El Sistema

A lovely little 15 minutes reading from the Beeb (Radio 4) this evening.

Melody Grove reads 'Peanut Butter and Cello' by Geraldine McCaughrean.
Produced by Eilidh McCreadie.
Read all abaat it here.

A young girl from the favela carries an unexpected burden on a cross-city journey.

Sadly, it's not on the iPlayer but that would only give you a week or so. By then I'm sure the Coalition Forces will have taken over Bush House. There will be grey uniformed militia under the direction of Gauleiter Pickles stamping their jackboots down on the iPlayer. For you Tommy the music has stopped. Now find a place to sit down; but not in inner London! (Didn't we have a run in with Lady Tesco about that before?)

A rare time to contrast El Sistema, which I'm sure some of the braying donkeys on the government benches from Wednesday would laugh at, to the wasteland that will be the cultural legacy of those two idiots McCameroon and the Cleggster.

Hate Filled Pinkos

So then that's it. The Coalition Forces have been subjected to the IEDs of the Institute of Fiscal Studies. The BBC reports the treachery

The respected IFS think-tank says poorer families with children would be the "biggest losers".

I believe I heard the word regressive connected to the word taxation, anarchy!

Soup Kitchen

Oh dear, I fell for the oldest trick in the book, there is no fool like an old fool.
By their maths ye shall know them.
Having avoided the snares of chain letters, email scams and the like I fell for the idea of sending a recipe to the person at the top of a list and putting my email address at the bottom of the list. I liked the idea of getting a few recipes. I was asked to send it to 20 friends. They in their turn would send it to 20 friends, etc. I should have done the math. It was late and I had had the odd glass of tempranillo!
So the list below shows that at the 5th level we have more than included all those living in the UK!
Total Friends
Me 20 (I know, don't laugh!)
1st 400
2nd 8000
3rd 160000
4th 3200000
5th 64000000

For my sins I would be willing to post good, nourishing soup recipes on this site and any that
come from the email returns.

Send to buddhistpizza at gmail dot com
I'll tag all the posts I use with Soup Kitchen and give you an attribution if you want one!
It's going to be a cold winter in more ways than one.

Gideon

It is a while since I raised the bible in anger other than to track down the odd solution to a crossword clue. Even then it is more likely to be mediated by Wikipedia. When you are as clumsy as I am the heft of the 'good book' is as likely to fracture a toe as lead to the light! Imagine my horror when idly googling and wiking Gideon. There it was, Gideon, the destroyer, the feller of trees.

Very unsure of both himself and God's command, he requested proof of God's will by two miracles, performed on consecutive nights and the exact opposite of each other:

Amen, comrades, amen! So think on. This afternoon, if you are in the squeezed middle or just plain dirt poor, the destroyer, the tree feller is coming to get you, your job, your house, your pension if you have one, your hospital, your benefits and probably your first born.

Doom, I telt ye, doom!

Soup Kitchens.

It is that time of year and that point in the political cycle when our thoughts turn to the stock pot. Stock jobbers, hedge funders, merchant bankers, off shore tax dodgers and any members of the Bullingdon Club who have fallen on hard times might like to warm the cockles of their trust funds with the following soup.

The recipe is my take on the
Special Lentil Soup p25 of
The Happy Herbivore
By Jamie Lass
Published by Conongate Edinburgh 1979
ISBN 0 903937 89 0

An interesting aside, one among many, in this age of debate about books and publishing:-
All 129 pages and covers were produced by Jamie from hand written masters and illustrated with a Parker ball point pen.

Serves 5, allegedly, or 3 at a pinch.

1. Cook 225 grams red lentils in 1ltr good stock; add ginger and cayenne to your taste.
2. Half cook 2 chopped onions with oregano and a bay leaf in oil; add 4 cloves of Garlic peeled, squashed and chopped.
3. When the onions are soft chop 225 grams mushrooms thickly and fry off with the onions. Turn them until they have colour, about 2 mins. If you overcook they will dry or go rubbery in the soup!
4. Season the lentils to taste and combine with the onions, garlic and mushrooms; this needs to simmer further for a minimum of 15 mins. The longer the better.
5. Before serving add a good slug of lemon juice and sherry!

So many people have asked me for the recipe!

And the wine to go with it Sir?
The odd bottle of 1990 Château Pétrus, allegedly laid on for David Cameron and friends by the Tory party treasurer, Michael Spencer, at their party conference in Birmingham. It should go well!

34,000 sovs a case since you ask!

What's that smell?

I don't know if you have ever been near enough but occasionally you catch a whiff off a politico.
In my mind Major will be forever linked to the aroma of curry, Peter Mandelbrot the rictus inducing bouquet of Arsenic and Old Mace and Tony the decay of stinkwort (Datura stramonium). The unholy quartet of Dave, Gideon, Nick and Vince will, in my memory, have the odor of sanctimonious dead skunk. You don't have skunk in this country - as Mr Wainwright III said on one famous occasion- think of a politician you don't like.

Enjoy!

After 20 October the blood and guts are going to make you swoon!

Cuts, what cuts?

We just sat down to our last Sunday lunch before the, so called, cuts.
Possibly the best Sunday lunch I've ever had. Not a cheese sarnie, no a cheese roll, wholemeal.
It had tomato, pickle and lettuce. I thought I had died and St Vincent de Cable had taken me to heaven.

As I savoured my glass of cheap (2 bottles for £7.50) white wine I thought on the hard times to come.

As I may have mentioned before, you aint seen nothing yet.

Hard Times

We need to be more nosey

Interesting post on the long nose of innovation by Bill Buxton in Business Week.
The idea of the long nose or snout has occurred to my good self (and others) before.

The heart of the innovation process has to do with prospecting, mining, refining, and goldsmithing. Knowing how and where to look and recognizing gold when you find it is just the start. The path from staking a claim to piling up gold bars is a long and arduous one. It is one few are equipped to follow, especially if they actually believe they have struck it rich when the claim is staked. Yet the true value is not realized until after the skilled goldsmith has crafted those bars into something worth much more than its weight in gold. In the meantime, our collective glorification of and fascination with so-called invention—coupled with a lack of focus on the processes of prospecting, mining, refining, and adding value to ideas—says to me that the message is simply not having an effect on how we approach things in our academies, governments, or businesses.

To cut a long nose short. His contention is that, even in the fast changing world of computers where it is almost impossible to keep up, the span from light bulb moment to the quotidian can be a nose spanning tens of years. So the major whizbangs passing into common as muck/cheap as chips category in the next ten years will be based on technology that is ten years old?

I've always thought that the driver for innovation was the transfer of technology on the hoof.
Maybe it also requires a certain amount of crying in the wilderness, about 20 years!

Hamming it up

I am fond of the pig. If a man, or woman for that matter, can live on potatoes alone then how much more pleasant and nourishing to prosper with the addition of cabbage and bacon.

Our travels in Spain resulted in frequent stops in places of refreshment where the legs of your porkers hung in the tobacco smoke with inverted paper umbrellas below them to catch any precipitation. We also spent a happy week in cork oak country and indeed watched the sweet little beasts rootling for the acorns. Your Spaniard does like his or her pig; every bit of it! This love affair has not gone unnoticed.

In Galicia they eat everything.

In Andalucia, in Jabugo, a slice or two of pata negra with your manzanillia would leave you thinking you had died and gone to heaven.

However, as with all things, the bad guys noticed too. The Grauniad reports that -

Ham inspectors put 17 tonnes of pig meat into quarantine yesterday as they cracked down on what they suspected was a massive fraud involving Spanish hams that – purportedly – come from the haunches of free-range pigs that feast daily on acorns.

By their arithmetic ye shall know them.
1 pig = 4 legs
X = the number of pigs happy rootling acorns and producing jamon to the required standard.
8X = the number of legs on sale purporting to be of the required standard.
I’ve seen some things in my life but an eight legged pig is not one of them!

Authorities in southern Andalucia said that, to provide the quantity of ibérico hams that now hang from supermarket meat counters, the region would need to double the number of locally bred, acorn-fed pigs…

By the way if you have not seen Jamon, Jamon by Bigas Luna get yourself a plate of pata negra, some fresh pan, a bottle of fino and be prepared for fun.

The Evils of Capitalism

Nice little blog in the grauniad. The case against uppercase.
I've always been lowercase myself, I'm sure it shows.
Good to note that there are occasions when uppercase makes all the difference:-

Capitals do have their uses, of course. As the Urban Dictionary puts it: "Capitalisation is the difference between 'I had to help my uncle Jack off a horse' and 'I had to help my uncle jack off a horse.'"

Capital, capital!