Sake-fuelled cultural insensitivity

Mrs B and I were lucky enough to go to the Eat Japan Sushi Awards over the weekend.

We had a great time, ate some amazing, truly world-class, food and made good use of the complimentary sake and beer.

There were seven chefs from seven different countries, all with a very different approach to the challenge.

The Czech entrant made a 'cute sexy hedgehog for pregnant ladies'. The US entrant had infused his with soil and the Italian entrant had used only Italian ingredients, even the rice.

The event was ultimately won by Tomoyuki Abe of Japan. This wasn't the foregone conclusion it may sound like. All entries where truly amazing but his salmon nigri was utterly sublime and he was a thoroughly deserving winner.

The great thing about the event was that we, the attendees, got to vote for the winner, which meant we had to taste all of their dishes. I actually plumped for the British entry as I felt his entry really worked well together but Mrs B, being Mrs B, voted for the eventual winner.

I guess I have to concede she has impeccable taste in many things ;)

Part of the evening involved a maki (sushi roll) making demonstration and then competition open to a couple of members of the audience.

I was one of those members and emerged victorious, though I had an awful lot of help from my appointed sushi-master. Video below.

Unfortunately, in my sake-fuelled joy I ended up hugging him, I then remembered the Japanese aren't big on the whole body contact thing.

Guess that career with the UN is on hold for a while.

Eat Japan Sushi Awards 2009 from Adam Bird on Vimeo.

Best Present this Christmas?

Discovered the Guitar Hero: Air Guitar Rocker in John Lewis yesterday.

Got to be up there with some of the best, daft Christmas presents. Perfect for who I bought it for.

Is Genius a shortcut to banality?

Like many others I've been enjoying the Genius playlist feature in iTunes 8. I've been generally pleased with the results until a realisation struck me tonight. It only really plays singles or well known album tracks.

It's like listening to Now That's What I Call Adam's Music.

I can't remember hearing an obscure album track that made me think wow, yuck, mmm or in fact anything. It was all very easy to listen to.

This weekend I spent a good couple of hours putting together a playlist for my son's birthday party. Basically a list of upbeat numbers that he likes from my collection, censored for rude words and inappropriate content.

That said, I couldn't resist Simian - La Breeze which I'm sure is about SBDs (Silent But Deadlies), perfect for his age-group.

I then got the tracks in order merging nicely, taking the tempo up and down and throwing in various timely numbers. I got Kaiser Chiefs - I Predict A Riot bang on, just at the point when they decided the winner of pass-the-parcel need a victory circuit of the room on their shoulders.

While I haven't got the time to do that for every playlist, it made for a very different and enjoyable listening experience. AS you can probably tell, I was quite proud of it.

Judging by the privacy warning I had to agree to to start using Genius, I'm guessing that it uses appearances in someone's playlist as a positive indicator that songs should be played together.

If this is the case ,what happens as people save these Genius playlists. The 'greatest hits' content gets fed back to the mother ship, self validating the Genius algorithms.

Systems like this can easily tend to the lowest common denominator, in the case of music this means banality. Commercial radio style scheduling at your fingertips.

I'm sure there are other drivers but playlists are probably high on the list.

So until we can find out otherwise, I urge you all to use Genius sparingly and whatever you do DON'T SAVE.

Incidentally if you have any John Mayer in your collection might be worth checking how often his songs appear in your Genius lists.

Something hilarious for the end of the week