The blog has moved to its own awesome domain!

Please make the relevant changes… And this one should be easy to remember:

http://gordonwhite.co.uk/

If you can’t remember it, I’ll kill you.

News is starting to trickle out about my imminent departure.

People are being really, really nice about it. I thought it would have been all “Gordon WHO? Ohhh… The fat guy from South Africa.”

But no!

Which is really nice because I have been feeling terribly guilty about the whole thing.

Excited… But guilty.

This may not surprise some of you but I have sometimes wondered what the galactic media’s response would have been to the end of Palpatine‘s grand Galactic Empire in Star Wars.

Well… It would go something like this.

The above link is a 17 minute video about Bush’s legacy made by The Guardian.

I know 17 minutes is long but please watch it.

You will be able to tell your grandchildren that you were alive for the passing of the worst president in the history of the United States and the man most responsible for the destruction of the global economy as well as the political destabilisation of two thirds of the earth’s surface.

This doesn’t begin to take in his collateral kill count.

Truly he was/is horrific in ways that will take decades to measure.

So watch and thank God/The tooth fairy/whatever imaginary friend you are currently giving money and time to (statistically it’s probably Oprah).

With that in mind please play SUPER OBAMA WORLD!

So awesome.

I know it’s been a while but if you look at the post beneath this one you’ll understand there’s been a fair bit going on in Ol’ Brizzle.

Bah! Enough excuses and witty banter. On with the links.

Anyway, here’s the first one.

• The top 10 food trends for 2009 according to Epicurious.

Now, they don’t exactly use the term “poverty meal” but check out number 1.

Exactly.

• Awesome renamed classic board games. Because boardgames are going to be big during the Great Depression 2.0.
• Here is a video of the world’s air traffic over a 24 hour period.

I think I finally understand why you always seem to arrive at Heathrow in the morning.

• Tintin is gay. Here’s the proof. He has also always been truly shit. I really REALLY hate Tintin. Stupid poof.
• Here’s a UK motorway map made to look like the tube map. Oddly helpful.
• The trailer for Lesbian Vampire Killers.

There’s probably a number of reasons why such a thing may interest you. But you will be SUPER excited if you are a fan of Gavin and Stacey.

• This piece of HP software turns RSS feeds into newsletters that you can print off. RSS feeds like mine. Because I know only a tiny fraction of you zoo animals actually use an RSS reader.
• Want to keep goldfish in your toilet? Yeah, you know you do.
• A truly compelling history of board games. I hate Monopoly but now I know way more about it.
• Behold the in-car microwave. Because the American consumer’s biggest problem is lack of access to convenient food.
• Lovecraftian Christmas carols. It’s a few weeks too late but you will find these really cool if you are uncool enough to be familiar with the Cthulu mythos.

(It’s the second and third video. The first video is just creepy.)

And that is all.

Goodnight ladies.

BREAKING NEWS:

I have been offered and accepted a job with the Discovery Channel.

So it’s back to London for us! Me in the next couple of weeks.

Guess I’ll do alternate weekends in Bristol and London as well as a few other days during the week.

More as it develops. But rest assured, it’s all good news.

Sent from my Nokia E71

I always manage to warp the metal in phone cords. I assume it’s my lies doing it.
 
Sent from my Nokia E71

The first resolution is to see one of these.

Aren’t they just the freakiest looking fish ever?

You can snorkel with them in June/July on the Isle of Man. Which makes this resolution a sub-category of one of my main resolutions: lots of staycations.

(I know the Isle of Man isn’t technically a staycation but it’s more of one than a trip to Turkey.)

For those who don’t know, staycation is the current buzzword for credit crunchy domestic travel typically undertaken because a weak pound and job insecurity makes spending two weeks in the Alps or whatever a little risky.

The other resolutions are

• Get good at regional cooking/food selection. Britain being the principal region… Followed by Europe.
• Match my knowledge of New Zealand wine with a similarly detailed knowledge of Frog wine. This one might have to stay on the resolution list for a few years running. Or even every new year I ever have.

I trust everyone had an excellent time wherever you were.

We (being Leon, Monique, James and I) were across the road at the local being slurred at by a drunk Bristolean until about quarter to midnight.

I’m sick and it was below zero so we decided to ring in the new year inside in the warmth.

Or so went the plan.

We cross the road to find that every fire alarm in the building was going off and all our neighbours standing outside in the car park.

After quickly making sure neither of our apartments were actually on fire we joined them.

It turns out the fire brigade had already turned up, assessed there was no fire and then left without making an effort to assist in switching off the alarm.

Thus commenced more than an hour of James and Monique ringing various landlords, call centres, management companies, etc at the single worst time of the year to try and get a hold of anybody in an attempt to reach somebody who knew the disarm code.

In all the hubbub we missed midnight entirely and only worked out that it was 2009 when we started hearing fireworks. So I guess that was 2008′s final little “fuck you” from the worst year of my life so far.

Other things we learned whilst standing outside in the subzero temperatures shouting over the shrieking alarm were that our upstairs neighbours are a czech/german couple who are in Bristol because they are avid rock climbers and Bristol has a gorge.

That seems like an arbitrary reason to me and I pointed this out but they were similarly unsatisfied with all our reasons for being here as well… And we had traveled further.

Speaking of… Here is a self-photo from our recent trip to Glastonbury. We went via Weston-super-Mare which means I finally got to see the Atlantic after spending four months living in a country surrounded by it.

I have been trying all day to upload the rest to Facebook but the shitass server is down.

Whatever. They’ll be up by the time you read this.

There are also going to be pictures of Tam’s visit to Bristol and other miscellanea. Life has been too frantic to worry about consistency in personal media.

I am assuming I will find some time in the next few days to cut the video together. Photos must suffice for now.

This isn’t the first New Years I have been sick for.

I thought it was maybe just a sinus attack but after inhaling all the (relevant) drugs I could find in the apartment I crashed out for two hours and woke up sick.

Awesome.

Oh, and according to BBC Weather this is going to be the coldest New Years Eve for two decades. Which means even the most timid of evening plans is bound to make me worse.

In fact, it’s so cold that it has sparked off another preposterous round of climate change denial from the Torygraph.

Bah!

Happy New Year to all.

I trust it was awesome for everyone else.

I scored big time on the cookbook front (thanks to James, Tam, Leon & Monique) so expect the poverty meals to get more diverse.