Kebabs

26 Sep 2008

The British answer to the late-night drunken pizza order seems to be the kabab shop.  These things are everywhere, possibly more predominant than burger joints, and have even more questionable quality products.  Almost without exception, I have never seen a crowd outside a kebab shop at anytime other than late on a Friday or Saturday night.  There is one, however, that is fairly near my flat and happened to be the source of my very first meal in the UK and I happened to swing by around dinner time and grab dinner to go.  The food is tasty, the floors are clean and the prices are reasonable which makes for a good take away in my book.

In any case, kebab shops usually offer something called a doner kebab which, depending on where you get it, involves a thick flour tortilla, shavings from a roast lamb, and then some or all of the following: salad, chili sauce, chips (that’s “french fries” for the Americans in the room), mayonnaise and some other random items. The most interesting thing about this whole process is that the lamb is on an upright skewer rotating in a half open oven and as the day progresses, more and more is shaved off for the various patron’s kebabs.  By the end of the day, it’s been shaved down to the skewer and a new cut of meat is put on in the morning.

The thing is, these things are quite big and I’ve never been there in the morning when they open (hmm, kebab for breakfast….) but I have this somewhat repulsive image of a full sheep on a skewer in the morning that just gets wheedled down to meat bits by the end of the day.

And with that lovely mental picture… perhaps I’ve just discovered why kebab shops only appear to hungry drunk people.

Who’s is bigger?

25 Sep 2008

There’s a great little startup also based in London called The School of Everything which has the incredibly brilliant concept of allowing anyone to teach anything and have all of the information located in a central place. Want to teach piano lessons? Find students, get listed and charge through the site. Want to offer home yoga classes? Done. Want to be the foremost local teacher on soap carving? Great but don’t expect many people to sign up.

Alex and Henry, the CEOs of Spoonfed know the team over at School of Everything and swung by their office earlier this week for lunch, something which ended up getting a write up in their blog. This post made the rounds through the Spoonfed office today and we of course expected their lunch to have involved some highly intellectual conversation, innovative business initiatives, cutting edge technology… and all that jazz.

Imagine our surprise when the School of Everything blog exposed their true conversation: a debate between whether the School of Everything team or the Spoonfed team has the bigger teapot.

Tea is a big deal in this country.

Veggies

25 Sep 2008

Last night I was quite proud of myself for managing to put together an absolutely delicious meal and I thought I’d share the recipe because it was so simple.

First I sauted broccoli (which had already been cooked in the microwave for two and a half minutes so it wasn’t raw), snap peas and onions in olive oil, garlic, fresh grated ginger, red pepper flakes and soy sauce.  Meanwhile I brought another pot of water to a boil and started cooking egg noodles.

Next, I combined the noodles and veggies to sit together over a very low heat for a few more minutes.  I didn’t have a wok pan but if you did, I suppose this is where you would use it.

After a ridiculously short amount of time I have a very flavourful and surprisingly filling (for being vegetarian) dinner.  I’ve got plenty of ginger and some left over snap peas… I might have to try this one again tonight.

I think it’ll be even better when I add some meat as well. 🙂

God Save the Queen of America

24 Sep 2008

So this is an oldie but goodie apparently throughout Britain but I hadn’t seen it before my flatmate Ann sent it to me at work the other day. I had a good chuckle over this one:

To the citizens of the United States of America from Her
Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

 In light of your failure in recent years to nominate
competent candidates for President of the USA and thus
to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the
revocation of your independence, effective immediately.

Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume
monarchical duties over all states, commonwealths,
and territories (except Kansas,which she does not
fancy).

Your new Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, will appoint
a Governor for America without the need for further
elections. Congress and the Senate will be disbanded.

A questionnaire may be circulated next year to determine
whether any od you noticed.

To aid in the transition to a British Crown Dependency,
the following rules are introduced with immediate effect:
(You should look up 'revocation' in the Oxford English
Dictionary.)

1. Then look up aluminum, and check the pronunciation
guide.  You will be amazed at just how wrongly you have
been pronouncing it.

-------------------
2. The letter 'U' will be reinstated in words such as 
'colour', 'favour', 'labour' and 'neighbour.' Likewise, 
you will learn to spell 'doughnut'without skipping half 
the letters,  and the suffix '-ize' will be replaced by 
the suffix '-ise'.  Generally, you will be expected to 
raise your vocabulary to acceptable levels.  (look up
'vocabulary').
-------------------
3. Using the same twenty-seven words interspersed with 
filler noises such as 'like' and 'you know' is an 
unacceptable and inefficient form of communication. 
There is no such thing as U.S. English. We will let 
Microsoft know on your behalf. The Microsoft spell-checker 
will be adjusted to take into account the reinstated 
letter 'u' and the elimination of  -ize.
-------------------
4. July 4th will no longer be celebrated as a holiday.
-----------------
5. You will learn to resolve personal issues without 
using guns, lawyers, or therapists. The fact that 
you need so many lawyers and therapists shows that 
you're not quite ready to be independent.  Guns should 
only be used for shooting grouse.  If you can't sort 
things out without suing someone or speaking to a 
therapist then you're not ready to shoot grouse.
----------------------
6. Therefore, you will no longer be allowed to 
own or carry anything more dangerous than a vegetable 
peeler.  Although a permit will be required if you 
wish to carry a vegetable peeler in public.
----------------------
7. All intersections will be replaced with roundabouts, 
and you will start driving on the left side with 
immediate effect.  At the same time, you will go 
metric with immediate effect and without the benefit
of conversion tables. Both roundabouts and 
metrication will help you understand the British
sense of humour.
--------------------
8. The Former USA will adopt UK prices on petrol 
(which you have been calling gasoline) of roughly 
$10/US gallon. Get used to it.
-------------------
9. You will learn to make real chips. Those 
things you call French fries are not real chips, 
and those things you insist on calling potato chips 
are properly called crisps. Real chips are thick cut,
fried in animal fat, and dressed not with catsup but 
with vinegar.
-------------------
10. The cold tasteless stuff you insist on calling 
beer is not actually beer at all.  Henceforth, only 
proper British Bitter will be referred to as beer, and 
European brews of  known and accepted provenance will 
be referred to as Lager.  South African beer is also
acceptable as they are pound for pound the greatest 
sporting Nation on earth and it can only be due to 
the beer.  They are also part of British Commonwealth - 
see what it did for them.  American brands will
be referred to as Near-Frozen Gnat's Urine, so 
that all can be sold without risk of further confusion.
---------------------
11. Hollywood will be required occasionally to cast 
English actors as good guys.  Hollywood will also be 
required to cast English actors to play English 
characters.  Watching Andie Macdowell attempt English
dialogue in Four Weddings and a  Funeral was an 
experience akin to having one's ears removed  with a 
cheese grater.
---------------------
12. You will cease playing American football.  There 
is only one kind of proper football; you call it soccer.  
Those of you brave enough will, in time, be allowed to 
play rugby (which has some similarities to American 
football, but does not involve stopping for a rest every
twenty seconds or wearing full kevlar body Armour like a 
bunch of nancies).  Don't try Rugby - the South Africans 
and Kiwis will thrash you, like they regularly thrash us.
---------------------
13. Further, you will stop playing baseball. It is not 
reasonable to host an event called the World Series for a 
game which is not played outside of America.  Since only 2.1% 
of you are aware there is a world beyond your borders, your 
error is understandable.  You will learn cricket, and we will 
let you face the South Africans first to take the sting out 
of their deliveries.
--------------------
14. You must tell us who killed JFK.  It's been driving 
us mad.
-----------------
15. An internal revenue agent (i.e. tax collector) from 
Her Majesty's Government will be with you shortly to ensure 
the acquisition of all monies due (backdated to 1776).
---------------
16. Daily Tea Time begins promptly at 4 pm with proper 
cups, with saucers, and never mugs, with high  quality 
biscuits (cookies) and cakes; plus strawberries (with 
cream)  when in season.

God Save the Queen!

Stay tuned… I’m composing a response to Her Majesty which I hope to have on the blog sometime soon ;).

StumbleUpon

24 Sep 2008

As promised, I want to explain a bit about StumbleUpon which I mentioned with regards to Oh How Lovely! the other day.  This will also give you a bit of an idea of one of the many things I do at work all day.

StumbleUpon is a social bookmarking tool which means that it is a social network (like Facebook or MySpace in that it allows millions of users to connect through shared interests or backgrounds on the same website) based around your favourite sites on the internet.  At it’s most basic, StumbleUpon stores your web favourites and bookmarks online so that you can access them from any computer.  But where things get interesting is when you bring in the rest of the social network.

When you register with StumbleUpon, you enter your interests and install their toolbar to your web browser (which adds another row of buttons to the top of your screen when you’re on the internet).  That toolbar includes a little graphic that looks like this: and when you click that button you are taken to a random page on the internet that someone else who is a member of the site had added to their list of favourite bookmarks and tagged with an interest of yours.

For example, let’s say that I discovered a page on this blog, saved it to my favourites on StumbleUpon and tagged it with the word ‘London’ (you need to provide tags for all bookmarks you save).  Then, let’s say you registered for StumbleUpon and listed ‘London’ as one of your interests.  When you click the button, you might see my page appear on your screen – simple as that!  Of course it gets a bit more complicated… in the tool bar you can give sites a or which makes it more or less likely that others will see it again.

Where this all gets very interesting is when you look at how StumbleUpon can be used from a marketing perspective.  With millions of people out there using the button, you want to make sure your page appears when they are looking for interesting sites.  It’s a very simple way to reach people who are interested in your content who may never have heard of your website.  On Spoonfed, we have hundreds of articles including great music reviews, writeups of art exhibitions, theatre commentary and more that’s not necessarily unique to London – we’d like people around the world to start noticing our quality content.

StumbleUpon has a pretty smart algorithm and you can’t just favourite your own site thousands of times hoping other people will see it.  The more diverse your own account is, with lots of different favourite sites from a number of interest groups, the more likely it is that a new find will appear to lots of other Stumblers.

Confused? The important things are that StumbleUpon lets you save your bookmarks online so that you, or any of your friends, can always access them from any computer AND it helps you find sites throughout the internet that match your interest but you may never have heard of.  Keep clicking around and if you see The Top Floor Flat or Spoonfed pages appear, be sure to give me a !