I went wine tasting for the first time this weekend.
Like many people who don't drink I long considered it...well...look, we know the kind of people who get way into their wine. I don't need to describe them.
I almost went tasting last year; I was in the tasting room when someone in the party told me "drinking wine is about growing up and refining your pallet."
And I was like, uh, hell to the no.
So this weekend we tried it again.
You know what, for my money, it tastes like sour grapes.
Annie says it tastes like mushrooms & vinegar.
I don't get how someone can get away with describing a bottle as having the scent of "roofing tar".
1) How is that appetizing?
2) roofing tar has a distinctive smell, and that wine did not smell like it.
(That being said, that was a yummy wine. I think it was the last wine where the taste mattered.)
So, after nursing a pretty gnarly hangover this morning, I've decided that wine isn't all bad. I can see drinking it with a meal. I'll go to more tastings. But I don't know if I can drink it for fun.
Also, dessert wines are totally delicious.
I struggled getting started writing this week's 90MM because I don't actually have the vocabulary to describe The KLF.
I started off trying to write something comparing them to that scene in [insert name of practically any teen movie here] in which the cool kids are pretending to agree with the uncool kid but actually they're just taking the piss out of them - but that didn't quite work.
Then, worrying that I was revealing a bit too much of my not-so-secret enjoyment of trashy teen movies, I thought about Marcel Duchamps and his dubbing of a urinal 'art' and what it meant when one of the leading lights of art starts, if not rejecting the concepts but at least examining the more self-evident absurdities.
Then I started off on a tract about style-vs-fashion and how some people are able to make whatever they do look good no matter what.
What it comes down to though is that Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty in their incarnations as The KLF, The Kopyright Liberation Front/Kings of the Low Frequencies, The Jams, the Justified Ancients of Mummu, The Timelords, The K Foundation, One World Orchestra, 2K etc etc managed to simultaneously mock the whole music and art industry whilst also changing the entire face of the industry and putting out storming, anthemic tracks like this
and this
They practically invented the modern bootleg with "Whitney Joins The JAMs" whcih mashed "Mission: Impossible" samples with Whitney Houstons "I wanna dance with somebody". Then, as The Timelords they deliberately wrote a nauseatingly catchy "lowest common denominator, something that Timmy Mallet would understand" song which took samples from Doctor Who and crashed them into Garry Glitter's "Rock and Roll (Part 2)" and The Sweet's "Blockbuster!" with the explicit intention of getting a number 1 single. Which they did with "Doctorin The Tardis". Then they wrote a book called "The Manual (How to have a number 1 the easy way)" which told you how they did it and gave the guarantee that if you followed the book to the letter and didn't get a number 1 they'd refund the cost of the book.
They 'retired' in the most spectacular form possible - at the 1992 Brit Awards they performed a live "violently antagonistic performance" of "3 A.M Eternal" in front of "a stunned music-business audience" with crust punk group Etreme Noise Terror. Prevented from throwing buckets of Sheep entrails over the audience a bekilted Bill Drummond theatrically limped on stage and fired blanks from a machine gun into the air
After which they burnt their last million pounds on the Isle of Jura and filmed it.
Every time someone tries to tell you that Green Day or Limp Bizkit or Sum 41 or god-forbid Avril Lavigne are punk I want you to think of this. I'm not saying that their music is bad necessarily I'm just saying that if some one tries to straight faced tell you that those or similar artists are "punk" then I want you to cock slap them. I want you to physically either punch them in the penile or vaginal area and/or lay about their face with your penis or other similarly degrading appendage - work with what both you and they have people. Get creative. Make sure they REALLY TRULY understand.
Because it's important.
Except when it's not.
It appears that Fedora 12 moved to a new boot init system called dracut. Sadly due to a number of odd circumstances this has caused me much pain. Here's my basic config
- /boot and / on /dev/sda
- /var and /home on a partitioned software raid on /dev/sd{cd}
# dmraid -r
/dev/sdd: sil, "sil_aiabafajfgba", mirror, ok, 488395120 sectors, data@ 0
/dev/sdc: sil, "sil_aiabafajfgba", mirror, ok, 488395120 sectors, data@ 0
fprintf(stderr, Name ": WARNING %s and %s appear"
" to have very similar superblocks.\n"
" If they are really different, "
"please --zero the superblock on one\n"
" If they are the same or overlap,"
" please remove one from %s.\n",
devices[best[i]].devname, devname,
inargv ? "the list" :
"the\n DEVICE list in mdadm.conf"
rd_NO_MD rd_NO_DM nodmraid
mdadm --zero-superblock /dev/sdd1
# mdadm --manage /dev/md_d0 --add /dev/sdd1
[root@mirth ~]# dmraid -E -r /dev/sdd
Do you really want to erase "sil" ondisk metadata on /dev/sdd ? [y/n] :y
[root@mirth ~]# dmraid -E -r /dev/sdc
Do you really want to erase "sil" ondisk metadata on /dev/sdc ? [y/n] :y
Today in the Twitterverse:
- 19:28 parents should be back from their vacation in Morocco in a few hours - I can hardly wait to see the pics and hear all about it! #
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Since there's a big round number coming up in not much more than a month I've been thinking about what has happened in my life in a DECADE. It turns out quite a lot.
- Married in October, 1999.
- Marriage ended in November, 2004.
- Divorced in May, 2007.
- Friend E murdered in August, 2000.
- Friend S died tragically this month.
- Mom got Leukemia, had a stem-cell transplant, lived.
- Dad got cancer, did a lot of chemo, had surgery, died.
- Got hired thrice.
- Laid off thrice.
- Started 2 businesses.
- Went back to school & got my BA.
- Visited: Texas, Oklahoma, France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, Czech Republic, UK, Mexico, Canada, Virginia...
- Had flings. Dated. For the first time since high school.
- Met and became good friends with my rockstar crush, David Gedge.
- Lots of friends had babies. I chose not to.
- Quit drinking for nearly a year.
- Started therapy.
- Went on anti-depressants for 2 years.
- ... and then weaned myself off.
- Wrote most of a memoir.
- Started blogging.
- Grandma Faye died.
- Grandpa Frank developed alzheimer's.
- Nearly got out of debt, but then got in further.
- Bought a digital SLR camera.
- Started doing yoga.
- Discovered the benefits of "friends with benefits"...
- ...and the non-benefits.
- Got a Meyer's Parrot, Beatrice.
- Fritz the iguana died.
- Paid for my elderly cat to be injected with radioactive iodine.
- Lived through my early-mid thirties.
- Lived alone for only the 2nd time ever.
- Started a record label (make that 3 businesses)
- Discovered the joys of cocaine.
- And then stopped.
- Went from having a job to having a sort-of career.
- Sang karaoke. Never imagined I would like that, but I do.
Today in the Twitterverse:
- 08:57 the sun has just come out - I almost didn't recognize it! #
- 09:49 @so_disenchanted yeah me too - hang in there! <3 #
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