...Our own rural local is very like one described in one of the news stories above -- a combined pub and grocery, with the ice cream and milk coolers near the door, and the bar and pub area through an archway past the groceries. Last night Paul the barman (who manages the place with/for his mother Mary, the licensee) said that there's been "not a bother". The ashtrays were gone. People sat at the bar chatting as usual. A few folks went out the back door to the new covered outside smoking area, then returned twenty minutes or so later. ...Mondays are always a little quiet: we'll see how things develop.
We're supporting our "local" by making sure that we're down there a little more often now. It's going to be very interesting to watch how this plays out...
(For those interested in some history on this business (hi, Shai!):)
The law was originally mooted as a way to keep Irish workplaces smoke-free (and incidentally to help people stop smoking) since the Irish death rate from heart disease and smoke-related ailments is the highest in Europe, and costs the Irish economy nearly a billion euro a year in social services support, hospitalization costs, etc. (The health minister's statement today was that smoking kills three times as many people in Ireland "as car accidents, on the job accidents, suicide, murder, drugs, and Aids put together." Some estimates run as high as a mortality rate of 20%.)
The present crackdown has come in a number of stages. First passed was the "Public Health (Tobacco) Bill", in 2001. This forbade the sales of cigarettes in packets of 10 as well as corporate sponsorship of sports events using a tobacco company's name instead of the name of a product, and required that tobacco machines be operated by special tokens obtained from the store or shop where the machine is located, rather than with coins. Then came another piece of legislation steeply raising the penalties for those who sell tobacco to under-18's.
After that came the present bill. There was fierce opposition to it from the Vintners Association (the biggest of the organizations representing people who own and operate pubs and restaurants) but the government resisted the lobbying. The legislation passed, if I remember correctly, in late 2002. Originally it was supposed to go into force in January, but there was a delay so that some exceptions could be incorporated into the law. There was also a question as to whether the Irish law would conflict with upcoming EU legislation, but that seems not to have come to anything.
The aspect of the law which has caused the most ruckus was the government's determination not even to accept the concept of indoor smoking sections, as the pub staff would still have to go into such places and subject themselves to the passive smoke. The only smoking areas allowed to be connected to a pub or restaurant are those open to the outdoors on at least one side. There has therefore been much installing of patio heaters, outdoor fireplaces, awnings over patios, etc etc.
...Google is full of stories about the ban today, with more context: check here for a selection. The Irish Times's stories are pretty much the best for getting a feel of the history of the crackdown, but unfortunately the Times is a subscription website.
"...Huebner said the test had set a world speed record for a craft powered by an air-breathing engine.
"Project members said the successful test had important commercial and military implications.
"Efficient access to space opens up a whole new world for industry in the future, to be able to get to space and get back, quickly, and do it several times a month," Sitz said.
"During Saturday's test, a modified B-52 bomber dropped the X-43A at an altitude of around 40,000 feet.
"A rocket attached to the 2,800-pound (1,270-kg) research vehicle then boosted it to an altitude of 95,000 feet, setting the stage for the scramjet engine test.
"Later this year, NASA researchers hope to test the engine at Mach 10, or about 7,000 mph (11,265 km/h), as part of their Hyper-X program."
posted by Diane: 3/28/2004 09:15:51 AM | link to this post
Here's a neat page at the website of the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research -- their Gallery of Nostrums, containing labels from and ads for old patent medicines.
Yes, there's snake oil. Several kinds. And many other scary things. "Epilepsy Remedy"... "Eckman's Alterative" (sheesh, that one sounds like Jack Vance or Gene Wolfe invented it) ... "Mixer's Cancer and Scrofula Syrup."
...Without warning, Carmela came around the corner and pulled Nita out of sight of the dining room.
"Who. Is. Your. Friend??" she whispered. "Where did he come from??"
"Ireland. There's this town on the coast, it's called Bray - "
"No no no," Carmela said, waving her hands helplessly in the air, "I meant it in a much more, you know, existential way. I was referring to his basic, you know, hotness -- "
Nita had to work to keep from snickering at Carmela's loss of composure. "Yeah," she said, "while I was there I noticed that there did seem to be a lot of really good looking Irish guys. I started to wonder if maybe there was something in the water."
Carmela put her head down by Nita's and whispered, if possible, even more quietly. "Is he attached?"
"In ways it would take me hours, if not days, to describe," Nita said, "yes."
Carmela's face fell.
"But none of them are those kinds of ways," Nita said.
A smile appeared slowly on Carmela's face. "Oh, good."
Nita raised her eyebrows. "You're going to break Filif's heart, you know."
"Oh no -- my feelings for him go right down to the root."
Nita groaned. "And what about Roshaun?"
"Roshaun? Please. That would be poaching," Carmela said.
While Nita started to try to work that one out, Carmela grinned at her, then strolled back into the dining room in the most casual manner imaginable.
Finally Nita shook her head. And I thought things were too weird around here already. I think we're about to set a weirdness baseline the likes of which the planet has never seen...
So they told us the new larder fridge and freezer won't be showing up until ten days or so from now. Great, I thought. One less thing to worry about while I'm working.
So naturally they're coming today. While Kit is arguing with a cranky alien about the meaning of life, Nita is up to her ears in trying to rewrite the physical laws of a volume of space she really doesn't know enough about, and Dairine and Roshaun are... no, never mind that, it's too complex.
Argh. Clutch head, yell "Cut!" at characters, put computer away, get busy rearranging the kitchen...
Just in case blogging gets a little sparse around here over the next ten days: this is because Wizards at War is due at the publisher on April 1 (don't ask me if there's a message there somewhere...). I expect to spend just about every waking minute for the next week and a half chasing the MS around the house and Doing Things To It.
The process won't be uninterrupted, heaven knows. Life and the cats will see to that.
I may post occasional one-liners from the MS for the entertainment of those interested, though.
YW.Com / YW.Net readers: An excerpt will go up on YW.Net next week.
Wandering over to Fandom_Wank, I find the following: (sorry, no permalink, please scroll down to it if you're interested -- )
"Just before midnight last night, various places start suggesting that the new Doctor [Who] has been cast...
"Somewhere round about midnight GMT the BBC confirm that we're getting Christoper Eccleston out of Shallow Grave. Squeeing commences, and LJ icons start appearing within minutes.
"But wait! Because while the BBC news site was the official breaker of this, the BBCi had no mention of it.
"And then, they replace their banner with this image."
This isn't the first time I've sent some bizarro link Dave's way. Last time I think it was this -- scroll down to April 28 and look for "Nature Alert". And then there was this thing. (Dave linked to it originally here, but the Japanese link no longer functions. Never mind, because a public-minded and genial nutcase called Polazzo has saved all the Hi-Ho animations and stored them here. Bless you, Polazzo, wherever you are.)
...I love Dave's stuff. He's a national treasure, if you ask me. Anything I can do to make him laugh seems a small return for the many, many times he's done it for me.
I can't remember when I first saw this cartoon's close "relative" -- and I saw it in black and white. It involved two kids, Billy and Isabel, and their meeting with a wonderful fish, Red Lantern, guardian of the Land of the Lost under the sea, "to which all lost things make their way." Only much later did I find that these cartoons were derived from a 1940's radio serial (Art Carney was apparently the voice of Red Lantern on radio).
An offhand web search this morning informed me that there were actually three of these cartoons, and led me to LikeTelevision.com. This site has assembled a big library of old TV -- classic cartoons, SF, classic TV (Jack Benny, Bonanza, Burns & Allen, Dragnet, etc.), movies, TV history (pick a day...) and toy commercials. All are available for viewing / download, and this is all on the up-and-up: make them a PayPal payment and save an .MPG of something you haven't seen in a long, long while...
Wow!
It didn't take long to download the third Red Lantern cartoon, which was waiting online. Now it's just a matter of tracking down the first two...
700+ hits from various sources, today, on the "Atlantic Europe: Ireland" page at EuropeanCuisines.com. But this has been the best search string so far:
March 17th again. (A nice day here, fortunately. The rain took itself away just in time to miss the parade.) And as the world turns and the Sun climbs up the sky over North America, suddenly hundreds and hundreds of websurfers start rolling into the "Ireland" page at EuropeanCuisines.com looking for...guess what?
Recipes for corned beef and cabbage.
(sigh)
Why We Have No Corned Beef Recipes
Ask someone who hasn't lived or visited here about what Irish food is like, and nine times out of ten, as they grope for answers, they'll mention corned beef and cabbage.
However, investigation shows that, while corned beef and cabbage is sometimes eaten here, it's probably eaten a lot less than most people imagine: and by no means is it the Irish national dish.
It first turns up, if translations are to be trusted, in the Vision of MacConglinne, the 12th-century poem which describes so much of Irish food as it was eaten at that time. It's described as a delicacy given to a king, in an attempt to conjure "the demon of gluttony" out of his belly. This delicacy status makes little sense until one understands that beef was not a major part of most Irish people's diets until the last century or so. To be sure, cattle were kept here from very early times, but they were kept mostly for their milk -- few people except perhaps the Swiss have ever so loved their dairy products as the Irish have, and the ancient Irish especially. ("They make seventy-several kinds of food out of milk, both sweet and sour," said one bemused sixteenth-century traveller and historian, "and they love them the best when they're sourest.")
From the earliest historical times, for routine eating, pork was always the favorite. Cattle were only slaughtered when they were no good any longer for milking, or for breeding purposes; otherwise, they were prized as a common medium for barter. The size of one's herd of cattle was an indication of status, wealth and power -- hence all the stories of tribal chieftains and petty kings of the ancient days, endlessly rustling one another's cattle (the greatest of the ancient wars of legend was started by one of these thefts, the Cattle Raid of Cooley). Eating beef, except for that of a cow past its milking days or accidentally killed, was the cultural equivalent of lighting your cigars with hundred-dollar bills...unless you were a chieftain, or a king, in which case you could afford it.
In later centuries, when the cattle raids were long done, the majority of Irish people still didn't eat very much beef -- because it was still much too expensive. Those who did eat beef, tended to eat it fresh: corned beef again surfaces in writings of the late 1600's as a specialty, a costly delicacy (expensive because of the salt) made to be eaten at Easter, and sometimes at Hallowe'en. -- Then other factors, tragic ones, made beef even rarer in the Irish diet. It often astounds people to discover that, during the worst years of the Great Famine, among much other food, Irish tenant farmers were still exporting hundreds of thousands of barrels of salt beef to Britain and Canada. ("Corned" beef, it then came to be called, because of the size of the grains of salt used in the preserving process: once upon a time, any single grain of wheat or rice or whatever was called a "corn".) But that was beef that the farmers were raising on behalf of the landlords who owned the land on which they lived and worked: they couldn't touch it themselves, and couldn't possibly afford what little fresh beef came on the market in their areas.
Many of them, during that period, hardly ever got a taste of beef until after they emigrated to America or Canada, where both salt and meat were cheaper. There, when they got beef, they treated it the same way they would have treated a "bacon joint" at home in Ireland: they soaked it to draw off the excess salt, then braised or boiled it with cabbage, and served it in its own juices with only minimal spicing (a bay leaf or so, perhaps, and some pepper).
This dish, one which still turns up on some Irish tables at Easter, has become familiar to North Americans as the (usually) dreadfully overcooked glop which in many East Coast cities becomes unavoidable around Saint Patrick's Day or (in some places) at election time. Why the festive association of corned beef slipped from Easter to the Saint's day, on the western side of the Atlantic, there's no indication. But one thing seems fairly certain: the basic understanding of the preparation of the dish has suffered over time. In the USA, at least, it's almost never done right in any restaurant: it's possibly too labor-intensive to cook the cabbage fresh every time, and not overdo it.
Certainly there are enough places in Ireland which will be serving corned beef and cabbage on St. Patrick's Day, but most of them will doing so to gratify the expectations of tourists. To most Irish-born people, the dish is seen as much too "poor" or plain to eat on a holiday. They'd sooner make something more festive ...if they bother cooking at all, in these days when the Irish shopper has as many frozen-food, microwaveable, and cook-chill options available to him or her as anyone else in industrialized western Europe. In any case, an observer of the supermarkets both in the city and country will note the appearance of a few packages of corned beef in the cold case this week...but only a few. A true "national dish" does not put in so poor a showing.
This does still leave us with the question of what the Irish national dish is. If by this we mean the dish most often cooked at home when the cook (a) doesn't feel like simply microwaving something and (b) is thinking about "traditional" food, the winner might very well be that "bacon joint" -- various cuts of salted or smoked and salted pork. The joint would sometimes be cooked alone, or it might be braised with a small chicken keeping it company in the pot; it might be served with vegetables, or with potatoes boiled in their jackets. For holiday eating, the winner would probably be spiced beef, found at Christmastime in the butcher's window with a red ribbon around it -- served cold, sliced thin, with soda bread and a pint of Guinness on the side. (Though there are also people who will argue loudly for roast goose at Christmas, or lamb at Easter, as well as for other festive occasions.)
What people will be eating here on St. Patrick's Day is a good question. We passed it on last year to one of our local radio stations, South East Radio, which serves south Wicklow and parts of counties Wexford and Kilkenny -- conservative areas, mostly very rural. (Want to hear them live? Their streaming audio is here.) South East kindly conducted an informal telephone poll to see what people liked to eat on "the day that's in it". The responses we got were things like, "Eat? I eat pints." (One respondent referred jocularly to the pint of Guinness as a "shamrock sandwich".) One lady mentioned a dish her family sometimes made on The Day, recalling the colors of the Irish flag, and using cabbage, turnip and potatoes. But no one else of the twenty-five people who responded mentioned any specific food as being of any interest. -- Meanwhile, inspection of two of the local branches of the two major supermarket chains (Tesco in Arklow, and Superquinn in Carlow) revealed a total of eight packages of corned beef (about evenly divided between brisket and silverside). These were vastly outnumbered by heaps of boiling bacon -- a couple hundred pounds' weight of it in each store.
So we think it can safely be said that corned beef and cabbage won't be a terribly common menu choice for native Irish people celebrating Saint Patrick's Day in the place where it was invented. That being the case -- and since we also think there are a lot more interesting and typical Irish dishes -- we don't see why we should perpetuate this particular food-stereotype, so we won't be carrying any recipes for the stuff on our own site. But here are a few Web sites that do:
Stephanie da Silva's recipe. The spicing suggests non-Irish influences, but it still looks good. Stephanie's recipe is the one which appears in the Irish section of the FAQ for soc.culture.celtic.
There was a link here to a recipe for CB&C with Jalapeño dumplings...a concept bizarre enough to cause a brief headache. But only a brief one. We're trying to find where it went. (The recipe, not the headache.)
These files are both in Windows MovieMaker (.wmv) format. Part 1 contains ingredient measurements and other advice for soda bread in general. (29 megs) Part 2 contains instructions for "farl" and a very small dissertation on Irish tea (40 megs). In either case, please read the article first!
And no sooner do I get that off my chest than I find that others agree with me...and have even written poetry about it.
I feel so much better.
And now it's time to go down to the local and watch Moggie and our other neighbors wear silly hats and do the Pinky Dance while wearing wellies.
The initial promotional pack from the producers arrived today. Boy, don't I wish I could just rip the four-minute trailer to a file and post it: but the music on it is copyright, so that isn't going to happen.
Nonetheless, it looks gorgeous. And here's the first promo poster.
Yes, there we are, wayyyy down at the bottom among the co-production partners' logos. (chuckle) Some day we will be in bigger lettering. For the moment, though, everything looks just fine...
Meanwhile, people who've seen the earliest pre-release info are already arguing about it on the forums on IMDb.
Especially if you have a lot of paperbacks (we have some thousands), you've probably noticed that finding nice-looking bookshelves that make the most of the available wall space is a nuisance. These people offer a good solution to the problem.
The shelving components come in a number of standard widths, heights and depths, so that with a little effort it's possible to put together a shelf that will suit even an awkward space. (They say there are 294 possible basic combinations: I haven't checked their math, but that seems about right.) The wood is solid pine, not too knotty, in a pleasant, neutral satin finish. The full-depth brackets that hold the shelves up run into fairly deep grooves cut into the shelf bottoms, so that the more books you put on a shelf, the more secure it gets. And the holes into which the brackets run come at 5 mm intervals, so that you can adjust the shelves pretty closely to the height of what you're putting on them. These are perfect for CDs and DVDs, too. You can join separate units to one another, you can build units over or around awkward pieces of furniture (radiators, etc), and there are extras available for them -- cupboard doors, drawers, glass shelves. There's also a Java-based design tool on one of their web pages so that you can see how the basic layout looks and works, and store the design for later reference or to order.
When I first stumbled across the Shelfstore website, we decided to test them by designing one shelf that would go on a "waste-space" wall in one of the upstairs bathrooms. The space is about 7 ft high by 20" wide, and we ordered nine shelves for it, 5" deep. Delivery took about two weeks (part of this was just shipping time from England to Ireland, which is routinely 4-5 days for largish things coming via TNT or one of the other "bulk" couriers). The bookcase took about twenty minutes to assemble, including the two brackets that secure the top of it to the wall and make everything rock-steady. The components are very solid and well-made: the finished shelf holds 250 paperbacks, +/- a few.
Two more of these were delivered over the last week, one for the living room, again as a test, and a second one for the bathroom (which is rapidly turning into an excellent library). The living-room one devoured all the books which had been in its predecessor shelf, and had room for half as many more again.
We're sold. Have a look at the websites and see if they suit you. (US readers: yes, they ship to the States: yes, the shipping charges will probably stun you. The owner tells me that thet're contemplating setting up a US-based distribution center because they've been getting so many orders from there.)
"I wanted to get him the perfect thing for his birthday, so I asked Matthew and he said, well, myrrh is good, but then Luke said, oh please, everyone always gives him myrrh, I bet he wishes those wise men had brought scented candles, some imported marmalade, and a nice box of notecards. ..."
"Our robotic inspectors on the surface, the rovers, have yet to find vast stockpiles of water, but keep in mind that Mars is a planet far larger than France and California combined. The rovers are also likely the victims of deception -- the Martians could easily be moving the water to keep it hidden from the slow-moving and gullible rovers. (As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has said, inspections on the ground are 'a sham.')"
So we're back, and there was no time to blog, as it turned out: there was just too much stuff going on during the trip, both work and play. Now I have a lot of piled-up mail and business to deal with before there'll really be time to post the many pictures we took. Anyway, we had fun: the weather held fair the whole time, which is a lot to ask, this time of year.
I stumbled across something neat, though. There's a website called iPodLounge.com which caters to those happy folk who possess one of these sweet little things. (And one of those, as of a couple of weeks ago, is me.) One section of the site is dedicated to iPod "travel photos" -- pictures people have taken of their iPods in interesting places, and sometimes using the image reflected in the iPod's mirrored back surface to show where they are (the Taj Palace Hotel in Mumbai, for example).
There's also an area where people can post pictures of iPods as art (check out the SnowPod at the bottom); and in another gallery, a contest has been going on for site users interested in designing new "concept" iPods.
Well, I must have had another of those Corel Photo-Paint blackouts after seeing that, because I can't think how else this would have happened. (The image also appears somewhere or other on this page: I don't seem able to do a fixed link to it -- the URL changes dynamically as new images are posted.) Such a device does seem like a logical extension of possibilities we've already seen played out in earlier volumes of the Young Wizards series: wizards in general seem to be almost the archetypal "early adopters"...so it wouldn't surprise me if one of these turns up in Wizards at War. We shall see.
Meanwhile, I'm waiting for the first question about why the "bite" is missing....
A Wind from the South
in a high altitude test over the Pacific on Saturday,
These are perfect for CDs and DVDs, too. You can join separate units to one another, you can build units over or around awkward pieces of furniture (radiators, etc), and there are extras available for them -- cupboard doors, drawers, glass shelves. There's also a 
