I = triumph

There was a disappointing lack of a drum roll. There were no masses waiting in hushed anticipation. There was no post-final interview with Ant and Dec, no follow ups on the talk show circuit and, crushingly, no thumbs up from Chuck Norris*. But all of these things are but follies, because I - living the work + no play = dull boy dream - have managed to complete a videogame for the first time in actual years.

Hey, Call of Duty 4! Not looking so tough now, are ya?

It's not been through lack of trying - I would have completed Halo if my iBook didn't start having seizures whenever more than, say, two enemies appeared on screen. KotOR would be in the books if the aforementioned iBook hadn't literally screamed when an entirely superfluous flying whale appeared on the Jedi Academy planet.

It's at that point that I realised that a three year-old iBook G4 probably wasn't the best choice as a gaming platform.

There are, of course, others.New Super Mario Brothers remains unfinished because I suck at Mario games, Phantom Hourglass would be seeing progress during my commute, if I didn't walk to work, Heavenly Sword would be done if there was actually a game I wanted to play in between the cutscenes.

So I managed to find the time, over the past week or so, to complete COD4's singleplayer (stop laughing at the back). It took me a while to reacquaint myself with a console FPS - after playing a lot of Fifa 08 and Okami and not a lot inbetween - but soon enough I was pop'n'shooting with the best of them. At which point I got executed.

And then killed in a nuclear explosion.

This was after completing the missions. What happens if you fail? You die? Where's my damn carrot?

What was genuinely weird about the experience was the vague guilt I felt when storming ahead of the rest of my squad into room full of enemies, even if it was what I was supposed to do. That, and spending three quarters of the game being called Soap by my CO.

But now it's over, and I am full of win. Just not online - I am truly horrific at multiplayer...

* What is it Mike Huckabee has that I don't, exactly?

NYC 07: The desperate* search for Havana Club

* Not so much desperate. More half-assed.

The history of Cuban rum is a long, impressive, convulated thing. This being the internet, though, I give you the long story short: Castro nationalizes rum production in Cuba; the Bacardi family leg it to Puerto Rico while Havana Club starts producing rum using the old Bacardi stills and facilities. Of couse, the US trade embargo on Cuba means that Havana Club is not available on American soil, so Bacardi took the opportunity to launch their very own Havana Club.

Following this ok?

The Bacardi Havana Club is not available in the UK, primarily because the Cuban Havana Club is, so I thought I'd make use of the couple of days I had in New York to find a bottle, just to see what it was like. After an exhaustive (again, nearer "when I didn't forget when passing one," than "exhaustive") search of Manhattan's liquor stores I had to admit defeat, safe in the knowledge that I had one last shot - duty free.

Or not. Guess I could pick up a litre bottle of Bacardi Limon, though. Or, in the country that's producing some of the more interesting gins on the global market, a bottle of Tanqueray Rangpur. I guess I'll have to settle for hoping that the Bacardi Havana Club tastes better that rum-flavoured vodka rather than knowing.

NYC 07

You should love New York. Every souvenir shop pushes one particular message: I (heart) NY, and when they say "I" they mean "you".

Therefore, you love New York.

They say it so much it must be true. In fact, everywhere you go in the city you get the reinforced message that this is The Greatest City In The World. The stores have the greatest deals, the restaurants have the greatest food, so on.

Whatever happened to "show, don't tell"?

I have to confess that I haven't had too many awe-inspiring moments over the past few days in New York. There are impressive things here, to be sure. There is a little rush of excitement the first time you see the Empire State Building towering above 5th Avenue, likewise the Brooklyn Bridge and Liberty Island in the distance. Times Square is remarkable in its neon tackiness. But these uniquely impressive spots are undermined by the ordinariness of the spaces between.

The overall effect is similar to looking at a Seurat painting - the closer you get, the less cohesive the whole appears. You start to see the disparate individual elements that make up the whole, and sat next to each other in close proximity they don't seem that impressive. Like Seurat's La Grande Jatte you marvel at the beauty of it from afar and at the achievement of creating that beauty from up close. The real New York is not just the New York of popular culture. It is both less than and more than that.

Getting touchy

I'm writing this on an iPod Touch for no reason other than that I can. It's a lovely device, but right now I can't see it as much more than a gadget. It isn't too useful to me outside of a wireless network except as a music player but as far as that goes, it's ticking almost all the right boxes. That said, you can really feel the potential of the hardware. This device is calling out for a port of the classic Lucasarts point-and-click games (Monkey Island et al) and some quality, native (not online, thanks) applications.

Muhahahaha. I have a desk now. So to work.

War Stories: Nor any drop to drink

Thursday afternoon, and someone has decided that the thing to do - right now - is dig a big hole in the floor beside the main bar. What's more, they've decided that once you've started going down there's only one way to go, and cut a water main in the process.

So, while four workmen and five bar staff try to stop the main floor flooding with mops, cardboard boxes and towels, one lucky guy gets to turn off the water supply to the building. Thing is, when you turn of the mains water supply, the sprinkler system sets off the fire alarm. Because the fire alarm has gone off - and this is not, funnily enough, a drill - we have to evacuate the building and wait for the fire brigade to arrive and check the building.

It all goes rather well, all things considered. The fire brigade have a look around, and they're pretty happy that nothing's on fire. So we start letting customers back in to the upstairs bar which is at least dry. On the downside, we still have one bar under an inch of water and no running water anywhere. All of this means we have no draught beers or mixer, and sooner or later the ice machines are going to start complaining. Because the water is off and the sprinkler system has triggered the fire alarm, the gas has shut off automatically and we have no food available, and a table of 25 booked in right about now.

Two and a half hours of bailing water later, we get the bar dry, the pipes fixed, the water back on and we reopen the main bar. Five hours after it all started, we've done four days work and we've still got a hole in the floor.

Spectacular.

War Stories: Fifteen minutes

Really, I'm not going to lie to you. I can't fight. Not in the fisticuffs sense of the word, or at least not well. But tonight - which up to a point had been pretty good, really quiet and on course for cleaning up and home within fifteen minutes of closing - was touch and go for a moment. I served a group of out-of-towners a couple of minutes before we shut the bar. Twenty minutes later they were moaning about having to rush their drinks (we give customers fifteen minutes grace to finish their drinks we close), so we get the manager out and he tells them it's over. Go home. And so it goes for a couple of minutes, we just want them to go so we can go home.

And then someone says something, someone hears something and all of a sudden there's standing up and shoulders being squared and just for a second there's the manager, me and one other guy on the bar and there's four older, slightly drunk but pretty hefty dudes and...

It's over. No drama. Well, no more drama. They shift out, grumbling about the level of customer care , and we all take a deep breath and thank whatever it is we pray to because we don't get paid enough to get hit because someone can't finish a pint in fifteen minutes.

Viva Glasvegas!: Shiny

Viva Glasvegas! celebrates Scotland's own East Coast/West Coast beef, one that's mainly lacking hip hop, violent death and, hell, much of the rivalry

There's an Apple Store opening near me (I say near; it's in Glasgow which is roughly the same distance from Edinburgh as any point of civilisation on the continental United States is from utter fucking wilderness). This is not a good thing, unless you happen to work at said Apple Store and get paid commission on every overdrawn geek you entrap.

Simple, really: stay out of Glasgow, stay out of debtor's prison.

Hurricane Dean

There's a lot of people in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico who won't be making this mistake right now, but everytime I see a reference to Hurricane Dean in the press, I just can't not think of dear ol' Howard.

Clearly there's a demographic that the mineral water industry doesn't cater for: alcoholics. Thankfully, the brains at Diageo are going to fill that void with shiny new Smirnoff Source - "the new premium malt beverage offering...that combines pure spring water with alcohol."

Lovely.

United States of England: There's really no point, is there?

At some point between the apocalyptic thunderstorms that have been lashing Auld Reekie, this year's Edinburgh International Festival Fringe officially kicked off, bringing exciting and diverse entertainments from around the world to our sleep little corner of Scotland. Also, Jimmy Carr.

Let's not forget the most important people in all this: London's Britain's cultural intelligensia who have decamped north en masse to sample pints of ale in Rebus' local, soak up the atmosphere in the world's first City of Literature and get in the way of the locals. The annual occupation more or less renders any coverage we'd be offering on the festival season irrelevant, except for those occasions when lame punning and excessive sarcasm are required, so we're just not going to bother.

A couple of hints, though, for the festival rookie - Spiegeltent is so 2005, all of the good parties are flat parties and you're not invited, and, whatever you do, don't heckle Daniel Kitson.

If you need us, we'll be in the Assembly Rooms Lane Bar.

I'd love to know how you fit that in a fax machine

The Fruitmarket Gallery is hosting an exhibition by Alex Hartley. To celebrate, it appears that they've faxed themselves an annotated version of the building.

The Essential Collection: say what?

I may have mentioned that we've just launched a new cocktail menu at Le Monde, but it's always worth throwing out there. However while the list is pretty big, it can't cover all bases, particularly with regards to classic cocktails. Bearing that in mind, we're getting together a list of all the "essential" classics that aren't on the menu with the intention of tweaking recipes to fit the products we have in stock and getting them put on our tills. All of this, though, begs the question of which cocktails can be considered "essential"?

It can't purely be a question of age. We classified the Margarita as a classic for the menu, even though it doesn't have much heritage before the middle part of the twentieth century, whereas a Martinez* - mentioned by Jerry Thomas in his 1882 bartender's guide, and the forefather of modern Martini - is undeniably a classic cocktail, but given its popularity it is hardly an essential drink for the modern bartender to know.

I foresee a rush on dudes ordering Martinezes (Martinii?) on a Saturday night, just to shut me up.

So, the question remains. Of course, lots of the old school drinks that we couldn't put on the menu will be looked at; the Old Fashioned, the Sazerac, for example, and we'll be taking a long, hard look at the Tiki legacy; the Zombie, the Mai Tai, so on. Clearly we're also going to have to include some drinks from the dark ages of the mid-late 80s - there'll have to be a Sex On The Beach, maybe even the Alabama Slammer (damn you Cruise, damn you) - on the grounds that we will get asked to make them.

I don't have an answer yet. Surely it will lie in the middle ground between history, popularity and quality. I think I'm going to enjoy getting there more than arriving.

* Just in case I do get that rush...

Martinez Cocktail (Jerry Thomas' recipe)
(Use small bar-glass.)
Take 1 dash of Boker's bitters.
2 dashes of Maraschino.
1 pony of Old Tom gin.
1 wine glass of Vermouth.
2 small lumps of ice.

Martinez (Simon Difford's recipe)
2 shots Plymouth Gin
½ shot Cinzano Rosso vermouth
¼ shot Cointreau
¼ shot Gomme syrup
3 dashes Orange bitters (optional)

Shake all ingredients with ice and fine-strain into chilled martini glass. Garnish with a twist of orange zest.

United States of England: doomed

United States of England: because you know you can go further north than Newcastle, right?


Via Londonist.

How to get ID'd

Can I see some ID?

I am a doorman at a neighborhood bar.[...]If you've never done it before, here are some things you might not know about how to interact with guys like me...
[...]
Don't ask me what it's like inside.

I'm out here too, buddy. Your guess is as good as mine

La Rue À Paris, pt 1

The good folks at my day job are getting ready to launch a new cocktail menu for Paris Bar, one of their four bars in the bar/restaurant/nightclub/hotel thingy. The list's been in the works for a couple of months now, and ahead of the official launch on August 2nd, I thought I'd drag out a couple of recipes that almost made it into the final thirty.

Transmetropolitan
- 50ml Skyy Berry vodka
- 10ml Martini Rosso sweet vermouth
- 2 dashes Orange bitters

Stir all the ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled martini glass. Garnish with a flamed orange zest.

This was an attempt to make a slightly more female-friendly martini-style drink, taking the flavour profile of a Cosmopolitan as its inspiration. Looking back, the recipe's a little simplistic, so I had a bit of a monkey around with it...

Transmetropolitan (refit)
- 25ml Absolut Kurrant vodka
- 25ml Absolut Citron vodka
- 10ml Martini Rosso sweet vermouth
- 5ml Cointreau
- 1 dash Orange bitters

Stir all ingredients with ice and strain into chilled martini glass. Garnish with a flamed orange zest.

Keeping with the martinis, I also had a play around with something more consciously...girly, if you like.

Beijing Skyyline
- 25ml Skyy Citrus
- 12.5ml Midori
- 12.5ml Cointreau
- 25ml Apple juice
- 12.5ml Lemon juice
- 12.5ml Cranberry juice

Shake the vodka, Midori, Cointreau, apple juice and lemon juice with ice and fine-strain into a chilled martini glass. Float the cranberry juice over the back of a barspoon, and garnish with a cherry on the rim of the glass.

Unfortunately, it missed the cut because our martini section was getting mighty full. There'll be more recipes from the menu process as we get nearer to launch. Just y'know, to keep you interested...

Headlines: the Seven Wonders of this post

• Frankly, the whole New 7 Wonders is getting a little out of hand - The Scotsman's Brian Helligan offers the Seven Wonders of Edinburgh.


• Edinburgh University will finally have to cope with the dishonour of no longer being associated with famed despot, Robert Mugabe. Shame, really.


• Second Life developers Linden Labs will be represented at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival, rather disappointingly, by regular humans.


• Altogether now: karate CHOP!

Bumbo!

A couple of weeks ago, the stork from Amazon dropped a of Wayne Curtis' And A Bottle Of Rum at Dirty Old HQ (more here) and between that at Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, we got a little carried away. One thing that really jumped out was drink called bumbo (also bombo) , which Curtis describes as "a mix of rum, water, sugar, and a bit of nutmeg".

First of all, a bit of history. Curtis ascribes the name to have come from the British Admiral John Benbow, famed for having his legs blown off during the War of the Spanish Sucession, for reasons that are unknown. Wikipedia suggests that the drink's popularity during the "era of piracy" is down to the fact that it tasted "better than British Navy Grog". Bumbo is one of the original rum cocktails, from the time when a man could say "Arr, me hearties" without being in a movie or wrong in the head.

For our purposes, we decided to combine the basic flavour profile of the old-style bumbo with the slightly more refined technique of a treacle. We've opted for Mount Gay Extra Old for authenticity's sake - Barbados being the cradle of Caribbean rum and all - but any dark, aged rum will suffice.

Bridgetown Bumbo
- 50ml Mount Gay Extra Old
- 2 barspoons Molasses sugar
- 1 cinnamon stick
- 1 nutmeg seed
- 1 dash Angostura bitters

Dissolve the molasses in the base of a mixing glass with the bitters and a touch of water if required. Flake off some of the cinnamon into the glass and add some grated nutmeg. Add a couple of ice cubes and stir. Start adding the rum, little by little, and continue stirring, adding more ice as you go. Don't dissolve the ice completely - the whole process shouldn't take more than a minute or two. Finally, fine-strain the cocktail into an ice-filled Old-Fashioned or Rocks glass and garnish with the remainder of the cinnamon stick.

Flickrdump

Parking spaces can be hard to find in the New Town

Picture from The Scotsman.

"Today there was more than the usual excitement on North Castle Street.

Short version of story is that Car thief/ Joyrider steals car...drives up North Castle Street being hotly pursued by the polis...hangs a left into Thistle Street at speed and loses control...car ends up in the basement area of the building on the corner...My office is just about directly opposite this and I got some photos..."

Check out this Flickr set from graemeandsandra of the fun.

Headlines: proof that smoking wrecks lives

• A tale of woe from Tollcross, as those dastardly smokers force a man to fire his own mother. How do they sleep at night? The nicotine probably helps.


• The Romanov empire continues to expand - soon it'll eclipse the sun with its massed ranks of Lithuanian youngsters and ineffectual Brazilians.

United States of England: Then clearly there's no fire

United States of England: because you know you can go further north than Newcastle, right?

It's been, ooh, what - a year? - since Scotland's smoking ban came into effect. Of course, seeing as the English will be joining the party on July 1st, they're getting all interested. Hope they bring some decent wine this time.

Anyway, the article makes a couple of points that stood out at Dirty Old HQ:

Perhaps more than any other city in the UK, Edinburgh's identity is closely bound up with its dark, gloomy drinking dens - a fug of smoke always having hung inside them alongside the smell of hops and a murmur of Caledonian accents.

The presence of the word "fug" here leads us to suspect that the BBC won't employ a copy editor below the age of 74.

Next up, a quote from our stalwart enforcement officer regarding a friend...

"She worked as a barmaid in working men's clubs from the age of 20," he grimaces. "Never touched a cigarette in her life, but the doctors said they'd never seen a worse set of lungs.

"She was left with two stumps where her legs should have been. I don't have any trouble getting up in the morning when I think of her."

Just make sure that righteous anger ain't pointed at us. More towards to those bastardish, alleged limb-thieving tabacco companies, please.

Weekend Roundup: leading exports - odour, fire engines

Cherry blossoms in the Meadows.

• Why does Norway smell? Oh, it's our fault...


• Only four months late, three lucky Serbian kids get their ideal Christmas present!


• Edinburgh University students still protesting Robert Mugabe's honorary degree; despot still sleeping untroubled.


• Staying with EUSA, the poor students of Edinburgh are going to have do with one less bar, at least for six days of the week.

Edinburgh University: failing to trouble despotic slumber

Seemingly Edinburgh University's decision to review the honourary degree it awarded to Zimbabwean presidespot Robert Mugabe hasn't triggered a rethink from Harare.

Mr Mugabe, 83, will not "lose sleep" over the threats, said George Charamba, his spokesman.
[...]
"It is not like the president suffers a crisis of achievement. He has seven solid degrees, which are more than enough to earn him a living and recognition."

I'm not so sure. I mean, I'd certainly start reconsidering all that land 'reclamation' and electoral fraud if it meant losing the letters after my name. Particularly the ones that spell "tyrant".

Headlines: rights? You ain't got no rights...

• An Edinburgh barman discovers that his First Amendment Rights don't cover threatening to stab customers in the face. Also, we don't have a First Amendment.


• Efforts are underway to attract Arnold Schwarzenegger to Dunbar in September. Kidnapping may work.


• We knew there had to be a reason to keep the Tattoo going - turns out there are 86 million of them.


• We're pretty sure that there's not a lot more to be said about the weekend's sewage uberleak, but A Scandal & A Disgrace's post is worth checking out, if only for Google's targeted ads - Sewage Water / Sewage Plant...


• Tonight: CSS at the Liquid Room; Fujiya & Miyagi, Errors at The Bongo Club (part of Triptych 07).

Headlines: not an approved babysitting technique

• Punch a baby in the face, get nine months in prison. Simply, really.


• Edinburgh city council leader unveils his 10-point masterplan for global domin- sorry, giving Scotland the capital it needs. Hmm? What superiority complex?


• One more time for the hard of thinking, try and stay away from the raw, untreated sewage carpeting the southern shore of the Forth.

Dead by Dawn 07

I had made a New Year's resolution not to write about any festivals that may be happening in Edinburgh, but y'know, 19 horror movies in 4 days is kinda hard to resist. They even schedule a breakfast break in the Saturday/Sunday marathon...

Weekend Headlines: Obviously we couldn't have polluted the Forth during the week

• Scottish Water prove once again that they are teh awesome at screwing shit up.


• Pagans of the East Coast rejoice! This year's Beltane festivities have begun with...um...a photo exhibition.


• Another free daily newspaper aims to emulate the Daily Record Edinburgh PM's success at accumulating stacks of unwanted recyclable material.


• Living in the capital isn't getting any cheaper - only the 173% increase in the past decade.


• Someone, somewhere, seems to think that bringing Edinburgh and Glasgow closer together is a good idea.


• There is a suspicion that professional rugby union in Scotland might not be working quite as well as it could.


• Old Town requires saving from dastardly "redevelopment"; pervert-suited hero possibly required.

Headlines: file under "hopelessly optimistic"

• The City of Edinburgh Council "unanimously" backs a plan to revamp the Grassmarket which does not, curiously, include banning 14 year olds from learning to be alcoholics.


• Edinburgh is the only UK city to be voted into the top 10 travel destinations by users of Expedia. (Interestingly enough, I can't seem to find a reference to this story on the Expedia site...)


• Looks like Tigerlily and Bramble were the big winners at last night's Theme Awards, although we're still awaiting official confirmation...


• Incoming music goodness: Mark Eitzel at Cabaret Voltaire, Thursday from 7pm; The Go! Team at Mansfield Traquair Centre, Friday from 8pm.

Today's headlines: special political theme edition

• Hey, what's another £35k when you're already spending £1.9m on spin doctors?


• We can add dodging TV licences to the list of things Scotland excels at; right behind obesity and short life expentancy.


• For those too lazy to leave the house, the postal vote registration deadline is looming.

The only thing worse than bagpipes...

...are bagpipes played at full blast in tartan-clad tourist traps, a view I seemingly share with anonymous Old Town residents.

If I hear Highland Cathedral one more time I think I'll scream," she said.
[...]
The owners of the gift shops today defended the practice, saying it was an important part of promoting their wares and denied the music was too loud.

Link

Another day, another festival

It's Tuesday which means, of course, that it's about time to start preparing yourself for another Edinburgh festival. This time, it's wine.

The Edinburgh International Wine Festival launches next month. It aims to build on the Scottish capital's long-standing position as one of Europe's leading importers of fine French wine.

Hotel owner James Thomson, one of the founders of the festival, which is sponsored by broadsheet Scotland on Sunday, said he hoped it would give rise to an annual two-day event incorporating wine workshops and tastings.

Link