DJ Leon Parker @ Brook’s Music Bar, Hammersmith
by matt @ 10:43 pm. Blogged under Music, Eating and Drinking
Suzie_Q had plans of her own on Friday evening so I was at a bit of a loose end after work. Whilst drinking at the Lincoln Lounge I was offered the opportunity to attend a birthday party with a colleague for a gentleman called ‘Phil’. I was promised belly dancers and funky DJs, so it seemed an opportunity too good to turn down. We took the tube over to Brook’s Music Bar on Shepherd’s Bush Road in discovered it only a few minutes walk from Hammersmith tube station, beneath the Brook Green Hotel; a night called ‘The Flying Carpet’. (more…)
‘The Big Chill House’ is the name of the newly refurbished bar / restaurant on Pentonville Road beside King’s Cross Thameslink station. Previously this bar had been themed around a Bedouin / Arabic tent and named ‘Sahara Nights’, but all traces of that establishment are gone, and presumably the Belly Dancing nights with it! The new decor of this bar is much more modern and minimalist. This visit on Wednesday evening was more of a reconnaissance mission for my fellow drinkers and I to see if we want to go back again. I think probably we do, as it seems much more professional and clean; I’d trust them to cook me a meal now. 
On our way to lunch at the Driver pub today, we discovered several fire engines, police cars and ambulances at the end of Wharfdale Road. A lorry had come around the corner into Caledonian Road much too quickly from the look of things, clipped another lorry and ended up running off the road - across the pavement and into a cafe! Hopefully nobody was injured, all cordoned off with police tape. When we’d finished lunch we came back outside and found the whole of Caledonian Road was closed off, not good news for traffic flow in King’s Cross yet again!
Following a recent issue with a Flash banner not displaying properly in a client’s browser, I started looking into the current industry standard for Flash file export. Adobe very kindly have a chart detailing Flash penetration levels as identified by two different market research companies (below). Their combined data suggests that for early 2007 Flash 8.0 is definitely still off the agenda for Flash ad designers at around 70% penetration. However Flash 7.0 is only marginally less well saturated than Flash 6.0 at about 95% vs. 97%. For my 2007 online advertising purposes I shall be stipulating ad design be exported in Flash 5, 6 or 7 and leaving Flash 8 until 2008. 
Fabio and Francesca’s wedding ceremony was held at the local church in Ortona at 5pm on Saturday, just as well because it would have been far too hot for a suit and tie any earlier in the day! The wedding didn’t begin very promptly but we were all entertained by a choir who put our English choirs to shame. Perhaps twelve men and women averaging 25 years of age and they really loved what they were doing – most choirs I’ve seen at English weddings consist of the elderly and the very young who sing with as much enthusiasm as a death row inmate on his final walk to the chair. If I had the cash I’d pay for them to come and do mine and Suzie_Q’s wedding, quite superb and a marvellous alternative to forcing guests to sing hymns (not that we could have done in Italian anyway). 
Ortona is very close to Pescara on the Eastern Coast of Italy in the region of Abruzzo. By car it’s about thirty-five minutes drive from Pescara airport into Ortona. A relatively small town with docked fishing boats, a small industrial harbour and wonderful beaches, the bay is surrounded by steep green slopes. The main town buildings in Ortona cut a straight and precarious line across a cliff edge, a winding road twists down to the harbour area. The odd medium sized boat comes into the harbour once or twice a day, but for the most part the calm seas are upset only by the occasional small leisure boats taking people out to dive and snorkel. This town is untouched by tourism and is authentic Italy through and through. 
With the added security measures currently in place, Stansted airport was absolutely packed on Friday. We arrived two and a half hours before our Ryanair flight was scheduled to take off and were confronted with two very slow check-in operators and a ‘queue’ more than one hundred people strong. I say ‘queue’ but it was more of a rabble, this is because Italian’s do not know how to queue. Such a sweeping statement might seem absurd but it’s absolutely true, the majority of Italians seem incapable of taking in their surroundings to gauge how best to behave. When confronted with a queue it is seen as a hindrance, so most Italians go around it, until you have a wide circle of people instead of a nice orderly English queue. It’s not that they’re being deliberately rude - more that they just don’t comprehend queuing. 
At lunchtime last Friday, Suzie_Q and I had a flight booked with Ryanair to Pescara. Pescara is a large town on the Eastern coast of Italy - roughly on a parallel with Rome. Suzie_Q has a lot of Italian relatives living in nearby Ortona and we were invited to the wedding of her second cousin ‘Fabio’. I met Fabio for the first time last year, spending a day or two with him and his fiancée ‘Francesca’ at their villa and on Fabio’s small boat. Flying to Italy for a wedding isn’t cheap, but it’s an experience you can’t really turn down, so despite being so close to our week in Ibiza, off we went. 
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