Poll #1498589 Oranges and Lemons
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 48

What does the great bell at Bow say?

Tags: music

This evening's treat was a performance of Handel's Messiah at the ENO, courtesy of the kind offices of the_alchemist. I enjoyed it thoroughly; the staging was mostly underwhelming (admittedly, I have high standards - it was by no means bad) with some standout points. The high point of the evening, for me, was seeing Sophie Bevan (soprano) singing I Know That My Redeemer Liveth flat on her back in a hospital bed, surrounded by rows of corpses on plexiglass biers. Which then woke up slowly while Brindley Sherratt (bass) sang Behold, I Tell You A Mystery. I'm not nearly educated enough to be able to comment on the music, beyond having enjoyed it immensely, so I shall comment on the theatrical aspects instead.

Technically, it was good, though using a mirror-shiny floor was a Brave Decision - and anything shiny enough to send reflections into the dome of the Coliseum is SHINY. It takes quite a bit of technical skill to combine that and Stage Clutter with gauze and front projection, but they pulled it off, and despite the reflectivity the production didn't even come close to looking too polished and glittery.

They didn't go for a continuous visual narrative, which was sensible; doing that would have come rather too close to dumb-show, and detracted from the focus on the music. Instead, we had the principal singers enacting a few scenes here and there, and a lot of interesting but not obtrusive group action for the rest of it.

Tags: music, theatre

Jock 'No, that really is his name' Stirrup, who is the UK's official chief militarist, has carefully explained why it's all our fault that our brave lads and lasses are dying in Afghanistan without actually having toppled the Taliban, offed the opium barons, and abolished Al-Qaeda.

Apparently, they get disenheartened and upset when the GBP starts thinking they might not actually be doing any good over there, they might not be able to provide a pony in every Afghan back yard, and they might actually be encouraging foreigners to dislike our country (and potentially try to blow bits of it up) rather than spreading goodwill.

Nothing to do with the military establishment's reluctance to give them adequate housing, helicopters, injury compensation, or even body armour, then. Nothing to do with the political leadership's insistence on the ludicrous idea that we have to fight a land war in Asia to avoid fighting a land war in Aldgate. Nothing to do with the way they and their allies keep blowing up wedding parties, killing innocent people, and encouraging the locals to use the Coalition forces as pawns in inter-tribal warfare.

Seriously, though - I appreciate the importance of morale when fighting a war. I just don't think that we ought to be fighting wars as a general principle; I don't think we are doing anyone any good fighting this specific war; and I haven't seen anything to convince me that they even know what winning would look like, let alone how to get there.

And I am damned if I am going to be told to shut up and cheer.

ACM Stirrup added: "Support for our service men and women is indivisible from support for this mission.

"Our people know that they can succeed, that we'll only fail if we choose to fail. We owe it to them, and to those we've lost, not to make that choice."

Indivisible, eh? Would you care to substantiate that allegation, because it's about to be arrested for vagrancy...

As for his second para, this is the classic loser's streak philosophy. It doesn't matter how much you've lost; it only matters that you win in the end. And the only way to do that is to keep doubling down.

If he were only spending his own money - or his own blood - then I wouldn't care. But he's throwing away taxpayers' money, the tattered vestiges of the UK's good international name, and a lot of other peoples' lives. Even if only Coalition soldiers had died, that would be completely unacceptable.

And now he's asking us to help him do it. No, actually, he isn't asking... he's telling us off for not helping, and explaining that it's our duty. From the same BBC article, one David Wakefield says: "The Taliban is not going to defeat us militarily, but we want the same patience, courage and discipline that soldiers show here from the public at home."

Sorry, mate. Ain't signed nothing, ain't getting paid, ain't going to surrender my judgement to anyone - especially not anyone with the kind of track record the UK military establishment has racked up by now. So you can fuck right off.

Tags: pacifism, politics

Does anyone let supermarket checkout assistants pack for them? I suppose it's not so bad if you're using a trolley till, but even then they're likely to use too many carrier bags and pack things in the wrong order, because they have no incentive not to.

I don't really do Christmas, and don't send (or care about getting) Christmas cards, but I do make them for other people to send. If you give me a small amount of money (£1 per card for these coloured ones, digitally printed with a high-quality inkjet on good recycled card) then I will make you some. You'll need to supply your own envelopes, but the cards are A6 and will thus fit perfectly into standard C6 envelopes you can get anywhere.

This year's designs are below the cut. [Edit: Hanukkah cards have also been requested. I shall see what I can do tomorrow.]
( Read more... )

Tags: art

From today's Guardian: Most creationists in the UK are not religious.

Tags: religion

I was looking through Jane Grigson's book English Food, and caught a reference to Victorian celebrity chef (and inventor of the kitchen timer) Alexis Soyer:

The French chef of the Reform Club, the great Alexis Soyer, caused a sensation by nobly going over to Ireland in the potato famine to save Irish souls with his soup (like most benevolent soups of the time, it was not very nutritious).

Obviously, Jane Grigson is not to be argued with over statements like that any more than Elizabeth David is. I was curious about just how not-very-nutritious it was, though, so I went looking for the recipe.
( recipes and comparisons )

Tags: food

Again this year, I'm wearing a white poppy rather than a red one.

The white stands for pacifism and peace activism: the idea that, because a great many people die or are injured in wars, or have their livelihoods and families destroyed, we should therefore not have any wars.

This concept, as Chesterton said, has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.

In the meantime, peace activists around the world will continue to do the things they've always done: drive ambulances, defuse bombs, roll bandages, fly SAR helicopters, drag illegal arms deals into the public eye, expose defence boondoggles, challenge war crimes, work with wounded soldiers, teach communities about each others' lives, and speak truth to power.

Tags: pacifism

Twice recently, I've been researching something and come across a stray reference to something from another research project altogether.

As I was reading through Hunter's history of papermaking, a footnote directed me to Närrische Weissheit und Weise Narrheit: oder Ein Hundert so Politische als Physicalische, Mechanische,und Mercantilische Concepten und Propositionen, by Johann Joachim Becher (1682). This is, indeed, the same Becher who wrote (in Physica Subterranea, pub. 1703) something that used to delight me during my undergraduate years:

The chemists are a strange class of mortals, impelled by an almost insane impulse to seek their pleasure among smoke and vapour, soot and flame, poisons and poverty: yet among all these evils I seem to live so sweetly, that would I die if I would change places with the Persian king.

The second is the great cannon Zam-Zammah, in Lahore, mentioned in Khushwant Singh's History of the Sikhs, and which I first encountered in the opening scene of Kim twenty years ago. It amuses me that the name has since become a slang term for a penis.

Tags: history of science

I strongly recommend this Guardian/CiF article by Arundhati Roy to all of you.

Tags: politics, signal amp

I have two of these - I'll be putting them into my Etsy shop shortly, unless anyone wants to jump in first. Comments screened, since it's nearly Christmas shopping time.

They're made from artist's mountboard, with six or so layers of acrylic and varnish, so they're lightweight, as strong as you'd normally expect non-metal jewellery to be, and waterproof.

Tags: art

I've posted a spoileriffic review over at the other blog, for those who're interested and have read it.

Tags: books

It's well up to the standard set by past WoT books, and with the introduction of Brandon Sanderson the pace moves faster and More Things Happen. Several long-standing plot threads get cleared up (some of them offstage, thank goodness), a couple of long-term goals get achieved, a couple of characters who've been around since the early books die, and the action scene near the end is more fun to read than Dumai's Wells and less morally icky.

On the other hand, as far as character goes Sanderson paints with a very broad brush, which tends to amplify a lot of the rather tedious gender stuff which has always been a feature of the series. I'm not using "rather tedious" in the same sense as most fans, of course - it's blatantly obvious that the books are about male-female relations, and I have no problems with this. It's a fascinating subject to write about. On the other hand, Jordan always just kept hammering away with the same sledgehammer, over and over again. Yes, we know that often people don't talk to each other and thus cause problems. Yes, we know that sometimes people just try to manipulate each other rather than communicating, and that that's silly. The key words are 'sometimes' and 'often'. In this series, they're all at it, all the time, and it gets really rather depressing. Sanderson's doing the same thing still (though, refreshingly, we do get some actual information exchange between characters - some trust and some basic competence, and that's why the plot is suddenly moving) and it's still annoying.

Tags: books

So there's been a huge mess on; you probably all know about it by now. Bunch of unethical corporate cowboys, gang of lawyers, Byzantine (not to say Kafkaesque) legal proceedings obsessed with letter rather than spirit, left-wing newspaper fighting back by sticking to the letter of Parliamentary procedure and making the spirit do triple reverse somersaults.

Not my field, so I'm not going to comment further on that, but I have just read the Minton Report (PDF link) and have some comments to make about the chemistry involved.

Most of them are unrepeatable, but can be summarized as "they did WHAT? WHY? What the BLOODY HELL did they think they were doing?"

In short, they found a nice-looking process to refine their partially treated crude, decided that using an actual chemical plant and some sensible procedures was too much like work, churned all the stuff together in the hold of a ship, and then slung in some more caustic soda for good measure, presumably on the age-old pharmaceutical principle of "well, if a little bit is good for you, a lot must be much better, right?"^[1]. After that, they separated out the bit they wanted^[2] and threw away the rest.

"The rest" in this case consisted of a total of about 285 metric tons of foul water, naphtha, caustic soda, and mercaptans. Mercaptans, also known as thiols, are the foulest-smelling substances known to humanity. One afternoon at Cranfield, I accidentally let about 10 cc of a harmless mercaptan loose from the fume cupboard (I'd been working with them too long, and couldn't smell them any more) and the entire School of Engineering spontaneously evacuated itself. It took me half an hour and a lot of waving the MSDS around to convince the builders working on the outside of the building that it was safe to go back to work.

When I say "harmless", I mean that it wasn't toxic, and that in those concentrations all it did was smell bad - we didn't get anyone choking and coughing, vomiting, or crying uncontrollably. That was mostly because it was a nice clear summer's day, with a good strong breeze, and it dispersed quickly. Most mercaptans will do all that, and are poisonous too; the ones released at Abidjan were. Oh, and there's another problem, too; when exposed to acid, mercaptans turn into hydrogen sulphide. H₂S isn't just the smell of rotten eggs; it's corrosive and highly toxic. UK Occupational Health guidelines allow exposure to 10 parts per million H₂S for 15 minutes. If the concentration goes over above about 20 ppm, it stops being possible to smell it, which means you breathe a lot more of it. The Minton report goes into a lot of detail on the dangers of these compounds, and the only other thing I'll highlight from there is that the waste dump is extremely environmentally damaging as well as toxic. Burning and salting the fields does not even make the list in comparison.

And they dumped this crap right there. If you're keen on the letter of regulations, it's possible to make an argument that what they did was not illegal yet; on the other hand, that's missing the point rather. It's also possible (and wearisomely inevitable) to make the eternal "That was the blokes we hired - nuffink to do with us, guv" argument, but I do hope none of my readers will insult our collective intelligence by doing that.

Trafigura have stated in several places since then that standard handling and disposal practices were followed. This is what we technically call "an outright lie". It may be standard if you happen to be a cowboy with neither common sense nor empathy; it may be possible to argue that that sort of slapdash unconcern comes as standard in the business; it does nobody any credit to do so.

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[1] It isn't. It made the reaction less efficient and more wasteful, and made it produce a much higher proportion of more toxic volatiles in the waste.
[2] Which still contained plenty of mercaptans. This procedure doesn't even get more than half of them out.

Tags: politics, science

mirabehn, mostlyacat, and I took the high road south to Brighton yesterday, for the joyous and long overdue occasion of angelislington and trukkle's wedding. It was an entirely delightful day, finishing in the Druid's Head (good beer, if a limited selection - Pride, Sussex Best, and Bombardier) by way of Brighton Pier. The sea air did us all good, and mirabehn was in transports and raptures of delight over finding a city with clean unpolluted air, at least on the seafront and in the south lanes.

We also stopped off for lunch at Terre a Terre, which I'd recommend to anyone^[1]. I had "Himmel und Erde" - "Potato, apple, onion and cheddar latkes with frozen fresh horseradish sour cream, golden and crimson pickled beet slaw doused with caraway and dill oil, finished with apple snappers." It very much lived up to the name - earthy and sweet, with a taste rising to heights of deliciousness. My only quibble would be that the promised "apple snappers" turned out to be one thin slice of dried apple. Rather nice still, but neither snappy nor plural. The chunky chips I ordered on the side were pretty much perfect (though definitely approaching the extreme upper limit of how chunky a chip can get before becoming a wedge), but the promised aioli was in fact slightly garlicky mayonnaise, which is really not the same thing at all.

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[1] At least, anyone who isn't an obligate carnivore.

Tags: elly, food

Best wishes and blessings from Iona. More when I get home.

At 5am last night, I finally gave up on chasing through odd translations of dodgy early-modern Irish history, and went to bed. Nevertheless, I'm going to share the reason for it and the results with you anyway.

While writing this post (last in the Tigana re-read series) I had to look up the Hen Ogledd, which led me through the usual odd byways to the history of Ireland and the Partholonians. A phrase in the Wikipedia entry caught my eye -

But Delgnat was unrepentant and insisted that Partholón himself was to blame, as leaving them alone together was like leaving honey before a woman, milk before a cat, edged tools before a craftsman or meat before a child and expecting them not to take advantage. This is recorded as the first adultery and the first jealousy in Ireland. The island they lived on was named Inis Saimera after Saimer, Dalgnat's dog.

On one level - oh, sweet misogyny, how we have missed you. OH WAIT. On the other, though - edged tools before a craftsman, as an example of paramount temptation? That rocks. ( So I went looking for the original source. )

Tags: history, language, poetry

Or, Why filling in the forms really is hard work, and why the process sent my mental health spiralling downwards.

A lot of you, O my readership, have been on government benefits or had a partner or close friend who has, and for you there is no need to explain that it really is unpleasant, counterproductive, interminable, and soul-destroying. On the other hand, there's a pervasive sense amongst some sections of the British public (and the media) that benefits are money for old rope; all you have to do is fill in a couple of forms, turn up to a couple of interviews, and then you're living the life of Riley.

( So here's how it works. )

Tags: dwp, esa, personal, politics

As promised! Click through for the full version - "All Sizes" will give you the huuuge one.

Tags: art, i claudius

Not complete; assistance appreciated. Source: Show of Hands, "Roots". Inspired by this LibCon article, quoting from the News of the World:

…local council candidates John Coombes, of Maidenhead, Berks, and Dick Hamilton of Marlow, Bucks, were sitting with others around a brazier.
Hamilton’s ghettoblaster blared out songs supporting Hitler and attacking “ni**ers”.

And a fascist thug said his hope and dream
Is events where everybody's white as cream.
Call it a festival? What d'you call
Events where no-one sings at all

And everyone stares at the same small dream
Losing at cricket and letting off steam
With piss-weak lager and combat boots
Whingers and thugs in cheap-ass suits

And we oughta be ashamed of all these trends
Of the way we treat our cousins and friends
Without their cooking or their sounds

How will we know where we're all bound?
I've lost St. George and the Union Jack
That's my flag too and I want it back

Laugh away boys, let them go
On and on in their lonely show
We've gained more than we'll ever know
From the open shores of England.

Tags: filk, politics, racism