Make a Merigue

 I'm one of those insufferable people who thinks they're good at tasting things so when one of my friends took to mixing and drinking cocktails I tagged along on his new hobby. At the weekend I did the most inefficient bit of "waste-not-want-not" that I can imagine. My recipe for cremes caramel uses more egg yolks than whites and I ended up with an egg white hanging around surplus to requirements. "That's easy to use up" I thought, I'll drink it in a couple of whiskey sours, I had ice, lemon and syrup in stock, all I had to buy was a bottle of whiskey and a bottle of bitters. It would have been much cheaper and easier to put the egg white down the sink.

Richard "speedrunning drunk at home any%" B

R.I.P

 My mother died last week.

This picture illustrates her perfectly. You can see that she's entertaining people. You can see that she's enjoying herself. You can see that she's in such a carefree hurry that she didn't even tie her apron strings. You can see that in the whirlwind of activity she might be just about to knock over the chair or drop the trifle on the carpet. Look more closely and you can see that the trifle dish is badly chipped and that she didn't have enough cream left to cover the whole thing. She didn't care, and neither should we.

Richard "live life to the fullest, even if people think you're a mad-woman" B

Forced my Lute

 I've said before how much I love all the words and idioms in the English language. Consider this list, they all mean more or less the same thing.

Annoys me
Irritates me
Infuriates me
Gets on my wick
Gets on my nerves
Gets on my tits
Gets my goat
Gets my back up
Rubs me up the wrong way
Puts my nose out of joint
Makes me fed up
Jars me off
Pisses me off
Fucks me off
Boils my blood
Boils my piss

There are probably more.

The wonderful Youtube man called Technology Connections has added "Forces my lute" to this list. It comes from a letter that some amateur chemist wrote to Robert Boyle (yes the gas laws chap) about making coal gas. The chemist said that the process "forced my lute" and the Youtube man wondered aloud whether it meant the same as "Ground my gears" - which is American for anything in my list above. The good people of the internet have since worked out that "lute" was a colloquial term for a jointing compound used in glassware, and the expression meant "blew my gaskets" – literally not figuratively, but it2s such a wonderful phase that Technology Connections has started using it to mean "annoyed" and I suggest you do the same.

Richard "Susie Dent" B