Breakfast

I have been in America three times in the last year, and although I'm not a fan of all their cooking, I'm very impressed by their breakfasts.  My favourite is waffles with bacon and maple syrup. I have bought myself a cheap waffle iron and set about learning to make waffles. The waffle recipe is challenging because the batter has to double its size and cook in about 5 minutes. Half of the recipes include huge amounts of baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, or tartar and their flavour suffers as a result. The better recipes use yeast, so there's slightly more to do than would be ideal between getting up and eating breakfast. This is the recipe that I've had best results with, and that I'm sticking with:

½ sachet yeast (3.5g)
Dessert spoon warm water
4.5oz plain flour
½ tsp baking powder
½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tbsp caster sugar
1 egg
½ pint butter milk [1][2]
1 tbsp vegetable oil

Wake the yeast up in the water with a pinch of the sugar. Leave it standing for at least five minutes.
Sieve the flour and powders into a bowl, add the sugar, make a well in the centre.
Slowly add the egg and butter milk stirring continually to make a thin batter.
Stir in the yeast.
Stir in the oil.[3]
Leave the mixture to stand for 10 minutes so that the yeast latches onto the starches in the flour.

Preheat the iron and add a few drops of oil.
Half fill the iron with batter. Close, swirl, and turn over so that the whole iron is coated with batter.
Cook for 5 minutes on a medium heat, turning regularly.

[1 The co-op doesn’t sell butter milk so I use a mixture of milk and soured cream]
[2 For my American readers, ½ pint is 10 fl. Oz.]
[3 The oil is less prone to separate out if you add it last.]

Richard "American Breakfast – stay away from me. American Breakfast – mama let me be." B

General Election

I normally try to write something light-hearted for my blog, but just this once I'm going to stray into politics:

There has been a lot of talk about there being fewer than 100 days until the general election and about whether the younger voters should even bother. My belief is that we should all, to a man, go to the polling station and spoil our ballot papers. Our votes WILL be counted, and there can be no talk of voter-apathy if we get a huge turn out of people, like me, who believe that the best candidates that the political parties have to offer just aren’t good enough.

I have no problem with parliamentary democracy, and I'm proud to live under one. I'd just rather not be governed by one filled almost entirely with self-serving, populist, centrist idiots. Here is a brief round-up of a few of my favourite reasons, since I left college, to believe that the entire political caste is incompetent:

• We've had a government who sold off the radio frequency spectrum (you only get one of those), paid off all the debts, and then announced the end of boom-and-bust economics.
• We've had a government who dismissed their advisor on drugs policy because he had the temerity to suggest examining cost and outcomes of the current policy. The bastard!
• We've had a government who decided that we needed to sell some of our gold and buy foreign currency. They then made such a bad job of it that you can see exactly when it happened on any graph of gold prices, from a long way away, if you squint.
• We've had a government which noticed that the (approx) 10% of school leavers who went to university ended up as the most economically productive members of society and decided that we could make the whole country richer if we sent 50% of people to university. In the process they have destroyed free higher education and de-valued British degrees. It was exactly the same logic which would notice that pregnant people are predominantly women, and then deciding that the way to increase the number of women in the boardroom would be to inseminate 50% of company directors. [note 1]
• Expenses.
• The standard of debate in the house of commons.

Richard "don’t waste your vote – spoil your vote" B

[note 1 If you want to know why it looks so much like going to university raises your wages in later life, it's probably because deciding to go away to university at the end of school used to be a good proxy for being bright and hard-working. In combination those factors have a positive predictive effect on your earning potential.]

Owls

One of the skills that you develop as a computer programmer is to read meaning into terse and complicated one-word names. If we saw something called "lastinlist" we'd know that it was the last something in some list. More usually we'd write the name as "lastInList" to make the words easier to separate.

There used to be a bowling alley in Plympton called the "Superbowl". Unfortunately their signage had an outsized "O" and with finger holes. This meant that I could never read the name or think of the place as anything other than the "Superb Owl". I passed a building in Portsmouth called the "Bowlplex". I suppose it could have been a place containing multiple bowling lanes, but it seems much more likely that the "b" tells us it's a Boolean variable indicating the truth or falsity of the proposition "owlplex". I assume that an owl-plex is distinguished from a simple owl in that it can represent multiple owls. The UK owl-plex probably aggregates little, long-eared, short-eared, tawny and screech.

Since I have been going out with a woman in Seattle I have adopted the Seattle Seahawks as "my" American Throwball team. They are going to the Superb Owl, and this weekend is Superb Owl Sunday!

Richard "camelCase" B

Throwball

I've been in Seattle for the last week and a half, and I've been somewhat drawn into the fever surrounding their American Throwball team. We settled on "Throwball" because "football" is such a loaded and ambiguous term when talking to an Englishman.

I watched one of the games on the TV In a bar with my friends. Other than the number of advert breaks, the experience seemed perfectly familiar. Americans watch the game at the stadium – obviously, but they also make a completely foreign arrangement. They call it "tailgating" but that's really just a fancy word for getting drunk in the car park. They will arrive at a large nearby parking lot (car park) before the game and set up grills (barbeques), music and beer.

I watched the game that put the Seattle Seahawks into the Superbowl in a very odd way. I watched two quarters (the first half) on a TV in an airport terminal. During the second half the score was occasionally relayed to the passengers on a British Airways flight by the captain over the intercom. It was a nail biting game, but robbed of some of its dramatic impact.

Richard "Go Hawks" B

When in Rome

Both "The Last Samurai" and "Dances with Wolves" tell the story of a white boy, transplanted into an ethnographically foreign culture, and becoming more skilled and more integrated than the locals.

I'm on holiday in America at the moment and the same thing hasn't happened to me.

I think I've got the skill of eating an American breakfast down to a tee. I can leave a low denomination note for someone who has poured me a drink, and I used the phrase "Costco gas station" successfully in conversation, but there are many skills that I don't think I'll ever master:

• Not flinching at the price of basic groceries like bread and fruit.
• Adding up the price of items you wish to buy and then multiplying by 1.095 to get the final price.
• Handling money. All the notes are the same size and colour, the 5c is silver and BIGGER than the 10c FFS.
• The bizarre and arbitrary "waste some clean water" phase of washing up that occurs between washing and drying

When in Rome, if the Romans are doing it all wrong, then educate them.

Richard "Objectionable Foreigner" B

Lazy Sunday Afternoon

Did you have a nice relaxed Sunday morning? Good. I didn't. On Saturday night I broke a loud speaker stand. On Sunday morning when I should have been sleeping in late and putting a suit on for my mum's birthday lunch, I was heavily involved with a light engineering project that didn't interest me.

One of my loud speaker stands:

We've broken this:

"Stock":

Hot hot hot:

I give the braise 6 out of 10 plus a bonus point for not destroying the threads inside the nut:

What's the tapping size for M6? This looks close enough:

Tap tap tap:

This is what I made:

This is where I'm going to stick it:

Richard "most boring episode of MacGyver ever" B