Finger puppets can be bought here,
A few weeks ago I was paying a visit to a friend of mine. While she sat on the sofa and surfed the internet on her laptop, I was baking a batch of brownies (which were, if I do say so myself, quite tasty). Once I’d finished I popped them into the oven and decided to sit down since I’d been working on them and tidying the kitchen for quite a while.
When I sat down, my friend stood up and went over to the messy mixing bowl.
“You could have used a lot more of this mixture, there’s loads left!” she said.
“Oh,” I said, “Well, I thought I’d got as much out as I could.”
“Nah, there’s quite a bit here. But don’t worry, I know what we can do.”
She then grabbed a clean mug and scooped as much of the left over mixture into it as possible.
“We better not just eat it since it has raw egg in it, so I’ll microwave it quickly and then we’ll have a nice mini brownie.”
“Sounds a good plan to me!” I said, I remembered having seen a YouTube video of somebody doing something similar years before.
She put it in and the pair of us watched a video that was on Google that day. The video finished around the same time as the microwave, so she went over and took out the mug.
“What do you think?” she asked, holding the mug up to me so I could see the results.
“Looks pretty tasty to me.”
“Really?” she said. “I’m not sure. I’ll put it in for just a little longer.”
She put it into the microwave then went back to her laptop to go on Facebook. I, meanwhile, was enjoying a delicious drink of water. After a short while, however, I noticed that things were not quite going to plan.
“There seems to be smoke coming from the microwave,” I said to her.
She swore and ran over to the microwave, then apologised to me for swearing.
“No need to apologise,” I said, “there is nothing wrong with swearing.” I still won’t put it on my blog though.
We opened the microwave door just an inch, and loads of smoke poured into the room, I couldn’t help but cough.
“Don’t breathe it in!” she said, which was quite hard, considering the smoke was everywhere.
I opened the back door to clear the air a bit.
I decided to use my Trusty Water Bottle to open to door of the microwave a bit more since I didn’t want to burn my hand, but she slapped it away and got a pair of oven mitts. She reached in, grabbed the mug and rushed it outside, where she placed it on the floor. It was at this point that we saw that the brownie was actually on fire. She blew out the fire, then went to get a knife to prod it with. It was all ashen and crispy.
“I wonder how it tastes?” she said, as she put some of the charred brownie into her mouth. “Pretty good.”
We then headed back inside, where it was still very smoky (no fire alarm had gone off though, oh dear) and we both sat down on the sofa.
“I love these quirky adventures I have with you,” she said. I suppose she meant things like this or this.
EDIT: I spoke with my friend about this entry recently, and she told me I had misrepresented her. She said that it was my idea to put the brownie in for a little longer, whereas I distinctly remember it being her idea. Obviously we each remember it differently, and there’s no reason to assume that either of us have a better memory, so, I’m putting this at the bottom so that you can hear both sides of the story.
Finger puppets can be bought here.
Cow torches can be bought here.
This book isn’t for me…
The story follows the development of the relationship between Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele. Christian is into BDSM (bondage, dominance, sadism and masochism) and Ana just wants a regular old relationship (something she’s never had before, as she has never before been attracted to anybody). Once they’ve met, Christian just seems to be horrible to her 75% of the time and she spends a lot of time very upset by his behaviour.
After about one hundred pages, they start to have sex with one another and, my goodness, I found this very hard to read. Some scenes in particular made me feel downright nauseous, for me, it was horrible. I found myself worrying every time they were alone together that, before long, they’d just be engaging in some explicit activity. On the other hand, if you like that sort of thing, maybe you should view this as an upside.
Another thing that really bothered me was Christian. He is a terrible, arrogant, annoying person, how on Earth anybody can read this and find him to be an attractive partner is beyond me. Quite often he’ll force sex onto Ana and, since she’s so obsessed with him, she lets him do it. So, since she’s so obsessed with him, she lets him rape her. Yep. The worst thing is, that it’s never really shown in a bad light, he never seems to be condemned for this.
The only upside, for me, was that there are a few sections of the novel where the two of them are emailing each other, and, in fact, they were quite enjoyable. Ana has more confidence when she emails and so is happier to stand up to him and criticise him, which is good. These email scenes are throughout the book too. Though, sadly, one time she’s criticising him in an email, so he decided to come round for a little bit of rape. Oh dear. It’s not the worst book I ever read, I did still want to find out what happens to the characters (and I wonder if I should read the sequels or not) but this was not good.
Rating: 5/10
(I wrote a fanfiction of the novel called Christian Learns a Lesson, read it here. Unlike my usual writing style, it does contain one instance of bad language.)
(Laci Green made an agreeable video on the novel which I saw shortly after reading it, watch it here.)
This game is the first in the excellent Banjo-Kazooie series, which is a spin-off for the character Banjo, from Diddy Kong Racing. The story starts with Banjo fast asleep in bed and his sister, Tooty, outside chatting with Bottles the Mole. Then, all of a sudden, Gruntilda the witch flies down, grabs Tooty and flies her back to her castle so that she can suck the beauty out of her and put it into herself. Not the most serious of storylines, but then again it’s not the most serious of games and that doesn’t change the fact that it is absolutely wonderful.
To get to Tooty, Banjo, along with his talking pet breegul Kazooie, must make their way through Grunty’s expansive castle. You may think that just making your way through a castle doesn’t sound too fun, but, when I say expansive, I really mean it, inside she has created various ‘worlds’ which Banjo must make his way through in order to get to her. There is a very big variety of worlds too; you get to explore a swap, a haunted house, a forest, a docking bay and even the stomach of a cyborg whale, that’s not all of them either, and they’re all populated with interesting and amusing characters. All of these worlds are very brightly coloured and accompanied by an amazing soundtrack, giving every area such an amazing atmosphere that even just walking around and not getting on with things is fun. All of this, for me, is combined with a lovely sense of nostalgia, making it a firm favourite.
The world which I enjoyed the most was one called Click Clock Woods. This, as I’m sure you’d expect, is a wood, which is a nice enough place to adventure, but Click Clock Woods is much more than that. You can choose whether you visit during spring, summer, autumn or winter and things are different depending on how they have been affected by the seasons. I love this idea so much, it’s inspired a photography project of mine, which regular readers may know about, but I am getting off topic.
The only problem with the game is that it’s too short! It doesn’t really take that long to do absolutely everything, and you can only pass so much time wandering around levels you’ve already beaten. The Xbox 360 edition of the game is even worse in this regard, as once you collect a musical note (there are one hundred notes hidden in every level), it is gone forever, whereas in the other version you can go back to a level and collect all of the scattered musical notes over and over again. One the other hand, the 360 version does connect to Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts, which is quite an exciting addition. Overall, this game stands as a real pinnacle in the world of 3D platformers.
Rating: 9.8/10
Also, since it’s been two years, I decided to go through every entry and count the number of appearances of all of my friends. I’ll post the four who have appeared the most often here along with the number of entries they are in.
1. David Tubb, whose total number of appearances is 40. (This was my expected outcome.)
2. My friend who I can’t name (but I can link to her blog), who at a very close second, is in 39 entries.
3. I wanted to just have a top three, but Dalfino Madrigal Keyte and Elliott Egan are joint in third place. Each of them have appeared 28 times.
This is blog entry 433.
(sorry, not sure if that’s interesting to anybody, but I love statistics and such, so I thought I’d make some!)
All finger puppets can be bought here.
Deary me, I feel a little like I’m arrogantly boasting now! This list was a little hard to make than the other, which is sad, I suppose.
