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peterbirksI made myself a sambar with dosai last night. The dosai(s) (rice & lentil pancakes) were absolutely delicious. The sambar was, well, sambar. Possibly a bit nicer than normal.
The problem with dosai(s) is not that they are difficult to make, but that you have to start with a frying pan that is no more than lukewarm. That means that if you want to make more than one you either need lots of pans (where "lots" = "number of dosai(s) required with a maximum number of pans of five") or a lot of patience.
+++++
I've also spent the weekend setting up the new computer and it is now running. I've bitten the bullet and bought Hold Em Manager 2. Significantly different from HEM 1, but I'm getting used to it. I'm also back to multiple monitors, so I can watch the stats update on one screen while multi-tabling on the other. Office 2010 is running fine, including Outlook (which Vista steadfastly refused to run in 2010 version). Windows 7 is a dream compared to Vista, although perhaps it's "the new Novatech computer is a dream compared to the old Dell".
Dell reported weak results earlier last week (as did HP) and blamed consumer sentiment. Well, yes and no. What they meant was "consumer sentiment against buying new PCs". In my case, I bought a new PC, but declined to buy one from Dell. That is one thing that the CEO (or all the other bean counters) will never admit.
My main prejudice against Dell was not the machine, but all the pre-installed crap. As it happens, Revo did a good job uninstalling McAfee. I have no anti-virus stuff running on the new machine. If by some unusual chance I get hijacked, then I'll probably curse. But I don't think that I will be. On the plus side, everything fires up much quicker, partly because it's a faster machine (running on 64-bit, I think, or whatever the terminology is for people who care about this stuff, which I suppose I do, in passing, but not enough to look it up) and partly because McAfee doesn't poke it's nose in every time you start something up.
I still have Windows automatically updating and warning me that I should restart the machine. That's an irritant I'll get rid of soon.
+++++++
I bought two Jared Diamond books on Amazon and then made the mistake of looking at "People who have bought "The Third Chimpanzee" have also bought.... "
As a result I also have Steven Mithen's "The PreHistory of the Mind", Clive Finlayson's "The Humans Who Went Extinct", Guy Deutscher's "The Unfolding of Language", and David Anthony's "The Horse, The Wheel & Language".
It's strange, but as I have reached (and passed) middle age I have become increasingly less enamoured with fiction (mainly only enjoying writers who can write well such as McEwan, Harris, Boyd, Faulks) and more interested in non-fiction -- not least because the real world has quite enough of interest to make it rather pointless to make things up, and secondly because I want to "know" more stuff, and as one approaches 60 one realizes that time is running out. John Humphreys once mentioned this in passing, but his solution was to "do" more stuff. My solution is more that I want to "learn" more stuff.
If I enjoyed the fiction, I'd carry on, but, as I told Craig this week, I got to page 600 of the second volume of "Fire and Ice", and I concluded that I just didn't really care what happened to these people who were the product of someone else's imagination. I had, in other words, lost my suspension of disbelief. I find that happening more and more often with fiction.
+++++++
I made a post on FB a week or so ago bemoaning this year's fashion in women's shoes. It was, if it was anything bar a light-hearted post, an attack on the fashion industry and the fact that some people fall for it. And the women I know saw it as just that. Curiously, a man saw it as "disrespectful to women", although the post was not made in that thread. Perhaps it was just a bit of a bitchy response to a rather bitchy comment that I had made in another thread. But it was certainly baffling. I wasn't going to lose any sleep over it because, as it happens, I know quite a lot of women and I asked a few about it. They all said that it was obviously (a) humorous and (b) rather true. Women are quite capable of making fun of their own weakness when it comes to shoes, just as men can laugh at their own weaknesses. None of them thought that it was "disrespectful". All a bit odd.
+++++++
I've been trying to catch up with movies (which, I note with a bit of surprise, do not suffer from the fiction/non-fiction dichotomy that I have applied to books) and I watched Angelopoulos's "The Travelling Players", all 3 hours and 42 minutes of it. It's from LoveFilm and I decided to watch it again, now that I had a better idea of what was going on and of the three levels on which it worked. The Birks jury is still out on Angelopoulos. He's been compared with Tarkovsky, but I haven't seen any evidence of it yet. But he's certainly adventurous and willing to take risks. In "The Travelling Players" for example, there are no close-ups. That makes it hard to remember who the hell is whom. It also shifts from 1939 to 1951, with the players in the troupe changing as the film progresses. There is a reason for this - Angelopoulos wants to make it a film about the forces of history rather than about individuals. Does it work? I'm not sure.
I was very impressed by Cosmo Jarvis's "The Naughty Room". Jarvis is clearly a multi-media talent (he's also a musician) and I expect great things from him.
Tetsuya Nakashima's "Confessions" was shown as part of Film Four's "Frightfest". That didn't do it justice. It's a complex work, not a gorefest. It's beautifully shot, well-acted, and asks difficult moral questions of the viewer, whose sympathies fly back and forth, where all victims are also perpetrators and all perpetrators are also victims.
+++++++++
After my stomach illness six weeks ago, I was "well" for two weeks before coming down with another cold. That has lingered for three weeks. I'm just about better now. None of that has done the training any good, although, paradoxically, sticking to just the two sessions a week does seem to have done my muscles some good. Perhaps they need longer recovery throught than Nick and I thought -- instead of 24 hours for the smaller muscle groups and 48 hours for the larger ones, it might be 48 hours and 96 hours respectively.
Certainly when I feel 100% again I'm ready to push to the next level. My best improvement in the past few months has definitely been triceps and biceps. On the downside I've got a tendon-related niggle in the right shoulder. I suspect that rest is what is needed for that.
______________
The problem with dosai(s) is not that they are difficult to make, but that you have to start with a frying pan that is no more than lukewarm. That means that if you want to make more than one you either need lots of pans (where "lots" = "number of dosai(s) required with a maximum number of pans of five") or a lot of patience.
+++++
I've also spent the weekend setting up the new computer and it is now running. I've bitten the bullet and bought Hold Em Manager 2. Significantly different from HEM 1, but I'm getting used to it. I'm also back to multiple monitors, so I can watch the stats update on one screen while multi-tabling on the other. Office 2010 is running fine, including Outlook (which Vista steadfastly refused to run in 2010 version). Windows 7 is a dream compared to Vista, although perhaps it's "the new Novatech computer is a dream compared to the old Dell".
Dell reported weak results earlier last week (as did HP) and blamed consumer sentiment. Well, yes and no. What they meant was "consumer sentiment against buying new PCs". In my case, I bought a new PC, but declined to buy one from Dell. That is one thing that the CEO (or all the other bean counters) will never admit.
My main prejudice against Dell was not the machine, but all the pre-installed crap. As it happens, Revo did a good job uninstalling McAfee. I have no anti-virus stuff running on the new machine. If by some unusual chance I get hijacked, then I'll probably curse. But I don't think that I will be. On the plus side, everything fires up much quicker, partly because it's a faster machine (running on 64-bit, I think, or whatever the terminology is for people who care about this stuff, which I suppose I do, in passing, but not enough to look it up) and partly because McAfee doesn't poke it's nose in every time you start something up.
I still have Windows automatically updating and warning me that I should restart the machine. That's an irritant I'll get rid of soon.
+++++++
I bought two Jared Diamond books on Amazon and then made the mistake of looking at "People who have bought "The Third Chimpanzee" have also bought.... "
As a result I also have Steven Mithen's "The PreHistory of the Mind", Clive Finlayson's "The Humans Who Went Extinct", Guy Deutscher's "The Unfolding of Language", and David Anthony's "The Horse, The Wheel & Language".
It's strange, but as I have reached (and passed) middle age I have become increasingly less enamoured with fiction (mainly only enjoying writers who can write well such as McEwan, Harris, Boyd, Faulks) and more interested in non-fiction -- not least because the real world has quite enough of interest to make it rather pointless to make things up, and secondly because I want to "know" more stuff, and as one approaches 60 one realizes that time is running out. John Humphreys once mentioned this in passing, but his solution was to "do" more stuff. My solution is more that I want to "learn" more stuff.
If I enjoyed the fiction, I'd carry on, but, as I told Craig this week, I got to page 600 of the second volume of "Fire and Ice", and I concluded that I just didn't really care what happened to these people who were the product of someone else's imagination. I had, in other words, lost my suspension of disbelief. I find that happening more and more often with fiction.
+++++++
I made a post on FB a week or so ago bemoaning this year's fashion in women's shoes. It was, if it was anything bar a light-hearted post, an attack on the fashion industry and the fact that some people fall for it. And the women I know saw it as just that. Curiously, a man saw it as "disrespectful to women", although the post was not made in that thread. Perhaps it was just a bit of a bitchy response to a rather bitchy comment that I had made in another thread. But it was certainly baffling. I wasn't going to lose any sleep over it because, as it happens, I know quite a lot of women and I asked a few about it. They all said that it was obviously (a) humorous and (b) rather true. Women are quite capable of making fun of their own weakness when it comes to shoes, just as men can laugh at their own weaknesses. None of them thought that it was "disrespectful". All a bit odd.
+++++++
I've been trying to catch up with movies (which, I note with a bit of surprise, do not suffer from the fiction/non-fiction dichotomy that I have applied to books) and I watched Angelopoulos's "The Travelling Players", all 3 hours and 42 minutes of it. It's from LoveFilm and I decided to watch it again, now that I had a better idea of what was going on and of the three levels on which it worked. The Birks jury is still out on Angelopoulos. He's been compared with Tarkovsky, but I haven't seen any evidence of it yet. But he's certainly adventurous and willing to take risks. In "The Travelling Players" for example, there are no close-ups. That makes it hard to remember who the hell is whom. It also shifts from 1939 to 1951, with the players in the troupe changing as the film progresses. There is a reason for this - Angelopoulos wants to make it a film about the forces of history rather than about individuals. Does it work? I'm not sure.
I was very impressed by Cosmo Jarvis's "The Naughty Room". Jarvis is clearly a multi-media talent (he's also a musician) and I expect great things from him.
Tetsuya Nakashima's "Confessions" was shown as part of Film Four's "Frightfest". That didn't do it justice. It's a complex work, not a gorefest. It's beautifully shot, well-acted, and asks difficult moral questions of the viewer, whose sympathies fly back and forth, where all victims are also perpetrators and all perpetrators are also victims.
+++++++++
After my stomach illness six weeks ago, I was "well" for two weeks before coming down with another cold. That has lingered for three weeks. I'm just about better now. None of that has done the training any good, although, paradoxically, sticking to just the two sessions a week does seem to have done my muscles some good. Perhaps they need longer recovery throught than Nick and I thought -- instead of 24 hours for the smaller muscle groups and 48 hours for the larger ones, it might be 48 hours and 96 hours respectively.
Certainly when I feel 100% again I'm ready to push to the next level. My best improvement in the past few months has definitely been triceps and biceps. On the downside I've got a tendon-related niggle in the right shoulder. I suspect that rest is what is needed for that.
______________
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no subject
Date: 2012-09-01 02:18 pm (UTC)YMMV, but I don't think it's exactly about "learning" things, either, although I hope that's a by-product. I have an increasing urge to learn foreign languages just for the sake of it, although I was rubbish at school. I want to go back to Ancient Greek. I might even get back to biblical analysis (or koranic analysis in the unlikely events that I learn Arabic and can put up with what, frankly, is an intensely dull and disjointed book). The only reason I'm holding back on maths is that I am no longer very good at it.
No, I think it's more a reflex action of the brain, trying to stay alive and active in the surrounding wash of mediocre gibberish. As the brain gets older, it needs a higher level of "Wow, that's interesting!" stimuli than you'll ever get from a novel.
Also, science writers (and other popular academics) just seem to write better than novelists, these days.
This doesn't stop me from reading "genre" fiction for pure escapism, but even that is tailing off.
Still, at least I have no desire to read "Fifty Shades of Grey..."
no subject
Date: 2012-09-01 02:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-01 03:39 pm (UTC)Like you, I'm becoming more interested in languages, and I would like to learn Greek in order to read some of the classics in the original (and the Bible in one of its earliest written forms). Theology is also a topic I'd like to delve into more deeply (I was going to say "comparative theology", but I suspect that this would be a tautology). And, of course, history.
Many original 19th and 18th century sources are now available, for free, via Gutenberg. Oh to be able to do a Ph.D today with the resources available! (Well, of course, one still can, but you know what I mean. I'm not sure that the energy and dedication is there any more).
And, yes, non-fiction writers have become better writers. Many historians can still be as dry as dust, but many others have realized that it might be a good idea not to send your readers to sleep before they have got beyond page 8.
All that said, I just bought (and immediately started to read) the new Ian McEwan. Robert Harris's "The Fear Index" also awaits, and, when I have a holiday, I am determined to get through all of those PD James books that are staring at me accusingly on a bookshelf in my bedroom.
PJ
no subject
Date: 2012-09-01 06:40 pm (UTC)I imagine you could always just complete the one you started off with. David Low, Philip Zec, and Eric somebody or other, I seem to (not) recall.
Looking at the current state of the Web, you might be OK for a casual weekend fling on the thing. But, of course, the trouble with the Web is that there are hundreds of thousands of idiots who are now empowered to write far less readable, far less interesting, and in general utterly useless PhDs on the same subject. 'Course, they'd have to stump up the £30,000 fees and so on to get it written.
Bit of an academic irony, really. Thatcherism meets Anti-elitism meets Pure-Dee Ignorance meets the Internet.
As regards your original PhD plans: take your time and publish it, presumably in e-book form, whenever you feel like it. It isn't clear to me that the Internet will affect the central thesis, although you might be able to download a few illustrations and fill in a few footnotes.
Neither of which is to be sniffed at.
no subject
Date: 2012-09-01 06:43 pm (UTC)