More Scottish food shenanigans, only this time it’s not curry or chilli but an ode to the good old humble Chip Shop by the Scottish rapper MC Tickle, set to the beat of the classic “Hip Hop” by Dead Prez. Scottish people do indeed love their chips (or “fries” for my American friends) and lots of other deep-fried delights, like Mars bars and pizza slices. So much so that it can be hard to find decently priced non-Scottish cuisine on in the major cities without paying top dollar, a fact which is reflected in the poor health of the Scottish people. Yeah, it may not be the healthiest fare, which Tickle acknowledges, but at least eating at your local chippie (rather than McDonalds or KFC) has an upside in that it is supporting your local businesses and agriculture:
“Pizza Hut we say “nuh”
We say fuck Mackie D’s
BK shut your face or that mutt KFC
Pre-chewed meat pseudo food
What is this total shit?
Try and support local business
Aye and buy a poke o’chips”
I know this is harsh, and my sympathies go out to everyone injured (including the unlucky “Curry” Kim), but c’mon, it’s also quite funny. Sorry but it is!
A CURRY house is under fire after its “world’s hottest chilli” competition went badly wrong, landing two people in hospital. Emergency services had to rush to Kismot Restaurant’s curry-eating challenge, on St Leonards Street [Edinburgh], after competitors started writhing on the floor in agony, vomiting and fainting during the contest. One participant, Curie Kim - pronounced curry - was so ill after sampling the “Kismot Killer” that she had to be taken by ambulance to the ERI twice in a matter of hours.
Participants were required to sign a legal disclaimer prior to taking part in the competition, and two members of the British Red Cross were on hand, but they could not cope with the nature of the injuries sustained. Curry house owner Abdul Ali admitted that he would have to “tone down” the contest, but said the challenge had raised hundreds of pounds for charity CHAS. He added that half of the 20 people who took part in the challenge had dropped out after witnessing the first 10 diners vomiting, collapsing, sweating and panting. Previously the restaurant’s Kismot Killer dish has caused diners to suffer nose bleeds and one elderly man had to go to hospital.
Looks like the “Kismot Killer” is well named. Oh dear!
UPDATE:
Via commenter stussyboy99, here‘s a BBC News report about the contest. Victim Curie “Curry” Kim, who is actually American, described the sensation after eating the chilli as being like “a chainsaw covered in tabasco sauce going up and down your esophagus”. Yikes!
Who needs Martin Scorsese’s documentary on George Harrison, when you can have this roughly cobbled together sequence of prime cuts of Pirate George causing mayhem on Eric idle’s Rutland Weekend Television Christmas Special.
The photos you see here are people’s actual reactions during the scariest moment of the haunted house’s tour. Must be a real shock from the looks on these faces!
I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’ll tell you of the time I saw one. It was summer, I was 18 and working in a 7/11.
Early one morning, at seven-thirty to be precise, I was awoken by someone pinching my toe. There, clearly at the foot of my bed, was my great aunt, dressed in a dark overcoat, as if she had somehow arrived to see me.
“I’ve come to say goodbye,” she said, but never opened her mouth.
We looked at each other for several moments. Then I rubbed my eyes, and she was gone.
Fifty miles away, in a hospital ward, my great aunt died at exactly seven-thirty in the morning. How to explain it, I can’t say, but there it is.
I’ve always had a fondness for ghosts stories, tales of horror and things unknown - they are fine entertainments. Of late, I’ve been collecting such stories recorded in journals and biographies, which often reveal a similarity in the haunting or, in the telling of the tale.
The following come from the journal of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the great writer of supernatural tales, Algernon Blackwood, a man whose stories chilled my schoolboy days. Like the tale of my great aunt, there is a similarity to these tales, of ghosts returning to visit the living.
IX. - Journal
Geneva, Sunday, 18th August, 1816
See Apollo’s Sexton,* who tells us many mysteries of his trade. We talk of Ghosts. Neither Lord Byron nor M.G. L. seem to believe in them; and they both agree, in the very face of reason, that none could believe in ghosts without believing in God. I do not think that all the persons who profess to discredit these visitations, really discredit them; or, if they do in the daylight, are not admonished, by the approach of loneliness and midnight, to think more respectfully of the world of shadows.
Lewis recited a poem, which he had composed at the request of the Princess of Wales. The Princess of Wales, he premised, was not only a believer in ghosts, but in magic and witchcraft, and asserted, that prophecies made in her youth had been accomplished since. The tale was of a lady in Germany.
This lady, Minna, had been exceedingly attached to her husband, and they had made a vow that the one who died first should return after death to visit the other as a ghost. She was sitting one day alone in her chamber, when she heard an unusual sound of footsteps on the stairs. The door opened, and her husband’s spectre, gashed with a deep wound across the forehead, an din military habiliments, entered. She appeared startled at the apparition; and the ghost told her, that when he should visit her in future, she would hear a passing bell toll, and these words distinctly uttered in her ear, “Minna, I am here.” On inquiry, it was found that her husband had fallen in battle on the very day she was visited by the vision. The intercourse between the ghost and the woman continued for some time, until the latter laid aside all terror, and indulged herself in the affection which she had felt for him while living. One evening she went to a ball, and permitted her thoughts to be alienated by the attentions of a Florentine gentleman, more witty, more graceful, and more gentle, as it appeared to her, than any person she had ever seen. As he was conducting her through the dance, a death-bell tolled. Minna lost in fascination of the Florentine’s attentions, disregarded, or did not hear the sound. A second peal, louder and more deep, startled the whole company, when Minna heard the ghost’s accustomed whisper, and raising her eyes, saw in an opposite mirror the reflection of the ghost, standing over her. She is said to have died of terror.
* Mr. G. Lewis, so named in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers - M. S.
The second story comes from Mike Ashley’s Starlight Man, the biography of the fantastic writer, Algernon Blackwood. In this extract, it is 1887 and the young Blackwood, just in his early twenties, has taken a keen interest in the Society of Psychical Research, an organization established by “some of the most notable men in the land and devoted to the series exploration of psychic phenomena.”
This group can be traced back to the Ghost Club, which was established at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1850. By 1882, this club had galvanized into the Society of Psychical Research (SPR), and conisted of “highly respected men - no charlatans. And early members to the SPR were of similar stature - Lord Tennyson, William James, John Ruskin, W. E. Gladstone, Mark twain and Charles L. Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) plus eight Fellows of the Royal Society, including the later Nobel Prize winner Joseph Thomson.”
Blackwood’s father Sir Arthur Blackwood was loosely involved with the group, but only as a debunker of spiritualism. Any evidence that the group provided to confirm Sir Arthur’s no-nonsense, rational view of life was to be commended. However, for Algernon, stories of ghosts, ghouls and things-that-went-bump-in-the-night proved far too attractive for the young man.
Of course, Algernon went on to become world famous for his chilling stories of the supernatural and the occult - as well as his more spiritual and esoteric tales, including the original book for Edward Elgar’s Starlight Express, which later formed the basis for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical. In 1887, Algernon was interested in joining the SPR after reading one of the group’s books
This was Phantasms of the Living (1886) and it was a book that young Algernon found fascinating. It includes several cases that he adapted for his own stories. Perhaps the best known was a case reported by Lord Brougham (1778-1868) while at Edinburgh University in 1799. He had made a pact with a university friend that whoever died first should try to appear to the other. Brougham was one day relaxing in his bath when he saw his friend sitting on a nearby chair. The vision soon faded but he made a note of the occurrence. Soon afterwards he returned to Edinburgh, only to receive a letter to say hat his friend had died in India. The core of the story is the same as Blackwood’s “Keeping his Promise”, also set in Edinburgh, where a dead friend keeps an appointment.
Blackwood rarely mentioned his involvement with the SPR, though he touched upon the subject in his last television talk “How I Became Interested in Ghosts”, in which he discussed the investigation of a haunted house. Blackwood is a superb horror writer, and is better than H. P. Lovercraft, who once said of him:
“Of the quality of Mr. Blackwood’s genius there can be no dispute; for no one has even approached the skill, seriousness, and minute fidelity with which he records the overtones of strangeness in ordinary things and experiences..”
He lived a rich and full life, worked at dozens of jobs, including farmer, undercover spy during the First World War, adventurer, writer, and lastly as a regular presenter of the BBC in the 1940s. His stories of the supernatural and the unknown are amongst the greatest written. They have also provided episodes for Rod Serling’s Night Gallery and his classic tale “Ancient Sorceries” was more than an influence on Val Lewton’s The Cat People.
With Halloween coming these stories may provide some atmosphere to all that Trick and Treating.
“You go into this thing and you build your own world.”
Captured from Watchman Broadcasting’s net stream in July 2011. Dorothy Spaulding and guests unintentionally entertain with their views on digital entertainment.
“Isn’t there a… uh… guitar that’s called ‘something Hero’?”
“That’s a new thing that they’re coming out with and the kids are really addicted to it.”
The best part starts at 2:50 when she asks him about how the “occultists” tried to intimidate him with over 100 dead ravens after he was on her show the last time.
I find this poster for Lego‘s “Basic Building Set” quite pleasing and rather beautiful, with its simple presentation of Lego bricks as color, geometry, mathematics, proportion and possibility.
It was a little after three o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, when the dark green Cherokee jeep, loaded with canisters of propane gas, hurtled towards the Departure zone at Glasgow International Airport. The driver was saying prayers and asking for god’s help, when his vehicle hit security bollards and burst into flames. 28-year-old, Kafeel Ahmed had intended that the jeep would crash through the glass doors, enter into the airport concourse, where it would blow-up, killing as many of the men, women and children who queued patiently for their holiday flights.
It was June 30 2007, and this was the first terrorist attack in Scotland since PanAm Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie in 1988. Little could Ahmed, or his co-conspirator Dr. Bilal Abdullah, have known that their actions were not to lead to holy martyrdom, but rather to the resurrection of one of the funniest, most popular and successful comedy creations of the last 50 years.
In a hotel room in Budapest, the writer Ian Pattison watched the images beamed from Glasgow onto a flickering TV screen, as the would-be terrorists were arrested, all Pattison could think of was one question: “What would Rab C Nesbitt make of this?”
Fall, present day, the trees are cashing in their savings, and the streets are covered with gold. I meet Ian in a coffee house, in Glasgow’s West End, a background of children and mothers laughing and chatting, and the hiss of an espresso machine. It’s a clear day, and we have a long sweeping view down to the Clyde and across the water to the high rises and tenements of Govan beyond, home to the fictional Rab C. Nesbitt - “the original unemployed man”, whose comic television adventures have brought national acclaim, incredible viewing figures and a cabinet full of awards.
Pattison looks relaxed, toned and much younger than his grey hair implies, and he must be older than he looks for It’s twenty-five years since he first dreamt up the alcoholic, head-bandaged street philosopher Rab C. Nesbitt:
“It was New Year’s Eve,” recalls Pattison, “And I was married and living in this masionette apartment in the north of England. Now I’m an anti-social person and when the front doorbell went, I said to my then wife, ‘That’ll be them from downstairs coming to First Foot, I don’t want to see these people. You entertain them, give them a drink and send them on their way. I’ll go upstairs and you tell them I’m in Glasgow.’
“I go upstairs to ‘Glasgow’, but wives don’t always do what you ask them, and these two neighbors sat there until about 5am knocking back the swally. I was upstairs fuming, wondering what can I do? I just can’t suddenly materialize – I’m in Glasgow!
“So I had a notebook up there, because I used write in the wee room, and I started trying to write something about a Liverpool councilor, but it wasn’t working. Then suddenly, I don’t know why, this mutated into a Glasgow speech rhythm, and in about 10 minutes I’d written the first Nesbitt monologue.
“I’ve no idea where it came from. All I knew about him was he raved, he had a head bandage and wore trainers.””
It was a piece of genius inspiration and Ian passed it on to Colin Gilbert, producer of the sketch show Naked Video. Gilbert liked it, but the actor chosen to play the part, Gregor Fisher, wasn’t so keen.
“There was no inkling of developing the character. I just knew it was a character piece, that is to say you weren’t going from gag to gag to gag. I just knew if it got into Gregor’s hands, I knew what he could do with it, and how he would play it. The trouble was persuading Gregor to do it.”
Anyone who has seen Fisher’s work will know that he is a brilliantly gifted actor, with a warmth and subtlety most Hollywood actors would pawn their looks to possess. I first saw Fisher as an unforgettable, happy-go-lucky, wide-boy in Peter MacDougall’s brilliant Just a Boy’s Game, then a few years later stealing the crappy eighties version of 1984 with a cameo role from under the noses of Richard Burton and John Hurt.
Now Naked Video had made Fisher a household name, on the back of his incredible comic acting, but when presented with a new character to play, he was less than impressed by Pattison’s latest creation.
“Gregor read it and said it was as funny as cancer,” Pattison recalls.
Thankfully, Head of the Comedy Unit, Colin Gilbert was on hand to quietly help matters along. Gilbert is a legend in TV comedy, with a long list of ground-breaking shows from Nesbitt to The Limmy Show, Still Game and Gary - Tank Commander on his long and impressive CV. Indeed, Gilbert with his white hair and beard and twinkling eyes is a polar bear disguised as a man - he may look nice and cuddly, but underneath you know there is this formidable energy just waiting for its moment.
“Colin quietly insisted, and Gregor tried it 2 or 3 times, and by the third time, I think Gregor began to think maybe I’m wrongish, and we never thought any more about it. But when the show went out, people picked up on this drunk character, largely because of Gregor’s eye-catching performance.”
Rab C Nesbitt returns to BBC 2 for 6 weeks from Wednesday 5th October at 22:00 hours
The full interview with Ian Pattison and more from Rab C Nesbitt, after the jump…
