Brilliant! Cheers! is going on a sabbatical. By that I mean I won’t be updating it for a bit until I decide what I’m doing with the site. I appreciate all the comments and all the visitors I’ve had but I feel like my blog has been sadly scattered over things I find interesting without developing a voice of its own. It will be reincarnated into something more focused shortly  but in the meantime, feel free to peruse the brilliant posts made and wait with bated breath for the supercalifragilistic reincarnation…

In the meantime, all you link whores with properties in Florida or those who have the secrets to how to make millions with a simple website; please visit google. You’ll find loads of rubbish for your rubbish there.

For those of you who are looking for a challenging, opinionated blog I encourage you to visit The Plum Duff. Agree or disagree, I guarantee you will get a response so you better have your thinking cap on. Mangled English and poorly thought out comments will be called as such.

Until B!C! is back… Stay brilliant.

I just got done watching ‘What We Do Is Secret’, the movie about one of my favourite bands: the Germs. It kinda blew.

There are many, many great documentaries on bands and music that I love. For some reason whenever they attempt to make a movie about a band they seem to lose the plot. Perhaps musicians and music scenes just aren’t that interesting unless you’re there.

And before anyone shouts about ‘Sid and Nancy’, I challenge you to watch that movie now. It absolutely ruled when I was 13. I watched it again last year and despite Gary Oldman’s creepy and spot-on personification of Sid, the movie sucked.

Is there a good punk rock movie out there that isn’t a documentary? Seriously, I really want to watch one.

There seems to be a lot of coverage on the news about a job transition, sadly mine seems to be overlooked. George W. Bush and I have a few things in common; we both have the same middle initial and we both left our jobs on the same day. The differences are that nobody calls me Dubya and my approval ratings at work are higher. I have less in common with Obama, but we will both be starting new jobs.

I’m moving on and I’m quite excited to do so. I’m really looking forward to the new opportunity I have.

As a proper farewell I and my coworkers went to a pub for some drinks at lunch time. The pub is near a jewellery store which happened at that moment, 1pm on a Tuesday afternoon, to be raided. Three men wearing balaclavas and wielding sledge hammers broke the windows and gathered up some bling before taking off in a Mercedes. I wasn’t a direct witness as I was a block away but one told my Creative Director to “Get the fuck away” while swinging a hammer. Apparently he was quite convincing.

Marlow always seemed such a quaint little village in Buckinghamshire. I am happy to return to the safety of East London and looking forward to my new job.

Coffee is one of the wonders of civilisation but there is always some buzzkill trying to find ways to make it scary. Now too much caffeine might induce hallucinations. I doubt this will deter us hardcore addicts; indeed it might open up a new market for Amsterdam coffee shops.

To be honest, I don’t put much stock in this. I drink loads of coffee and didn’t notice anything too unusual on the way to work.

I´ve been on a bit of a blog hiatus. At first it was because of a lot of traveling to Denmark and the States and then there was a bit of a forced blackout. I was interviewing for a new job and didn´t really want to be discussing that.

Now I have a new job lined up and I couldn´t be happier. It´s a great Christmas for myself and Mrs. Yanqui and we are now celebrating in Madrid.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Every once in a while it pays to look around and see what opportunities are out there. This is an opportunity. While the remuneration isn’t great, it is local and I can’t pass up the opportunity for future world domination.

Knife crime is constantly in the news here, often accompanied by the word ‘epidemic’. The Economist referred to Britain as the ‘Island of Savages’ a couple weeks ago, and today’s Metro cites a report that one in five kids carries a knife for protection.

AMV BBDO has created an ad for my council, Tower Hamlets. It’s aim is obviously to reduce knife crimes and convince kids not to carry them. I think it misses the mark, and probably by quite a bit.

The ad is very well done, nicely shot and paced, but the message is if you carry a knife, you’re more likely to be stabbed by your own knife. I think this is like telling people that if they speed they are more likely to die in their own car. Kids carry knives to look tough, to be tough or because they feel they need protection from others carrying them. They are less likely to be concerned about being stabbed by their own knife than by being stabbed by someone else’s.

The Euro Cup was absolutely thrilling, and we couldn’t be happier that Spain won. I’d been watching the matches and had predicted early on that Spain would win. Of course a lot of that was wishful thinking, but still, I was right. We watched the final at a packed Spanish bar surrounded by cheering, dancing and kissing Spaniards.

The Spanish love football. They really love it. So all the hugging and kissing was reserved for football celebrations while the annual Erotic Film Festival in Barcelona was uncharacteristically chaste. Normally the promoters expect 50,000 men in trench coats using aliases and paying in cash. This year’s attendance was down over 70%, and the decline was blamed on the Euro Cup.

“Football is one of the few things that can compete with sex,” moaned the festival director: compete and win, apparently.

One of Spain’s newest sex symbols:

How can hot, naked women compete?

Without exception, everyone of the locals that we met and interacted with were amazingly friendly. The Scots have a bit of a reputation for having a personality akin to their prickly thistle, but that wasn’t our experience here. I have only been to Scotland once before and that was a trip to Edinburgh, where I wouldn’t say the people were unfriendly by any means, but the Ileach were markedly different.

Our publican was a salesman through and through whose chief aim seemed to be to convince us that whatever we could possibly want could be found at his hotel. A guided tour showing us every aspect of our room, the hotel and grounds to a proud walkthrough of his extensive menu was our introduction to him. Throughout our trip he was impeccably dressed and groomed in his suit while running about chatting to every guest while managing the bar, kitchen and hotel. He was like a Scottish Tasmanian Devil running by and enquiring about how you’re doing, how you slept and how your day was. He would barely wait long enough for an answer before disappearing with a thumbs up and an “Aye, that’s grand. That’s what important!”

We spent a good deal of time on Islay driving around and discovering new places. It was quite peaceful as our car stereo came equipped with a cassette deck and nothing else. Occasionally we could get a radio station playing either country music or a talk show in Gaelic. Generally we just drove around having a conversation or enjoying the sights in silence occasionally punctuated by my “Look out! Sheep!” every time one would bounce across the road in front of us.

When driving in the car you can’t pass another car without receiving a wave. People on the side of the road will wave at you. When walking about you can’t pass somebody on the sidewalk without a comment about the lovely weather and a how are you doing. Visits into shops are never of the quick “I’ll just pop in” variety as they will have an entire conversation with you ranging from the weather to whisky to history to the role of the Scotland in the UK or the UK in the EU.

And the Scots are proud of being Scots. English pounds are brought in by tourists and promptly deposited into bank accounts, because the only notes we saw in circulation were Scottish. Three different banks mint three different varieties which I’m certain is done to spite the English. They even have a £1 note. Many of the plates on cars bore an SCO with St. Andrew’s cross rather than the familiar GB and EU ring of stars.

What makes Islay whiskies so distinct? Well the truth seems to be that nobody quite knows for certain, and while there are a lot of theories and ideas, consensus has yet to be achieved.

I have been told in the past that the barrel is where whisky picked up its flavours as it matured. Undoubtedly that has a great influence on a whisky and is one of the reasons there are so many special finishes and double-matured varieties out there. I tried a Kilchoman new spirit that was three months old and while it looked like vodka since it had picked up no colours from the wood, it had a distinct peaty, smoky, whiskiness about it. Clearly the wood and age aren’t the defining characteristic.

The recipe similarly affects the final effect of the whisky. All of the distilleries used malt from Port Ellen Maltings Co. to their own specifics. Laphroaig also floor malts 20% of their own malt which undoubtedly contributes to that special Laphroaig flavour. Ardbeg claims to be the most heavily peated whisky because they order their malt at 50 ppm of phenols in the peat. This seems to be somewhat open to debate though as Laphroaig said their malts are 55 ppm and supplemented with 40 ppm malt from Port Ellen. Caol Ila and Lagavulin both go for 35 ppm and Bunnahabhain uses a scarce 2 ppm. Clearly this influences the final flavour, but how much so is open to debate.

The processes and equipment used leaves a mark on the final whisky. While Ardbeg uses more heavily peated malt, Lagavulin say they achieve more with their because they do a second distillation of 10 hours compared to Ardbeg’s 5 hours. The shapes of the stills are universally accepted to shape the flavour as well, just nobody knows why or how. The goosenecks on the stills at Lagavulin point down and our tour guide espoused the virtue of the design as quickly condensing and removing the good spirit. The goosenecks at Laphroaig point upwards and similarly the tour guide claimed that made it harder for distillate to leave therefore only removing the best of the spirit.

Geography plays a part too, even on an island as small as Islay. Perhaps it is the spray of seawater at one distillery and one peat field that makes a different. The lochs where they each draw their water might have subtle geological differences that end up in the dram. Ultimately a distillery worker at Laphroaig just shrugged and said, “You could take all of our equipment, our whole distillery and move it a half mile up the road. The whisky made wouldn’t taste the same.”