Your feet, my meat

Move your M-E-A-T!!? (see 1.3)

The truth is out there

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/oct/20/aliens-crop-circles-ufo-roswell

On a cloudy night in Kent, Milton Torres, a US air force fighter pilot based at RAF Manston, was scrambled to intercept a UFO. Ordered to go full throttle towards East Anglia, within minutes he was 15 miles from a mysterious blip that looked as big as a B-52 bomber on his screen. He was ordered to fire a full salvo of 24 missiles, but before he could, the object vanished.

Details about the incident, on May 20, 1957, appear among 19 files released by the Ministry of Defence and newly revealed by the National Archives. It is the second tranche of UFO files to be made public since a handful were released in May.

The reports range from the bizarre to the intriguing. There is the Alitalia pilot who shouted to his co-pilot to "look out" as a brown, missile-shaped object shot past the cockpit, and a sketchy self-portrait of a pointy-eared woman in a gown, who told the MoD she had crashlanded on Earth during the second world war, having left her home planet of warrior women.

The MoD released the files, covering 1986 to 1992, after a flood of requests from enthusiasts and conspiracy theorists who are convinced the truth is out there.

Details of the East Anglia event only emerged after Torres, who was warned never to mention it, did discuss it with a military historian at a reunion at RAF Manston in 1988. The MoD, whose policy until 1967 was to destroy UFO files every five years, had no data on the event.

An account from Torres, now 77 and living in Florida, describes his anxiety at failing to fire after struggling to read codes on a scrap of paper in the cockpit of his F-86D plane. "It was totally black and the lights were down for night flying. I used my flashlight, still trying to fly and watch my radar. To put it quite candidly, I felt very much like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest," he said.

David Clarke, a UFO expert at Sheffield Hallam University, said: "If the UFO had turned out to be a civil aircraft that had strayed off its course, it could have been a major international incident, and yet it's been airbrushed out of history."

He believed the pilot was a guinea pig in a test of the Palladium system, developed by the US to make "phantom" aircraft appear on Soviet radars.

Another incident in Britain, in April 1991, recorded a captain of an Alitalia airliner, flying at an altitude of more than four miles on route to Heathrow from Milan, seeing a missile-like object. At first this was labelled "cruise missile?" but it was quickly found not to be a military weapon. There were a number of similar sightings within the next six months. Four passengers on a Dan Air Boeing 737 spotted a "wingless projectile" flying under their plane.

Other papers reveal the MoD's sensitivity to military helicopters taking pictures of crop circles, which they feared would undermine the line that the government had no interest in the phenomenon.

Documents also relate how a Tina Turner concert triggered a spate of UFO sightings in London in 1989, and how one person was "contacted by aliens" descended from "legendary feathered serpents from ancient Peru".

Clarke said the papers showed the government could not conceal anything and that people were not going to find "that elusive bit of evidence that proves we're being visited by aliens".

She knows what she doesn't want, but doesn't know what she wants

Doesn't want

All work and no play/All play and no work
Broken hearts
Changes for the sake of changes
Dumb and Dumber
Eye bags
Fakes
GM food
Hello and goodbye
i-whatever
Jerks
Kidney stones
Losers
Morons (aka McCain and Paline)
Nationalists
Ordour
Plastic bags
Queuing
Re-whatever
Sleepless nights
Tainted milk
Unemployment
Vulgarity
Windowless office
X-factor
Yes men and women
Zombie life

Do 26 negatives necessarily add up to one positive? Are our wants too many to name? And do we really need what we want and want what we need?

Jamie Oliver's new Italian eatery

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/oct/12/restaurants-foodanddrink

A hazy shade of autumn

A little shiver underneath my flimsy blanket (actually not that little) yanked me out of my bed last night. I had to turn off the fan in the middle of the night--for the first time this year.
Autumn is finally here. Thanks goodness for that.

That not I've stopped sweating like a pig during my hectic commute to work every morning, yet.

Featured on the news yesterday was Iceland--the latest hot (pun intended) tourist destination, only it's on the telly for all the wrong reason: glaciers are melting faster than i-bankers streaming out of Wall Street with their cardboard boxes, and by early next century, there'll be none left!
Imagine that: An Iceland without ice!
I honestly don't know which is scarier: my investment fund swept away by the financial tsunami or the planet earther flooded by the ever-rising sea level. Both sound very Doomsday to me.

So I found a little solace in good old music, from the Internet. I googled the guitar chords and lyrics of "Way Back into Love" (the song has been ringing in my head every now and then since I saw it on HBO) and "Falling Slowly" from Once. I took my guitar (a baby Taylor, well, not exactly mine), and started to sing out loud, and finally got back in touch with my music side.

And boy, it feels so good.

I've been living with a shadow overhead,
I've been sleeping with a cloud above my bed,
I've been lonely for so long,
Trapped in the past I just can't seem to move on.

I've been hiding all my hopes and dreams away,
Just in case I ever need them again someday,
I've been setting aside time
To clear a little space in the corners of my mind...

There are moments when I don't know if it's real,
Or if anybody feels the way I feel I need inspiration
Not just another negotiation


Well, to hell with those maniacs.

p.s. News just came that not only Iceland is on the brink of melting, it's on the brink of bankruptcy too. Talk about rubbing salt in the wound.

We are what we read...and eat

What I’m reading this week:
Remember Me? Sophie Kinsella
All Kinsella’s books should be subtitled “Happy-Go-Lucky”, as in the latest Mike Leigh film.

Things that should be banned—now!:
Reading free papers on the MTR. Reasons? Plenty of them:
1. Let’s begin with something grand—save our planet earth!
2. It pains me to see old people begging for papers outside the gates. Creating scraps for old people at the bottom of the waste chain to sweep away is NOT the answer to ending poverty.
3. I can’t honestly rationalise the phenomenon of 50 people each holding the same copy of a paper, crammed in the same carriage when they could be so much better off reading the copy of the person standing in front.
4. But here’s the real one: I’m sick and tired of fending papers thrust into my face, as if they own my precious little space too because they’re armed with a legitimate weapon and I don’t.
Men in polo shirts with stand-up collars. Can’t really put my fingers on why it turns me off. They just give me hives. These men, by the way, are always wearing pink.

I am reading Kate Fox’s Watching the English two years late during the National Day holiday. Class really is everything in Britain—not only it’s in the way you talk but what you eat. So I’m particularly awestruck by this article on a new TV series, on real food for thought, from the one and only Jamie O:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/oct/01/foodanddrink.oliver

And I didn't know Jool and Jamie are expecting their third bundle of joy:
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/news/third-baby-joy-for-chef-oliver-937986.html

Which footballer ('s recipe) do you fancy?
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/news/footballers-target-obesity-with-cookbook-947426.html

Why banana, Thiery? I don't like them in a cooked dish.