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.
quotes

Quotes : On People

The problem with me is, I guess, the way I express myself, you have to be with me 50 years before you can get a sense of what I`m talking about.
[Al Pacino]

There’s no point in constantly worrying about everything. What will happen will happen anyways. So breathe, look on the bright side, have some laughs, fall in love, accept what you can’t change, and carry on. To actually live is courageous. Most people exist, that is all.
[unknown]

Some people are old at 18 and some are young at 90 … time is a concept that humans created.
[Yoko Ono]

Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out.
[John Wooden, basketball coach]

Each person has inside a basic decency and goodness. If he listens to it and acts on it, he is giving a great deal of what it is the world needs most. It is not complicated but it takes courage. It takes courage for a person to listen to his own goodness and act on it.
[Pablo Casals]

More people have poor taste than good taste. They come to their opinions quickly and without any thought, like a small child. That’s why there’s fast food. And moronic reality television shows. And people who follow Paris Hilton. More people will enjoy crack than Proust’s novels. Ergo, just because something is popular doesn’t mean it’s inherently good or worthwhile. Too many people just love bad shit because they don’t know any better.
[HyperSexual Girl at Love & Lust]

history, links, science

In Case You Missed …

Another in our occasional series of links to interesting items you may have missed. First several scientific items.

Why is there a universe? Where did it appear from? Sean Carroll investigates.

Singing Mice? Yes they really do sing! And no-one knew until recently.

Next, an interesting summary of the history of the last 200 years in surgery. Just be thankful you live now and not then!

And after all that heavy stuff here are some great examples of the humour of taxonomists. Never let it be sad that scientists are terminally dull.

And finally for the scientific, here’s a report of a rather pretty and extremely rare strawberry blonde leopard (above) spotted in the wild.

Back to the heavy stuff for a minute, here’s an important examination of the interaction of gender and world politics. Seems those countries which are worst on gender equality are also the least stable.

Finally something completely different. Scholars are suggesting that a previously unexamined Elizabethan map of America provides clue to a lost colony.

food+drink

Rustic Fruit Tart

Something else I cooked this weekend was what I’ve called Rustic Fruit Tart. This was mainly because I’d had some blueberries in the fridge for some days and thought they should be cooked. It’s rustic because it used mostly what I already had to hand and it isn’t designed to look fancy, just taste good. I used rhubarb and blueberries; you could do it with any other combination of fruits you like.

For two 8″ (20cm) tarts this is what I did …

1 packet of commercial pasty (or enough homemade pastry for two 8″/20cm flan tins)
800g fresh Rhubarb
350g fresh Blueberries
2 tbsp Sugar
half wine glass of Fruit Juice

1. Pre-heat the oven to 200C (gas mark 6); use the fan if you have one.
2. Wash and chop the rhubarb and put in a pan with the fruit juce and sugar. You want the end product to be fairly sticky so don’t add too much fruit juice.
3. Cook, with a lid on and stirring occasionally, until well cooked and the rhubarb pieces have broken down.
4. Meanwhile roll out the pastry and line the two flan tins. Prick the base of the pasty cases with a fork so they don’t bubble too much; use baking beads if you have them. Keep any pastry offcuts.
5. Blind bake the pasty cases for 15-20 minutes.
6. Remove from the oven and fill each case with the cooked rhubarb.
7. Scatter plenty of blueberries on top of the rhubarb.
8. Decorate — as badly as you like, after all this us “rustic” tart — the top of the flans using the pastry offcuts and glaze (I used milk and sugar).
9. Now bake for another 15-20 minutes until the pastry decoration is golden and the filling bubbling.
10. Remove from the oven and eat hot or allow to cool in the tins before turning out.
11. Dust with icing sugar (if such is your desire) and devour with clotted cream.

Notes
1. You can use either puff or shortcrust pastry. I used puff which didn’t work well as it puffed too much when blind baked. I’m also lazy and use commercial pastry — well I’m allowed some shortcuts!
2. Individual tartlets would work too, using exactly the same method.
3. I put a piece of baking parchment in the base of each flan tin to ensure the case didn’t stick too badly.

food+drink

Pork Fillet with Pesto

I can’t believe that I haven’t posted a recipe for … ages and ages. So to make up here are two in one.

This evening I’ve cooked some extremely scrummy Pork Fillet with Pesto. You could use commercially prepared pesto, but I made my own. It’s dead easy, takes minutes to prepare and it tastes wonderful. It is real restaurant/dinner party food! Here’s what you do …

For the Pesto
This makes enough pesto for at least two pork fillets. It can be made a day or two in advance; just store it in the fridge. And of course you could use for anything else where you want pesto.

100g Pinenuts
A bunch of fresh Basil (I used the end of a pot of Basil, including the stems)
A small bunch of fresh Coriander (optional)
A couple of good squirts of Garlic Purée (maybe 2 tbsp)
A glug of good Olive Oil (not too much)
Black Pepper to taste

Put all the ingredients in the food processor. Don’t add too much olive oil; you want the pesto to be fairly stiff, not slishy; you can add more oil if it ends up too stiff. Whizz everything together until you’ve got a chunky paste.

For the Pork
You can prepare the pork fillet a few hours in advance (even the night before, if fridged) as it will improve for marinading in the pesto.

You’ll want one whole Pork Fillet for every two people.

1. Preheat the oven to 200C (gas mark 6); use the fan if you have one.
2. Cut the pork fillet lengthways but not all the way through and open it out. Do this again down each half and fold the edges out again.
3. Put the fillet on a piece of clingfilm on a flat surface and cover with another piece of clingfilm. Now beat the pork out flatter with a steak hammer or rolling pin. You’re aiming to roughly double the width of the pork which should end up no more than 5mm thick.
4. Remove the top layer of clingfilm and cover the pork in a good layer of pesto.
5. Roll the pork along the long edge like a Swiss roll; you may need to tie it with string 2 or 3 times to stop it falling apart.
6. Place the pork roll on an oiled baking sheet.
7. Any pesto left over, or any which oozed out the ends, can be used to coat the outside of the pork.
8. Cover with foil and roast in the middle of the oven for about 30 minutes. Check the pork is done by stabbing with a knife to see if the juices are clear. You can remove the foil for the last 5 minutes to brown.
9. Allow to stand for 5 minutes before serving in slices with potatoes and veg of your choice.

Notes
1. Red pesto should work as well as the more traditional green.
2. If you want to add something extra put a layer of prosciutto on the pork before adding the pesto; or wrap the rolled pork in bacon.
3. If you want to trim the untidy ends from the pork fillet then do so. They can also be beaten out and placed inside the main piece before rolling.
4. The oil in the pesto makes this slightly oily although most of the oil will drain out; the rest keeps the meat nice and succulent.
5. Do not under cook pork; however also take care not to overcook as it can get tough and dry.
6. I served mine with steamed new potatoes and steamed asparagus.

Finally many thanks to Lily on the butchery counter of our local Waitrose for the idea, which I adapted slightly.

personal

Reasons to be Grateful: 25

Experiment, week 25. Continuing the experiment here are this week’s five things which have made me happy or for which I’m grateful.

  1. Sunshine. Yes, for the umpteenth week running the weather has been so dismal I’ve really appreciated what little sunshine we have had.
  2. Animals Inside Out. On Wednesday we went to see Gunther von Hagens’s Animals Inside Out exhibition at the Natural History Museum, which I blogged earlier. Despite my disappointments I did enjoy the exhibits and the incredible skill that goes into the plastination process.
  3. Prawns & Pasta. Again this week I cooked pasta with prawns for evening meal. I like cooking it, and I like eating it!
  4. Not having the Alarm on. I love being able to sleep until I wake up naturally, which is usually rather later than the time the alarm would go off.

  5. Scheurich Glass. I’ve been searching for suitable cachepots for my orchids. They really should be clear-ish glass as orchid roots like light. But I came across these rather lovely German glass pots. They come in a variety of colours: red (which is gorgeous), green, purple and white/clear. Amazon.co.uk sell them at a sensible price, although they don’t always have them in stock.
books

Literary Styling

There’s an interesting short article in New Scientist of 5 May 2012 by Sara Reardon. It seems mathematicians have worked out why/how authors have distinctively different styles. Apparently it’s all down to all the small, meaningless words they use. The article is behind a paywall but I hope I might be excused for reproducing it here for the benefit of my friends in the literary community.

Writing style relies on words with no meaning

Few novelists today would have a character say, “It is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” That is not only because few modern characters ponder death by guillotine, but also because writing styles have changed dramatically since Charles Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities in 1859. So how does literary style evolve? Surprisingly, clues lie in words with seemingly little meaning, such as “to” and “that”.

By analysing how writers use such “content-free” words, mathematician Daniel Rockmore and colleagues at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, were able to conduct the first, large-scale “stylometric” analysis of literature (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.l073/pnas.lll5407109).

Content-free words are indicative of writing style, Rockmore says. While two authors might use the same words to describe a similar event, they will use content-free “syntactic glue” to link their words in a different way.

Using the Project Gutenberg digital library, Rockmore’s team analysed 7733 English language works written since 1550, tracking how often and in what context content-free words appeared. As you might expect, they found that writers were strongly influenced by their predecessors.

They also found that as the canon of literature grew, the reach of older works shrank. Authors in the earliest periods wrote in a very similar way to one another, the researchers found, probably because they all read the same small body of literature. But approaching the modern era, when more people were writing and more works were available from many eras and numerous styles, authors’ styles were still very similar to those of their immediate contemporaries. “It’s as if they find dialects in time,” says Alex Bentley of the University of Bristol, UK, who was not involved in the study. “Content is what makes us distinctive, but content-free words put us in different groups.”

That writers should be most influenced by their contemporaries rather than the great works of the past is interesting, Rockmore says, because it challenges the reach of “classic” literature. When it comes to style at least, perhaps we aren’t so strongly influenced by the classics after all.

words

Word : Chitty

Chitty (noun)

A letter or note. A certificate given to a servant or the like. A pass.

Hence the short form chit.

Anglo-Indian from the Hindī chiṭṭhī.

quotes

Quote : Marriage

Marriage teaches you loyalty, forbearance, self-restraint, meekness, and a great many other things you wouldn’t need if you had stayed single.

[Source unknown]

photography, pleasures

Something Colourful for Another Grey Spring Day

Three Orchids

These are my three orchids (all commercial Phalaenopsis hybrids) which I wanted to get as a group. This was best done after they’d been watered (a weekly soak) so they’re in the shower. The lighting is a mix of natural (grey, evening) daylight and the bathroom “white” fluorescent. Not the best of pictures, but at least something more cheerful than the greyness outside.

photography

Buggered Britain 7

Another in my occasional series documenting some of the underbelly of Britain. Britain which we wouldn’t like visitors to see and which we wish wasn’t there. The trash, abused, decaying, destitute and otherwise buggered parts of our environment. Those parts which symbolise the current economic malaise; parts which, were the country flourishing, wouldn’t be there, would be better cared for, or made less inconvenient.

Buggered Britain 7

These two closed and uncared for shops are at Greenford Broadway, although in fairness the pet shop has moved to better placed premises 100 yards round the corner.