Thursday, November 08, 2007
Sausages (concluded)
The sausages of October 31 with the Porky White labels have now been consumed as part of a toad in the hole. Sad to report, the sausages were so full of some sickly sweet flavouring that one was unable to tell whether they had absorbed any Porky Whiteness from the label. I suspect not. Texture not right either - too finely ground - this last usually being a sign of cheap ingredients (the sort of thing not fit to put in a pork pie - or is it the other way around?) which need to be ground down fine to make them edible.
October 31st reminds me that I ought to have a pop at Halloween. The papers are full of ecotwad of one sort and another, the answer to which has to be that collectively we have to consume less of everything. Then the shops were full of all sorts of heavily advertised junk and junk food which our children will pester us to buy. Wouldn't the world be a much healthier place if the whole operation had been missed out? And if our children had done something wholesome like spending weeks making a guy... How many of them have got a clue what a guy is or means? We have to persuade them that having fun does not have to depend on spending money and conspicuous consumption of one sort or another. Or at least that there are cheaper ways of being conspicuous, if that is the objective. Which will be hard as long as we have big companies who want to be bigger companies and who have bigger advertising budgets than I do.
Halloween is an easy target, which, despite its ancient origins, in it's present form in England, is an invention of said big companies. But some of us might feel much the same about Christmas. I seem to remember some Californian called Vance Packard having a go at all this sort of thing in the revolutionary sixties (of the last century). Perhaps it is time we wheeled him out again.
The rats have returned! Having enclosed the brick compost bin at the bottom of the garden to stop the foxes getting in, the rats have now set up house. Don't quite see how I am going to make the thing rat proof and I don't want to move over to one of those little plastic barrells from the council. Don't like the idea of all that fossil fuel being locked up in heavy duty green plastic apart from anything else. As it happens we have a couple of rat traps, left over from some previous abode - vicious things which would do something very unpleasant to a finger if handled carelessly. These have now been primed with the finest bacon from Mr S and placed one at each end of the service road which the rats have built right at the back of the bin, where it is not usually opened. No luck on the first night. Maybe the foxes did something useful and grabbed them.
Have now finished the first pass of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and perhaps got a bit nearer to why to be called Uncle Tomist is insulting. While the thing is a tear jerker, written by a decent white middle class lady and so the whole thing is very much from that point of view, I do not know of a better take on what life might have been like in the slave states in the years before the civil war. One can overlook the unlikely plot given that it was much better written than I had expected, with the various white takes on slaves (and I had forgotten that a proportion of these last were also white and could pass as free) and slavery being described in a much more sensitive way than I had expected. Speaking for myself, this 400 page, four day reminder of this part of our history was salutary. A reminder, for example, that many otherwise decent white men were responsible for much evil by omission. That power does indeed corrupt children. That lack of power corrupts too (something which it has taken the Irish some years to get over). And that many Northerners who professed to abhor slavery were not so keen on black people in their own neighbourhoods, let alone their own kitchens. The South was a nice long way away.
But I can also see that a black reader might not be impressed by the implausibly Christian stoicism of the hero. They might think that taking a hatchet to a drunk and brutal planter might have been a better way forward than turning the other cheek. Although writing that, I am reminded that early Chrisitans impressed by their willingness to be gentle martyrs for the cause. Perhaps the author had them in mind (who should, whatever one might think of the book now, be given much credit for being first to reach a large public).
And on a less solemn note, I have learnt that a critter is a variant of creature, originally used in connection with the two legged sort, God's own creatures, rather than the small four legged sort.
October 31st reminds me that I ought to have a pop at Halloween. The papers are full of ecotwad of one sort and another, the answer to which has to be that collectively we have to consume less of everything. Then the shops were full of all sorts of heavily advertised junk and junk food which our children will pester us to buy. Wouldn't the world be a much healthier place if the whole operation had been missed out? And if our children had done something wholesome like spending weeks making a guy... How many of them have got a clue what a guy is or means? We have to persuade them that having fun does not have to depend on spending money and conspicuous consumption of one sort or another. Or at least that there are cheaper ways of being conspicuous, if that is the objective. Which will be hard as long as we have big companies who want to be bigger companies and who have bigger advertising budgets than I do.
Halloween is an easy target, which, despite its ancient origins, in it's present form in England, is an invention of said big companies. But some of us might feel much the same about Christmas. I seem to remember some Californian called Vance Packard having a go at all this sort of thing in the revolutionary sixties (of the last century). Perhaps it is time we wheeled him out again.
The rats have returned! Having enclosed the brick compost bin at the bottom of the garden to stop the foxes getting in, the rats have now set up house. Don't quite see how I am going to make the thing rat proof and I don't want to move over to one of those little plastic barrells from the council. Don't like the idea of all that fossil fuel being locked up in heavy duty green plastic apart from anything else. As it happens we have a couple of rat traps, left over from some previous abode - vicious things which would do something very unpleasant to a finger if handled carelessly. These have now been primed with the finest bacon from Mr S and placed one at each end of the service road which the rats have built right at the back of the bin, where it is not usually opened. No luck on the first night. Maybe the foxes did something useful and grabbed them.
Have now finished the first pass of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and perhaps got a bit nearer to why to be called Uncle Tomist is insulting. While the thing is a tear jerker, written by a decent white middle class lady and so the whole thing is very much from that point of view, I do not know of a better take on what life might have been like in the slave states in the years before the civil war. One can overlook the unlikely plot given that it was much better written than I had expected, with the various white takes on slaves (and I had forgotten that a proportion of these last were also white and could pass as free) and slavery being described in a much more sensitive way than I had expected. Speaking for myself, this 400 page, four day reminder of this part of our history was salutary. A reminder, for example, that many otherwise decent white men were responsible for much evil by omission. That power does indeed corrupt children. That lack of power corrupts too (something which it has taken the Irish some years to get over). And that many Northerners who professed to abhor slavery were not so keen on black people in their own neighbourhoods, let alone their own kitchens. The South was a nice long way away.
But I can also see that a black reader might not be impressed by the implausibly Christian stoicism of the hero. They might think that taking a hatchet to a drunk and brutal planter might have been a better way forward than turning the other cheek. Although writing that, I am reminded that early Chrisitans impressed by their willingness to be gentle martyrs for the cause. Perhaps the author had them in mind (who should, whatever one might think of the book now, be given much credit for being first to reach a large public).
And on a less solemn note, I have learnt that a critter is a variant of creature, originally used in connection with the two legged sort, God's own creatures, rather than the small four legged sort.
# posted by Jim @ 3:05 AM 
