The latest (at this writing) Chris Morris TV series. Extremely dark and controversial, and of course, funny. Based partly on the radio show Blue Jam. The kind of show that makes you realise that English TV is the best in the world, when it wants to be. Or rather, English Comedy is the best in the world. Regularly pilloried on viewer feedback program Right to Reply (the last time by a greasy little student who kept saying "Did you find that funny?" about bits that weren't supposed to be funny. Dumb fuck).

A typical sketch? Well, there are no typical sketches as such, just dream-like chunks of disquieting surrealism submerged in ambient music and video effects. A lot of the imagery is rather memorable, for instance a trailer for one episode consisted of a piece of Police-style camcorder footage looking into an upstairs window of a house. Two men in y-fronts appear, holding revolvers. They squat down in a sprinter's starting pose, facing away from each other, and then simultaneously take aim and shoot each other up the arse. Now that's comedy.

Also, what musicians do when they get together. I'm thinking about those that can loosely be called popular musicians.

When my band, Missing Neutrinos, came over to my place on Sunday afternoons we would jam our blues, many of which I've noded (see the Unattributed Blues Metanode).

I suppose the derivation is jamming musicians together, causing "an injury caused by jamming".

But what an injury!

There is little that compares with playing changes that are just easy enough to work from memory, but just hard enough so little accidents happen. You use everything you have, but it seems like magic--suddenly new, really cool stuff happens.

This is the genealogy of the programming language JaM:

JaM is a child of Forth.
JaM was born in year 1978.
Then it begat InterPress around year 1978.

The name means "J and M", where J is John Warnock and M is Martin Newell. They created the language at Xerox PARC.

This genealogy is brought to you by the Programming Languages Genealogy Project. Please send comments to thbz.

Jam as collective musical improvisation actually comes from an acronym: Jazz After Midnight.

Jam is fruit, preserved, with lots of sugar. It is chunky yet spreadable. It is pure genius in a jar in your refrigerator.

I like jam. I Really like jam. I like apricot best but I like raspberry second. My mother used to make apricot preserves; this is how I became oriented to such an uncommon favorite flavor. The cheap generic kind with way too much sugar is best. Raspberry MUST have its seeds. Jam.

jmc and I often sing a jam-oriented song that goes a little something like this:

Elephants peanuts elephants and jam; jam jam elephants and peanuts, jam!

Sing it over your jam sandwich! You will like it! You have my personal quality guarantee.

Jam is the saviour of breakfasts everywhere. Just add your toast eggs and tea (assam, with milk) and you have a fabulous and nutritionally balanced meal incorporating members of all four food groups! Especially if you put cheese in the eggs in order to up the dairy content. I can eat jam on bread when I am nauseous to anything else (except the aforementioned tea, that I can drink just fine). This is often the case upon getting up in the morning. Who among us gets up and can't eat in the morning? Show of hands. It seems to be everybody. But you can eat your Pop Tarts when you get to class, can't you? I saw that! JAM is so far superior to false flavored sugar in a rock-hard pastry casing, I cannot accurately compare it. JAM brings new life, puts color in your cheeks before you even get out into the cold, can be eaten in combination with a variety of foods, is GOOD! JAM!

In general, jam is made by boiling crushed and pureed fruit, water, sugar, and fruit pectin (the stuff that makes the jam gel into actual jam). You can use any kind of fruit you want. After you've made the jam, you can it. Then you have a shelf full of lovely jeweltoned shiny jars in your pantry! And you can open them whenever you want, and eat your own personal jam!

I am such a sucker for jam that I have to consciously try not to buy any when I go to the store. There is so much jam in the refrigerator. For instance, the other day I got some strawberry rhubarb from American Spoon, www.spoon.com, that is just brilliant. There was also one of plum jam and but I already had the strhubarb (I would just like to point out that you can contract "strawberry rhubarb" to "STRHUBARB") and so I valiantly with MUCH VALOUR resisted.

I like Dickinson's orange marmalade, although this is marmalade as opposed to jam. Other marmalades just do not cut it. Seriously, I could not find this stuff for a long time, and was suitably irked, and then I found it when I was in Cleveland for a weekend and fell upon it with glad cries. That was a pretty literal description. And then I had to open it and bring the total up to nineteen jars of partially eaten jam, preserve, or marmalade product in the refrigerator.

Side note. Jelly (American terminology here: jelly, not jello or gelatin business) is just not to be eaten. I'm sorry, it's so overprocessed and liquefied and has approximately zero fruit left in it. You want the real stuff, with texture. Jam or preserves and that is IT. Do not be fooled! Accept no substitutes!

You put your jam on decent bread toasted to light golden brown and buttered, as in "fuck this, I'm having butter". Continue to accept no substitutes! Or on English muffins, to which you do the same. Sweet breads already have their own sweetness; you need plain sandwich bread (but Good plain sandwich bread) or sourdough in order to fully appreciate the contrast of textures and flavors. If you are using said jam more as a garnish than as the main deal, you do whatever floats your boat. You can do no wrong with jam. You put it on any any different kind of bread or otherwise flour-oriented baked good, as long as that baked good is not already stuffed with say spinach and feta, or ham egg and cheese. Any plain baked good only desires jam. O luscious combination of apricot jam and cheap yellow cake from a mix! O fabulous seeded raspberry on English muffins! O blueberry and melting butter over buckwheat pancakes!

IN CONCLUSION, JAM!

Jam.



Here are some fine jam resources:
http://www.smuckers.com/
http://www.getcrafty.com/read/craft/features/homecanning/
http://www.homecanning.com
http://www.spoon.com (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED)

Jam is a port of Chris Morris' comedy radio series Blue Jam to the medium of television. The original radio show started being broadcast in 1997 and its TV equivalent in 2000. It's not just a transfer of the general style of the show; the majority of the "sketches" are taken directly from the radio show (sometimes with no changes to the dialogue). It's sometimes possible to tell which are original because they're those which wouldn't work in an audio-only format. An example would be the sketch consisting of two men in underpants shooting each other in the arse.

Though it's often been billed as a surrealist or black comedy, I'd have to say that Morris has pushed so hard for absurdity that there is almost no humour to be found here. I have a similar problem to that which I have with a lot of syndicated comic strips; I can see where the humour is meant to come from, and why other people find it funny, but I'm just not laughing. It doesn't help that a lot of the sketches are based around one joke and go on for far too long. (Case in point: the man who tries to kill himself by jumping 40 times from a one-storey flat instead of jumping once from 40 stories. The joke is a one trick pony, but it goes on for several minutes with the punchline coming in unsubtly at the end.)

It all gets a bit dull after a while. The whole thing is pretty repetitive, with quite a number of themes or motifs making themselves obvious after viewing the series. Children, repairmen, doctors, vets, criminals, armed robbers, security camera footage, kinky sex, amateurish filming, dropped frames, television, and so forth. Jaaaaam took this to new extremes by applying yet another layer of video effects to an already hyperprocessed show. Thought it's often described as a "remix" of the original Jam, it retains the same sketches, the same order, same running times, same ambient music, and so forth. Good if you're in a low-key, sombre mood, but otherwise not really what I'd look for.


The contents of this writeup are in the public domain.

Jam (?), n. [Per. or Hind. jamah garment, robe.]

A kind of frock for children.

 

© Webster 1913.


Jam, n. Mining

See Jamb.

 

© Webster 1913.


Jam, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Jammed (?); p. pr. & vb. n. Jamming.] [Either fr. jamb, as if squeezed between jambs, or more likely from the same source as champ See Champ.]

1.

To press into a close or tight position; to crowd; to squeeze; to wedge in.

The . . . jammed in between two rocks. De Foe.

2.

To crush or bruise; as, to jam a finger in the crack of a door.

[Colloq.]

3. Naut.

To bring (a vessel) so close to the wind that half her upper sails are laid aback.

W. C. Russell.

 

© Webster 1913.


Jam, n.

1.

A mass of people or objects crowded together; also, the pressure from a crowd; a crush; as, a jam in a street; a jam of logs in a river.

2.

An injury caused by jamming.

[Colloq.]

 

© Webster 1913.


Jam, n. [Prob. fr. jam, v.; but cf. also Ar. jamad ice, jelly, jamid congealed, jamd congelation, ice.]

A preserve of fruit boiled with sugar and water; as, raspberry jam; currant jam; grape jam.

Jam nut. See Check nut, under Check. -- Jam weld Forging, a butt weld. See under Butt.

 

© Webster 1913.

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