Sushi For Breakfast

Day 308 Well not quite, but they're naturally arranged that way:



We've got so many because Tesco have an offer on - buy 1, get 2 free - so we thought we'd stock up for Christmas, or whenever we can eat our way through these.

And in case you've not seen, Stephen Fry is back tweeting ♥ he has a post on his website about recent happenings. I did think that if he's coming back, then it would be within a few days.

Day 264 The Fry Chronicles - written by Stephen Fry, dedicated to Hugh Laurie.



Have you bought yours yet? Some people have no plan to, how absurd of them. This book has sex, drugs, rock & roll, space shuttles, Olympic gold medallists, water, pianos, rivers, houses, wood, sanitary bags, grown-up schoolboys, figurative archdeacons, posters, apples, Apples, driving tests, credit cards (not stolen), cunning plans, and comedy. Buy it. Read it. Love it. Yeah.

I've finally got the smaller Stephen Fry items uploaded to YouTube, so here they are, below the cut - mostly interviews, but also a couple of films showing Stephen Fry & Harry Enfield learning BSL for a Comic Relief feature in 1989:

( Stephenings )

Apologies for the varying picture quality, but I haven't seen these anywhere else so I hope you like them.

I have another Stephen Fry interview to download, his appearance on The Kumars At No.42, which was in 2002 according to IMDb. More about this show here.

Download here, another large file I'm afraid, too long for YouTube but that means lots and lots of Stephen.

You may recall my mentioning recently in my LJ about a Christmas surprise I was planning on springing on you at some point before the festivities. The waiting is over - I wanted to get this done before Christmas so that anyone spending Christmas away from the Internet (not me, too scary) would have the chance to download these before going LOS.

'These' are five bundles of articles from various news sources in the UK and North America, which I gathered together earlier this year from my newly-discovered sources (thank you, University!). There's a bundle each for Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Fry & Laurie (ie a separate bundle for the two of them together), Robert Sean Leonard, and John Sessions. All the bundles are zipped up in .ZIP files, and the individual articles are in PDFs, with a couple of JPGs in the Hugh Laurie bundle.

The articles vary in length from a single paragraph to several pages, and are a mix of reviews, interviews, profiles and a few brief mentions. There are a few reviews where the writer wasn't too impressed with the overall product, or some major aspect of it, but showers praise on the bundle-subject. Also, these articles tend to be the whole article as published at the time, so you may have to scroll down or flip through to another page to find the review of the TV show or play featuring our bundle-subject.

You may have seen some of these before, in particular the recent items, but they go back a long way. For example, there's a couple of reports covering Hugh's rowing career (he's referred to as 'James Laurie' in some texts, the reporters logically assuming his first firstname is the one he uses), and there's a few about a young teenage actor from Ridgewood, NJ called Robert Leonard.

I hope you like them. These are all on Sendspace, if anyone has problems with Sendspace, let me know of a host you don't have problems with and I'll re-upload.

• Fry & Laurie - 1.03MB, 12 files Download


• Hugh Laurie - 8.27MB, 105 files Download


• John Sessions - 2.13MB, 19 files Download


• Robert Sean Leonard - 2.24MB, 32 files Download


• Stephen Fry - 5.08MB, 41 files Download

If you missed my posting a couple of Christmases ago of extracts from my Fry & Laurie scrapbook, you can see the articles here. This is a real scrapbook of articles I started collecting in the mid-1980s in a ringbinder, scanned for your viewing pleasure. Happy Christmas!

Today is Hugh Laurie's 50th birthday! Many congratulations to the blue-eyed one.

Let us celebrate by enjoying some of Hugh's awesomeness:



( More.... )

Under the influence of Hugh Laurie's SAG Awards win, Stephen Fry's Tweetings and my poor brain (which is still under meds and off work for the snotty URI) I slept until around 1pm today and had a strange dream.

It was a bright sunny day, but had been raining earlier. My sister was driving me to work in my Dad's car (why? I have my own car and she lives in another part of the city) but instead of going into work, we went to a strange-looking dull postwar building and through to the terrace seating round the back of the cafe. Sitting at a table-for-two drinking coffee were Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie! Why they were there I'll never know, probably the kind of logical explanation you only get in dreams. Stephen was wearing the same clothes he wore last week on the Jonathan Ross show, and Hugh was wearing blue jeans, a red checked shirt and his hair looked like it had been bleached platinum-blonde a few weeks back - enough for unbleached roots to appear. He looked like he was dressed that way for a film role, although I couldn't work out what that role would be.

I approached them both and asked for autographs, telling Hugh how much I loved House and congratulations on the SAG Award. I started to fumble about in my bag and look around for something to be signed, as I didn't have my autograph book from meeting the astronauts with me. I was also trying to be discreet and not attract attention which would result in a big crowd round them. Eventually I found some paper and Hugh wrote a message (which I can't remember as I was struggling to read his handwriting) and signed it. Stephen had disappeared by this time and had gone back into the main building.

It didn't take me long to track Stephen down. By contrast, the main building was modern and attractive and functional, including large double-entrance elevators (elevators with large floor areas and two or more entrances are a recurring feature of my dreams, they can be simple Lego-built platforms or large sophisticated 'floors' of a vast department store or hotel). Some of my workfriends were there, attending a meeting, and with their help I found Stephen sitting in a waiting area on an upper floor. I asked him for his autograph and he politely refused, but gave a long story about how he wasn't being unkind because a mark on an arbitary piece of paper wasn't the lasting impression he liked to leave, but a conversation with him was better than an autograph because it's personal and different every time, and an opportunity for both parties to leave a lasting impression on each other. I asked him if he would mind if I told people (ie my workfriends and my sister, wherever she'd driven off to), he said he'd rather I didn't tell the details of our conversation. I asked him if he'd mind if I told people I'd met him briefly, he hesitated but then smiled and said he didn't mind, and I said I'd tell people anyway - for which I got a hug from him :)))

The dream then progressed to the hostel where I apparently live, and where several workfriends also have little apartments, and we discussed evenings out to play bingo. Some people had been and enjoyed, others hadn't been but liked the idea, and I said I'd arrange a group night out at the bingo for us all. I said I'd ask my grandmother for advice about which bingo hall to visit - a sound idea, given her enthusiasm for bingo, but made tricky given that she died in 2000.

I do not celebrate New Year if I can help it, not being in the fireworks business or a faceless BBC presenter. I was happily watching Stephen Fry swim with sharks when I was called downstairs to see Rebecca Adlington on a boat with a load of other New Years Honours people with a load of fireworks going off and people counting down to a big clock like we did before ITV Schools Programmes.

I've officially done New Year twice. Once was Millennium New Year at a friend's house, their last big celebration before the kids came along. The other was when I was about ten years old, our grandparents came round and we were allowed to stay up to midnight for the first time and we played cards all night and I was wearing my favourite T-shirt.

Now thankfully I am back upstairs watching Stephen Fry in Hawaii. Much more fun.

I decided not to go out, but to have a relaxing day off. I started with adding a salt scrub to my shower routine, something from a Boots Spa gift pack I received a Christmas or two ago. It continued with the starting of my advent calendar:



Only downside has been the failure of my Blip.fm to automatically post to my Twitter, but I've overcome that manually so all is there now. I need to catch up on the STS-126 post-mission stuff, it's still mid-morning at Houston so I need to check what time things are happening. But for now I have an Innocent Smoothie (lemon, honey & ginger) to enjoy, along with everyone's Tweets - particularly Greg Grunberg's tweets, as he seems to have become Stephen Fry's newest fanboy :)

I have a crappy rotten cold. Just when I don't need one, when I'm supposed to be enjoying my holiday and getting loads done and being awesome at physics.

Woke up feeling a little better than yesterday, but throat very sore and ears blocked. Can't taste much unless it's highly flavoured, so am holding on the Jellybeans and Hotel Chocolat goodies until I can taste them. Am downing the paracetamol and lucozade at the prescribed regular intervals, they got me up & to the shops and back to buy food, and am part-way through the laundry so hopefully they'll see me through to the end of that.

Hope I have enough energy to stay up to see the shuttle launch (12.55am tonight my time), have downloaded some wallpapers - here - and also it's Children In Need tonight, and there's a brand new QI on at 10pm. I'm trying to keep a little busy, doing stuff and planning stuff, cos otherwise I just go "oh noes my poor throat my poor nose oh woe".