Three Strikes: Week 5

What is Three Strikes? 

Guess how many times I've been to the gym this week? Go on, guess.

Yep. Not once. I'm having an awesome Christmas break though: The 25^th I spent at my sister's husband's parent's place. She got married in the summer, so it was the first Christmas with them. A good day. I've had a few decent nights out with friends through the week, despite previous fallouts here and there. The best friends remain so, though, and I intend to keep it that way.

I finished Antony Burgess' Tremor of Intent, a novel so good it's sickening. Written in the 1960s, it tells of a spy sent abroad to bring back a defected colleage. There's just a couple of problems- he's utterly crap at keeping his cover and is revealed numerous times by a plethora of equally unscrupulous characters, most of whom are possibly spies themselves. Also, he has a tendency to chuck his lunch up for numerous reasons. It's brilliantly written, although I had to look up words on nearly every page. This was either because of my own apparently insufficient vocab or because these words have now fallen out of the lexicon.

While we're on the subject, check out the Dictionary.com app on the Google Playstore. Very handy for definitions on the go. But back to the script: Tremor is well worth a read if you want to sample Burgess' NadSat-free prose. 

One thing I'm learning on this Three Strikes project is the art of spontaenity. I try to write these posts on Sundays and upload them on the same day, without “sleeping on them” first. There's always a little hesitancy within me, a feeling that I'll spot some glaring error tomorrow morning with fresh eyes- after I've uploaded it and shared it over social networks. But I'm learning that, “so what if I do?” I can still change it. I'm finding I don't actually make that many mistakes, and that there just isn't the time to worry about these things. I'm 30 and there's too much I need to do in life.

Still Waiting

Here's a poem I wrote a few years back during a period of longing. Let's just say I no longer am.

I think about it every day.

It's supposed to be an amazing experience.

I'm twenty-eight, and I still haven't done it.

Everyone I know already has.

Some say it's not as good

as people make it out to be.

But I don't care.

I just want to know for myself.

Yes…

I really must get to Nando's.

Curry-tastrophe

Taking Fluffy's advice, I took on Delia Smith's How to Cook, supposedly much simpler than Keda Black's Classics. I had a go at the first recipe, “Egg and Lentil Curry with Coconut and Pickled Lime.”

Contrary to Fluffy's suggestions, this recipe was hard. Incredibly hard. Largely because the numerous obscure ingredients weren't stocked by Tesco. (What the SHIT is “lime pickle juice”? And which oil is flavourless?) Or at least, the Huddersfield Road branch, the largest in the North West, didn't have any of these oddities. They also had no creamed coconut, and tyically I forgot to write down every bizarre ingredient necessary for the meal. Fennel seeds, coriander and groundnut oil all got left off.

If Delia had laid out her recepies with not just a list of ingredients but a list of untensils required as well, this would have been easier. I don't own a zest peeler, so getting said shavings from the lime was a huge ballache. I'd have gone and bought one before starting cooking, instead of clumsily using a cheese grater.

Towards the end of the recipe, Delia drops this phrase in- “serve with rice.”

Thanks, love. You could have fucking put it in higher up in the instructions. It's a bit late now.

I also felt that Delia's method of instruction to be awkward. A full paragraph of how-to information is difficult to read, especially when you're to-ing and fro-ing from book to hob to ingredients. Why not put the instructions in bullet points like Keda Black does? Am I the only person who'd find this much easier?

I'm just pissing and moaning about the process now. The eggs cracked mid boil. Shelling them took ages and I still left bits of shell on, as I found mid-eat.

The verdict? Too dry. Too spicy. So bad I actually couldn't finish it.

So, an all-round disaster of a meal, basically. Not least because I scratched my balls after handling the chopped chillis. You do not want to do this.

I've had a look at the next meal in How to Cook and it looks considerably easier (and tastier). So I'll stick with it for the moment. But even including secondary school home-ec abominations, this was by far the worst meal I've attempted to cook.

Three Strikes: Week 4

It does not matter how slowly you go, so long as you do not stop.

-Confucius

What is Three Strikes?

I made a few steady improvements at the gym this week:

Cable crunch with rope up 1 notch to 13.

Pec deck up 2 to 14.

Squats with weights up 1 to 18.

Pulley cross (punching outward with the pulley machine) up 1 to 4.

Got a free haircut at Oldham College. Check out Salon 7, the college's Hair and Beauty department, if you're local. If you're not, why not get a free / heavily reduced haircut at your local college, and give something back to your community? The chance of them “doing a Britney” is pretty minimal, and life's about taking risks.

With it now being Christmas, there's another risk I'm likely to take: not hitting the gym at all and becoming monstrously obese. I think you know what the Week 5 post will read like... I'll have to take Confucius' advice and do a few press-ups between the pissups.

The 'Dam

Here's a writing exercise that I performed back at the end of October. I subsequently lost the hand-written copy under a pile of mail and paper- until this week.

Organiser Oz brought in a series of photographs from glossy magazines as prompts. The pictures had been folded in at the edges, showing only a part of the picture. We picked one from which we took inspiration and scribbled out a vignette. I picked this picture:

I guessed (correctly) that it was a shot of Amsterdam. I didn't get as far into the scene as I'd hoped before the 10-minute timer blew, but I scribbled out this:

It looked like a stamp, only a little bigger. It had been perforated before it was torn off a bigger sheet and slammed into my hand. I would never do this kind of thing back home.

Honest.

“You just put it on your tongue,” Murphy said.

I looked around for police, some of whom would have been British I think. It might be the 'Dam, but it's not a free-for-all out here.

No police were around as far as I could see, although I'd already sank numerous Goldschlagers, so that was questionable. Just the canal, not looking that different to Saddleworth or anywhere else back home if you dropped in a few crumbling office blocks.

And on the subject of dropping, I thought...

I pressed the tab onto my tongue and sucked. It tasted like brown paper.

“Okay,” I said, and zipped up my coat. “To the pub.”

Reed and Chan were already sniggering, waiting for me to do something more ridiculous than usual. We started walking, the November air startign to feel like cold fingers smearing something on my face.

“Don't let me fall in the canal,” I mumbled, although I already couldn't tell if my voice was audible.

The buildings were starting to distort, like someone had sprayed a hosepipe over the window of my vision. I pictured the yuppies stumbling down their melted staircases on the way to work.

Try picking out a few unusual pictures and cropping them to obscure the scene portrayed. See how your group interprets the reduced pictures.

Blade Runner Inspires Freemasons

The Freemasons' new house track Tears sounds like an absolute blinder. Only the preview is available right now.

Notice that the lyrics appear to be inspired by Ridley Scott's SF masterpiece, Blade Runner. Have a listen to Roy Battye (Rutger Hauer) and his classic unscripted monologue about his well-travelled replicant memory.

That is, of course, unless it's some really well-known phrase that I only know of in these two examples. Anyone?

The track will be out in February on Freemaison. I'm looking forward to hearing it drop.

Three Strikes: Week 3

Hmm. Here are the week's minor improvements:

Pec deck up 2 notches

Squats with weights up one weight.

Isn't clear how much each plate or dumbell weighs at Oldham Sports Centre as every plate / dumbell is numbered and doesn't appear to reflect the actual weight- in kilos or otherwise.

Away from the gym, I've helped a student with a week-long survey about what I eat, I've visited relatives in Essex and I've finished my Christmas shopping surprisingly early. There are still big challenges ahead (I'm still learning to cook new meals and, erm, don't have a girlfriend) but, clearly, things happen one step at a time.

Oh, and I finally put the star ontop of my Christmas tree.