I'm back -- with pickled cabbage!

I've been resting for a little while, but as the weather gets colder it's time to emerge from hibernation to continue the production of jam and to expand my repertoire into the domain of preserved vegetables. As with all good plans at world domination, sauerkraut is only a start -- as with bicycles and as a general rule also with accordions, there's little sense in restraining oneself to one variety of pickled cabbage when others are being produced as we speak in the very same city...
Results soon.

Post-festive-season-indulgence recovery

Though at least I'm not in the same boat as this poor blue comrade:

Those who live in glass cases...

Voyeurism on the ukulele!

Indeed!

This thoughtful and heartwarming public service announcement was one of my highlights for a mid-week break in the mountains, though the humans seemed more impressed with the gallery the café was attached to. Magic Pudding indeed. Two days away and they were deep into hound withdrawal -- nothing for the humans but they couldn't stop themselves from bringing back gifts for him.

More food than I want to think about, a four-poster bed in the Shakespeare room (no less) and a commodiously triangular bath -- albeit served by a patent chrome soap dispenser above the sink requiring either sixty squirts of soap (rounded, for reasons that can only be divulged by the perpetrators, to the nearest twenty squirts) or dismantling with a 3mm allen key in order for the lids to be unscrewed.

Hills there may be in the mountains, but bringing one's bicycle at least ensures one has the appropriate tools!

On somewhat inconvenient aesthetic developments relating to well-intentioned implement substitution

This is not the first time that the jiggler siphon has been mentioned in these chronicles, nor in all likelihood will it be the last. However I must report that the human seems to be both pleased and slightly vexed with his latest escapade, resulting from an attempt to transfer nutrient-rich yeast sediment from a patent glass fermentation vessel onto a garden bed that continues to produce both fruiting and tuberous solanaceae well out of season.
Despite its alleged status as a supercooled liquid, glass is generally known to be brittle. What is less well-known is that over-enthusiastic siphon-priming can cause an almost perfectly circular section of fermentation vessel to detach itself, resulting in somewhat faster than planned egress of said intended fertiliser.
Aside from the obvious application of such an unintended carburation port (obvious, that is, to a being larger than either myself or the human), can anybody suggest either a new use or a means of returning this vessel to its zymurgic destiny?

Arr!

Greenwash

Time was when Nero fiddled while Rome burned -- a pursuit whose merits can be debated, perhaps, but rendered obsolete (in urban areas at least) by the advent of modern firefighting.
We do self-destruction differently here on the driest continent on earth. If you're going to go in for Oxbridge pastiches then you might as well do it properly -- no point watering the grass unless it's already raining!

Ancient Inventions and their Modern Applications, Part I: The Siphon

The siphon is a most wondrous device.The principle is simple: take a length of hose, stick one end in a full container, the other end in an empty container below it, prime thine hose, and thine liquid moves from one container to another as if by magic. It has helped me move home-brewed beer from a large glass container into suitably-sized bottles on several occasions in diverse corners of the world, and I shall toast the wise and creative Egyptians that invented it as soon as the next batch is ready to drink.

The bath is an equally wondrous device, and the ancients are also to be praised for inventing ablutions, part and parcel of last week's otherwise diligent trip to the country, by means of train, train, bus, and the most welcome and generous many-wheeled articulated conveyance of Monsieur Paul, Bathurst-based Monty Python fan and occasional transporter of hydrated lime.

Siphons come in many shapes and sizes: one excting encounter during the week was with the jiggler siphon, a commodious means for transferring fuel from jerrican to motor quadricycle with a minimum of said carburant transferred to soon-to-be-pastry-making hands. And for draining the soon-to-be-revealed-as diesel fuel from motor quadricycle back into jerrican, and ultimately for effecting final transfer of previously-revealed-to-be petrol (unleaded; 91 octane) into said eventually-to-be-restarted motor quadricycle. But I digress. The ancients, to my knowledge, preferred to place chariot wheels side-by-side rather than in tandem, and in lieu of the laborious and recreative functions of the modern motor quadricycle mainly employed slaves.

The combination of siphon and bathtub, on the other hand, is a great advancement for relaxing outdoor ablutions, obviating the need to carry water in buckets from the nearest convenient hot-water tap, cunningly designed not to take the thread of standard outdoor hose fittings. Procedure is as follows, assuming water tanks of sufficient repleteness and an audience composed solely of placid bovines and close friends:

1. Fit plug in laundry sink; fill sink to a suitable level at a temperature calculated to account for further heat losses in transmission.

2. Ensuring the level of the bath is below that of the sink, insert one end of any convenient hosepipe in each, while leaving the tap running. Any rise and fall between the two ends of the hose will be self-cancelling.

3. Prime hose, either by manual application of upper end of hose to tap outlet until suction begins in earnest, or by suction on lower end. Ensure upper end of hose is well submerged in sink.

4. Allow final water level in bath to be determined by Archimedes' principle, and enjoy requisite ablutions.

Stuffed chicken makeover

Rodney before:Rodney after:
Q.E.D.

Things humans do on the driest continent on Earth while pretending to write a thesis (I)

Activities planned for the one-night interval between one lot of marking and another

A Hippo's croissant is his château!

The human may still be running around after châtelaines, francophone or otherwise, but I have been engaged in more important battles!

I have nothing against ants, in general, especially when they feature in short stories. I'd love to have their uncanny sense of whether it's going to rain or not. But sharing my breakfast with them is another matter - especially when I've gone to the trouble of having a real live baker live in the house in order to keep up my Gallic delusions.

Surrounding your consumables with a moat may be an old Australian joke, but hey, mediaeval technology works. Ants can't swim. So there.

Raisons pour mon départ (I - Aquae Sextiae)

Et moi qui croyais que la France était restée malgré tout un état de droit...

Haloof or human?

The following photo, snapped by she whose travels make me green with envy, and whose cooking posts inspire hunger and jealousy in equal measure, should be evidence enough that hippos are social creatures. Dangerous at times, yes, especially to foolish bipeds, but we are civilised beings that like nothing better than bathing in congregation.

It will be of little surprise, then, that the human was far more amused than I by a recent encounter at the inexpensive and commodious HI hostel in Casablanca, site of the Hassan II Mosque, the world's second-largest. He kept talking about trying to find a certain Signor Ferrari, but in the end had to settle for being driven from the station in a bright red Fiat Uno.

Anyway, despite his pitiful efforts at speaking Arabic (a practice that he justified by claiming that he was hiding behind someone else's colonial past by speaking French), some visitors from Fes were kind enough to invite him to share their dinner. He was reluctant to join them at first--too busy reading Huysmans' A Rebours, I ask you!--and so had to be gently reminded that sharing meals was simply part of being human, whereas eating alone and keeping to oneself was to be a Haloof--a hippopotamus!

Not once did the (h)aloof human speak up in my defence, even though he's far less sociable than I am. My only revenge was that he ended up having a cold shower, but he'll get his come-uppance one of these days.

I point him, and all ungrateful humans, in the direction of horrible haloof Howard, whose final ingnominy was to refuse to concede to the inevitable until every last vote had been counted.

On bathing

It may be that it's winter again, it may be that the curtain-less French telephone shower (did I forget to warn you about that, o unsuspecting Christmas guests?) is starting to get on my nerves, or it may be a flash of self-satisfaction and/or hypocrisy at Australia finally ratifying the Kyoto Protocol. I have been fantasising about having a nice hot bath.

Off with the pet human to Morocco tomorrow where I fully intend to indulge in a hippo hammam, but my thoughts are strangely starting to turn back to Australia with its hot summer temperatures, chronic water shortages, and newly-confirmed status as the most energy-hungry nation per capita in the world.

In short, I wish to locate and clean a bathtub of the sort used as cattle troughs in dry paddocks, place it at a suitably commanding viewpoint, fill with water the night before and light a fire of red gum logs or other rare native hardwood underneath. The idea is that the next day the water is just right, and there are are just enough coals to keep the water hot. The bath is to be taken with a bottle of red wine and preferably the company of a like-minded, bath-loving, château-owning hippoess. Bathing can occur both by day, with a good book, and by night, as clouds of steam waft down the hill, and wisps of smoke drift upwards, engendering that authentic country smell native to toasted marshmallows and after-pub overcoats.

[Dsclaimer: I must thank the gentleman in the silly hat for kindly sending me the CAD-created rubber duck appearing above, and apologise if any of my environmental statements end up jeopardising his career as an architect.]