previously known as [cold][wet][durham], [dirty][grimy][london],[busy][shiny][toon],[frantic][crowded][south]
I’m currently staying with my ass, and thus has somewhat limited access to the interweb. In fact a the moment Im sitting in the back room of a very funky bar, who’s decor seems to be inspired by, well, opium dens at the turn of the century.Bon!
I’ll update next week when I’m back a la ‘rents.
1) Four petits filous (27p on offer)
2) Sierra Nevada Pale Ale (£1.20 on offer too!)
3) Seabrooke Salt crisps
4) Men Behaving Badly on telly
Could you get any better?
editted: Yes - it could get better - my girl says she misses me AND its the Men Behaving Badly where they go to a rave! Top That!
As a follow up to fetish knitwear it…fetish lego! You’ve not seen anything like this before.
wget - the command line utility for “GET”ing things via http is very very handy. Instead of right clicking of 40 links, you can writea quickie script to do it. You can test systems to see exactly what they throw back at you. Its just very handy for geeks.
Anyway - the latest version of Mac OS X doesn’t come with it. it has curl instead, which is fine, but I have lots of wget scripts. Step up to the mark Status-Q for provinding a version compiled for Mac. Bon.
Having achieved his aim of getting 5 million hits to his website, Richard and Katie will be having a threesom. If you’ve not heard of this deal have a look at Please Make This Work.com for all the details. There’s now some “double or quits” action going on too, so it’s definatly worth a visit.
Our planet is mostly, well, fucked, and unless we start to do something about it, we are totally utterly fucked. Hence my desire to remember where to find Do It Yourself Renewable Energy Projects.
Today I bought my first solar panel. It’s only dinky, but I shall try and get it sorted to charge a battery, which I shall then attempt o use for something.
Is anybody else amused by this medical amaze of a Vaginicola. How can you not be? Were you never 15?
On another note, it came from an amazing gallery of winning medical images which blew me away.
A little while ago I posted about peoples views on vegetarianism. I got some great feedback, with some very erudite, and well thought out answers, and nobody took the huff (which is always a danger with such subjects). Anyway, I’ve had enough time to mull over what I was trying to write (and I got half way through writing but put on the back burner), and so it’s time I posted this. Far more people (Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, Jamie Oliver, Rick Stein, The Food Programme on Radio4 to name but a few) have written on the subject far more logically and clearly than I, but I feel I should at least try.
I honestly believe that human beings have evolved to eat meat. Our teeth are arranged to allow an omnivore diet, with sharp tearing sharp ones at the front, and flat grinding ones at the back for grinding things (ideal for roughage and bone crunching!) and hour digestive tracks cope wonderfully with meat. However, I suspect we eat far too much meat. We have a caveman digestive system, and they would have eaten meat as and when it was caught, and before the we domesticated animals, this once mean glut and starvation. I would guestimate that today we eat on average ten times as much meat as our caveman relatives, if not more.
This does not mean we have to eat meat, and if people don’t want to that is their own choice, and should be allowed to do so, whatever their reasoning. There are numerous good arguments for vegetarianism, and some for veganism too, but I personally don’t want to.
However, there are many arguments that are used in favour of vegetarianism. Most people have absolutely no clue where their meat comes from. Not a clue. A huge amount of people have no idea which animals produce which cuts of meat, in fact I would imagine the majority of people can’t identify any cuts of meat. Farm yards do not generally not look like http://www.terhuneorchards.com/photo_animals.html which is a great shame. In fact if you eat chicken, especially if it’s of the “cheap packs” on polystyrene trays, it is far more likely that it they will have “grown up” in conditions like this poor buggers
So, if you’re going to eat meat, and I think you should give it a try, it is a privilege, and should be treated as such. With it comes the responsibility to eat with respect for the animal that has died so that you can enjoy it. One of the things that makes me extremely sad is that people are not willing to admit that it is an animal that is being eaten. An ex-housemate of mine didn’t like meat that “looked like something dead”. A wonderful roast duck once went into the bin before I could pick off the crunchy bits, let alone make stock, because it “looked like a dead duck”. Wake up. It was a dead duck, and you enjoyed eating it’s roasted breast, and crunchy legs, so at least make good use of all of it.
The American Indians had the right idea. They used very part of an animal which they killed, and preyed to it’s spirit to give thanks, because they recognised it had died. The same is true of pigs at the turn of the century, where every bit of a pig could be used but it’s squeak.
People seem to be only interested in sanitised meat. Little neat pink wobbly packages wrapped in clingfilm, sitting on an absorbent nappy to stop bleeding, on a polystyrene tray, in a row with a million other identical cuts. No fat, no gristle, no blood, no smell, no organs and a complete fucking waste.
There is a wonderful website which is basically a travel log of an Eastern European country. Leafpile Slaughter Pages shows hows your dinner goes from animal to lump of meat. The pig one is defiantly the most “raw”, but the most involved. Firstly the animal is killed. Hopefully this is relatively painless, but at the end of the day, it’s not going to be completely painless, because you are killing something. Then you either gut or skin the animal, in an order appropriate to its size. Generally you eviscerated first, keeping back heart, liver, kidneys and anything else you wish to eat or use. Most of this is ditched or thrown for dog food in this country. You then skin the animal, generally using a strong arm to separate the skin from the body, taking with it the fat layer. The pelt can then be used. Then you join the meat. This is another point where modern life seems to miss numerous cuts. Everybody has eaten steak, and roasts, but very few people now eat things like lamb of neck, or shin beef, and that’s leaving out the really “way out” bits like brain, pancreas ), and brawn.
Our food economy is driven by cheap meat. Cheap meat results from poor animal husbandary, and mass production methods. This leads to poor animal health and welfare, and is yet another reason to skip eating meat altogether. Don’t kid yourself that 12 chicken breast (6 chickens worth) can be ethically produced for £2.99 or even £6.99. If you are going to eat meat you should be expecting to pay a premium price for it. Hopefully you are paying a farmer enough to mean he doesn’t have to cut his welfare standards, rather than lining the pockets of supermarkets. The best way to do this is to cut out the middlemen. Butchers like Cranstons are working with local farmers to provide quality meat in a supermarket-like shopping environment.
So, if I’m going to to shout and scream about this (and I have another heap of points to make), I guess I’m going to have to change how I eat. I’m going to eat less meat. I’m going to only buy meat which is UK sourced (I have far more faith in our farming system which has been nicely refined by BSE and foot and mouth). I am only going to buy organic meat (this is no guarantee of quality, but at least it means the animal hasn’t been pumped full of chemicals to make it put weight on rapidly or fend off diseases). I will only buy meat which is free range (or carries the Red Tractor mark).
There will be numerous times when I miss these mark, and don’t do as I preach, but I shall do my best.
*locked, to those who know me, but not those being described*
I hate rude people. It doesn’t help that the rude people in question are a bit posh, and my ex housemates, and to be honest, I suspect they wouldn’t be friends but for the random act of us having rooms next door to each other in our first year at uni.
I’ll cut to the chase. I’m probably jumping the gun and reading far too much into this, but today I recieved an email as follows:
Ol, I'll sponsor you a fiver!!http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,,1823110,00.html Looking forward to seeing you all next Saturday (if not before). Si
Or paraphrased “you are a wanker! I’ll offer you a pettyful amount of cash to make this a joke, and I’ll cc’ in our mutual friends!”
I ended up quite worked up about it, which is stupid, because it might well be meant in good faith, however knowing the people involved, it feels like a cheap jibe, and it’s all a bit old. Wanker.
I’m half tempted to get involved, and hold him to the cash. At a fiver a pop over a 24 hour period I could blow half his wages I imagine, if I put my mind to it.
I have no idea if this little Overheard in New York gem is based on truth, but I’d love it to be.
..and I blame these nasty inbreed corporate wankshites Labour.
Right - the longer I live in this country, the more I find problems with it. I understand there are few places which are better (after all I could be living in China where I couldn’t write this, or Iran, where I might well have a hand cut off), however, the case of the Natwest 3 is bugging me.
Quick and dirty explanation: Three bankers concocted a way to make money. One flogged shares at less than market rate, another bought them at this stupidly cheap rate, and a third bought them back at market rate. They split the money. It’s a “normal” practice, though illegal. I’ve also over simplified this.
And the story so far: UK police decided they didn’t have enough evidence to charge these three sneaky gits, but the shares were in Enron (who were a massive bunch of thieving twats), and so now the Americans are involved, are they want these boy extradited to America to charge them there. They are being extradited under an agreement with the US, which, the US have not ratified. eg. if we wanted to pull three “innocent” (until proven guilty”) yanks from their homes, to bring them here, then we couldn’t.
There’s far more to it than that, but it’s late, and I’m tried, and thus not being very cogent. It’s a fucking farce all round. Poor fuckers, I’m going to try and organise coleman’s mustard and HP sauce to their cells in Houston.
Not even slightly. No. I wasn’t really amused by the Orgasm Calculator. Never. I’m far to mature.
I’m working on a little project for somebody to allow people to allow people to book their time out online. Hence I needed a quick and easy calendar in php. Step up Give Cascade Calendar. It’s open source too, so you can thrash the code to bits yourself if needed. If my code is handy, I’ll post it up for y’all to love.
Forget nuclear, forget wind power, even solar is old hat, because now you may fear… Cow Power!
Ok, as describes by Boris Johnson as “a wheeze“, it is now official, ‘I will form part of a human chain around the Westminster no protest zone’ as coordinated by PledgeBank.
It’s a silly fucking law, and it’s time people pointed it out.
Always.
Never hit “Sync” on your mobile phone, laptop, or anything else, especially where windows is onvolved somewhere in the chain, without having a good solid backup.
I forgot, are I’ve just removed 400+ contacts (about 5 years worth) of phone numbers, email addresses and other vital details.
Rats Cocks!
Learn form my mistake, oh and if you know me, text or email to say hi, and include your name. Many thanking yous.
When the phrase “My bush is really overgrown around the front and my back passage has fungus growing in it.” doesn’t make you laugh, you must have had your sense of humour removed and replaced with something dull. You need to read Genuine Council Complaints. I don’t care if they’re made up, they brightened my grey Sunday afternoon.
There’s something strangly wonderful about boats with sails. As well as their inherent environmental benfits, they are just so much more elegent, so it made my morning to read of Skysail, which uses giant kites to brack ships! Brilliant!
watching Johnathen Ross tonight it’s good to see Pete Doherty looking a bit better than the last time I wrote about him on here. Singing cogently, picking and plucking though Beg, steal or borrow, it’s good to hear him at work.
Browsing wikipedia I ran across this, the last photo of a Libertines gig with Pete involved The Libertines - 7th June 2004). Interestingly the photo is by Andrew Kendal, who’s blog (on Live Journal) is well worth keeping an eye on.
