bunker an infrequent blog

Back from a bit of a northern home xmas and so, so glad to be back in London. This city is quite special. Anyway on with the show…

I’m reading Neil Postman’s
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business at the moment. Although written from a very American point of view and a little out of date (written in 1985 – all very cold war) it is fabulous. We should all read this (actually, most of you probably already have – I’m a little slow) and am eager to discover what might be a similarly good angle to read on the contemporary TV situation and new mediums like the internet.

Suggestions? Introductory quote:

“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture death is a clear possibility.”

Got some free time, what with it being the traditional freelancer december/january drought so it’s time to fix this site up once and for all. I’ve been trying to handle the panel borders using CSS box model padding, which in theory is the perfect way to do it. Unfortunately it just hasn’t gone my way as while the box model is fine, the implementations of it on different browsers isn’t reliable.

Yeah, I’m a pixel nazi so I want the real life design to match my original photoshop screens as much as humanly possible. I’ve got a couple of ideas of ways to work around this browser flaw which *hopefully* one of them will work across all without being as much as a pixlet out. Ha! So for the next couple of days things might move around and generally look quite broken – sorry about that! I recommend getting the new RSS feeds i have with the full content posted inside – rss2_full.xml.

Update: This helps – www.browsercam.com

Here’s a rather simple example broadly outlining the requirements, benefits and outcomes of using a colour/context/emotion management and metadata dataset like ‘Feel Of A Colour’. Click for PDF.

A paraphrased quote, originally from the Pantone website seems appropriate: By using Feel Of A Colour, designers might one day be confident that their output will match their expectations.

Also recently got a first reference to FOAC in a great article about related issues, the transmissions of feeling, intention, etc. Read at Anti-Mega. Part one of FOAC was here.

Recipes. Of course, what this site needs is yet another include, and what better content to include original recipes by my good fiend, sorry, friend Bertrand Man. He’s working on a fabulous new cookery book and has been supplying our private email list with tasty recipes each week.

As a publication test and an all round good deed here is last weeks as is. I plan to build another mini blog and give Bert the keys just as soon as I get the time. (New site live here: www.rassami.com)

This week it’s chicken and chorizo and it’ll serve four.

You need:

1 chicken carcass or bones from your butcher
1 Organic Chicken
4 small cooking chorizo
1 small ring of black pudding
2 medium onion or a handful of shallots
2 cloves garlic
4 bayleaves
Whole peppercorns
2 carrot
2 sticks of celery
1 tin or 250g of soaked cannellini beans
2 glasses of white wine
Fresh thyme
Salt and pepper

Method:

Roast the carcass or chicken bones on at 190c for about 30 mins. Then place in a large pan with about 1.5l of water, 1 onion halved, halved carrot, 2 bayleaves and 4 whole peppercorns and halved sticks of celery. Bring the the boil and simmer for about 45 mins. Strain out the solids and reduce the liquid to about 3/4 litre.

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