There i am reading rec.humor.funny and I encounter a ROT13 joke. I can’t find the ROT13 button/choice in the menu structure of Thunderbird. Has this arcane skill been lost to us? <sarcasm>I must compose a letter of complaint to the Times. I think they should know about such an egregious omission</sarcasm>.
Marmalade Pudding
Medium Pudding Mixture:
- 4oz. Margarine
- 4oz. Sugar
- 2 Tablesp. Water
- 6oz. self-raising flour
- 2 eggs
- 1/4 Teasp. salt
- Flavouring
Method:
cream fat and sugar, beat in the whisked eggs, stir in the flour and salt with added water, Steam or bake.
For Marmalade Pudding:
Add one large tablesp. of marmalade to the foundation mixture. Steam and serve with Marmalade sauce.
To Steam:
-
- use a steamer over a pan of boiling water.
- Have a well fitting lid.
- Keep water boiling and steaming all the time
-
- Place the pudding basin in a saucepan with boiling water.
- Water should come half way up the sides of the basin
- Keep the water boiling, and as it boils away, fill up with
boiling water, but do not wet the top of the pudding
- Steam in a pressure cooker, according to instructions.
Time for steaming is about 1.5 hours for a pudding made from 6-8oz. flour.
Turning out: A light pudding breaks easily, so loosen it gently from the sides of the basin with a flexible round-ended blade, which should be pressed against the side of the basin, not the pudding.
When loose, cover the basin with a hot dish and invert quickly.
A good pudding may be marred by careless serving and enhanced by dainty dishing.
To Bake:
Use a pie dish, cake tin, soufflé tin, fireproof dish, ring mould, small moulds or deep bun tins.
Grease well.
Line the base of any flat-bottomed tin so that pudding will turn out easily.
Bake in a moderate oven (350f or No. 4)
Small moulds may be baked at a slightly higher temperature than large ones.
Time required: 30-40 minutes for large and 15-20 for small moulds.
Lots of cups
Today was of course christmas dinner, but over the last few days (yesterday included) I’ve been struggling with an upgrade to SuSE linux 10. I stupidly installed the commercial version, instead of the open one. X doesn’t work correctly (swapping VTs crashed the X server – this is apparently a bug with Xorg when compiled with gcc 4.0.2 [laptop dell inspiron 500m, 855 intel graphics). fixing the missing packages took a while. The only reason I noticed was that xgettext was missing. Turns out that there’s a bunch of packages missing (ncft, gettext-devel). For someone who cares about having a decent ftp client and be able to use xgettext (I mean what the fuck are you people thinking – do you even care about the rest of the world. You pretty much can’t compile a single open source project without xgettext).
Anyway, rant over for the time being, on to the fixes. I made use of a page on the jem report, which got me a convenient set of Yast sources to add the missing packages.
A partial fix for X was to download the fairlite x drivers, the problem is that I lose 3d acceleration. Lose one thing, gain another! Frustrating to say the least.
Dermot came back from Holidays
and a round of applause… He got engaged. Good for the both of them.
Toe the line
Or: Gyles Brandreth shame on you!
on the generic complaints program ‘Room 101‘ on the BBC, he claimed that phrase’s origin was from the Houses of Parliament where they have a pair of red lines separating the opposite sides of the room. The problem is that it is a slight confusion. He was mixing up the ‘Thin Red Line‘ phrase and the toeing the line definition. No-one in the houses of parliament would have been bare-footed, so they would have never ‘toed the line‘. The origin of the phrase is most likely military or naval, where people were required to line up at various times for inspection. Convention claims the navy, as most common crewmen on a boat were bare-footed.
The lines in the House of Commons themselves are actually quite thick, and are positioned two sword lengths apart from each other. The principle being that you stayed behind the line during a debate, and thus could not attack your opponent on the opposite side. Such was the animosity of the two sides during certain periods of England’s history that this principle was created, and it is still adhered to.
The origin of ‘Thin Red Line‘ is slightly different. In the mid 19th Century there was an understanding between officers and men that British Infantry would never be asked to stand and face an enemy onslaught in less than three ranks, four was more common. The retreat would be sounded rather than allowing this to happen. At the Battle of Balaclava on October 25th 1864, Colin Campbell’s 93rd Highlanders (Argyll and Sutherland) stood in just 2 ranks and faced a Russian Cavalry charge. It was here that the phrase originated.
There is a similar, but not identical phrase ‘Coming up to Scratch‘, which refers to the scratch line that bare-knuckled boxers were supposed to get to before resuming fighting once they’d been knocked down. If they didn’t come up to scratch, then they were out of the fight.
In Other news…
Joan Cosgrave passed away at about 8.15pm on the 11th September 2005. My condolences go out to her family at their time of loss.
Vac
Off on holidays to France today. I will try not to update this before I get back.
See ya later.
New Phone?
At the start of January I got a new phone. Less than a month later the phone, along with my jacket, was stolen in a night club – from the cloak room. After several weeks of to-ing and fro-ing with the phone insurance, they refused to replace my phone. Wasted money, that insurance policy I tell you. Apparently because it was within a month of having obtained my phone, it was far more than a formality. I’ll have to remember that in future.
On to new phones. I had a Sony Ericsson V800. Nice phone, but really bad battery life. I’ve been looking at the S700, which is a better phone (battery life-wise) but a friend was telling me of his new XDAIIs (an O2 phone). But you will lose 3G capabilities comes the cry. Lets kick in with a reality check here – 3G coverage in Ireland is cities and major towns only. Lets talk phone reception – I have virtually No coverage when I’m in the Castlegregory area with Vodafone. It has not improved in the last 4 years, while my little sister has had no issues with her O2 phones.
There is only one kicker. Calls abroad are covered in my minutes on Vodafone, which means that calls to the sister and others are significantly cheaper than they would be otherwise. If O2 would just stretch to that then I would completely swap over to them in a heartbeat.
Ah yes, geeks with their toys.
Mark Kingston is gone
There was a phone call late tonight from someone that nobody recognized.
A very good friend of mine was killed in a car crash in Roscrea.
This brings to two the number of close friends I have who were killed in road traffic accidents.
Hug an old person today
Yesterday my next door neighbor called over. He’s getting on in years, pushing on to 84 at this point. His problem was that he had seen some young lad in his house causing problems. We have a problem with local kids breaking into houses and robbing them blind, so a local kid in the house would not be totally surprising. The cops were called, people came, itwas al much excitement but no-one was found. About an hour later I left him, under the impression that we had convinced him that there was no-one in the house. About an hour later he came knocking on the door again. He again repeated that he had seen someone in the house. By this time my sister’s boyfriend was visiting so we both went to the house and went through it with a fine tooth-comb. No kids. We’re not completely convinced that there was anyone in the house in the first place, but we again feel that he deserves listening to again, just in case.
You have to bear in mind by this point, he is really agitated, and scared. It’s an awful sight to see a person in such a state of distress, and we were trying all that we could to make him feel safe and secure.
By this stage he’s spent the best part of the afternoon in the house, and I’ve been feeding him tea, and listening to his stories of the past. He’s really really, really difficult to understand, the conversation is slow and painful, but I feel I understand what he’s saying, even if it’s not completely in one piece.
We seem fine until later in the evening. He arrives at the door at about 7.30 pm, absolutely scared out of his wits, saying that the kids have been in his house and have been harassing him when he was up town. I settled him down, he smoked a few cigarettes, had a couple of cups of tea, and I went next door, torch in hand making sure that there was no-one in the house. It took until about 10.30 before he felt he was able to go back to his own house, so I followed him in and practically walked him up to his bed, all the time assuring him that there was no intruder in the house and that I would be in the house for as long a it took him to feel happy. He insistede that he was OK, and practically walked me out of the house.
The next morning, I had my shower and no sooner had I the towel on my head then there was a knock on the door. He was there, telling me that there he had encountered three women sitting on the sofa in his living room, that he could not open the door and had rushed out to the house. Again, I settled him down; a cup of tea, and he smoked a cigarette. By this time, I had completely figured out that he was imagining the intruders in the house. Afger about an hour he left to visit one of the neighbors, and I went next door to have a look around the house. He had left the front door open, and had jammed the key in the back door. He had been so f**king frightened that he had left the house through the front door, which is something he never, ever does.
Long and short of it, he’s gone dotty. It’s only been in the last few days. The cause could be a change in medication, a reduction in the amount of booze he’s drinking, seeing ghosts; I just don’t fucking know. What I do know, is that if he has more visitors than the home help for a solitary half an hour during the day that he might not be in the situation he is in. I would hope to christ that it’s just a temporary aberration, and that he’ll be better soon. He’s living on his own, he’s lonely, and for some reason, I’m able to understand what he’s saying better than a hell of a lot of other people, which makes me even sadder, as it only emphasizes the fact that while I’ve only been in contact with him for a short period.
It only exemplifies my statement. Hug an old person today, because they need it.