Not dead -- assisting the human with culinary and other enquiries

It's been a quietish summer on this front. Bar December's outbreak of fluvially-challenged equine spam (is this a particularly gelatinous form of foot and mouth disease?) and the human hogging the computer to wrestle with the problem of jokes that are no longer funny once you try to explain them, I've been doing not much other than observe the decline and fall of the cherry tomato empire, soon to be supplanted by the upstart snake beans.

I ventured into the kitchen this evening to find the human engaged in trying to fit the remains of a packed of pasta into a jar that had held what is euphemistically named "Cranberry drink," and couldn't help climbing up to investigate.

The human, meanwhile, wouldn't stop muttering that his experiment had finally proved wrong the angry socialist flatmate from a half-remembered John Birmingham novel, who claimed that the manufacture of pasta to be two centimetres too long to store in an empty juice jar went to show the lengths capitalism will go to to conspire against universal happiness. He may have been right about capitalism, it seems, but I can't find the reference -- googling "felafel socialist empty juice pasta jar" produces some strange results!