I did my freebie ‘taster’ session this morning, which comes with the enticing offer that if you sign up properly within 24 hours, then the £35 joining fee is waived. I suspect this serves two purposes:

1. You sign up while you are still buzzing from all the endorphins after the taster
2. You sign up before everything hurts a day after the session (I will confirm this tomorrow)

I’m not going to say anything about what I did at the session or what I thought of it, because if I don’t stick at it, then not only will I be out of pocket to the tune of over £100 (by the time you include DD and the running shoes I bought in preparation for it), but I’ll also look like a prize idiot if I write an entry saying how great it was.

So we’ll see how this all goes…

Oh. And it’s all his fault that I went in the first place.

1. TRUE – I am left handed.

2. TRUE – One day when I was 10 or 11 we returned home from school to find a pigeon roosting on my parents bedroom window sill. Peering at him through the window, we could see he had a ring on his leg and he wasn’t a manky urban bird either. We figured he’d disappear soon enough, however after a few weeks, it was clear he was there to stay. So with some care, Dad went up on the ladders, caught the bird, placed him in a cardboard box and drove him to his brothers house 40 miles away. Dad duly released the pigeon. Has was back at the house about 20 minutes after Dad was. So this went on for a couple of months, and every time we visited someone, we’d take the pigeon with us, release him, and he’d be back home soon after. Finally after getting fed up with the amount of poop accumulating on the side of the house, Dad contacted the RSPB and they in turn had a local pigeon racing type person come and collect him. He never came back and I really hope he didn’t end up in a pie :(

3. TRUE – Corin, Jenny, Iona and Aniq all chipped in for my 30th Birthday for me to have a day at Silverstone, which culminated in 5 laps in an awesome 360. Loved it.

4. TRUE – It is still chipped to this day as the veneer fitted soon after kept falling off, so I am waiting for a suitable occasion (and when savings permit) for proper whitening and a crown (done privately).

5. TRUE – The story is too long (for this entry at least) but Giles and I were in Las Vegas in 2003 and went to a gig with Richard Cheese and Lounge Against the Machine. We had emailed him before we left the UK to find out where the hell the casino was (as it was way off the strip) and he then came and talked to us in the show, and we then went back into Vegas with him and the band in the bus (with minibar). More on this another time.

6. TRUE – The left one.

7. TRUE – I was in the 1990 Avon Scout Gang Show.

8. TRUE – I did a degree in architecture at Portsmouth from 1996-99 and left with a third, possibly due to too much time spent having fun and not enough time working. The frustrated architect still lurks within from time to time, but I’m pretty certain that I am better at what I do, than had I been an architect.

9. TRUE – Two of my ex-girlfriends have both subsequently joined the navy. Not as a result of me (I don’t think), but it’s still true.

10. TRUE – One of Dave’s housemates in around 2001 managed to get a summer job at a TV production company and bagged us VIP seats in the crowd for Robot Wars when it was being filmed. We didn’t have to queue outside with the other punters and instead went through to the VIP room where we ate doughnuts and drank tea at one end of the room, while the judges sat there at the other end with their grandchildren doing much the same. We saw the filming of the show and then had a tour of the pit area afterwards and met the teams from Razer, Hypnodisk and the super-awesome Tornado. We couldn’t see the house robots or their operators sadly, as they were a very secretive bunch apparently…

So there you have it. All true! Onto the scores now.

I’ve not added a row for FitForNothing, but I can confirm all matters are unrelated. And I’ve not added a row for Dave, as he is my brother and knows all the answers anyway.

As this is my quiz, I have marked as I see fit, so tough luck if you are unhappy about it.

The winner (as you already know by now) is Hannah, who by taking a chance and guessing they were all true wins it with a clean sheet. Good guessing from AndyC, although, I resent left-handedness being referred to as perverted. JH, I wanted to award you some bonus points, but in the end, you didn’t have the nerve to go through with the “all true” response. And if I gave you bonus points, everyone else would have wanted them too.

Thanks to everyone for reading and commenting :)

(Please keep any bickering in the comments polite!)

1. I am left-handed
2. I had a racing pigeon at home when I was younger
3. I have driven a Ferrari 360
4. I chipped my tooth in a swimming pool aged 16 and it still isn’t fixed
5. I went drinking with a band in Las Vegas after a gig they performed
6. I have a pierced nipple
7. I have performed in a production at the Bristol Hippodrome
8. I started training as an architect, but never quite made the cut
9. I’ve had two of my exes run away to sea
10. I was a VIP guest on Robot Wars

Ok folks, answers in the comments and I will reveal all in the near future.

(And people visiting this from facebook – the comments form won’t bite, it only asks for your email address to discourage spammers and goes nowhere else. Go on, you know you want to…)

2. It takes longer than you’d think to make a hat.

3. I wonder if the Kenco “97% less packaging” coffee pouch can be recycled like the glass jar does? (Sub-question: Is it actually more environmentally friendly, if so, how much?)

Really loving this song at the moment despite the fact that it does remind me a bit of “Wearin’ my Rolex” (Whiley) and “Yeah yeah” (Bodyrox). It’s ok though, as I liked both of those tunes as well :)

And shockingly, I heard the tune before @IHaveaBoomstick did and he is always the one pointing me in the direction of new tunes…

Bring on the summer, festivals, windows open and stereos playing too loud :)

Awesome!

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last month or two, you’ll have noticed that there was a General Election on Thursday. Before you give up on yet another political blog entry as there must be millions out there, I thought I would share with you the split of the votes cast, in my constituency, as shown in the pie chart above.

The percentages that go with this are as follows:

40.8% Conservative
26.4% Labour
25.3% Liberal Democrat
3.1% UK Independence Party
2.7% British National Party
0.9% Green
0.4% Christian Party
0.4% Independent

What find more than a little bit disturbing here is the BNP turnout – if you type 0.027 (i.e. the decimal value of 2.7%) into a scientific calculator and hit the 1/x button, then you get the reciprocal value of the number. (If you want the explanation of reciprocal numbers, go visit Wiki).

But essentially, what this does is tell how many people voted BNP in my area. And disturbingly it works out at 1 in 37 people. I was in the pub on Friday and there were probably 120 people in there… so statistically three considered that the BNP’s views were the best way to vote. There are a hundred houses in my parent’s road… so that is two or three households. If you count the number of flats in my block and houses in the cul-de-sac, it’s roughly 37… You get the picture.

You’ve probably got your own view on the BNP and it’s not for me to say what anyone should or shouldn’t think, but I find those numbers pretty disturbing. Urgh.

My blog on an iPad! Kudos to Omar for the pic.

I was going to write something here about why I’m probably never going to buy anything made by Apple, but I’ve heard they’ve shifted something crazy like a million iPads already and you have to give them credit for that, regardless of your opinion.

(I bet it’s really lovely in real life too)

“Sometimes it’s the simple things. The rest of the time it’s usually Star Wars quotes or internet memes”

I made this up about 2 hours ago. Either rightly or wrongly, I think it sums me up pretty well. Thanks to @stepheneyre who led to it turning up in conversation.

I’ve been wanting to make my own curry for ages, this was my second attempt and I was rather pleased with it. Once you have the spices, the rest is pretty much standard ingredients, which is why I went for it.

Lamb Rogan Josh

Serves 3-4

Ingredients

5 small red, or 2 medium white onions, diced
4 cloves of garlic, crushed
A thumb sized piece of root ginger (about 20g), peeled and finely chopped (fyi: my thumb is 60mm long)
800g diced lamb
2 teaspoons tumeric
6 teaspoons garam masala
4 teaspoons ground coriander
4 teaspoons ground cumin
2 teaspoons chili power (I used hot, because that’s how I roll)
1 tin of tomatoes (chopped, or chop them yourself)
142g of double concentrate tomato puree (i.e. one of the little tins)
1 small 150g pot of natural yoghurt
3 chopped spring onions to garnish (completely optional, but I love ‘em)

Method

1. Heat a some vegetable oil in a large saucepan.
2. Add the onions, garlic and ginger; fry until the onion is soft.
3. Add half the spices and stir in well (I measured all the spices into a seperate container first)
4. Add the lamb, stirring in well.
5. Add the rest of the spices and fry the lamb until it is browned.
6. While the heat is still high, add the tinned tomatoes, tomato puree and yoghurt. Stir well, cover and bring to the boil.
7. Reduce to a low heat, uncover and leave to simmer for at least 90 minutes, stirring every 30 minutes.
8. Taste while cooking and add extra chili if required.
9. Check that the meat is tender, serve and sprinkle the spring onions on the top.

Served with

Rice, a can of Stella 4% and a cheese naan (don’t get excited, it’s just a normal one with grated cheddar on the top, but seriously, you should do this).

Verdict

All good. Tasted like I expected a curry to taste like (i.e. what you’d get when you eat out). Was nice and spicy, but not stupidly hot. I got the recipe from here and only made a few changes to get to the above, as it seemed sensible to use a whole can of tomatoes and a whole pot of yoghurt rather than odd amounts.