I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
[Galileo Galilei]
Abominable Menu – Additions
Café Zen is has added some further dishes to its much acclaimed Abominable Menu:
Quick Snack: Transylvanian Omelette
Starter: Wasp Risotto
Main Course: Grub in the Hole
Sweet: Toffee Rat on a Stick
Zen Mischievous Moments #133
Today’s Daily Telegraph reports on Clive James interviewing himself at the Edinburgh International Books Festival. The article includes:
Did we know, he asked, that by decree, no rank below Major could wear make-up in the Romanian army during the war – a gem first divulged to him, incidentally, by Anthony Powell.
Full article here.
[With thanks to Julian Allason]
Zen Mischievous Moments #132
From “Feedback” in New Scientist, 04 August 2007
Calendar chaos
[X] was, sitting at his computer, when the calendar window of his Microsoft Outlook office program started scrolling uncontrollably back through time. He watched, helpless, as it zoomed back through two world wars, past the Great Reform Act of 1832, the French revolution and American independence – stopping only in the 1760s when, he guesses, a frantic IT worker somewhere in the bowels of the famous London building he works in must have fixed the network glitch.
Naturally, [X] was intrigued to see how far back in time he could personally make Outlook’s calendar go. Trying to view even earlier dates, he got stuck at All Fool’s day 1601. Putting this into a famous web search engine revealed no special event in history that day. It did, however, provide a link to a “rather weird” website devoted to the work of a genealogist named John Mayer at www.arapacana.com/glossary/mb_mn.html. This notes that “Outlook provides a series of perpetual calendars covering something less than 2898 years, from 1 April 1603 to 29 August 4500,” but that users can manually scroll back to 1601.
Feedback’s further searches suggest that 1 April 1601 was declared the beginning of time by the authors of the COBOL computer-programming language …
Oh and for the geeks amongst you, Outlook 2003 will also let you schedule meetings during the missing days, 3-13 September 1752, when British Empire changed to the Gregorian Calendar.
One is left with just one question: Why?
Doctoring the Toilet
Spotted this notice in the toilet at my doctor’s surgery the other day. How to murder the language! Well it amused me!
Zen Mischievous Moments #131
Giraffe’s necks and Golden Gate Bridge
[It seems] an appropriate moment to introduce readers to the unusual unit converter discovered … at http://www.weirdconverter.com/. This enables you to convert from one unusual unit to another. Sadly, in the “weight” section “male polar bear” is listed, but there is no baby elephant, only a fully grown one. Even so, you may be interested to know that one African elephant equals 12.24790343434 polar bears. There is also a “length/height” section which reveals, for instance, that one Golden Gate Bridge equals 720 giraffe’s necks.
[New Scientist; 28/07/2007]
Recipe: Pasta with Antipasto
Today’s evening meal made up as I went along from a vague idea!
For 2 hungry persons or 4 with a small appetite you will need:
- enough Pasta (any variety, preferably fresh)
- 2x 200gm tubs of Antipasto and/or Roast Peppers in marinade (or equivalent; you can even do your own!)
- 1 medium onion, preferably red, thickly sliced
- enough garlic, thickly sliced
- 4 tomatoes, quartered
- 6 medium button mushrooms, thickly sliced
- 10-12 black olives
- a handful of pine nuts
- some basil leaves
- olive oil
- Parmesan cheese
- Put the pasta on to cook. When cooked, drain and keep warm.
- When the pasta is almost done, fry the onion and garlic in olive oil until translucent and just starting to caramelise.
- Add the tomatoes, stir for a minute or so then add the mushrooms and olives.
- Cook for 2-3 minutes, and add the tubs of antipasto with their marinade/oil . Cook for a further 2-3 minutes until everything is hot through.
- Add the basil leaves and pine nuts. Stir.
- Add the pasta and mix all together for a minute or two ensuring the pasta is well covered in the flavourful oil and vegetables.
- Serve with the Parmesan cheese and a robust red wine.
Yes, it was rib-sticking and yummy!
Excessive DUST?!
Absolutely brilliant — so much so it is stretching my credulity neurons.
As @j-sin syas: I’ve lived in the UK long enough to know that this is the only country where “leaves on the track” stop our trains but this seemed a new level of sillyness. Was the dust “high in fat or low in fat” I wonder?
Friendship
I’ve just come back from a couple of days in Somerset attending the funeral of one of my closest friends. Although old enough to be my father, Victor was 82 when he died a couple of weeks ago, we had been friends for almost 35 years since we met when we were both post-grad students: he doing an MA in Art History, me just starting on my doctorate in Chemical Spectroscopy. In the year we spent together at university we became close friends; so close that when Victor’s wife died a couple of years back I was asked to be the celebrant at her funeral, and this week I gave the funeral oration for Victor – which was well received.
How nice then to return to find the following quote (attributed to Muhammad Ali) in my email:
Friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain. It’s not something you learn in school. But if you haven’t learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven’t learned anything.
I’ll perhaps write more about Victor later; as I said in my eulogy, he was a great man.
Avatar
OK, the current meme wins; I’ll play the game!
I never thought about being in The Simpsons, but here I am …
