food+drink

Bacon & Cabbage

Another easy, quick and cheap meal this evening: bacon and cabbage. I know this is an Irish speciality, but as always I did it my way. It is good hearty peasant food, and none the worse for that! I give you the recipe in case you want to try it!

Bacon and Cabbage Leftover Somehow

You will need (adjust the quantities to suit):
Enough bacon. I used part of a large pack of bacon offcuts (hence cheap) but you can use any bacon you like.
Leftover potatoes
Leftover cabbage, or any other green veg
Spare soft tomatoes
An onion
Some cloves of garlic
Olive oil and black pepper

Do this:
Shred the cabbage, if it isn’t already.
Cut the potatoes, tomatoes and bacon into bite-sized pieces.
Finely slice the onion and the garlic.
Fry the onion, garlic and potatoes in a drizzle of olive oil for a few minutes, until the onion is going translucent.
Add the bacon and continue cooking until it is starting to cook (longer if you like it well done).
Add the tomatoes, put a lid on and get everything up to temperature; cook for a few minutes.
Now add the cabbage and a good grind of black pepper, bring it back to temperature with the lid on but stirring occasionally. Continue cooking for a few minutes until the bacon is cooked through and the whole has melded together and is good and hot.
Serve and eat greedily, washed down with a beer.

If you’re short on potatoes you can serve it with good bread.
And if you’re short on bacon you can always top each plateful with a fried or poached egg.

ramblings, words

Will Save Lives

I’m getting really totally fed up with the rubric that

Doing A will save X lives

Just this morning the Daily Telegraph has given us

Minimum alcohol pricing would save lives, says Tory MP

FFS, once and for all … NO IT WILL NOT!


Let’s get this one straight — for better or worse, none of us is immortal, hence lives cannot be saved.

What you mean is: Doing A may postpone X deaths. Which is rather different, innit.

photography

Weekly Photograph

This is a miniature Phaelenopsis orchid of my mother’s which I’ve been looking after and which has come back into flower in the last week. Seen here enjoying the sunshine on our study windowsill next to the scented geranium cuttings being rooted for this summer’s patio planting etc. The orchid was returned to my mother when we went to see her yesterday; we also took a collection of catkins for her to paint.

Mini Orchid
Mini Orchid
4 March 2013

words

Word: Fud

Fud.

For a small, emphatic word it is surprising that this is one which appears to have little if any use. That’s possibly because it is largely Scots and northern dialect. So what does it mean?

  1. The backside or buttocks.
  2. The tail or scut of a hare, rabbit, etc.
  3. Woollen waste for mixing with mungo and shoddy. [Although the OED isn’t certain about this]
  4. The pubic hair (especially of a woman) and hence the female genitals. [Now scatological]

The last of these meanings is the earliest quoted by the OED in the 1771 poem The Hen-peckt Carter by James Wilson Claudero

Each hair of her fud is the length of a span,
What fud can compare with the fud of Joan?

Yes it is surprisingly little used given its scatological possibilities.

[Found in Mark Forsyth, The Horologicon]

links

You Might also have Missed …

Our regular round-up of link to stories you may have missed, and will probably be glad you had. 🙂

Now just what are they doing beneath the streets of London? Oh, yes, doing a marathon dig to create the tunnels for Crossrail. Here are some mind-boggling photographs.


Worried recently about getting hit by a meteor? You’re not the only one, ‘cos the little green men need to start worrying too. Apparently next year Mars may take a hit from a comet, or more likely its tail.

In other astronomical news, here’s a piece on how other objects dance around Earth in our orbit round the sun.

Closer to home, apparently British couples argue twice a week about the mess they live in.

Well who would have guessed? Dieting makes you feel guilty not thinner.

And while we’re all feeling aggrieved, here’s a rant about the lack of) science behind the idea of trying to determine someone’s ancestral origins from a simple DNA test, as many direct-to-consumer ancestry companies do.

And here’s one for the thinkers out there. Physicist Sean Carroll considers the relationship between science and morality, with diversions into what science and philosophy actually are and how they aren’t mutually exclusive.

After which we probably need to settle into bed with a good erotic story — if we can find one. Rowan Pelling, former editrice of the Erotic Review, reckons really good sex scenes are hard to find.

Never mind, here’s a story about a visit to Iceland’s infamous Penis Museum. It doesn’t sound all that entertaining really.

Continuing one of our recurrent themes, here’s one girl’s thoughts about whether to shave her pubic garden or not.

Finally we bring you an interactive map of (some of) the vaguely rude place-names of the world.

books, science

Book Review

Dr Geoffrey Garrett and Andrew Nott
Cause of Death: Memoirs of a Home Office Pathologist

For over 30 years Geoffrey Garrett was the senior Home Office pathologist for NW England. This means he got all the juicy jobs, like working out how some notorious murders (like one of the Moors Murders) were committed and the actual cause of death.

Most of it would have hardly been routine, even for an experienced pathologist, but you would never think so from reading this book. Garrett makes the job sound absolutely mundane and boring most of the time. And that’s a reflection on the book, because clearly the job wasn’t at all routine on the ground and Garret says this in a few places.

But I found the book dull. So dull I almost gave up reading it. The style is to me very flat and lifeless — like the corpses Garrett is so often examining. Not that we get much detail of those examinations, beyond a few bare medical facts: so many wounds, such and such internal damage, a few broken ribs and skulls. And a lot of it obfuscated in medical terminology which is hardly ever explained.

Indeed the book is so bland it is not at all gruesome. Surely it should be gruesome? OK we don’t need great detail of the basic autopsy method every time (Garrett covers that once in the introduction, though even that is a bit sketchy) but we would benefit from more on the methods specific to the cases. For instance, what is the test done on blood to determine the level of carbon monoxide present; and how is it done? We’re never told. As a scientist, I wanted to know.

Yes, I wanted a lot more. More on the tests which are done, but also more on the forensic investigative process; more interesting puzzles to solve and how they were solved. I had expected this and that I didn’t get it left me feeling somewhat short-changed.

This should have been an interesting book, illuminating a world which, thankfully, most of us are never involved with. But sadly for me it failed.

Overall rating: ★★☆☆☆

books

World Book Day

Today is apparently World Book Day — but only in the UK and Ireland.

I have just two observations:

  1. If it is only in the UK and Ireland it isn’t WORLD Book Day is it!
    Apparently the rest of the world celebrates World Book Day on 23 April — which is Shakespeare’s birthday, and hence a much more appropriate day. But of course we can’t do that because (a) it might clash with Easter holidays when children (at whom this is largely aimed) aren’t in school and (b) it is St George’s Day (which never mattered to the English before).
  2. And anyway, who knew? I’m a book-o-phile, and I didn’t know. Which shows just how well publicised it has been.

Come on guys: must do better! Let’s get this together. It’s especially important that we engage kids in reading — reading anything will do! So let’s get together with the rest of the world, celebrate a single day and get the publicity working.

nudism, personal

Five Questions, Series 3, #5

OK, guys & gals, we’ve come to the last of the Five Questions I posed some weeks ago. So here goes …


Question 5. If you could get everyone who reads this to do one thing, just once, what would you get them to do?

Now this probably isn’t going to come as a surprise to many of you but I think my answer would have to be:

To go completely nude in public, or just in their garden, for 1 hour during the hours of daylight with their friends and/or family.

Those who read here regularly will how I believe that we would all be better adjusted mentally, and healthier, if we were all more comfortable with our bodies, nudity, sex and sexuality. We would be more comfortable discussing “intimate” matters with our doctors so we wouldn’t delay seeking help for supposedly embarrassing ailments. We need to normalise nudity and sexuality, not marginalise and criminalise them.

To go nude, with friends and family is the start of this process. I was brought up in a family where nudity was nothing to be remarked about, and indeed quite normal. Consequently I have no fear of being nude, of seeing other others nude, nor of discussing anything “embarrassing” with my doctor. There’s nothing to be ashamed of, or embarrassed about — at the end of the day we all know, give or take the odd scar and mole, what’s underneath those jeans and t-shirt. So where’s the problem?

And no, being the wrong size or shape isn’t an excuse! We’re all the wrong size and shape, because there is no right size and shape! We’re all different. Some are tall, some short; some fat, some thin; some have darker skin than others; some have larger or smaller accoutrements than others. It’s all normal. And the variety is all part of the spice of life. No men, you don’t end up getting an erection (and frankly so what if you do, it’s natural); girls don’t end up looking at every bloke’s dangly bits; and men don’t spend their whole time ogling girls’ chests (or lower). No-one gives stuff whether you shaved there or not. And no, it doesn’t pervert children; they’re actually remarkable unfazed by it all and there’s actually evidence they end up better adjusted. So you end up behaving like civilised beings! Try asking the Swedes, where anything other than a totally nude, mixed sauna is seen as rather odd.

Indeed if we could get people to experience social nudity, then I bet that a good proportion of them would actually enjoy it and find it liberating. They may well end up wondering what all the fuss was about.

In my view social nudity is a basic human right, and I think all public swimming pools etc. should have to provide a few hours of clothes optional sessions every week. I bet it would soon catch on (and no, not for those reasons).

Try it, you might like it!

— oo OO oo —
OK, that concludes Five Questions, Series 3. I’ll do another series in a while.

Meantime, do please suggest suitable questions for consideration.