A.C. Flory's Blog, page 14

Chicken Soup with Parsley Dumplings

I’ve written about chicken soup before, but the parsley dumplings are new. Light, fluffy, and delicious, the recipe is dead easy, and arose out of an accident!

I’ve been making nokedli type dumplings for decades, but recently I grabbed the wrong jar of flour, and mixed the batter with self raising flour instead of plain flour! Oh no…

That was literally the best culinary mistake I’ve ever made. The dumplings turned out very, very soft and fluffy – no good for stews etc but perfect for soups. So as I haven’t shared a recipe in a very long time, here’s my quick and easy parsley dumpling recipe.

Ingredients

1 egg1/2 a cup of chopped, Continental Parsleyroughly 1/2 a cup of self raising floura dash of black peppera pinch of saltjust enough water to make the batter easy to beat but not runny

Method

Bring your soup to a gentle simmerMix the parsley with the egg [I just use a fork]Add the flour and pepper and saltMix thoroughly [if the batter is too ‘dry’ add just enough water to beat the batter with a fork].take a teaspoon and gently slide spoonfuls of the batter into the soup.allow the soup and dumplings to simmer for 5 – 10 minutes until the dumplings have tripled in size and are floating on the surface of the soup.

And that’s it. A few ingredients, a few minutes of mixing, a few minutes of simmering, and you’ll have delicious dumplings to liven up your soup!

If you don’t like parsley, leave it out. Or substitute some finely chopped spinach instead. Or, if you have boiled chicken from the soup, mash some of it up and add to the dumpling mixture. That’s the beauty of these dumplings, you can add whatever you like, and the soup itself will complete the ‘flavouring’.

I did try to cook these dumplings in plain water once. They were ok but lacked the rich flavour we’re used to.

I’d love to know what you think, so if you do end up trying these dumplings, please! come back and let me know how they turned out.

cheers,
Meeks

Andrew…who?

The name – ‘Andrew Tate’ – sounded vaguely familiar, but I had no idea he was a misogynist whose toxic message was grooming boys as young as ten! Not until today.

What teen boys see in Andrew Tate – ABC podcast hosted by Samantha Hawley:

“When parents I know heard about him [Andrea Tate] it was in December when he was jailed. So we’d never really heard about him before, but when we asked our teenage sons if they knew who he was, they all did know who he was, and we had no idea. And I found that really, really disturbing.”
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/abc-news-daily/what-teen-boys-see-in-andrew-tate/101887710

I found that really, really disturbing as well, and I wondered how many of you know how your sons and grandsons are being groomed?

Grooming is usually associated with sexual abuse, but it can also refer to mental and emotional brain washing. Teens without good role models will go searching for someone to emulate. Girls go looking for glamorous women on social media. Boys search for strong, successful men who make them feel good about themselves.

And make no mistake, having someone you look up to say that you deserve to be powerful is addictive, especially when the social media algorithms amplify the message to keep you engaged.

To test the role of social media algorithms in radicalising vulnerable people, researchers set up five archetypes with varying ‘issues’, then waited to see what the algorithms would recommend.

‘The initial suggested content was in line with the stated interests of each archetype, but after five days researchers said the TikTok algorithm was presenting four times as many videos with misogynistic content including objectification, sexual harassment or discrediting women, which increased from 13% of recommended videos to 56%.’
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/feb/06/social-media-algorithms-amplifying-misogynistic-content

56%… But I knew that already. I don’t use Tik Tok, but I am on Youtube, and you would not believe the flood of cute cat videos that end up on the home page of my channel. I like cats, but I hate being manipulated by a piece of code!

But how does this manipulation work? Well, this mindless piece of code is deliberately designed to look for engagement. If I watch one cat video and then watch a second cat video, the algorithm will present me with more cat videos. Why? Because the longer I stay on social media the more advertisements I see, even if I don’t consciously ‘watch’ them.

My own experience is that each video I watch contains one or more advertisements. Recently, however, Youtube started presenting 2 paid promotion videos on my home page. That’s 2 out of 6 videos I didn’t ask for that the algorithm just plonked in front of me.

Advertising doesn’t work on me, but that’s probably because I’m old and grumpy and know how to search for what I actually want. Teenagers who grow up with social media have no such filters. And influencers are very good at creating fantasies that make those teens want to emulate them.

But what does the Andrew Tate message actually do? Apparently, it’s now so pervasive that it’s showing up in our schools and female teachers are being targeted.

And then there’s the domestic violence epidemic. 26 women killed in Australia in the first 4 months of the year. And let’s not forget the Archbishop stabbed to death by a sixteen year old.

Algorithms are spreading messages of hate all over social media, but because we aren’t vulnerable, we don’t get bombarded with the same poison as our kids. We’re not targets, so we simply don’t see what’s happening in plain sight.

The teen years are always difficult, but now more than ever before, parents and grandparents need to be there for their kids, because if we’re not, the Andrew Tates of this world will be.

Meeks

I did it! I made a Youtube Short.

You’ve already seen the first attempts, so I don’t expect you to actually watch this Short. I just wanted to be able to show that I finally got there. In a later post I’ll do a ‘how-to’ in case anyone else wants to give it a go.

cheers,
Meeks

p.s. comments are off.

Seeing is believing!

Anyone still on the fence about evolution should either keep reading, or look away now, because this post is going to showcase an indisputable mechanism of evolution: two lifeforms merging into one.

“The phenomenon is called primary endosymbiosis, and it occurs when one microbial organism engulfs another, and starts using it like an internal organ. In exchange, the host cell provides nutrients, energy, protection and other benefits to the symbiote, until eventually it can no longer survive on its own and essentially ends up becoming an organ for the host – or what’s known as an organelle in microbial cells.”
https://newatlas.com/biology/life-merger-evolution-symbiosis-organelle/

I love biology, but I know not everyone shares my passions, so this is how the New Atlas writer explains primary endosymbiosis:

“Imagine if kidneys were actually little animals running around, and humans had to manually filter their blood through a dialysis machine. Then one day some guy somehow gets one of these kidney critters stuck… Internally (who are we to judge how?) – and realizes he no longer needs his dialysis machine. Neither do his kids, until eventually we’re all born with these helpful little fellas inside us. That’s kind of what’s happening here.”
https://newatlas.com/biology/life-merger-evolution-symbiosis-organelle/

Other examples of this process are Mitochondria – the little powerhouses in our cells that give us the energy we need – and Chloroplasts – the green bits of plants that allow them to make food from sunlight.

This is what the algae/bacterium combo looks like as the cell divides [reproduction]:

The pale blue bits are the organelle/bacterium which is shown reproducing along with the other parts of the algae cell. This proves that it’s not just a one-off or a standard form of symbiosis.

The reason scientists are so excited by the discovery of this algae/bacterium meld is that it’s only happened a few times, so it could be kick-starting a whole new branch of life. Don’t worry though, the algae/bacterium took roughly 100 million years to get to this point, so we probably won’t see the end result for another billion years or so.

cheers,
Meeks

WordPress ‘Quote’ block malfunction

I was typing up my post for tomorrow when I realised that I couldn’t get out of the ‘Quote’ block I’d been using. As a result, new paragraphs NOT part of the quote were also getting indented. Worst still, selecting the Quote block again, indented the new quote INSIDE the original quote.

The problem seems to be that once you select the Quote block, the paragraph block is no longer shown as an option in the block list. This means you can no longer change the format of the Quote block, or the format of any paragraphs that come after the Quote block.

The only way I could fix this malfunction was to cut and paste almost all of my text and place it manually into separate paragraph blocks. As I’m not game to try the Quote block again, tomorrow’s post will feature ” and ” to indicate what’s quoted and what’s not.

WordPress blocks are not my preferred way of creating posts, but I’ve been using them for a number of years now, and I haven’t had this problem before so I have to assume that the Happiness Engineers are meddling again and inadvertently created this malfunction. You really aren’t making us happy guys.

Not happy,
Meeks

A video and a Tukti

I was hoping to create a Youtube ‘short’ video, but after much research I realised that shorts really are only designed for mobile phones. The image ration is 9:16 – i.e. nine wide by 16 long – but most screen capture is the reverse – i.e. 16 across and 9 long. It is possible to convert from the standard format to the mobile phone format, but…it looks pretty awful. So, I turned my failed short video into a short, normal video:

Elder Scrolls Online – player housing: Ald Velothi Harbour House re-imagined.

And I’ve also been working on another Tukti scene. This one shows Little Miss outside the Mound. She’s holding two stones, and she’s using them to tap out a ‘where are you’ to her brother. Think primitive SOS.

I have one more image to go, and then I can put them together in a story sequence.

Have a great weekend,
Meeks

A man with a knife in Sydney

‘Six people are dead after a stabbing attack at the busy shopping centre in Sydney.

Eight others who were also injured, including a nine-month-old baby, are still in hospital.

Some of the people injured are in critical condition.’

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-14/several-killed-in-mass-stabbing-at-westfield-bondi-junction/103705354

That’s what you get when a nutter goes berserk with a knife.

Mass killings are very rare in Australia, and they leave all of us shaken, yet as awful as yesterday’s senseless slaughter is, imagine how much worse it could have been. Imagine how many people that man could have murdered if he’d had a gun, especially one of those automatic machine gun type guns.

I don’t give former Prime Minister John Howard credit for much, but I will be eternally grateful for his decision to ban guns after the Port Arthur massacre. That decision continues to saves lives to this day because there will always be nutters, in any society. Restricting their access to weapons of mass destruction – and yes, that is precisely what an AR-15 is – reduces the number of people they can kill and maim and terrorize.

I know the rhetoric: ‘guns don’t kill, people do’. And it’s true, but it’s also a great big LIE. Yes, nutters will always find a way to vent their hatred, but it takes a lot of effort to kill people with a knife or a machete. So the number of people killed will always be less than if the same nutter sprayed a crowd with bullets.

Freedom means having the right to live.
Not kill.

Meeks

I could not resist!

I blame Widds and her brood for making me even more clucky than usual!

cheers,
Meeks.

Innerscape is coming…

When I wrote Innerscape, I imagined a lot of the tech becoming available late this century – i.e. 2090-ish – but I keep discovering emerging tech that’s way ahead of [my] schedule. This is what I discovered this morning:

‘Normally, using a BCI is an acquired skill that can take up to weeks or months to develop. In this case, it can apparently be as quick as a matter of moments: at a demonstration by the researchers at the SXSW festival last month, several volunteers learned how to control two hand and arm rehabilitation robots using the brain cap within minutes.’

https://futurism.com/neoscope/cap-play-video-games-with-mind

A ‘BCI’ is a ‘Brain Computer Interface’. Some require implant surgery, and some, like the red and black cap in the photo, have special electrodes that can pick up signals from the brain. The thing about this one is that it uses a ‘decoder’ created with the assistance of an AI. The decoder makes tuning the cap to the individual much quicker and easier.

In terms of Innerscape, this tech could eventually develop into a full body gaming suit, like the one that killed Leon. -cough- Sorry, that was a teensy weensy spoiler.

cheers,
Meeks

Happy Easter to all cat lovers :D

-hugs-
Meeks