My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen...

Brigstocke on Chicken

nobody@vox.com(Tubbydammer) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 20:37:26 +0100

Not many people know this but I was used to work on a farm. Not for long. In fact, just just for an hour or two, really. I helped stock a few sheds with day-old baby chickens that would be on a sanitary towel and under wrap in a chiller cabinet six weeks later. This is what they look like when they're a day old.

Chicks_0672

We all know what they look like at the other end.

Which is why I was so happy to hear Marcus Brigstocke's rant about chicken on this evening's Now Show. (~18 minutes in). It was superbly offensive but made a point that really needs making. It's more important to eat a small amount of something that tasty that you made yourself than to gorge on plastic-wrapped packet food. I'm glad I was eating a crispy, tart apple while I listened.

I loved the beard joke, too.

Hurry and download it. It's a topical show and the MP3 will disappear in a week if it's not picked up an archived by the wonderful Speechification blog.

Updated

I published and straight away noticed this great post from penguinmad. I am incredibly jealous. I always wanted to keep chickens when I was a kid but my parents didn't let me because we had so many foxes in the garden. Now I live in a 5th floor apartment I can't keep chickens.

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Was it a turd? No it was a Skechers shoe disintegrating

nobody@vox.com(Tubbydammer) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 20:12:29 +0100

Shortly after I moved to Brussels I found out that the Belgians - those living in this city at least - love cobbles. I'm not a huge fan but I can put up with them. Sadly, I cannot put up with them in the thin soled shoes I had bought a couple of years beforehand. I needed new shoes with sturdier soles. I went shopping.

I saw a pair of shoes I liked in a shoe shop, tried them on, walked around for a bit and decided that the soles felt thicker and sturdier than those on the pair they were replacing and made my purchase. I probably spent about 10 minutes on the whole process. I should have spent a few more.

This afternoon I was walking up the hill on my way back from work and thought that I'd trod on something unpleasant. I wiped my feed and continued. The feeling continued, too. I wiped again but the chunk of stuff that was stuck to the sole of my right shoe wouldn't budge. I was worried that I had trod in some kind of plasticised super-turd. After considerable scraping on a convenient piece of metal something dislodged. I averted my eyes and continued on my way.

When I got back home I checked the bottom of my shoe before walking inside and noticed that it had a strange leather swoosh on it - and that most of the leather had come loose. It wasn't a super-turd. It was a stupid design flaw in the sole.

Skechers Shoe Sole

Frankly, I'm disappointed with a pair of shoes that doesn't even last six months. I'm doubly disappointed because I'd mainly been wearing a seasoned pair of boots but had to switch to the shoes when the weld between the sole the uppers on one of the boots sprung a leak.

Lesson learned? Turn shoes over to check the soles before buying them. Frankly, I wouldn't have bought them if I'd noticed the stupid swoosh in the sole. Oh, and don't buy Skechers because after a while it feels like walking on dog turds.

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iTunes 7, Podcasts and the Music Library

nobody@vox.com(Tubbydammer) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 20:25:00 +0100

My mum has a nice new iPod Nano. It's just the right size to fit in her purse and can store her photographs, movies, contacts and calendars. Oh, and she also has some audio files on it, too.

Silver iPod Nano

Unfortunately, finding the audio files in the main iPod menus was not as straight forward as you'd expect. She didn't rip any CDs and didn't buy any downloads from the iTunes music store. The audio files are classical piano and Jane Austen podcasts. I'm sure it is content that will be listened to again and again.

But they did not appear in the "Music" "Playlists" "Albums" "Artists" or "Genres" menus on the iPod. This drove her crazy. And because she couldn't work it out she asked my uncle and me. After considerable searching I found the answer.

It appears that Apple have decided that putting podcasts in the main music library is confusing and have separated the main library from the podcast library. And while playlists that contain podcast episodes are visible in iTunes they are not visible on the iPod. Frankly, I find this more confusing but I don't have tens of thousands of hours of HCI analysis to back up my opinion. I just know that their decision confused my mum, my uncle and me.

It turns out that the way to put podcasts into the main library is to select the episodes you want to keep, and then select "Convert Selection to MP3" from the "Advanced" menu. As iTunes defaults to using AAC, the menu will presumably say AAC if you haven't changed your import preferences to MP3.

Convert to MP3

Of course, once you've done this you end up with two copies of the original file. As you want to keep the 'copy' you need to mark the one seen in the podcast library as "not new" and then delete it. If you don't mark the file as "not new" iTunes will assume that you aren't listening to the podcast and will stop downloading new episodes.

This procedure strikes me as unnecessarily cumbersome. What Apple should have done is to allow podcasts to appear in the main music library if the user wants them. As long as the user could choose to have podcasts appear in the main music library there wouldn't have been a problem with a default setting that separated them.

I hope this changes in iTunes 8.

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Mjukt Tunnbröd med Råg. Mmmmmmm

nobody@vox.com(Tubbydammer) — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 21:32:38 +0100

It's that part of the year when the US has moved from winter time to summer time and Europe hasn't. That means my regular evening call is an hour earlier than normal and so I'm a little more rushed in the evening. So rather than shop for raw cooking ingredients I popped into the English/Irish/Swedish shop and picked up some things that didn't need preparation.

I came away with some cereal and some super soft, Swedish flat bread: mjukt tunnbröd med råg. Nurani tells me that it translates as "soft thin bread with rye" and is normally served with meats, like reindeer.

I didn't have any reindeer at home. In fact, I didn't have any meat at all, so I had two cheese sandwiches: one was humous and English stilton and the other was Spanks' sweet shallot and balsamic vinegar relish with parmesan cheese. Both were excellent, although I think I prefer the shallot and parmesan.

Mjukt Tunnbröd med Råg

This bread is much better than most tortillas, because it's so soft and because it's oblong shape makes it really easy to roll up into a sandwich. I'll be buying Swedish bread again.

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Cup of Tea Cake

nobody@vox.com(Tubbydammer) — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 18:59:01 +0100

When I was a child, my mum used to make a fantastic cake that I called "Cup of Tea Cake" because it's made with a cup of tea. When I visited her in London last weekend she had made one of those cakes for a tea party she hosted. She sent me the recipe and I made one for myself this morning. Frankly, I'm quite impressed with the cake and will be sharing it at work tomorrow.

Cup of Tea Cake - Just Out the Oven

The recipe is very simple and unlike most baking, the exact amounts aren't terribly important. It's the proportions that count. So the cups you use just need to be the same size, they don't all need to be eight US fl. oz.

You will need:

1 cup of brown sugar
1 cup of dried fruit, like raisins
1 cup of good, strong tea
2 cups of self raising flour
1 egg
1 pinch of nutmeg

Start off by making a good strong cup of tea. Ideally, use a really good tea and make it stronger than you would normally drink it. Remember, it's going to be mixed up with a lot of other ingredients, so you don't want the flavour to get lost.

Soak the dried fruit and sugar in the cup of tea overnight. In the morning, pre-heat the oven to 325°F (435K if you use metric) mix the flour, egg and nutmeg into the soaked fruit. Grease a bread shaped dish, fill it with the batter and pop it in the oven.

I baked the cake for about 1¼ hours and then turned off the heat and left it in the oven for another few minutes. Every oven I've ever used has cooked at a different speed from all the others, so I expect the time it take to cook will vary. Especially if you use an Aga.

Cup of Teak Cake (Slice)

Serve the cake with a cup of tea. It's really great if you spread some butter on it, too.

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I'm sorry, I have a cold

nobody@vox.com(Tubbydammer) — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 12:33:17 +0100

Despite copious amounts of Emergen-C in the last few days I have a cold. When I woke up today, my nose felt drier than a box of tinder, although that changed as soon as I'd had another glass of Emergen-C.

I looked in my fridge and realised I very little that was suitable for curing colds, so I turned my store cupboard and decided to make a soup with my last few shallots and red onions. I sliced them thinly, added in half a bulb of garlic (peeled but not chopped) and gently sweated them in a pan for 20 minutes or so. Then I added half a mug or orange lentils and a few mugs of water and cooked it all at the lowest heat on my stove-top for another couple of hours.

Soups are always better the next day as the flavour in them takes time to develop. But I wanted to eat something that might help fight my cold and so I tried a bowl of onion and lentil soup for lunch. It was remarkably good for something that hasn't had a chance to mature.

I'll be making this one again.

Onion Lentil Soup

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Pee in any language you like

nobody@vox.com(Tubbydammer) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 15:14:34 +0100

Olof and I popped into l'Atellier just after lunch as he wanted to ask about a booking for a party. While he was chatting with the people at the front desk I took this snap of the door to their toilets. Frankly, it fits the area of the city beautifully and makes it far less likely that anyone dining there will be caught short.

Multi Lingual Toilets

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Animal arses

nobody@vox.com(Tubbydammer) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 10:46:40 +0100

I went to the zoo in Antwerp with my brother and his family on Wednesday. It's actually a pretty good zoo, although I think the lion enclosure needs major improvements or to be relocated to a safari park. The lion looked very, very lonely and his enclosure was bare concrete with none of the environmental enrichment available to the primates. The monkeys and apes have rope pathways, tyre swings, foliage and companions. The big cats looked very sad and frankly a little bit insane.

But on the bright side, the zoo mostly seems to be doing the right thing as none of the animals look underfed and even the big ones looked fairly happy in their small enclosures. These giraffes look elegant and well fed.

IMG_2678_giraffe_arses

The tattoo on this elephant's arse suggests it could have been rescued from a circus. Frankly, it's probably better-off in a zoo, with a small family.

IMG_2695_elephant_arse

It might be even better if these animals were in a large safari park with dozens of acres to roam instead of a small inner-city zoo. Hopefully they will be moved out soon.

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QotD: Stranger in a Strange Land

nobody@vox.com(Tubbydammer) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 12:16:55 +0100

When you travel, do you use a guidebook so that you're well prepared, or do you go without much prior knowledge so that you're surprised?
Submitted by Jack Yan.

The most preparation I do is consult Google Maps for directions from one place to another, once I've decided on where I want to go. I don't use guidebooks and I never read the tourist literature that hotels leave in hotel rooms. I much prefer to talk to local people and ask them what they think is good and worth doing. I also like walking around places and getting myself lost. Paris is especially good for getting lost in. If walking isn't practical because the place is too big then I like to use public transport and then loaf around in cafés.

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