Monthly archive: April 2007

To throw into a state of confusion.

Read more about discombobulate at Answers.com

To pass off as genuine, valuable, or worthy. To impose (something or someone unwanted) upon another by coercion or trickery. To insert fraudulently or deceitfully.

Read more about foist at Answers.com

To whine; whimper.

Read more about pule at Answers.com

Composed chiefly of rock fragments of volcanic origin.

Read more about pyroclastic at Answers.com

Dr B.'s parents are coming down from Staffordshire tonight, then tomorrow morning the four of us are hopping onto the Eurostar and spending the next forty-eight hours in Paris.

He has organised this as a present for his dad's birthday, and getting his mother to come along took some planning and presentation skills, as in the past she had threatened to divorce her husband if he ever sprung a surprise trip abroad to her. Ireland? That's OK. Anywhere where people speak foreign and eat strange? Nah.

So Dr B. told his mum he was taking his dad to Paris, and would she be at all interested in coming along if I was there? She knew I lived there for six years, and having me around probably means that she would never have to interact with the locals.

I don't have more information about this, but I know her a little and she does not strike me as a closed-up or fearful person. Maybe she is a little like me, in that she gets extraordinarily frustrated if she is not able to communicate properly.

Why do you think I got so interested and good at languages?

Why do you think I made super human efforts to lose my accent?

Why do you think I start boiling with rage whenever I mispronounce something?

A beam, as of steel, wood, or reinforced concrete, used as a main horizontal support in a building or bridge.

Read more about girder at Answers.com

A few weeks ago I got into the habit of picking up a Del Monte ice smoothie on the way to work every morning. The perfect refreshment after a stifling tube journey.

'Only 96 calories', it says on the packaging, as well as 'No artificial colours, flavours, preservatives or sweeteners'. Well, they had me at '96 calories'.

Then last week I looked at the ingredients.

Water, Raspberry Puree (25%), Sugar, Glucose Syrup, Blackcurrant Puree (3.7%), Lemon and Lime Juice from Concentrate (3.2%), Colour (Anthocyanins, Beetroot Red, Curcumin), Stabilisers (Methyl Cellulose, Guar Gum, Locust Bean Gum, Carboxy Methyl Cellulose, Pectin, Sodium Alginate), Citric Acid, Natural Raspberry Flavouring.

I consulted Dr B. (who is a Doctor in Chemistry) and he confirmed that none of the colours, flavours, preservatives or sweeteners above are artificial.

However, one may notice that the packaging does not claim 'no artificial stabilisers', and I am not totally sure that Methyl Cellulose and Carboxy Methyl Cellulose are the most natural ingredients you can find.

And even if Mr Del Monte himself came to see me and convinced me that not a single ingredient is artificial, I would still not trust a product that lists 17 individual ingredients.

So now I have a banana instead.

To howl, wail, or lament loudly.

Read more about ululate at Answers.com

(Chiefly British) Odd; strange. Presenting danger or difficulty.

Read more about rum at Answers.com

Recent comments on my pictures on Flicker left by Chig have made me realise that things are not always the way they look.

First of all, I so wish my phone (an HTC Hurricane, which is usually a particularly smart smartphone) geo-tagged pictures. Alas, although yes, it does have sat nav software, I would need to take the GPS receiver with me and record the location every time I take a picture, which I so obviouly don't. So if you see any location tags, they have been added manually by me. Yay technology!

What my phone does do is upload the pictures to Flicker via Shozu, with one click right after taking the picture. I could also add titles, descriptions and tags but most of the time I'm busy living my life and I'll do it (or don't) later.

And my recent pictures of youth in underwear? Just because there were these totally wasted kids near us on Clapham Common on Saturday afternoon, and one of them stripped and jumped in the muddy puddle they call a pond. Dr B. suggested his friends hid his clothes, which they did. He came back covered in mud shivering. Then he rode his friend's bike into the pond. The friend was not impressed.

(Sports) A tournament in which each contestant is matched in turn against every other contestant. A petition or protest on which the signatures are arranged in a circle in order to conceal the order of signing. A letter sent among members of a group, often with comments added by each person in turn.

Read more about round robin at Answers.com

I have absolutely no idea how I came up with the idea of making a Finnish sweet bread for a picnic with friends on Hampstead Heath.

I seem to remember waking up at stupid o'clock, wanting to impress people with my culinary skills, then going to the supermarket, and the next thing I knew I was crushing cardamom seeds. Sans mortar and pestle.

It is absolutely delicious dipped in strong tea. Probably not very Finnish, but it makes me go yum just thinking about it.

This is a recipe I did not need to fiddle with to adapt it to my taste, so you can view the Bread machine Pulla recipe at cooksrecipes.com.

A broad flexible part, such as a flipper. A young woman, especially one in the 1920s who showed disdain for conventional dress and behavior.

Read more about flapper at Answers.com

1. You can resize your insanely ginormous desktop icons in Windows Vista by clicking on the desktop, then holding down the Ctrl key and scrolling with the mouse wheel. Faster than right-clicking on the desktop, then View > Classic Icons.
2. Arcade Fire are from Montreal. Watch two acoustic semi-improvised sessions for Neon Bible and Wake Up at Olympia in Paris.
3. 34sp.com, the company that hosts bitful.com, uses PHP Safe Mode enabled, which is not compatible with the InstantUpgrade WordPress plugin I installed, which means that sometimes it is not possible to leave comments on bitful.com. For the time being, if this happens to you, please try again later. It works most of the time, and I hope I will be able to fix it soon.
4. Hugh Laurie and Dawn French are in the video for Kate Bush's Experiment IV. Watch Experiment IV on YouTube.
5. Actor Martin Clunes was a photo model for Gilbert and George in the early 80s. He can be seen in their 1983 work 'World', currently in the Gilbert & George exhibition at the Tate Modern, London, until 7 May 2007.
6. If you could drill a hole all the way through the earth to the antipodes, an object dropped in the hole through the earth would oscillate back and forth.
7. There are two types of fibre in muscle: 'slow twitch' and 'fast twitch'. The former contract slowly but they can keep going for a long time, which makes them ideal for running marathons. The latter contract quickly but are rapidly worn out, and are best for sprinting. You are born with more of one or the other, but training can make a difference.

A protective covering for the backs of chairs and sofas.

Read more about antimacassar at Answers.com

The purchase of an iPod nano (three days before the announcement that the hundredth million iPod had been sold – yes, that was me) changed somehow my Last.fm profile, so much so that it prompted David to exhult

PopBitful is Back! Back! Back!

when he saw the string of madonnabritneygwengirlsaloud in my 'recently played' list a few days ago.

That is because my gym playlists consist of light, mindless and very energetic music.

Or rather, shall I say, 'consisted'? Because as of Wednesday, I am now working out to:

• Kings of Leon – Charmer
• Maxïmo Park – Our Velocity
• Arctic Monkeys – I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor
• Fall Out Boy – Thriller
• Kaiser Chiefs – Everyday I Love You Less and Less
• LCD Soundsystem – Daft Punk Is Playing at My House
• The Gossip – Standing in the Way of Control
• Hard-Fi – Living for the Weekend
• The Killers – Somebody Told Me
• The White Stripes – Seven Nation Army
• LCD Soundsystem – Tribulations
• The Arcade Fire – No Cars Go
• Kaiser Chiefs – I Predict a Riot
• Fall Out Boy – "The Take Over, The Breaks Over"
• The Futureheads – Hounds of Love
• Snow Patrol – Crazy in Love
• Speedway – Genie in the bottle
• Arctic Monkeys – Love Machine

I can hardly find the words to define the feeling I have when Kings of Leon start every line in Charmer with a scream and I manage to channel enough strength to lift two scary dumbbells in the air for one more rep than last week.

To habituate to something undesirable, especially by prolonged subjection; accustom.

Read more about inure at Answers.com

My ex-flatmate is coming to dinner tonight.

My ex-flatmate is a chef. I should therefore probably be all stressed out and produce a repeat performance of our recent overcomplicated dinnerparty that was not particularly successful taste-wise.

Maybe I should worry, but I don't. You see, I lived with that man for two and a half years and I know what he likes, so it's going to be easy:

• a selection of Italian hams;
• my Thai beef salad;
• and I wanted to make a trifle (my ex-flatmate favourite dessert) but last night when I shopped for tonight's dinner party I felt a bit intimidated by a Sherry trifle recipe listing fifteen different ingredients (two of which I could not find). So there will be a Tesco Finest Raspberry & Choc Truffle.

I am sure anything will be appreciated; after all, my ex-flatmate cooks for a living, so probably the last thing he wants to do when he gets home is prepare a meal.

It's as if somebody who builds websites for a living spent most of their spare time on the web updating their weblog.

Oh wait. Wrong comparison, I guess.

Instructions are for Google Reader, but you can probably play with other aggregators.

1. Refrain from checking your feeds for a day or so, until most blogs you read have had a chance to update.
2. Switch to the 'List view' setting.
3. Hide the blog titles in the left hand side column with a piece of card.
4. Read post titles and try and guess who wrote them; you will be surprised how easy it is – after all the best writers all have a distinctive style, voice and centre of interests.
5. Reveal and calculate your score.

I should be in bed sleeping, really.

By a small amount at a time; in stages: articles acquired piecemeal. In pieces; apart.

Read more about piecemeal at Answers.com

I always happily give away any pretense of privacy and let people access my data for a quid or two.

It is therefore hardly surprising that I always, always use my Tesco ClubCard, even when I but a stick of chewing-gum at a gas station. Then, every three months Tesco points turn up on my doorstep as vouchers that give me money off on next purchases (1 penny for each pound spent, I think).

In return, I let Tesco know exactly how many sheets of toilet paper I use every time I wipe my butt. Seriously, this should give Tesco enough information to fire off some powerful algorithms to lure me into buying more stuff by presenting me with offers I cannot refuse.

However, I would recommend they add something that says

'IF

> 75% of items purchased

=

skimmed
low-fat
fat free
diet
light
extra-light
super-light

THEN

do not send the chap a voucher that
offers 100 extra points when you buy
Nuts or Loaded magazine'.

'cause you see, T&A? Not much popular round here, no.

Retention of juvenile characteristics in the adults of a species

Read more about neoteny at Answers.com

I have been running Windows Vista Home Premium for a couple of months now, and the biggest annoyance is that it refuses to retain your email account password(s) if you are using Outlook 2002.

Windows claims you need to enter your email account passwords every time because of security reasons. I say they do it to make you upgrade to Outlook 2007. Fair enough. These are people who do business.

However, this snag annoyed me so much that, short of keeping my machine on 24/7 so that I would not have to ever restart Outlook, I downloaded AutoHotkey and followed the instructions to create an exe file that starts Outlook and insert the password(s) for you.

The software encripts the passwords and the text file where you enter them in the first place must be destroyed.

So there you go, once again a feature in Vista that was designed for enhanced protection has triggered a potentially unsafe behaviour. Well done guys – I am this much closer to switching to Thunderbird now!

Alcoholic liquor, especially inferior or bootleg liquor: “bootleggers smashed on their own hooch� (Christopher Hitchens). Marijuana.

Read more about hooch at Answers.com

I have installed Show Top Commentators, a quick and easy WordPress plugin to show who left the most comments on this website. You can see the top five from the past 365 days under 'Top commentators'.

The current top five is:

1. David (16)
2. mike (10)
3. Dr B (9)
4. Justin (7)
5. Chig (5)

At last, something where Dr B. is not number one – although I would not be surprised if today his competitive streak spurred him to leave seven comments somewhere in the old archives just to be at the top.

Although, to be fair, quering the database for

SELECT * FROM `wp_comments`
WHERE `comment_author` like '%d%r%b%'
and `comment_date` > '2006-04-16 00:00:00'

shows 11 entries from Dr B with various spellings.

So everyone is a winner.

To make decorative additions to; spruce up.

Read more about titivate at Answers.com

I always find that whenever I put together a meal with the only few ingredients I can find at home, it turns out quite well.

So on Friday night, after a short but hard week at work, the last thing I wanted to do was to fight for a trolley at Tesco. I knew we had fresh milk at home, so tea could be made.

I also knew that we had frozen blocks of cod, a can of beer, some flour and a bunch of potatoes that were starting to get a bit old, so…

… fish and chips!

I quickly looked up a recipe for batter and I was on a roll.

Ingredients

• Two blocks of cod per person (or any other fish, frozen or fresh, for that matter)
• 1/2 pint of beer (can be replaced with fizzy water if you do not drink)
• 125g flour
• 400g potatoes per person
• Oil (I only had olive oil so I used that for frying – you pick your favourite)

Preparation

1. Peel potatoes and cut into your favourite shape. I go for cubes/pyramids by simply slicing medium-size potatoes in eight
2. Soak potatoes for about fifteen minutes in salty water. My mother claims it makes them go crispy outside, and considering that roast potatoes is the only thing she cooks that is barely edible, I swear by it too
3. Put the potatoes in a greased oven tray and stick in the oven at, uhm, high for, er, as long as it takes to cook them. Sorry, next time I'll pay attention to the settings. Let's say it was around 200 C degrees, for 30 to 40 minutes. So do that well in advance. Also, move them around half way through so that they cook evenly.
4. Defrost fish in microwave (my mistake was pinging it for too long, which made it break up)
5. Mix beer and flour slowly, to stop the beer from going flat. Reserve a bit of beer for later
6. Heat enough oil in a pan for shallow frying
7. Test oil temperature by dropping a tiny quantity of batter in it. If it floats and cooks rapidly it is ready. If it sinks, the oil is not hot enough.
8. Carefully blend in the beer you had left aside into the batter. This will make it fizz and puff up nicely when fried
9. Coat the fish with flour, then roll it in the batter and fry it until the batter is golden and crisp

Serve with plenty of vinegar and a dollop of mushy peas – or, as they are pompously called at our local Riverside pub, 'Pea velouté'.

A word of advice: while the fish is cooking (it won't take very long), quickly wipe your kitchen surfaces and rinse the bowls where you had the flour and the batter. Do not leave them until the next morning. Flour and water equals glue equals a very grumpy me on Saturday morning scraping gunk off the counter with a knife.

But man, the meal was absolutely worth it.

While preparing to install the Add-Meta-Tags WordPress Plugin, a quick way to automatically generate XHTML meta tags with existing post categories and blog tagline, for the first time I feel the need to put something in the Options > Tagline field.

I never felt the need for a tagline before. To be honest, I probably never wanted to have to sit down and ask myself what this weblog is about, only to discover that in fact, it is just a pointless exercise in stubbornness.

Oh wait, there you go:

Bitful: just a pointless exercise in stubbornness

Ta-dah! Tagline done.

Trouble is, I want my tagline to tell people what bitful is about. To have the tin say what it does, in a very matter-of-fact way, like for instance:

Bitful: UK-based weblog on technology, queerness, language and fitness

What do you think? Please leave a comment with your feedback or suggestions.

Small freshwater fish, often silver-coloured.

Read more about minnow at Answers.com

1. I knew you made fish batter with beer. I did not know that you can replace it with sparkling water, must not mix too vigorously and should add a bit of fizzy water or beer at the very end, because it's the bubbles that make the batter go crisp and puff up when it cooks.
2. You can search Google using dashes instead of inverted commas and you will get more or less the same results. A string in inverted commas (e.g. "search this phrase") returns exactly the same sequence of characters and spaces. Separating words with dashes (e.g. search-this-phrase) also includes variations of punctuation within the string (e.g. search "This phrase).
3. Two-way syncing between your iPod and iTunes does not work on manual sync mode. If you want your play and skip count, and rating info to sync from your iPod into into your iTunes library, you need to set it in automatic syncing mode.
4. Some default shortcuts in Windows Vista (Local Settings, My Documents, Recent, SendTo, Start Menu, My Music, My Pictures and others) cannot be accessed because they are not true folders but junctions that point legacy applications to their new locations in Vista. You can hide protected operating system files so they don't clutter your interface.
5. Retro bar held its Eurovision semifinal this week. Found out when a mate who was there sent me a text. Funny how this year I am completely not interested in it. Might be because lately my music taste has changed, might be because the few songs I've heard suck big time. If you do give a toss, Denmark won the Retro bar ESC semi, with a drag queen named DQ singing a song entitled, er, Drama Queen. Ooh, so daring, so controversial! Not. And yes, I'd heard the song, and it sucks. Big time.
6. In the original Battlestar Galactica series, Lieutenant Starbuck was a male character, played by Dirk Benedict of UK Celebrity Big Brother 2007 (and A-Team) fame. The reimagined female Starbuck also happens to be my favourite BSG character. So now you know that I have only started watching BSG with season three. Must catch up soon.
7. WordPress spam comment filtering plugin Akismet automatically deletes spam comments after 15 days. One of my weekly tasks is to check spam comments for false positives (only ever found one or two because the comments had too many embedded links) and delete them all. I guess that a) I'll just do the former now, and b) I should perhaps stop guessing how stuff works andRTFM instead.