Snow and shadows

Snow seems to do extraordinary things to humans -- cause projectile fights, close airports, that sort of thing, but I rather like it. There are new friends to play with:

old friends just back from hotter climes:

a refreshing lack of Saturday afternoon riffraff:

and ample opportinuty for absurdist signage.

Snow!

Here we go again -- it's officially cold, and the human is finding better and better excuses not to ride to work -- though paradoxically he seems less worried about doing so late at night on machines belonging to street furniture monopolies...
The more fashion-conscious amongs our four-legged friends may be feeling the need for one of these.
Not sure if that will be much help for this fine specimen, though I certainly wouldn't mess with it!

It's official: yeast works faster in hot weather!

Not all snow is static

or pride (and a cold bottom in an unheated loo) comes before a fall!

Of velocipedes and boopotamy

I have been much neglecting my writings lately, sadly, as there has been much to do keeping the human on the straight and narrow. This became urgent three weeks ago when he decided to embark with an intrepid colleague on an autumn jaunt along the Canal du Nivernais, braving rain and pinot noir in pursuit of the Burgundinian sublime.

Sweet showers rightly belong in April -- it must have been the humans' decision to put up for the night in a pilgrims' residence that led both rain and gravitation to make the experience as authentic as possible. Complain they might, but Romanesque basilicae are designed to be built on top of hills that are intended to be walked up, in the dark and if possible on one's knees.

Sunday lunch of wild boar stew and complimentary pâté sounds tempting -- sorry Fidel! -- but it was quite a relief to have a weekend to myself in a nice warm kitchen. Greetings from canalside cows notwithstanding, I think I got the better end of the deal.

Nuit blanche I: Dancing at the Centquatre

On a more cheerful note from a slightly earlier era, long live the return of the bal populaire -- dancing 1940s style complete with braces, net veils and accordions! The place may have once been a morgue but it seems no less jolly for the experience, and to top it off there's a late-night bookshop selling postcards of old photos captioned with truly appalling puns -- who but the French could pour half their science budget into la fission de la tomme?

Fame precedes me!

As do vertical gardens attached to the front façade of menswear chains...

Voyeurism on the ukulele!

Culinary rifts in the space-time continuum

The human had been muttering for some time about something called a kitchen clickalong, which I'd been praying would be something reasonably innocuous, like snapping one's fingers in time to the exhaust fan while watching the toast burn. No such luck I'm afraid -- it turns out to be something resembling a parody of/improvement on obnoxious real-time TV recipe shows, with the added interest of being able to receive instructions and ask questions in real time via a blog.

Never one to make life simple when it could be complicated, the human wanted to follow a clickalong based rather a long way away, giving the options of making provençal fish stew for breakfast, or missing the point entirely by following live instructions after the event. Then struck an even better idea: take the list of ingredients distributed beforehand, harass the patient staff of the local pescatory emporium for a sea bass equivalent, and assemble them by elimination to produce something resembling dinner.

Voilà: Not identical to the official version but not too far off it; and we've ended up with a ponus potful of seafood stock fur future projects. So there. The sauce didn't emulsify as well as it could have, but was great fun pounding it!

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?

And now for something fully sick...

First the human decided to become a dogfather, now everyone's doing it! There's a fluffy-tailed cat watching me from half way up the stairs as I type, and next thing I know another favourite human is talking of rescuing the following:
Sausage hound, 9 months old, black gloss with front flame job and white highlights, long wheelbase, lowered. Stock exhaust system with oscillating rear spoiler. Custom-made ramp recommended to protect rear end on large bumps. Will run on paprika blend but answers to Pudding.No promises, mind you!

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!

Nuclear disarmament, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the eggplant

"Perhaps not in my lifetime," says the master of sartorial understatement, but it's comforting to think that this time the guy in charge might actually want there to be less nuclear weapons floating around the place. Nearly as comforting, in fact, as seeing eggplants start to ripen even past the date where it gets dark far, far too early in the afternoon.

The following exhibits support this hypothesis:

(a) with apologies to the person, place or thing it was ripped off:(b) with apologies for the amateur camerawork:

Q. E. D.

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!

A Hippo's Château is his, well, Château

DON'T MESS WITH HORACE!

I've been resting

in the handkerchief pocket of the cream, the white, the off-white, the ivory or the beige, no less.

I faithfully promise that this is the closest this blog will ever come to talking about cricket.

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.