It all started with a Coke commercial.
I don’t normally keep up with new bands and new songs these days. But occasionally, a TV commercial will play some music that I like. Then I’ll go to the google and find out what it is and who created it.
A few years back there was a Coke advert which showcased this really fun, peppy music. It was a genre I’d never heard of before; electro swing. They take old school jazz and swing music, and remix it with a dance beat. It’s the only music I mow the lawn to anymore.
In the process of learning about and listening to electro swing, I made a musical discovery that has become very important to me and very close to my heart. It’s an odd little British category from a strange, tea-drenched musical corner called Chap Hop. It’s rap but written and performed by eccentric British gentlemen.
Chap Hop is what might happen if Steampunk and Gilbert and Sullivan’s modern major general had a loony love child.
It’s witty, smart and catchy as all get out.
And Professor Elemental is both the Shakespeare and Lawrence Olivier of this genre. I could tell you about him, but he tells it so much better than I ever could.
From the biography he wrote of himself on the Tea Sea Record Shop website:
“Professor Elemental was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. It was removed by doctors soon afterwards and remains in the British Museum of the Unpleasant to this very day. Raised under the watchful eye of his overprotective mother, fed on a diet of pureed swan and old-fashioned British madness, he soon grew into one of the least respected and most ridiculed Professors to ever be turned away from every London society. He enjoys dissection, gin and shrieking with maniacal giggles at inopportune moments.”
There are two additional facts you should know.
1.) He has an orangutan butler named Geoffrey.
2.) Since I discovered him, we have had a minor correspondence, and he has very kindly agreed to an email interview of ten questions.
10 Questions for Professor Elemental
1.) Who makes for a better butler—a mercurial orangutan, or a unicorn with working thumbs?
Ah, to me questions like this are the very essence of scientific enquiry. That’s how I ended up with my flock of vampire kittens and the goat with all those extra knees. Usually the simplest way is to create both creatures and then have them fight to the death. It’s still the method used to settle scientific debate in 90% of British laboratories.
2.) Please describe your perfect day.
I am very much a believer that any day can be perfect if you have enough caffeine, cake and access to potentially dangerous equipment. For me, a day answering the questions of a mysterious yet alluring American journalist is about as good as it gets {debbie here: He means me!}.
3.) Where is the British Museum of the Unpleasant located, and what are its operating hours?
It’s located just outside Rhyl in Wales, the only surviving business on the once thriving seafront. It opens for exactly one afternoon a year and if you are still inside when the doors shut, you will have to wait the full year to be released.
4.) If I were to ask the Queen, “Professor Elemental?” what might she say?
Ah. I’d rather you didn’t mention me to her, if it’s all the same to you. After that unpleasant business last year with the airship filled with geese and the subsequent fire at Balmoral castle, I’m still not entirely sure she has forgiven me. Let that be a warning to your readers, if you are planning a show for the Queen, always make sure your geese are wearing flameproof smocks. Or better yet, avoid using fire and geese altogether.
5.) Who’s more entertaining, Meghan Markle, or unfortunate American stereotype come to life, paterfamilias Thomas?
Gosh, I have a soft spot for both of them really. They represent both sides of the American dream- that one day you could get famous for doing something you love and marry a prince, or alternatively that you could get famous for just being awful.
6.) Is Sunday roast similar to our American Sunday dinner? And do you eat the exact same meal of beef, roasties, Yorkshire pudding and Brussel Sprouts each week? Do you get tired of it? What happens if you eat something else?
Every single Sunday is Thanksgiving to us. EVERY SUNDAY. Yes we vary the meat, whether roast chicken, lamb, beef or badger, but the basics remain the same. We never tire of it. Never. Basically, we don’t like change in Britain and fear things we don’t understand. That’s why we only got the internet last month and still watch comedy programmes from the 1970s every Christmas day.
7.) Is spotted dick funny to Brits too? Or is it in actuality a giant practical joke designed by the UK to wind up (mess with) the world?
Horrifyingly, they’re all real…
I have no idea what you mean madam. It’s a great family tradition that after a roast dinner, we would sit around as a family; Mother tucking into a steaming spotted dick, Father getting his hands on a juicy plum duff and the rest of the family munching down on a packet of Dorset nobs. Happy innocent fun for all!
8.) Who are some musical heroes and inspirations? Do you agree with the statement, “DJ Jazzy Jeff is an international treasure”?
I listen to all of the American rap, well apart from all that mumbling nonsense. Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince were my gateway into the world of Hip Hop and I love everyone from Pete Rock to Joey Bada$$, from De La Soul to Black Thought. There are a few chaps over here that your readers should check out too. Have a look for Dr Syntax, Dizraeli, Ocean Wisdom and Longusto for a slice of British Hip Hop pie.
9.) What the award’s dinner like for 2012 Greatest Living Eccentric & Most Eccentric Artist from The British Eccentric Club?
10.) What year is it where you live?
The same year as the Carry On Films, Wallace and Gromit cartoons and The Wind in the Willows. Or thereabouts.
Next time, please join me for a second set of ten questions answered by the man who invented and portrays Professor Elemental, Paul Alborough.
In the meantime, you can check out Prof’s Youtube channel, and his website.
Thanks for your time.
100% Umbrage Free
10 Questions for Paul Alborough
Last week Professor Elemental, pride of the British musical genre, chap hop, answered questions about himself, his inspirations, and his artistic community.
Paul Alborough, with what looks suspiciously like chicken and waffles. And a Corona…
This week, the man who invented and portrays the professor, Paul Alborough, has kindly agreed to answer a new set of questions that range from Weird Al Yankovic to Brexit.
1.) The first song of yours I ever heard was, “All in Together”. Would you mind talking about it?
I’ve always loved Hip Hop that conveys a positive message and I wanted to write a song that was specifically aimed at my sort of tribe. Nerds, the worriers, the people who have doubts about themselves- it was a song to say ‘It’s alright. Nobody has an idea what we’re doing and it’s fine if you don’t too. You’re lovely just as you are.’
2.) Do you care to speak about Brexit, and do you believe Europe and nations to the west *ahem, ahem* have demonstrated what others have categorized as a romance with the far right, and a flirtation with fascism?
I think it’s a genuinely terrifying time for politics on the world stage. The ideas themselves are awful, but hardly new. It’s the way that they can be given a platform and legitimized by uncaring technology giants like youtube and facebook that is undermining democracy worldwide. I’ve seen how Brexit has divided this country and it’s not very nice. These days you are either a limp wristed lefty snowflake communist or a nazi with a hammer, there’s no middle ground and I miss that.
The actual song is much, much creepier.
3.) Your song “Animals in Ice Cream” is the macabre, bewildering confession of an ice cream vendor with a twist. Why, and what, and really, why? Satirical, I hope (…and pray)?
I’m glad you asked me about that one. It came from a late night argument about whether you could ‘write a song about anything’. Someone said, ‘well you couldn’t rap about sticking animals in ice cream, you weirdo’ and off I went. Once I had taken a turn down that particularly strange avenue, it opened up the possibility of creating something as unusual as the Professor Elemental character.
4.) How do you feel about our nations’ shared obsession with celebrity and social media’s pervasive, all-encompassing frenzy? Without sounding like a Whitehall wanker or a DC crook can you speak to the dual nature of both the better angels and the malevolent depths of human nature on display for consumption every day?
I read “The Reluctant Dragon” to my kids the other night. It was first published in 1898 and features villagers fawning and obsessing over a visiting knight, then making up ‘fake news’ to provoke a fight. I found that both comforting and slightly saddening at once.
Watching the likes of Trump or Farrage break the delicate strands of civility that hold our society together means that we have to be much more outspoken in our positivity. We need to straddle that fine line between standing up for what we believe in and not stooping to the level of the opposition.
On the other hand, I am a great believer that people, as a whole, are generally good and that better instincts will eventually prevail.
If the idea of an increasingly divided world seems overwhelming, then I take the opinion that you should try to help the people around you: do good deeds for strangers, say nice things to people you respect on the internet, volunteer with people who need it. You might not be able to change the whole world, but you can change your world.
5.) “The Rain (featuring Sabira Jade)” on the album Odd Beast from the Menagerie is an amazing, moving, catchy piece of music, about austerity, and the lengthening of the divide between rich and poor. Can you speak about the talent involved, and the message?
That was my favourite song on our last ‘Menagerie’ album (a non-professor hip hop group featuring Dr Syntax, Nick Maxwell and Tom Caruana). Austerity did untold damage to the most vulnerable people in our society- hundreds of libraries closed, benefits to the disabled were savagely cut, school budgets were cut to the bone. Sadly, that divide grows ever wider too, I was just with a friend who works with young people and a teenager client of his killed himself after counselling sessions were cut. The human cost of all this is terrifying. Political Hip Hop might not change things in and of itself, but it can take a snapshot of where we are and how we got here.
6.) Famousbirthdays.com calls Professor Elemental a comical musician, similar to Weird Al Yankovic. Although I’m a Weird Al fan, I take extreme umbrage to this description on your behalf. Prof is a creation of Shakespearian complexity and is the W. C. Handy of chap hop. Please speak of the creation process, and tell our readers whether you harbor any amount of umbrage on your own behalf?
I am completely umbrage-free. Like most creative people who manage to make a living out of it, I am incredibly lucky. The Professor came on the scene just as Steampunk was taking off, without Steampunk, there’s no way this would have been a career. Thanks for the nice compliments, if anything the Professor owes an awful lot to comedy archetypes before him from Chuck Jone’s Daffy Duck to Toad of Toad Hall. There’s a lot of Vivian Stanshall in there too.
7.) Speaking of the dawn of the Professor; how barmy did people think you were after his debut?
I was just starting to lose my way as a middle aged, white, middle class rapper. I continually made bad choices in front of a regular rap crowd (wearing an easter bonnet or doing a show in drag) The Professor took me away from the over-serious UK rap scene towards a tribe of like-minded weirdos to party with.
8.) What do Americans get wrong about Brits?
British people are incapable of paying genuine compliments. The more we like someone, the more we are horrible to them. I think that sometimes this can be misunderstood, and Americans think we are not very nice people when they meet us.
Maybe that’s just me though.
9.) What do Brits get wrong about Americans?
I think Brits still carry around that slight arrogance that come with having once been an Empire. We can unconsciously assume a bit of a superior attitude in America, not realizing that most Americans just think of us a delightful novelty toy town with good cake. If they think of us at all.
10.) Might you share one piece of advice for Donald Trump, and one for Elizabeth Windsor?
I couldn’t give advice to the Queen, I doubt she’d listen to me any way. I quite like the royal family, but I wouldn’t mind it if they connected to the country a bit more. Here’s hoping that nice Meghan will help with some of that.
Oh God…
To Trump I just say Stop. Everything you’re doing, just stop it. Now.
Thanks to Paul Alborough, Professor Elemental, and you, Gentle Reader, for your time.
Anne Burrell is kind of a big deal at Food Network.
But as a baker, she has really blond hair. And, as a baker, she loves spending time in upstate New York with her family. And, as a baker, Chef Burrell studied cooking in Italy. All this witty bush beating is my way of saying that her baking muscles are either undeveloped or atrophied.
Remember, these contestants are folks who show up and make their signature dish of mole marinara spaghetti studded with peanut M&M’s or matzo ball gummy bear gazpacho. They believe that eggplants are some sort of purple bird egg and corned beef is both a meat (beef) and a vegetable (corn).
When it’s all said and done, baking is science. It’s chemistry. If you can read, follow directions and learn a few terms and techniques, you can be a successful baker. You may not be an inspired pastry chef, but you can turn out after school treats, bake sale cupcakes, and pie for Thanksgiving dinner without blowing anything up or killing anybody.
My English teacher, Mrs. Flood told me something that I’ve come to believe is true in most endeavors: first you have to learn the rules, then and only then can you bend and/or break them. She was talking grammar, but it applies to baking. Thus, when teaching novices, it’s imperative that they are taught best practices.
I let out an involuntary shriek and got angry on behalf of all the attentive students, both on the show, and at home watching.
Secondly, you never dump egg from shell straight to bowl. An eggshell shard that has escaped along with the egg will be impossible to find and remove amongst the other contents. Nothing quells my appetite faster than eating an egg dish and feeling that crunch of doom as you bite down on an errant shell. 
And what if something is wrong with the egg? Do you want a bunch of blood in your white cake? Or what if it’s rotten? Yuck. You’ve just wasted every other ingredient that made it into your bowl before the eggs. And what if you don’t have enough on hand to recreate the recipe? You have to run to the store or abandon the project.
So, the grasshopper must be taught diligently, paying strict attention to proper procedure. Then when the educated cook chooses to cut corners, they take an informed risk. And if/when it gets screwed up, then I know I have only myself to blame.
Hi,
Today I bring you a story that almost didn’t make it to print. I am The Kid, the offspring of your normal columnist, and recently back from vacation in Budapest and Vienna.
These days, curious tourists are welcome to tour the labyrinth, with only occasional arrow signs on the walls as guides. Not long after entering, you are greeted with a fork in the road. One side leads towards more of the dimly lit labyrinth. The other heads towards the Maze of Darkness. This section is totally unlit, and your only guide is the rope attached to the wall. By the end, the rope was my best friend. I feel like the rope really understood me.
Thanks for your time.
Greetings from sunny Budapest!
Regular readers will be familiar with The Kid, the offspring of your regular columnist. I just got back from vacation, and she asked if I would be willing to talk a little about the food of Budapest. I offered Toronto as well, but as I never left the airport, it would be “Yes, Starbucks here tastes like nearly every other Starbucks.”
As every meal shared amongst friends in Budapest starts with a small glass of palinka, I’ll start there. Palinka is a clear fruit brandy that is traditionally served before a meal. The idea is that you drink the palinka, and it prepares your digestive system for food. Every restaurant and pub I went to had at least 5 and 20 flavors. I guess they were all just hoping to ready people for digestion? I’m sure that was it.
My first meal in Budapest was Chicken Paprikas. It was at a restaurant my Airbnb host pointed me to, and it was a perfect introduction to Hungarian food. Chicken Paprikas is slow-cooked chicken, in a creamy red gravy. It’s full of Hungarian paprika, and served with spaetzli, a homemade egg noodle. While it’s traditional and delicious, I learned later that most Hungarians save Paprikas for the cooler months at my next culinary outing.
There is a dinner hosted by a local, called Meet and Eat in Budapest. While the host is from Budapest, she moved away to go to school for a hospitality degree. When she got back home, she found that there just weren’t enough jobs, so she made one. Four nights a week, she opens her home to tourists of all different nationalities. With the help of her parents, she cooks family recipes and pairs each of the three courses with a different wine.
All the courses were amazing, and so was the company. Who would have thought that I would spend my Hungarian vacation sharing a meal with people from Scotland, France, and England? The stand-out dish, though, was the dessert. It was a Dobras Torte, a chocolate and vanilla mouse sandwiched between chocolate sponge cake. It was fluffy and lightly sweet. I don’t really have a sweet tooth (a stark difference between myself and your regular columnist, who would list birthday cake as her favorite food), so the cake was a perfect end to a wonderful meal.
If my prattling on about Budapest has got you excited for the food, try this one on for size:
¼ cup butter + 1 tablespoon
For the past few years when the entire Matthews Family band can gather together, we try to catch an on-demand episode of Face Off, a SyFy network special effects makeup competition. The show has made me both more aware of the creations and more appreciative of what folks go through to create believable science fiction productions.
But there were a couple of things during Voyager that made me yell at the TV in frustration.
Dear Picard,
Trek on!
And goulash is the tippiest tip top of the culinary iceberg. If a national dish can be changed so profoundly that the only thing left in common with the original is the moniker, we, the people have probably done it.
This mania to morph traditional recipes has almost become a national joke, a kind of twisted point of pride. At a bicentennial dinner attended by Paulucci, President Gerald Ford summed it up by asking, “What could be more American than a business built on a good Italian recipe for chop suey?”
Flavor NC production observation, day two:
Here’s something that will give what follows some context; a generous portion of my blood is composed of caffeine. Whether it’s an expensive fancy coffee beverage, a glass of my homemade sun-tea that’s so strong Petey and The Kid call it jet fuel, or chocolate so dark it absorbs surrounding light, my engine runs on that stimulant of the jacked up, jittery gods. Without it, I am a cranky toy, with failing batteries, and a belligerent headache.
The attached building contains two of my favorite summer items—air conditioning and homemade ice cream. Charity loves to use freshly harvested produce for it. We’ve just missed the blueberry sweet corn, but the fresh watermelon ice cream becomes part of the shoot.
After visiting the okra field, we drive to the farm annex where the fields went on as far as we could see. One portion was full of countless plants heavy with different varieties of ripe tomatoes. Purely as research I ate a couple; sweet, and warm from the sun.
Next was summer squash of different shapes and colors. Then were pumpkins, a few for cooking, but most were purely ornamental, including ones that were pale green and covered with what looked like warts. Our host Ashley said they were perfectly suited for jack-o-lanterns and Halloween decoration.
We concluded our visit back at the farm stand. Lisa and Charity did a shot that culminated in biting into a raw piece of okra.
And nope, it didn’t taste like chicken.
On breaks, The Kid brought all kind of things home from college.
As a consequence, we only had salads every couple of months, and in between there would usually be a couple of times where I purchased greens and mushrooms for salad but then something would come up and a week later I’d end up face to face with slimy malodorous lettuces and ‘shrooms that had a decidedly gangrenous quality.
The Kid, however, advocated a much more casual, spontaneous approach. This included buying a row boat-sized container of mixed greens from Costco or BJ’s, a log of goat cheese, and some ready-to-go protein to toss into the mix (I butter-toast and salt a couple pounds of pecans every few months and mix them with dried fruit. It keeps in the fridge for weeks). It’s dressed with a bottle of ready-made dressing; I love Trader Joe’s balsamic.
Then there was the time my very own shine-hauling mini Richard Petty pulled into our driveway with six or seven cases of homemade pomegranate mead. Transporting this quantity happens to be a felony in most of the states driven through on the way home.
The mad scientists at Whiskey Kitchen serve it on sliced heirloom tomatoes speckled with crispy-fried okra, all resting on a shallow pool of their homemade pesto aioli. But before any of this happens, they lightly cold smoke the burrata, which gives it a flavor that compels one to just.keep.eating. 
Their pesto is delicious, with a sauce-like consistency. This makes it much more versatile, and a silky coating for pasta, unlike most, which can be greasy and is prone to separate.
If you haven’t been to downtown Raleigh in a while, very interesting things are happening. There’s unique shopping, museums, and NC legend and lore. I strongly suggest a trip in the near future that includes a stop at Whiskey Kitchen.
bull city mom 