Skip to main content

My 2022 awards

It's award seasons again, and here's my contribution.


Best food

A couple of times last year we ordered a "ready meal" from Cook. If Carlsburg did ready meals they would be like these. They are cooked to order and very tasty. The best part of the meals though was this cheesecake. It's light and fruity and the best food I ate all year.

Best music biography

Running up that Hill - 50 visions of Kate Bush isn't a sequential biography, but has 50 chapters on different aspects of her life and music. It's bang up to date, so includes the Stranger Things use of the title song. There are some great stories, like when Lenny Henry came into the studio to record backing vocals for Why Should I Love You?, and remarked, "that sounds like Prince on the guitar". It was, and Kate asked Lenny if he wanted to meet him.

Best TV programme

The Secret Genius of Modern Life from the BBC looks into modern gadgets that we rely on, like contactless credit cards, smart speakers, or electric cars. It's presented by Dr Hannah Fry, who also does the Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry podcast/radio programme. It's a bit like the old Tomorrow's World (and I did detect the musical flourish from the end of that theme tune at the end of the Secret Genius's theme tune). The difference is, rather than seeing an invention and wondering if it will ever make to market, these are things that are already part of our lives.

Worst response from the council to fix a road painting problem

I could write a whole blog about potholes and road problems, so just be glad I don't. It took 18 months and 3 reminders to paint a picture of a bike at a junction. Enough said.

Best advert - Cunard 

It's from 2019 but I saw it in 2022, so I'm including it. It features a quote from "philosophical entertainer" Alan Watts in his own voice. He probably wasn't thinking of cruise liners when he wrote the lines "I wonder, I wonder what you would do if you had the power to dream any dream you wanted to dream?" I find the original record very evocative.





Comments

Popular posts from this blog

20 years of blogging: fourth post

4/1/2000 Things are moving   We've had the letter from Wycliffe about "raising support".  They want us to aim that 25% of our income comes from other people by the end of a year, and 50% by the end of two years.  Other news: I've officially asked for voluntary redundancy Spoiler: after 4 years of trying I didn't even get to 20%, so I was paid a salary after all.

Follow up to Matt's "Three feelings" post

This is in response to Matt 's post Three feelings I don't have a word for .  (A blog post in response to a blog post. How quaint.) "Imagined vastness" sounds like a very specific instance of the more general "sense of wonder" or sensawunda . For me I get that feeling of imagined vastness when reading Iain M Banks' Culture series. I don't get the Stack Overflow vertigo he talks about, but I do have a feeling of holding something almost physical when I've got something on the clipboard and I haven't pasted it yet. It's similar to the feeling that I (maybe it is just me) get when I know there's a bit of coffee left at the bottom of the cup. Atemporal hotel lobbies is something I can't really relate to. I do have my own unnamed feeling though: Cycling to work It's that moment when I whizz down our sloped drive and start pedalling up to the road. Because I WFH I go out at lunchtime these days, and the feeling just isn't the sa

20 years of blogging: First post

Back in 1999 it mostly cost money to run a blog (from what I can remember). You had to sort out your own hosting. Then Dave Winer  made on offer on his blogging platform editthispage.com  for a 60 day free trial , so I was away. So what was my very first post? What words did I choose to post for all on the internet to see?  23 December 1999 I'm stil trying to decide what to do with this. Click on the skull to add your suggestion. Oh, that's not very good is it. A typo in the second word too. The URL was morrissfamily.editthispage.com. (I think. Everything I say could be unreliable, because it was a while ago.) I also created an FAQ page that day: Who are the Morriss family? We are just a normal family with a dad who likes exploring the internet. Why don't you have more information? Because I'm not sure want I want to do with this site. I think there are no typos there. The idea was that I would share family news. Come back in January to see what my next