Category Archives: Entertainment

Upcoming Local Beer Festivals

Date	Location	Festival
28-30 Jul	Bishops Stortford	3rd Bishops Stortford Beer Festival
2- 6 Aug	Earls Court, London	Great British Beer Festival
18-21 Aug	Ipswich	Ipswich Beer Festival
23-27 Aug	Peterborough	34th Peterborough Beer Festival
6-10 Sep	Chappel	25th Chappel Beer Festival
9-10 Sep	St Ives, Cambs	St Ives Booze on the Ouse Beer Festival
15-17 Sep	York	York Beer and Cider Festival
16-17 Sep	Melton Mawbray	9th Melton Mowbray Beer Festival
22-24 Sep	Letchworth	20th Letchworth Garden City Beer & Cider Festival
28- 1 Oct	St Albans	St Albans Beer Festival
5- 8 Oct	Bedford	34th Bedford Beer & Cider Festival
12-15 Oct	Milton Keynes	18th Concrete Pint Beer Festival
13-15 Oct	Wallington	18th Croydon & Sutton Real Ale & Cider Festival
27-29 Oct	Twickenham	11th Twickenham Beer & Cider Festival
27-29 Oct	Birmingham	Birmingham Beer Festival

La Margherita and glow worms

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Today we finally managed to get organised enough to book a table at La Margherita. It’s a very nice Italian restaurant on Bridge Street. It’s always looked interesting and tempting but also rather busy, so we were surprised to find it almost quiet when we arrived. It also turned out that booking the table probably wasn’t necessary even if it had been more busy as there are several more tables in two first floor areas. The food was tasty and we had a fruity fresh Pinot Grigio Blush. We both had risotto, but they were rather different. Mine was with sea food while Katie’s was with mushrooms. We aimed for something that wasn’t too heavy because we wanted to make sure we’d have room for pudding. The photos below show how that was a very good idea 🙂

After dinner we realised we’d missed our bus to the glow worm location (an abandoned chalk pit in Cherry Hinton), so we ended up walking almost all the way there. That wasn’t necessary a bad thing because the later we’d get there, the greater chance of seeing some glow worms. This might have been why we no more than arrived before we saw the first one. This was the second time I’ve gone looking for these little fellows, and it’s still hard to believe when you spot them. They really look like small, slightly green LEDs that have been installed in the grass. It’s a rather amazing phenomenon and I recommend anyone to try it at least once. Our trip ended up being a short one as it started raining more and more heavily, but we still managed to find 7 happily glowing worms (they’re not actually worms, but larvae of beetles).

Emmy The Great

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I felt like writing something about Emmy The Great. I’m not sure what exactly it will be yet, but I’m listening to her right now, and felt inspired 🙂

I first came across her when one of my friends posted a link to her Black Cab Session where she performed the amazing “Two Steps Forward” together with Tom Hobden from “Noah and the Whale”. The song was not included in their first album “First Love”, but was later included in a bonus CD sold with the album. There was something in that song that made me able listen to it over and over and just never seem to get tired of it. It even seemed to be getting better every time.

I then discovered that Emmy was playing a charity gig against violence towards women at The Shop in Cambridge, so I went to see her. Again she hadn’t brought her usual band, but showed up alone. It was a very small gig (it’s a small place), and there was no mic, speakers or stage and the closest people were sitting on pillows in front of the people sitting on chairs. It was a very intimate concert, and seemed much more personal than usual music gigs.

Another quite special gig was an “in store” performance at Pure Groove in London. Katie and I managed to get there straight after work, and even though it was a very short performance that was ok, as it was free and we like going to London. It was also very cosy and Emmy was sitting on the counter.

The first real gig I saw was at the O2 in Oxford. Katie and I went there together and spent the weekend exploring our “brother city” (I guess Oxford is “the brother of art” while Cambridge is “the brother of science”). The gig was great, while of a more “normal” sort and to my great excitement she reluctantly played “Two Steps Forward” after lots of shouting from the crowd, even though she said it was a very personal song. This was before it was put on the bonus CD for First Love (the album was originally sold with a different bonus CD). Maybe she got lots of requests for the song at all the live gigs and decided it was too popular to keep private 🙂

Last year I noticed a link on their website (emmythegreat.com) to Pledge Music where they were selling “pledges” to finance the production of their second album. I really liked the idea of them being able to produce the album this way with no producers interfering or “owning them”. I was happy to support them by buying a couple of signed albums (one for a present for my sister) and a ticket to a special “pledgers’ gig”. This turned out to be yet another very special experience with a small gig in a beautiful little church in St Pancras, London. The warm-up act was provided by some apparently quite green stand-up comedians, which added an extra unusual edge to it, and the church’s acoustics were perfect for Emmy’s voice 🙂

Now their second album is out, and I think it’s even better than the first one, and can’t wait to see her live again in September in London and then in Cambridge in October. You can get the album (from Amazon or Rough Trade) and see the tour calendar on emmythegreat.com. If you do get it (or already have it), please let me know what you think on here.

If you’d like to listen to some of the music it’s available on SoundCloud.

Blogging on the move

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Standing in the “no priority” queue for the flight to Oslo. We’ve just had breakfast at Franky and Benny’s, so feeling a bit bloated …

This is the first blog I’ve posted using the WordPress app for Android. It’s quite nice 🙂

Have to board now!!

Hidden treasures of the internet

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It’s amazing how popular (and awesome) things on the internet can be and then still hidden (or undiscovered) by so many. One of my own new discoveries is “The Lonely Island”. They are a group of three musicians from Berkeley, California. They got known by performing some of their material on Saturday Night Live, and since several of their youtube videos have had over 100,000,000 views! And it’s only after this that I’ve discovered them.

I would give a description of what they do, but it’s too hard to do it justice in word. The originality, outrageousness and silliness is just phenomenal and I can only recommend checking it out! 🙂 … it’s free as well! 🙂

My favourites, I think, though it’s hard to choose, are probably “I’m on a boat”, the “Shy Ronnie” series and maybe “Motherlover”…

My favourite pizza place

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Today, we went to London. We do that sometimes. As often as we can 🙂 One of the things we focus most of London trips around is food (and drink). There are so many different kinds of amazing places to eat in London, and even though we’ve hardly scratched the surface yet, we’ve already found some favourites that we keep returning to.

One such is Otto Pizza in Notting Hill. It’s Britain’s first (and as far as I know still only) cornmeal pizza place, started by two guys after they discovered this amazing food on a trip in Oregon. The pizzas are like nothing I’ve ever tried before. The toppings are amazing and the crust is crunchy and tasty. We had this pizza:

It’s the “taster” and includes a selection of six different slices of amazing pizza. If I remember correctly they were: A special salami-meat one (on the plates already), which was lovely and spicy and very tasty, Pepperoni, Sausage, Four Cheese, Pesto and Sweet corn… It wouldn’t be easy (or fair) to pick a favourite, as they were all simply amazing. The specials sounded tempting too, but it seemed this way we got most different tastes of heaven 🙂

To make it all perfect, they also normally serve very nice beer. Today the specials were Flying Dog from Maryland’s “Snake Dog IPA” and The Kernel from London’s “IPA Citra”. It was difficult to choose, so I’m very glad that I didn’t and just had both 🙂 (one at a time, of course)

We also went to one of our favourite chocolate shops, but it’s late now, so that story will have to wait 🙂

Good night!

A Top Five of pubs in Cambridge

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Here is a Top 5 of pubs in Cambridge:
(the order is how I like them-ish, though it’s hard to really rank them as they have different qualities)

The Red Lion, Histon
This is probably my favourite pub in the whole world 🙂 It’s got Tring Blonde on all the time, which is a very nice beer, and also Mighty Oak’s Oscar Wilde which is one of my highest ranked non-Tring non-Welsh beers 😛 (I don’t actually have a beer rank. There’s just too many of them and they’re way too different to rank). The staff is very friendly and the landlord (Mark Donachy) is a real character 🙂 ). Only downside is the lack of food in the evening, but then there’s a pub just next door with nice Thai food (Barley Mow), so it’s easy to just pop over there for tea 🙂 The Red Lion has two beer festivals a year: One at Easter and one at Autumn. During the beer festival more food is available.
Kingston Arms, Kingston Street
This is one of my “old pubs” that I used to frequent particularly much when I lived on only a couple of minutes walk away. It’s got a very wide selection of real ales, and normally at least a few real ciders as well. It’s got a small quiet garden and very nice food. It’s also a friendly place, and you’re always very welcome to taste all the ales before deciding what to go for 😉
The Cambridge Blue, Gwydir Street
This is another of my “old regulars” in the same area as The Kingston Arms. It also has a wide real ale selection and a web cam where you can almost see which beers they have on just now (and if there’s a lot of people queuing) 🙂 The food is nice, and there’s a lovely large garden with plenty of benches and view over a stone wall of the pretty, idyllic Mill Road Cemetary.
The Live and Let Live, Mawson Road
This is a newer discovery for me. Even though it’s in the same area as the previous two, it’s on the other side of Mill Road, which caused it to remain hidden to me until this year (or maybe it was a year ago, but still…). The reason I found it was because I was flicking through the Good Beer Guide looking for pubs in Cambridge with Tring regulars, and apart from The Red Lion, this was the only one. It’s got the Jack O’Legs on regularly, though they sometimes run out. Also, they seem to sometimes be shut at random times, but then fortunately the above two pubs aren’t too far away 😉
The Devonshire Arms, Devonshire Road
There were many pubs contending for this last spot in the top 5. One of the reasons for this one winning, is that it’s the pub of Cambridge’s only really local brewery, Milton Brewery who brew several lovely brews. It’s got a wide selection of those, but also several other small brewery beers on at all times. It’s one of the newest pubs in Cambridge (only a year and a half old) and it’s very nice. My only regret is that I’ve only been there two or three times, and I don’t even know what the food is like… but there’s still time to change both of those 😉

So, that was my top 5 of Cambridge pubs… I might just post some reviews now and again of other pubs I like, since it’s really not fair to rank them, and I’m not completely sure that the order above means very much…

Enjoy! (Please drink responsively!)

Adverts

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I’m generally against adverts… what does that mean? I don’t like commercial TV channels, and I don’t like the way many products sell well because they have lots of adverts, rather than because they’re good products.

But, I’ve just added adverts to my own website. This might have been research and educational, for work purposes, etc, but in the end I’ve left them on… just to see what would happen 😛 I guess that makes me a hypocrite? 😛

To be fair on myself, I use a lot of websites that are free but have adverts on them, and I don’t really mind that 🙂 So, I guess it’s all ok… and today, with the ease of setting up adverts (for instance using AdSense, in my case), it’s a means for the “common person” to make money off a simple web site, without being Zuckerberg 😛 … although, it’s probably never going to be big money when all you do is write blogs on a wordpress.

It was nice (and almost a surprise) just how easy it was to set up (this is not an advert for AdSense! :P), and now it’s there it seems a shame to remove it… at least until I get a lot of complaints from my many readers 😛 (NOTE: You can register under “Meta” on the right hand side, and then comment on the posts 😉 )

This was just a short one 🙂

Beer Festival

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Tomorrow is not just Saturday, it’s not just the day after pay day, but it’s beer festival day!

… Of course you could argue that most days (if not all), there’s a beer festival somewhere. But is that important? It’s not as important to me, as the fact that there’s a beer festival tomorrow that I’m going to. That makes all the difference.

Does that make me selfish? I guess it’s natural for someone to look forward to something _they_ are going to do, rather than something other people will do, however much fun they might have. Of course, if it was on TV and I watched how other people were having fun that might make me feel all happy and warm inside. Why is that? I know there are lots of people out there having fun, but if I see it on TV, it makes me happy (even if not as happy as having fun myself). Of course this isn’t news to the world, and it’s been long since the media world discovered how they could make lots of people happy just by showing them how other people were doing just what they wanted to do, be it eating expensive food in a fancy restaurant, travelling to amazing locations, or just having a lovely time. This way they could all be happy in front of the TV (and its adverts) rather than actually go out and experience things themselves. And if something wasn’t as great as they’d hoped they could just change the channel…

Anyway, tomorrow I’m going to a beer festival, and that’s good for me 🙂 And I get to go to somewhere I’ve never been before. That’s always exciting 🙂

Now, this isn’t much of a topic for a blog post… but I felt like writing some… anything… after being “away” for such a long time… and something that isn’t about sandwiches at all 😛

Silence

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What is this silence I hear? Why isn’t anything happening on the site? What is the shotgundentist up to? Is he not busy with his patients? Is he so busy he has no time to share his adventures with the world? Or is he having technical problems keeping him from communicating through this powerful media? Or is the problem really that the only devoted developer around here is a lazy drunk who spends most of his sober awake time trying to change one of those aspects of his state?

…

NO! Do not believe the lies! The truth is really that aliens in a complicated scheme to take over the Earth and all it’s resources (especially tube socks), are sabotaging the development of this site as they wisely have predicted that it would be the greatest hope of rekindling the spirits of mankind that they have almost broken down by flooding our medias with way too many turnips and old women knitting socks. Therefore, keep supporting this site if not for your own entertainment then for the future of mankind!

Thank you all,

Ace.