it to Dubai. It’s pedantically awesome.

The one I found in the cache was a bug deployed by a Dutch family, that’d been missing for six months until I found it. I’d have worked it into the article properly if I’d known about it before taking the screencaptures. I left behind a little wooden aeroplane, and didn’t leave a worm that’s headed for America. Again, I find it awesome, but it’s definitely a lot more straight than my normal things-I-like. And running out of words. Bye everyone!

I don’t have a brilliant knack for reviewing, mainly because I’m terrible at describing things. Colleagues have learned that stammering and gesticulating accompany any description of anything I give, and heaven help you if I don’t have a pointy stick to gesticulate with. But beer is a thing I know a few small things about. So we’ll kick off my first beer review with a stupid video:

For those who weren’t at university with me, that was my reaction to seeing a beer called Sharp’s Doom Bar on the menu at a Weatherspoons about five years ago. This does not convey any qualitative information about the beer, mainly because a.) I didn’t try it b.) I was already drunk.

But I’ve had half an eye out for a bottle since then, to no avail. Until about a month ago, when a quick trip to the local cornershop (in no way a Little Waitrose, oh no, I’m totally not that posh >.>) had a row of them on a shelf. So I went straight for a bottle, abandoned whatever else I was buying to get it home… and then left it, thinking “that’d be a cool thing to Youtbe/blog about”.

And now I’m doing both!

A bottle of... *ahem* DOOOOOOM BAAAAAAAAAAAR!

See the outstanding quality of my cameramanship, as I film my crotch for five whole seconds! Relish in the outstanding audio, as my camera’s mic pics up almost nothing! And marvel at my editorial skills, as I forget to edit the video to solve any of these problems!

Well, to be fair, I am drinking the rest of the beer as I write this. And… turns out a funny name was the most astounding thing I could think of about it. Not to say it’s bad – it’s a very good beer, lacking the overt bitterness I was expecting from my presumptions, and having a pretty good flavour. It’s just not very astounding.

That’ll do, student me, that’ll do. You can carry on not getting laid and wasting my money not getting a good degree now.

OK, so we’re at least pretending I’m working on a regular writing schedule. Naturally when this happens, my first instinct is to reach for the terrible ideas that I’ve been hoarding in the “man, if only I ever updated my blog, that’d be cool” file. And now I’m updating it, here’s the first one!

So it’s not a big spoiler that I currently work as a copywriter for a toy retailer, mainly because I’m apparently now an adult and am obliged to tell anyone who’ll stay still about work. But this line of work has meant that I need to know way, WAY too much about the kind of… what we’ll call entertainment, that all the kids these days like indulging in when listening to their hippedy hop music. There’s lots of ways I can milk this for your entertainment and amusement, but for today, let’s start by picking on the dumbest elements of Ben 10.

Our brave protagonist, before he realises he can't actually fly.

Now Ben 10 is your everyday sort of eight year-old boy wish fufillment fare: a young boy finds a watch that’s so high tech it might as well be magic, that lets him turn into alien warriors, then starts fighting alien invaders, giant robots, and (for some reason) mercentile templar knightly orders. Ragging on the base concept is like kicking a puppy, so let’s talk about these aliens.

Following on with the wish-fufillment theme, the magic watch is plenty of big muscly aliens that could totally beat up Biffer Zonkins when he takes your lunch money, as well as fast ones, hard ones, massive stony ones, etc etc. And then there’s Alien X.

You can tell by the name it’s something stupid, right? And you’re right. Alien X is your stock nigh-omnipotent character, “ able to warp reality and time/space itself, becoming nearly invincible”. Thanks to the Ben 10 wiki for that line, and remind me to write about wikis another time. Naturally, it’d be a very boring show if one alien could do everything, so they built in a weakness, of course. And that weakness?

Erm…

Alien X (and his entire species) has split personalities. He literally can’t do anything without a majority of the personalities agreeing to do it. So if they’re in a funny mood, then no matter disintegrating rays for you, you’re not even walking around.

Yeah, just a little dumb here.

The face of utter, utter evolutionary redundance.

Bear in mind that any aliens Ben 10 has access to are actual alien species that have evolved, developed sentience, and been actual functioning creatures before being scanned by his magic watch. All the rest of them make sense as creatures (the strong alien developed on a warrior planet, the fast alien needed to hunt quickly, and the clockwork alien evolved to help Bandai expand the toy line). A schizophrenic demi-god who can’t even tie his shoelaces without having a ten-hour brainfart is not the sort of thing Darwin would be entertained by.

And it gets worse once you actually study these personalities. The default in-box personalities are “a voice of rage and aggression”, a “voice of love and compassion”, and… a ten year old boy who isn’t there when the aliens are out in the wild. So quite how the TWO basic personalities decide a MAJORITY of anything I’ll never know, let alone that they’re quite literally as opposite as can be. And just to compound the evolutionary pointlessness, they’re apparently millenia old, and still arguing about whether to save the goddamn dinosaurs.

Apparently, Ben has hacked his magic watch to lock away the stupid crazy alien to stop him accidently turning into Alien X, and being left standing around looking gormless when evil space pirahna are eating his girlfriend. When a ten year old boy has realised you’re a goddamn liability, it’s time to step back and re-evaluate how useless your species is.

Wasn’t that worth waiting for, everyone? Join me again soon, where I talk about how Mega Bloks encourage xenophobia or something.