Speaking of Twitter, as I was below, more excitement this week in Manchester’s Twitter community stemming from these...ahem...eye catching photographs (courtesy of @manairport):
Not particularly exciting unless you’re an airport interiors fanatic (and you know that somewhere out there, probably with a website, there is one of them) but given the context it might be just a little bit more interesting. These are the final preparations for the arrival of the Airbus A380, which we’ve spoken about on here before. Manchester airport is to become the first regional airport in the world to run regular A380 flights, flying daily to and from Dubai. £10 million has been spent upgrading the airport to accommodate the new plane, mainly to adapt for the size of it.
The main thing about the A380, you see, is that it’s massive. The biggest passenger airliner in the world. It has ‘vertical walls’, as one expert pointed out – to us land-dwellers, that may not seem such a luxury any more, but if you’ve ever been 35,000 feet up in a metal tube you’ll appreciate the benefit of such things. The size also naturally affords greater diversity in interior layout and you can, if you’ve got the money, get yourself a desk, massage or even a whole suite for your flight to Dubai. First class naturally comes at a price – around £3,000 – but everyone, even those in cattle class, gets 1200 channels of video entertainment to play with.
The first flight of the A380 out of Manchester is scheduled for 1 September 2010 but, naturally, there are an abundance of videos online of the A380 landing in Manchester and these prove, if proof were needed, that it is indeed a large plane. Incidentally, in the third one, you may note that the video is being shot outside someone’s house.
The Manchester Twitter world all went a bit loopy last week because The Guardian sent one of its reporters to town with the simple instruction to go wherever local Tweeters told him to. This isn’t the first time The Guardian have done this – indeed, the TwiTrip is a regular feature for them – it’s just the first time they’ve done it here, in Manchester, and I’ve had the benefit of knowing the city in which they were Twexploring (can you see what I’ve done there?!).
The result was a relatively pedestrian meander through some of Manchester’s popular, famous and not so famous points of interest. He went for lunch in Sam’s Chophouse, had a look round St Mary’s Church, went to the top of a car park in Shudehill to take in a view – it’s cheaper than the wheel, you see. Thrifty, them Tweeters.
He went to Salford Lads Club, for the obvious reason, and a few other places, including Chetham Library, then got to the good bit – the bars. The Temple, Cornerhouse, Marble Arch and Deaf Institute were all he could manage – an unlikely collection but, I suppose, a reasonably representative one. And that was about it. A decent day out in Manchester, I suppose, and it certainly caused some excitement amongst the city’s Tweeters, but I couldn’t help thinking a bit more could have been done with it. You know, like that traditional swim up the Urwell and the visit to the Maine Road pub in a united shirt...those sorts of thing.
Anyway, here’s the man who took the TwiTrip, Benji Lanyado, in the Salford Lads Club weights room:
You’d leave, wouldn’t you? Or perhaps not if your tea drinking preferences stretched as far as Mariage Freres’ Sacred White, a speciality tea grown by French tea company Mariage Freres on a private and apparently secret estate in Sri Lanka that is, as dictated by tradition, picked by ‘virgin women wearing gloves, using golden scissors.’ This apparently ensures that the buds are untainted. It’s currently being served at Kitchen at The Circle Club as part of a new tea menu brought in to celebrate that most British of drinks.
Your £25 gets you a pit of tea for two, although Kitchen do say you can get a good six cups or so from the pot. There’s also a number of other teas on the new menu, starting at a more modest £2.25 and including the Malawi Antlers (£4.50 a pot), a tea only served at one other venue in the UK – Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck restaurant.
Still, the question remains, are there enough people in Manchester prepared to pay £25 for a pot of tea? Judging by the interest in the story (it’s even in the London papers! And GMTV are up here filming afternoon tea at Kitchen) there just might be. Judging by the comments on the article in Manchester’s favourite daily newspaper, perhaps not. ‘Unimpressed’ would be one way to sum up the general feeling on there. ‘You can get a cup of tea for 85p from Greggs’ seems to be the general response. I’m not sure Kitchen would recommend dunking a sausage roll in a pot of Mariage Freres’ Sacred White though.
The internet is a strange and wonderful thing, something I am sure most of us are agreed on. It’s also full of rubbish. The latest ‘thing’ that was all over Twitter yesterday and my old school acquaintances will be LOLZ-ing about on Facebook in about two weeks time (in between requests for magic wands for their pet wizards) is ‘White board quit job girl.’ The following few photos, selected from the 33 that were the entirety of this thing, should give you an idea of what it’s about:
So there you go – ha ha, isn’t she ballsy, screw you Mr Boss Man etc. Except, as many were pointing out not minutes after it ‘appeared’ on the internet, it’s fake. Obviously. People don’t really do these sorts of things - at least, not so well, not so wittily and clinically. People, in general, aren’t clever enough. And, in fact, the following appeared on the same website today, just to make sure everyone’s clear:
This raises the question of ‘what is the point?’ - a question my father asks quite regularly concerning things of computers and the internet. Well, dad, it’s a good question. The point basically is to get people to visit their website – it’s the sort of site that has videos of kittens falling off tables and pictures of people looking stupid - and I guess it’s worked. For a day.
In the town where I grew up, there was a Chinese restaurant with a huge fish tank in the entrance. It was sort of known for its fish tank – people would say, “You know, the one with the fish tank,” and things like that. You didn’t eat the fish – they just lived there, like ornaments, I guess.
Why am I telling you this? A new Thai restaurant called Chaobaby has opened up in the Trafford Centre that has set the live-ornament bar a little higher – I have one word for you: jellyfish.
As far as I am aware, these aren’t available to eat either.
Think of a picnic and what springs to mind? A country meadow, maybe a river running at the bottom, wicker basket, a blanket, daisies, the sun shining, homemade bread and lemonade? No? Me neither – we’re not living in a Jane Austin novel. You might not, however, have thought of Manchester when the word picnic was mentioned. That’s right – a picnic in Manchester city centre. Well, why not.
As part of The Children's Society's National Picnic Week, The Manchester Picnic will be taking place between 6-8 August. The aim is a simple one - just get people out enjoying Manchester, whether it’s the city’s green areas (i.e. parks), tranquil waterside locations or vibrant urban spaces. There will be a ‘Picnic Hub’ in Piccadilly Gardens, with food stalls, picnic benches and entertainment. For more information, have a look on the Manchester Picnic Website. Here’s a map too for you to look at:
The sad news of the demise of Area 51 and House 9 this week brought about a certain nostalgia in the office, not least for the optimism showed from those behind Area 51 in videos such as this one:
Ah...‘Continental Clubbing’ arriving in Manchester.It was a nice idea but evidently not one that really grasped the Manchester public to full effect.Spending all night dancing and sipping cocktails in an open air club somewhere in the Mediterranean, under the light of the moon and the stars, the scent of jasmine in the warm night air, sun kissed ravers with smiles on their faces waiting for the sun to appear on the horizon, is undoubtedly an appealing prospect, if that’s what ‘continental clubbing’ is about.Spending all night in a hot, damp room opposite Deansgate Locks while it throws it down with rain outside and you know you have to be back at work within 24 hours, doesn’t quite have the same appeal.
House 9 was an ideal a little shorter of life, their ‘we’re on Deansgate Locks but we’re not like the rest of them’ selling point an interesting one to begin with but one that never really took hold.That, some might argue, had something to do with their web presence – or rather lack of – an important tool in today’s digitally social world.A website, for example, is an essential element to such a venue.House 9 offered the following throughout their existence:
If you were an American-based film company about to make a superhero film set on the gritty streets of New York and you had a huge budget to play with, you’d think the obvious place to film the scenes set on gritty New York streets would be, well, New York, wouldn’t you? Either that or some massively expensive bespoke film set made with the latest technologies, in a warehouse in Los Angeles.
It is with some surprise then that we learn the forthcoming, and much anticipated (especially amongst the geek community), Captain America film is to shoot some of its scenes in Manchester’s very own Northern Quarter. Filming is due to start next month, running for two weeks and should see the film’s big stars arriving in Manchester, with all the associated entourage that a big budget Hollywood movie comes with (we’ll be expecting to see at least one trailer). Chris Evans, who plays Captain America himself, Samuel L Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones are the big names on the cast, so keep an eye out for them when you’re in the area.
We’re told, “Producers picked the Northern Quarter to recreate the Big Apple in the 40s because of its towering buildings and pre-war architecture.” They’re going to be filming a car chase, apparently, and I suppose if it’s questionable, exhilarating driving they’re after, Manchester might not be too bad a place to find it. I see quite a lot of it myself on a weekly basis. There’s never a police car around when dudes are doing 80mph through town though, is there? Yet I do 34 mph on a deserted country road and there they are!
Anyway, in homage to this nod from Hollywood we though we’d have a little go on our friend Google Maps and see if we could find some similarities between New York City and our very own Northern Quarter. First, we had a look at a typical street scene – here’s 5th Avenue, Greenwich Village, New York City:
And here’s Oldham Street, The Northern Quarter, Manchester:
Hmm...it was obviously a Sunday when they took the Manchester photo – either that or some sort of air raid siren had gone off. Next, we tried to find a typical bar – so we took the Dry Bar as a classic example:
In New York, we found the Mercury Lounge:
That’s not too bad actually. One more...what other classic Northern Quarter feature could we pick to compare? How about a typical back street – the apparent reason they’ve chose The Northern Quarter over New York. Here’s Manchester’s finest:
We were a bit hard pushed to find a New York alternative, as it happens, and our intensive 60 second search could only produce this pleasant looking, leafy street. Maybe the film’s producers have a point – as far as Captain America's concerned, the Northern Quarter is better than New York.
Do you know New York better than us? Got a Google Streetview location that is more Manchester-like than our sorry examples? Leave a comment with details.
