Oh, look, another web app

16 May 2008, 3pm

You’ll agree that, of all the Twitter-related apps springing forth every couple hours, few have much real use. Summize seems to be doing a pretty good job offering real-time search of a mountain of 140-character detritus, but all the others just tap the public timeline and process it using basic business logic. When it comes to filtering for quality, the only show so far seems to be Ono Matope’s Favotter, but it’s slow as heck, and the English-language section there is seriously undermaintained. Also, the pool of people whose favourites are polled seems to be locked at the 950 or so who, at the time of Favotter’s launch, had the largest number of ‘favourited’ items. This, to be unfair, is a bit like being recommended music by that weird single guy who goes to see a different band every night.

So I spent the last few days knocking this together. It works on three principles: first, that anyone who wants to can have their vote counted; second, that things people find interesting are more important than people who find things interesting; and third, that by any means necessary, web-strategy, social-media, online-marketing webcocks – unaware as they are of how toxic their presence is in the arenas they cannot shut up about – must and shall be filtered out of view.

There’s some fancy albeit inchoate weighting logic going on under the surface, and I’ve got a few vaguely neato features in the works, though it is as they say very beta. It will I hope grow, and, as more people are added to the voting ranks, be a reliable source for funny, weird, obnoxious, entertaining, inspiring, webcock-less, tiny little fragments of life.

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Gaggia

11 May 2008, 2pm

A short poem by Dean Allen

Water, electricity
In such close proximity

Soon minerals will make her
An ex-espresso maker

No symbolism whatsoever

9 May 2008, 9am

Cherries? Foliage? Cherries under foliage? Nah, I got nothin’.

A chicken in every pot belly

8 May 2008, 3pm

Where we live you’d be hard pressed to find anyone under 70 (and even then, at any time other than Sunday morning before family lunch) making poule au pot, but nonetheless it is I think one of the very best of the ancient, rustic slow-cooked standards, and everybody should have it at least once or go to the grave wondering why they hadn’t.

Tons of good brining info here.

Right: brining chicken, even if it is to be poached in liquid, is righteous and good. On a tip picked up reading the great McGee (a book so hugely useful it should be distributed Gideon-style) I’ve been tinkering around with the idea of brine as tea, into which other flavours can be brewed to participate in the saline-protein exchange voodoo. You’re going to prepare a 7% brine (70g of salt per litre of water), so while boiling enough water to dissolve the salt, chuck in a few bay leaves, a head of smashed garlic, a big bunch of thyme and twenty three black peppercorns. Boil for 5–10 minutes, then strain and add enough ice water to make the final brine, into which is gently slid a nice plump dead chicken. Into the fridge overnight, then rinse.

Elizabeth David’s bread crumb method still reigns: dry slices of dense crusty white low and slow in the oven, lay them out on a counter and bash like hell with a rolling pin. Also: packaged bread crumbs taste like shit.

Create about a chicken cavity’s worth (that’s a standard measurement, look it up) of a stuffing made from chopped garlic and shallots, lots of chopped flatleaf parsley, good home-made bread crumbs and ground pork or sausage meat (the proportions are entirely yours to choose; I go about 40/60 bread/flesh) and a raw egg. You should be smoking while doing this, with the cigarette perched at enough of a jaunty angle that falling ash may add random colour and texture every time you swear. Stuff the chicken quite tightly (cram, cram) before trussing with string.

It now dawns on me the whole reason for typing out this longish quasi-recipe is to strut about a fetish object I’ve wanted for, like, ever, and just got because the local hardware store was doing a sale on Le Creuset, which even here in its country of manufacture is risibly expensive, and hardly ever discounted. Anyway, in the second recent bout of consumer ecstasy I am now in squidgy love with this enamelled cast-iron thing:

Seriously, love. I visit it at random throughout the day. Anyway this or any vessel of its ilk will do: it’s strictly stovetop, so oven-proofedness isn’t a concern, but it should be deep enough so the chicken can be, oh do we really need a Pooh reference, completely surrounded by water.

Do just that and bring to a low boil, skimming off any scum that should rise to the surface. Add any combination you like of aromatics like carrots, celery, onion, parsley, garlic. Simmer for an hour or so, then remove the chicken and strain the by-now knackered vegetables from the broth to be chucked in the compost or served to rotten children.

Check the broth for seasoning, then the chicken goes back into the pot, to simmer for another half hour with whatever vegetables you like; here that’s chunks of waxy potato, carrots, young purple turnips, spring onion bulbs, and, toward the very end, thickly sliced fresh fennel (this does tend to make everything taste like fennel, so go lightly if that’s not your thing).

While that is burbling away, mash together a sauce gribiche, which is just an emulsification of boiled egg yolk, mustard and olive oil into which you mix chopped sour pickles, chopped boiled egg white, capers, anchovy, chopped parsley and shallots with salt and pepper until it’s about the consistency of lumpy ketchup.

Let the chicken rest on a plate for 15 minutes before mutilating it into dainty little portions with your favourite knife, then prise out and slice the stuffing. Pile the vegetables high in a huge bowl, arrange the chicken and stuffing slices on top, ladle a lot of the broth on top of the whole mess, then plunk it down in the middle of the table. The sauce may be passed from person to person, but only counter-clockwise, to be globbed thickly onto the plate as necessary. Cheap red wine and bread go real good.

Screenwipe

6 May 2008, 2pm

During that rather gruesome thing I went through last year there was a lot of content piped through the Mac Mini to the fickle and aging television. The percentage of garbage was high, but in every dumpster there lies the chance to find, say, an unopened bottle of beer (which, along with the return deposit, can practically rain good fortune). By far the best and most surprising television discovery was coincidentally a show about television: Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe.

People in the UK likely already know about Brooker from his TV and video game reviews and ‘Comment is Free’ posts at The Guardian, or from the satirical TV listing web site TV Go Home, in particular its recurring item Cunt, about a loathsome stereotype of the day, which he and Chris Morris eventually turned into the infamous Nathan Barley, which didn’t quite work (was dated by the time it appeared, wrong actor in the lead, comedy and strident moral advocacy can’t and won’t mix, I could go on). 

It’s on Screenwipe, though, where he truly shines: you know how you watch Boston Legal just because it’s fun to watch Alan Shore get away with such singly dimensioned grandstanding and axe grinding in court? It’s like that, only funny. You know how, against your better judgement, you watch those shows in which talking heads crack snarky about decontextualised clips of some common theme? It’s like that, only he makes sense, and you almost always agree.

The way he deflates execrable bullshit like the various Simon Cowell franchises, or the relentlessly vacuous Lost, or the tooth-pulling UK version of Deal or No Deal, is just so bang on you want to dance around the room. His facility with cruelly sharp language seals it: doing a recap of the fiasco that was last year’s Celebrity Big Brother, he described the mother of the puzzlingly famous Jade Goody as ‘Dot Cotton reflected in the side of a dented kettle’. I laughed so hard I think something came loose.

I could quote all day, but best to enjoy them in situ. Do search around – there are quite a few episodes on Youtube, and the tenacious will find collections of all four extant series floating around torrentially.

And then, to contrast and compare, watch TV Burp. Or, rather, don’t.