Out with the old

A scan of the corpse and it is time to get rid of the old copy of Delia Smith's Frugal Food - having acquired a copy of the new edition last month - as you see it's been well used - or at least had lots of stuff spilled over it! 70p....

And looking at the inside, it was acquired 31 32 (need to get used to 2009!) years ago tomorrow - New Year's day 1977. The lentil curry, potage flamade recipes were well used and I must revisit the courgette souffle!

Reflections

Hat tip to Raspberry Rabbit. May your reflections on the passing of 2008 be good!

Last teaser of the year - Dec 30

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!

This is from my current book club read:

'Forgive me, but I thought of you directly I sighted that cloth, for the green is the colour of your eyes.'
I felt my face flush, and my vexation at blushing made my cheeks and throat burn all the hotter.

Geraldine Brooks 'Year of Wonders' The story of the plague at Eyam which is fairly local to here...I'm currently finding it gripping.

120 years?!

It probably won't go down well on a Sunday morning with all the profanity...HT to NT Wrong

Surreal peppermints?

Modern art? HT to Lindsay Marshall

I _am_ the administrator

I'm trying to install Adobe Air on this Mandriva/Linux/FSF system to try the BBC iPlayer. Tried the various links from the BBC page and the Adobe Air phase just seemed to do nothing. So followed these instructions, and I get this message:

I tried running it as root and then as myself when it asked me to enter the root password but still the same result. I am the administrator, I'll go and talk to myself for a bit...but I think I need a bit more work to get iPlayer up and running!
(the suggestion I found on googling of closing down firefox first, doesn't work for me, I suspect it might want use of audio, tomorrow will try immediately after a login so nothing else will - I hope - be getting in the way)
Later (31st Dec)... I've tried logging out and in, tried it with kde rather than my preferred blackbox desktop, tried rebooting and again with both kde and blackbox, so at the moment I'm stuck, maybe a little more googling?
And again... Mandriva 2008.1 (which I'm running) comes with firefox 2.x.x, I've previously installed firefox 3 but with a tarball and in my home area, I guess Adobe Air is looking for firefox 3 and when it doesn't find it stops with that unhelpful message. I've now added the main backport repository and installed the firefox 3 rpm and now Adobe Air installs correctly! (a good diagnostic would have been so much more helpful!!!)

Christmas Music

.. but only if you feel brave! rmcr has pointed me to this web site with details of a recording of Foster Jenkins (dramatic soprano, not to be confused with Katherine Jenkins star of stage, screen and radio?) and 11 of her rivals. It has musical(?) extracts and I'm still shaking after listening to the Tosca extract. The order page unfortunately appears to have vanished.

Free Associations

And this week's words from Unconscious Mutterings are:

1. Destined :: Chosen
2. FAIL :: Blog
3. Camping :: Kenneth Williams
4. Only you :: deserted
5. Incessant :: rowdy
6. Tomorrow :: Is Another day
7. Impressive :: erection (that was a building - honest, Dr Freud)
8. Riches :: gold
9. Dislike :: getting the goat
10. Speaker :: Woofer

Cooking in difficult times

My mother has a copy of Mrs Arthur Webb's 'War Time Cookery - published 1939 (reprinted 1940), she clearly didn't hang about. There's this to give the flavour:
Casserole of cucumber -

• 4 small cucumbers
• 1/2 lb of sausagemeat
• 3/4 pt of stock
• 1 turnip
• 3 carrots
• 6 small onions
• seasoning

I don't have the precise method here but she does recommend removing the cucumber seeds before cooking.

Happy Christmas!

more animals
unoriginal sorry, back to the posting soon! (weblog post no 1000!)

getting a bit late now...

..but here is the wonderful Trinity Wall St Advent calendar.

for Christmas Eve

Poulenc's wonderful Christmas Motet O Magnum Mysterium

News

Well while everyone else has been preparing for Christmas - or not! - I've spent the past 4 days, seems like a week, rushing around helping to resurrect the work web and email server. It died with a dead disk on Friday. I do recommend warrick for recoving those lost bits of websites, it goes to various web caches and puts your site back together as they claim it was.
Anyway, in all the kerfuffle I missed the news on Friday that the Church Times blog mentions that the Scargill trustees hand the Scargill movement have agreed:

We are now pleased to announce that agreement has been reached between the Trustees of Scargill House and those representing the Scargill Movement for the purchase of Scargill House. This is subject to contract, survey and the approval of the Charity Commissioners. We value your prayers for the speedy exchange of contracts, the future of the Scargill Movement and the proposed Foundation of the present Trustees.

Sounds like good news!
On a more parochial level the household Christmas letter is here.

Snow

(bit late now..) here's one of the sets of words I was trying to find from earlier in the month

Everyday it snows an inch or two,
Muting the music in the pines.
Old music.

Snow holds back the dawn-
an extra minute of lying here
while the self sleeps on.

again from Twichell's Snow Watcher.
And for a slightly different comment, here's Ivor Gurney's Sleep:

And more conventionally

St Michael's choir
Originally uploaded by rajmarshall

..here's the choir in front of the tree

.. and behind the tree

.. and behind the tree
Originally uploaded by rajmarshall

After this evenings carol service spotted the reflection of the tree in the bank's windows announcing sales and insecurity.

this weeks inkspots

And this week's associations

1. Carpet :: Persian
2. Bottoms :: Tops
3. Music :: Life
4. Nails :: Cross
5. Watch it! :: No!
6. Your life :: Big red book
7. Candies :: indulgence
8. Chafing :: blisters
9. Svelte :: not a hairy man
10. Ding :: Dong

This month has just been hectic - sorry - doubt if it will improve until next weekend!

Late Presents?

Well there's always this - it probably only has key bindings I already know on it though! Now if it had copy-to-register (and the converse), it would be of more interest - I used to know where they were, when I had a memory, they've moved them and I'm lost!

Search engines

Couldn't resist a vanity screenshot of the top search strings which lead people here (not that there are many of them). I won't quote them to avoid skewing figures further but there seem to be a fair range of subjects but maybe nog__ the n__ is what those seamen get up to on those icebound ships?

Manchester Theological Society

I meant to get to the December meeting of the Manchester Theological Society but have missed it - moved laptops and I'd forgotten I had various reminders on the old one. Intend to go to the January meeting on RS Thomas! Looking at their website I found this mention of a rather old meeting!!

I'm not going to that one!