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Technical writing. How not to do it.

Monday, June 07, 2010
As spotted on a packet of satay sauce powder:



It reads 'Dissolve coconut milk powder in 150ml water in a small pan, do not use hot or cold water'.

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posted by Croydonian

Stunning poll finding o' the day. And a curious poll about cereals

Wednesday, November 04, 2009
The Plain people of France have been asked whether they think the various pre-Sarko presidents of the Fifth Republic were 'good presidents'.

Guess who scored highest, at a knockout 87%?

Here's a hint (1):



Next up is Pompidou, he of the Centre, at 74%.  Given that both he and Le Général died before maybe half the current French population were born, either history is taught well Transmanche, or France is a nation of liars for venturing opinions.  The unspeakably odious Mitterand manages 67%, so presumably ignoring the phone calls of his suicidal PM and friend Bérégovoy does not count as making a bad president.  Chirac rates 60% approval, and everyone's favourite fantasist - Giscard - manages 54%.

Sticking with presidents, the Mighty Sarko is looking well placed for 2012, as of those polled, 72% of his 2006 voters are sticking with him, whereas only 57% of Royal-istes will vote Aubry.  10% have sheared off to support the new wave Trot candidate Besancenot, and 9% right winger De Villepin, if he runs.  bayrou has blown it, with only 52% of his 2006 voters still prepared to vote for him  

And since the French media is awash with polls, here's another one: 80% of Gauls want schoolchildren to learn la Marseillaise.  (Maybe they have some furrows they need watering with impure blood).  18-24 year olds are the least keen (67%) and oldsters the most (89%).  That 77% of Trots agree is rather amusing, and that 36% of Greens are anti is no great surprise.

And final survey of the day, the all important questions on attitudes to cereals.  As God is my witness, I am not making this up. 41% think they taste good, and 23% think they taste bad.  Really.  Gauls cook cereals with meat (85%), fish (62%) and with salad (57%).  33% think they make a lousy substitute for vegetables, and 60% fear they lack recipes for it.  Apparently 97% Gauls know nothing of corn beyond the name, likewise 95% for maize.    


(1 - I've seen the cross at Colombey-les-Deux-Églises from afar - it is very impressive, as it should be at 164ft tall ) 

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posted by Croydonian

EU weirdness o' the day

Thursday, October 29, 2009
Words almost fail me:




Back to the EUTube description:

"Self-confident, "emancipated" chickens on a farm do not want to be rushed to lay their eggs. They know it takes time to produce a good quality, tasty egg".

That would seem to suggest the imputation of conscious thought and reasoning to chickens, and furthermore that they wish to have their eggs eatern.  Very rum indeed. 

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posted by Croydonian

Is 'The Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention' imperilled?

Monday, October 26, 2009
This one:


"In his book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas L. Friedman proposed The Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention, observing that no two countries with a McDonald's franchise had ever gone to war with one another, a version of the democratic peace theory. Shortly after the book was published, the NATO bombing of Serbia proved the theory wrong, though in a later edition Friedman argued that this exception proved the rule: the war ended quickly, he argued, partly because the Serbian population did not want to lose their place in a global system "symbolised by McDonald's".

I've also heard it said that as NATO itself does not have a Maitre D's, the theory should stand as not disproven.

Anyway, Iceland is about to lose its two McDonalds as they import all the raw materials from Germany, and the fall of the Icelandic Crown has made it uneconomic.

So, Cod War II, here we come?

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posted by Croydonian

A brief DPRK update - and it's a winner

Wednesday, October 14, 2009
From the usual place:

The Pothonggang Shop newly constructed in the heart of Pyongyang is now crowded with citizens. The shop is a service center for improving the dietary life of citizens.

Sounds interesting.  Any chance of further and better particulars?  Oh yes...

Such fragrant merchandise as fresh apple, pear, grape and other fruits line the shelves on the well-arranged first floor.

Well knock me downwith the proverbial.  A greengrocers.  How very, very avant garde.

But there's more.  It's a butchers too:


The counters on the second floor are set out with various kinds of meats and meat products. Among them are more than 10 kinds of pork by-products including stomach, liver, ear, hoof (sic) and tail and processed goods such as sausage and ham, as well as meats of duck, goose and turkey.
 

Mmmm, hoof - my favorite.

Still, it would seem that this emporium can do more than M&S, Waitrose, Tesco, Sainsbury etc combined:

General Secretary Kim Jong Il gave field guidance to the shop in August last. Then he said that nothing was more important for the Workers' Party of Korea than to provide more affluent and cultured life to the people, adding that the shop should sell enough fruits and meat products to citizens of the capital so as to permeate the streets of the city with fruit fragrance and to make the streets full of people's happiness.  

I will 'fess up to being colour blind in both nostrils, but in my experience fruit is not generally all that aromatic until it is cut open, so either the Pothonggang counter jockeys cut open the fruit for aromatic purposes and thus render it unsaleable, or else KJI is going to be thwarted.  Then there's the whole issue of the clashing fruit and meat smells.     


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posted by Croydonian

Two and a half cheers for the robust common sense of French women

Friday, September 25, 2009
Harris Interactive has been asking French women impertinent questions about diets, and a rather depressing 83% 'fess up to watching what they eat.

In a truly epic piece of denial, the leading cause of weight put on is 'nibbling' (Named by  40%), apparently, followed by stress (32%), an unbalanced diet (29% ) and fourth 'eating too much' (25%).  Right...  

Anyway, here's the bit which merits 2 & 1/2 cheers:

"Bread is regarded as the most essential  food (for about half of the women: 47%). Chocolate (38%), cheese (37%) and pasta (35%) were other foods women could not do without".





Hear hear.  To adapt Socrates, the cheeseless life is not worth living.

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posted by Croydonian

Coming soon - cheaper kosher restaurants

Thursday, July 09, 2009
The Chief Rabbi of Be'er Sheva has had A Good Idea:

"The extended hours at Be'er Sheva bars and restaurants have brought the proprietors an additional expense: paying kashrut supervisors. So the city's chief rabbi, Yehuda Deri, proposed a solution: placing cameras in restaurant kitchens in order to send video feeds straight to the supervisors of Jewish dietary law.

Deri, the brother of former Shas leader Aryeh Deri, believes the idea will save businesses money while improving kashrut supervision".

Might impact on the earnings of a few rabbis, mind.

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posted by Croydonian

Beefing up the Falklands

Monday, March 09, 2009
From Hansard:

"Mr. Gray: To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to which countries beef reared in the UK may be exported; and how much was exported to each such country in each of the last 10 years".

Jane Kennedy (blah blah blah - and then a table)".

And the table shows that our leading export market by value is the Republic of Ireland at £75.9 m, with only the Dutch, French, Italians and Belgians buying £10m or more. Elsewhere we discover that in 2008 the good people of Stanley and the Camp bought more than the US of A, at £382,000 to £314,000 respectively. As such, even very rusty O level maths makes me confident that the Falklands must be our richest export market by head of population. So, maybe lamb / mutton is no longer the 365 of legend. However, given that exports to Afghanistan have increased 25 fold since 2002, perhaps it is the military, diplomats and spooks doing all the eating. Lucky them.

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posted by Croydonian

Let them eat...

Saturday, February 28, 2009
...cabbage.

This, care of Komsomolskaya Pravda via The Moscow News:

"People should ditch kolbasa and fizzy drinks and turn back to homely foods such as kefir and cabbage to beat the crisis, Russia's chief doctor said in a new report".

I've looked up kefir - fermented milk, and kolbasa - a type of sausage, so readers will not have to.

If the Woolton Pie is going to make a comeback in these parts, I think the Government will have to sack Alan Johnson at Health and bring in someone rather more patronising. Stand up Patricia 'very, very regular bowel movements' Hewitt - cometh the hour, cometh the woman.


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posted by Croydonian

Survey finding o' the afternoon

Tuesday, February 17, 2009
From Pew Global, asking the all important question: "Would you prefer to live in a place with more McDonald's or more Starbucks?"

Admittedly it was our American friends that were asked this rather than us, but the results are in, and MickeyDs wins 43/35, with 22% preferring neither or not caring. Men go strongly for McDonalds (46/30), and the ladies margninally so (41/40). Hispanics prefer Starbucks (39/38) and black and white Americans for the Golden Arches.

Conservatives opt for McDonalds by the broadest margin (50/28) and Liberals flip the other way (46/33).

More here, presuming it is legible.

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posted by Croydonian

Like father, like son?

Tuesday, January 06, 2009
Or is it a call for cannibalism?:

"[Hillary] Benn urged people to "buy more British and eat more British".

Soylent green all round, eh?

Facetiousness and slightly selective editing aside, this -

"Benn added: "I want British agriculture to produce as much food as possible. No ifs, no buts. "We could produce more fruit and vegetables here in the UK - the market is there, so what's holding us back? "If there's demand then production should follow. So the answer is to buy more British and eat more British."

- sounds an awful lot like a clarion call for a return to an exciting 70s siege economy.

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posted by Croydonian

Thatcher - was it all in vain?

Monday, January 05, 2009
I ask, because of this:



Milk for schoolchildren, 'c/o' our friends in Brussels. While it is framed in terms of healthy eating, you know, I know and the next door neighbour's gerbil must surely know it is actually about market rigging.



Note for younger readers - in the early seventies a youthful Croydonian was compelled to drink a daily carton of milk by his school, as were his contemporaries. A certain education secretary did away with the force feeding and earned the soubriquet 'milk snatcher'.

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Potato food shows, armed hooligans and 'a despicable guy'. Yup, 'tis the DPRK update.

Monday, December 15, 2008
Further DPRK-shenanigans, including the zoo - again, the doings of the Lee Myung Bak group, the ever appetising descriptions of food and so on and so forth:

Things are pretty bleeding edge, tech-wise at the zoo:

"The aquarium was also built in accordance with the ecological features of rare fishes, equipped with the advanced facilities including filter".

I wonder if they were given filter tips....

They love their spuds:

"The Changgwang Public Service Management Bureau held a potato food show where over 200 kinds of potato dishes including boiled rice made with potato and five grains, potato dish seasoned with soysauce and rice hash mixed with potato and vegetables were presented to delight the visitors".

Wot, no chips?

"And the Ministry of Commerce sponsors national food show and contest and the like with city, county and ri as a unit to discover local original dishes without exception and strives in every way to standardize and put the cooking method of the national food on a scientific basis".

And I thought our homegrown food writers etc were a plague on a par with leprosy.

Meanwhile, the DPRK's scribes have been using their tape measures:

"The warmongers of the south Korean puppet army are getting evermore frantic in the war exercises targeted against the DPRK these days, according to a military source.
They deployed units of tanks, 227mm multiple rocket launchers and 105mm artillery pieces in the area of Phaju City near the demilitarized zone in the wake of hurling hundreds of fully armed troops into the area of Ryonchon County on Dec. 10, thus fanning up war atmosphere.

It gets better:

"After occupying their combat positions in Phaju City and the area of Cholwon County of south Korean Kangwon Province on Dec. 10 and 11 many armed hooligans of the puppet army staged madcap exercises under the simulated conditions of an offensive operation against the DPRK, frantically firing more than 26,000 large-caliber machine gun and automatic rifle bullets".

Not that it will do the ROK any good, by the look of things:

"Lee's zealous involvement in the criminal moves of the Japanese reactionaries to harm and stifle Koreans bespeaks that he has become a despicable guy who is so hell-bent on acts of treachery that he is utterly indifferent to compatriots and the destiny of the nation...His plight is so wretched that he is unable to prolong his remaining days without clinging to the coattail of such political pigmy as Japan. Therefore, his treacherous remarks are nothing but a dirge heralding his ruin".


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posted by Croydonian

The DPRK update. It is a good one. Really.

Tuesday, December 02, 2008
In which Kim Il Jong goes to the zoo, the DPRK clasps the soya bean to its collective breast, and a list of rather unappetising food stuffs is reeled off:

"He highly praised the constructers for having built a splendid structure and sent thanks to them, noting that the zoo reconstructed on an expansion basis was successfully designed in a peculiar manner and the best quality was ensured in its construction....In order to build the zoo better under a long-term plan it is necessary to increase the species of animals and consolidate its material and technical foundation to serve its purpose, he added. It is important for the zoo to solve the feed problem and establish a veterinary and anti-epidemic system as it breeds a lot of animals of diverse species, he noted, underscoring the need to take thorough-going measures for providing feed suited to the diversity of species of animals and, at the same time, build modern veterinary hospitals".

And

"It has been scientifically confirmed that domesticated soybean today was derived from it. Hence it has been proved that the home of soybean is Korea and some areas around it where Koreans lived".

And

"Flour food, sea cucumber dish and meat dish were proved as time-honored national foods peculiar to Korea. The sort of traditional dishes is ever increasing including bean food, rice gruel mixed with red-bean, rice-cake soup, steamed food, baked food, fried food, meat boiled on a skewer, pan-broiled food, slices of raw fish or meat, broth, beef with vegetables cooked in casserole, thin stew of vegetables and meat and etc".


Mine's flour food with rice gruel please, but how does one increase traditional dishes, eh?

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posted by Croydonian

Parliamentary exchange o' the day

Wednesday, November 26, 2008
From Lords Hansard:

"Lord Laird asked Her Majesty's Government: Whether the Ministry of Defence has any contracts with Starbucks for the supply of materials or services.

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Defence (Baroness Taylor of Bolton): Information held centrally by the Ministry of Defence indicates that MoD has no direct contracts with Starbucks for the supply of materials or services".

Now if it was the infamous superheated McDonalds coffee I could understand... There's probably a joke involving The Pequod to be had, but I lack the energy to concoct one.

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posted by Croydonian

Would they call Derby 'rural' too?

Monday, October 27, 2008
"The world famous French chef, Raymond Blanc" has been given an honorary OBE, which is nice.

As I have noted before, describing someone as famous is a bit silly, as either the reader knows who the person is in which case 'famous' is redundant or the reader does not and etc etc.

Even I can't work up any degree of outrage about that this time, but it is a big F for Fail for the DCMS when it comes to geography:

"Raymond Blanc was born in Besancon, rural France". Besançon (no knowledge of cedillas at the DCMS?) is only an urban area of some 220,000 souls and the capital of Franche-Comté, and about the size of Derby city. I have been to both, and Besançon is prettier.

I was sure that I'd read something about Raymond being ready to quit these parts (help me out here Mr R), but cannot lay hands on a reference

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posted by Croydonian

Hello Dolly...

Thursday, October 09, 2008
Remember Dolly the sheep?

Anyway, here she is in all her ovine glory:
She is, so to speak, a current issue as my mates at eurobarometer decided that the Eurocrats and the like neeed to know how Euroman and woman feel about eating etc meat from cloned animals. As long as it is tasty, it is fine by me.

Anyway, the findings:

81% of those polled claim to know what animal cloning is. The remainder know the term but do not know what it means or have never heard of the concept. We Britons fared better than most, with 86% knowing it means 'making an identical copy of an existing animal'. Dunce's cap for Latvia at 60%. Mind you, asked whether cloning 'involves genetic modification', less than a third of British respondents knew that it did not. Danes and Latvians topped and tailed the results.

Asked whether cloning animals was morally wrong, we were alone in thinking otherwise - 46% yes, 48% no. The Austrians and Slovenes were the most concerned at 79% and 76%. Must be something to do with the air in the Julian Alps, maybe.

As to whether 'Animal cloning will cause animals unnecessary pain, suffering and distress', our Latvian and Maltese chums were the most convinced (60%), with only us, the French, Danes and Dutch scoring 50% for the reverse proposition. Wonder if the sentimentalists feel the same way about shearing and dunking in the sheep dip, let alone ritual slaughter?

Cloning rare species wins the greatest favour with 67% favouring it to a greater or lesser degree, while doing so 'to improve the robustness of animals against diseases' gets 57% approval. Who are the real animal lovers, eh? The UK figures are 74% and 68%. The Austrians lead for squeamishness at 57% and 41%.

Given that most of us eat meat, I do wonder how many actually know how the process works, given the responses to this statement: "Using cloning for food production isn't acceptable, as it would treat animals as commodities rather then as creatures with feelings". Erm....

84% of Austrians will be shunning their Wiener Schnitzel on that basis, while we find it the least problematic at 62%. Spaniards and Czechs share - take your pick - first or last place with us.

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posted by Croydonian

You might as well try to copyright bread....

Tuesday, October 07, 2008
This week's most foolish lawsuit comes from Lebanon:

"The president of the Lebanese Industrialists Association Fadi Abboud, said he is preparing to file an international lawsuit against Israel for allegedly "taking the identity of some Lebanese foods" and thus violating a food copyright".

And what are these foods that are so unmistakeably Lebanese, given that Lebanon is a construct that has existed for all of sixty five years?

"Falafel, tabouleh and hummus".

OK, point by point:

Falafel - "The actual origins of falafel are not certain, however, all common theories acknowledge that the falafel was invented several centuries ago, perhaps by Egyptian Copts, or even by the Ancient Egyptians".

Tabouleh - The Lebanese are on slightly less shaky ground here: "a Levantine Arab dish". Note that this page is locked as an editing war is in progress....

Hummus - "One of the earliest verifiable descriptions of hummus comes from 18th-century Damascus and the same source claims it was unknown elsewhere".

Anyway, "According to Abboud, the Lebanese are losing "tens of millions of dollars annually" because Israel is selling and marketing traditional Lebanese dishes. "The Israelis are marketing our main food dishes as if they were Israeli dishes," he charged. "We are working on registering all the foods and ingredients which will be submitted to the Lebanese government so it can appeal to the international courts against Israel," Abboud said".

Now I consider myself an 'ethical consumer' in that I go out of my way to buy Israeli food products where appropriate, and I do not doubt that there are plenty of other folk who buy Carmel, Jaffa etc etc precisely because they are Israeli, thus rather negating Abboud's rather silly contention that sales of hummus and the like are a zero sum game.

Meanwhile, a popular retort on the Haaretz's site is that Jewish Penicillin (chicken soup) ought to be copywritten too. And as the old, old joke goes, 'I had some Middle Eastern food an hour ago and now I falafel....'


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posted by Croydonian

Thought for the day

Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Just because I feel like it, having recently re-embedded myself in the oeuvre of Flann O'Brien:



Hard to disagree, eh?

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posted by Croydonian

Here come the food police - in full SWAT mode.

Wednesday, August 13, 2008
At least on the other side of the North Sea:

"The Netherlands Nutrition Centre wants the brakes put on the growth of snack bars and fast food restaurants. In neighbourhoods with an abundance of such outlets, it wants local authorities to prevent any more being opened. In areas around schools, its demands are even stricter: it wants a complete ban on any business selling fast food".

How long before our very own soi-disante 'liberals' float that idea in these parts, or have they already done so?

I don't suppose there is much point bewailing the death of personal responsibility and that the freedom not to deal with the consequences of one's actions is only for children and gods.

(Blogging, in the time honoured phrase, will be light for a few days as the Futures of Croydonian-kind are visiting)

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