Breezeblog

As I’ve shared here before, one of the joys of my week is reading anything AA Gill writes in the Sunday Times. This week brought another classic barb. I mean who esle would have the verve or the nerve to write this:

I started with a complimentary shot glass of insemination-temperature cauliflower soup, with a cold cream cappuccino top and a grey, slimy nose-blow of truffle oil as a garnish. You can sip it like espresso, the waiter said helpfully. Liquidised cauliflower tastes like fat boy’s farts. Effluent cauliflower with added truffle oil tastes like corpse bloat.

Anyone care to join me in a whip round to get AA and Gordon Ramsay to come out here and give some of our complacent over-priced establishments the flaying they deserve?

 The BBC has given its website a makeover featuring, amongst other things – wider pages with a more open design, bigger pictures and, just for us international readers, more prominent ads. See BBC News website editor Steve Herrmann’s blog for some of the reasons behind the changes. Audio and video is supposed to be embedded in the pages, although on many items it still pops up in that annoying separate player window. Generally, though, I think it’s an improvement on what is already IMHO one of the best sites on the web. The old site was starting to look too packed and busy – this looks much cleaner and is easier to read. However I do miss the handy subject tabs along the top as it means I now have to search down the left hand menu for items like sport and business – or scour the home page for “Sport Headlines”.  And if we have to suffer ads, at least get a move on with that international version of the splendid iPlayer service!

If you held off on buying a new MacBook or MacBook Pro, pat yourself on the back. Apple just announced that it is beefing up the processing power on all its laptops. The Pro line is also getting Apple’s Multi-Touch technology debuted in the MacAir. According to Apple, MacBook Pro is now available with Intel Core 2 Duo (Penryn) processors that are built using a 45-nanometer technology. The processors run at up to 2.6GHz, and the laptops come with up to 6MB of cache memory, 4GB of RAM, and whopping new hard drives with up to 250GB of storage space. MacBook Pros start at US$1,999 with MacBooks (120GB drives) stating at US$1,099. 

And just in case you missed it, Apple has dropped the price of iPod Shuffles to $49 and introduced a new 2GB model for $69 – $10 less than the old 1 GB. And if you scoot over to Amazon and order a 32GB iPod Touch, they’ll throw a 1GB shuffle in for free.