Two very good Stand-Up gigs to go to.

It's rare we advertise other people's artistic endeavors, due to a mixture of arrogance and innate laziness.

However with two great Stand-Up nights occurring in such a short space of time it seems ridiculous not to shout their presence from the rafters as everybody likes to laugh right? Right? Right?

First up on the 29th of November is The Reckless Moment, a comedy night that has been running off the crumpled back's of a group of incredibly dedicated Warwick University students. Starting out as a small project amongst friends, the night has grown to a point where it now features as a key spot on the mythical "circuit". Ooohh. It still remains true to its credentials and privileges new work above all else whilst managing to book well known and emerging headline acts. The beer is really cheap too. Like really cheap. The night consistently delivers great material and has built a strong community of dedicated acts and audiences, of which the line between the two is often blurred. Not through heckling it must be mentioned though, trust us, they will call you out on your dumb shit. But in a nice way. Still, don't do it. It will sting. You may even get a biscuit.

EVENT! http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=171591532867136

Next, is a brand new night that has started in the aging crusty punk crevice that is Camden. Remember Camden? Of course you do. You love Camden, which contrary to poe faced East Londoners (yeh we know who you are, yeh you! ((See you next week)) is still a great place to go and find something interesting going on.

The night is named The Ministry of Whimsy, aptly named after it was concluded that the original name Snigger Please just wouldn't fucking fly with most people, as much as we pleaded with them.

Started by two young, superb (and, sorry chaps, amazingly named, well done parents) stand-up's, James Mcphun and Richard Stainbank, the night acts as a place for emerging, new, old, any stand-up to try fresh and experimental material. This doesn't simply act as a place for the trawling out of new, half formed jokes, but rather provides environment where form, content, and the mechanics of comedy are experimented, mucked about with, and generally disregarded in favour of artistic expression. How ominous. Heading into their second night there's a really exciting atmosphere surrounding the gig and to catch it in its early days will be a privilege.

But yeh, here it is. The Event. The Facebook event.

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=177754478903509

Go to both of these. Or one of them. Preferably both of them.

IRONY or PSYCHOPATH: 2, Nigella Lawson

Okay, so writing about how Nigella speaks is a little passé – passé like, say, Alistair McGowan and his FUNNY FUNNY IMPRESSIONS are passé. However. At the seventeen minute mark of the seventh episode of Nigella’s Kitchen, which aired last night, there was this amazing little moment where her fattened, opulent syntax revealed, to our mind, a side to Nigella’s HAPPY SUCCESSFUL LIFE that we’re not sure we’ve seen before:

It’s the cooking that needs precision and a great deal of pernickety detail – that is enough to send me over the edge. But then [turning to the camera and smiling with all her teeth] that’s not very hard.

You see what we mean – it makes us rather suspect that Nigella is one of two things: deeply, deeply unhappy or actually mentally ill. Sardonically ironic, then, or a psychopath? Let us consider the evidence, all taken from last night’s episode:

At the end of a busy week, I love a bit of hunter-gathering so that I can grab the wherewithal for a really relaxing weekend of cooking and eating. PSYCHO

Though I say peas, they are in fact petit pois, that’s what it says on the label and they are indeed very small peas. PSYCHO

It feels wrong, and yet good [using a gigantic knife to cut a big pile green beans inside their packet]. PSYCHO

Despite the bucolic appearance, these leaves were not picked in turquoise-skied Portafino but in grey Battersea. But no matter, they smell fantastic. IRONY

If anything is guaranteed to get my children coming to the table promptly, and nothing is really guaranteed to do that. IRONY

It’s like a holiday without leaving the kitchen and without the hell of air travel. IRONY

My ideal way to spend my Sunday is just giving myself up in the warm embrace of the kitchen. HOW VERY SYLVIA PLATH OF YOU. PSYCHO

I am thinking of everything here. PSYCHO

I want a flat oval-ish. I don’t want any geometry professor telling me this isn’t an oval. It’s my meatloaf. IRONY

Inside my meatloaf are jewels. And these jewels are eggs. Hard-boiled eggs. PSYCHO

And now [talking to meatloaf] this baby just needs swaddling. And what I’m swaddling it with is bacon. PSYCHO – this one made me think of Nigella cooking children, like the witch in Hansel und Gretel.

The thing about meatloaf, it comes from a time when food was fuel. IRONY

I feel a sense of Sunday lunch splurge coming on. PSYCHO

To give this the consistency of dressing, I need a quick trip to the frigo. IRONY

Try and be patient, to be as serene as this sauce looks. PSYCHO

Look at this, just ready to be dolloped on a baked potato. I say, let’s cut out the middle man [licking cheese and buttermilk off the spoon]. IRONY

Friend at dinner: I haven’t heard of a strawberry crumble. Nigella: You haven’t lived. PSYCHO

Endnotes: Nigella’s Kitchen is the only show on the BBC to have it’s own ‘focus-puller’ and two ‘home economists’ – the latter of which suggests, a la Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman being taught how to fuck gracefully in preparation for Eyes Wide Shut, Nigella needs to be taught how to make it look like she has a happy home life. Also, as ever, episode seven concludes with a post-credits sequence featuring Nigella returning to the ‘frigo’ at the dead of night for a wee snack. This time, she decides on an entire slice of bacon-wrapped, egg-studded meat loaf between two slabs of bread. She takes a bite, spreading her fat lips a width that would absolutely dislocate my jaw. PSYCHO, mos def.

The Verdict: PSYCHOPATH

A very strange, very troubled woman who has suffered her fair share of tragedy and has lived her entire life named after one of the biggest douchebags this country’s ever been governed by, has definitely been sent over the edge. ‘Try to be patient, to be as serene as this sauce looks’ – she manages for half an hour a week. But when the cameras stop rolling, all bets are off. Good luck Charles, keep an ‘emergency bottle’ of gin handy yeah?

Filing: some points and notes

Filer's nightmare.

We at the Mansion have a lot on our plates. It’s not all swearing and snarking here. The hard-nosed world of business is something that we have to treat with as much care as that of the soft-snout slobbery puppy dog. Specifically, we thought we’d get onto the unaddressed issue of filing. Yes, that’s right.

And so it goes… For those of you not in the know, or perhaps those who think hitherto that they are, the below is for you. Filing essentially involves two major areas of file organisation, divisible into one of either (i) inter-file or (ii) inner-file. The first is the sorting of different objects that constitute a whole, distinguishable body distinct from other objects of a very similar or very different kind.

The second… OK, we may be slightly disingenuous here as the latter could be sub-divided into entrance and ordering, which could open the second area into perhaps two whole areas. However, we think the two-areas distinction still holds up when we take note of the fact that the act of entering paper (or what have you) into the file is so great a part of the filing process — not only of time, but also of energy. We know we’ll be preaching to the converted when we ask: did you ever notice how you get past that 700-page mark, entering pages and some strange cramps and aches begin in muscles that you didn’t even know were muscles?!… Yeah? Recognise that? God, that’s a bitch, are we right? We sure know Paul from accounts knows the ol’seadog! (See you next week for lager-lager, Paulio?)

Of course we’re right. Now, the entering part needs emphasis. We think it has been undersold in the promotion of filing, its advertisement in culture generally, and in press commentary on the issue.

Check out those staggered organisational tags.

Let’s paint a particular example to make our point. Say you have, ooh, 89 Office Depot-brand, 30 sleeve, clear plastic A4 files, with blue flexi-plastic cover (including removable bind label). You’ve also got into each has to go, in a specific order, 25 various-coloured printed A4-pages to constitute 89 booklets.

How are you to go about placing these pages into the files? A pertinent question in the field of file entering, indeed!

Now, you don’t have all the space in the world, here. In fact space is limited to a small-sized office desk, around two metres squared. You also have to be wary of the folding. You can roll and unfurl each page to ease the passage of entering. Or, you can slightly lean the edges in to ease said passage. The perils of getting fold-lines in your pages need not be extensively considered here, so suffice to say that we must be vigilant at all times.

Thumbs up, indeed!

So the first option that’s out is sorting all the booklets into respective individual order, and then beginning the entering, there’s simply no space! (One page at a time increases the risk of fold-lines f/y/i.)

Second option: enter the pages page one into booklet one, page one into booklet two, right through to the last page, then begin page two into booklet two, booklet three, and so on. Now that’s just way too slow, there’s the opening and closing of the files for each single one. Completely inoperable and inefficient!

The third option: enter all the pages into one booklet-file, then move onto the next booklet. Here the issues become where to place the files and the entering pages according to seated or standing position… the height differential between the enterer and their desk… whether you’re a right- or left-handed enterer… and anything else one can recall to think.

Now, what order you are required to enter makes huge sways upon whether you can enter page-by-page or conglomerate two pages back-to-back and enter them into one sleeve. It’s either a stroke of luck or an inspiration business tactic (we’re not sure which yet) if you can, because your efficiency savings are going to be mind-blowing — the sort that’d have Paul celebrating in ways we all know we should keep out of forums like this. What’s more, your rivals will be seething that they, unlike you, couldn’t reach these heady heights.

We hope this goes someway to redressing the balance in the filing field. It’s an issue that reaches far-out from the specific profession and into our culture widely. We’re excited at the news that a think-tank may be starting-up to lobby the Lithuanian parliament for a monument to be erected in each township as a movement into file-entering becoming one of the three national sports. Hopefully we can take the journey further from the inroads being made on the continent, to the power hubs of Reading, Swindon, and perhaps even Redditch.