101 Things #77 - Serious Eating

From time to time I amuse myself by following, on YouTube, the exploits of a few intrepid young people who undertake food challenges. These invariably take the form of eating as much as possible of a certain food, or set of dishes, within a set time. I covered the fascination of fiery peppers a short while back but in this piece I have picked on up a suggestion found on the website called Bucket List Journey. They think that everyone should, at least once in their lives,

Order one of everything on the menu.

I am not prepared to have this as one my life goals. Indeed, I have no intention of ever even trying it and instead shall add this to my seemingly-interminable series, known in the better parts of Ruislip as 101 Things I Refuse To Do Before I Die

What menu? That of a small local restaurant or that of a national chain? Maybe a cafe or the palatial dining room of a grand hotel? It's a bit vague. It would need to be one that is not too huge - for example a typical Indian restaurant will have a lamb course in a dozen different sauces and maybe a choice of five heat settings from Korma to Vindaloo and beyond. That's 60 dishes before ordering the equivalent in chicken, prawns, duck and all of the side dishes and vegetarian mains. Plus bread. Plus rice. And don't forget the popadums. This, I think, can be ruled out on grounds of sheer impracticality.

However it is possible to find menus sufficiently restricted that it is feasible to order and attempt to eat one of everything. Indeed, this is one of the standard approaches of one of the guys I keep an eye on, who has a channel on YouTube called BeardMeetsFood. He likes a pretty wide range of food and is happiest scoffing the entire menu of a pizza joint or a pub, literally eating a full portion of each individual dish available. Here he is enjoying a Christmas dinner.

Pic: Screenshot from Youtube

Now the point is that Beardy (real name Adam), aided by his supportive wife Lindsey, does this for a living. He has trained himself to be able to cope with enormous quantities of food - 12,000 calories at a sitting is not unusual - and keeps his body in trim. How he does this I don't know. If I were to eat just a quarter of one of his typical meals I would be violently ill.

Of course, the good folk behind Bucket List Journey have been rather cunning in their proposal. There is nothing about actually eating anything - to mark this one off as a bucket list done, all that is needed is to order the food, confirm to the staggered waiter that yes, all fifteen main courses and ten sides are wanted, and don't forget the desserts. Or the starters. But that doesn't seem much of an achievement since it merely involves spending a bit of money. Surely a serious effort has to be made to nosh the lot and obviously the noshing needs to be done by just the one person. Bringing in the local rugby team after a hard morning's training is not fair.

We are left with a simple conclusion. For the ordinary bloke, like me, to attempt to order a load of food that I could not possibly eat is a repulsive idea. I'm not even going to go into the morality of it.  It is not going to be something I would ever look back on, wistfully, wishing I had attempted it. Kudos to those who can and those of us who cannot will cheerfully do something - anything, really - instead.  Now, then, what's for lunch?

101 Things #76 - Give us a Song

We're about three quarters the way through this excoriating set of pieces devoted to debunking the bucket-lists of others, known to a select few as 101 Things I Refuse To Do Before I Die. A good time to look inwards and clarify my position on one of the most important cultural expressions of the day. I will not now, tomorrow, or at any conceivable time in the future

Perform karaoke.

According to the Macmillan Dictionary Blog (and other sites as well) the word karaoke is a compound of two Japanese words and means "Empty Orchestra". The empty bit refers to the missing vocal track on a recording and of course this is supplied by the person who sings the lyrics to the backing of a recording.

I suggest that an alternative meaning is the orchestra who empty, meaning the bar as soon as the karaoke starts and, for the twentieth time that night, someone croaks out My Way or I Will Survive.

The problem with karaoke is that it is really only fun for the singer. They are in the limelight, everyone has to watch them and can do little else, given the volume of the backing track (apart from quietly stealing away, obviously). It doesn't matter if you can't hold a note, indeed it doesn't matter if you cannot hit any note. The words are probably displayed on a screen so you won't have the embarrassment of forgetting them and at the end there will be a loud cheer from anyone left because that is what you do at karaoke sessions.

I don't much like poor renditions of popular songs and I actively dislike much of the repertoire of karaoke machines. If I was to cheer at an event it would be with relief that the noise was over. I have no illusions about my singing voice and refuse to inflict it on anyone else, and certainly not in the name of fun. It would not be fun for me.The stuff I like is not found on karaoke machines.

What this means is not only that I utterly refuse to perform karaoke but will do all in my power to avoid being anywhere close to a performance. Instead I suggest a new art form which I intend to call smyltnes gebregd efenlæcung¹, or smygebfencung for short. Just as karaoke is for people who cannot sing, so smygebfencung (doesn't it just trip deliciously off the tongue?) is for people who cannot do mime but have always, passionately, wanted to don skimpy black clothes, paint their faces white and pretend to be inside a box.

 At a smyg ..., oh sod it, let's call it sge, at an sge session  someone from the audience comes up and struts about in absolute silence pointing at things and pulling funny faces for about twenty seconds. Then they return to their seats, with the audience observing a silence as rigorous as the would-be mime,  and everyone can get on with enjoying the rest of their evening. It costs absolutely nothing, apart from a very modest set-up fee², will not assault your ear-drums or inflict moronic lyrics on your brain and it can be done anywhere without any equipment or preparation. I commend it to you.




Footnotes:
1. Taken, of course, from Anglo-Saxon and many thanks to Old English Translator for help
Smyltnes - silence
Gebregd - movement
Efenlæcung - imitation

2. A small licence fee will be levied by the Worldwide SGE Fund (President: RR Commuter) but don't worry about that, it's all covered by the Terms and Conditions.As they are in Anglo-Saxon (Ruislip dialect), you will need to purchase our translation as well for a really modest, given the lavishness of the binding, extra fee payable well in advance.

101 Things #75 - Disney Extravaganza

Followers of this series of jeers at the cherished bucket-list ideas of others will be used to the main thrust of it by now. Newcomers may be unaware that I am building a veritable encyclopedia of disdain called 101 Things I Refuse To Do Before I Die. The suggestion being vandalised today was found on the website of the clearly much-travelled Aussie on the Road.  I am not, under any circumstances, going to

Visit every Disney Park.

Every Disney Park? I have no intention of setting foot in any of them. However our standards are high here at Ramblings and so we have researched the matter in order to know just what it is we are walking away from. We have:

•  Disneyland Resort - Los Angeles 
• DisneyWorld - Orlando 
• DisneyResort - Tokyo 
• Disneyland - Paris (well, nearish to Paris)
• Disneyland - Hong Kong 
• Disney Resort - Shanghai 
• Aulani, Disney Resort - Hawaii 

• And there are four Disney Cruise Liners, (calling in at Neverland, Treasure Island, Cair Paravel in Narnia and Davey Jones' Locker, no doubt), and Adventure Club and other holidays. 

Good luck to Aussie on the Road in wading through that lot. It means travelling right round the world and spending some real money. And in each place you will encounter people wearing costumes of cartoon characters who will wave a lot, and then you can queue for yet another roller-coaster ride before queuing for an ice-cream or to see a film.

I am sure kids love it all. I am not a kid. I am not and have never been taken with Mickey Mouse or any of the stock Disney characters. I dislike intensely the way that many great children's stories, such as Alice in Wonderland, have been turned into loveable non-contentious cartoons.I don't want to walk along recreations of places when the original can be explored instead. I don't want to look at magic castles when there are plenty of stupendous examples of the real thing, here in the UK.

101 Things #74 - Teetering on the Edge

Readers! Have you been following this seemingly endless series of related pieces called 101 Things I Refuse To Do Before I Die? If you have then you will be familiar with the concept. I take an idea (often found on the internet) commending an activity as worthy of being your bucket-list and debunk it. Sometimes I take note of a common practice or belief. But today you are getting two for the price of one as I cunningly merge recommendations from two websites.

 Bucket List Journey reckons you should try jumping off a cliff. Backpacker's Tale is a little more cautious, opining that you should go cliff jumping anywhere it is safe. I don't care how many people are in favour. I am not going to

Jump off a cliff (safely or not).

I don't swim. This makes it fairly obvious why I shall be the bloke standing on the beach watching others hurtling over the edge of the heights above. Even if I did, I have a problem being too close to any drop, as you will know if you encountered my little piece about decorating. And a dodgy back so thumping down from a height, even into water, is not appealing.

As to the whole business of four seconds of "Hey, everyone look at me, I'm falling a hundred feet" followed by the long dull trudge up the path to do it again, forget it. I do hope that Bucket List Journey man takes note of the sensible attitude expressed by the Backpacker. Indiscriminate plunging into unknown waters does seem a trifle headstrong. A reasonable depth of water, absence of rocks, sharks and crocodiles and a benign current are all called for here, surely. Otherwise you may as well climb the nearest handy scaffolding and aim for a small bucket of water far below, and get it all over with, without the risk of months of painful and expensive treatment in a foreign hospital:-

"I am so sorry, señor, but you can no longer afford the anaesthetics. Or a bed. But fear not, señor, my friend Miguel has a very nice shack near the cement works where we can continue your treatment. Perhaps another time you will not venture over the Death Leap Cliff, huh?"

Of course, if we define a cliff to mean any sort of natural drop we might manage to defuse the whole plummet-to-your-doom situation. On the other hand it probably does need to be a bit more impressive than a diving board height.

I can happily live out the rest of days without shedding one second of regret that I never fell off a cliff. Admiring them from below, fine. Gazing out over the view from the top, absolutely fine. Managing a profitable little ice-cream stall for those struggling on the way up, just the ticket. But I am not going to take a running jump, no matter much how my detractors might plead.

101 Things #73 - Bye-bye Body

I have had some harmless fun examining one or two recommendations found on the Lifelot  website on the subject of bucket-lists. You will not be surprised to learn that I have selected another which I think is worthy to join to my festering heap of rejected ideas, known to the world as 101 Things I Refuse To Do Before I Die. The notion getting the custard pie treatment today is to

Experience an OBE (Out-of-body experience)

It is as well that the definition of OBE was supplied by the originator otherwise I would have been pondering how I could experience being an award given to reasonably meritorious citizens, as well as long serving senior civil servants. I suspect frock coats and top hats might have entered into it.

No, what we have to deal with is the age-old idea that the mind is somehow an entity that exists independent of the body in which it functions, and therefore can continue to function when no longer within the body and then can return to that body so that the owner can, by consulting his memories, conclude that his mind has made observations that his body did not make. Such a free-ranging mind seems not too dissimilar to the popular conception of a soul, although you will also find people who promote mindfulness and the like speaking about body, mind and soul so now we have perhaps two bodiless entities that each encapsulate our personalities and everything we know.

This however is not the right place to go into the heart of one of mankind's most cherished beliefs, survival of something resembling ourselves after death. What I really want to explore is how a mind can experience anything at all on its own. Scientists, such as Douglas Hofstadter¹, have advanced some fairly detailed models of how the mind emerges from the ceaseless interactions of billions of neurons in the brain, each chemically bound to its neighbours and influenced by signals from the body. These models debunk the ancient ideas of the "I" who sits somewhere behind our eyes and looks out on the world and who constitutes the immortal part of our selves. It follows that any claims for OBE's need to be proven and some reasoning given for how the "mind" can move, experience and remember anything when the thing that is doing the moving, experiencing and remembering is not actually able to do any of these things independently.

The OBE state does not have eyes or any sensory organs because these are all separate organs within the body. How then does one "see" in this state? The usual stories are about people floating above their bodies and looking down to see themselves. I cannot tell how you distinguish this from simply imagining it . Floating up a bit more and reading the registration numbers of aircraft passing by, that would be a bit more interesting. And if the mind is out of the body, does that mean the body is brain-dead? If not, does that mean your mind has effectively split in two so that there are now two sets of memories that then have to be merged back into one in a sort of database synchronisation?

My scepticism is really about the mundane nature of reported OBEs (usually from patients in near-death experiences). They always say that they seemed to be hovering just above their bodies, watching the medics trying to bring them round. Why not hover outside the cafe and see what the doctors are having for lunch? What about drifting down to the football stadium and catching up on the Rovers? I am not being facetious here [Seems like it to me: Ed] - If one is really out of the body and free to float around why not move at will through the world (and why not the entire universe?). And since the patient knows he is being resuscitated why bother to look on where there are countless other things to do?

Is it all a delusion based on the patient envisaging himself at a critical moment?  And why is the OBE always reported as being floating above the body? Not sideways, not looking up from the basement (or maybe thirty feet below the ground)? You might as well glue a mirror to a stick and hold it up over your head if looking down at your own body is really the only thing that ever happens in these cases and then you can spare yourself the tedious business of being thumped in the chest and having electric shocks.

Apart from being rather too close to death than I care to contemplate right now, the only other way to have an OBE seems to be to follow some meditative discipline, usually associated with  Indian or eastern religions. There is no guarantee this will work. Again, I have to ask, if it is possible, what do all these out-of-body minds actually do? Once up there, floating, what happens then?

I shall not be holding my breath waiting to have an OBE (or is this where I am going wrong?)

-&-&-&-&-

OBE Believers - Do you dare take the Ramblings Challenge?

Here is the Ramblings challenge. There is a small brown leather-bound case on a shelf in my study. I will gladly pay anyone who has had an OBE and who can tell me what is inside it the grand sum of money that is currently in my wallet (and you should be able to tell me what this as well.)
There we are. Entirely fair. Use your mental powers to find out where I live, park outside, float your mind free and into the house and it should be the work of but a moment to determine these two elementary pieces of information. No complaints about it being dark - you won't be using your eyes to see anyway, will you?

Terms and conditions apply and can be scrutinised by floating your mind to the top shelf in my study where you can rummage through some piles of paper if you really have nothing better to do.


Footnotes:

1. see  Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid and Metamagical Themas but make sure your brain is well screwed in before you start because easy going they are not.