The Windmills of Your Mind
I don't have a clue what this will be about. I'm just writing stuff occasionally.
Yours truly, angry mob
0320 days
We are the angry mob
We read the papers everyday day
We like who like
We hate who we hate
But we’re also easily swayed~ Kaiser Chiefs, The Angry Mob
Did most of the people in the UK wake up this morning and discover we have the media we deserve?
Did it leave them disgusted?
So unless you’ve been under a shell for the past day you can probably guess that I’m talking about the News of the World phone hacking scandal (makes a change from recipes!) and the recent revelations that the mobile phone of Milly Dowler was hacked in 2002 after her disappearance.
To be clear, undoubtedly, hacking into the voicemail of the victim of a murder and deleting messages will have an effect on the investigation and the family of the victims. As well as being just plain illegal it’s not difficult to argue that it’s morally bankrupt and these cases (there may be others) should be investigated with a view to prosecution of those responsible.
But what I’m wondering, is what the public and media reaction over the last day or so says about us?
The roots of the phone hacking scandal go back to 2006 when Clive Goodman, royal editor on the News of the World and Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator were charged with intercepting voicemail messages from members of the royal household. Both were found guilty and jailed in 2007 and ever since allegations of hacking have dogged the News of the World with other journalists implicated.
Throughout this time the allegations have only occasionally entered the public consciousness, with most media coverage coming in The Guardian. As it has become clear the the Metropolitan Police have failed to act to investigate other cases of phone hacking that were known about The Guardian and some notable MP’s like John Prescott and Tom Watson have kept up the pressure while coverage in other parts of the media have been more muted. Occasional revelations have stirred the odd bit of controversy on Twitter and mentions on the usual panel shows on TV. For the majority of the general public though it hasn’t been a concern.
It’s clear though that the majority of people alleged to have their phone hacked and voicemail illegally intercepted are celebrities as the paper looks for the kind of bread and butter stories turned out by itself and its sister paper The Sun. It’s also clear that these two papers are not the only ones who have used illegal phone hacking and it’s fair to expect others to have used this tactic.
Max Clifford, Andy Grey, Steve Coogan, Sienna Miller, Chris Tarrant, Sky Andrew, the list goes on as to who is alleged to have been hacked with News International settling out of court with some individuals. It’s obvious though that a large number of people targeted are not of the greatest national importance and that salacious gossip is the best that they can hope for. Our media loves to build people up and to knock them down and then be the same people they come to when they want to get their won story out and earn a few bob into the bargain.
At the end of the day though, if the that’s the stories that they are pursuing, then that’s what’s selling papers. Who is buying these papers?
We are…
We are, because we love the salacious gossip. We love the so called scandal and the lives of the rich and famous.
Do we buy papers like the News of the World because they give us what we want, or do we buy them because that’s all there is?
Since Monday this week the media and social networking sites have been busy with people commenting on the most recent allegations. Whereas before allegations before didn’t enter the consciousness of the mass public they have now. When the allegations centred around politicians and the celebrities we read about most people weren’t bothered. It was just another juicy story about people we always read about, who in some cases we don’t care about. The usual suspects that were built up, knocked down and asked for forgiveness in the usual media merry-go-round we see week in week out. This time though the victim of phone hacking was an murdered teenage girl.
Facebook and Twitter have exploded with public reaction and it has been an exercise in showing the power of modern social media. People have been campaigning for the public to boycott the News of the World, many have contacted the papers advertisers on Twitter and asked the to consider whether they wish to consider no longer using the paper for adverts. This has had some success with Ford, nPower and others stating that they will consider their position. Call me cynical, but isn’t this just good publicity for these companies? Don’t they get public brownie points for announcing this without actually cutting off their relationship with the paper?
In all this direct action, how may people will boycott The Sun tomorrow or The News of the World on Sunday?
How many members of the public who have voiced their disgust at the paper and those advertising it have cut off their relationships? Who phoned Sky TV today and said they want to quit as they no longer wish to support News Corp, ultimate owners of the two papers?
When the allegation related to celebrities and politicians, people we regard as fair game for the media, we weren’t all that bothered. Once it affected an innocent member of the public, somebody who had been the victim of a tragedy and the family around them we were moved to outrage, to foam at the mouth, have our say and make vocal our disgust. The crime though was the same s before.
If it wasn’t clear before it certainly is now that our media are full of hypocrisy, when it transpired that some game shows weren’t completely genuine they foamed at the mouth, called for peoples heads and stirred the public into a rage. When two radio DJ’s recorded a prank call to one of the countries national treasures, poor Manuel, we were told this was a disgrace and that heads should roll at the BBC. More people complained to the BBC than actually heard the broadcast but we all spewed our disgust. Some of the people calling for heads to roll have today refused to resign from their positions at News International.
How many newspapers called for heads to roll today?
Do we, the public, show the same hypocrisy as our media by being ambivalent to the crimes committed by them until one of the normal people like us are affected?
Are we just an angry mob that is easily shaped by our papers?
Do we have the media we deserve?
What do you think?
Big beany soup
0347 days
Look, look, a blog post, here… Well you haven’t seen one of these in a while have you? No, you haven’t.
Why?
Dunno really, this was only ever here for when I felt like rambling to nobody in particular. Started off about a year ago with a bit of politics around election time. Got a bit bored of that, now appear to have segued into recipes, but there haven’t been many of them really has there.
I like to cook, and I like to eat good food. When it comes to cooking though I suppose I like to make big dishes, hearty stuff, comfort food. Like wot your mum made. Though not mine, which is why I learned how to cook in the first place. Sorry if you’re reading this mother.
But anyway, here is a recipe for a soup I have been enjoying a lot of lately. I used to eat Special K for breakfast, and then have a sandwich for lunch (cheese, cheese and ham or cheese and bacon, you get the theme?). Halfway through the morning and halfway through the afternoon I would invariably find that my energy level drops, my brain crashes and I buy crisps, chocolate or both to get me through.
So now, I have muesli for breakfast (Dorset Cereals, high fibre mix, very middle class, I could get laughed out the local back home) and for lunch I like a bit of soup, because of all the beans and chorizo in this there’s plenty to keep you going with all the protein. If you’re a vegetarian then use some common sense and leave out the obvious.
So, for bean and chorizo soup you will need:
- 1 tin chopped tomato’s
- 1 large onion, small dice
- 1 litre stock, chicken is best but veg will do
- 1 large carrot, chopped into a decent size dice
- Chorizo diced, around 225g or above, best to buy a sausage and not the thinly sliced stuff, you want diced bits
- 4 tins of pulses, any types, kidney beans, cannellini beans, butter beans, borlotti beans, haricot beans, you see where I’m going here
- Appropriate herbs, take your pick, dried or fresh, optional but adds some flavour
- Hot chilli sauce, as above, optional
Heat some olive oil in a pot, gently fry off the chorizo, you want to get to the point where the chorizo has coloured the oil and the fat in it is starting to release. Spoon the chorizo out the pot and put to the side. Leave the oil in the pot.
Chuck the onion in the pot and start to fry it off, not to quickly, you want to soften the onion up and sweeten it but not colour it too much. This can take up to 15/20 minutes depending.
Once the onion is done put the carrots in for about 5 minutes. Then add in the chorizo, tinned toms, whatever beans and pulses your using and the stock.
If you want add in some herbs and of course the hot chilli sauce. Not too heavy on the chilli sauce, only a few drops, you just want a bit of background heat.
Bring it to the boil and simmer until the carrots are cooked through, roughly twenty minutes.
That’s you done. You should get 6 or seven portions, so for a little bit of work you can have a weeks worth of lunch taken care of. Some beans seem to thicken the soup whereas others leave it watery, either way it’s all good.
Bolognese sauce
0575 days
Hello, yes it’s been a bit of a break since i posted last hasn’t it, so here’s a nice comforting recipe to start off.
Nearly everyone had spaghetti bolognese, or spag bol, as a child. Everybody’s mum had a different way of doing it, some better than others, though it’s a fair bet that most people from Bologna would find British versions of the sauce to be weird at best or disgusting at its worse.
Sorry if you’re reading mum, but it may not surprise you to learn that I was never enamoured with your version and I’ve been looking for a decent recipe for years. If I was being constructive I would say it had too much tomato in it, way too much. After trying different variations from different books and telly programs and doing a bit of reading, I think I have something that starts to work, though it isn’t perfect yet.
There’s not too much tomato and the idea is to try to build up the meaty flavours but make something that can stick to your pasta the way a sauce should. The mushroom, Worcestershire sauce and tomato purée are there to add to the meatiness of the sauce, tomato purée and Worcestershire sauce are a good source of umami, or savoury flavour.
Before we start though a quick bit of basics from the oracle of Wikipedia, Bolognese Sauce is a type of Ragu that originated in the Italian city of Bologna. A ragu is generally started by making a soffritto, which is basically onion, carrot and celery fried in olive oil, now if you’re eagle eyed you’ll notice that this makes a good base for any stew or soup and funnily enough it seems similar combinations appear in different cultures. Often a sauce made with two meats this recipe uses minced beef and some pancetta, but it is easy to substitute left over lamb, beef or pork from the Sunday roast.
Do, the recipe, this make enough for about 8 portions, half the ingredients for half the portions:
- 1kg minced beef
- 175g pancetta cubes – Often available in supermarkets in little packs, you can substitute bacon lardons or rashers of bacon or pancetta
- 2 x Portobello mushrooms, cut into roughly 1cm cubes
- 2 x medium/large onions finely chopped
- 2 x big carrots chopped into a small dice
- 2 x celery sticks finely chopped
- 4 x garlic cloves, finely chopped or crushed, feel free to reduce to 2 if you don’t love garlic like me
- 1/4 pint of milk
- 1 x large glass white (yes white!) wine
- 1 x beef stock cube
- Worcestershire Sauce, a good waz
- 2 x tablespoon tomato purée, sun-dried is good if you can manage it
- 1 x 400g tin chopped tomatoes, as always buy decent ones if you can, it makes a difference
So, to start off with you fry off the pancetta, the idea is to get it started and make sure it’s releasing its fat. Fry the pancetta off in the cooking pan, remove it and put it to the side.
Next make your soffritto, add some olive oil in the pan the pancetta was fried in and get your onion, carrot and celery an the go, sauté the lot of them off until everything is soft and the onion is starting to turn golden and sweet, then chuck in the garlic and give it a couple of minutes to soften.
One that’s ready add your mined beef, turn the heat up a bit and brown the mince. It’s important to get stuck in here with a wooden spoon, or even a fork, to break the mince up and get rid of any lumps. You want it to be well broken up so it will cling to your pasta.
One the mince is browned add the milk in and reduce down by at least half, once that’s done it’s the same with the white wine, chuck it in and reduce by half.
Next add the chopped mushroom and cook it for a couple of minutes. Then add the tomato purée, chopped tomatoes, Worcestershire Sauce and stock cube. Season, bring to the boil and then back down to a simmer. Cover it and let it simmer for about an hour, keeping an eye on it and giving it a regular stir, adjust the seasoning when finished. The end result should be a sauce that looks brown and meaty and not a red tomato slurry.
To serve, I prefer a big ribbon pasta like papperdelle to pick up the sauce, but spaghetti or fusilli or penne will do. Remember to use a generous amount of parmesan cheese.
Let me know how it goes.
I promise to pay the bearer on demand
0726 days
“I promise to pay the bearer on demand”, a promise that’s always with you in your pocket, because it’s written on the bank notes we carry.
@carlospictor recently put up a blog post that raises a question many sensible people have asked in the past few months. If the country is £890bn in debt, why should we pay it off?
We’ve spent a lot of money (an obscene amount) propping up the banks through buying shares and providing finance as well exposing ourselves to more risk by indemnifying them against future problems. The budget deficit is about £157bn so the £6.2bn of cuts announced in the last few days is about as significant as a flea fart in a tornado.
Banks were regulated too lightly, staff were incentivised to chase big deals with rewards that didn’t recognise long term risks and the financial system invented and traded product it didn’t understand based on essentially risky debt. They lost focus of their essential social purpose and lets be clear, in a stable democracy with a well regulated economy (not excessively regulated though), the function of a bank is to ensure money moves from those that have money to those that need it for the good of society. It’s the most efficient way of doing this and has been so for hundreds of years, since before the rise of Jewish bankers in Venice, up to now and beyond.
So why don’t we just write it off? Instead of the Bank of England creating money to buy debt why not just zero the account?
Trust. That’s it really, just trust, the same trust inscribed on the front of the bank note in your pocket, it’s what the financial system has been built on for hundreds of years. If you decide not to pay your debts, who will trust you in the future? If you gave somebody a tenner, they promised to pay you back and didn’t, would you trust them again? Probably not. As a country, there will always be time where Britain (or any other country) has to take out a loan, like yourself when you go for a mortgage a good credit history helps you get a good deal.
Ah, but we should live within our means? Good question, but ask yourself, have you always had money when you need it? If the worst happened do you have enough rainy day funds to cover the costs? If we had another foot and mouth crisis, or storms ravage the country, would you be happy if the government said we can pay off the damage but we will need to cut the NHS or education or benefits? There would be outrage, so accept it,sometimes we need a loan.
So if the country defaulted on its debt, who would trust us when we needed that bit extra in the future? How would we get the best deal? We need to pay off the debt. We need the rest of the world to trust us when we say we can address the problem, because our recovery and our future prosperity is based on trust.
Right, so that’s that question answered, I’m not here to bash somebody ele’s blog so I thought I’d echo something else I agreed with.
The cuts announced in the last few days will hit the front line of the public sector and those working in central government, local government or the third sector will feel the pinch. The agenda of the past few days has focused on waste and inefficiency. I do think there is great inefficiency in the public sector, it’s not hard to see examples published in the press. But I don’t believe that any worker in the public sector sets out to be inefficient, they just get caught up in an bureaucratic system that doesn’t change quickly enough. Large councils are big organisations providing a huge range of services under conditions that regularly change at the whim of government. If a private company had to provide as wide a range of products in a market that could change at the whim of another body I’m willing to bet it would not be the most efficient. @carlospictor is right, public sector workers hate waste, are focused on providing a great service and take pride in what they do. This unites public sector workers no matter what area they work in. They aren’t trying to take the piss with the tax payers money.
Well lets just outsource it then, that will be cheaper?
Will it really? The PFI deals done by the last government put pay to that, in fact outsourcing done badly can be more costly and can hide costs. The coming cuts are an opportunity to improve the public sector and give tax payers more bang for their buck.
No crisps for a month
3742 days
The eagle eyed amongst you (the many readers I have) will notice from the widget on the right that there hasn’t been a shed load of training going on for the marathon recently. So to punish myself, motivate me and loose a bit of weight I’m going without crisps and corn snack type things for at least the next month. Reckon I’m also going to cut right down on chocolate, biscuits and cake as well. That’s it, they’re all gone.
It’s fair to say I love crisps and with little effort I can easily east 3 packets a day. This is of course shameful, I realise this, that’s why I have been know to wander to other vending machines or shops so people don’t notice my high crisp consumption. It is my shame.
I reckon I can manage it, in fact I’ve done it before for longer than a month. Cut out the crisps, eat more nuts and seeds and generally just eat less.
I will miss them, Walkers cheese and onion is probably my favourite, they make an excellent crisps buttie, especially with Warburtons Toastie bread. Golden Wonder just ain’t what it used to be. McCoys, now there is a good crisp, thick and ridge cut, the steak flavour is good, but the cheese ones are great as well, usually I find it hard to choose between them so I buy one of each.
The introduction of fancy designer crisps in the past 10 years has been nice, but really the basics are the best, though ridge cut Kettle Chips, cheese and onion, are excellent. This was a bit of a shock as I don’t generally love Kettle Chips, too hard and crunchy.
The puff type snacks you used to get for tuck at school as well, love them, who doesn’t enjoy a Frazzle or Jonny’s Onion rings. At primary school the teacher used to sell tuck before play-time, generally this was a choice between 5p and 10p crisps like Transform-A-Snack, Cheese Balls, Cheese Puffs, Ringos, Discos Fish Sticks. All great.
I have a vague memory of my sister introducing me to the crisp buttie one Saturday by asking mum to make one. I thought it was the stupidest thing, but oh how wrong I was, even with prawn cocktail the shittiest flavour known to man.
Enough memories, I’m off for dinner with no snacks to nibble on in front of the telly tonight.
What’s your favourite crisp?
