Cooking With Richard

Shugendo:
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Our dear friends Matthew and Brian in the band GILBERT played their first ever live gig at the Purple Turtle in Camden last night, which was most excellent.

Brian:

Matthew:

The boys back together:

Who is this sexy lady?

Out for beers and curry in Newcastle, my brother booked a table at the excellent Bangladeshi restaurant, Arami.

Puri (recipe 1, recipe 2) are tiny breads, here combined with chickpeas and a mash of coriander and potato:

The lamb shank was cooked to perfection in a rich tomato sauce, and it just fell off the bone:

The only disappointing thing was the dismal selection of chutneys that they served with the poppadoms. Don’t let that put you off though because the rest was excellent.

They have a website, but it’s flash so hardly worth linking to here. Review and another review.

The weather was miserable all over the bank holiday weekend. Today was hardly better but there were at least a few brief sunny spells. A bloke came over to fix the boiler and he grumbled about the state of our back lawn, which is looking more jungle than bowling green at the moment. It’s not exactly my fault if there haven’t been any days in May when we’ve had the happy coincidence of no rain and no work.

Anyhow, after one rainy spell, a double rainbow:

Previously the lovely ふみねこ said “Oh lord” …

We had a late lunch today at Sofra in Exmouth Market. The lamb kebabs and falafels were great.

We had milk pudding too, but unfortunately the photo didn’t come out well. It turns out that milk pudding is quite easy to make.

Paul Smye-Rumsby, who lives in Dover, said: “It was about 08.15 when suddenly the bed shook violently. “I thought my wife had got cramp or something but then I saw the curtains were moving and the whole house was shaking. It lasted about 1.5 seconds..

When I was in Aomori four years ago there was a really huge earthquake near Sendai which shook the whole place for a minute. Screen capture from the TV:

Video of ducklings

Sign the official petition to save Oriental City which is due to be “redeveloped” (turned into a B&Q superstore of all things) without any consideration except for profits.

Links

• Petition
• If-else blog
• BBC Inside Out programme describes the “real Chinatown”
• Developer’s website describing the work

• 4-core AMD Athlon development box
• 2-core Intel Xeon development box
• IBM X60s laptop

Tonight’s lunar eclipse.

I was using my camera with the rubbish 300mm lens, in our back garden:

Full moon, taken at around 9pm:

This is about when we can see the eclipse:

Half-eclipsed in the earth’s shadow:

More:

What doesn’t really come out well in photographs, and what you don’t know unless you read stories about 19th century travellers: The lunar eclipsed moon has an uncanny bloody quality about it. We know that this is caused by light filtering through the earth’s atmosphere, but still it is unsettling. I tried to capture this in this photograph, taken with a 1 minute exposure during the eclipse:

In no particular order …

Scotch eggs and Irish stew at The Peddler’s Daughter in Nashua, NH. The food was pretty good.

It’s a geek joke:

Freedom to destroy the planet:

They have the Antique’s Roadshow in the US, which I was quite impressed about. However they seem to have a lot less of the old fuddy presenters handling crockery with shaking hands, and a lot more about how many thousands of dollars everything is worth:

While I was walking along the bay, an eagle flew past holding half a pigeon. It dropped its meal on the ice and then sat in a tree while I grabbed my camera and took some pictures. This was (unfortunately) the best one:

A 16th century graveyard:

Cheeky squirrel:

The squirrel was next to this ice-rink in the main park in central Boston:

Carl Zeiss Planetarium at the Boston Museum of Science:

Some street scenes from the old quarter:

The office is in fact in Westford, MA which is miles away from Boston itself:

The Red Hat office:

Some typical lunches. I had to go a long way to find those fruits:

You get these daft warnings on everything. We went to a sushi restaurant and they were warning about food poisoning. Strangely enough they don’t warn about how you’ll die of a heart attack if you keep eating the junk above.

This is only barely one step above a “Cat stuck up a tree” story.

See also the Framley Examiner.

I only took my crappy mobile phone cam to Munich (partly because the war on water has stopped me from taking my usual range of bags, pocket knives, etc. abroad). So I only took a few photographs.

In the composite above you can see:

• Top left: cow’s feet (tastes a bit like nankotsu)
• Dunkel (dark) beer in a stein
• an angry pig
• Munich’s central Marienplatz station after 1am, when all the trains have gone

I’m a bit sausaged out at the moment because I’ve just come back from Munich.

Update

Wurst für den Hund means “sausage for [your] dog”.

I look rather mad, but that’s because I was concentrating on taking the photo. Actually my new job’s pretty cool.

Using a tilt-shift lens like this monster (more about that here) you can trick the brain into thinking that an ordinary photograph is actually an intricate model.

If you don’t want to bother with the expensive lens, you can fake this in Photoshop, or even better in the GIMP. Here was my best shot:

(Schoolchildren crossing the road near the controversial Yasukuni Shrine. Click for big).

It’s tricky to get the right image and the right technique for this. The source image is crucial. Ideally it would be a shot taken from a height showing a relatively flat, open scene stretching off into the distance. The shot should contain lots of detail — cars, people, buildings, etc., but ’shopping is complicated if there are any raised structures/poles/etc. poking up from the scene, so avoid those. The process using the GIMP is relatively straightforward, but it relies on proper use of the Quick Mask feature (don’t make the mistake I did and do a google search for “gimp mask”!). The final step of adjusting the colour curves is also important.

See this flickr pool for some much better examples.

Pelican eats pigeon in St James’s park.

In the photo the pigeon looks a bit unconcerned, but apparently it flapped and struggled as it took twenty minutes to pass down the pelican’s throat. Onlookers were, according to the MSM, “shocked” (yeah, right).

Updates

Times article with a more disturbing photo.

The pigeon was still alive as it reached the pelican’s stomach says the Daily Mail rather obviously, which is exactly the reason we eat organic meat from animals that we prefer to see slaughtered.

Click —>>> http://www.k3.dion.ne.jp/~tabihito/towadako_fuyu.htm

I took this photograph today in a forest near the attractively named Potters Crouch.