Via the ever well informed Katabasis my attention has been drawn to a new blog/project: Censoring.me, which is apparently
“… a clearing house site for information, news and opinions on the issues of censorship, propaganda and surveillance. It has an especial focus on the UK, however exceptions will often be made for particularly egregious examples internationally (such as SOPA in the U.S. or ACTA internationally).”
Looks like one to keep an eye on.
This blog would like to make it clear how very proud it is not to be an Olympic sponsor for the London 2012 games this summer. Following what must surely become known as chip gate the level of paranoia exhibited by the official sponsors turns out to exceed that of our security forces. Though of course they haven’t tried to put missiles on to nearby tower blocks to pre-emptively remove any unauthorised advertising, t-shirt, snack. The 300 purple capped brand police will be enforcing special legislation brought into protect the corporate interest of the big sponsors making sure no small business can benefit from having their usual trade disrupted by the games. If you object to their entering your business to enforce the banned words including “gold”, “silver” and “bronze”, “summer”, “sponsors” and “London”, one has to wonder if they’ll be calling some of the thousands of troops drafted in or copying most private security forces and calling the police. Anything that could be associated with the games is verbotten so who knows what that will actually cover, guess it’ll depend on what the enforcement drone decides on the day after all who knows what might be “effectively depriving the Games of revenue”.
IT may turn out that the longest lasting legacy of these games is the reduction in freedom resulting from the creation of numerous free speech exclusion zones, which would seem likely to hasten the erosion of our our public spaces. Sadly it’s probably far too late in the day, but is there any project to record what ‘s been shut off from the public for the Olympics so we can spot which bits they “forget” to re-open?
Given the paranoia of these Olympics the all seeing eye of the much loved Wenlock starts to seem an inspired choice.
An almost complete break from politics now, as I suspect my current project may amuse some of you. This also counts as evidence why prohibition is always doomed and the decline in drinking should be taken with a pinch of salt, where by pinch I mean a large bucket full.
So the story starts with this rather amusing photoshop image that got posted to facebook:
Now a friend of a friend works in a place where they could verify that this si sadly a joke and not a real product. However as a bit of a home brewer and back before decent absinthe could be easily bought a dabbler in what could be done by way of herbs to make palatable DIY absinthe, the only course of action open to me upon discovering this was a joke was to cause Marmite absinthe to exist, after all what’s the worst that could happen? Now it so happens there is a recipe for a Marmite based booze called “Holy Water” (I’ve no idea why), this recipe suggest the following:
“4lb sugar
7.5 pints water
1tsp citric acid
1tsp yeast nutrient
1tsp marmite
1tsp wine yeast
Heat half the water to just before boiling point & stir in the sugar & marmite until fully dissolved. Pour into the demijohn & add the rest of the water. Allow to cool to room temp, then add the citric acid, yeast nutrient & yeast. Attach the airlock & bung & allow to ferment out, which it should do rather quickly (ten to fourteen days) Serve with cordials to make them alcoholic.”
Now obviously that’s never going to be up to the task of Marmite-Absinthe, so I tweaked the recipe slightly and decide to start with this:
That should brew out to about 20% in a couple of weeks, maybe slightly lower as I’m using cheap sugar from lidl rather than dextrose but it’ll do. Then to blend it with Absinthe or with herbs or both I’m making about 20 litres of this stuff for about 50p a litre I can afford to experiment. So in less than a month I’ll have some very cheap, possibly ghastly, falling down juice that will likely be brown so if I stick a cog on it it’ll be steampunk and thus cool. Really what could possibly go wrong, I even get to upset the prohibitionists while I’m at it, just ignore the fact it already looks like this:
Official UK Threat Level
"a youngster trying to defend from a moral standpoint themselves living an immoral existence." - Harbringer
