Thursday, November 20, 2008
Franklin
Franklin was lying in the road in the sun, just outside the lee of his owner's wife's car, when I came back from Cheam yesterday. A dangerous habit last seen in the geriatric marmalade cat at the end of the road - a cat which got all of us very busy, phoning up vets and the RSPCA, rather to the annoyance of the owner.
The purveyors of spam on the Internet continue to think that I am in need of Viagra (the most popular item), or a watch. These two lines must account for three quarters of the slowly growing daily intake of spam into my Googlemail in-box. Maybe 10 a day altogether. One can only suppose that gents of my age are into both items in a big enough way to make all this advertising worth while.
Excellent toad in the hole the other day, well risen crust which was neither burnt, too fragile nor too chewy. No pub or restaurant could come anywhere near it, microwave or DIY. BH really getting into the swing of them now. It seems that it is important to let the batter stand for a few hours before attempting to cook it and to get the oven really hot before attempting to cook it.
Followed up yesterday by steak and kidney. Chuck steak cut cross-ways into small peices, maybe 2cm by 1 cm by 0.5 cm. Fry in lamb dripping for a bit. Remove pipes and so on from kidneys, cut into slightly larger peices and add. Chop some onions very fine and add. Add a little water. Simmer for 95 minutes. Mix a little corn flour with water and add that in - there being less risk of lumps this way than adding the stuff straight in. Add some sliced carrots. Simmer for 15 minutes. Add some chopped mushroom stalks. Simmer for 5 minutes. Add the sliced mushroom caps. Simmer for 3 minutes. Serve with, guess what, crinkly cabbage and white rice. Have a good feed and expire in front of the telly with some Chilean red.
The other day while watching a repeat of an episode of Lewis - something about the twice born - I had a sense that some of the scenes were not quite what they were the last time around. Now this might of been the effect of the Chilean red of choice that evening, but I think not. Pondering on the subject some more, in preparation for applying for a BSc (hons) in media studies at the university of the third age, I came up with the scheme that an episode is made up of a sequence of scenes and each scene is made up of a sequence of takes. (Remembering seeing a write up of a famous film, of normal length, famously made in a single take. Can't remember what it was called. Also, more recently, reading or talking about people called continuity girls, whose job it is, for example, to make sure that I have the same number of buttons done up on my waistcoat in successive takes). So I want to re-screen this episode of Lewis but for some reason, perhaps to do with an increasing bite of time given to the advertisers, I need to trim 10 minutes off the forty five minutes episode running time. So, I can take out whole scenes, perhaps on the grounds that they are only providing a bit of depth and colour, not essential to the flow of the thing. I can take out whole takes. More tricky, I can lop bits of the beginning or end of takes. I assume that what I can't do is lop bits out of the middle of takes. I presume that with a suitable workstation, I can do all this very quickly, more or less at the touch of a button. None of that nonsense on the cutting room floor, cutting and splicing fiddly strips of film. But there must still be a fair bit of skill involved. Does the original director of the episode retain sole rights to such editing on the grounds that he could not bear to see his masterpeice chopped up by some apprentice on a bad day?
The purveyors of spam on the Internet continue to think that I am in need of Viagra (the most popular item), or a watch. These two lines must account for three quarters of the slowly growing daily intake of spam into my Googlemail in-box. Maybe 10 a day altogether. One can only suppose that gents of my age are into both items in a big enough way to make all this advertising worth while.
Excellent toad in the hole the other day, well risen crust which was neither burnt, too fragile nor too chewy. No pub or restaurant could come anywhere near it, microwave or DIY. BH really getting into the swing of them now. It seems that it is important to let the batter stand for a few hours before attempting to cook it and to get the oven really hot before attempting to cook it.
Followed up yesterday by steak and kidney. Chuck steak cut cross-ways into small peices, maybe 2cm by 1 cm by 0.5 cm. Fry in lamb dripping for a bit. Remove pipes and so on from kidneys, cut into slightly larger peices and add. Chop some onions very fine and add. Add a little water. Simmer for 95 minutes. Mix a little corn flour with water and add that in - there being less risk of lumps this way than adding the stuff straight in. Add some sliced carrots. Simmer for 15 minutes. Add some chopped mushroom stalks. Simmer for 5 minutes. Add the sliced mushroom caps. Simmer for 3 minutes. Serve with, guess what, crinkly cabbage and white rice. Have a good feed and expire in front of the telly with some Chilean red.
The other day while watching a repeat of an episode of Lewis - something about the twice born - I had a sense that some of the scenes were not quite what they were the last time around. Now this might of been the effect of the Chilean red of choice that evening, but I think not. Pondering on the subject some more, in preparation for applying for a BSc (hons) in media studies at the university of the third age, I came up with the scheme that an episode is made up of a sequence of scenes and each scene is made up of a sequence of takes. (Remembering seeing a write up of a famous film, of normal length, famously made in a single take. Can't remember what it was called. Also, more recently, reading or talking about people called continuity girls, whose job it is, for example, to make sure that I have the same number of buttons done up on my waistcoat in successive takes). So I want to re-screen this episode of Lewis but for some reason, perhaps to do with an increasing bite of time given to the advertisers, I need to trim 10 minutes off the forty five minutes episode running time. So, I can take out whole scenes, perhaps on the grounds that they are only providing a bit of depth and colour, not essential to the flow of the thing. I can take out whole takes. More tricky, I can lop bits of the beginning or end of takes. I assume that what I can't do is lop bits out of the middle of takes. I presume that with a suitable workstation, I can do all this very quickly, more or less at the touch of a button. None of that nonsense on the cutting room floor, cutting and splicing fiddly strips of film. But there must still be a fair bit of skill involved. Does the original director of the episode retain sole rights to such editing on the grounds that he could not bear to see his masterpeice chopped up by some apprentice on a bad day?
# posted by Jim @ 12:16 AM 
