"According to this you did sixty-three miles on Wednesday the fourth, sixty-three miles on Thursday the fifth, and on Friday the sixth, one million, twelve thousand and twenty-two miles. Where did you go that day?"
"That should say sixty-three miles." I said. "Sorry, must have put it down wrong."Magnus Mills - the scheme for full employment.There was a lot in the papers recently about the holiday reading list posh twat David Cameron gave to his follow twat heads to read over the (twatting long) summer holidays. It's all bollocks of course. Not a single one of them is going to read "Empires of the Sea: The Final Battle for the Mediterranean 1521-1580" by Roger Crowley. There's a slight chance a few of them might skim through "The Rise of Boris Johnson" and chuckle at how the bumbling racist somehow found power, but really, are any of them going to read "Inside the Private Office: Memoirs of the Secretary to British Foreign Ministers, Nicholas Henderson Britain in Africa"? Of course not, it's all just silly season guff.
My holiday reading tastes are simpler. I spend every day at work
thinking so why would I want to spend my holiday
thinking? Books by
Magnus Mills are the best holiday reading I've come across. They're short, sharp, utterly dry, entertaining, and pretty much unlike anything else I've ever read to be honest (not that I'm much of a reader). I'll also be taking some Spike Milligan and a biography on Stalin. That last one might sound contradictary, but well written biographies are as exciting and engaging as any novel. If it's not well written, I'll just chuck it in the bin. Well, I won't because it's a library book, I'll first take it back, wait for them to scan it, and then snatch it back of the and throw it in a bin melodramatically and say "That, sir, was utter shit".
Wednesday, August 13, 2008 6:26 PM
This weekend just passed, me and Jim spent 4 days skulling down the river on a Thames Skiff, from Henley to Walton. If I had to sum up the trip, I'd say that when it was sunny it was great, when it was raining, it was a bit miserable. Fortunatley there was enough sun to make it worthwhile. I slept on the Skiff each night; jim opted for two nights in a tent, then a night in a hotel room. The photos tell the story just as well as I could (which is another way of saying I'm tired and can't be arsed to write another blog post), so
click here for the pictures.
Wednesday, August 06, 2008 10:31 PM
Me and Liv have been toying with the idea of buying an ice cream maker - one of those cheapo battery operated ones that simply churns the cream in the freezer. Well, to put it more accurately, I've been pointing out to Liv that we need an ice cream maker, but she reckons that it will probably be one of those gadgets that we use once which then gathers dust in the cupboard. That's not the point. The point is that we need an ice cream maker, and frankly I don't understand how we've lived so long without one.
What is the point of an ice cream maker? Well, using conventional household cooling techiques (i.e. sticking something in the freezer) the mix will freeze quite slowly, and as it does so, ice crystals will form, which doesn't make for a smooth creamy result. In order to combat this you either need to churn it so that the ice crystals get broken up (which is what an ice cream maker does), or you need to freeze your mix really quickly. Heston Blumenthal's book
In Search of Perfection recommends that you use dry ice to rapidly freeze your mix, but frankly that stuff isn't that easy to come by, and while it will look cool it's bit of a faff and an expensive way to make ice cream.
Harold McGee, one of the godfathers of mollecular cooking and author of one of the most influential modern texts on cooking:
On Food & Cooking (a book I'm currently ploughing through, hence that exciting post on milk a few weeks back), has reported in
his NYT column on a method of rapidly cooling your ice cream using items you will probably already have in your kitchen: a bowl, salt, water and a freezer bag. Basically, salt reduces the freezing temperature of water from zero degress celsius to -12 degrees celsius. Therefore an ice bath with salt will have a greater cooling power than ice made simply with water, and would for example cool a bottle of water in half the time it would take in a standard ice bath.
This technique can therefore be used to rapildy freeze an ice cream mix, and he provides a recipe
here. I've not tried it yet, but will when I get a chance. If it works, it will have saved us £35 on a gadget that will rarely get used.
10:24 PM
I come across a number of interesting, fun, clever, stupid links on my travels around the internet, but can never be arsed to blog them as it's too much effort. However, Friend Feed has aleviated nearly all of that hassle. So, subscribe to
this feed and you'll get all the links that I think worthy of your attention. It will be just like old times, when this blog was nothing but a repository of links to other sites.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008 10:45 PM
I've been to Poland once before. That's not quite true: I've been
through Poland once before. I was on a train from Brussels to Moscow, had a headache, hadn't really slept thanks to the screaming child in the next cabin, was hungry and was in a bad mood. So, even it
was possible to get a taste for a country in the 13 and a half hours it takes to cross it on a train (it isn't), I was in no fit state to do so.
I've just spent a much more fulfilling weekend in Poland to celebrate Parners's birthday. The flight from Doncaster got in to Gdansk at 1:30 am, so we just went straight to bed on Friday night. We managed to crawl out of bed the following morning to go and visit the "Upside Down House" museum, which commemorates the hardships thrust upon the country in the 20th century by both Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia. The Upside Down House itself is exactly that, an upside down house respresenting how lives were turned upside down.
In the evening, we partied. I'm afraid my memory of the evening is incredibly hazy. I do remember having a great time, being drunk, saying "Na zdrowie" a lot prior to downing another shot of vodka, and accidentally ripping my shirt. Twice. What I don't remember but seemingly happened, is deciding at just 11pm that the best thing to do was to go bed. Somehow I managed it while everyone's back was turned, I think the vodka fairies must have been looking out for me. I stirred occassionally, heard everyone else carrying on partying, thought what a shame it was that I was in bed, and then fell asleep again. What a lightweight! My evening may have been too short, but it was a lot of fun.
The next day we went to Monica's parents' house, chilled out, and went for a walk to the lake. It's a lovely part of the country. I'm afraid I don't know how to spell the name of the town we were in (though I can tell you it's pronounced "Shit No"), but would love to go back for longer.
More Photos Here
Monday, July 14, 2008 10:42 PM
We're not really supposed to drink milk beyond infancy. The fact that we do, and the fact that we are able to, makes us unique as a species. It's all down to an enzyme called Lactase. This is produced in infant mammals so that they can break down a complex sugar called Lactose which is found in their mother's milk. Without this enzyme, the only way the body can break down this sugar is with bacteria, which creates gas and thus what is commonly known as "the shits". When an animal is weaned off its mother's breast milk, it is a waste of energy to carry on producing this enzyme and so usually the body no longer does so. After all, what kind of species is going to go around, as an adult, sucking milk from another animal's breasts?
Well, that'll be us. You see, a genetic mutation occurred in northern European humans a few thousand years ago with the birth of dairy farming, opening the door for humans to exploit a source of sustanance that is rich in fat and protein: other animals' breast milk. Evolution in action, yeah?
Not all humans have the ability to digest lactose. The Chinese can't for example, which makes you wonder whether sales of Immodium in China have increased in parallel with the nation's increased demand for cow's milk. Even if you are of northern European descent this doesn't guarantee that your body will continue to produce lactase for the rest of your life. Adults often develop a lactose intollerance in later life.
I will end this post on milk by noting that "Mammal" means "Animal of the Breast". And yes, as mammals, whales and dolphins breast feed.
Thursday, July 10, 2008 6:54 PM
Take a picture of a man and a baby.
Swap the heads and you get:
Man Babies
Friday, June 27, 2008 9:06 AM
I saw this on the wall of a toilet in Nerja, so thought I'd share. This wasn't translated by FreeTranslation.com which to be honest makes even less sense of the original.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008 9:25 PM
Confused. That's how most people are about the scientific claims they hear in teh medias.
"Last week they said red wine gives you brain cancer, now they say it can cure AIDS! I wish the scientists would make up their minds; is red wine good for you or not?!"Of course, in such cases it is often not the scientists that are at fault, it's the journalists that are reporting (or to put it more accurately - misrepresenting) their claims which are to blame. The problem is that people trust the media. They pretend they don't, they pretend that they "
know newspapers can't be trusted and shit" but the fact is that if the BBC put on its website that scientists have welded a cat onto a donkey, then the very same evening a thousand pub conversations will begin with the words "
Did you see on the news today that scientists are now welding cats onto the back of donkeys? Makes me sick. You couldn't make it, you just couldn't make it up."
The reason I mention this is because for the last few months I've been an avid reader of Ben Goldacre's
Bad Science blog. His blog shines a light on bad science, and misrepresentation of good science, and does so in a very accesible manner. I can't recommend it highly enough really. His
summing up of spurious claims of a miracle cure for dislexia is a good example of his work, and for lolz check his
latest post about a creationist getting out of his depth.
8:49 PM
