My friend up in Edinburgh has started selling his own brews to pubs in the Edinburgh area and has started renting out a local microbrewery to mass produce his creations. He's called it "Innocente brewing company" after himself and I managed to win naming his first beer which is the "Bystander". I actually came up with several names and suggested a high-risk PR strategy but he wasn't brave enough. My strategy was as follows;

Make a beer called "Innocente smoothie"
Hope "innocent smoothie" tries to sue.
Bring out a beer called "innocente till proven guilty"
followed by "innocente bystander"
and then when he was successfully sued bring one out called "innocente's lost"

By then I'd have hoped he'd have gotten enough free PR to make up for the lawsuit. I can understand why he wants to take it slow and steady though. I'm hoping he will at least use the motto I gave him of "Don't lose you Innocentes!"

Anyway, I'm pretty pleased their is a beer out there that I christened.

This one's a little late but I like to try and get these things down if just so I can look back and see how my tastes change or remind myself to check out a forgotten classic.
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It's funny how some albums slowly creep up on you. I've been a fan of Apparat for a while but it's taken me of 6 month for his most recent album to "click". As is usually the case, I'm left wondering why it took so long to realise it was so good. A particularly good example is this one.


For fans of "Breaking Bad" it should ring a bell as the score was used in the recent season finale for a monumental scene. Come to think of it whoever chooses the music in that show does a pretty good job as they also manged to combine TV on the Radio's "DLZ" perfectly with a scene in the show a few years back. Then again pretty much everything about "Breaking Bad" is quality. It's such a crime that it isn't even aired in the UK anymore,

http://youtu.be/UVu0VGAVuOw  Tygra is the man and Mumm-ra is creepier than ever. Why did he have to pose as a female fairy?

Anyone with access to BBC's iplayer should try and check http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01by6lm/Super_Smart_Animals_Episode_2/ . It's a little bit dumbed down but has some excellent examples across the animal kingdom that humans aren't the only intelligent creatures. The presenter does a good job of building up all the criteria of what constitutes our modern definition of intelligence and even with a stricter definition we're not alone by a long shot. I don't want to spoil some of the examples but I was very impressed by the bird that uses bread that is thrown to it as bait for (tastier) fish and for cuteness there is a skateboarding bulldog which is great. The dog apparently learned to do this himself! I'll be watching the next episode where it looks more at social intelligence and whether animals are capable of empathy.

Here's the dog just so I'm not leaving out all the non-uk folk

Thank God for facebook, Otherwise I'd never have known it had snowed in London now I'm living "oop norff". Apparently I'm 261 miles Northwest of london now. I found this great site that tries to make Flimby seem fun http://visitflimby.com/our-town/our-town-2/ enjoy!

While I'm back I will try and compile a dictionary of cumbrian phrases as it will take me a while to slip back into full on west cumbrian mode.

When I was 8 years old our school used to show us educational programs to encourage us to read and spell. The series was called "look and read". The one I have the fondest memories of was "Through the Dragon's eye" which was a bit like the chronicles of Narnia but with a highly literate dragon as opposed to a lion.
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Last week over coffee my (old) lab were talking about identical twins. The usual stuff was cropping up like how can identical twins brought up in the same home have different personalities (we figure it's because they aren't treat exactly the same - one might be a favourite or initially submissive to the other one) and the question of spare parts vs wouldn't they have the same chance of certain diseases.

We then got onto sillier things like accidentally sleeping with the wrong twin etc and then I had a curious thought. If identical twins married other identical twins and had kids would those children be siblings? Genetically they'd be the equivalent of siblings - depending on recombination some "cousins" could be more alike than their siblings which would be rather odd and a pitfall for communities that like to marry their cousins. Chances are such an example really exists. I guess legally they are still cousins.
This then made French C, say that it would be handy in that scenario as she could just let her twin have a baby for her so she wouldn't have to take time off work.

Inspired by Xray's post I thought I'd play too:  http://thesurrealist.co.uk/newyear

Give up sufjan stevens.
Spend more time with my furriebarrys.
Put fifty rockstarwookies a month into my savings account.
Overcome my secret fear of silanahs.
Cut down to ten silverstar1610s a day.
Go to the isis_newtons every month.

That is an utterly bizarre/slightly disturbing list of suggestions. I do like the idea that "isis newtons" could be the name of a pub though and I think it's always handy to have a certain amount of fear of Silanahs ;)

I noticed this http://www.inthehiddencity.com/time-out-cryptic-christmas/ advertised last weekend and thought it would be a fun way to spend an afternoon. It also had the advantage of being free, It almost didn't happen due to the incredibly bad weather report that scared several of us off. Luckily I was able to convince people that at worst we'd just have to make do with a pub lunch and that weather forecasts for central london are notoriously unreliable. We managed to complete the walk without any rain so it all turned out fine.

I won't go into details as it may spoil the tour but it starts in regents park and then has about 1.5-2hours of walking around depending on how good you are with the clues. It's a great way to see some bits of london i'd never bother to have see and there's also lots of nice freebies in the form of drinks (alcoholic and non-alcoholic) along with two pub stops where you can take a "free" 45 min break off the clock for a drink/snack. We actually found an interesting dutch pub along shaftsbury avenue i'll be tempted to revisit.

After completing the walk we went for some pub food at the "coal hole" which I was pretty impressed with for bar food. It took a very long time for them to charge us too but it let us unwind a bit.

For anyone in the london area or for those who may be visiting over the xmas period, I'd fully reccommend it as a cheap and fun way to have a wander around the city centre. Just remember to use the Timeout code which lets you sign up for free!