After my tomato crop was wiped out in the summer, I decided to plant some carrots and broccoli to grow during the autumn. The broccoli's almost ready to eat, and we've got the steamer on standby!
This stuff usually retails for quite a pretty penny, and it's usually best cooked fresh from the garden. We've also got rocket salad growing too, so with luck, we'll end up spending very little for tastless food at the supermarket this summer!
I'll nail my colours to the mast: I'm a big fan of Barack Obama. He's not perfect: he's a politician after all, but I can't help being moved by his increrdible rhetoric, and the apparent transparency and fair play his campaign demonstrates.
Having said all that, Obama's not only winning this, but Hillary's losing it as well:
Obama might have similar faults, but I don't see him showing it yet. He has also turned a lot of the mud flung at him into positives, such as his "A More Perfect Union" speech.
Anyway - there's everything for Hillary to play for, according to this video:
Despite the snow today, summer's definitely coming. I can feel it in the air: there's this frisson of ozone. I can also hear it: the birds are singing. I can see it too: it's light when I go home (usually), and my flowerbed and veggies are starting to wake up.
Summer also means barbeques. Lots of them. It also means some experimentation at Nev's place. Last year we grilled pretty much everything we could lay our hands on, but there was always a trusted favourite that we keep coming back to: the Nev Burger.
I call it the Nev burger, but chances are Nev found it somewhere else. I don't know and I'm not really sure I care. It's delicious.
Here's the recipe. You'll notice that it's a "guy" recipe, in that it doesn't rely on weights and measures in the same way that a "chick" recipe might. In "guy" land, measures are units of booze and weights are things you lift in the gym to pack the burgers you eat onto your Herculean physique.
Back to the recipe (feeds the guys you have over):
Chop the onion and garlic, chuck them into a bowl with the beef. Add some chilli powder and creamed horseradish. The horseradish acts as a flavour enhancer and binder. Chop the coriander. Chuck it in. Chuck some more in. Salt and pepper the mix. Form into patties and chow down with the rest of the ingredients in traditional burger fashion.
Enjoy with a cool, crisp, refreshing beer or a mojito.
You may have read about the thrilling and gripping adventures I had in the garden last year here.
Well this year, I'm starting early. I had already prepared the frozen soil by digging it up in late February. Now, I've pulled together something that vaguely resembles a project plan for my garden.
Yesterday, I sauntered out of the house for my idea of retail therapy, the garden centre and bought:
Here's a snap of the seedtray system I'm using. It will allow me to grow a lot of individual plants that I can quickly prick out. I've got about 120 seeds sown in 3 trays. I'm also using 20 "peat pots", which are designed to rot over time in the ground. The idea of this is to minimise the disturbance to the roots of the seedlings when transplanting. I read somewhere that this was especially important for sweetcorn
140 plants is a lot! My garden doesn't really have a huge amount of room. Last year I had about 15 tomato plants on the go and the garden was like a jungle. So I think this year, I'll be looking to pick a good mixture of seedlings to grow on to full plants and give the rest away. I didn't have any trouble finding homes for the dozens of tomato plants I raised from seed last year, so this year should be no different, and it seems that sweetcorn isn't all that tricky to grow either, so these should prove unusual and popular gifts too!
I've got the seeds germinating in the loft at the moment under the window. With any luck, I should see some shoots in a week or so!
I was at a work party the other day in the Barbican. We'd booked out one of the cinemas for the company pow-wow, followed by the arboretum for drinks and nibbles. Magicians and cartoonists worked the room and one of them drew this of me:
I'm as vain as the next guy, I suppose. I wanted a caricature for use on this blog and on Facebook, but I wanted it to look as if it were a caricature of me, rather than, say, Jude Law's Gigolo Joe from the movie A.I.
What do you think?
I was two minutes late.
My barrister friend had invited me to attend a lecture on the subject of Sharia Law and British Law. He'd invited me in early January and I'd pencilled it into my diary.
I was two minutes late arriving at the British Court of Justice and because they have such strict security, I was unable to enter. Instead, I had to console myself with watching a heated debate in the street between two women who shared my timekeeping predicament.
This isn't really news. We've all heard of stories where family ties conflict with the interests of the law, but my take on this is that if there are people who don't relate to the British legal system, that's one thing. If they choose not to obey the law, then they're criminals. It's pretty simple, really.
I don't have a religous belief. I think the way that we are governed should be determined by reason, by agreement and not by revelation. God is not a democrat: what he says is law and must be followed without question and his laws are unchangeable. To me - any move away from a legal system that is determined by a democratic system is dangerous and possibly irrevocable.
Equality under the law is something we've treasured since the Magna Carta. And it's paid off: being free of despotism, having a system within which there are a series of rules that are predictable and which free the individual to be productive and achieve their potential; has allowed Britain to flourish.
In theory, even the Monarch can be tried for murder.
I usually like a good discussion. I think the one thing that unites pretty much all of my friends and many of my colleagues is that they are totally opposed to this idea. In some way, this is a shame because I'd like to at least what sort of justification there could possibly be for this idea.
So I've had to turn to the Internet. Apparently, some apologists claim that other religious groups are permitted to live according to their religious/ cultural norms, so why shouldn't Muslims? To me, the answer to this is pretty straightforward: everybody should be equal under the law, regardless of their beliefs.
As usual, the right-wing press has gone to town. It's quite funny to read the Daily Mail's comments on their site. One reader said,
"Not promoting homosexuality" is, of course, standard right-wing code language used to imply that homosexuals can only either be persecuted or "promoted", rather than just thinking, "it's none of my damn business if you're gay or not". Whatever the reader is getting at, would she prefer homosexuals to be persecuted in the name of Jesus or Allah? In the end, what's promoted by both religions is an intolerance of homosexuality.
We need to get rid of the intolerance of religion in our public discourse. It is the 21st Century and we're in Europe, we should move on from this primitive thinking and live and let live.
"Ah!", runs the counterargument, "If you want to live and let live, at least give us Sharia Law! We're not imposing it on you. We want to use it for ourselves; for our families and for our children."
We have to draw the line somewhere. We do so with some cultural practices. We have family law in place to protect vulnerable people in society. This includes women and children.
The moment you open up the "choice" to follow a more restrictive, paternalistic set of laws, rather than the laws of the land, you open up the opportunity to pressurise the vulnerable into laws that don't protect them as effectively.
There are also technical issues to do with, inter alia, deciding on which set of laws to apply to family court proceedings, and when; how to staff up the bar with Sharia-compliant barristers and importantly: coming to a clear definition of what Sharia actually means, since it appears to have different cultural influences in any case.
Is Rowan Williams Playing Chamberlain or Machiavelli? Is he giving in to demands made by a vocal minority, or is he playing the long game of protecting religious privilege? As I've mentioned earlier in this post, I think it wrong that any religious considerations are involved in making laws. I totally oppose the idea that you need religion to have morals. I think it wrong that churches can play the game of politics and remain tax-exempt. I think it's crazy that, in 21st Century Europe, we have bishops sitting in our upper chamber. Is Rowan Williams kicking up a fuss to drive people into supporting the status quo against the possibility of Sharia, and in so doing keeping the privilege with the Church of England?
I'm not saying that there aren't problems with integration at the moment. I think we need to look at our melting-pot and how we make it work. I'm from a mixed background myself, so I have a little bit of an insight here.
And you mustn't shove a group of people, religiously-identified or otherwise, into a legal ghetto because a minority of them demand it. Remember we're dealing with only a fraction of 3% of the population here. They're free to vote to elect people to try to change the law how they wish (within reason).
Until that time:
… do as the Romans do.
"Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion."
An internet movement called "Anonymous" has declared war on Scientology. They appear to have done so after Scientologist lawyers tried to have a video of Tom Cruise talking about scientolgy taken off Youtube. This followed many years of attempts by Scientology's lawyers to stifle freedom of expression on the internet.
Here is the declaration of war video in full:
If you click through to the actual YouTube site, you'll find a transcript of the message. It ends with:
"Knowledge is free.
We are Anonymous.
We are Legion.
We do not forgive.
WE DO NOT FORGET.
Expect us."
Anonymous appears to be something quite new. Since critics of Scientology get silenced with lawsuits, Anonymous has chosen anonymity. Anonymity makes association difficult, but not on the Internet.
Anonymous has grown organically into a (possibly) large, decentralised mass through web technologies, such as Internet Relay Chat, Message Boards, Wikis and sites such as Digg and Facebook. Anyone could be part of Anonymous! I say "possibly" because I don't know how many are active in the Anonymous cause. This mass seems to work a little like a terrorist cell, except this cell is massive and everyone inside the cell is anonymous to one another.
In any case, their activities seem to be having some effect. Aside from the video of Tom Cruise, which has gained it enough publicity to feature in the Economist, Anonymous has called for the investigation of Scientology's tax-exempt status, circulated damning documentation about the current Scietology leadership and (controversially) carried out Denial of Service attacks to disrupt Scientology websites. Internet chatrooms are buzzing with discussion of Anonymous, and other mainstream media is carrying stories about the group.
On February 10th, 2008, Anonymous is planning peaceful protests outside Scientology offices. It will be interesting to see how many people actually turn up for these protests, and whether this aggressive campaign towards the Scientologists will win them more sympathy than ridicule.
I've had personal contact with Scientology, and I've seen a friend of mine descend into the abyss and sign a billion year contract with them. I don't think they're heralding the "Truth". I certainly don't think the Earth was visited by an alien called Xenu. I feel uncomforable about the intolerance Scientology seems to show its critics. I see a lot said about their mistreatment of members and family of members. I do think it is a cult, and whilst I disagree with religion, I actually hate cults.
However, they should be allowed to expose themselves to ridicule. With their denial of service attacks, Anonymous is sailing very close to accusations of persecution of Scientology, and that is never a good thing because it can strengthen the faith of members already involved with Scientology, as well as winning sympathy and dividing Scientology's opponents.
To learn more about the Anonymous movement, visit their wiki site here.
I watched Hugh-Fearnley Whittingstall's Chicken Run. There's not really much to add to what he's done; he's kept the issue of industrialised food production up in the public debating space, but I did stumble over this:
That's right! It's a Cheeseburger in a can. If McDonald's burgers don't look anything like the pictures, do you expect this to? I'm curious to see what the actual contents of the can look like, but suspect that I'll wind up with nightmares as I look at some grey, tuna-shaped chunk of matter.
To be fair, this is camping food. It's designed (to use modern marketing parlance) to be a "portable cheeseburger solution for the outdoor nutritional context". It isn't meant to be haute cuisine.
Having said all that, though, it does cost FOUR EURO! That's a hell of a lot of money, especially when you consider that some of the nicest meals you'll ever taste involve beans and sausages cooked in the open for pennies after a long hike. In my opinion, this puts to rest the argument that people eat bad food to save money (an argument that gets trotted out all the time in response to campaigns to get us to eat more healthily/ ethhically).
There's something awesome about William Shatner's stop-start gravitas.
Alongside Mr. T and Verne Troyer (Mini-Mi from the Austin Powers movies), Shatner's taken Blizzard's gold to advertise World of Warcraft, the massively-successful MMORPG. With coming close to 9 million subscribers, I'm at a bit of a loss to see how much bigger they want it to become, but I love the advert anyway.
I honestly thought they were Italians.
I was sitting (yes, sitting! I got lucky!) on the Tube on the way home last night, head buried in the Endymion Omnibus, when a load of rowdy blokes got onto the tube, adding to the already sardine-like quality of the rush-hour crowds. They started singing football songs, which had a south European lilt to them, hence my false assumption: they were Croatian.
Apparently, there was a big football match last night at Wembley. I live fairly near Wembley and I had no clue. This is because I don't follow football. It doesn't interest me in the slightest. In fact, on some level, I'm anti-football. I see people talk for hours about the ins and outs of their sports, applying incredible reasoning and statistical powers to the points-systems and league-tables. At the same time, the real world around them needs these people to apply this deep thought to the real world problems around them.
It's a taboo to talk about sex politics and religion in polite company, but it's OK to talk football. In the end, our public discourse is infantilised.
The Croatians started banging the ceiling of the carriage, singing "We love Croatia, we do!", and some brave Londoners tried to start a counter-chant of "So why don't you fuck off back there then!", but it was a flaccid attempt and the commuters weren't in the mood.
Still, the local pride was still there. After all, London had once been the capital city of an Empire that controlled a quarter of the world's population, and this faded jingoism is now relegated to playing itself out on the football pitch. Perhaps this is better than the fields of Flanders or Omdurman, but the pride's still there and one chap muttered to the other, "They'll be laughing on the other side of their faces after the match".
England lost 3-2 to Croatia. Croatia was all over them like a cheap suit, from what I saw whilst channel-hopping. England was beaten by a country with a population 13 times smaller with an economy 31 times smaller. The Croatians were laughing on the other side of their faces alright -they had to give the other side a rest.
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