memes, personal

Seven Haiku Words of Me

Now here’s a little challenge for you!

Some while ago I came across someone suggesting we should describe ourselves in seven words.

Hmmm … I wrote down a list of almost 30 without trying – and they were just the polite ones!

Then I thought it should be made more interesting (translate: difficult). Hence was born …

Describe yourself in exactly seven words,
written as a (correctly formulated) haiku.

Here are my first two efforts:

Spectacled obese
Deaf diabetic depressive
Grey geriatric. 		Deaf geriatric
Grey liberal scientist.
Devil’s advocate.

It isn’t easy. I tried to find some more last evening and got no further.

What can you do? Please share your haiku seven word descriptions in the comments.

quotes

Monthly Quotes

Here’s this month’s collection of quotes …

What a con these “so-called” cats are. They’re supposed to have been domesticated since 7500BC. In that time, we humans have come up with the wheel, medicine, aeroplanes, art, the internet and much more. Yet cats are still shitting in flowerbeds and bringing us half-chewed mice as gifts. You’d think that with the thick end of 10,000 years of living with us under their belts, they’d have learned to occasionally bring us a nice bottle of wine or even an Amazon voucher or something to show their appreciation.
[Private Eye?]

The air in a man’s lungs contains 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms, so that sooner or later every one of us breathes an atom that has been breathed before by anyone you can think of who has ever lived – Michelangelo or George Washington or Moses.
[Jacob Bronowski]

We need to reduce production of private jets, SUVs, commercial airlines, mansions, industrial beef, fast fashion, advertising, arms, cruise ships – there are huge chunks of our economy that are mostly organized around capital accumulation, and are wasteful and destructive and totally irrelevant to human well-being. We can also ban the practice of planned obsolescence and introduce policies to expand product lifespans. When products last twice as long, we will need half as many. Finally, we urgently need to cut the purchasing power of the rich, using basic sensible policy tools such as wealth taxes and maximum income ratios.
[Prof. Jason Hickel]

Keep in mind, the news media are not independent; they are a sort of bulletin board and public relations firm for the ruling class – the people who run things. Those who decide what news you will or will not hear are paid by, and tolerated purely at the whim of, those who hold economic power. If the parent corporation doesn’t want you to know something, it won’t be on the news. Period. Or, at the very least, it will be slanted to suit them, and then rarely followed up.
[George Carlin]

If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?
[Carl Sagan]

The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.
[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We ought not to ask why the human mind troubles to fathom the secrets of the universe. The diversity of the phenomena of nature is so great, and the treasures hidden in the skies so rich, precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment.
[Johannes Kepler]

There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
[Douglas Adams; The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy]

Quantum mechanics describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And yet it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as she is – absurd.
[Richard Feynman]

The physical act of passing through a doorway is the reason why you often walk into a room and completely forget what you were doing. Because going through a door signifies the beginning or end of something, this creates an “event boundary” within your mind. Basically, every time you go through a doorway, your brain starts filing away thoughts from your previous location to make room for a new group of memories in the next.
[unknown]

In the Ramtop Village they believe that no-one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock he wound up winds down – until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence.
[Terry Pratchett]

Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise.
[George Whitman]

A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and, in order to divert himself, having no love in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest forms of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal. And it all comes from lying – lying to others and to yourself.
[Fyodor Dostoevsky]

It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere.
[Voltaire]

Every child needs to learn how to cook, learn how to cultivate a garden, plant seeds, learn about sustainability, be taken to a garden and be able to put their hands in the earth.
[Alice Waters]

Baths, wine, and sex ruin our bodies. But what makes life worth living except baths, wine, and sex?
[Ancient Roman saying]

food+drink

Culinary Adventures #100: Summer Pudding

This Summer Pudding is definitely worthy of being post number 100.

As usual I hacked up someone else’s recipe as I went along; in this case a recipe by Sophie Grigson for the BBC at https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/summerpudding_90295.

Sorry no picture because we ate it! But it was just as good, and just a yummy as the one in Sophie Grigson’s recipe (below). Indeed it came out far better than I had expected.

Ingredients

  • 400g punnet Strawberries
  • 225g punnet Raspberries
  • 200g punnet Blackberries
  • 150g punnet Blueberries
  • 160g Granulated Sugar
  • ½ wine glass very sticky blackberry liqueur
  • Loaf White Bread
  • Sunflower oil or Butter for greasing

What to do …

  1. Wash the fruit. Hull the strawberries and halve any large ones
  2. Put all the fruit in a pan with the sugar and liqueur.
  3. Simmer very gently for about 5 minutes to get the juices running, then turn up the heat and cook for another 2 minutes. Take off the heat and allow to cool a bit.
  4. Meanwhile, grease a large pudding basin.
  5. Cut the bread into 1cm slices and remove the crusts.
  6. Cut a piece of bread to fit the bottom of the basin. Then cut pieces (rectangles, triangles) to fit the sides of the basin without any gaps. Remember to cut a piece to make the lid.
  7. Carefully strain the juice from the fruit; be careful not to mash the fruit.
  8. Starting at the bottom, dip one side of each piece of bread in the fruit juice and put in the basin, juice side out. Continue until you’ve done all the pieces of bread. If there are now gaps (the bread may shrink slightly) fill them with more slivers of juiced bread.
  9. Now tip the fruit into the basin.
  10. Dip the lid in the juice, and pour the remaining juice in with the fruit.
  11. Put on the lid.
  12. On top of the lid place a plate or saucer which fits closely, and weight it down with 1-2kg weights (or use tins of soup, beans, etc.).
  13. Leave to fully cool, then put in the fridge overnight.
  14. The next day, remove the weights and the plate/saucer. Run a thin blade around the edges, then invert the basin onto a shallow serving plate.
  15. Cut into thick slices and serve with double cream.

Notes

  • You can use any summer fruit. Blackcurrants are especially good and in my view preferable to blueberries; redcurrants and white currants work well. You could also use sliced peaches, nectarines or apricots.
  • So you don’t have blackberry liqueur? Use Cassis, which is more traditional anyway.
  • Don’t worry if the fruit doesn’t come to the top of the bread case – as mine didn’t because I used too large a bowl. Just turn the sides over and cut the lid down to fit the remaining space.
amusements, topographical

June Quiz Answers

Here are the answers to this month’s five quiz questions. If in doubt, all should be able to be easily verified online.

June Quiz Questions: World Geography

  1. Until 1930, what was the Turkish city of Istanbul called? Constantinople
  2. What country has the most islands in the world? Sweden, with 267,570.
  3. What is the largest desert in the world? Antarctica
  4. What country is located between France and Spain? Andorra
  5. What is the smallest country in the world by area? Vatican City at 0.49 sq km

Answers were correct when questions were compiled in late 2022.

photography, pleasures, ramblings

Roses (2)

Having written a couple of days ago about our roses, they were the ones in the back garden. What I omitted was the wow display in the front.

Like the back, our front garden is allowed a certain degree of licence. Amongst the understorey there are some Apothecary’s Rose. Officially it is Rosa gallica officinalis. It’s a very old rose – Peter Beales says it dates to before 1200 – with large, semi-double, fuchsia-coloured flowers and a pure Old Rose scent; very free-flowering, creating a mass of colour. It mostly just grows as a mass of single stems, which creep and sucker their way around.

Apothecary’s Rose (Rosa gallica officinalis) from our garden

We were given a couple of off-shoots many, many years ago, and it is now rampant around the front garden. It is currently a mass of saucer-sized, shocking fuchsia-pink blooms. Sadly it has only a short season and will pretty much be over by the end of the month, but it is stunning for a few weeks.

memes, science

Ten Things: June

This year our Ten Things column each month is concentrating on science and scientists.

Where a group is described as “great” or “important” this is not intended to imply these necessarily the greatest or most important, but only that they are up there amongst the top flight.

Important Chemistry Discoveries

  1. DNA
  2. X-ray Crystallography
  3. Oxygen
  4. Plastics
  5. Glass
  6. Vulcanisation of rubber
  7. Distillation
  8. Graphene
  9. Periodic Table
  10. Chemical Bonding
photography, pleasures, ramblings

Roses

Where there’s an image, you can click it for a bigger view.

I walked round the garden this afternoon and it is absolutely awash with roses. I’ve never seen such a profuse display.

Our Lady Hillingdon, once it took off 20 years ago, is always prolific and provides flush after flush of apricot coloured roses from May until Christmas &ndash’ There are usually a couple of blooms out in Christmas Day.

The Buff Beauty did nothing for many years until we moved it under the birch tree, since when it’s gone berserk. It’s now 3-4 metres up the tree and hanging over providing swags of pale creamy yellow flowers.

One swag of Buff Beauty; about 1.5-2m long
A trio of Buff Beauty

There are dog rose suckers growing from the Buff Beauty too. They’re smothered in flowers – small, single pale pink roses – right to the top of the birch tree (higher than the house) and as much sideways. There are great weeping branches of it over our neighbour’s garden!

Dog Rose

The old roses down near the pond are also going well rambling up the trees. One is the pink Anne Boleyn; another slow starter.

Anne Boleyn

And the two climbers rambling up the supports where the apple tree was taken out are also doing well after a couple of poor years. Lots of pink-blushed white roses. One is Albrighton Rambler (see Unblogged May); although this is a newly developed rose it is of the old Bourbon style but sadly not very scented.

Albrighton Rambler
Albrighton Rambler, which fades to off-white very quickly in the warmth

There’s a standard rose down by the pond which is a hoot. For a standard it is vigorous with branches extending a good 2-3m (because we let it when it went native, rather than bother trying to prune it). It is clearly grafted at standard height (so about 1.5m) but the graft has thrown off at least two different colours of tightly double roses – some a dark purply-pink, others almost white. Heaven knows what’s been done to it, but it’s very “Alice in Wonderland”.

There are a few other roses yet to come. The small Maiden’s Blush is now out and it’s being nurtured from being neglected in a pot for some years; if the other roses are anything to go by it’ll take off in a couple of years. And there’s a pink rose also down under the birch tree which is usually also prolific. That was sold as a patio rose (so miniature) but is another that has grown naturally into a 1.5m round bush. Once it starts it usually just flowers non-stop through to the autumn – although it had an off year last year, maybe as it got cut back too hard away from the path.

If you walk down past the birch tree to the pond, especially on a nice sunny day like today, the garden is just a heady haze of rose scent, and a visual haze of roses. I have never seen them so abundant.

Moral. If you want great displays of roses, leave them alone. Don’t prune them into silly little bushes, but let them climb and ramble – after all that’s what roses do naturally.