All posts by Keith

I’m a controversialist and catalyst, quietly enabling others to develop by providing different ideas and views of the world. Born in London in the early 1950s and initially trained as a research chemist I retired as a senior project manager after 35 years in the IT industry. Retirement is about community give-back and finding some equilibrium. Founder and Honorary Secretary of the Anthony Powell Society. Chairman of my GP's patient group.
words

Word: Panjandrum

Panjandrum
1. (A mock title for) a mysterious (frequently imaginary) personage of great power or authority.
2. A pompous or pretentious official; a self-important person in authority.
According to the OED, the word is supposed to have been coined in 1754 or 1755 as part of a a piece of nonsense written by actor and dramatist Samuel Foote (1720–77) to test the memory of his fellow actor Charles Macklin, who had asserted that he could repeat anything after hearing it once. In the first published version (in 1825) the relevant passage (attributed to Foote) is:

So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage-leaf to make an apple-pie; and at the same time a great she-bear, coming up the street, pops its head into the shop. “What! No soap?” So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber; and there were present the Picninnies, and the Joblillies, and the Garyulies, and the grand Panjandrum himself, with the little round button at top, and they all fell to playing the game of catch-as-catch-can till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots.

(It’s not up to Lewis Carroll’s standard, but never mind, eh!)


Panjandrum was also a (failed) experimental World War II device (above), invented by Nevil Shute, for delivering high explosive to enemy targets. There’s a good description of this on Wikipedia.
The word’s original derivation is unknown.

amusements

Middle-aged?

I spotted this somewhere the other day. I feel sure it’s been around for a while, but it made me chuckle.
How to know when you’re Middle-Aged:

  1. You don’t understand what young peasants are talking about
  2. You struggle to read Chaucer in weak candlelight
  3. You hate rowdy taverns
  4. You constantly worry that you might have the Black Death
  5. You don’t know or care who Blondel is sleeping with
  6. You tell your wife that Crusaders seem to look younger every year
  7. You struggle with new technology such as the heavy plough and the longbow.
  8. You find Gothic architecture too modern
  9. You keep forgetting who the King is
  10. You dream of buying a second hovel in France
food+drink

Recipe: Mary Berry's Sausage Supper

I’ve not posted a recipe for quite a while, so here’s a quick, sure-fire, easy winner from our kitchen. It’s based on a Mary Berry recipe.


Mary Berry’s Sausage Supper
For each person you will need:
Good sausages (at least 3 per person)
3 small salad potatoes, cut into ping-pong ball sized pieces
A selection of vegetables; choose from:
– a small red onion (quartered)
– 2 medium (quartered) or 6 cherry tomatoes
– ½-1 bell pepper (cut into 8)
– ½-1 bulb of fennel (quartered)
– a few mushrooms (halved if large)
– a few slices of aubergine (cut in 1-1.5cm slices)
Several cloves of garlic (roughly chopped)
Bunch fresh herbs; thyme is good (roughly chopped)
This is what you do:

  1. Preheat the oven to 220C/200C Fan/Gas 7.
  2. Place all the ingredients in a large bowl with 2 tbsp olive oil and turn until they’re fully coated in oil. [Or you could use a large, resealable freezer bag.]
  3. Tip into a large roasting tin and spread out into an even layer. Season well with salt and pepper.
  4. Roast in the oven for 30–35 minutes.
  5. Turn the sausages and vegetables.
    [At this point Mary Berry adds a glass of white wine, but I think this ends up too wet.]
  6. Replace in the oven and roast for a further 20 minutes or so, until the sausages and potatoes are cooked through.
  7. Serve hot, with mustard if liked, and a beer or glass of red wine.

I challenge you to have leftovers!

quotes

Quotes

Here’s this month’s collection of recently encountered quotes amusing and thoughtful. There’s a somewhat philosophical theme this month …
The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine.
[Penn Jillette]
Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance.  It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes.  A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.
[Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1865]
When you try to form an institution around such a loose set of non-beliefs [Zen Buddhism], and around that kind of idea of what spiritual authority means, you’re going to have some difficulties. How do you get all sorts of people on the same page about something when one of your core ideas is that no two people are ever on the same page about anything?
[Brad Warner at http://hardcorezen.info/more-buddhist-scandals/5464]
One should never immediately attribute bad intent to a person holding a position one disagrees with.
[Ben Shapiro]
Those who have no knowledge of what has gone before them must forever remain children.
[Cicero]
Brexit. The undefined being negotiated by the unprepared in order to get the unspecified for the uninformed.
[unknown]
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
[Ralph Waldo Emerson]
Beware of purity workers [who are] ready to accept and endorse any amount of coercive and degrading treatment of their fellow creatures in the fatuous belief that you can oblige human beings to be moral by force.
[Josephine Butler, 1828-1906]
Naturism brings confidence, positivity and better health for body and mind. After all, we are born this way. We are part of Nature.
Most people have some means of filling up the gap between perception and reality, and, after all, in those circumstances there are far worse things than gin.
[Terry Pratchett, The Thief of Time]
All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it’s pretty damn complicated in the first place.
[Douglas Adams]

words

Word: Cruft

Cruft
1. Trash, debris, or other unwanted matter that accumulates over time.
2. Unnecessary digital information that accumulates over time, such as unneeded files or obsolete lines of code in software.
The OED describes the word as “computing slang” originating in the late 1950s but with an unknown origin. However I’ve always known the word for the first of the two meanings – as in the detritus which accumulates on a fan grille or dust bunnies.

current affairs, environment, topographical

The Garden is Dead

Yes! Some common sense has prevailed. The London Garden Bridge project is being abandoned.


It was a nice idea, but in the wrong place and wrongly conceived as a commercial project which would feed off the public purse. How much better to use the concept and the funding to green London’s abandoned railways tracks and other such to increase London’s green space as the Mayor, Sadiq Khan, has pledged to do. That would make the money go a lot further, but then it’s not “willy waving” is it!
Let’s hope this is the first of many vanity projects to bite the dust – yes I’m looking at you Brexit, HS2, Heathrow Runway 3 …

amusements

Ten Things

Again this month we have something slightly different …
Ten Colours which are also Surnames:

  1. Black
  2. Brown
  3. Green
  4. Grey
  5. White
  6. Blue
  7. Pink
  8. Orange
  9. Lavender
  10. Scarlet