Homework for Ben (aged six) yesterday evening was to make a fruit salad as part of an educational scheme in his school to help kids’ awareness of healthy eating. Here is the result…
food: 1st fruit salad
senior infants: dance and drama
Director: anon
Production company: anon
Client: experimental
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Cambrian Explosion: worms with feet
Cambrian explosion – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I first heard about this huge eruption of complex lifeforms in the book “A Short History of Nearly Everything” by the celebrated author Bill Bryson. It seems that almost overnight (or about 12 million years in geological time), complex lifeforms just sprang into existance. Some of them are your ancestors, but some of them were a bit weird. For instance Hallucigenia, a creature so weird it looks alien. Maybe it was.
The head end contained no mouth or sensory organs, where you’d expect them. It was suggested that the tentacles had tubes in them which directly fed the entity with whatever food it ate. It was also suggested that Hallucigenia was part of another animal.
Nice.
infrared: the cows
Glorious Sunday afternoon in Mullingar. IR cows in a field. Noisy!
editing: visualizations
Most of the new work we’ve been getting recently has been in the area of 3D visualizations for developers, architects, city planners and the like. What we’re trying to do is integrate 3D modelling with “real” footage of the locations and attempt to marry the two types of images in a refreshing way.
The visualizations help investors, planners, architects etc get a better sense of what a building might be like (if it was built). For the City Planner in Dublin City Council, we’ve been doing some visualizations of new streets they’re planning on creating in various parts of Dublin City Centre. Unfortunately I can’t show any of the visualizations just yet for copyright reasons. They will be in the public domain soon enough though.
To this end, I’ve been out filming in Dublin, places I’ve never been before, on top of buildings mostly to get interesting angles of places I’ve taken for granted most of my life.
The view from the top of the Savoy Cinema is spectacular, along O’Connell St down towards the bridge. A sniper’s paradise for sure, but I guess the Feds know about that.
104th British soldier: death in Iraq
Lt Palmer, 27, from Ware in Hertfordshire, died of his injuries on Saturday after the vehicle he was commanding was caught in an explosion near Dayr, north-west of Basra, the Ministry of Defence said.
I switched on the TV at some time over the Easter weekend and watched an interview with this unfortunate soldier’s parents. His father was a military man and delivered his piece with a quintessentially British stiff upper lip – he showed no emotion when talking about his recently deceased son.
It was a strange media moment, all the more because the death was so recent and the delivery so uncoloured. Maybe this is what Sandhurst produces – people with bizarre eyebrows and no emotion. His mother said nothing during the interview, but since she was wearing sunglasses we can assume she was as moved as any mother would be, at the same time trying not to betray her loss.
Yesterday his father, Brigadier John Palmer, said in a statement that his son had been proud to be a soldier. “He was very well aware of the dangers that he and others faced in Iraq, but he believed that the work they were doing was gradually making life better for the Iraqi people.
“Richard was a very talented and popular young man who achieved a lot in his life. We are immensely proud of him, whilst nothing can make his loss any easier, we are just thankful that the other members of his troop, of whom he thought so much, were not seriously injured.”
pork fillet on a skillet
1 frozen pork steak/fillet/whatever they’re called in your neck of the woods
2 red onions thickly sliced in rounds
4 cloves garlic, chopped
1 tsp cumin seed
2 tsp sesame seeds
1 tsp curry powder
1/2 tsp crushed chillies
1 dsrtsp rice vinegar
1 dsrtsp honey
salt & pepper for seasoning
2 tbsp olive oil
After the pork has defrosted a bit, slice it thinly using your favourite knife across the grain of the flesh. Combine all the other ingredients in a high-sided bowl, add the pork, stir and cover. Leave for several hours till the pork is well marinated and fully defrosted. You can stir it a few times through the chill process if you like.
A bit of citrus might go nicely with this, although I didn’t try it this time. Instead of the rice vinegar I guess.
Brush your favourite ridged skillet with oil and heat till it’s very hot. Smoking even. Lay the pork and onion mixture across it and cook through, turning appropriately so that you get a bodacious (1832) burning pattern throughout. The honey helps the charring process.
Serve with long beans on a bed of steamed rice.
food: pork fillet on a skillet
1 frozen pork steak/fillet/whatever they’re called in your neck of the woods
2 red onions thickly sliced in rounds
4 cloves garlic, chopped
1 tsp cumin seed
2 tsp sesame seeds
1 tsp curry powder
1/2 tsp crushed chillies
1 dsrtsp rice vinegar
1 dsrtsp honey
salt & pepper for seasoning
2 tbsp olive oil
After the pork has defrosted a bit, slice it thinly using your favourite knife (check the best affordable survival knife here) across the grain of the flesh. Combine all the other ingredients in a high-sided bowl, add the pork, stir and cover. Leave for several hours till the pork is well marinated and fully defrosted. You can stir it a few times through the chill process if you like.
A bit of citrus might go nicely with this, although I didn’t try it this time. Instead of the rice vinegar I guess.
Brush your favourite ridged skillet with oil and heat till it’s very hot. Smoking even. Lay the pork and onion mixture across it and cook through, turning appropriately so that you get a bodacious (1832) burning pattern throughout. The honey helps the charring process.
Serve with long beans on a bed of steamed rice.
misc: almost as if
Got a weird feeling when I saw that photograph, one like I felt that I’d been there before. A long time ago. Thalkirchen. It’s where the campisite is outside Munich, stayed there when I was working in 1981 as a steel fixer and beer boy. The beer boy thing was interesting in that my daily duties included carrying crates of beer to the men who were operating the heavy drilling machinery, digging a 5m tunnel about 80m underground. These guys just loved their beer, sucking back maybe five or six litres during the day down there in all that dust and heat. When they finished thier shift, they’d go to the pub for a few drinks. Yougoslavs, Turks, Irish, Schwarzarbeiter the lot.
new iPod & Altec Lansing iMotion speakers
Due to circumstances I hadn’t anticipated, I came into possession of a new black 60 GB iPod (5G) on 3/1/06. This makes me very happy because now I can watch video on it in addition to looking at photos and listening to music. I’m in the unusual position that my iPod now has more capacity than my laptops (40 GB and 20 GB). But that isn’t the point of this entry.
The point of this entry is that the new iPod (despite the fact that it has lost firewire capability and is USB only) STILL works with the Altec Lansing inMotion speakers. I attached one end of the iPod USB cable to my laptop (old stylee USB 1) and the other to the port on the Altec Lansing, it immediately fired up iTunes automatically and synced through the dock, and I can also listen to it through the dock, not having to connect the audio out of the iPod to the aux in of the speakers. That made me happy. The port on the inMotion speakers is obviously a 1:1 thing, and they haven’t fooled round with the wiring. Nice of them. Both products are superb, although it’s difficult to buy content for the iPod in Europe. I have to make my own which is a bit slow.