small quick pallet animal for Hackney Wicked Festival
Entries Tagged as 'london'
solar powered LED underwater graffiti creatures
June 20th, 2011 · No Comments · art, london
slug1, somewhere in East London, Anthony Goh, 2011
slug1, somewhere in East London, Anthony Goh, 2011
jellyfish1, somewhere in East London, Anthony Goh, 2011
jellyfish1, somewhere in East London, Anthony Goh, 2011
EDIT: if you like this project, please consider voting for it in an instructables contest! If I win, I will auction the prize (an iPad) and give half the money to a marine charity which reduces the (obscene) amount of plastic junk in our water systems. YOu should also check out the other projects in the contest, some of them are insanely good.
Vote here at the Instructables 2011 LED Contest
LED graffiti has been around for a while, most notably LED Throwies and signage using LEDs to spell words. One problems is power supply – after the batteries expire, LED graffiti becomes simply more junk.
Solar panels used to be prohibitively expensive for novelty projects, but as solar powered LED garden lights have exploded in popularity so their price has plummeted. They are currently flooding the eco-system of consumer electronics at the cheap, destined-to-be-junk level , and you can find boxes and boxes of them at any car boot sale.
Solar garden lights (normally used to adorn a path) are simple devices which use solar panels to charge a rechargeable battery in the day, then they automatically switch an LED on at night. Since they are now very cheap, and are even often thrown away, so we can use these to create self-powering (immortal!) glowing pieces which can happily live in the wild.
After thinking about places for an installation – somewhere interesting, beautiful, that wouldn’t get disturbed – I settled on underwater.
So, inspired by nature, this art project re-creates beautiful, mysterious, bio-luminescent creatures from the deep sea in your urban canal, pond or river environment. In the initial test phase of this project, I built 2 creatures, one based loosely on a jellyfish and the other on a sea slug.
To find out more about the making of this project, check out the step-by-step guide on Instructables
the device is built from fibre optic LED garden lights, glued to a frame. the control box with solar panel floats in the water above the creature
3 solar panels are glued together. these float onthe surface, and the battery pack and electronics hang below in the water. The rim is made from an LED rope necklance and the guts from re-cycled plastic and a flashing RGB LED.
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The Oxford & Cambridge Goat Race 2011
March 31st, 2011 · No Comments · abelha cachaca, art, london, nature
So, the dust has settled on another Goat Race, and we are happy to announce that about £6300 has been raised for the farm, a huge increase on the £3400 from last year! So thanks to everyone who came, everyone who worked there, especially those who volunteered their time, and to the farm staff.
Exciting new additions this year included the Oxford & Cambridge Stoat Race, food, coffee, beer from Meantime Brewery and cocktails from Abelha Cachaca.
Music from the excellent DJ Pigsnoots, and live freestyle MC’ing from the excellent Voodoo Browne, whose single, Low Budget Raver drops this April.
This year, we had more time to put into making lots more decorations and bits & bobs for the farm which was nice.
Bramble the Golden Guernsey romped home for Cambridge in 57 seconds as Oxford never recovered from stopping at the start of the race to do a poo.
From a personal point of view, I think it’s really important to connect people to city farms – they do an important thing of not letting us forget ultimately what life is about - which is easy to do in cities. So I was happy to see thousands of smiling people walking around the farm, taking it all in. Many will have been to Brick Lane and Shoreditch tens of times and never known about the farm just a street away.
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2010 resolutions review
January 2nd, 2011 · No Comments · london, nature
Last year I set a bunch of objectives for myself, based on aspects of my life that I wanted to explore. So here are the results. This year’s plans coming soon!
Food
1. Grow and eat 2 kinds of vegetable or fruit in the garden.
This doesn’t sound that hard, but I am a terrible gardener. I only have mint, thyme and chives (almost dead) in my back garden because Dog and I just could not kill them, despite our best efforts using claws, drought, biting, urine and neglect.
Results: Grew potatoes in tyres and a seemingly infinite supply of peppery rocket. Had some difficulties with tomatoes and rhubarb.
Status: ACHIEVED, HAPPY
2. Forage 3 new wild items and utilise them for food (or chutney, soup etc.)
Two high points of 2009 included picking sloes from inside the M25 and the resulting sloe cachaca, and also an amazing wild blackberry crumble. So more of the same this year.
Results: Achieved with a couple of different types of mushrooms and a good day’s foraging in Two Trees Island in Essex, picking Sea Purslaine and Wild Fennel. I think picking and eating wild fungi was my happiest surprise discovery for 2010, I am definitely now a slightly cringey amateur mycologist.
Status: ACHIEVED, VERY HAPPY
3. Kill and eat 3 different species of animal.
There is nothing more satisfying than catching your own dinner. I hope to maybe catch/eat a couple of new types sea fish (bass?), or maybe a rabbit.
Didn’t go fishing at all this year, and not really to any farm-like places either. I seem to be eating less meat these days anyway too. Feel ok about this one.
Status: FAILED, DON’T MIND
4. Build 6 new food/drink items from scratch.
Last year I set the wholly unrealistic goal of only eating scratch built things (e.g. no bought ketchup, no coleslaw, etc). This year I will try a few new things like beer, jam, tonic water, jelly or a gala pie.
I just couldn’t get this going, but on the plus side we now use the breadmaker every day which is amazing. It took a while to get right, and even now we get it wrong sometimes, but I love the smell of yeasty baking flooding the house from 5 in the morning, and we rarely buy bread from a store.
Status: FAILED, PERTURBED
Work
My theme for work is building things with long term value, and generally being freer – getting more control of my time and more control of what kind of work I do.
1. Abelha
has gone well in our first year so me and Hal are mega-excited about the future. We started with the theory that booze makes people happy, and henceforth the more booze we move, the more we get people to spend time happily chatting, chilling, flirting, dancing and who knows what else. So far we are up to something like 17800 of these man-hours of Abelha-fuelled fun. Our resolution is to further increase the peace around the UK and world.
A big year for us, we have increased our volumes significantly, started working with a great agency, LoveDrinks, and myself and Hal’s roles in the business has changed a lot too. Up to about 111,948 hours of Abelha-fuelled good times now. All systems set for world domination.
Status: ACHIEVED, HAPPY
2. Work freelance less, and more on developing own projects.
(about 1:2 ratio of freelance to own projects)
Status: ACHIEVED, HAPPY
3. Get the wheels going on one new product or service with long term potential.
We started getting paid (tiny amounts) for our art-related activities, which is excellent, and also I realised that don’t even almost have time to set up a new business scheme right now.
Status: FAILED, DON’T MIND
4. Do about 165 days of work in 2010.
Status: ACHIEVED, DON’T MIND
Fun/Art
This is the easy section. I think it’s really important that we try to bring lots of moments of beauty into other people’s lives (as well as our own). For me this means craft, sort-of-art, events, and general silliness.
1. Make the Goat Race bigger and better this year.
Wowee, we had over 1000 people through the door and coverage in nationals and all over the radio. So a resounding success. Even bigger for 2011, watch this space.
Status: ACHIEVED, HAPPY
2. Do another installation piece in a gallery or festival.
2 exhibitions this year, one of which was in the V&A, which was ace.
Status: ACHIEVED, HAPPY
3. Develop our multi-touch screen into new useful object.
Hmmm. We learned the obvious lesson that it’s much more interesting to make new things than muck around with old ones. I am glad to be moving away from screen-based stuff though. However it is taking up room in the shed.
Status: FAILED, OH WELL
4. Build a piece of art that has ongoing development/usage potential.
Status: UNCERTAIN, DON’T MIND
5. Do our jousting party bigger and better this year.
I really haven’t been in a party mood since my epic birthday, and over the spring and summer I spent a lot of time surfing, which has been my other favourite activity this year. Bike jousting is a noble art which will have it’s day though.
Status: FAILED, DON’T MIND
6. Make the DogBox club into a regular self-sustaining thing.
Status: SEMI-ACHIEVED, DON’T MIND
7. Build three hats that I designed ages ago but still haven’t made.
I just didn’t have the bandwidth/energy to pursue this. In fairness the amount of time I spent doing self-directed art-like projects has been much more than I thought this year, so I am not too bothered about this. There is now a studio-traffic list of projects waiting to be built, so it will just have to wait it’s course.
Status: FAILED, PERTURBED
8. Make one sustainability-related project.
Both Mobile Phone Birds and this lamp I built would count. Would like to do more in this field. Watch this space.
Status: ACHIEVED, PERTURBED
Nature
1. Observe and sketch the 12 Zodiacal constellations.
I observed 9 of them, including getting much better grip of all the stars visible from the UK. Capricorn, Sagittarius and Scorpio eluded me though.
Status: FAILED, DON’T MIND
2. Observe and sketch 10 Messier objects (e.g. galaxies, star clusters).
Had some other great moments “discovering” Jupiter’s moons, shooting stars, and so don’t mind this. I haven’t yet found myself that interested in the Messier objects yet, perhaps they’re more of a thing for telescopes.
Status: FAILED, DON’T MIND
3. Pick/sketch/photograph 12 UK wild flowers.
yup
Status: ACHIEVED, HAPPY
4. Catch a falling leaf.
This was a surprise highlight of 2010. Having never done this as a child, I couldn’t believe what a rush it was. Daft but true.
Status: ACHIEVED, SUPER-HAPPY
5. Observe and sketch common cloud types
I in fact got totally obsessed with clouds, collecting about 100 pictures of them. They are a constant source of beauty and amazement to me.
Status: OVER-ACHIEVED, HAPPY
6. Mark the equinoxes with some kind of cool sculpture (this is the goal I am least keen on, and to be frank it sounds a bit druidic, but I like the idea of building a modern stonehenge).
Done, pictures coming soon!
Status: ACHIEVED, HAPPY
Tags:nyres2011
happy christmas 2010
December 24th, 2010 · No Comments · art, london
Nice festive piece of art somewhere in East London
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sloe gin 2010
December 5th, 2010 · No Comments · domestic life, london, nature
Spent a morning picking sloes in the glorious winter sunshine. The hardest part about making sloe gin is avoiding the temptation to drink it before it’s ready.
The difference between homemade sloe gin and the store bought stuff is phenomenal – store bought stuff tastes like Ribena and Halls Soothers, while the homemade stuff is very mellow and berry-like.
wild field mushroom omelette
October 19th, 2010 · No Comments · domestic life, london, nature
One of the things I am enjoying most this autumn is learning about, and eating, wild mushrooms.
Today’s breakfast, omelette with freshly picked field mushrooms form around the Hackney / Tower Hamlets area. Field mushrooms (agaricus campestris) are just about the most common edible mushroom. Delicious, deeply satisfying and a bit scary.
trusty bike stolen
October 17th, 2010 · No Comments · frivolity, london
You were my only bike to not ever get a name, but my most faithful steed of all time. You seemed so cheap when I got you for 20 quid, and now no amount of money can bring you back. Together we skipped, skidded, weaved and filtered over 7000 miles together, went to Belgium, Cornwall and Wales. Ran over 2 squirrels and a pigeon, got run over by the 55 on Hackney Road. Given backies to numerous cute females, and you outlasted the fickle human promises of love not once, but twice.
The time you steered completely by yourself all the way home from KFC Dalston so I could use both hands to eat a whole 3pc Colonels meal, including the coleslaw. You also chewed up all my right leg cuffs and now I have no smart trousers left, but that’s ok, it’s part of my style now. Us two and Zogger all getting stuck together in 6 inch deep river side mud in the Marshes and Zogger being terrified of you because you used to always fall on him with a terrible metallic clang.
Singing Patrick Swayze with that chick at the lights at Tower Bridge. Playing probably the world’s only ever game of Bike Jereed in the car park at Gwithian beach. The time your bars were covered in blood when I sliced my hand open on a sharp bit of chrome flake that was peeling off.
But tonight you have left me for someone else, no note, just a broken lock where you once stood. I know they won’t love you like I did, probably they have taken your wheels and seat and thrown the rest of you in the canal.
But you will never truly die physically as some parts of you will live on forever in the bike ecosphere. And everything you taught me about riding is forever in my muscle memory and so you live again each time I ride.
Unnamed but never forgotten.
Aug 2008 – Oct 2010
hackney wild puffball mushroom salad
October 7th, 2010 · No Comments · domestic life, london, nature
Another New Years Resolution done, foraging new kinds of food. Yesterday I found some little wild puffballs. Peeled skins off, cut into slices, fried with butter and garlic and added to salad. Tasted delicious with a kind of neutral, mushroomy flavour. When you cut into the flesh, it smells exactly like a can of Heinz/Campbells mushroom soup, but fresher.
I am still not dead. Luckily, puffballs are mostly safe to eat and hard to mix up with poisonous mushroom. As long as the flesh is white (not yellow or any other colour), and they are definitely a ball, with uniform flesh throughout (as opposed to another kind of mushroom that just hasn’t opened yet, in which case you will see the formation of gills and a cap when you slice it open), then you should be ok. Please check many books and websites before eating any mushrooms!
Escape [Mobile Phone Birds pics and video]
September 29th, 2010 · No Comments · art, london, portfolio
Some pics and video of our installation down at the V&A, also read about it at Not-fig and Creative Applications
Escape by Anthony Goh and Neil Mendoza from Neil Mendoza on Vimeo.
Birds [Objects] by Neil Mendoza from CreativeApplications.Net on Vimeo.
Tags:art·birds·installation·mobile phones·tree·V&A
London Design Festival: Digital Design Weekend at the V&A on 25th & 26th September
September 24th, 2010 · No Comments · art, london, portfolio
UPDATE: see pics and vids of the installation in action here
This weekend at the V&A, there are a bunch of workshops, events, art and joining-in stuff that celebrate digital art and design. Me and Neil will be there all day Saturday and Sunday with some robotic birds constructed out of mobile phones so pop down and say hi if you’re around. We will be talking to anyone who listens about microcontrollers and hardware hacking(!) aka the language of love.
Mobile phone birds in construction phase
It’s all free. Other highlights include light graffiti workshops, Hidden V&A iPod tours, and toy hacking. Full programme here:
Digital Design Weekend at the V&A on 25&26th September
Tags:art·mobile phone birds·V&A
close shave, almost ate poisonous mushrooms
September 15th, 2010 · No Comments · london, nature
DO NOT EAT THESE
These look pretty good to eat right? I found them growing wild around woodlands in Hackney. Anyway I identified them as Wood Mushrooms from a book. Let them sit in the kitchen for a couple of days. Looked at the book again carefully, then went for a walk, came back and was just about to turn them into omelette for breakfast when I did one final check, for no reason, and it turns out they are the poisonous “Yellow Stainer”.
DO NOT EAT THESE
Wood mushrooms also bruise yellow, but these produce bright yellow stains even down in the stem when you cut it with a knife.
There is a old carpenter saying, “measure thrice, cut once”. No idea why it was only the 3rd time I looked at the book that I got it right.
Article from someone who knows more about mushrooms than me:
http://www.mushroomdiary.co.uk/2010/08/horse-mushroom-imposter-the-yellow-stainer/
sun dogs in Victoria Park
March 17th, 2010 · No Comments · london, nature
I have been looking at clouds loads recently. An exciting(!) day today – as we had sun dogs a.k.a. parhelia over Victoria Park. Sun dogs – little suns that appear 22° to the left and right of the Sun, often displaying the colours of the rainbow.
Also a faint upside down rainbow in the clouds above the sun – if you zoom in you can see the colours start from red at the bottom.
At first I thought it was a circumhorizontal arc, but no such luck.
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The Oxford & Cambridge Goat Race 2010
February 16th, 2010 · No Comments · london, nature, portfolio
Image from Michelle Bower
Just an early warning to say hold the date, The Goat Race is back, at Spitalfields City Farm, just near Brick Lane, on Saturday 3rd April 2010 (Easter weekend). Same day as a similar sounding sporting event.
Image from WowtheWorld
If you’d like to get involved with either the Goat Race, doing a stall or activity, promoting something, or the afterparty, get in touch.
I finally built a site for it at www.thegoatrace.org , and you can join us on Facebook at bit.ly/goatrace .
We are taking on board feedback from last year – more activites and fun surrounding the race, and a better organised afterparty. So stay tuned.
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eilidh cairns
February 6th, 2010 · No Comments · london
Our close friend Eilidh Cairns was killed in a cycle accident a year ago yesterday involving an HGV. I went down to the accident spot at Notting Hill Gate – right on the man road near the tube – yesterday to hang out. Some friends of ours have done a nice plaque and ghost bike for her – it’s the first ‘officially sanctioned’ (by Boris Johnson) ghost bike and won’t be removed.
To all of us who cycle, please take care. Lorries really can’t see you at all so stay well clear. Peace and love, Ant
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2010 resolutions
January 4th, 2010 · No Comments · domestic life, london, nature, thoughts
This year, instead of making vague statements, or trying to *not* do things (which is really difficult), I made bunches of little objectives across a number of categories which are important to me: Food, Work, Fun, Nature and Personal. The idea is that all these little tasks added up will hopefully shape life more in the direction I am trying to go.
Food
This year focusses on going back to basics: growing, foraging, killing, cooking and eating.
1. Grow and eat 2 kinds of vegetable or fruit in the garden.
This doesn’t sound that hard, but I am a terrible gardener. I only have mint, thyme and chives (almost dead) in my back garden because Dog and I just could not kill them, despite our best efforts using claws, drought, biting, urine and neglect.
2. Forage 3 new wild items and utilise them for food (or chutney, soup etc.)
Two high points of 2009 included picking sloes from inside the M25 and the resulting sloe cachaca, and also an amazing wild blackberry crumble. So more of the same this year.
3. Kill and eat 3 different species of animal.
There is nothing more satisfying than catching your own dinner. I hope to maybe catch/eat a couple of new types sea fish (bass?), or maybe a rabbit.
4. Build 6 new food/drink items from scratch.
Last year I set the wholly unrealistic goal of only eating scratch built things (e.g. no bought ketchup, no coleslaw, etc). This year I will try a few new things like beer, jam, tonic water, jelly or a gala pie.
Work
My theme for work is building things with long term value, and generally being freer – getting more control of my time and more control of what kind of work I do.
1. Abelha
has gone well in our first year so me and Hal are mega-excited about the future. We started with the theory that booze makes people happy, and henceforth the more booze we move, the more we get people to spend time happily chatting, chilling, flirting, dancing and who knows what else. So far we are up to something like 17800 of these man-hours of Abelha-fuelled fun. Our resolution is to further increase the peace around the UK and world.
2. Work freelance less, and more on developing own projects.
(about 1:2 ratio of freelance to own projects)
3. Get the wheels going on one new product or service with long term potential.
4. Do about 165 days of work in 2010.
Fun/Art
This is the easy section. I think it’s really important that we try to bring lots of moments of beauty into other people’s lives (as well as our own). For me this means craft, sort-of-art, events, and general silliness.
1. Make the Goat Race bigger and better this year.
2. Do another installation piece in a gallery or festival.
3. Develop our multi-touch screen into new useful object.
4. Build a piece of art that has ongoing development/usage potential.
5. Do our jousting party bigger and better this year.
6. Make the DogBox club into a regular self-sustaining thing.
7. Build three hats that I designed ages ago but still haven’t made.
8. Make one sustainability-related project.
Nature
I sometimes get an awesome sensation of peace and awe in beautiful natural surroundings – mountains, sunsets, lunar eclipses, etc. I knew when I got Dog that I wanted to spend more time outside, exploring; also, being a bit of a nerd I’ve always had a keen interest in nature too. I want to spend less time on the Internet too, and just to slow down a little.
1. Observe and sketch the 12 Zodiacal constellations.
2. Observe and sketch 10 Messier objects (e.g. galaxies, star clusters).
3. Pick/sketch/photograph 12 UK wild flowers.
4. Catch a falling leaf.
5. Observe and sketch common cloud types (if I ever have a kid, at some point they will ask about clouds, and I will feel like a bit of a cunt if all I know is that the wispy ones are good and the big grey ones are bad).
6. Mark the equinoxes with some kind of cool sculpture (this is the goal I am least keen on, and to be frank it sounds a bit druidic, but I like the idea of building a modern stonehenge).
Here’s to 2010!
Tags:
bicycles
July 5th, 2009 · No Comments · london, thoughts
I’m currently selling my beloved Schwinn beach cruiser for £160. A little info below.
This is my beloved super sweet beach cruiser which I am forced to sell as I have decided to live a more zen-like life. Because of this, I am trying to discard some of my unnecessary earthly possessions, even the ones that make me obviously way more awesome. I have decided that I am still allowed to eat meat and drink booze though.
This bike would suit someone 5’5″ to about 5’11″, who is either very cool, or aspiring to be cooler.
It is a classic Schwinn american beach cruiser alloy frame, with many of the parts having been replaced with lighter, better parts.
It has a rear coaster brake (back-pedal amsterdam style brake) and no front brake. You don’t really need one.
It is relatively lightweight, and not slow as you might think. For example, I rode it from Hackney to Earls Court, and it only took about 45 minutes. On my normal skinny tyred bike, this might take 38 minutes. So it is a very comfy bike to commute even relatively long (London) distances on. This is owing to the sit-up riding position and the giant, double sprung suspension seat that is like a DFS sofa. She is even pretty lively through traffic.
I am selling it for £160. The bike is in great shape – tyres are almost new, brake, cranks, are all tip top. I have just given it a good servicing and re-painted the front fork.
cheers, Ant
anthony.goh@gmail.com
Image from lookingatdamascus
On another note, I have been working on a new bicycle, which I am building up bit by bit. Because of this, I have been looking at other bikes – I have found the sweetest store which sells these amazing stretch cruisers – if I wanted a new bike and had about 550 quid to spare, I would deffo get one…
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takeaway festival opening night tuesday 19th may 2009
May 13th, 2009 · 2 Comments · art, london, portfolio
For the past couple of weeks I’ve been working with Neil and Simeon, building a giant collaborative art touch screen thing. It involves lasers, loads of wood, and cameras, and it’s been a nightmare to build so far. I have almost cut all my fingers off numerous times and accidentally shot myself in the eyes with high power infra-red lasers.
This is all for the Takeaway Festival – a fusion of technology, music and art – happening at the Dana Centre, SW London over a couple of weeks starting Tuesday the 19th May. It’s without a doubt the nerdiest thing I have ever been a part of, but it feels good.
I would love if it you came down to the Tuesday opening night (they have beer), or if you can’t make it, you can see our installation anytime after that for a couple of weeks. See the details below.
Here’s a picture of us prototyping the device.
Takeaway Festival Schedule
The Festival opens Tuesday May 19th with our first day of workshops and our Opening Evening 7.00-9.30
- The Exhibits and Interactives are open from Tuesday May 19th until Saturday May 30th
- Entrance is Free
- Exhibition finishes on Saturday May 30th 15:00
- Please note: The exhibition is also open on Monday 25th May (Bank Holiday)
Opening times: Monday to Friday 10:00 – 17:00
Saturday 23rd May 12:00 – 17:00
Saturday 30th May 12:00 – 15:00
For workshops and evening events you will need to book in advance so please call 020 7942 4040 or e-mail tickets@danacentre.org.uk
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Oxford and Cambridge Goat Race 2009
April 12th, 2009 · No Comments · london, nature, portfolio
I hereby declare the First Annual Varsity Oxford and Cambridge Goat Race to be a total success. An edited thank you note from Anne Hopkins, Goat Race co-founder:
Thanks to the 300+ of you who chose Goats over Boats on Sunday – it was awesome and ridiculous in equal measures and most importantly raised over £700 for the farm. Thank You.
Our favourite squat-legged friend, Cambridge, barreled in first on the day in front of the rather more willowy Oxford with a time of 52.6 sec. Go the under-goat!
We can’t get enough of giggling at shots of the goats muscling their way along the course, so please do send us your pics (simeonrose@gmail.com) or add them to the Facebook event page or put them up on the net and tag them goatrace2009.
Huge thanks to go to Cookie for his brilliant design work, Ben for winning tunes, Hal for race-calling and general fine-sportsmanship, Paul for playing Bookie, our nimble-needled knitters, La Fromagerie for the cheese (which Sam Williams won…eventually!) AND of course to the Spitalfields City Farm for letting us run with this random idea in the first place.
(Sorry about the drinks bungle, we were there with free booze but the pub wouldn’t let us serve it to you due to a miscommunication — we will make it up to you next time, promise!)
Anne, Simeon & Anthony
See the pics here on Flickr.
Anthony Goh http://www.deadinsect.co.uk
Abelha Cachaca http://www.abelha.co.uk
Anne Hopkins http://www.snap-shot-city.com/
Simon Cook http://www.made-in-england.org/
Pigsnoots http://www.myspace.com/dothedirt
Magic-ish http://www.magic-ish.com/
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McGangBang Review, Old St, LONDON N1
March 20th, 2009 · 2 Comments · domestic life, london
I’d forgotten the joys of working in an office, where you are mostly in front of a computer. The buzz of the Internet surrounds you constantly, like bugs in a rainforest, and bits of it fly at you – mostly dull, ugly, biting and and irritating, but the occasional beautiful butterfly lands on your shoulder.
This is how I felt when I read about the McGangBang. Exec summary: kids in the USA order a whole McChicken Sandwich INSIDE a Double Cheeseburger, and nickname it a McGangBang. It’s popular to the point where some branches know what it is, and serve it.
I love eating at McDonalds, and I love innovation. One of my highlights of last year was going to McDonalds (Commercial Road) drive through on a tandem bike and ordering everything from the PoundSaver menu – 8 items for £8.22 (some things on the pound saver menu don’t cost a pound), and asking if anyone had ever done that before. (They hadn’t). I was of course inspired by my favourite thing on YouTube, MrChiCity.
Without further ado, my review of the McGangBang.
Ready and ordered. They had no idea what I was about to do.
At this point I start to feel slightly wrong. Not guilt, more physical icky-ness. Like having to touch a really big insect.
The McGangBang is assembled. Looks good, smells good.
One of the greatest joys about bad bread sandwiches is squishing it -like squishing a fishfinger sandwich made with cheap white sliced bread. The McGangBang squishes well, it holds together nicely too (unlike Big Macs, which have a remarkably low snack cohesion coefficient).
Eating: Actually pretty good. The McChicken sauce lifts the flavours out nicely and the crunch of the McChicken adds an interesting interplay of texture. the only incongruous element is the lettuce, which is mercilessly overpowered. It all physically holds together too, and weirdly, the extra bread doesn’t matter too much. 8/10.
Conclusion
This burger originates from McDonalds in the US, where they have a McChicken Sandwich on the Dollar menu, so the whole thing only costs £2.16. This make a lot more sense. Next time I will try it with the Mayo Chicken on the Pound Menu.
I find it interesting to note that:
1. The greatest creativity, as ever, comes from constraints – kids who needed the most un-hungriness from the cheapest items at McDonalds created this.
2. It was first mentioned on Urban Dictionary in May 2006 – 3 years ago. We sometimes think that the Internet makes everything instantly famous, but things can take years to get noticed.
Tags:mcdonalds
