A friend's moving over from Ireland on Tuesday, but has unexpectedly been shat on from a great height by his expected landlady who has given the room he'd promised to take to someone else.

Anyone know of any possibilities? 'Cheap' would be good, 'not a hell hole' would also be good. East London would be useful, but not obligatory. He's a non-smoker, possibly lapsed but certainly well-behaved.

Recipe as requested by weegoddess.

Part 1: Take a generous pile of red lentils - I don't generally measure anything so I can't be more precise. Pour in a generous glug of soy sauce and a sprinkling of sea salt, and top up with cold water. Put it on to heat, and cook the lentils as you would normally - boil them for 15 minutes or so. I skim the foam off the top when it's boiling, but you don't have to if you can't be bothered. Around that point, add in a generous dose of sage and marjoram and leave it to simmer till Done.

Part 2: Take a moderate-to-generous amount of bacon, ham, or other dead pig product, chop it into small portions, and fry it up. When it's nice and hot, mix in some spices - I used smoked paprika and some rather nice urfa biber imported as a guest-gift by sunspiral. After a while, turn the heat up to 11, toss it around a bit, and pour in a large glug of red wine vinegar or suitable substitute (either red wine or balsamic vinegar work well) and let that bubble off in a fun dramatic manner. When that's glazed on and there's no liquid left the bacon is done, so set it aside till the lentils are done.

Part 3: Add part 2 to part 1, and stir them around on the heat till they reach a suitable consistency. Then serve!

Tags: food

The very rich are not like you and I.
No, they have more money.

Yes, this is a post about Boris Johnson. Feel free to skip.

A lot of the Boris-criticism-criticism I've been seeing lately can be more or less summed up as "don't hate him for being a posh Tory prat". After all, we wouldn't dream of saying that someone wasn't qualified for an elected position because they were too working-class, right?

The problem with that is that the two aren't equivalent. Because our Mayor has always been rich, he's always been privileged and insulated - he's been surrounded by other people of his own class, race, and wealth level to a greater extent than any council-estate hoodie, first at private school and then at Oxbridge. He's never been forced to work at something he didn't want to do, never run the risk of homelessness or bad credit, never had to live hand to mouth. (To the best of my knowledge, at least. I may be wrong about that. If so, please correct me.)

The fact that he went to Eton depresses me more than the Oxford education - after all, many people manage to get through Oxford without being ruined. (And I should stress that this isn't linked to party affiliation. At the moment, they're all posh gits.) But he was a member of the Bullingdon Club, like Cameron, there. For those of you not familiar with the term, they're a bunch of yobs who dress up in penguin costumes and go out to smash up restaurants.

So, like David Cameron (notorious for surrounding himself with others of his own background) he has a far smaller range of people he can identify with, empathise with, and relate to than someone like Ken Livingstone with a more rounded education and socialization. I'm not trying to say he can't, or that he has no interest in it - just that being a posh toff brings with it a lot of disadvantages when it comes to relating to ordinary people, and posh toffs are statistically much more likely to be out of touch with ordinary people than the rest of us are.

What I'd like to see - though there are more than a few problems with the idea - is a rule that nobody can stand for public office unless they've spent at least six months on Government benefits in the past.

Tags: politics

Ladbroke Grove.

Had a very pleasant evening at the theatre last night, courtesy of webcowgirl's invitation. National Theatre, Nicholas Hytner, Simon Russell Beale, GBS, what's not to like?

More comments here.

Tags: theatre

From the BBC, one of the most irritating weasel graphs I've seen recently. (US deaths in Iraq vs number of troops there.)

I've been wandering through a lot of discussions on the covers of SF&F books in the last few days - the old chestnut about "is this tacky or great?", "Will this put off new readers or will it keep the mundanes out of our genre?", and so on. I may work up a longer ramble on the subject, but I wanted to share my bogglement at one thing with you, O my readers.

Someone posted this image, showing the cover of his book, and asked for honest opinions.



Inexplicably, they didn't eviscerate him. There was not even any pointing and laughing. It's pretty good art, as fantasy art goes, but apparently that isn't a joke title or series name.

Tags: books, sf

My birthday celebrations, in the Pembury Tavern from around 5ish onwards. I confidently expect lots of people to be there, hopefully including you. Original invitation here.

Oh, and something I discovered yesterday - Richard Kadrey's novel Butcher Bird is available for free download. It's a well-written gore-filled story of a tattoo artist who gets dragged into a shadowy world of demons and monsters.

A couple of retired nuclear safety officers are suing CERN in a Hawaiian district court, claiming that the possibility of producing small black holes or clumps of strange matter are all too real and may destroy the Earth in pursuit of scientific knowledge. How I wish this was an April Fool story, but it's all too real.

Really, this kind of fuckwittery is ridiculous. In order to be scared of nano-black-holes, you need to believe that Hawking radiation isn't going to happen - otherwise, any black hole with less mass than the Earth will evaporate within a second or so. And these experiments take place, for fairly obvious reasons, in hard vacuum.

Something similar goes for strange matter - it can't eat and convert normal matter, at least without being specifically made to.

Tags: science

Steampunkish YA one-volume quest fantasy. It took me a while to twig that this was actually supposed to be a YA book, since that wasn't mentioned anywhere on the dustjacket (apart from the detail of our heroes being early teenage orphans), but once I shifted gears to that I could enjoy it.

He has some amazing ideas, but he's too clumsy about executing a lot of them - the 'clever' similarities to Victorian history look more like lazy copying, and his characterization doesn't live up to his worldbuilding. The world is filled with fun, amusing one-note characters.

Tags: books