Famous for the wrong books
I forgot to blog last week that Michael Crichton has died.
Most people probably know him for Jurassic Park
However, his first work that made an impression on me was The First Great Train Robbery
His ideas got progressively worse, I’m sorry to say.
Timeline
In spite of this, his books were always a good read.
Is torture better for kids than naked breasts?
I don’t get the UK ratings system.
A movie like Coming to America, which is entirely harmless but contains a few naked boobs and sexual references, is rated 15.
On the other hand, Casino Royale, which contains graphical scenes of a naked man getting his testicles whipped, is rated 12A (which means that no kid is too young if accompanied by an adult).
I think I prefer Spanish ratings for violence (Casino Royale: 18) and Swedish ones for nudity (Coming to America: 7).
Curry cheating
Many Indian cookbooks are mostly about Indian home cooking. The food is nice, but it’s not what you encounter in Indian restaurants here.
However, some years ago I bought a most astonishing cookbook: The Curry Secret.
It’s a small paperback without any photos, but is teaches you how to do Indian restaurant cooking at home.
The trick is to make a basic curry sauce (which you can make in huge amounts and freeze in practical amounts) and to precook the meat (which again can be frozen).
When you then want to cook a nice curry, you just fry some of the basic sauce with some precooked meat and/or vegetables, and you add the relevant spices.
For instance, today I cooked both a dopiaza and a korma in less than half an hour. This was possible because I had made the basic sauce and the meat over the weekend.
Both the curries were lovely and very different – you couldn’t tell they were derived than the same sauce!
Cheating
I have been noticing recently that some products in Asda have been labelled as being Delia cheat ingredients.
This intrigued me, so I bought the book on Google.
It’s basically a cookbook for when you’re in a rush, so lots of the ingredients are frozen or from tins or boxes.
Lots of the recipes look really nice, although I think some of them are cheating a bit too much for my taste, such as by using frozen mashed potatoes.
Marcel seems to like the idea, though, so he’s already bookmarked some dishes that he wants to cook. Excellent!
筋肉番付
Marcel has found the most amazing Japanese TV show on Challenge (Sky channel 125).
It’s called Ultimate Banzuke and shows Japanese people jumping through obstacle courses on pogo sticks, walking on dominos, and so on.
I found an example on YouTube:
Fact and fiction
I’ve almost completed reading Brian Sykes’s The Seven Daughters of Eve.
I must say I thoroughly enjoyed the first two thirds, although the book is a tiny bit out of date. It’s one of those nice examples of popular science that actually gives you a feel for how things happen in the engine room, rather than just presenting the results.
However, towards the end he starts writing fictional stories about the seven “clan mothers” of Europe, and this is definitely the weakest part of the book.
He assigns hair colour and other physical characteristica to them, although he obviously doesn’t know this.
Also, to make the descriptions seem realistic, he strays into areas about which he clearly has little knowledge.
For instance, he writes about one of them that their “language was not elaborate, but quite sufficiently developed to impart [...] basic information.” As a linguist, I know this is nonsense. All human languages, whether spoken by hunter-gatherers or by invest bankers, are equally elaborate and highly developed.
So read the first part of this book, but skip the seven fictional chapters.
Newspaper subscriptions
If you buy a newspaper in a shop in Denmark, you’ll notice it’s much dearer than in the UK (£2-3 for a quality newspaper, rather than 60p-£1.20).
That’s because most people in Denmark subscribe to their daily newspaper, which is much cheaper (often less than half the price).
When you subscribe to a newspaper, the publisher will arrange delivery straight to your home, and in cities this is guaranteed to happen before 6.30am so that you can have it before you go to work.
So when I moved to Scotland, I was more than a little surprised and annoyed to discover that you can’t just call the Herald and get them to send you the newspaper every morning at half the price.
I’ve since discovered that many corner shops will deliver your newspaper to your home, but that doesn’t save you any money.
Also, some newspapers will let you subscribe, but that works by giving you vouchers that you can use to buy your paper in the shop.
Why don’t British newspapers realise that they can increase sales significantly and increase profits (by cutting out the shops) by introducing the Danish system?
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice
I’ve just finished reading The Beekeeper’s Apprentice by Laurie R. King.
It’s the first book in the Mary Russell series. I happened to start out by reading number 5 (”Oh, Jerusalem”), followed by 6 (”Justice Hall”), 2 (”A Monstrous Regiment of Women”), 4 (”The Moor”) and 3 (”A Letter of Mary”).
I’d actually recommend reading number 5 before number 1 because the whole of the former is summarised on two pages in the latter (I expect the author didn’t at that time expect to write it up as a novel), but it’s then worth reading 1 and 2.
I must say I really enjoyed this one – it feels like the author had good fun writing it. It’s a much lighter and faster read than some of the later books.
The whole series is a must-read for Sherlock Holmes aficionados!
Why are they talking about Gustav?
Hurricane Katrina was an important news story in many ways, not least because it came as a partial surprise.
This time the media seem to have decided not to be surprised again, and they seem all to have placed tons of reporters in Louisiana.
However, Gustav is now only a Category-1 hurricane, and while I would expect that to be reported if it happened in Scotland, I really don’t expect to hear about such minor event if they happen abroad.
However, all the news channels seem to be reporting non-stop from the area, standing upright with hats on their heads, with birds flying in the background, talking about the horrible storm they’re experiencing…
The reality of the long tail
There’s an article in Slate discussing whether the long tail is as long as has been thought. Please do read it.
I think there might be a lot of truth in this, and I think it’s got to do with knowledge: In order to buy an obscure book or film, you first need to know it exists. It simply is not very likely anybody will pay money for a random song from iTunes that nobody has recommended to them.
Because of this, I think the size of the long tail is depending on online communities. If people mainly get their information from TV and other mainstream media, they’re going to buy items from the head, not the long tail.
Only if many people get a lot of their information from blogs or Facebook groups or other specialised contexts is it likely that the tail gets really long.