Walsingham

I liked it.

You clearly didn't grow up in a village. Nor, I suspect with less conviction, did you grow up in an anarchy. Give me civilisation like New York, where I there are scarves, cappucinos, and rosy cheeked women, all available to for sale 24 hours a day.

No. A NOT **** test.

Thanks, Sluggo. Sorry to hear about your exam results being bad. I hate to say it, but I'd have been disappointed if you'd been too successful. Time now for you to become a master sushi chef or something.

That food sounded great. Good work, Walsy, good work. You should try that pudding recipe. It was deadly simple.

Three problems from where I'm standing: 1. In representative democracy the vote does not get translated directly into policy. This is probably just as well, since no-one knows much about governemental issues like inflation or defence. even if one knows about one area you don't know about all of them. 2. Given the above, the purpose of the vote seems to me to be about protecting the voter from abuse, rather than making proactive decisions. All persons have the equal potential to be abused, so having an equal vote seems fair. Although on reflection an idiot probably has more capability to be abused, and should perhaps have more votes. 3. The concept of merit seems difficult to articulate. I suspect that you would eventually turn to the concept of 'general Intelligence', or IQ. This is flawed on two grounds. IQ is firstly linked to economic status and ethnic background, so your state would come to resemble an apartheid monstrosity. IQ is also a nonsense in theoretical terms, but that's a long argument tackled better in the book 'IQ in question'.

Hosted hugely succcessful dinner party on Friday night. Everyone still chiilled out yesterday. I so much so, and so well fed that I didn't eat breakfast or dinner yesterday and went to bed at eight. I just woke up at nine (ish). The event went as follows: Openers: A platter of salt meats and fresh pave bread cut into chunks, served alongside a dipping bowl of olive oil that had been put in a jar with salt, dried chillis, garlic chunks, and fresh rosemary for three weeks. Just before serving the oil had three fresh basil leaves put in it. Wine was a 2006 Chilean Merlot from Rapel in Chile. Rich and dark and full of fruit but not too sweet. Music was Anouar Ibrahim Main 1: I loused up the real main course so had to improvise. Pork spare rib steaks marinated in coriander seed, chilli, lemon juice, lemon zest, and olive oil, slow roasted in foil. Spare rib steaks are shot through with fat, and don't go dry. Sweet potatoes mashed with fried garlic and leek, and goats cheese. Plain bulgur wheat. String beans fried with garlic, almonds, plenty of salt and pepper, and a slug of orange Californian dessert wine (my own invention, and bloody good). Wine was 2007 garnacha from Spain. Garnacha is a rare grape on its own, but it went down very well. Violet coloured, light, and with more flavours than I can remember. Cut through the oils. Music was Norah Jones ( I know, I know). Main 2: About an hour later the slow cooker finally delivered. Lamb shanks seared in bacon fat, garlic, and rosemary, then slow cooked in tomatoes, oil, and pepper. Served with any side dishes from Main 1. Wine was 'Fireship Red', from Australia. It doesn't say what grape it is. I bought it under advisement, and wasn't disappointed. Cheap, but rounded, and sweet. Enough weight to go with lamb. Not so expensive it was wasted at this time in the evening. Interlude: Shorts were delivered at this point. Rum, bison grass vodka, and malt whisky. Thus giving me time to make a pudding since everyone still seemed hungry, or at least gluttonous. Music was Tom Waits. Pudding: Like the beans, this was my own invention. First was to half fill a loaf tin with a dough made with beef suet, self-raising flour, brown sugar, a little coffee, and plenty of cinnamon. Pretty ugly mixture, but everyone's too drunk to care. Into the oven at some temperature or other. While this was baking, on a very low heat I melted a block of dark chocolate, and stirred into it a whole tub of double cream. by good luck this took exactly the same length of time as the baking (about thirty minutes). I took the opportunity to chop a load of strawberries into thin slices. Once the batter had turned brown, but frankly while it was still not properly cooked, I pulled it out, and while still hot, poured a cup full of amaretto almond liqeuer over it. Sizzling and great smell of almonds. But could have been any liqeuer really. Before it could all evaporate, however, I poured over the chocolate cream sauce. I then floated a decorative pattern of strawberry slices over the surface. The purpose of which was to give the spurious impression this was a healthy fruity pudding. Cherries would have been very good, but might have sunk. So you have about an inch thick layer of almond cinnamon cake, covered in a two inch layer of chocolate sauce, and layered with sharp fresh strawberries. Most people were drinking rum at this point. There was no music that I can remember.

Regarding the toilet, can I suggest you dump three litres of bleach in before you disconnect it, to clean that sucker out?

That does suck. You'll have to get a job in a library. Partly for the free web services. Mostly so I can imagine you in a librarian outfit.

Partly because you care about people. Partly because you'd like someone to care for you? Seems pretty simple.

i never realised you used sidereal time. I always assumed you aged like pears. Nothing at all for ages, and then suddenly you'd be all wrinkly and smelly.

When I was coaching/captaining at university the simplest thing to do was put in a selection test. However, it sounds like you're trying tos elect for not being a **** rather than pure skillz. Do you think you could concoct a test?

This is quite common, apparently. What boils my bacon is that she acknowledges that owning the damn thing is a mistake, but won't ditch it. My compromise plan of going into a pet store and putting it into one of the cages when no-one was looking. I say compromise plan because my starting plan was to drown it in armagnac, stuff it with water-chestnuts, almonds, and arrowroot flour, and flash bake it for twenty minutes, wrapped in banana leaves. I think the parrot was the appropriate target. My girlfriend may occasionally bite me, but she doesn't poop in my office.

My girlfriend has been visiting. Hurrah! She has brought her parrot. Hurrooh. Her parrot hates me. I am, generally, good with animals, even monkeys, so I thought it could be handled. On Tuesday I extended to it the hand of Friendship. It accepted the hand of Friendship, waddled sideways up to the shoulder of Peace, and bit me as hard as it could on the earlobe of Naivety. It ****ing hurt. Later in the same day it flew into my office, waggled its arse and crapped into my ongoing projects file. I thought I'd mention this as an example of how to cope with pure incandescent fury. Knowing as I do that any permanent harm would distress my girlfriend, I suddenly had a brainwave! I marched up to its cage, turned about smartly, and farted as fulllsomely as possible into its tiny bastard face. I feel much better now. The end.

Satellite of Love?

Still doing the couple thing, as my girlfriend is staying the week. It's a nightmare because she's too smart to be fooled by my standard excuse list, and only a concert of lucky happenings has prevented me doing all sorts of chores.

So too do broadband internet companies. I feel it's a precipitate drop to set this as a precedent. What about a bar where drug deals happen?

Yet ironically we crave your sinewy anime body.

More time has passsed, and the biggest attacks have been sectarian, Sunnis killing Shias to try and spark a race war. Yet I was strolling past the Houses of Parliament last week and saw a dinky lil' village of protesters camped out with a placard reading "the true face of the enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan" covered in shrapnel and bomb fragments.

I showed her bioshock for the first time yesterday, and she immediately loved it on a graphics and gameplay level. How's that?

I just painted the spare room burnt orange. Nails depression, I can tell you. And peels your retinas off like old wallpaper, but that's incidental.

If nobody else did, Mark Twain clearly foresaw the threat of future beyond-the-grave activities by Ms. Austen. Two illustrative quotes : "Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig [Jane Austen] up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone." "Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death." (Source) Nice to see the truly great authors concur with my own assessment.

That was how I saw that volcano lightning picture. I just wonder where the good old 18th century picures are of peasants being crude? Irving Welsh style.

Sio, in order to avoid another Firefly your plan is to... NOT watch the show.

Two things about this. In America medical records are sealed to anyone except the health care provider, and the patient. So if I a woman got knocked up and wanted to hide it, she could pretty easily because of the amount of legal work and force required to get those things open. So it may exist, but it won't be in anyone's hands (if it does get out you can sue the doctors pants off for releasing confidential information and probably defamation of character) I suppose so. But that's a lot of schlepp. I prefer to avoid it coming out in teh first place. Case in point I let slip that I was drinking 40 units of alcohol a week. The doctor looked genuinely pained but dutifully wrote it down. Came back to bit me in the ass, long after I cut it in half. No real way of knowing how the information got out.