Author Archives: Fordiebianco

Pink Milkshakes = Good Sundays?

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Just look at it: Pink drink on pink wall in front of reddish condiments. No wonder I was frogmarched into the place by two beautiful women (who, I haste to add, didn’t wear anything pink). The Rose vegetarian restaurant in a north-western corner of London (just around the corner from Kingsbury tube station) may not offer much solace for the tired eye, but it makes it up in the quality of its food. Just like a certain other gentleman I am always on the prowl to find excellent south-east Asian food, and if that certain gentleman declares that the food is excellent I am happy to follow him blindly even into the deepest darkest alleyways.

The Rose restaurant is not in such an alleyway. Located on a busy high street this place is brightly lit and oozes fun. Pink walls and other primary colours reflect the light and distract from the gloom outside. The menu is exhaustive and caters for even the pickiest religion. The food was heavenly. Meat wasn’t missed a minute, and the four us raved about the delights that were put in front of us. Service was swift and friendly, the punters numerous and happy.

If I ever make it back into the foreign lands that are NW London, I’ll make sure to visit again. Recommended.

Film Museum Duesseldorf. Avoid

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A postcard. Of a Cinema. Yes, it is that exciting.

Last Weekend the best girlfriend ever and myself made one of those unavoidable journeys to Germany that tend to ruin the weekend as there is the inevitable early morning dash to the airport, the never-ending desire to throw something at Germans who just can’t queue and far too much Weissbier. To alleviate this conundrum we extracted ourselves from our family duties and ventured to Duesseldorf (also known as Ork-City), to visit the city’s Film Museum, combining lore and light entertainment. Placed in an attractive street of this otherwise drab town, the entrance of the Film Museum bristles with toned down efficiency, and a friendly attendant takes your money and sends you up the stairs. There you enter the ‘panthenon of directors’, a circular collection of pillars with a picture, quotes and some trivia on famous and rather obscure directors. I have no problem with the fact that the curators find Andrzej Wajda as good as Howard Hawks and Hitchcock (but omitting Kazan and Houston) but please, at least tell us which films they were responsible for. Movies past 1980 don’t seem to be included, so no Fincher, Spielberg or Polanski.

Really?

The rest of the museum is an uninspired, haphazard collection of old projection and recording material thrown together with some postcards of cinemas worldwide, some programmes from the forties and thirties and a ludicrous motley accumulation of figurines (and a Harry Potter cup). The shelves are dusty and the whole place looks like someone has taken some cinematic collections and randomly placed them around the limited space. There is no programmatic thread and no cohesion.

Heartily uninspiring and disappointing. Avoid.

Apple, Where’s The Love?

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So I bought a new MacBook Pro. My old MacBook was starting to lag a bit and was so tattered and battered that it started to become a bit of an embarassement.It now rests in the office and is working diligently as backup storage and media server. To get the new MacBook, all I had to do was walk into the Apple Store in that monstrosity that is Westfield Stratford, tell the nice polish store assistant what I wanted, gave her my credit card and, fuuump, 2 minutes later I was walking out of the store, schlepping a nice new computer. Of course I could have ordered the beast to be delivered, but as the bloody mall is literally on my way home, this was much better.

Now, rewind to 1998. In my 5th year as an Apple owner, my main machine was a Power Mac 7100, a painfully slow G3 PowerPC based, ugly as hell beige brick that I was immensely proud of. To acquire such machines (and remember, this is year 4 of the web) you would have to search for the hidden 5 or 6 Apple dealer around the country (or, in my case, search for the even more obscure used Apple dealers). On top of that, I still had a Powerbook 165 lying around (with a 68040 chip!), a Macintosh IIfx and a Powerbook 150. All computers that were terribly slow and rather ugly compared to the then (comparatively) blindingly fast PCs. But as an Apple owner you would sneer and get a rash in the presence of any Microsoft product or Intel based PC. When in 1999 I finally bought my first iMac and thanks to Steve Jobs Apple’s ascendancy to the most valuable company in ze vorld was secured, nobody thought back to those painful years between 1986 and 1998 when Apple was almost completely irrelevant outside the graphic design studio.

So, do I get any Lurve from Apple for my unwavering commitment over 20 years of ownership (ok, their shares made me a fair bit of money)?

No. On the contrary. The bloody things seem to be getting more expensive every year.

But then, would I have any other portable computer? Looks I’m locked into their business model forever.

They are rather shiny, though.

 

Mmmh. Shiny.

 

Cultural and religious references wasted on the innocent.

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Today, while listening to the radio driving along some non-descript country lane, Ken Bruce on BBC Radio2 allowed some vacuous young man to play the ‘tracks of his years’ (mostly an opportunity to plug a new album). After playing Genesis’ “Jesus he knows me” the chap (apparently somebody called ‘Matt Cardle’ who won some TV-contest) commented what a deeply religious song this was.

Pardon me?

“I believe in the family with my ever loving wife beside me But she don’t know about my girlfriend or the man I met last night Do you believe in God, ‘cos that’s what I’m selling And if you wanna go to heaven, I’ll see you right You won’t ever have to leave your house (oohoh) Or get out of your chair (oohoh) You don’t even have to touch that dial (oohoh), ‘cos I’m everywhere”

He might want to check his references.