Like a lot of people, I am aware of the ecological impact of my diet, and for that reason I’m eating a lot less meat now than I did a few years ago. I’ve also moved away from beef specifically, which is three or four times as ecologically costly as pork and chicken. But then there’s this …
Posted in Food and drink, Life
Blackjack is card game played with a standard 52-card deck, similar in broad outlines to Uno. (It’s not to be confused with the card game of the same name, also known as Vingt-Un, Pontoon and other names.)
There are many games of this basic type. This version is sometimes called Taylor Blackjack, because it gets played a lot a big, raucous house-parties at our home in summer.
In my experience, the particular rule-set of Blackjack is tuned to make the game funny to play, rather than especially challenging or skillful. For this reason, it is by far my favourite card game.
Like everyone else, I’m aware of the Cost Of Living Crisis — or, “recession” as we used to call it in the old days. (Much as we now say “chumocracy” instead of “corruption” for some reason). We’re fortunate to be reasonably well off, so we don’t need to count the pennies. But I did find myself wondering whether pizza from scratch is quite such an amazing deal as I imagine.
Let’s do the numbers for a basic, and a more exotic, pizza.
Posted in Food and drink, Life, Pizza
As we approach the end of 2021, I have a pretty good idea of what my top ten albums of the year will be, for my now traditional What I’ve Been Listening To post. And one of them is an album I want to write much more about than will reasonably fit into one of the brief entries in that post. Hence today’s post:
The eagle-eyed among you will spot that this album is by my wife Fiona. That has everything to do with why I know about it at all, but absolutely nothing to do with why I love it so deeply.
Continue readingPosted in Art, Domestic bliss, Life, Music
Yesterday we had an amazingly clear rainbow. And it happened at just the right time of day (4:20pm) that the sun was in just the right place that I was able to step back from the house and frame it entirely within the rainbow. Here it is, straight off the phone, with absolutely no retouching:
These are dark, dark time. But at the risk of sounding like Movie-Sam trying to encourage Movie-Frodo with greetings-card sentiments that Tolkien would never, ever have written, it does help every now and then to see something like this, almost supernaturally beautiful.
Fiona and I both love the sunshine, and it’s something you don’t necessarily get a lot of in Britain. We’ve often thought that if we had the money we’d love to add a conservatory (“sunroom” for you Americans) to the house — but we never have had the money and doubt we ever will. Plus who needs all the upheaval and disruption?
Then one day it occurred to us that a conservatory is basically just a greenhouse with a sofa in it — so why not get a greenhouse and put a sofa in it? And that is exactly what we’ve done. I woke on the morning of Saturday 24th April, looked at Facebook Marketplace, and found that someone was selling a greenhouse for £2 provided we could come and collect it that day. The listing said it was missing some panes of glass, but obviously it was bargain. So I woke Fiona up and we drove 30 miles to Cheltenham, thinking it would take half an hour or so to take the greenhouse apart and load it into the car.
Posted in Domestic bliss, Life
Have I got good news for you!
First: the following albums, released in 1983, are as close to WWII as to the present day:
Back on 12 December last year, we had a spectacular rainbow out behind the house — so clear it felt you could reach out and touch it. Here’s a photo of it that I took on my phone, completely unedited:
That’s all: just something beautiful for these dark times.
I recently learned that Pink Floyd played a gig in my home town, a little under a year before I was born (on 12th March 1968):
It’s a strange thought. I am 52 years old. Pink Floyd are even older. For the princely sum of nine shillings and sixpence, I could have seen them play less than a mile from the house where I grew up, if only I’d had the foresight to be born twenty years earlier.
Do you have unmetered Internet access?
Do you have a nearby neighbour with either metered or no Internet access?
Give them your wireless password for the duration of the COVID-19 crisis. (You can change it later, to lock them out when the crisis has subsided.)
At this time, access to the Internet is literally a lifesaver. Not only that: with video calls the only human interaction some people have, lots of data is a lifesaver. A connection limited to some number of Gbits per month is not going to cut it.
The Reinvigorated Programmer 