Random Madness

Today has been a bit of a weird day as far as bizarre random ideas go and for some reason, maybe I ate something peculiar yesterday? Either way today has been interrupted by an influx of abnormal and random thoughts courtesy of my brain, which is probably revolting after several months of under use.

The first idea came - as so many of the best ideas - in the shower this morning. I have decided that using our eyes to watch TV is a complete waste of time and that it would be better delivered straight to the visual processing centre of the brain by some sort of in head interface. On reflection, I'm not entirely sure I'd be comfortable plugging a device into the side of my head - or any part of my body for that matter.

The second idea came after my late afternoon jelly feast. Yesterdays culinary creation had set perfectly overnight and I was looking forward to sampling the pineappley delights for the first time. I was rather confused yesterday when making it as the instructions say that if you put fresh pineapple - amongst other fruits - into the jelly before it has set, well... it won't. There must be some chemical reason behind why jelly doesn't set when exposed to pineapple. Perhaps a task for the rest of the evening can be to do some research into this phenomenon. Anyway, back to the idea. Whilst devouring the jelly, I was curious to find out what would happen if you ate the jelly cubes raw, and then drank a mug of hot water. Would the jelly set in your stomach? After a lengthy discussion with my mum, we decided that the best approach would be to drink about half a cup of very hot water, jump around for several minutes to help it dissolve, and then drink another mug of ice cold water (enough to make it up to a pint :p) and jump around some more. For added effect, you could then sit in a fridge / freezer, but I'm not sure that that would help.

The other surprise of the day came last night when I was watching Mr and Mrs Smith. I must have either been totally immersed in the film or concentrating on anything but the plot because about a quarter of the way through, in one of the kitchen scenes, I noticed that the toaster in the kitchen was the same as the one in my kitchen! How coincidental, although I do actually hate my toaster and decided a long time ago that along with the kettle (they were a set) are some of the best examples of how not to design kitchen appliances. Okay so they are reasonably stylish, and from what I remember were quite expensive. I think that they were wedding presents so they probably were, and that's probably why they were in the movie, trying to depict the wealth of these people in their posh kitchen. These devices are however, some of the worst, correction, the worst toaster and kettle I have ever had the misfortune to use.

The toaster takes forever to cook the toast and because of this, end up cooking it all the way through. I think I share my idea of the perfect piece of toast with the majority of the population when I say that it should be toasted and crispy and brown on the outside, and soft and fluffy on the inside. I think I have found the reason for it's failure to deliver this and it's because it is one of these toasters designed to cook anything from bread to bagels. Because of this, the holes need to be spaced far enough apart to fit any of these into it and therefore, the heating element is far away from the bread when using a standard medium sliced loaf. It does perform slightly better when using thick sliced bread and this was the basis of the above hypothesis. If we move along to Granary (seeded) bread, the problem gets so much worse. Trying to toast a medium sliced piece of this sort of bread results in something resembling a cross between cardboard and charcoal. Because it is cooked all the way through, and does not have the same structural integrity of white bread (due to the weakness caused by the seeds and grain).

Toaster rant over lets move over to the kettle. You can't have the same complexities of use with the kettle as you can with the toaster because the result is always the same... boiling water. However, this kettle seems to do it in the most roundabout way possible. Firstly, it takes an absolute age, several minutes for one cups worth at least. This is probably due to the hidden element design, which probably makes it much less susceptible to lime scale and therefore much easier to clean, but I'd rather clean and de-scale it every six months that waste what would add up to be hours of waiting if I used it regularly. Thankfully, I can't stand tea or coffee and only rarely use kettles in the winter for hot Ribena so this isn't a problem unless I'm making a hot drink for someone else, usually my Mum who consumes and inhuman amount of tea everyday. The second problem, and the one which is more annoying than the first, is the sheer volume of the thing. It is so loud that it easily drowns out the sound of the TV or radio and is probably on par with something like the extractor fan on full whack.

Wow, it certainly does feel good to get these things off your chest once in a while. The burden of carrying around such rage cannot be good for your health, maybe if I'd have let it build up I'd have shouted at someone or something. Well, I won't find out now will I?