Obviousness

Some things are obvious to nerds, but less obvious to the rest of us. From two recent coversations:

me:	Some guy did a 24-minute loop of Manhattan in a BMW Z4. But he got arrested because he made a dashboard camera recording of the ride and uploaded it to YouTube.
Anasua:	It is no longer necessary to say the words "to YouTube".
Surya:	Obviously I am acquainted with the Scandinavian genre of crime of fiction...
Saha:	Surya, there should be no "obviously" before that sentence.

The 1/27720 Sheppey Asparagus

It is said that Jiro Ono, perhaps the finest sushi chef in the world and a fanatical perfectionist, always uses his own palm to measure the quantity of rice for each piece of sushi, because an assistant's palm would introduce inconsistency.

My approach to cooking is far less exact. Onlookers are often alarmed to note that I don't bother to measure out spices and condiments, preferring instead to pour apparently arbitrary quantities from the containers directly into the cooking pot.

However, following the introduction of a new cutting board in our kitchen (a standard Sainsbury's cutting board, which Anasua engraved with a laser from her lab), guests can be sure that their food will have evenly-chopped ingredients.

This asparagus tip, for example, is 1/27720 of a Sheppey. As Douglas Adams fans may know, a Sheppey is a unit of length, defined as the closest distance at which sheep remain picturesque.

Below left is a photo of sheep grazing on snow on a Himalayan hillside, taken at ~1 Sheppey. Below right is a sheep seen on a day walk in Kent at a distance of much less than a Sheppey.

Not Bloody Margarine

Detractors of I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!® say that the product is so obviously inferior to real butter that no one in their right mind would actually say, "I can't believe it's not butter." This is not strictly true. I personally know of at least two instances when this phrase was used, though perhaps not in the way the manufacturers intended.

First instance: A few months back, having gone to the supermarket to buy butter, I bought a tub of I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!® by mistake. When I got home, I realised my folly and exclaimed, "I can't believe it's not butter!"

Second instance: Anasua looked in the fridge and said, "What is this crap you've got? I can't believe it's not butter!"

Anyhow, owing to our extreme reluctance to throw food away, we bit the bullet and finished it (mostly by consuming it as a substitute when we ran out of real butter). But as is my wont, I retained the tub for storing real butter.

The problem was that in the course of our epic struggle to finish I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!®, we had grown to loathe the sight of the tub itself. It seemed that anything stored in that tub, even real butter, would seem unappetising. So I have covered the repulsive packaging (see top left photo) with a home-drawn replacement that leaves the beholder in no doubt about the contents of the tub.

Cumulonimbus

When I first moved to London, people would ask me what I miss about Calcutta. Mostly, I missed the Arsalan Mutton Biryani. Family was a distant second.

Then one day I heard someone in the street dragging along a large, thick plastic sheet. It made a crackling sound exactly like the hammering of rain on a tin roof, and in the split second between hearing the sound and identifying its source, I had thought, against all logic, that it had started to rain really hard. And suddenly, I missed the monsoon.

Londoners complain about rain all the time, but that is because they've never seen what I like to think of as real rain. The sky turning black at noon, the temperature dropping several degrees in minutes, the ominous stillness in the air before the fury of the storm, the clap of thunder, coconut trees buckling in the teeth of the gale, thoroughfares knee-deep in water. In our neighbourhood, many women still blow conch-shells when there is a really good thunderstorm.

Yesterday, by all accounts, there was a corker. My friend Takai took these photos at mid-afternoon. I like the geometric lines, the sombre tones and the graphic novel-style layout (for which, too, credit goes to Takai).

Dashy Writing

My work notebook is quite organised (once I left it in a partner's office and she returned it to me, saying she guessed it was mine because of all the tables and numbered lists). But sometimes I retrospectively clutter the pages with doodles or recreational maths. Here is a page where I worked on a practical problem of geometrical optics.

 

Unfortunately, my handwriting in my work notebook tends to be slipshod. I suspect it is not quite at the stage where, as suggested in the early 20th century Lessons in Dashy Writing, it can be a promising ladder by which I rise in the world.

 

Bulgarian Plain Speak

Restaurants in Bulgaria serve good coffee. If you want something cheaper, instant coffee is also on the menu, but they have the grace to not pretend that it's coffee; just...

Asking for Directions in the Cinque Terre

At the Cinque Terre we stayed in a room rented out by an idiosyncratic Sardinian, Pierpaolo Paradisi, in a tiny hamlet called Prevo which has only a handful of inhabitants.

Prevo is not reachable by public transport, so we planned to go there by hiking along the Sentiero Azzurro (Blue Trail) from Vernazza. But Pierpaolo's house has no number, so I asked him how we would find it. These were his directions:

Our house is right on the blue trail between Vernazza and Corniglia.
The house is located in a hamlet called Prevo, in half way.
When you reach a small tunnel you walk in, our house is on the left when you exit the tunnel.
The door is green, generally is open, with a small bamboo gate, and you listen to opera music.

Addresses are conciser, but directions are nicer.

Long-time readers may recall another much older post with a title of the form Asking for Directions in [Place], and there is at least one other post which involves me asking for directions. Maybe one day there will be enough posts in the series to justify a new label.

Sachertorte

"There is only one Original. Since 1832."

So declares the pamphlet at Vienna's Café Sacher, purveyors of "Original" sachertorte. The rest of the pamphlet gives you the history of the sachertorte, tells you how the secret recipe with its "exact sequence of the 36 individual steps" is jealously guarded by the café, and instructs you in the 6 ways to identify "Original" sachertorte.

Between 1954 and 1963, Café Sacher and the nearby Demel bakery were involved in a complex legal dispute over the use of the "Original" label. Having finally won the right to use the label, it is as if Café Sacher will let no opportunity slip to remind their customers that theirs is the one and only "Original" sachertorte. If I am biased against Café Sacher, it is because of this tedious insistence on originality doled out without a trace of humour (surely I am not the only person who finds it amusing that a nine-year legal battle was waged over "the dessert's specific characteristics, including the [...] second layer of jam in the middle of the cake"), and the fact that I thought sachertorte itself is hugely overrated.

Nor does their branding stop at sachertorte. Nearly every item on the Café Sacher menu, from truffle ham to ice-cream cake, is prefaced by "Original Sacher", or some variant thereof. The trend degenerates into farce when, in the "Viennese Classics" section, they appear to serve portions of their founding father's anatomy.