| Another First Discworld Con... |
[Nov. 13th, 2009|01:33 am] |
...The Irish one this time, and just as good in its own way as the USDWCon at the beginning of September. One was big, the other was small; one was far away, the other was relatively speaking in our own back yard, one was hot and dry, the other was intermittently but impressively - Hollywood special effects impressively - wet.
And then the sun would come out :-)
D and I had a great time - including one especial benefit, being able to sit and speak to Terry for the first time in too long. We didn't have any opportunity to chat with him at all during the Tempe convention, so really enjoyed being able to just talk: about knightly things like spurs (we gave him a pair, since HM didn't) and swords (he's making one, since HM overlooked that, too) and the leverage being a Sir can give against the more annoyingly petty bureaucracies; about writery things like DragonDictate, which can now be trained to recognise the vocabulary of a complete backlist; and about stuff we weren't allowed to mention till the banquet - the Scottish BAFTA award for Living With Alzheimer's. I'm happy the documentary won, but at the same time I wish it had never needed made.
We had the chance for a natter with Jack Cohen and Bernard Pearson as well. Jack is as wise as ever, and added some interesting comments to our impromptu, five-minutes-warning Folklore panel (the original panellist didn't show) that gave people second thoughts about having furry slippers in their bedrooms, never mind on their feet. Bernard is his usual ebullient self - has anyone ever thought of bottling that man's laugh as an anti-depressant? If an audible dictionary needs to define guffaw, that's what to use.
Much beer was consumed over the weekend (of course) and I'm not the only one to think that Sir T. Pratchett, all in black with a white beard, looked very well matched by the pint of Guinness in his hand. He also seemed very at ease, so much so that he decided to extend his stay at the hotel. And There Was Much Rejoicing.
We weren't the only ones who got plenty of Terry-time beyond the programme items (where there were a few moved or cancelled events, but nothing earthshaking that a glance at the Voodoo Board couldn't fix.) The Falls Hotel and the convention numbers were both cosy enough that he was able to sit in one place and let the con come to him - which it did, with great enthusiasm. As he said at the closing ceremony, IDWCon gave him fond recollections of other early conventions, and he even used the word "relaxacon."
Though fortunately not the word "custard." :-D |
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| History Programmes: colour, taste and texture... |
[Nov. 4th, 2009|08:15 pm] |
...but not much more. A bit like candy-floss or cotton-candy – there's not much substance and I wouldn't like to over-indulge. Britain’s Real Monarch is an example. It's been on before, but last night was the first time I've actually watched it with any care. After it was over, I realized why...
The premise put forward by Tony Robinson (Blackadder's Baldrick, and Time Team's long-time presenter) is that Edward IV, King of England near the end of the Wars of the Roses, was illegitimate, thus not "the real King." Because of this, the present royal descent through his daughter Elizabeth, wife of Henry VII, is also "not real" and the genuine Monarch of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and its Commonwealth is a chap living in Australia. It's an amusing theory, but I can't see Elizabeth II vacating Buckingham Palace on the strength of something with enough holes in it to drive several coronation coaches through without touching the sides.
The right-to-rule of medieval monarchs had as much to do with who had the biggest army and the most support, as it did with what side of the blanket he was born. It didn't concern William I very much: he was known as The Bastard before he was The Conqueror, and by all accounts continued to be a right bastard afterwards. Like William and Edward, Henry VII gained the crown by force of arms; in fact his very dodgy claim to the throne (he was descended from Edward III by an extremely distant illegitimate line) was also straightforwardly based on de jure belli: the right of conquest.
He was a Lancastrian, and his marriage to Edward IV's daughter Elizabeth, a Yorkist, was a peacemaking gesture, a demonstration that the old wars were over, not something to make his own claim to the throne any more secure. After all, he was already sitting on it, the previous occupant had died in open battle, and he had the support of any number of important nobles who were just happy that the country seemed to be stable again.
Incidentally, Elizabeth herself had been declared illegitimate a few years earlier, during the same business that removed her brother Edward V in favour of Richard III. If Elizabeth was re-legitimized to make her a suitable wife for the new King Henry, it also applied to young Edward. Just as well for Henry that the lad and his young brother were both dead, murdered in the Tower by their wicked uncle Richard. He must have been really, really certain of that, because otherwise reversing the illegitimacy in order to marry Elizabeth would have put Edward V back on the throne. Given that their deaths never had solid proof, just gossip and rumour, I’ve often wondered how Henry knew for sure...
(Which prompts another documentary idea, based on Josephine Tey's 1951 novel The Daughter of Time - thoroughly dated, but a fun read for all that. It would show how Richard III was innocent of his most famous crime, how Henry VII was the actual murderer of the "Princes in the Tower" and how the commonest proofs of Richard's guilt – Shakespeare's play and Thomas More's "history" – were propaganda fabrications. Processed footage of re-enactor groups, sound-bites from favourable historians, judicious editing of anything else (I wonder if it's possible to edit something said by Alison Weir so it had a pro-Richard slant? Now that would be a challenge...) and there you go. In terms of accuracy, just the ticket for Histovery Channel - or, from the look of Britain’s Real Monarch, Channel 4.)
Robinson's show claims that the "real" Royal line of England descends through Margaret Pole, daughter of Edward's brother George, the Duke of Clarence who, "it is said" (or "according to legend" – two phrases common in this sort of documentary before a recitation of dodgy factoids) was famously drowned in a butt of wine. Never mind the method, he was definitely executed for High Treason, and the Bill of Attainder that comes with a treason verdict barred his descendants from the succession. That's just the succession to his noble title – it went double for any hope of succeeding to the throne. There’s no mention if that Attainder was ever reversed, but a potential threat that was merely barred from the succession was never enough for a Tudor monarch. Margaret's brother, the last legitimate male Yorkist heir, was beheaded at the orders of Henry VII, and his son Henry VIII cleaned up the last loose end by doing the same to her.
The documentary also ignores other blips that mean "descent by Blood Royal" is hypothetical at best. When the last crowned Tudor died, she was replaced by a Stuart from Scotland; when the last crowned Stuart's religious views became a problem, he was replaced by an Orange from Holland. When the Orange produced no seedlings, and his successor Queen Anne left little but furniture, the German state of Hanover supplied the next King of England. Despite some dilution over the years, the Royal Family got a new injection of German genes when Albert von Saxe-Coburg-Gotha married Victoria, and has remained quite German ever since. Diplomatic name-changes at the start of the 20th century didn't mean a thing. Calling a Battenburg a Mountbatten or a Saxe-Coburg a Windsor is like deeming a cat to be a firearm. It’s just a convenient label.
Which means that two World Wars – the first one in particular – began as something of a family squabble. Not much change from the Wars of the Roses, then. Better to stay in Australia. |
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| Adam (a)Diment Lives...perhaps. |
[Oct. 30th, 2009|07:30 pm] |
It's been a year (to the day!) since anyone posted a comment here.
Last time I thought to check on Diment information, I read a suggestion that he had settled in "rural England." Since his family were in farming (as were his hero Philip McAlpine's: certainly Think Inc. Chapter 2 hints at a rural background) I thought nothing more of it.
But now this: Adam, now 66, is happy and well and living life to the full in far off places. It's the only thing so far posted from an LJ account opened just today, an extract from a slightly fuller version of the same thing on the "Nickel" post shown below. According to the LJ Profile the poster is located in Thailand, so "far off places" indeed!
I wonder who ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) huchi really is...
My immediate response was to put "Adam Diment" into Google in case there was anything more than the sparse information of last year. Not much more information, admittedly, but since January 11 of this year Diment at least has a Wikipedia entry (which lists this blog as one of its few external links...)
It also needs to link this, which fleshes out the rather skeletal information in my own post last year. Posted on August 1, I'm coming to it a bit late, but better later than never. The article includes photos which I've seen before - Philip McAlpine was Diment's Marty Stu, no doubt about it, and the one where he's in bed with a girl and a "Schmeisser" submachine-gun is an incident (and a paperback cover) from The Dolly Dolly Spy.
There are also facsimiles of two anonymous letters tipping off the Bank of England's Exchange Control Department about the currency swindle I mentioned. It's interesting that the typeface looks like both letters came from the same machine, and thus the same person - so was the swindle real and being reported by a "concerned citizen," or was it something more malicious? I find these more unpleasant than the two quoted examples of "sexism in writing," which (IMO, YMMV) are just the usual observations of a young man who appreciates good-looking girls with not much on. (There are entire industries based on that sort of appreciation...)
The comments include reminiscences from people who actually knew the man and confirm, unless you want to disbelieve them, that he was real, not a pseudonym or house-name. I've heard that before, and never gave it much credence for a reason obvious if you think about it. If "Adam Diment" was the house-name author for an ongoing series of Swinging-London spy thrillers, the series - still successful at the time, I believe - wouldn't have stopped so abruptly with Think Inc., especially with such an obvious hook for a sequel. The publisher would have assigned another writer to produce the next "Adam Diment" book at once.
If there really was a big fuss about his disappearance in 1971, then one comment's opinion that it was just a publicity stunt might bear consideration, but my memory (I was 15 at the time and may have missed something) was that Diment just stopped writing. After a couple more years I concluded there would be no more McAlpine books, and that was that. I just remain curious as to why.
As for A Nickel in the Machine, I didn't know it existed until today: a fascinating blog about the social history of 20th-century London. After seeing the Diment entry, and others which mention "Brilliant" Chang (see Watson's Snobbery With Violence) and that eerie, melancholy film The London Nobody Knows, I think it's something I'll enjoy. |
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| Gramophone? Is that when you call someone who's won a Grammy? |
[Oct. 11th, 2009|09:00 pm] |
BBC-4 is currently running their Electronic Revolution season of documentaries (and the drama Micro Men) about design and technology development over the past 40-odd years: interesting, sometimes fascinating, and occasionally able to make a viewer (me!) feel really old!
Take Upgrade Me, for instance, where writer, poet and gadget-fan Simon Armitage is trying to understand why the camera, phone, MP3 player and/or laptop you bought in February and still works perfectly is now not only out of date, but why your life won't be complete until you've replaced it with a new one. (He doesn't come up with an answer, by the way, apart from the obvious ad manipulation and Need to Shift Product.)
During the show he presented a class of tech-savvy (or at least gadget-canny, as in owning all the usual stuff and knowing newer is better, never mind why) 12-year-olds with a 1960s-era portable record-player, to see what they made of it. I wonder if he expecting the result - which was that they didn't even know what it was...
"Is it the first-ever portable computer?" asked one. Good guess: it looked a bit like Diane's ancient Osborne 1, but I'd have thought 21st-century British schoolkids, or late 20th-century ones, come to that, would have seen even fewer luggable computers than record-players.
"Is it a radio you sit on?" ventured another: again, fair enough, because like the one my parents had (and which was still in Mum's sitting-room last time I saw it, a couple of years back) this had a padded vinyl leatherette lid. Once that lid was opened and they could see the turntable, things became clearer since DJs still use turntables - but I think the record-stack changer still baffled them a bit.
It made me wonder: do sound effects (SFX now, but long ago, GRAMS) still use clichéd audio shorthand even though the listeners increasingly don't know what those sounds mean any more?
You've all heard them: the screech of a needle pulled across a record as inappropriate speech or music comes to an abrupt stop; the windinng dowwwn noiiizzzze of an unpowered turntable as a drug or time dilation takes effect; the tick "a few words" tick "a few words" tick "a few words" of a broken record after a character forgets something or has been hit on the head...
Does anyone still say "You're like a broken record" if you repeat something too many times? "You were vaccinated with a gramophone needle" if you talk too much?
Or will anyone saying that get "What's a broken record?" back at them, or "What's a gramophone needle?" - or even "What's vaccination?" |
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| I'd like-a Leica - but not at this price-a |
[Sep. 22nd, 2009|11:56 pm] |
I read Ken Rockwell’s photography web site on a regular basis, and smile (or occasionally growl) at the vehemence and occasional insularity of his opinions. If Rockwell doesn’t like a piece of camera gear he says so - but he also says why, which counts for a lot more; however, saying so repeatedly is a bit of a vice (which I recognise, being prone to it myself.) He'll witter on and on like a dog with a particularly recalcitrant bone; I got it about the overpriced Nikon D3x after the first three times, and don't need all the rest...
However, if he does like something, he’s just as enthusiastic, and it was that enthusiasm which pointed us in the right direction for our own current camera, a Canon SD870 IS – that’s the SD880 in the US, or was: it’s been discontinued. Shelf life, about ten months. Given the way they come in and go out of production, there must be landfills devoted to nothing but out-of-date digicams… However, if you’re looking for a new camera (and are partial to Nikon DSLRs or something from the latest crop of Canon compacts – there’s nowt else but Leicas) check his recommendations.
He’s fallen in love with Leica (can't blame him) and has been lavishing glowing praise on the new Leica M9 digital rangefinder, which is certainly a smashing-looking piece of kit - but then, the earlier Leica attempts at digital looked just as good, but didn't cut the mustard when it came to actually taking pictures. I'm going to be interested in the first full reviews, because I've had a thing for rangefinder cameras since I was at school: they have the same 1930s retro charm as fountain pens, typewriters, the good Indiana Jones movies and the Crimson Skies computer game of blessed memory, and for all its 21st-century interior, the new one has that charm in spades.
Trouble is, it also has Leica’s one big flaw: price. The M9 camera body is $7,000 as near as makes no difference; the lenses start at almost three grand a pop and go up from there. Even the flashgun costs nearly $700. I haven’t bothered with prices in Euro or Sterling, they’d just give me a headache, but a basic system from brand new (body with wide, standard, and telephoto lens, flashgun, memory card and case - one built like Fort Knox, to protect that particular investment) won’t leave much change from $16,000. Sixteen. Thousand. A one, a six and three zeroes. Ouch.
It’s just as well that used Leica lenses from as far back as the dawn of time are all over the place, that they all fit (with an adapter if necessary) even the newest Leica bodies, and that some of the older, cheaper ones are supposed to be as good as, or better than, the shiny new stuff. Careful (and lucky) eBay shopping can cut the price of lenses right down - Rockwell writes about how he scored a full Leica system for about $4000 that way - however, it was a film system, not a digital one, and that $7,000 tag for the M9 remains an unavoidable expense for would-be digital Leica users.
Maybe one day, if I win the lottery or sell a movie, I’ll do more than just think about it, but right now I can’t see me ever taking enough photos to justify that sort of outlay. But somewhere west of Laramie there's a zoom-lensed, flash-fitted Nikon DSLR that's got my name on it - and I plan to give it a home before Christmas.
In the meanwhile, window-shopping costs nothing, and the one with the Leica digital in it will be wearing my nose-prints for quite a while. |
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| "You gave up DragonCon for THIS?" |
[Sep. 18th, 2009|08:44 pm] |
I almost didn't write a post about the North American Discworld Con in Tempe at all, I was so late in getting around to it; after all (he thought) others will have done it sooner, better, more enthusiastically...
Then, reading someone else's con report, I saw the comment that provides this post's title and did a slow burn. Not that slow, either. In answer to such a question, I had to say, somewhere, "Hell, yeah!"
All right, Diane and I were invited guests - I blogged about that nearly two years ago - but after having to pull out of the 2008 UK Discworld con thanks to a last-minute deadline we couldn't sidestep (and we tried, oh how we tried) I think we'd have done our damnedest to go to the NA one in any case. We're certainly going to the UK 2010 and deadlines be buggered.
This is not to disparage Dragon*Con in any way, and certainly not the snotty way my title poster dissed Discworld (there's some sort of wordplay in there, probably a bad pun.) For one thing there were a lot of friends whom we haven't seen for years - but multiple streams were less attractive than a single-focus con, especially since Terry's Discworld novels are the only fiction I always buy in hardback - the collapse of Mort into a loose-leaf folder proved that paperbacks just weren't sturdy enough for that much repeated reading.
What a sad wanker individual, I can hear Mr Title Poster thinking (not from censorship either, but because as an American he probably wouldn't know how to use "wanker" properly...) Yeah, maybe. But I know what I like, and a con of (checks Dragon*Con's Wikipedia entry) 30,000-plus members is way too big to be fun, at least for me. I'm not enochlophobic by any means and I'd attend a convention of that size as business, but not on my own nickel; I prefer to meet my friends in smaller groups.
The NA Discworld con was what I do go to cons for: big enough to be impressive, small enough to be fun, people I already knew, people I hadn't met until then, a subject I enjoy - and with an extra bonus: sunshine. Lots of sunshine. Diane calculated that by the time we left for the convention at the beginning of September, it had rained in our part of Ireland for some part of every day since mid-June. There were a bunch of American lady tourists on the plane who were wittering on and on about how green Ireland was. Yes, and we knew why. When it goes beyond verdant into verdigris, it stops being so attractive. Even the cats were starting to rust.
I should shut up about rain or lack of it at this point: the next con Diane and I are going to is another DWCon, but this one is in the West of Ireland (Ireland's first DWCon, in fact, just as Tempe was the first in the USA) and if they can lay on sunny weather in November, I for one will be most impressed.
And will wonder, rather nervously, how they did it. |
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| A rather mixed McMessage... |
[Jul. 6th, 2009|10:15 pm] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | keyboard | ] |
| [ | mood |
| |  in a shivery sort of way... | ] |
| [ | music |
| | "Visions in Blue" - Quartet - Ultravox | ] |
McDonalds (the hamburger people, though you'd be hard put to tell until the end) are running a TV ad at the minute showing little kids having a grand old time on a farm in the sunny countryside. It's accompanied by that jolly old song "We're busy doing nothing" from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Until the final few seconds, there isn't an adult in sight, so the kids are at liberty to romp around unsupervised and wreck the joint enjoy themselves.
It reminded me of an entirely different ad I saw when I was about 12 (not the infamous Public Information Film Apaches, BTW - I'm too old for that one.) "Farms aren't playgrounds," was the message, and long, low-angled black-and-white shots of the hooks and blades of massive farm equipment hinted at how easily they could rip and smash you all over or deep into the topsoil of the neighbouring half-acre.
I had nightmares for ages; not because it was especially graphic, but because at that time the family took occasional weekend breaks on my Uncle Matt's farm outside Lurgan. After seeing the ad, I knew what was waiting in the shadows of the barn, just for me...
So I reworked the lyrics a bit.
We're busy doing nothing,
Playing around the farm,
Quite unaware these machines can do us harm.
We're pulling all the levers
On the harvester in the shed,
Where Mum and Dad can't see us, so...
We're likely to end up dead! If Emergency Services can't find all the bits after a trip through the muck-spreader, at least there's some corner of a rural field that is forever little Tommy, or Helen, or Sam, or Babs, or... Yeah. Very comforting.
Have fun down on the farm - and enjoy your Big Mac sensibly. |
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| Dish of the (yester)Day... |
[Jul. 5th, 2009|05:52 pm] |
On a happier note than the past couple of posts...
I like chilli, and the Fourth of July seemed like a good reason to make one (as if I need an excuse!) Diane asked me to produce something a bit different, so after a rummage in the store-cupboard to find what was there, I put a couple of less common chilies in the oven - they were already "dried," but an extra half-hour at 100C/200F made them easier to grind - then whizzed them to powder in the electric coffee spice mill.
(We have two, one for spices, the other for (gasp) coffee, and we've only ever mixed them up once - of course after grinding a couple of smoked habanero chilies and forgetting to clean up properly. The resulting coffee was hot in a whole new way. That was the day we decided the two mills did need labels after all...)
I also dried and ground fresh oregano from the herb-patch, then toasted whole cumin seeds in a dry pan and ground them too. To be honest, this was because we’d run out of ground cumin, but the toasted home-ground stuff tastes even better and I'll bear it in mind for the future.
Rather than the usual minced (ground) beef, I used stewing meat from our local craft butcher. This is sold in quite big chunks, so I cut them much smaller; a fiddly task, but worth it, because the texture is deliciously different to the usual version made with hamburger mince.
All measurements are approximate, all times are vague.
One kilo / 2 pounds stewing beef, chopped to 5 mm / 1/4 inch dice
4 onions, finely chopped
6 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
1 teaspoonful ground black pepper
1 tablespoonful ground pasilla chili
1 tablespoonful ground New Mexico Green chili
3 teaspoonfuls ground cumin
2 teaspoonfuls dry oregano
500 ml / 1 pint beef stock
2 tins chopped tomatoes, crushed or passed through a colander to remove chunks
2 tins kidney beans, drained and rinsed (optional)
oil or fat for frying
No salt is required: I made the stock from a Knorr "Stockpot" (as plugged over here by Marco Pierre White) - better than a cube, but still with salt as its second ingredient (after water... Yes. Quite.) Remember that tinned beans are also packed in salted water. Home-made beef stock and soaked dried beans are another matter, but I'd still taste first and salt second.
Put about two teaspoonfuls of oil or fat in a frying pan and gently fry the onions and garlic, stirring often, until soft and golden.
Meanwhile put two teaspoonfuls of oil or fat in a large casserole and gently fry the beef, stirring often, until all the red has gone; Michael McClaughlin, in the Manhattan Chili Co. Cookbook, says "until grey," which sounds a bit yuck, but he means Don't brown the beef: it gives a grilled-burger taste that doesn't work in chili and it seals in juices that should be allowed to get out and play with the other flavours.
Add the onion/garlic mixture to the beef, then all the dry ingredients, and stir together over low heat for 5 minutes.
Add the stock and tomatoes, bring to the boil, then reduce the heat to a low simmer and cook, uncovered, for 2-3 hours, until the meat becomes really tender and the chili has thickened. Stir frequently, and watch out for sticking. There should be no need to add extra liquid, but if so, do it only in small amounts.
If you're adding beans, then check the tenderness of the meat and add them about 1/2 an hour before the chili's likely to be done.
Serve it with rice, tortillas, hominy, pasta or even crumbled crackers. The flavour is complex but quite mild; there's no more burn than Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce, which is my yardstick for nervous folk who want to know "How hot is it really?"
This makes enough for about six people. Since there's only us, we were able to leave a lot of it overnight for the flavours to mature and get friendly with each other. Like curries, goulashes and other spiced stews, it's even better the next day. Yesterday’s was good, today's is amazing. |
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| Memorial for Beems |
[Jun. 23rd, 2009|12:05 pm] |
Thanks to everyone for their sympathy, and in particular for understanding how we feel.
I've been through times like this before, and the response "It was just a cat..." even from my own dear Mum (just once) can provoke an unfortunate reaction. A small life that's been part of ours for 24/7/365/several years is never "just" anything.
Squeak and Goodman are our eldest cats, and it's now we really want the magic thirty seconds when they understand what you're saying. You know what I mean: "It's all right, we'll be back tomorrow;" or "these people will take care of you for a while, and then we'll all go home again," or "this will hurt, but you'll feel better soon..."
Or, right now, "She's gone away for ever, please stop looking..." |
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| Diane's cat Beemer... |
[Jun. 15th, 2009|10:03 pm] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | At home | ] |
| [ | mood |
| |  depressed | ] |
| [ | music |
| | none | ] |
It's been more than six months since my last post, and I suppose this one is a Last Post of another sort.
On Saturday 13th June at about 6 p.m., Beemer was hit and killed by a car, on the same 10-metre stretch of road that has already claimed Bubble and Pip.
By 8 p.m. we were wondering why she was late for dinner. Then I glanced out of the upstairs window and saw something black-and-white lying on the verge just beyond our gate. Like the last two times, it happened that close to the house. No more than the width of a broad country lane from home and safety. All the way down the three-at-a-time stairs and out of the house I hoped it was just a piece of windblown paper. I should have known better. Our luck hasn’t been that good for months.
Beemer was stretched out in the warm June evening as if she was asleep. Yes, it’s a cliché, but we have photos of her snoozing in that same pose. She wasn't even dirty, so her white bib and boots and mittens were as neat as ever. When I lifted her, she had the same clean scent of fresh laundry she always picked up when she was out in the open air. But she wasn't sleeping this time. Her fur was still soft, but her body was already stiff.
It’s been just two days since the accident happened, and the house feels very strange. She was such a quiet little thing that we often didn't know if she was in or out, yet there are empty places and odd silences all over. No tiny demure mew requesting food, or milk, or attention, or a lap to sit on. No rustle of paper from the box where she slept in my office. Two mornings without the tickle of whiskers and insistent head-bump that meant someone (usually Diane) should get out of bed and open a can of breakfast. Two nights without a small body edging onto the lounger around midnight, which is when Beems decided it belonged to her...
She would snuggle on that chair with Squeak because, even though they were both neutered, as senior male and female they were the top mates of our little pride. It's sad to watch him peering under the sofa where she used to hide when she’d had enough playing, and sadder still to see him sitting by the gate, waiting for her to come home. We let Squeak and Goodman examine her body, and – we’ve seen it too many times, because they’ve now outlived four companions – both seemed aware that this might look and smell like Beemer, but what made it her wasn't there any more. I think they know she won’t be back. They just won’t accept it yet.
But at least we know. We didn’t have to hunt up and down into nightfall, calling without an answer. We’ll have no days of wondering what really happened. Most of all, we won't have an ugly mess as a bad last memory of our kitty. I dug her grave in the shade of the big hawthorn tree, alongside Kasha and Lilith and Bubble and Pip. Then we wrapped her in the cover of her favourite cushion, laid her in her last bed, covered her up and came away.
Beemer got her name from the car we’d rented to deal with errands before heading out to CONvergence in 2002. We’d collected our plane tickets and were on our way home, but stopped when we saw what seemed to be (and was) an abandoned kitten at the roadside. We adopted her – or she adopted us, we were never quite sure – and gave her a longer and I hope happier life than if we’d kept on driving. Now that life is over.
Diane said it best; "We found her by the road, and we lost her by the road." For the seven years in between, she was our friend. Now she’s with the friends who’ve gone before. Sleep well, Beems. We miss you. |
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| The Imperial March from Star Wars... |
[Dec. 3rd, 2008|01:32 am] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | Desk | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | amused | ] |
| [ | music |
| | What do you think? | ] |
Whatever tinkering has been inflicted on the visuals and the characters of Star Wars, the music has been pretty much left alone. I've heard Darth Vader's version of "Whistle While You Work Oppress" played by orchestra, by military band, and by synthesizer - but never before quite like this.
YMMV, but I loved it! |
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| The next step... |
[Nov. 24th, 2008|12:45 am] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | Desk, of course | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | awake | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Theme from "Taxi Driver" - Bernard Herrman | ] |
[sarcasm/on]
...In this sequence is to ban cars completely. Oh, and the TV show Top Gear too, as an accessory before the fact. After all, if viewing pornography encourages sexual misbehaviour, then obviously a programme which celebrates extreme driving and impatience with other road users must have a similar effect.
Since fully-licensed, fully-taxed, fully-registered handguns in private hands killed far more people each year than cars ever did, banning legally-held handguns from the UK eliminated gun crime completely...
Didn't it?
[sarcasm/off] |
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| Swan Song |
[Nov. 19th, 2008|07:20 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  annoyed | ] |
| [ | music |
| | "King Henry" - Below the Salt - Steeleye Span | ] |
We have a pond in the meadow at the back of the house, with the standard complement of bird-life: ducks, coots, moorhens, some rarities like teal and snipe, the occasional heron and usually a pair of swans. There was a pair when we arrived, more than ten years ago, who'd been here for years before that. One of them died in 2006 (of old age, according to village gossip) and the survivor flew away. It was nice when a new pair arrived last summer.
They hatched a brood of five cygnets this spring, and as the year and a game of Ten Little Indians progressed, we counted fewer and fewer until finally there was just one left. It grew well (about the size of a goose, when I put the binoculars on it yesterday) and was starting to change to adult plumage. Soon there'd be the entertainment of flying lessons, and maybe next year this one would come back with a mate of its own.
Yeah, right. You know that proverb about counting your chickens? It applies to other birds as well.
This cygnet, because it was well-grown, didn't just vanish like all the others. Instead, there was a big patch of grey-turning-white feathers in the meadow this morning, some with blood on them, and some pathetic puffs of baby-down that hadn't grown out yet. I'm no tracker, but a couple of paw-prints in the mud suggest the culprit was a fox, just like all the other times.
So much for that, then. I wish at least one had survived, because losing all of them seems unfair. Swans supposedly mate for life; I wonder do they also grieve at loss? I know cats do.
Certainly watching the two adult swans quartering the pond from end to end and poking into every patch of reeds and rushes suggested they felt more than just curiosity about Junior’s whereabouts - especially if they didn't see or hear the attack and don't know where their cygnet has gone. How much conclusion might they draw from those feathers when they find them? Enough to get what we call closure? I hope so.
I guess I'm not much of a countryman, because though I can cheerfully write about all sorts of messy death and destruction, I won't do even small-scale stuff myself. Utter hypocrisy: I eat meat, including game, but I won't go out with a shotgun. The loss of pets is another matter, of course – when Pip was killed last year it made me thoroughly wretched. (It's odd how life went abruptly downhill from there, culminating with Mum, and apart from a couple of notable high points has only recently started to climb back up again.) But I'm surprised at how annoyed I feel about a wild bird.
Maybe it's because I watched those cygnets from the time they hatched; maybe it's because I mentioned the presence of the fox to our landlord just last week and suggested something be done about it, even though I said (hollow laughter) "that last cygnet's probably big enough to be past risk by now." However the usual firearms around here are shotguns, and you only shoot foxes with rifles, and then only if they're a menace to sheep. (Apparently supergluing the sort of little bell you get on a cat-collar to the new lambs is enough to keep the foxes at bay... Who knew?)
So Reynard is still out there somewhere.
I think foxhunting with horses is still done here. I don't approve of it, but this time, if I'm here on Boxing Day (St Stephen's) or New Year's Day when the Hunt comes by, I intend to give them directions towards where they might find something to chase.
And I hope the swans have better luck next year. |
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| Whatever happened to...? |
[Oct. 29th, 2008|11:35 pm] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | keyboard | ] |
| [ | mood |
| |  tired | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Metal on Metal - Kraftwerk - TransEurope Express | ] |
Adam Diment? If still alive, he'd be in his mid-sixties by now.
He wrote four rather good James-Bondy secret agent thrillers from 1967-1971. These are sometimes described as spoofs, but in my view they're neither spoof nor pastiche, just very much of their time, the Swinging Sixties. Less martini and Savile Row, more pot and Carnaby Street; just as much sex and violence, though. Think Austin Powers done in-period and (more or less) serious.
The titles were The Dolly Dolly Spy, The Great Spy Race, The Bang Bang Birds and Think, Inc.. (I have all but Bang Bang, which I must track down for completeness' sake; they're thoroughly out of date, but still a fun read.) Diment ended the last one with what I interpret as a definite plot hook for a sequel, and then...
Vanished.
There was a website devoted to the books, but that's vanished too (I should have saved it off-line) and web information is extremely spotty. I've seen one suggestion that Diment went all hippie and headed off to some Maharishi-run ashram in India, another that his hero's fictional drug habit was but a pale shadow of his own and it caught up with him.
Who can say? Can you? |
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| Our first convention in a couple of years! |
[Oct. 27th, 2008|02:42 pm] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | Keyboard | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | cheerful | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Dayspring Mishandled - Peter Bellamy & the Young Tradition | ] |
(Because the SiWC gig in Vancouver last year was a three-day seminar, not a con, and we had to pull out of both P-Con IV and V, and DiscWorldCon.)
Last weekend, Diane and I were guests at Con†Stellation
XVII Casseopeia, the annual regional science fiction convention in Huntsville, Alabama.
It involved a long flight-time – Dublin to New York (Newark), then New York (LaGuardia) to Houston and on to Huntsville.The trans-Atlantic flight was uneventful, and once in New York we met up with Don (our agent) and one of Diane's editors for lunch and comments on various works-in-progress. After that, we pottered around Manhattan before dinner in a rather different sort of fusion restaurant.
This one was Chinese Mirch, and was Chinese-Indian(!) It was also extremely good, a combination of Chinese dishes with an Indian twist, and Indian dishes prepared Chinese-style. If we hadn't been tired after a long flight, and well-fed after a long lunch, we might have experimented further; as it was, the Hunan and Sichuan spicy dishes we tried responded very well to the Indian treatment. In this restaurant they used paneer instead of tofu, and the usual crunchy Sichuan shredded spiced beef were shreds of North Indian-seasoned spiced lamb - though with enough flavour of soy sauce and Sichuan pepper to remind us that this wasn't something from the Punjab.
It was also splendidly hot, something which in my experience is a bit hit-and-miss in the USA where Indian food is concerned. Hot spicing seems okay in Mexican food, and (mostly) in Thai and the hotter Chinese cuisines, but American restaurants often seem at a bit of a loss when dealing with Indian food. Sheer heat, yes - but then any corner curry-house can do that with a few spoonfuls of chili powder; it's usually the subtle forms of fieriness that they can't manage. Maybe I haven't eaten enough curry in the States, but there's so much else to try that it's only when the curry bug bites really hard that I find myself going for an occasional (often rather disappointing) vindaloo (back to the curry-house formula again; a proper Goan vindaloo isn't just extra-hot with potatoes in it, but I'm not likely to find that locally, never mind in New York- though any information to the contrary is welcome! :-) Chinese Mirch got it more right than some of the purely Indian places I tried over the years. Start of a good trend? I hope so.
The intensity of spicing seems very regional, too. Alabama, or at least Huntsville, spices fried chicken quite hard with white pepper, but I missed real chili heat, which seemed odd since Huntsville has a close connection with both NASA and the US military, and both of them are enthusiastic users of Tabasco Sauce®, which comes from Louisiana, next-but-one state over. I should have brought my own bottle-and-holster combo; I'm sure I could have made room in the security wet-pack.
Even the Chinese restaurant where the committee dinner took place was very cautious, despite having little "spicy" marks against various items on the menu. I ordered General Tso's Chicken (cubes of chicken fried with whole chilies, a cooking process that can produce a tear-gas effect so intense it drove Diane and I out of the kitchen last time we made it at home without doors and windows open and the extractor fan full on.) The restaurant version, however, was rather like a peppery sweet-and-sour, pleasant enough but definitely not what I was expecting. Mike Resnick's wife Carol ordered some chili paste to perk it up – but the paste itself was also amazingly mild and I had to use the entire little bowlful. Local preference again?
That said, I can't remember any convention that fed us quite so well, or so regularly – not in terms of going out to restaurants, but by having a con-suite equipped with what looked like every committee member's crock-pot. These were filled with soup, rice, mashed potatoes, chili, chicken, vegetables and so on; the sort of food that can be safely kept hot without drying out or getting aggressive. Free hot food available at a con for something like 12 hours a day is a new experience, and it was there for everyone, not just the guests and the concom. Granted, Con†Stellation was quite a small con, with about 240 attendees, but even so, if that was a demonstration of "Southern Hospitality," I approve!
If the trans-Atlantic flight was uneventful, the connection between LaGuardia, Houston and Huntsville was more...exciting...than either of us cared for. LaGuardia Airport in New York is notorious for delays, and our flight was no exception. Instead of leaving at 10:30 in the morning, it left at 12 noon - but we still needed to make the same 4:30 to Huntsville, despite a layover reduced from 90 minutes to just 15. Making matters even more "interesting" was being directed not only to the wrong gate, but the wrong terminal. If it hadn't been for a lift on an airport cart driven by a guy channelling Ben-Hur (or possibly Michael Schumacher) we'd have missed our connection. Instead we made it with literally three minutes to spare. (Another demonstration – besides a dislike of letting unlocked checked baggage out of our sight – of why we do our best to travel only with carry-on: if we'd had to wait for luggage, we'd have been spending a lot longer in Houston than either of us intended.)
Before the con got under way, we were taken for a visit to the Space and Rocket Centre, just a couple of miles down the road. It’s an impressive museum, but my abiding memory is of the Saturn V. There's a reproduction standing outside, with the real thing in a hall all to itself. I knew the Saturn booster was a big beast, but until I was standing right underneath it, I hadn’t realised how big it really was – and the whole thing shrinks down to a tiny Apollo command capsule right at the very top. Three men sitting all by themselves on top of the world’s biggest skyrocket, built down to a budget by the lowest bidder. Coo ur gosh what a chiz...
The convention itself was a lot of fun (and for those who think a one-paragraph con report is a bit terse, it's only when things go wrong that I have a lot to say. Nothing went wrong here at all.) Mike Resnick was MC, and handled proceedings like the pro he is (a lot of which seems to involve keeping other pros under something resembling control...) We clicked immediately with his daughter Laura, another writer guest, and chattered away like old buddies; the same with John Welch, where I suspect that if the con had lasted another day we'd both have lost our voice… (No comments about "and a good thing too" – that's Diane's job.) I did a late-night reading of "The Longest Ladder" that was a great success. Kevin's room party was a hoot (and had some yummy home-brew – thanks, Kev!) The panels all got their laughs at the proper time – and always there was that friendliness from everyone.
"Strangers are just friends you haven’t met yet" can sometimes sound like a trite cliché best suited for souvenir mugs and teeshirts, but clichés develop because they're used a lot, and they're used a lot because they’re true. This one was true repeatedly in Huntsville.
Many thanks to Doug Lampert for inviting us (especially me – it was Diane who was the Guest of Honour) and to all the other guests and fans who attended Con†Stellation, for making it a great weekend. |
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| Breakfast of Champions! |
[Sep. 29th, 2008|07:30 pm] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | typing | ] |
| [ | mood |
| |  nostalgic | ] |
| [ | music |
| | "Trans-Europe Express" - Kraftwerk | ] |
Diane says that this was the slogan on Wheaties in the USA. Was it also on Scott's Porage Oats? My grandfather used to stock this in his grocer's shop; I remember the label of a kilted Scotsman in a vest*, putting the shot at some Highland Games or other, and that idiosyncratic spelling of porridge.
(*actually an athletic tank-top, but it looked just like what I wore under my school uniform shirt in November when I was about 12 years old. Warm body, but cold knees. The uniform at that age included shorts. Brrr.)
So why blog about porridge/porage/oatmeal?
Because a certain coffee-shop chain have started to sell it, about three years after some lads in Scotland had the same idea. And I blogged about it then, too.
This appeared in March 2006, and this was posted in January 2007. It looks from their website as if they've become a chain...
It's good stuff, porradge, especially with honey or brown sugar, maybe a blob of home-made jam or some fruit - and nowadays I wouldn't be averse to a wee huge dram stirred into it.
This last additive did not go into my breakfast at age 12, by the way, and even if it had, I don't think I'd have got the famous glowing force-field effect; visible energy emissions were © ReadyBrek. (Invisible ones were © Heinz Baked Beans, but let's not go there.) ;-)
And I bet my knees would still have been cold. |
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| Roast Beast and How to Do It. |
[Sep. 25th, 2008|03:00 pm] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | Desk! | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | hungry | ] |
| [ | music |
| | The Voyage of Bran - "Legend" - Alan Stivell | ] |
After taking a slap at The Supersizers for getting period roasting techniques wrong in favour of a misplaced attempt at "comedy", I was fascinated when I found this website about getting roasting right.
The courses offered look like a great foodie/history fan/writer (now who do I know falls into one or more of those categories...?) weekend break.
Next year, maybe. |
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| You talking to me...? |
[Sep. 23rd, 2008|07:57 pm] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | desk | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | amused | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Events in Dense Fog - Music for Films - Brian Eno | ] |
I've just reinstalled Dragon NaturallySpeaking. There was something giving trouble that was more easily fixed by removal and reinstallation than by fiddling with it. That was a minor aberration; by and large it's a good voice-to-text dictation program - so long as you don't catch a cold half way through a project. If that happens, you'd better have put the last time to good use and and trained a User as your voice complete with all the coughs, sniffs and sneezes...
(No, I don't have a cold - but I do remember trying to run my normal User through Dragon when I had 'flu. I'd have had better recognition speaking Klingon. Under water. While snorting treacle. And if that's not an image you care to visualize, think what it felt like... Ew.)
Diane and I have been using the program for a long time, ever since it was called DragonDictate and had to be used by speaking One-Word-At-A-Time. I see that Wikipedia claims some exorbitant price for the early program, but whoever was paying $2000 a pop, it wasn't us. :-)
Dictation and playback always seems a bit strange even when you're just using an ordinary cassette recorder: your voice never sounds right the first few times (something to do with hearing yourself without bone conduction or something) and the temptation to start every dictation with "Take a letter, Miss Jones..." is quite strong.
Starting dictation using voice-to-text is even stranger, because unless you're Victor Borge and always pronounce your punctuation, saying "comma", "semi-colon", "open/close quotation marks" (this one with or without using your fingers to make air-quotes) and all the rest sounds very peculiar both to yourself and any independent observer in the room, including the cat.
But once used to it, the system is quite efficient. In particular, it's very handy when writing words or phrases that use accents or diacritical marks. So long as you can remember what the accents are called, it's much faster to say "Spell That", then spell out the word with e-acute or o-circumflex or whatever, than hunt each accented letter down in Character Map or remember what the Alt+num-pad code might be.
What made us laugh was to discover that while the program had to be taught to recognize our pronunciation of some words, it seemed to have all the main swear words off pat, right out of the box.
The Beta testing story behind that is probably something best left untold. |
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| What makes a Swashbuckler swash? |
[Sep. 16th, 2008|02:43 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | content | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Domenico Scarlatti - Harpsichord concerto in E | ] |
The various home-burned DVDs of movies saved from TV have been mostly transferred from unlabelled jewel cases (which might contain a CD, a DVD, a data/installation disk or just be empty) to proper library cases. Once they've got proper labels, they'll be a lot easier to find. Some of the tidying has produced a "why did I save this?" reaction - at least they're mostly RWs, so can be RW'en - but every now and then there's a "Wow, so there it is!" and one of those reactions was prompted by finding the Errol Flynn Captain Blood. I thought I'd loaned it to someone and forgotten who; turns out I'd put it somewhere safe and forgotten where.
I caught this on TCM more than four years ago, and was delighted to find incidents and lines of dialogue I didn't remember from Sunday afternoons on BBC1; it turns out the Beeb was showing a trimmed re-release, and the original (this one) is about 20 minutes longer, running almost exactly two hours. According to IMDb, this is the original running time; I suspect those 20 minutes were cut from the re-release to make room for commercials in a two-hour TV slot, and the BBC were simply showing the cut they had available.
Captain Blood is a bit of a curiosity; it's one of the great cinematic swashbucklers, and yet the swashbuckling is surprisingly understated. The actual "piratical" part of the drama doesn't begin until the 45th minute and I think, though haven't checked, that the very word pirate isn't used until that same point.
In addition, and despite its fame in the swashbuckling genre, there's only one major swordfight in the entire film, short, but perfect, when Blood (Flynn) confronts Levasseur (Basil Rathbone) on a rocky Caribbean shore. There are no other plot-point duels at all, and by comparison with modern examples, very little in the way of on-screen action of any sort except for the final battle between Blood's Arabella and the French warships bombarding Port Royal. Even a major plot development like Blood's advancement from runaway slave to famous buccaneer takes place mostly in montage and title-card.
This probably reflects the movie's smallish budget; a nitpicker (like me) can see where quite a lot of the intercut and back-projected ship-to-ship footage was lifted from other movies - The Sea Hawk of 1924 is supposedly one of them, but I'm sure I saw HMS Victory or a similar Napoleonic three-decker at least twice.
None of this detracts from Captain Blood's quality as a rattling good yarn. Yes, it may move a bit slowly for modern tastes (though it's by no means as leisurely as some) but since there's no mass of special effects or CGI for any lack of plot to hide behind, the film has to stand or fall on its story - and it stands remarkably well. |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 15th, 2008|07:12 pm] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | At the desk | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | cheerful | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Playford's "Millfield" - The Carnival Band | ] |
I've been clearing out past recordings from the Sky+ hard drive (memo to self: watch and delete, or burn to DVD - don't just let the stuff pile up!) and found a couple of the Supersizers Go... series. This is an odd show: it pretends to be a look at food from various periods of British history over the past 500 years (Tudor, Victorian etc.) but seems more a backdrop for Giles Coren and Sue Perkins to do a costumed comedy double-act.
The two progs I'd saved – or more correctly, hadn't deleted yet – were "Restoration" and "Regency." Probably my notion was that the Restoration one would be useful for Blood's Ruby (it wasn't), and the Regency one was recorded by accident.
Hey ho, once again ye olde laddish observations were trotted out: Oo, look, they drank ale all the time so they must have been sloshed all the time… One of the experts, food writer and chef Allegra McEvedy, described the all-day ale for the Restoration episode thus: "that's small-beer, it's the weaker one, about 3½ percent…" In fact 3½-4 percent is the strength of some regular session bitters; small beer runs between only about half-a-percent or maybe one. It's called 'small' for a reason.
On the subject of drinking beer all day, Sue Perkins had this to say:"I have been off my face since 9 o'clock this morning, and whilst it's a good idea to drink two litres a day, I don't think it's that good an idea to drink two litres of ale a day…" If 2 litres – about 4 pints – of 3½ percent beer spread over the course of a 16-hour waking day is enough to make her that tiddly, she has a real problem, and should stay well away from the Munich Oktoberfest…
The reason ale was drunk all the time was that drinking straight water could and did kill you, while ale-making involves boiling, which germs don't like, and fermentation produces alcohol, which germs also don't like. Even so, I suspect that any form of period ale was weaker than most modern equivalents – you certainly got drunk and threw up (the Sumerians, Babylonians and Egyptians left enough catty remarks about that in cuneiform and hieroglyphics) but you probably had to swill down more for the effect. My own notion about the whys and wherefores is based on the use of hops. This additive gave more flavour and that attractive bitterness, but also acted as a bactericide and preservative. Unhopped ale became undrinkable in a matter of days, which is why alewives brewed at least once or twice a week. Once the stuff was able to sit around for a while, the yeasts had longer to turn sugar into alcohol and CO², producing a stronger, gassier brew known as beer. Beer gave the same effect as ale, but now you had to drink less to get there. Oh yes, and all the extra gas meant that you could fart tunes.
There was a lot more laddish stuff, including valiant attempts at over-eating from a dozen plates or supersized servings. Olio Podrido, a sort of multi-meat casserole based on a recipe in The Accomplish't Cook (1660) by Robert May, had everything but the kitchen sink in it, and needed two servers to carry the monstrous basin to the table. From the look of it, another few hours of cooking wouldn't have hurt either.
Though these huge dishes were indeed a demonstration of wealth and conspicuous consumption, in period context they were also meant to feed many more than the 4-8 people of a Supersizer reconstruction, and over more meals than just the one. The modern equivalent is to go into a restaurant and order everything on the menu, because if you're not supposed to eat it all then why's it all printed out for you?
Because you're supposed to make a choice, that's why – a concept which gets dropped out of reconstructed period dining more often than not.
As for Coren peeing into a bucket in the corner of the dining-room, well, maybe at a men-only dinner, but when ladies were present, it just wasn't done. There would have been a health risk – that of someone taking offence on milady's behalf, challenging the pee-er to a duel and turning them into a human kebab. Safer to go to the closet…
The Regency episode also contained what looked like a deliberate-error-for-effect; the reason why, I don't know, but the error was one I could check. From Coren: "In the kitchen, Rosemary (Shrager, chef and cookery teacher) is rustling up a very British dinner. The first recipe for Yorkshire Pudding is found in Hanna Glasse's book The Art of Cookery (1747). (The first recipe for "dripping pudding," same ingredients and same cooking method but without the regional name, appears in The Whole Duty of a Woman (1737), ten years earlier.) Her recipe requires the beef and pudding to be cooked for two hours…" No it doesn't. How do I know? Because I have a copy of The Art of Cookery, from Prospect Books who publish a range of, among other things, facsimile period cookbooks. (I've got the May facsimile as well.) Even though several of the other pudding recipes have a cooking time, the Yorkshire pud doesn't: 'hours', never mind something as specific as 'two hours', doesn't appear. Instead the recipe just has that usual period estimate, "let it cook on the fire till you think it is nigh enough," after which it's finished under the spitted roast, to catch the savoury drippings and "turn a fine brown."
Their roast (it looks like about 4 lbs of rolled sirloin) didn't deserve any two hours (30 minutes per pound) either. In a modern oven, it should get about an hour, though oven-cooked meat is described by Ben Rogers in Beef and Liberty (2003) as "not roasted, but half-baked, half-braised." The unfortunate TV cut of beef did get the full two hours in the oven, got dried out and overdone, and was rightly compared by Coren to a chunk of firewood.
He'd have liked the authentic version better. Beef at this period was spit-roasted in front of an open fire, turned constantly, often by clockwork – a spit-jack was one of the earliest kitchen machines – and basted constantly by a roast-cook with an experienced eye for when the meat was done. The difference in finished product was probably like that between an oven-roasted chicken and one from a rotisserie (and I know which I prefer…!)
In addition, a metal spit big enough to handle large joints transmits a lot of heat right through the centre of the meat, cooking it from the inside as well, and that will definitely speed up the process. A modern food writer like Elizabeth Luard (in European Peasant Cookery (1986)) calls for about 15 minutes per pound, in an oven starting at 425°F/220°C and reducing to 400°F/200°C after the first twenty minutes to give rosy rare beef. Glasse, however, writes "To roast a piece of beef of about ten pounds will take an hour and a half at a good fire." That's only about 9 minutes per pound, and suggests that her 'good fire' was not only very hot but the massive spit was conducting that heat right to the core of the joint, because Rogers's book doesn't mention that historical beef was notably bloody.
If you haven't seen The Supersizers go…, keep an eye open for it; the programme is quite good fun. But it's not terribly informative, the accuracy is open to question, and there's a constant need to keep a cruet handy - because you'll need to take things about this cookery show with a big pinch of salt. |
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