The Mountain and the Tree

December Days: Art & science

2014-12-10T00:10:52Z

I had a choice of two icons for this post, both very appropriate in different ways. One is one of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks, and of course he's seen as the embodiment of the crossover between the two. The other, which is of course at the top of this post, is a terrella - a spherical magnet, a little Earth - used by William Gilberd in his research into magnetism. They're both my own photography, and being in the presence of these artifacts - in the V&A and the Science Museum respectively - was a wonderful feeling.

Part of the reason I decided not to use the da Vinci icon was because the need for a crossover at all is a modern illusion. Art, as in artisan and artificial, has only recently acquired the airy & impractical ivory tower connotations it has today. In previous centuries, the artist was a tradesman, or at best a professional, on a conceptual level with a plasterer or a chemist rather than with a prince of the Church or of the counting-house, and their labours were devoted towards distinct objects rather than concepts or creations.

As so often happens, the change was (partly, or even largely) due to advances in technology. On the one hand, industrialisation and laboratory-made pigments were making true, vivid colours much cheaper and more common, and more accessible to everyone. Before that point, if you wanted a true vivid blue then you had to buy a very specific kind of stone from a particular mine in Afghanistan, and go through a long physical & chemical process which needed quite a lot of skill to do right—if you don't grind the lapis lazuli perfectly, you end up with something a lot like washing powder, a slightly bluish-grey-looking white, and your entire investment (often twice the mineral's weight in gold) is wasted. If you wanted a true vivid (and lightfast) purple, you were entirely out of luck, and your best bet was to wait four or five centuries then go to the shop. So artists had to find new techniques to maintain their social monopoly, and redefining Art was one of them.

On the other hand, Art was becoming much more available through advances in reproduction technology. Even before monochrome cameras (let alone the early and limited colour films) engravers of great and obsessive skill were making detailed copies of Great Works, but you can only pull a certain number of copies from brass engraving plates before the metal deforms and the engraved lines soften & blur. Advances in steelmaking, partly driven by weapons technology, were mitigating that, though, and once you had a film camera and a bit of chemical skill then you could churn out as many reproductions of Great Works as you had the supplies and the patience for. They could even be published in newspapers, and where were artists then? Reduced to mere suppliers of the prototype for an industrial process, and that's not interesting. So the locus of value kept shifting, and artists shifted along with it, towards Theory and Concepts, and through Romantic genius, Modernist optimism, Postmodern yesbuttery, and take-it-or-leave-it mysticism.

Which isn't to say that the people who are artists today are the same kind of people who were artists in the past. It takes a different—though overlapping—set of skills, and more critically we're working in a completely different market area.

Interestingly, Science codified itself more or less around the time that Art went through this change, and in a similar direction, embedding much more Theory into itself and synthesising all the discrete chunks of lore held by guilds, armies, and trades with the Classical Greek approach of attempting to subject the universe to the penetrating gaze of Pure Reason Unsullied By Commerce. Gilberd, whom I mentioned at the top of this article, was a very good example of that, though he was really a pre-scientist (he floreated in the 1590s, around Bacon and well before Newton, Hooke, and Boyle)—he had an absolutely burning and overriding desire to prove that the Earth had a soul, but he did this by experiment, including designing and commissioning his own experimental tools like the terrella in my icon, and he spent a great deal of time learning from navigators and sea-captains.

So one way of looking at the soi-disant split (which is much more marked amongst critics and followers, rather than active practitioners) is that they grew from the same base, the impulse to Do Things To Stuff And See What Happens, and along similar paths, but in different directions.

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Pie recipe

2014-11-20T19:05:33Z

If you're of a similar mind to me, one of your reactions to the onset of Fimbulvetr is "time to make stew!" And if you're even more like me, you have stock left over once you've served it out. Usually I make Unconquered Stew, ie. put more vegetables and protein in the next day, but this time I decided to do Pie instead - and not entirely because I'd run out of suet to make dumplings, either.

Boil potatoes for mashing as normal, but using the leftover stock and some extra water. Mash them all up together, for a semiliquid potato sludge, and add lots of chopped leeks and mushrooms - let them sit off the heat while you make up the pie crust.

The pie crust (and yes, this is a heretical pie, because I cooked it all in the same dish that then goes in the oven) uses one part wholemeal flour, one part porridge oats, and one part butter-substitute, with salt and a hefty dose of Scarborough Fair herbs, then the whole thing gets liberally sprinkled with nutritional yeast.

Technically, this is sort of an upside-down vegan homity pie, I suppose. The best way to de-veganise it would be to use cheese (a good sharp cheddar or goat's cheese) instead of the mushrooms.

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December Days

2014-11-17T19:15:26Z

If you give me topics in the comments, I will attempt to write about them. Because "every day" is a bit much for me, I'm going to put up 15 slots, and a further 10 as stretch goals, ie. for if I end up with writing energy left over when I've done the first set.

1. Art & science
2. Being a Quaker
3. Conversation
4. Is the trend towards urbanisation sustainable?
5. Trying to balance multiple factors in self-care (inspired by Soylent)
6. How I define artistic success, and how the gap between that and others' notions affect my art
7. Universal Basic Income
8. Interesting things in Derby
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Adventures in Multiverse Theory

2014-11-13T18:03:47Z

So, I did this survey a while ago.

Actually, when I say I did it, it was carried out by an alternate-universe version of myself, in the parallel branch where I decided actually to do the work, but nothing else changed. To be precise, by selves in an infinite number of alternate universes. And since everything is possible in the infinite multiplicity of infinite worlds, an infinite number of those selves were also genius inventors, and beamed the results of the survey over to me (and an infinite number of other selves who hadn't done the work) so here we are.

Or would be, if they hadn't all got slightly different results.

Not that that matters, because an infinite number of other genius-inventor selves also decided to use this technology to broadcast persistent musical earworms instead.

So the results consist, apparently, of a really complex Fourier transform.

What do we learn from this? - that in the final analysis, which is in this case much the same as the most cursory application of common sense, multiverse theory is to all intents and purposes total bollocks.

But it still makes more sense than this particular pile of foetid shite. (Warning: that site is a nearly-TVTropes-grade memetic hazard.)

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mirrorshard @ 2014-11-08T16:46:00

2014-11-08T16:47:36Z

Oh, goodness, why didn't I know there was a Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell re-read going on at Tor.com? Fantastic insightful discussion.

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Drinks

2014-11-07T13:00:44Z

Revolutionary socialist coffee followed by rosehip tea. I am a stereotype.

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Social graph expansion

2014-11-04T21:14:44Z

Navigating social graphs is hard, in several senses.

It's mechanically hard, especially for those of us who don't get to get out to parties much, and because both Facebook and Twitter actively discourage private communication between people who don't already list each other - on Twitter, you can't direct-message someone unless they follow you, and on Facebook, your direct messages get sorted into a disused filing cabinet in a dark cellar.

But more interestingly, it's conceptually hard. It's easy to think "that friend of my friend(s) looks like an awesome human" but less easy to go from that to "they should be my friend too". In the first place, I don't know how they are friends, whether they have something close that they don't want to share, or whether she's an acquaintance (or an ex) who thinks she's a closer friend than she really is. There's no coded mechanism for us to recommend friends, beyond the list of mutual friends we all see, and there's a definite social disincentive to use that as a recommendation - even if it weren't a patently silly thing to do, and a trivial violation of Geek Social Fallacy #whatever.

There's also a definite feeling that it's wrong to want more friends - it feels like being dissatisfied with what I have, and looking for upgrades, rather than an attempt to increase the flow of awesome across my eyeballs, and - with luck - theirs too.

It's certainly possible to ask for an introduction, but I'm not completely certain that anyone has done that since 1896 - they've certainly never asked me for an introduction to another friend, and if they did I'd probably assume it was for romantic purposes. For that matter, approaching someone and saying "please tell your friend that I'm awesome" is difficult enough, even if you have the kind of relationship where you know perfectly well they think you're awesome.

Of course, like everything else, it's very gendered. Women and female-presenting people often say "not looking for friends, I have enough friends" (and whilst I've heard that from men & male-ish people, it's not nearly as common) and that's a really, really good way to protect themselves from the kind of Nice Guy who treat social interactions as some sort of commando raid through the barbed-wire-and-explosions battlefield of the dreaded Friend Zone, into the enemy camp. As a result of the existence of these douches, all us male-ish or -presenting people are Schrödinger's Nice Guy, and it's very difficult to go "hello, would you like to be friends" without worrying about ruining someone's day. (Standard disclaimer: it's far worse for the female-ish half of this interaction. I'm not currently interested in the effect at the end, just the mechanism by which Not Doing It happens.)

(This post brought to you by noticing some points of congruence on Facebook and overthinking things.)

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DW communities

2014-11-04T13:05:54Z

Recommend me some interesting and active communities to join? Art- and/or SF/fantasy based for preference, but I'll consider anything you find interesting. I'm trying to be here more, and More Stuff will help with that.

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Monsters

2014-11-03T18:38:49Z

We all have our own favourite mythological monster. (Mine is the selkie, though I have a soft spot for the manticore.) But there are some who turn up ever and again, in so many variations - vampires, werewolves, mermaids, elves, zombies, witches & wizards - and there's one thing that they all have in common, which the less successful varieties don't. They take you out of this view of the world and into another, and if you're lucky you'll get to be like them - if you aren't, you'll have to watch your friends changing sides first. They can all do so much more than kill you.

Vampires exude dangerous and polymorphous sexuality, and the way to render them harmless is to enact missionary position on them. (Seriously, Dracula is destroyed - in the original - by van Helsing kneeling on top of his prone form and hammering a three-foot piece of wood into him from above.) They're positioned as the Other by casting them as predatory women - there's one male vampire in the original, Dracula himself, and it's actually made a feature of in the book that he does all his own domestic duties, which in the 19th century was even more of a thing than it is now. First Lucy and then (nearly) Mina are seduced to the dark side, and on them it looks just as tempting as the original Brides of Dracula do to Jonathan - specifically, lots more feminine imagery and lustful behaviour, which of course was considered a specifically feminine mode of Bad Manners. Even the Twilight style vampires keep the "if you are worthy you can join us and Become Awesome" aspect, when they keep nearly nothing else.

Werewolves are uncontrolled violence and the pure fuzzy essence of dick-waving. They're nothing like real wolves (though there was this one series I read recently, where they behaved much more interestingly - one, out of hundreds) but are instead the distilled & uncut essence of Those Guys The Writer Went To School With. But, unlike Those Guys, they've got the narrative potential to accept you, make you one of them, give you furry superpowers, and then admire you for not giving in to the urge to rip everyone's teeth out. Or, of course, they might just eat you, but nobody tells them they have to be elegant and restrained and use the right fork for your liver.

Mermaids are another interestingly gendered one. Women & feminine-of-centre genderqueer people tend to be much more attracted to mermaids as a concept than men do, probably because it's men they choose as their victims, dragging them down into the deep cool depths of a thinly disguised metaphor. It's not normal to become a mermaid, but their equivalent - the selkie - is something that anyone could return to being.

Elves (faeries, sidhe, the Tylwyth Teg) are famed for stealing children & poets, and anyone who escapes - or who's returned - comes back Interestingly Broken in an awesome sort of way. We all dream of that - of having a disability that makes narrative sense and actually gives you something in return, that you can find an actual reason for. And if you're as awesome as Sir Huon of Bordeaux, you may even become King of Faerie yourself.

The mere existence of zombies changes the world you live in: it becomes survival horror, because eventually, no matter what you do, these things are going to come after you. They are your future, and you will become either one yourself, or its brutalized reflection, the zombie hunter. If zombies exist, you have no choice but to step up to the plate and become awesome.

Concerning witches & wizards - again, their existence changes your world. The possibilities become so much more possible. Even just by meeting one, you learn so much more about the way the world works, and they teach you: yer a wizard now, Harry, and those mean girls are in So Much Trouble. Like it or not, you'll never see the world the same way, and you've got a job to do, whether your name is Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden or Juanita Louise Callahan.

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All to do - all to do!

2014-10-19T19:13:34Z

Our new greenhouse! It has a few panes missing, but a friendly neighbour on the allotment site has donated us some replacement panes (the right size, at that) and it will all be lovely when we've cleaned it up a bit. The picture links through to a set of photos, showing all the salient features of our allotment. We have a large and overgrown strawberry patch, a thicket of sage & fennel, two vegetable beds each 2x8m, a couple of square metres of raspberry canes, a group of currant bushes (red & black) and a little orchard with two apple trees, a pear tree, and a plum tree. The beds will take a bit of weeding, but not more than a few days' worth, and there's lots of long grass to cut.

We're planning on planting herbs & flowers in the orchard area, for a bit of companion planting to keep pests off the fruit. More flowers around the willow bower, and I'll have to strengthen it a bit more - there'll be enough withies and more coming off the top to add all the density we could ever want at the bottom, and we'll put in a loveseat and probably some solar-powered fairy lights. I'll have to experiment a bit with willow weaving, but in a few years it should have enough strength in it to keep off most of the rain, and to put in a shelf for a cup of tea.

Next job, establishing a new compost heap - the last tenant's heap has rotted down very nicely indeed - and filling it with weeds. After that, hedging! The site's got some lovely thorn hedges, and it's our responsibility to keep the hedge at the front of our own plot trimmed - it's been neglected almost as much as the willow has. When that's done, we can start working out how to remove the Enormous and Almost Certainly Verminous Sofa from the shed, and start clearing that up.

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mirrorshard @ 2014-10-17T16:55:00

2014-10-17T15:56:17Z

We have an allotment, complete with a willow arch leading into it! A half plot is huge, and we have inherited not only a shed (which I'd been hoping for) but a greenhouse, a willow bower (to match the willow arch), redcurrant bushes, a blackcurrant bush, raspberry canes, strawberry plants, an artichoke, a huge sage thicket, two mature apple trees loaded with fruit, a pear tree, and a plum tree. I am delighted, and currently trying to work out what variety the SEVEN BILLION APPLES on one of the trees are. (Small-to-medium green eaters.)

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Seeds

2014-10-14T17:18:32Z

Right, so we have (will have contingent on viewing and accepting, etc., but we will) an allotment, less than a hundred yards from our house. So now it's time for me to start making a list of plants I want to grow in it. I'm assuming that we won't have anything resembling a greenhouse, so some of these will be aspirational at best, but nevertheless I am going to list them, and in a few years' time with any luck I'll have tried the lot. Someone did suggest putting the wishlist up so we could be sent presents of seeds - if you do fancy that, we will be utterly delighted, but it isn't in the slightest necessary. (NB: I like turnips and Florence fennel, but Elly doesn't, and Brussels sprouts are low priority for both of us, so seeds for those would probably get passed on to someone else who'd eat the results. Same for chillies.)

I'm using The Real Seed Co. here, since kht originally put me on to them and they've done wonderfully in the past, but interesting seeds from any source are good. If anyone localish fancies going in on an order, their packets are large and plentiful, so it'd be very possible to split them between us.

For herbs and flowers, Thomas Etty have a much larger variety.

Beans: I have some 'Trail of Tears' beans, but some Cosse Violette stringless beans would also be good. I have some 'Wizard' field beans as well, which are supposed to be very cold-hardy.
Peas: I have some 'Serpette Guilloteau' peas, but it would be lovely to grow the 'Golden Sweet' mangetout peas too.
Squash: I'm looking at all the lovely varieties there and goodness, how does anyone narrow it down.
Cucumbers: Given the amount of cucumber we eat, growing our own is a priority. Edible skin is good, because I get annoyed with peeling things. Exploding cucumbers are probably not ideal, given wildlife and children. Neither of us are gherkin people.
Lettuce & salad greens: yessssss. Some seed, more always good. Rocket.
Tomatoes: ditto, all down the line, but concentrating on eating varieties rather than cooking varieties.
Peppers: sweet peppers yes, chillis no, because I can't be doing with the heat (can't taste anything else) and wouldn't want to risk them crossing into the sweet peppers.
Root vegetables: Interestingly coloured carrots, parsnips, and Hamburg parsley.
Potatoes, of course.
Melons: I would dearly love to grow melons, and it does seem to suggest that they can do OK outdoors. I would grow Prescott Fond Blanc for the look of them alone.
Kale: I have a fondness for Thousand-Heads because Soyer talks about it, but other varieties are also very nice indeed.
Leeks: I've never met a leek variety I didn't like, see. A combination of Jaune de Poitou and Bleu de Solaise looks like a very good idea indeed.
Broccoli: Green heading Calabrese & purple sprouting.

Herbs: Generally, my attitude to herbs is "the more the better" and I'd love to have as many as possible in the kitchen garden (the knotweed will still let us put herb plants in, I'm just reluctant to do actual vegetables next to it) and on the windowsills.

Soft fruit: We are Extremely Keen on growing a great number of raspberries, and I'm also keen on gooseberries. If the management like fruit trees, putting in a Mirabelle would be a very good thing - if not, we may do that in our own garden.

Flowers: We're both very keen on things which will attract and feed bees, and on British wildflowers.

(Admin note: the Livejournal version of this post will be locked for spam reasons, but the Dreamwidth one will stay open and should allow comments from people without accounts.)

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Garter research

2014-10-09T13:48:43Z

Another instalment in my (very) occasional efforts to research the historical antecedents of people (usually female) wearing pictures of other people (usually male) on their garters. I should stress that I'm doing this for artistic and marketing reasons!

This research is difficult, and usually turns up boring pr0n and members of the Order of the Garter. One common result is from modern wedding tradition, in which it's often a picture of a deceased family member - though putting a photo of your grandfather on your garter under your dress seems counterintuitive.

The only other results so far are two films: Red-Headed Woman (1927, with Jean Harlow in an uncharacteristic non-platinum role) and Getting Gertie's Garter (1927, remade 1945 with Marie McDonald). That's an interesting result, and in isolation implies that it wasn't a widespread Thing.

There are some literary allusions as well, but I've not found anything before the 1970s yet, and that refers to embroidered names, not paintings or photographs. More research remains to be done!

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The Nine Tailors

2014-10-02T11:10:57Z

I finished The Nine Tailors last night, and I'd forgotten just how incredibly bleak and affecting the ending is - and how Sayers does it through what she doesn't write.

Knowing rather more about Wimsey's PTSD than I did the last time I read it helps me understand the book more, but having experienced it myself makes it hit home all the harder, with a kind of helpless gut-wrenching empathy, and brings the arc of the book around to completion in much the same way as the Great Belzoni would treat an iron bar.

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Vegan apple pie

2014-09-28T17:01:16Z

On a whim, I ended up making the apple pie yesterday after all, so here's the (experimental) recipe.

Grease a loaf tin (or something else if that's what you have) with your butter substitute (I use Pure sunflower, since it's fine for the lactose-intolerant person, the milk-protein-intolerant person, and the person who can't have soya) and start the oven heating up to around 200C.

Three Jazz apples (it's what we had), peeled and cored and chopped into interestingly sized bits, go into the tin, followed by a handful of raisins & sultanas, and a hefty sprinkling of mixed spice.

For the pastry, take about three tablespoonfuls of white self-raising flour, about the same of your butter substitute, and a scant tablespoonful of sugar. I used builder's sugar, ie. granulated white, but next time I'll use something more interesting to see what difference it makes. Mix them all up till the mixture no longer sticks to your hands (add more flour if you need to) and add a little water, or almond milk if you have it. Roll it out thinly, drape it over the top of the apple mixture, brush it over with almond milk or the equivalent, and sprinkle more sugar on the top.

Put it in the oven till it's done - it'll take 20 to 30 minutes. Eat with cream or custard - the Alpro soya versions of either are delicious.

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Gaude, Sabaoth, John, Jericho, Jubilee, Dimity, Batty Thomas, and Tailor Paul

2014-09-26T17:18:43Z

I had forgotten just how good Dorothy L Sayers's writing is when she's writing about something she really loves.

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Not a Sunday roast

2014-09-26T13:12:38Z

Yesterday, I roasted a chicken, and I want to talk about that for a while.

I've been trying to eat more vegan, partly for health reasons and partly because that's the easiest way to opt a little way out of the dietary Omelas of doing harm to animals and ecology and communities, but I'm not about to give up free-range chicken, for personal as well as ethical reasons. (It's a very resource-light meat, very low opportunity cost compared to other meat, and whilst I don't have the numbers it's comparable to processed vegan food.) Mostly, though, it's a family history thing - my mother used to cook roast chicken or lamb every Sunday, and whilst I'm not so bothered about the days of the week it's a nice thing to do. It still feels special, it gives another couple of days' food with the leftovers, and it actually works out quite cheaply.

There's another reason, too, which is that this is the bar that the DWP use to decide whether I'm entitled to DLA or not. Can I reliably and repeatably cook a meal? Specifically, a roast dinner with all the trimmings? (A Sunday roast, that is, not a Christmas one.)

So. If you're anything like me, you'll need to start by clearing a workspace and finding the pans. Use your best knife; mine is an ugly-looking square ended spring-steel blade made in Vietnam and bought in Milton Keynes, with an epoxy-resin handle I made for it that looks like it was pulled out of a bog. You don't need anything special, though - so long as it goes through vegetables and not fingers, you're doing well.

Take many potatoes, King Edwards for preference but Maris Piper or a red-skinned variety will do nicely, and the "basic white potatoes" that a supermarket sells are just fine. Wash off any dirt, or peel them if you don't like the peel - I prefer to leave it on. Chop them to about the size of a toddler's hand, and put them in a large pan. Ideally, you should be thinking "how on earth are we going to eat all those potatoes?" at this point. Cover with cold water, throw in a teaspoonful or two of salt (sea salt if you can, because it does make them taste better than "table salt" does), and boil them till they feel "almost done" when you stick in a fork.

While they're cooking, it's time to make the stuffing. Turn the oven on to heat up, and put a couple of slices of bread in there, to get crispy but not toasted. There are a few different kinds of stuffing I like to make, but it's always based around the bread (cut into tiny squares), a couple of eggs to bind it together, and an onion chopped small. Sometimes I'll add a bulb of garlic, chopped small; sometimes a lemon, chopped into eighths. (If you don't have "unwaxed lemons", give it a thorough scrubbing. And yes, put it in peel and all.) This time, I used about a metric shedload of parsley, because I was passing by a Turkish supermarket and took the opportunity to get some. Put in some more salt, and some black pepper, and anything else you feel tastes good, mix it up, and spoon it inside the chicken, shoving it down hard. Unless you're some kind of kitchen demigod, you'll spill a lot of it, but so do I.

Chop a few parsnips, too. I feel they should be cut into long thin batons, quarter-round, rather than chunks - they don't need boiling first, so you can do this at your leisure.

Put the pan you're going to roast things in in the oven for five-ten minutes, with some vegetable or sunflower oil in, to heat up. Drain the potatoes well, and pour them in the pan - doing this helps them crisp up, especially if you bash them around a bit and get them well covered. Chuck in the parsnips, too, and balance the chicken on top. When I had a rosemary bush, I used to put a couple of branches from that across the chicken. I like to cover it with foil (or do it all in a lidded pan) but if someone's asked for extra-crispy potatoes then leave it open, and if you're worried about the chicken drying out then drape a few slices of good bacon over it, or at a pinch a bit of greaseproof paper.

After all that, leave it to cook till you can smell it throughout the entire house. This is my personal metric, and it's worked for all the houses I've lived in!

These days, I usually steam vegetables in the microwave, instead of cooking them in a pan. A head of broccoli in a Pyrex dish, with a few splashes of water and a plate on the top, works perfectly - so do leeks, and carrots, and almost anything else. The way my mother used to do carrots is to slice them into thin rounds, lay them in a baking tin, and sprinkle sugar across the top - they'd go in about 15 or 20 minutes before the chicken came out. I tried that myself last month, and my test subjects were delighted.

What's left? - gravy, of course. I don't make gravy, because I'm not nearly as good at it as kindjourneys is, but theirs is based around roux, red wine, and Marmite. That'll take about half an hour, so start it well before the vegetables.

If you open up the roasting tin and leave the chicken to sit on the stove-top for five or ten minutes before you carve it, it makes things easier - and your guests get the opportunity to admire it, too. Take it off the pile of potatoes before you carve it, and start by slicing down at about 45 degrees to remove a breast, then ideally you should be able to slice off the leg neatly. Personally, I usually end up fumbling around and separating it by a combination of guesswork and forks. The important thing is that the meat gets onto plates, and frankly mediaeval noblemen would sneer at us for carving meat on a plate rather than held up in the air on a fork anyway, so impressing them is a lost cause.

Traditionally, I'd make apple pie for pudding, with shortcrust pastry and custard, but I never have the energy for that these days.

So: can I do this reliably and repeatably? Not yet, no. It's a good day when I can manage the energy and coordination to get everything in, get ready to cook, and get started on it. But I've done this enough now that it's a simple one-thing-at-once, I-know-what-comes-next recipe, and it always works well enough.

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dust

2014-09-26T11:45:25Z

I should start using this thing again. Which also means I should follow more people. Recommend me some? I'm hesitant just to do a random walk through my friends' friends, because that feels intrusive.

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mirrorshard @ 2013-11-08T12:19:00

2013-11-08T12:50:00Z

There's a strong bias - at least amongst the policy-making classes - that "a handup, not a handout" is the way to go when dealing with poverty. The problem with this culture is that it's based on ~~two~~ ~~three~~ four fundamentally bad assumptions. (There are also other problems, mostly based around business interests, but that's for another day.)

First, that everyone should be middle-class, with a nice middle-class job at a desk, in a tertiary sector industry, and a car and a mortgage - so there's already a well-defined route "up".. And as a corollary to that, choosing to take a route which isn't that one is a bad thing, because other life choices are just temporary aberrations - the kind of thing you do in your gap year for the experience, or something you do for pin money, or to keep yourself busy.

Second, that "dealing with poverty" isn't the business of poor people themselves. The idea that if someone is in a bad situation they are therefore less capable of getting themselves out of it - that someone else, who isn't involved and has more resources (or more moral authority) is better able to see the route out of that situation. This is partly to do with the whole "underlying reasons for poverty" meme: the toxic & stupid idea that if someone is poor, it's their own fault - that they are poor because they are a bad person - or, in a slightly more advanced form, that they are a less competent person because they are poor, and once they become less poor (ie. once they get a nice middle-class job & lifestyle) they will rejoin the ranks of competent people worthy of respect.

Third, that the amount of effort someone is putting into solving a problem is the same as the amount that's visible, and that if they're unsupervised they won't take the problem seriously. This isn't just a fundamental failure of trust, it's a failure inherent in measurement culture - it's the same problem as measuring productivity by lines of code written, or expressing quality of life in terms of GDP per head.

Fourth, that a handout is automatically a bad thing - that it's an undeserved reallocation of finite resources. I'm not sure where these people get the idea that any significant proportion of the money in this country is where it is because its owners "deserved" it, or worked for it. For every Joanne Rowling, there's a George Osborne and a Duke of Grosvenor. We're all broadly behind the idea of social return on investment, but apparently the idea that individual currently disadvantaged humans might be able to manage that for themselves is a bit too revolutionary.

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Housing benefit & the minimum wage

2012-10-08T01:15:39Z

If you resent minimum wage requirements, and you also resent the size of the housing benefit bill, you are not only an arrant hypocrite, but a rather foolish one. Sadly, it doesn't seem to be that uncommon in the general public, who have apparently not grasped some fairly simple facts.

1) Most people who are claiming housing benefit are in work. They're claiming housing benefit because their employers are not paying them enough for them to pay their rent along with all the other useful things in life. There are a number of entirely legal ways to do this, ranging from zero-hours contracts (where you might work 20 hours a week at minimum wage, and take home £130, or you might not work at all) to "apprenticeship" positions paying £2.50 an hour. Or, indeed, paying a full-time minimum wage to someone who is trying to support a family on it.

2) Everyone needs somewhere to live. This costs money, because that's the only way you can get both security & economic independence, and for some reason we seem to have a long-running fetish for leaving housing to the "free" market and therefore making it more expensive^[1]. (And no, we can't just live with our parents. Even if we all, or even most of us, had families who could support us, it's telling that this argument is only made by people who are not currently living with either their parents or their grown children.)

3) There is an income threshold below which it is impossible to save for anything more than unpredictable expenses. (Appliance repairs, vet bills, cold winters. They will happen, and the savings will be spent.) The same goes for capital, with knobs on: unless you already have quite a lot, there's not really any way to invest it which will pay off better than a decent bank account. Unless you start with money, there is no predictable way to get much richer (or much more secure) than you already are.

4) People who have lots of money prefer not to give it away. They will do everything they possibly can to avoid paying their staff any more than they can get away with, including lobbying, bribing, and bullying government officials to make sure that minimum wage legislation does not rise to a sensible amount. For a complicated set of reasons, the employer classes have a lot more power in wage negotiations than the employed classes do, and therefore much more power to command labour for their money than the employed classes do to command money for their labour.

5) The people referred to in point 3 above have no idea about the cost of living. They don't know how much it costs to rent a flat at the bottom of the market, or a room in a shared house. They don't have any idea how to keep a family fed for a week on £10 and coupons. Their idea of reducing utility bills is something like "buy more insulation and wear more jumpers". This means that their consciences are not troubling them unduly, because they can lie to themselves about the misery they're causing.

6) Somehow, the employer classes have managed to shuffle off the burden of their wage bill onto the state, in much the same manner that one person in a shared house usually ends up doing most of the cleaning. This is because the employer classes are dominated by a combination of ruthless spivs and clueless rich people, after decades of overenthusiastic application of the measurement fallacy^[2]. So as a result, housing is effectively treated as a subsidised public good, in the same efficient and cost-effective way as the British rail industry.

[1] OK, that looked like a contentious statement, so I'll expand. The housing market is not free, because it's far too constrained by geography, inequality, and banking practices. It's inherently more expensive this way because there are many more people who want to live in any given area (demand) than there are properties (supply), and the profit motive means that sellers/landlords end up preferentially selling/renting to richer people. Over time, the influx of people outweighs the influx of properties, because land doesn't breed, and therefore the prices of the ever-scarcer goods rise. The ways to fix this would involve making currently unattractive areas of the country much more tempting, and capping private rents (which would involve capping private mortgage payment levels, and probably totals).

[2] "Hurrah, we know how to compare how much people are getting paid, and perform complex analysis on the numbers. We shall therefore ignore anything which is harder and more complicated than that, such as structural inequalities, mutual back-scratching cartels, and any analysis of relationships between reward levels and any actual competence or usefulness."

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Recipe: One Dumpling Stew

2012-09-27T15:54:39Z

Tasty vegan rocket-fuel autumn food. All the quantities are approximate, because it doesn't matter at all if you don't do it the same way as I do. When I say "250g", I mean "about half a 500g packet, more or less". Serves 6 or so hungry people.

If you're keen on de-veganizing it, add bacon in the first stage.

1. Dice a couple of medium-sized onions, and set them to sautee in sunflower oil (rapeseed oil or vegetable oil also work well - olive is usually too strong) until soft & golden. While they're cooking, chop two or three carrots and toss those in immediately. If you like garlic (and who doesn't?) then throw in half a dozen cloves to sautee too, roughly chopped.

2. When that mixture's done (ie. soft and golden and not dry - keep an eye on it and add more oil if you need to) then pour in two tins of chopped tomatoes. Add a generous helping of Scarborough Fair herbs (about a heaped teaspoon of each), sea salt & black pepper. Don't season it to taste at this stage - make it ridiculously strong and intense. If your taste buds & budget feel like it, then a couple of glassfuls of red wine won't go at all amiss - before you put the tomatoes in, turn up the heat to full, splash the wine in, stir it around, and let it bubble off. (This removes the alcohol, leaving the flavour.)

3. Toss in about 250g of lentilhas verdes (Puy lentils or lentilles vertes - to be carefully distinguished from green lentils), 250g of pearl barley, and two tins of chickpeas, drained & rinsed. You can quite happily substitute other pulses (black beans work very well) for the chickpeas, or green or brown lentils for the lentilhas verdes, or mix & match.

4. Add some vegetables: potato, swede, fennel, and aubergine all work well. You'll want roughly the equivalent of two large vegetables, or the size of four clenched fists.

5. Add a couple of teaspoons of vegan stock powder and top up with water till everything's covered, then another inch or so on top. Bring it to the boil, then leave to simmer for a while - it'll take at least half an hour, but might be more depending on the pulses. If you're using pre-soaked dried beans, boil them for at least ten minutes. Adjust the seasoning to taste.

6. Make the dumplings. The reason this is called One Dumpling Stew is that I always make rather a lot of dumpling mixture, and they join up in the pan. Four tablespoons of flour (wholemeal bread flour works well, especially if it has seeds & grains in), two of vegetable suet, a heaped teaspoon of baking powder. Salt & pepper, and a teaspoon of herbs - I usually use tarragon, but caraway seeds work really well too. Mix them all around, put in about a wine-glass worth of cold water, and mix it all up till there's no loose flour and the mixture can be lifted up in a large wet glob clinging to the spoon. (You might want to put the water in a bit at a time - it's easy to go too far, and adding more flour is boring.) Drop the large wet globs into your simmering pan, one at a time, as far away from each other as possible. When all the mixture is in, stick the lid back on and leave it to cook for five or ten minutes.

Other good things to put in it include leeks, chestnuts, mushrooms, and garden peas.

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Doctor Who

2012-09-11T19:57:00Z

OK, so Asylum of the Daleks was appallingly bad, but Dinosaurs on a Spaceship was actually pretty good apart from Matt Smith. (I don't have anything much against him, but he was just eclipsed here.)

I especially liked the way Queen Nefertiti followed the annoying hunter dude back to his own time with a dinosaur trank rifle. Ten minutes after the credits end, a half-dozen underpaid & underappreciated local blokes will find him unconscious with his trousers pulled down and some scornful comments in hieroglyphics painted on his arse.

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GPP

2012-07-21T16:46:32Z

Taken by merrythebard, because I asked for one to show off the barrette I made & have been wearing for the last few days. (Layered & varnished art paper, calligraphy ink, spring clip.) The sheer messiness of my hair annoys me, but I love the reflections.

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Storytelling Speakeasy, 9th August

2012-07-11T12:03:06Z

Once upon a time a young girl dreamt of a playground. It was filled with beautiful men and handsome women. They told stories not just with their voices but with the whole of their bodies. With fire, water, ice and a nipple tassel or two. Now, for one night only, she has taken over a beautiful, Victorian town hall to make it happen.

Alchemist Dreams present a narrative extravaganza at Limehouse Town Hall, with operatic circus skill performances, boylesque, "the myth of Medea... with a naughty twist", delightfully complex & unusual games run by spiker_uk, and their own artisan spirits & unique cocktails.

I'll be there with a stall (and with merrythebard as my beautiful assistant), selling jewellery, art prints, cards, and miscellanea, all at very reasonable prices and many with a storytelling theme.

I'm told the other stalls will involve delicious baked goods, fine corsetry, and interesting brass jewellery, but I don't have names or links yet.

Tickets are £10 early-on, £20 in advance, and £30 on the door if there are any - last time, everything went very fast, so I recommend getting in early!

[If you're on Facebook, there's an event here too.]

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Questions about accessories

2012-07-06T13:35:45Z

Dear people who wear fascinators (specifically, but not solely, the kind which consist of extremely small hats) and other things in their hair:

Do you prefer the kind mounted on small combs, the kind mounted on Alice bands, or the kind mounted on those unnecessarily-complicated-looking metal clips?

Or some other method?

Thank you!

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