Rick's b.log - entry 2025/04/02

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Sun!

I'm in today as it's fairly warm, but sun and clouds and a ferocious wind that makes the warm feel decidedly less so.

Cherry blossom

The other cherries are not yet ready. The flowering (pink) cherry will be soon, just not today.

As I write this, on Wednesday, the semi-wild cherry out front still hasn't started flowering. It is supposed to reach 20°C Friday and Saturday - is it waiting for that?

And this... just to keep with the theme here... is a Cherry Laurel. It's an evergreen cherry shrub - and I'll forgive you if you think those words don't go together. But there you go. Even stranger, "Prunus" (the genus which includes cherry, peach, nectarine, apricot, and almonds (ie the stone fruit)) is a part of the "Rosaceae" family which is not only roses, as the name suggests, but damn near everything that's useful and not a grass crop or some flavour of Belladonna (*). Apples? Pears? Raspberries? Blackberries? Almonds? Roses? Cherries? All of those.

Just opposite is the Bay tree, properly a Bay Laurel. Despite the Cherry Laurel being called a Laurel and looking damn near identical to the Bay, the Bay is in the genus "Lauris" in the family "Lauraceae" of the order "Laurales". So there's absolutely no mistaking that it is a laurel. Cherry Laurel, on the other hand, is a cherry tree in drag. There's nothing laurel about it, other than the name and the striking resemblence which is why it has such a name.

The sweet almond (which you now know is a rose-relative) seems like it's been in flower for quite a while - long enough ago that it has frozen at least twice. Which, actually, was just last week.

The "GC-161" apple is getting itself ready, too. Maybe this year I'll not only have apples, but will come up with a plan for getting them before the wasps do.

Something is giving me the sneezes. I wonder what. Let's just say "a rose", I'll be about 40% correct. ☺

* - I'm referring to the "Solanaceae" family, which is commonly known as "the nightshades" (yes, as in deadly nightshade). We eat some of these - bell and chili peppers, tomatoes, audergine, and potatoes. One branch of this family is cultivated, usually to be burned. Its genus is "Nicotiana", you might be able to guess from the name how and why it is burned.
It's quite interesting seeing how all of these things relate to each other. I mean, would you have guessed that a spindly odd-smelling green plant that makes huge red fruit that dumb humans treat as a vegetable is related to a shortish plant that makes big fat tubers underground?

Stew!

Carrot, beef bits, potato, fried onion, fried shallot, and sliced leek. In the final hour, I turned the slow cooker back up to high and added two sachets of Ebly (wheat kernels) to absorb the water. It was rather dramatically effective.

So I had stew for dinner, stew to take to work the next day, stew in the freezer, and stew in the fridge (also frozen because it is right up the top) that I think I'll have tonight.

McDonald's Nether Flame Sauce

The burger flinger known for it's iconic arches is doing some sort of tie-in with a Minecraft movie. Now I might be the last person on earth that has no idea what Minecraft actually is. The very little that I've seen, it sort of looks like digital Lego meets SimCity.

Whatever, it's not important. There's a movie being made, and the burger flinger is getting involved in the hypefest because, well, because that's where they think the money is.
As part of this tie-in, they have introduced a new "limited edition" hot sauce called Flaming Nether. Don't ask me, I guess it's a Minecraft thing. Flaming Nether, to me, sounds like an overly sterilised description of the Christian concept of "Hell". Or what happens when you eat that thing you really shouldn't have eaten. But that's a different sort of nether and a very different sort of flaming.

I got one of them just "because" when I got all of those chicken nuggets, and decided to try it with my fish and chips. Just "because".

Anyway, I wasn't expecting much as Frenchies don't seem to be that fond of spicy food. I'm quite able to splash Tabasco onto Pringles. Or the rather lovely Cholula Original. Cholula is slightly hotter than Tabasco, it is rated three peppers (out of three). Cholula is very very red. Not the colour, the sauce itself is a sort of orangey-red. No, when I close my eyes and pop some into my mouth, it is undeniably red. By comparison, Tabasco is green. The actual sauce is a slightly darker red than Cholula, but the impression that I get from Tabasco is a muted green, like lime green.
A slightly hotter sauce can be found in the American style pick-and-mix box from Lidl, that offers onion rings (proper onion pieces!), mozerella sticks, and chili cheese nuggets. But, then, it's probably made for the German market and not the wimpy Frenchies. ☺ Case in point, I'm not going to name and shame the supermarket's own-brand spicy salsa sauce as, well, it was sauce. At least that much of the description was correct.

So I opened up the McDo Nether Flame sauce, dunked some chips (mine, not theirs) and stuffed the lot into my gob.
My synesthesia colouring did not offer anything. It didn't get a chance. Immediate fire (so it lives up to its name) followed by words better left unsaid. In order to try to mute the fire, I popped a piece of battered cod into my mouth. You know, something else uncontaminated. But no, the cod was hot (as in temperature) and the heat (temperature) encouraged the heat (spice) of the pepper sauce and made it worse.
And since I'm me I ~~ran screaming into the kitchen and one-shot an entire litre of milk~~ loaded up more chips and more sauce and thought that if I'm going to do this, I'm going all in.

I finished my chips. And the dip pack. No milk, no drink, even dipped some hot (temperature) pieces of battered fish into the sauce to really screw with my senses.

Now, if this is a ten then by comparison Tabasco is maybe a six and a half. I think regular Tabasco is about 4,000 on the Scoville Scale. Oddly, Cholula Original around 3,000 but to me it seems stronger. So I'm just going to guess that the McDo sauce is maybe a five to six thousand? However, to put this into context, Carolina Reaper is two and a half million ... a number of children taking part in the One Chip Challenge, a challenge aimed at adults, needed medical assistance afterwards because, well, small sized humans really shouldn't ingest stupid amounts of capsaicin.

Note, however, that this sauce probably shouldn't be inflicted on unsuspecting children. They will learn the meaning of "instant regret" if they treat it like ketchup.

Suffice to say, this was quite a pleasing sauce. I'm rather tempted to get some nuggets after work on Friday just to go all in with this sauce. "Because".

April Fool

Here is the entire version of the pop-up that appeared on my site (with some watermarking added to avoid using the usual method which would obliterate the button at the bottom).

Note the psychologically reassuring green theme. It's safe, it's even environmentally friendly! Oh YES!

And once you have clicked on the button (you have no other choice) it will change to a different button, that also needs to be clicked on.

Opera was... useless. I noticed as I was setting it up that the "Send usage reports" option was pre-ticked and hidden away in the settings. Poor show. But even worse, Opera failed to fetch anything at all. Even my site index which is small and simple. Instead it just crashed and restarted itself.

It worked on Microsoft's Edge browser, also available on Android. What's more, when Edge was installing and setting itself up, it prompted whether or not it was allowed to send back usage reports. Take note, Opera, when flippin' Microsoft look like the good guys, you're failing hard.

Interestingly, Brave and my installations of Firefox displayed the top of the dialogue and the accept button, but none of the options. I suspect this is the cookie auto-accept add-on (Firefox) and something similar built into Brave, that is "sort of recognising" this as a cookie pop-up and is hiding the cruft, but isn't quite certain enough to make it go away altogether.

Obviously, in case it wasn't obviously obvious, it obviously wouldn't work on NetSurf, which is an obvious thing that should really be quite obvious.

It's after 9pm and I'm hungry and tired so I'm going to heat up a bowl of stew for dinner and if there are typos then my bad.

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