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The icing on the cake
I'm currently enjoying an egg mayo sandwich. This was easy enough to make, put four eggs in an egg boiler, cook, leave to cool, then put in the fridge overnight.
Today, today the eggs were peeled and chopped. After removing the yolk, I'm not so fond of the gushy yellow bit. The eggs were chopped haphazardly (to give texture), and about half a bottle of mustard-free mayonaise was dumped on top.
This concoction was then spread on two pieces of bread, to make two egg mayo sandwiches. Lunch.
I don't think I've eaten this in eighteen years. It's stupid little things that I miss from English cuisine, like a decent egg and cress sandwich.
A nice little tea shop (or "salon du thé") has opened in town. Run by a French woman, it caters to French sensibilities (obviously). That means no Tetley, but several dozen types of specialty tea that need to brew for several minutes in order to colour the water. Still, there's a "Breakfast tea" which is acceptable (five minutes later...) which is served in a little paper bag in a metal basket in a pot. A proper tea pot. Sometimes, you know, you just need it in a damn pot. Maybe it's a bit of latent Englishness leaking out, I dunno, but while there are many benefits to slinging a teabag in a mug, something it just has to be in a teapot.
[for my American readers, allow me point you to: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpotOfTea]
So we got onto the subject of cakes. She has an old (2016) cakes calendar, but she doesn't read English. So I translated the carrot cake recipe.
She nearly died. The cake, 250g of flour, 400g of fine sugar. The icing, 450g of caster sugar. She was like "that's nearly a kilogram of sugar for one freaking cake" and I'm like "yes?".
I bought a "Lutin", a sort of a muffin with chocolate bits in it. Made the French way. That is to say, if I hadn't had that conversation with her I might have thought she'd actually forgotten to put the sugar in. I guess I'll have to rummage through mom's baking book to see if I can find a recipe that won't give her, and her French clients, heart attacks.
But, on the subject of carrot cake. Or any English style cake really... she can't make them. No icing on top, no cut-in-half and put jam and cream in between. The reason for this is... you might want to sit down...
Okay, it's like this. Anybody can make a cake. Almost anybody can make a cake and sell it (there are some obvious hygiene things). But if somebody wants to make, and sell, slices of cake with some icing on top, or cream in between the layers, then they need to be a diploma-holding patissier.
Seeing my expression, which I'm sure was the very embodiment of "WTF", she just shrugged and said "it's France".
So I suggested she serve the cake, and put some icing in a bowl, and serve that too. Let the customer ice their own cake... or as I think I'd probably do, eat the cake and then the icing.
In a true democracy, people are allowed to change their minds
It was strange seeing people outside the Lib Dem conference protesting that their stand of revoking Article 50 is "undemocratic" and does not "respect the referendum".
What they fail to understand is that their idiotic bullying is not democracy.
You see, people's opinions are not fixed and forevermore unalterable. Things can change, situations can change, people can wise up to the lies. Well, some can. Others are beyond redemption. Anyway, lives and times change and so do people's opinions.
It is for that reason that most functional democracies have periodic elections. One doesn't vote once for "the party" and they rule until death.
For that reason, not only is it entirely democratic to hold a second referendum now that the truth of all those promised easy solutions is known, it is also perfectly acceptable for the Liberal Democrats to promise to revoke Article 50. It isn't even slightly undemocratic, for if "the people" do not want it, they won't vote the Lib Dems into power. And if they do get voted into power, then that's a clear democratic mandate for them then revoking Article 50.
If the referendum is sacrosanct and cannot be altered, questioned, or contradicted (the attitude a lot of English seem to take over Scottish independence), then I propose that Brexit is immediately annulled, as it is blatantly not respecting the result of the referendum held back in 1973.
Yes, times have changed a lot since then.
Times have also changed a lot since 2016.
EBook
I have a little e-ink e-book reader, and something that I thought might be useful is to have a way of reading e-books on RISC OS.
It turns out that EPUB (electronic publication) files are simply zip archives containing a number of files in a more rigid form of XHTML with CSS. That is to say that they can be assembled in a way that a browser can display them, although the presentation is rather different in that traditionally you get a page at a time instead of a long scrolling document.
That is something that I'd like to do in the future, but for now I have a "splitter" that ignores the CSS, takes the HTML, and "splits out" the textual content. It understands some UTF-8 (at least, that which RISC OS is capable of displaying without jumping through hoops) and inline formatting (like <i> and <em>, not CSS). This stripped content (containing some embedded markup codes) is then passed to a lineificator (I made that word up) that scans through the text to build up a list of where each line begins.
Then, it's a simple scrolling window that will display the content to you in 14pt Corpus (Courier/monotype) with some simple markup if detected in the content (bold and italics, headings in bold). It isn't great, but it is sufficient to read most European-language EPUB files. Those that don't work, some have been sent to me so I can figure out why and make them work.
Here is an example of EBook showing Cory Doctrow's Homeland (sequel to Little Brother, read that first!):
So... With Koi-Koi and Manga, I provide yet another way to waste time on RISC OS and not get work done. ☺
All of the above are on !Store.
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| David Pilling, 24th September 2019, 15:10 |
Cake recipe, weigh an egg, add equal weight amounts of self raising flour, sugar and butter. |
| David Pilling, 25th September 2019, 13:25 |
English law famously has a definition of a cake and a biscuit, does French law have a definition of a patiesserie. |
(Felicity? Marte? Find out!)
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