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!

Networking, if that's OK with you

An Article in the New Yorker

Why the revolution will not be tweeted, by Malcolm Gladwell October 4, 2010

In 1960 four African American college students sat down at the segregated lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. The action became part of the growing civil rights movement. Necessarily, it happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter. These tools are available now and it is claimed by some that they have had a significant effect from Iran to Moldova. Would the technology have made a significant difference. Gladwell claims that it is one thing to be loosely connected in a network that believes in equality, god mom and apple pie and another, as in Greensboro, where you are required to stand shoulder to shoulder with an exposed, non violent group, about to get its head beat in! You may need a little more than the ethereal connection of ewaves and 500 e-friends to sign up for that one.

Networks are very important and can bring about change and he quotes a report of an example that really inspires:-

In a new book called “The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to Drive Social Change,” the business consultant Andy Smith and the Stanford Business School professor Jennifer Aaker tell the story of Sameer Bhatia, a young Silicon Valley entrepreneur who came down with acute myelogenous leukemia. It’s a perfect illustration of social media’s strengths. Bhatia needed a bone-marrow transplant, but he could not find a match among his relatives and friends. The odds were best with a donor of his ethnicity, and there were few South Asians in the national bone-marrow database. So Bhatia’s business partner sent out an e-mail explaining Bhatia’s plight to more than four hundred of their acquaintances, who forwarded the e-mail to their personal contacts; Facebook pages and YouTube videos were devoted to the Help Sameer campaign. Eventually, nearly twenty-five thousand new people were registered in the bone-marrow database, and Bhatia found a match.

Certainly there is a role for the new tools and the new ways of working. Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody”, is a very good exposition of that. They are not the panacea for all our ills, and I would accept that I am susceptible to panaceaitis, maybe more that the next person. Where I might differ from Gladwell is that he believes:-

…if you’re taking on a powerful and organized establishment you have to be a hierarchy.

You have to be well organised and have your members committed but we all know the dangers of hierarchies from churches to political parties.


Commenting on the better known protest:-

The Montgomery bus boycott required the participation of tens of thousands of people who depended on public transit to get to and from work each day. It lasted a year. In order to persuade those people to stay true to the cause, the boycott’s organizers tasked each local black church with maintaining morale, and put together a free alternative private carpool service, with forty-eight dispatchers and forty-two pickup stations. Even the White Citizens Council, King later said, conceded that the carpool system moved with “military precision.”

He finishes the article with:-

The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.

However, consider in turn that if you want to read the truth, write it on a wall. If you want to be free, pull the wall down. But make sure it is not a structural member, it is not of historical or architectural interest, you have planning permission to demolish, you have carried out a risk assessment for the demolition, you have consulted widely on this and genuinely believe that a majority of the relevant population are in favour, that the minority who have fears about the demolition have been reassured, and that it has zero carbon impact and that David and Gideon could find a slot in their very busy diaries if there was a suitable photo op. with the common people, there was provision for drinkie-poos afterwards, no press, and………..

Chilly Chilies

It has been a good year for chillies. Herself has grown a range in our extensive greenhouse provision round the back of our baronial pile in this pleasant Suffolk messuage which time has gratefully forgotten.
While they have fierce names and impressive ratings on the Scoville Scale adding them to our dishes raw and cooked has resulted in an increase in flavour and not any great heat! Obviously it has something to do with the humour, airs and graces of the village.
A recent overnight trip had herself in fear for her chillies. She had forgotten to zip up the greenhouse. All is not lost and our chillies did not get too chilly.

A far cry from a story in the Grauniad about a chilli measuring 1,176,182 on the Scoville Scale.

Evil, pure evil.

Just heard news that pope on the grope was last seen heading to Holyrood with a tartan scarf round his neck.

Could almost forgive him the Hitler Youth thing, the covering up child abuse for the greater glory of god and the Catholic Church, condemning a large section of the world to poverty and exploitation because he refuses to accept that they should have access to contraception, the fact that HIV infection will progress and deaths from AIDs will increase because simple prevention, condoms, is denied to believers -

BUT A BAY CITY ROLLERS FAN

AAAARGH!

Watering Workers Beer

The decision has been taken to scrap the £3.3m Community-Owned Pubs Support Programme

I am the man, the very fat man, who waters the workers' beer.
I am the man, the jolly fat man, who waters the workers' beer.
What do I care if it makes them ill; if it makes them terrible queer!
I've a car, a yacht, an airoplane from watering workers' beer.

Or words to that effect.
What would you think of the man, the terrible fat man who took the beer out of the workers and peasants hands. That's what he is about to do for some communities.
Shame! I hear you cry.
What can you expect from the man, the oleaginous fat man, who destroys the Audit Commission with the stoke of his pen!

Eric von Pickles has always struck me as a throwback to the days of the Ragged Trousered Philanthropist. Possibly to those interminable B Movies of my yoof about brave RAF guys escaping from a hell hole of a prison camp run by, you've guessed it, a chubby and totally evil Gauliter played by Eric von Pickles.

"For you Tommy the war is over. Have some beer, it is warm as you English like it; I leave you to guess why!"

However, help is at hand, not for the films, mercifully they all sank without trace.
As Social Enterprise reports:-

Co-ops step in to support community pubs.

Good guys!

An island not much visited

According to Boswell, Dr Johnson reported this after his visit courtesy of the wind and waves. This is a good thing for the few who find lodging on it and are able to enjoy the views, beaches, flora and fauna in relative peace.

Much restored after a week here, battered by beauty and the wind (but not rain) we return with glorious colour worthy of a tropical sun, at least from the scarf up!

Goodwill Bunting!

We had a meeting today in our village hall.
For some time we have been trying to get affordable housing to buy or rent for local families.
There are so many people out there who know the score and are trying so hard to make it happen. It would bring tears to the eyes of a stone needle!
However, there are those who do not want it to happen for a variety of reasons! NIMBY being one.

It begs the question when it will not be in their backyard and the only real objection is the colour of the brickwork that will be employed.

A number of ideas/phrases surfaced during the course of the afternoon.
The first was that you can not have a good public meeting without bunting, obviously goodwill bunting. Herself admitted, under duress, that she had colluded with the man in the Town Hall in Hackney to secure bunting whenever there was a public gathering at the heath centre, often it was tatty bunting.

Later through the haze of the evening meal it was reported that one of the nieces had been appointed as the Curator of Yurts.

Maybe we should get a few yurts, plonk them on the village green and have a festival of Mongolian Throat Singing. Now that would stick in the craw of the the bad guys!

Felbrigg

And so to Felbrigg!
Our journey was set about by ambulances, police cars and helicopters.
Arrival at the hall was soothed by a walled garden. I am very partial to a walled garden.
There were many beautiful flowers, nigella, or love-in-a-mist, being one of them.


I think we may return!

Debenham

We travelled to The Mid Suffolk Village of Debenham for our August perambulation.
It is described as “unspoiled without being a showcase” and well worth a visit but might provide more interest on a working day! The building that caught my eye, grand but not very beautiful, was the former Chapel of the Ancient Order of Foresters. It was built in 1905 but is of significance as it was the local branch or lodge of a Friendly Society formed in 1834. The society which, is still in existence, provides its 70,000 members with insurance policies against sickness and death; an example of the small society?

Forward to the Horse

I have been riding this particular donkey(buddhistpizza - the blog!) for some years now. It was with considerable alarm that I read on my Grauniad website the claims that the poor beast was dying on it's feet. With my girth, you might unkindly comment, that is not surprising!

Cory Doctorow links a report from The Economist on the Death of Blogging.

A report last month in the Economist tells us that "blogging is dying" as more and more bloggers abandon the form for its cousins: the tweet, the Facebook Wall, the Digg.

Do a search-and-replace on "blog" and you could rewrite the coverage as evidence of the death of television, novels, short stories, poetry, live theatre, musicals, or any of the hundreds of the other media that went from breathless ascendancy to merely another tile in the mosaic.

Of course, none of those media are dead, and neither is blogging. Instead, what's happened is that they've been succeeded by new forms that share some of their characteristics, and these new forms have peeled away all the stories that suit them best.

Have I played Sancho Panza too many times to Hidalgos on their Rocinantes?
Forward to the horse!

Passion

Regular readers who are looking for confessions from your correspondent about being overwhelmed by the hots for some floozy will be disappointed.
We spent a relaxed few days in the garden with the company of family and friends and the blessings of good weather, simple food and some drink. The weekend was rounded off at a concert by Fugata. You can read about them here. The music and the playing were summed up in one word for me, passion.

We pootered home and caught the news that Spain had won the World Cup of Football. No doubt from the pictures of fans in Madrid that they were rather pleased with the result.