Delia Smith Cookery Course

The Delia Smith Cookery Course. Recommended.

Delia is the David Pogue of cookbook authors. She has sound viewpoints, is very easy to read, warm, and sometimes funny. And above all: She explains the basics! This is so important and so rare. It is obviously important to fools like me, whose mother never taught him and whose school course on it was rudimentary at best. But it is also important to more advanced pupils, simply because nobody knows all the basics, and one is often surprised. As in "so that's why we do it that way". Knowing basics is so important for skill and for enjoyment of anything.

How basic does it start? Rock bottom. This book taught me the best way to boil an egg, and how to make porridge. And now it's teaching me the basics of grains/cereals and bread making. This is because reader DreamingWolf nudged me into finally getting a bread maker, which I'm eager to start using.

But it's also a big book, and I've no doubt that it's the rare cook who can't learn anything from it.

----
By the way, I knew that rye bread ("black" bread) was unusual in the UK (and it seems in the US), but I had no idea how much. It turns out that buying rye flour is virtually impossible here. Geez.

=================================
TTL salivates:
I don't know. I prefer Nigella Lawson. More shapely body, more luscious lips, and overall sultrier presence.
I don't cook, though. So I can not comment on that.

Heck, she could cook for me any day.

... Funny thing, she is so f***ing attractive that I find myself going in reverse gear, "she just has to be a bitch or something". Or thinking that parading her looks that way to sell her books is just commercial and fake. "English muffin" indeed! But is that a reasonable reaction?

Update: I just realized she'd be on Utoob. Sample:



Notice how she draws attention to her breasts by taking off her pullover. :-)
She hardly needed bother.

Fun comments on the Utoob page:

I just watched a show of hers on tv and she said "I love the way it bulges out.." (talking about pudding in a wine glass)
"I love a large portion" (while cooking steak on the bbq)
"It's a really juicy pair" (Can't remember what she was talking about because I may have been staring at her "juicy pair" :P

And:

i feel sorry for the women who come to Nigella videos looking for actual cooking advice, then end up reading all our pervy comments.
That said, i'd love to [explicit sexual comment]

---
I'm reminded of a woman I once saw manning a booth at an exhibition. Nice looking, and she had a huge bosom barely held back by a tiny top. It was just impossible not to stare at it!
She gave me a friendly hello, and I gave one back, and for a split second my eyes slipped down. There was no doubt whatsoever that she had seen it, and I just couldn't talk to her.
Not that I had any reason for being ashamed, but I'm a shy person, so I couldn't.

Joyride13

Following up on the last post, there are so many ways now you can get yourself into the world without any budget and without any help.
It takes balls though. Witness this girl. An asshole who would not have the guts to heckle her at a concert can easily type in a nasty comment on her youtube channel. So bully for her for doing it.

TV and gin

Seth points to this article, an excellent look at a new resources and how we handle them.
"And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year... One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects [the whole of Wikipedia] per year worth of participation.
I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you?"

Revenge of Tarzan

1921... they repainted the facade when they got a new movie? It's not like these days when a movie plays for a fortnight or so.




Below, there's something about big machines, especially moving ones, that we men just like.

Breakthrough in solar energy storage

Breakthrough in solar energy storage, article.
"MIT researchers have overcome a major barrier to large-scale solar power: storing energy for use when the sun doesn't shine."

Like I've said before, in my ole age I've become sceptical about what I read in science magazines, because after decades I've pretty much yet to see any of the amazing science fiction actually hit the street. Still, this sounds promising.

Art and fidelity

I just wrote this as a comment on the Bang and Olufsen post, which had gotten into sound fidelity.

I've been a little of a high fidelity freak, both in sound and in pictures. But I'm starting to ask: is enjoying a high image quality/sharpness or an excellent sound reproduction the same as enjoying pictures or music?

Sure, there are *some* things you just can't do with pictures or music without a very high quality (fidelity) being involved. But the question is how high is the percentage of those.

I think the enjoyment of high quality is very real and laudable, but in the end it may be entirely divorced from enjoyment of art.

Male nudes

Sometimes people wish for a male nude site, and I consider doing one, but then I look at something like playgirl.com, and it just seems subtly wrong...

I am not entirely sure why. But I think it's something about: sure, a man can be decorative, just ask any woman who've walked past fit workers with their shirts off. But a man can't be aware that he is decorative and still stay... manly. So how can he pose for pictures nude.

Also, maybe for the same reason, maybe for another, it seem much more difficult to me to do a male nude site and have it remain largely non-sexual. Heck, it's tricky enough to balance it with Domai, but for males I have the feeling one might have to back off even more, maybe into arty BW pictures. I'm not sure.

The question is, if Playgirl is doing it wrong, how do you do it right, and can it be done?

----
Update: there's "fit", and there's "parody of man".

Pascal sed:
PlayGirl is the "modern woman's" Playboy. It's deliberately sexual to the stretched limits of softcore, with the penis being as much as possible a phallus, and the man being as much as possible a heap of steroid-inflated muscles with a sex-object face. I mean, cripes, this site could just as well be called "PlayGay", and there would be nothing to change!

"It just seems subtly wrong", you say? Well, yeah, if your definition of subtle is like a molten iron pizza being "subtly hot".
I'm sorry, but that site is SO remote from a male Domai, that it really rubs my masculinity the wrong way! "Um, let me rephrase that..." - (George W. Bush, World Master & Baiter) ;-)

How to do it right? Peace of beefcake! Do the opposite of the PlayGirl method, just like Domai does the opposite of the Playboy method. The pointers from Alex sound sound (they feel right) for a working basis.

It's pretty simple, really: if it feels like it would perfectly illustrate a Roman sex slave catalogus, then it's done wrong. If it feels like the Garden of Eden, where nudity is supremely natural, people are people, and sex has its own place but you have to do some guessing work to locate it, then it's done right.

Laurie, it's not just that these men are glancing towards the camera, it's the WAY they're glancing. If your experience is lacking in that domai...n, I suggest you invest in a random Playboy issue as educational material. Compare the photos there with what you see on Domai. And then imagine the same kind of difference in male nude photos.

On the International Naturists Association's website, there's a daily photo which I never miss. Be warned, some of the men and women you'll see there are totally un-sexy! And then, some are impeccable. But they'll always be in a non-sexual context, which can give a very proper starting point. They have a TV network, and some of their newscasters do take great care of their body, but it's light-years from PlayGirl.

Today's America-influenced world culture, I feel, is saturated with convoluted ways to intensely focus on sexual while playing innocent. The epitome of this being the clearly satirical visual jokes in the Austin Powers series. They're practically porn that avoids showing genitals. And it IS supremely funny, precisely because the best humour is that which refers to ourselves and the world we live in. (This is why most jokes are about sex, money, politics, driving, and family.) If there wasn't such a huge quantity of torrid innuendo in Hollywood, the Austin Powers series would just be a boring bunch of crude jokes. But in today's rampant hypocrisy? It's a powerful caustic satire. A festival of sexual symbols strictly within the allowed boundaries of cinema. Therefore ridiculing them along the way.

It's mind-boggling, but true: many images from Domai would be far more likely to be labeled as "porn", for the sole reason that they don't titillate by craftily playing hide-and-reveal. They neither flaunt, nor wriggle around to avoid facing you. How DARE they!

Eolake, I think the link to that article on systematic bad taste in porn should be a permanent item on your blog's main page. We keep returning to the same conclusion: the truly taboo thing is nudity when it refuses to be vulgar and squarely pornographic. Because it doen't fit into the neat and simplistic world system of the effed-up sex-obsessed bigots.

Anonymous insisted...
"We only find them beautiful because of sexuality."
Then do you consider that a horse, a dolphin, a swan, a tiger, a sunset... are also sexual to us? Nature's full of things which are very beautiful to us. And even put us in a romantic mood, but not towards THEM.
Sure, a woman is intrinsically sexual to any hetero man... whether she's naked or not! But what makes Domai unique is precisely that it rejects the typical deliberate emphasis on the sexual component of women. Without trying to smother it either. "Simple Nudes" is just that.
One thing that makes those nude women more beautiful to us than the examples I've given, apart from the sexual component which is simply left to be, no-more-no-less, is that they are people, with faces, and souls showing through these faces. While the typical Pamela Anderson (there, I've said it: Miss Playboy par excellence) would be better off being a robot, for such vacuity of soul and total switchability of bodies is just horrible to consider in a human being. Object-women, and God forbids that they ever be more than that, more than the warm flesh equivalent of an inflatable doll.

Scoundrels and liberty

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."
-- H. L. Mencken

Vulva puppet on Tyra Banks

[Thanks to Karen]
Sex/anatomy education on American TV! Zippidy doo-dah.
I'm happy she mentions that the vagina is only the inside part, the tube. It's dumb that it's being confused with the vulva, which is all the external parts.



Anonymous commented:
This belongs on TV? No it doesn't. This is part of the degeneration of society (no, I'm not religious, it has nothing to do with that).

Eric said:
If anything is disgraceful, it's the fact that the subject has to be broached like this with grown adults.
You have vaginas. Clothes can only go so far in making you forget that. There's nothing shameful about them. There's nothing wrong with talking about your body.
With that said, this kind of thing is a step in the right direction. It's better we approach it in a childish manner than never talk about it at all.

Mary added:
I didn't find anything offensive there. Not one iota.
And following Eric's comment, it may seem "childish" but some women feel terribly guilty looking at themselves (imagine we felt like that about ears or noses?). I'm sure that bit of tv has helped many a lady.
For heaven's sake, we must know our anatomy, if only for hygienic purposes!

YouTube comment spam?

There's some weird comment spam happening recently on YouTube. Only it does not seem to sell anything or have any links, and it has these weird strings of characters above and below the text. I wonder what it is.

Example:
----
ToiNDFqZKPxitPphLbhrcZOTj

any boy out there want to give me a ride on his dong?

lWIQexHBacRpIvnjXKdMnnlcalj
----

Great tits cope well with warming

No really, they do, it's official.

Getting through sucking

Thanks to NasonArt Review, which also has a post today on recovering hidden paintings.