Giving The Engine Room a polish

As you've probably noticed, I'm in the middle of updating The Engine Room's template. Please bear with me as it might take me a few days to iron out the kinks and restore all the widgets (especially the blogroll).

Thanks - and I hope you like the new look.

£0.30 buys you... no credits

I've been frequenting those North London pubs again, and in one of them I spotted a jukebox with the following price list:


For only 30p you can get... no credits! What a bargain!

The Engine Room's top 10 posts from 2009

Here are The Engine Room's 10 most popular posts from 2009 (according to Google Analytics):

1. Police seize nipple clamps in council offices
2. Have fun with homonyms!
3. The Apprentice and Lorraine Tighe's eyes
4. Yao Guai Bear!
5. Timothy Taylor steak and ale pie
6. Due to the bad weather
7. Six-yearly, bi-monthly, every two months
8. Beware the escalator of death
9. Word of the day: bustitution
10. Google Maps wants me to swim to Glasgow

So - reality TV, pies, Xbox games, portmanteaux and funny pics. You lot have very similar tastes to me...

Words Between the Spaces

One of my resolutions for 2010 is to share with you more of the blogs, sites and tools that I stumble across and enjoy.

So to kick things off I'd like to mention the blog Words Between the Spaces, written by a magazine copy editor in the US.

Having a background in consumer and business mags myself I'm always pleased to see a magazine copy editor or sub blogging - especially as most editing blogs seem to be kept by newspaper journos.

I'm adding Words Between the Spaces to my blogroll (in the 'Favourite Blogs' section, if only provisionally).

Black text on dark grey

STA Travel is a great company, but I'm not sure about the colours it is using in its email newsletter (click on the image for a larger version):


Red text on dark grey? Maybe. Black text on dark grey? I can't read that at all.

(To be fair, when I forwarded the newsletter on to one of my other email accounts the black text showed up there as white. It's a mystery to me.)

Individually handmade

Pizza Express (sorry, I mean PizzaExpress) claims its pizzas are "individually handmade".

This has got me thinking: is 'individually handmade' different to just 'handmade'?

Well, yes: I suppose it is possible to make pizzas by hand but in batches.

While I'm not surprised that pizzas in PizzaExpress restaurants are made both individually and by hand, I find it harder to believe that PE's 'at home' pizzas are prepared in the same way. What, no batch operations at all? That's quite something.


PS. I know I've written a lot of food-related posts recently. Normal service will be resumed in the new year...

Gender stereotyping on the Daily Mail website

So this New Year's Eve we're staying in and cooking some nice Moroccan dishes (rock and roll, huh).

My girlfriend had been looking for a recipe for Moroccan fishcakes and found a promising-looking one on the Daily Mail website.

She noted with disdain, however, that the recipe was located in the 'Femail' part of the site - which is coloured a nice pinky-purple - "because obviously cooking is women's work".

James Brown buys UGG boots

Back in September I blogged about James Brown wanting to buy a sun lounger from me. The following month the deceased entertainer was after some asymmetric bars.

Unfortunately I couldn't help him with either of these requests - but Mr Brown has made at least one purchase this year, according to a blog I maintain at work:


Godfather of Soul? More like Godfather of Sole...

The grill can be used as a grill

One of the Christmas presents I received this year was a fantastic Sainsbury's 'Health Grill' (an own-brand equivalent of a George Foreman grill):


Being a thorough kind of person, I read the instructions before using the grill and was amused to come across the following sentence:

The grill can be used as a grill and can cook a wide variety of foodstuffs.

Really - the grill can be used as a grill? And here I was planning to use it as a microwave...