Saturday, January 09, 2010
Culinary catch up
Become aware that foodie content is slipping well below par. So a few notes by way of mitigation. The half-price gammon from Tesco at Cheshunt went down very well. No skin but boiled, impaled with many cloves. First take hot, second and subsequent takes cold. Good texture - which might mostly be about water content - and flavour. By comparison, the back to basics tinned rice pudding from Mr S. did not look very hot at all. A cream coloured fluid with a modest amount of rice floating about in it. FIL, a careful man, said that this was fine as he did not get on with the calorie and chloresterol packed versions offered by other brands. What I don't understand is that when the BH makes a rice pudding it is brilliant white. Not a hint of cream. So what are the tinners up to to get cream? Only of academic interest as I stopped using rice pudding when I came of age.
Then there was the pot of festive pear jam from our next door neighbour, something we have never had before. Must have been made with quite hard pears as the jammed chunks - maybe quarter inch cubes - were still firm. Texture not unlike that of the tinned pineapple jam we used to have when I was a child. Excellent with middle aged wholemeal bread. And an excellent present idea. Easy enough to do and to consume and no great expense. Shows a bit of care and attention without lumbering one. And today was the day of the big bratwurst from the Lidl at Leatherhead. Stonking great things about 10 inches long and 1 inch in diameter. Served with Polish sauerkraut and mashed potatoes. These last needed a fair amount of preparation having been a bit bashed about at some time in their career. But we are grateful still to have a corner shop to help out on those few days in the year when we can't get the shiny new car to the supermarket. Bratwurst warmed up in the fish kettle and did fine. A bit like saveloys but with a milder flavour than I remember these last having. And memory might be right on this occasion as Wikipedia thinks that they are bright red and highly spiced - and I am quite confident about the bright red bit.
Which reminds me of bit I read a few days ago about Google being OK as a research tool for our young while Wikipedia is not OK, with the source being some educational pundit, tsar or whatever. While my understanding is that Wikipedia is as accurate as the Encylopedia Britannica. The model may be open access but, on the whole, it seems to work. OK, so some of the high profile entries - such as those for our leader - are a bit vulnerable to vandalism, but the vast majority are fine. There is a whole army of conscientious, hard working and unpaid Wikipedia editors out their, ploughing their lonely furrows. The advice to aspiring editors is to pick some obscure topic which no-one has had much of a go at and get on with it. Most of the time you are left in peace and quiet to build your own little bit of on-line knowledge. Ideal, partly because worthwhile, occupation for the semi-retired geek.
But then I started to think about the business of verification and peer review which the pundit mentioned above was on about. Supposing I was to insert an article in Wikipedia, all dressed up in respectable clothes, about how wolves were the original lunatics, only do it when the moon is full and the reproductive cycles of lady wolves are aligned, in one of the more straightforward examples of natural selection, with the moon. Studies have been done on the time it takes the cycle to realign itself when you move a lady wolf from one place to another, with the interesting result that the time to realign varies as the cube root of the misalignment, rather than varying as a simple linear function, which one might have expected. So after a while, this might become the accepted truth. Anyone who wants to know about the reproductive behaviour of wolves picks this up and uses it, bamboozled by the respectable clothes.
Now suppose I am a respectable academic, who really does know something about wolves, and come across this interesting factlet. What do I do about it? I know next to nothing about Wikipedia and could not possibly interupt my valuable and interesting research to do anything about the bad entry. I'll just use the experience to slag off the whole enterprise over port at the high table.
But a better solution might be if every university in receipt of state funding were obliged to appoint a fixed term, three year fellowship in wikipedian regulatory affairs (WRA). A fellowship suitable for the decent but not stellar young scholar. Then whenever anyone at said university came across something that they thought ought to be put right, they simply email their local WRA fellow, whose job it was to do something about it. The WRA fellows could have regional and national conferences from time to time to share information. They could publish articles about their affairs. Perhaps run a scholarly journal, peer reviewed naturally. People who throve in the national WRA fora would get free passes to the international ones. They might even be allowed to take their partners. In this way we could all be some much more confident that the Wikipedian ship was steering a good course.
I close with a mention of one of the heroes of the sixties, which means that I have heard of him. Name of Ginger Baker, a noted snuffler of white powders and basher of percussion instruments. It seems that he now runs polo ponies on 75 acres of South Africa and is short of money. How more establishment than that can you get? It would be interesting to know how such a person moved from one state to the other - but not so interesting that I am going to go and find out. I shall make enquires at TB. Probably someone there who knows all about him.
# posted by Jim @ 6:03 AM 
