Martin Fone's Blog, page 269
February 18, 2018
Dish Of The Week
Have the Scots found something to rival the deep-fried Mars bar?
Well, according to Stephen Mann, owner of the Pearl River takeaway in Erskine, his salt and chilli pizza crunch is flying off the shelves. The concoction, which boasts more calories than 22 bags of crisps and more salt content than the daily recommended allowance, consists of a deep-fried pizza coated in spices, topped with onions, peppers and fresh chillies.
At least with the chilli and pepper topping, you are getting one of your five a day.
This ultimate in fusion cuisine, blending an Italian staple with Chinese flavours and Scottish frying, will set you back £7 for a full ten inch pizza, while a half pizza retails at £4.
The only problem is that after eating it, it leaves your mouth as dry as a wallaby’s pouch.
Mann says he gets a lot of repeat customers. You don’t say?
For those for whom a ten inch pizza is not enough, perhaps the enterprising Mann could serve them on a plate made by the Polish firm, Biotrem. Made from natural wheat bran and small amounts of water, compressed together under high temperature and pressure into a plate shape, they are microwavable and totally edible. What’s more, they are environmentally friendly, being compostable, and a tonne of the bran can make 10,000 plates.
With the bowel evacuation that the pizza is bound to guarantee, the plate once ingested will be out of your system in a jiffy.
Just a thought.
February 17, 2018
Job Of The Week (3)
For some this will be the equivalent of the golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Mondelez International, the company that owns Cadbury’s, has just put an advert on-line, I read this week, for three chocolate tasters.
No experience is necessary and full training will provided to “develop your taste buds”, according to the advert. As part of the interview process the short-listed candidates will be invited to an assessment day where they will sample up to ten different samples and be invited to discuss their findings.
The pay is a paltry £9 per hour and the role is on what is termed a permanent part-time basis but I’m sure there are other compensations.
If you have any food allergies or dietary restrictions, then this is not the job for you but there is a vacancy for a chocolate and cocoa beverage tester.
You’d better get your skates on as the company expect a phenomenal response.
Of course, you may pile on the avoirdupois in the role and so could be tempted to do a spot of jogging. This pursuit has its own perils as reports from the Tsawwassen Police in British Columbia reveal. There has been a spate of incidents where owls have swooped down from the skies and attacked joggers and bikers.
The birds have been mistaking ponytails and flashy headgear as prey and so do what comes naturally to them. The problem has become so severe that residents have been urged to avoid the area.
The Donald had better give it a swerve.
February 16, 2018
What Is The Origin Of (167)?…
Tabloid
Last year (2017) the Guardian newspaper here in Blighty announced that it was moving from its existing Berliner format to tabloid form sometime in 2018, leaving just the Telegraph in a broadsheet format. There was a time when there was a clear divide between what were termed as the low-brow, populist papers which were in tabloid format and the broadsheet newspapers, which were more serious and respectable. As with most things, the desire for convenience and usability has won out but it did leave me wondering where the term tabloid came from. My investigations revealed an interesting story, worthy of many a column inch.
Firstly, it is a made-up word, the brain child of the pharmaceutical manufacturer, Henry Wellcome, who was searching for something to describe the highly compressed pills that his firm, established with Silas Burroughs in London in 1878, was producing. Tablet, which in a literal sense meant a small table, had been used since the 16th century to describe the sort of medicines which were made up as solid rectangular, dry packages. This was not good enough for Wellcome as he wanted to stand out from the crowd. Taking the root tabl- he added the suffix –oid which meant resembling, having the form of or the likeness of. So pleased was he of his neologism that Wellcome registered it as a trademark in 1884.
Wellcome’s problem was that his linguistic creation proved to be a bit too successful. In the following decade or so, tabloid began to be used in the vernacular to describe anything of a small, compressed nature. Innovations in the field of journalism saw the launch of the Daily Mail in May 1896, whose size was half that of a broadsheet, establishing what are now the commonly accepted dimensions for a tabloid. The Mail’s hallmark was a succession of news stories told in a simple and condensed style rather than using the grandiloquent prose of the longer established journals. The Daily Mirror soon followed suit.
Small newspapers with condensed articles soon earned the moniker of tabloids. On 1st January 1901, the Westminster Gazette gave its readership notice of a change of editorial policy, advising that “the proprietor intends to give in tabloid form all the news printed by other journals.” The term tabloid journalism was established.
These were unwelcome developments for Wellcome who decided to fight back in defence of his trademark, suing a Manchester firm, Thompson and Crapper, in 1903 for using the word tabloid without permission. Not unreasonably, in their defence, Thompson and Crapper pointed out that the word was now firmly ensconced in the nation’s vocabulary, citing such uses as opera in tabloid, knowledge in tabloid form, tabloid missives and so on. In other words, Wellcome had been victim of his own linguistic genius and by taking this unwarranted legal action was attempting to stifle the development of the noble English tongue.
Nevertheless, Wellcome won his case. While the judge agreed that the word had developed legs of its own and was now used in contexts that were outside of the Wellcome’s original conception and, indeed, had become an accepted description of something in a compressed form, nonetheless he upheld Wellcome’s right to enforce his trademark.
How times have changed. We would scratch our head to associate tabloid with a compressed form of pharmaceutical but would readily accept it as a noun to describe a small newspaper. Sometimes you can be too clever for your own good.
February 14, 2018
Gin o’Clock – Part Thirty Five
One of the interesting by-products of the ginaissance for the seasoned traveller is that the airport duty-free shops are packed full of premium gins. As well as the usual suspects it is possible to stumble across an unusual gin which at the modestly discounted prices on offer is worth a punt.
Wandering through the duty-free shop in Alicante airport my attention was caught by a white, dumpy, ceramic pot – I am a sucker for a ceramic pot – with a grey, pixellated map of the world on the front. The only splash of colour is a red arrow and a red spot on the area that is the north-west coast of Spain. There is no doubting where Nordes Atlantic Galician Gin comes from. The back of the bottle is like a modern-day Rosetta Stone, with descriptions in Spanish, Italian and English. After reading the ingredients – we will come to them in a minute – and as it was the only gin on offer I hadn’t tried, I decided to deploy my last few Euros and buy a litre bottle.
Readers will know by now that our favourite hooch falls broadly into two main camps – the more traditional, juniper heavy, London dry gins and contemporary gins where a whole cocktail of botanicals are thrown into the mix, leaving the juniper as an also-ran rather than the main protagonist in the taste sensation. Nordes is very much in the latter camp – indeed, it is very hard to detect any of the traditional tastes you would associate with a gin in the drink.
For a start, the base spirit is made from Albarino grapes, rather than the usual grain spirit. Wine buffs tell me that Galician vino made from these grapes are the next thing in summer wines – we will see – but for me, they give the foundation of the spirit a rather sweet taste, from which it never recovers. Continuing on the Galician theme, the majority of the botanicals deployed are garnered from the region. So we find verbena, which, it is claimed, is a cure for melancholy, glasswort, hibiscus, lemongrass and peppermint. A touch of exotica is provided by eucalyptus leaves and the ultra-trendy marsh samphire or sea bean, which no self-respecting contemporary gin can be without, it would seem. To complete the cast list we have juniper – at last! – cardamom, ginger, and tea. The spirit has an ABV of 40%.
Unscrewing the dark blue cap, the aroma from the spirit was definitely floral. To the taste, initially, it seemed as though I had ingested some perfume but gradually other flavours, including a hint of juniper, began to come into play. There was the customary warmth coming through at the back of the throat but it was gentle and as I got accustomed to the crystal-clear spirit, I began to appreciate the complexity lurking within. The aftertaste was rather fruity and floral and lingered, leaving a not unpleasant sensation in the mouth. I found that Fever-Tree Mediterranean tonic complemented it well.
In summary, it wasn’t exactly my cup of tea. It wasn’t unpleasant and would work well if you were spending a languid afternoon basking in the heat which the Nordes wind is said to bring to the Galician region. But for me, it confirmed my preference for the more traditional London Dry Gins. As the French say, a chacun son gout.
Until the next time, salud!
February 13, 2018
The Streets Of London – Part Seventy
Puddle Dock, EC4
It was not just the Great Fire of 1666 or the German bombers in the early 1940s that wrought a significant change to the topology of London – it was also the town planners in the 1960s. One victim of their zeal to reclaim the foreshore of the Thames and to make Upper Thames Street a main road was Puddle Dock, now a pale shadow of its former self linking the reconfigured road with Queen Victoria Street. As its name suggests it was once the site of a dock, although what was stored and conveyed there was not the usual merchandise.
Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, published in 1864/5, has the Thames running through it as one of its major motifs and the memorable opening scenes feature Lizzie Hexam and her father, Jesse, rowing along the river on the look-out for dead bodies to fish out. But it wasn’t just bodies that found their way into the water. For a city with a population that was growing like topsy and with rudimentary sanitation at best, the Thames was a convenient receptacle for the detritus and excrement accumulated during the day. At Puddle Dock was sited a laystall which is where cattle were held before they went to market and where dung and other forms of detritus were stored before being disposed of by the fives barges which operated from the dock somewhere downstream into the Thames. It must have stunk to high heaven.
As often is the case, John Stow, in his invaluable Survey of London, published in 1598, gave some insight as to what went on there and the origin of the name. He wrote, “then there is a great Brewhouse, and Puddle wharf, a water gate into the Thames, where horses use to be watered and therefore filed with their trampeling, and made puddle, like as aso of one Puddle dwelling there: it is called Puddle Wharfe.” The dock is shown on John Rocque’s 1746 map and marked as Dung Wharf. A newspaper article from 5th July 1722 gives a sense of the hustle and bustle of the area and the tragedies that could befall the unwary – the use of the pronoun another suggests that it was not unusual. “Another Misfortune happened Yesterday at Puddle-Dock, where a little Boy was killed by a Cart loaded with coals. The Child was stooping down to take up some thing from the Ground when the Cart Wheel ran over his head, and crushed it to Pieces. The Carman is absconded”, the report noted ruefully.
William Maitland’s The History of London, published in 1756, provides a succinct summary of what went on there at the time; “on the banks of the River Thames are the Wharfs of Puddle-dock, used for a Laystall for the Soil of the Streets, and much frequented by Barges and Lighters for taking the same away, as also for landing of Corn and other Goods.” A sense of the stench and inconvenience to all is provided in a report of a case, the King v Gore, to be found in the Evening Mail of 25th November 1836. There we read that “the affidavits of several persons residing near Puddle-dock were read, in which they stated that their health was impaired in consequence of the stench arising from the filth which was allowed to accumulate at this dock.” The defendant argued that “he was obliged, by the covenant of his lease, to allow all persons to place any filth they chose there” and that there had been “a laystall ever since the great fire of London.” The case was unresolved.
In more recent times, the Mermaid Theatre could be found there until it closed in 2003. Now it is just a nondescript, if considerably more fragrant, street but one with a fascinating history.
February 12, 2018
You’re Having A Laugh – Part Eight
Solar Armour
One of the keys to military success, I’m told, is to ensure that your forces arrive at the field of battle in optimal condition. When temperatures are at their height, it would be helpful if the soldiers had some apparel which cooled them down. An article, published on 2nd July 1874 in Nevada’s Territorial Enterprise, described the enterprise of a certain Jonathan Newhouse who had invented something which was known as solar armour, which seemed to be a solution to the problem of perspiring soldiers.
The armour consisted of a long, closely fitting jacket and a cap, both made of sponge about an inch thick. A rubber sack was fitted below the right armpit into which was poured cold water. There was a tube leading from the sack to the cap. Before setting out into the desert the soldier would saturate the sponge and then keep themselves moist by occasionally depressing the sack with their arm.
Having invented the thing, the intrepid Newhouse decided to put it through its paces, choosing the appropriately named Death Valley for the experiment. Alas, for Newhouse, his invention worked too well. An Indian tracker went to a nearby camp and indicated that the men should follow him. About twenty miles from the camp, they saw Newhouse sitting against a rock in his armour, frozen and dead. His beard was covered in frost and an icicle, a foot long, hung from his nose. It seemed that he had been unable to remove the straps to the mechanism and in time his invention had killed him.
The story was soon picked up by newspapers in San Francisco and New York and even crossed the pond where the paper with the largest circulation in the world at the time, the Daily Telegraph, deigned to give it some column inches. But something did not seem quite right about the extraordinary tale. Inventions were a bit Heath-Robinsonish at the time and, as readers of this blog will know, a number of inventors have fallen off this mortal coil at the hands of their invention. The Telegraph, in relating the tale took a rather neutral stance as regards its veracity. Whilst acknowledging the fact that when you ice a bottle of wine by wrapping a cloth around it, the moisture caused by the evaporation is very cold, it would not go as far as accepting the circumstances of poor Newhouse’s demise. Perhaps, it was troubled by the twelve inch icicle hanging from his nose. Instead, rather like Herodotus, it was “not prepared to disbelieve it wholly nor to credit without question.”
Still having got the story into so august an organ as the Telegraph, more details started to emerge of Newhouse’s strange death. A further account of an inquest appeared in the August 30th edition of the Territorial Enterprise, recounting the inquest. Bottles of strange chemicals were found in Newhouse’s backpack and the verdict was that “he fell victim to a rash experiment with chemicals with the nature of which he was imperfectly acquainted.”
Of course, it was all an elaborate hoax and the truth eventually came out. On the staff of the Territorial Enterprise at the time were Mark Twain and William Wright. The Solar Armour story was the work of Wright who was better known as Dan de Quille and who in the 1860s was tipped to achieve greater literary renown than his colleague. The Solar Armour story was the creation of his fevered imagination and an experiment in to how far a ludicrous story would run. Quite some distance, it would appear.
February 11, 2018
Shot Of The Week
I love stories around the theme of biter bit and here’s a great one I came across this week.
Robert Meilhammer was in a group of hunters in Easton, Maryland. A flock of Canadian geese flew over ahead and the group, not wishing to miss out on a bit of sport, blasted away and downed several of the unfortunate birds.
However, one of the geese, which weigh between 12 and 14 lbs, had the last laugh, plummeting to the ground and striking our Robert. So severe was the impact that Meilhammer was knocked unconscious and suffered what was described as a “severe head injury.”
He had to be airlifted to a hospital in Baltimore where he is said to be in a stable condition.
The goose, alas, is dead.
In a statement of the bleedin’ obvious, spokesperson for the Maryland Natural Resources Police, Candy Thomson, revealed that geese can cause “severe damage” falling from height due to their weight and size. But, hey, not as much damage as a bloke with a loaded shotgun aimed at a passing goose.
February 10, 2018
Tee-shirt Of The Week
I suppose that for people like me who run a mile to avoid exercise we will never have the satisfaction of wearing one of those tee-shirts that proclaim that the wearer has completed some benighted marathon, half or otherwise, somewhere at some point in time. If it didn’t involve any effort, I would doff my hat to them.
Mind you, I am on the look-out for anyone who completed last Sunday’s Dewsbury 10k, a course which took the runners through the pastoral delights that are Batley and Birstall. Upon crossing the finishing line, they were presented with a fetching blue tee-shirt, emblazoned with a logo which is supposed to represent the outline of Dewsbury’s splendid Victorian town hall.
It didn’t take long for people to point on social media the rather phallic nature of the logo. Was it all a bit of an unfortunate error or was the designer an anarchist making a point?
We will probably never know.
February 9, 2018
What Is the Origin Of (166)?…
Nothing to sneeze at
Well, despite having a flu injection, I have endured the usual round of winter colds. Apart from a runny nose and a sore throat, the most obvious sign of my affliction has been frequent, and volcanic, outbursts of sneezing. Of course, I use a handkerchief to catch whatever my nose expels but it set me wondering about the origin of nothing to sneeze at which we use to denote that something is worth having or is worthy of our attention.
Sneezing is an affliction which has been with us since the year dot and so it is no surprise that the root of the verb can be found in the Old English word fneosan, which meant to sneeze or snort. During the 15th century the opening f dropped off and nese or neese was used to describe the act of sneezing. At some point thereafter the letter s was added to the opening of the word, giving it a more emphatic form and, to some ears, making it more imitative of the act itself.
Our phrase first made its appearance in printed form in John Till Allingham’s play, Fortune’s Frolic, first produced at Covent Garden in 1799. There we find the line, “Why, as to his consent, I don’t value it a button; but then £5,000 is a sum not to be sneezed at.” There it is, in all its glory, with the modern meaning of something that shouldn’t be rejected without some careful consideration. The antithesis of the phrase appeared slightly later in A Winter in London by Thomas Skinner Surr, published in 1806. The novel contains the sentence, “He tells me it is the sort of thing a young fellow of my expectations ought to sneeze at.” That neither usage needed any explanatory gloss suggests that these were phrases with which the audience and readers would be familiar with and that they were part of common parlance.
But why did sneezing come to represent an expression of disdain? Some commentators suggest that the 18th century was an era of volcanic nasal eruptions, courtesy of the habit of taking snuff. Perhaps, if a bewigged gentleman of the time heard something with which he disagreed, he would reach for his snuff-box, inhale the fine grained tobacco that is snuff and sneeze violently. Appealing as this explanation may be, it seems to me to be a bit far-fetched. After all, it would be quite a performance and the time taken to produce a stentorian response would rob the moment of its drama.
It seems to me that the answer is to be found in a parallel phrase, to sniff at. An earlier citation can be found for this phrase, in Jonathan Swift’s poem entitled The Grand Question Debated: Whether Hamilton’s Bawn should be turned into a barrack or malt-house, written in 1729. The Irish satirist wrote, “So, then you look’d scornful, and snift at the dean”, clearly an expression of disdain or contempt. Thomas Carlyle, in his The French Revolution: A History, published in 1837, wrote, “Camille Desmoulins, and others, sniffing at him for it” and, in a passage that the modern reader could easily misinterpret, “Dusky D’Espréménil does nothing but sniff and ejaculate.”
The Swiftian citation suggests that sniffing as a sign of disdain was already established in the mid 18th century. Perhaps the adoption of sneezing was simply a stronger expression of disdain, the explanation being as simple as that. Who knows?
February 8, 2018
Motivated By Curiosity And A Desire For The Truth – Part Thirty Three
Do woodpeckers suffer brain damage?
One of the distinctive sounds to be heard in the garden of Blogger Towers is the drilling of a woodpecker as it tries to dislodge insects from within the bark of one of the nearby trees. It has always struck me that there must be easier ways for them to get their food. After all, each time they strike the tree their beaks and head undergo forces of between 1,200 and 1,400 G, over fourteen times the force that would give a human concussion.
A team of scientists from Boston University School of Medicine, led by Peter Cummings, reported in the ever popular Plos One, carried out some research into the brains of woodpeckers, using exhibits from the Field Museum and Harvard Museum of Natural History. The tell-tale sign for brain damage, in human brains at least, is the build-up of tau protein around our axons. Normally, tau protein wraps around the axons, giving them protection and stability while preserving their flexibility. Too much of it, though, disrupts the ability of the neurons to communicate, causing problems with functions such as emotional, cognitive and motor.
In what is thought to have been the first detailed examination of woodpecker brains, the little grey cells were removed from a number of exhibits and the amount of tau protein was compared with that to be found in the brains of Red-winged Blackbirds. Now, of course, the woodpeckers in question may have been particularly stupid, having allowed themselves to be caught and end up in a museum’s glass case, but the researchers found that there was considerably more tau protein in their brains than in the blackbirds.
Is this indicative of brain damage? Frustratingly, the researchers are not prepared to commit; all Cummings was prepared to say was “We can’t say that these woodpeckers definitely sustained brain injuries, but there is extra tau present in the woodpecker brain.” It is dangerous to assume that what is good for humans must also be the case for other forms of animal life so a bit more research is needed, I guess.
Empirically, though, as woodpeckers have been around for 25 million years and nature evolves – a controversial contention, I know – you would think that they would have developed mechanisms to prevent injurious damage to their bodies. And it seems they have. Researchers have previously established that woodpeckers have particularly thick neck muscles which serve to diffuse the blow when their beak strikes the wood. They also have a third inner eyelid which prevents their eyeballs from popping out.
In 2012 scientists from Beijing’s Beihang University and the Wuhan University of Technology carried out a more detailed examination of the thick bone that surrounds and cushions the woodpecker’s brain, details of which were reported in Science China Life Sciences. It appears that their brains are surrounded by a spongy bone plate made of tiny beams or rods called trabeculae. This provides a protective layer around the brain. Similarly, their beaks contain these same trabeculae. It is thought that the beak deforms during impact, absorbing the impact rather than sending it onwards towards the brain.
So the answer is probably no. Makes sense, I suppose.
If you enjoyed this, why not try Fifty Curious Questions by Martin Fone which is now available via www.martinfone.com
