Chicken tikka ala Ramsay

Today it was tikka masala day ala Ramsay. I was surprised how easy it was to make it. Not sure if Gordon would eat it though knowing his standards but i was good enough for me. Have to say i really like the guy and his passion for food is ver contagious. Nothing beats home made cooking the stuff from a jar is really horrible comparatively speaking.

You got mail

A day or so back i saw "the Lake house", i remember seeing it a couple years back and i really liked the film. A romantic film with a bit of time traveling is just my kind of thing on a cold and cloudy day. There is quite a lot letter correspondence happening in the film and that just made me think how much i miss that. Times have changed. Don't get me wrong i think its great that we can text people and say a quick hi, ask how they are doing or just leave a little message. I still miss my snail mails though. Hand written letters where the handwriting was so bad you had to ask yourself: what does it say? Today if i ever get a letter  its written on a computer and then it is just signed (if even that) by the person who wrote it. To really think about it the only thing popping into my mail box are bills, information or advertisement from various companies. I miss my post cards! Today wether it is Christmas or you go abroad on a holiday you send a e-card or a text message. It is cheaper, faster but less personal in a way. Really it could serve as a nice compliment to a card. Call me old fashion but nothing says "ah, they are really having a relaxing holiday" then that little post card you get in a mail box with a picture of a palm tree on the beach.

Mashup

Do we remember all the music from 2010? Here is a mashup of top 25 from the US.

Batman

Last couple of days i have been organizing my photos. I have let it slip quite a bit and now there is tons of work. To take a break i ended up browsing through the net and saw that it is really not far now till they start shooting the last movie in the Batman trilogy, if everything will go according to plan that is. They still have not found their leading lady. This film will of course star Christian Bale, Michael Cane and Morgan Freeman although this will be Bale's last Batman movie. The film will be directed by Christopher Nolan (Inception, the Prestige, Batman begins) and i really can not wait. Love his work. With Peter Jackson's "the Hobbit" just around the corner, 2012 seems to become a good year regards to films.

The Script

Meet the Script! I stumbled across this soft rock band last year, while looking for some music on Spotify and immediately i was hooked. I had not heard of them before, yet they released their first single "We Cry" in April,  2008. The single became their first top 20 hit peaking at number 15 on the UK Single Chart and at number 9 on the Irish Single Chart. Four months later they released their self-titled album which made number one in the UK and Ireland, with single hits like "Man who can't be moved", "Breakeven" and "Talk you down". I really love the sound of this band, it is unique and the guys can really write expressive music conveying feelings that hit straight to the core. I was waiting with anticipation for their next album. September 2010 they released their new album "Science & Faith" and the single "For the First Time". One word - awesome! The next single from the album is called "Nothing" and boy i am blown away. Love it!

Secrets

I love this song by OneRepublic, a band that made it big thanks to MySpace. This song appears also in the Sorcerers Apprentice starring Nicolas Cage. In the film Dave (Jay Baruchel) plays this song on the tesla coils (the other song was Superstition by Steven Martin). Anyhow, enough babbling, enjoy the song!

The Tourist

Finally we get to see such amazing actors as Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie act opposite each other in a film called the Tourist - a remake of the French thriller Anthony Zimmer. In the film the dazzling beauty, Elise Ward (Angelina Jolie) is first seen sipping a coffee in a cafe. While under surveillance, of Interpol, she receives a message. The message is from her former lover, Alexander Pearce, an international criminal, who stole millions of dollars from a gangster by the name of Shaw. Elise gets the instruction to take a train and meet Alexander in Venice, Italy. Whilst on the train she is suppose to find a man with a specific height and looks. She gets acquainted with a tourist by the name of Frank Tupelo (Johnny Depp), a math-teacher from Wisconsin. Elise convinces Frank to have dinner with her and later on to stay in a hotel, where they kiss; a kiss that sets of a chain of events, resulting in Frank being mistaken by Pearce and colliding with the Interpol investigation. 

During the film there are a couple of twists, but they leave you with a confused state of mind - I had no idea if i was watching a comedy or an action movie. The story was there, the acting was there but the execution was poor. It was good to see Johnny Depp act as an down to earth man instead of the eccentric characters we are used to seeing him play, but being Johnny he still added his quirks to the character. That part i liked though, i had more trouble with the music that was trying to buildup the pace, leaving you expecting an event that never came. The editing was rather poor as well. It seemed like bits and pieces where missing, which spoiled what could have been a great chemistry between the characters. There where bloopers too; like during a shooting scene bullets went through the roof of the boat and in the next scene the roof is polished and shining, or when a hand-cuffed Depp is swimming in the water without hand-cuffs...and there where more of such mistakes. Those are perhaps details but very annoying ones. It was like the film was taking the "p" for the better part. The good set of actors, beauty of Venice, some wittyness, shooting and running over roof-tops lift the film up but only so much. Don't get me wrong though - after accepting the film for what it is - it becomes decent one. It is not a movie that will leave you with a sense of "what pile of crap was that(?)" but it will not blow you away either. That said i enjoyed it.

Disney on Ice

Disney on Ice! I thought it was a great show so i can imagine that the kids thought it was awesome. Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, the Incredibles and characters from Toy Story, like Woody and Buzz Lightyear and many more from the world of Disney were skating around the ice in a story where Donald and Minnie where put to a hundred years of sleep by the evil witch. A show i warmly recommend to anyone with kids. I will definitely go next year! Sorry about the bad quality pics but didn't have the SLR with me.

Just a few seconds from the show :+)

Is this a dream?

A while back i got this app called Inception for my iphone. I have to admit that it took a while before i understood how it works. The app basically augments the music (by Hans Zimmer) from the film. It captures the sound from your surrounding distorting and combining it to create a dream world. Just like the film the app idea is genius. It has different dreams that you can enter: the still dream where you have to sit still for a while to unlock it or the active dream where its enough that you shake your iphone. The full moon dream, which you can only activate ones a month, as it actually checks if it is full moon where you are. If you then enter too many dreams you end up in limbo. The app is brilliant as it uses GPS, microphone and positioning on the iphone. Saying that: the most confusing dream is the Africa dream. Do you have to be in Africa in order to unlock it? People have cracked this dream on a jail broken phone, but i will not jailbreak my phone just to listen to some sounds. I am also not traveling to Africa just to unlock the dream (unless it would be a real dream coming true to go to Africa). Then again maybe i just do not get it, how to unlock it. I think this app is cool for soothing and relaxing sounds. I would want to listen to it just before sleep but then i am afraid I will never wake up and as i have lost my unique token i would not know the difference between what is real or fiction. In a way this app does not make much sense but then again does everything have to have a meaning?

Happy New Year

2011 has started with a quiet and peaceful day. I do not know anyone that thinks that last year was a good one so thank god it is over and will not return...and if Hollywood is right then 2012 will be a right *beeeep*, so let's make the best that we can out of this year, then again if there will be a virus outbreak then maybe Will Smith will save us in the end. Although following Aeon Flux or Terminator: Sara Connors Chronicles then we are pretty much fried already this year.

Some events from 2010:

1) A massive earthquake takes place in Haiti causing death to around 150 thousand people. This year there are earthquakes also in Indonesia, Japan, Mexico and other places

2) The Swedish car manufacture Saab is sold to the Dutch Spyker, causing it drop on the stock market

3) The polish governmental plane crashes over Russian soil killing more then 90 people including the president, Lech Kaczynski.

4) Eyjafjallajökull a volcano in Island erupts and causes a lot of trouble for the air traffic in Europe

5) BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, causing massive damage to the coastline.

6) Spain wins, for the first time ever, the FIFA World Cup in South Africa. The Netherlands was the runner-up.

7) Election is held in Sweden and the right wing extremist party gathered for the first time enough votes to enter the parliament in the role of a weight master between the major parties.

8) Apple launches ipad (i want one!)

9) A suicide bomber blows himself up in central Stockholm, killing only himself. Muslims in Sweden go out on the street the day after protesting.

10) Winter Olympics is held in Vancouver, Canada

11) The first synthetic genome is created

12) Wikileakes makes classified documents public causing a huge debate all over the world

13) 33 men got trapped in a miner accident in Chile. They got rescued after almost 70 days underground