Super Saturday

So, pubs and restaurants are opening again this Saturday. I've heard quite a few references to the milestone on various media channels this week so far, and can't help feeling that things are getting slightly "hyped"? (BBC R4 was labeling it "Super Saturday" today) It's easy to see how the day might end in tears if this continues and people become irrational like they did over toilet rolls and hand-sanitizer. I can think of a few people who could easily get "over-excited" at the prospect of a session in the pub after an absence of 3 months.

The big question for me is how good will the experience be? Like most Brits I suspect, I can't quite get my head around the concept of booking a table for a pint. It's something that used to annoy the bejesus out of me when I worked in the USA, where table service is quite often the norm. You'd drop into a bar or pub after work gagging for a pint (particularly in the hotter climes) and have to wait 20 minutes to get served and then another 10 for your pint to arrive, when a perfectly serviceable bar sat there right in front of you, empty. 

It's going to be interesting to see how the hospitality industry will handle the changes, most pub-going people I know (especially older blokes) will, I suspect, get somewhat frustrated with measures like table service, especially as the evening progresses! Seems like a perfect scenario for a specialized phone app to me but I guess that's beyond the capability of most small outlets to pull together and not obvious enough for the demographic I have in mind. I think restaurants will be somewhat easier for people to deal with (booking is relatively easy and habitual for most), but, I can't help thinking that the spacing of the tables and inevitable reduction in revenues might cause difficulties for many, time-limits and reduced menus might be the way to go, increase throughput and minimize potential exposure etc.

Will we venture out this weekend? The quick answer is no. I think we'll stick to doing our own thing with friends/Zoom and/or a good movie for a while yet, however, it's a shame not to support local businesses somehow. In the absence of experience we'll probably continue to place the occasional take-away food/cans order and see how things pan out for a few weeks until we get some qualitative feed-back from more devout pilgrims.

Monday mirth

Christian epidemiology ?

Small world

So, here's a photo of the queue at my local brewery (Siren) of people wishing to collect their weekend supply of cans etc. I came across it on Twitter, on the feed of a complete stranger and low and behold yours truly is in the picture (3rd head from the photographer) - such a small world these days..!

Best foot forward

So, what's it like when a leading light in the new wave of craft brewers has a go at making a traditional English bitter? 

Answer: bloody marvelous! 

One of my favourite producers at the moment, DEYA (Cheltenham) has created a traditional malt-forward bitter (Best Foot Forward), at around 4% ABV it's everything you could want from a classic pub Bitter. Low carbonation, malty, caramel, with a background of flowery hops, a delicious way to start the weekend!

Gulp..

Many people don't believe that birds are the descendants of dinosaurs (religious nutters mainly), well, take a look at this seagull swallowing a huge rat, whole. Looks pretty "t-Rex" to me!

Progressive PPE

Gotta get me one of these!

Friday Smirk

The ever marvelous J&M strip investigating the phenomenon of "validation", something that modern minority groups seem to crave above everything else, even logic and reason! Strange times we live in, strange times.

Average Americans

I see that the "stupid" world championships are off to a great start in Florida USA.. 

Just imagine, this person is testifying before her representatives and is therefore supposed to represent the "average American", meaning that 50% of Americans are even more stupid than this! (joke stolen from George Carlin, an above average American)

Tortoises all the way down..

Apparently it's not "turtles all the way down", it's tortoises!

Time travel

Excellent comic strip from xkcd My own hypothesis is that if time travel were possible at all then the fact that we're living through 2020 and no one came back to stop it, proves it isn't.

Customer service

Something I've noticed over the course of the lock-down is how different companies have wildly different attitudes towards customer service. Having to order almost everything for delivery whilst shops were shut has definitely highlighted a few suppliers that are somewhat lacking in terms of systems and processes around ordering. My experiences with some companies make me reluctant to place business their way again, and it's not always the direct person-to-person contact that makes the difference. Thinking about it, here's my list of feel-good factors that make me more or less likely to re-order..

1. WEB site performance and utility

2. Delivery (tracking system)

3. Customer support

4. Delivery (courier used)

5. Efficiency of return/failure process

6. Shopping basket & payment process

Lumina

Excitement (or at least what passes for excitement in lock-down) this weekend as my local brewery Siren launched a brand new core beer. Called "Lumina" it's a hazy session IPA that features a whole slew of different hops, including some Hallertau Blanc from Germany along with the usual American suspects. The beer comes out at a very drinkable 4% ABV and tastes great, really refreshing with a good balance between tropical fruit flavours from the hops and good old-fashioned malty notes from the grains. A beer that I could see many of my real-ale die-hards being tempted to transition to if the setting was right. Anyway, I wish them great success with it, should sell well I reckon, can't wait to see it in the local shops and supermarkets!

A brace of brews

A brace of brews yesterday evening from my brewery du jour which is DEYA (Cheltenham). On the left we have "Invoice me for the microphone" which is a hazy 6.5% IPA made with Citra and Mosaic hops, a lovely soft, juicy and "dank" tasting beer. On the right we have "Into the haze" which is a 6.2% IPA made with a ton of American hops (not sure which ones but I'd bet Citra, Mosaic and perhaps Simcoe) giving it a massively tropical aroma and taste, soft and fluffy again and slightly more malt forward than the previous beer, a couple of bangers!

Like clockwork

Amazing photo taken with a pretty ordinary camera (w/600 mm lens) It shows the crescent of planet Venus in the background and the crescent of the Moon in the foreground, clearly the Sun is to the left of the shot, out of view. Amazing to think how dynamic our Solar System is and how it all just whizzes around like clockwork.

Friday Smirk

J&M pointing out that if religious people actually took their holy books literally (i.e. interpreted them honestly and acted on it) we'd all still be living in the (cultural) middle-ages! Although, I guess in some countries that are still run by religious "heavies", like Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Saudi-Arabia, Brunei etc. it probably still feels like it.

Walk of life..

Took my usual lunchtime walk today but it was chucking it down the whole way round. Consequently, I took a little detour through some local woods, it was magical, no one around and exquisite sounds, sights and smells. I noticed that as the rain ricocheted off the leaves and the humidity rose it felt very much like a rain forest in there, perhaps not warm enough to be the Amazon or African versions but certainly very much like those on the North West Coast of America. Anyway, I took a couple of shots of things on my way through, on the left we have a poppy, can't believe how vivid the colours of these flowers are, looks like CGI! On the right we have a huge fungus, not sure what species it is but it was pretty big, something I'd expect to see in the Autumn but clearly the moisture has accelerated its growth. The whole woodland was alive with life, birds singing away and the floor carpeted with green things of all sizes and shapes, bursting upward, almost like it was a race to reach the source of rain and light, which of course is exactly what it is!

Happiness

Here's an interesting report, it's the "World Happiness Report" and charts various levels of "happiness" around the world with the aim of determining the happiest places, i.e. cities, countries etc. Of course "happiness" is quite a subjective thing so the report looks at social, economic and subjective factors (like generosity) via polls and firmographic data. So, the happiest country turns out to be Finland with Denmark coming a close second, it seems as though the Scandinavian and Northern European countries are doing particularly well, which is surprising given the weather up there most of the time. Anyway, the UK was 13th behind Canada (11) and New Zealand (8) with the USA making 18th. At the other end of the scale we have the usual suspects (i.e. the theocracies and war-torn lands) for example, Egypt (138), South Sudan (152) and Afghanistan (153).

On the city front the results were slanted toward the country results, i.e. Scandinavian cities did very well and typically the larger Northern European cities came out well. At the top spot was Helsinki followed by cities like Copenhagen (5), Oslo (7) and Aarhus (2) outside of Europe the best city was Wellington NZ (3). Our own capital London came in at number 36 behind places like Dublin (22) and Vienna (29) which is somewhat surprising, even Dallas was higher at 19! Having been to Texas many times, this result is slightly puzzling to me, never seen the attraction myself. Anyway, they say you can't buy happiness but if you believe the results of this report you might get a lot closer to it by booking a tour around Scandinavia after the pandemic is over.

Attention span

Updated C-19 charts showing the build-up and decay (so far) of the case count in four different countries. To me this is an almost perfect map of my mental image of the (grossly over-simplified) national characters I would expect from these countries as it relates to attention-span and stamina.

Cooking in a vacuum

Splashed out on Saturday evening and cooked steaks and as you can see they're vacuum sealed in plastic bags ready to go into a hot water bath at 54 centigrade for three hours. This method of cooking is called "sous-vide" which is French for "under vacuum" but is essentially a way of slow cooking things like meat and fish so that a precise degree of "done'ness" is achieved. 

I've been using this method of cooking for around 10 years now, not for everything of course, but when we treat ourselves to something like expensive steak (see above) then IMO it's the best way to achieve that "restaurant quality" finish. The great thing about it is that you can chuck food in the water bath and forget about it, it will never burn or over-cook and, if like me, you prefer your steak medium-rare then so long as the water is around 54 degrees then that's exactly what you'll get. A quick flash under the grill or in a smoking pan adds that brown crust to the meat but the inside remains moist and "melt-in-the-mouth", clever really.

That "Monday" feeling...

Well, it's Monday morning again, noses back to the grind-stone, although saw this and it made me smile, perhaps 1620 felt the same the same to them as 2020 does to us..

Fighting back

Quite a few of these appearing now.. seems like the statues are fighting back!

Summer downpour

Treated myself to a beer while cooking dinner last night and it was a real banger! One of my favourite breweries DEYA over in Cheltenham and their "Summer Ale" 4.5% ABV. Now, I've had this beer before back in April 2019 (that feels a long way away now!) at a local event over at the Siren brewery in Finchampstead, Berkshire it was the stand out beer of the day for me and even made it into my top 20 beers of 2019. I was delighted to see it popping up on the DEYA web site last week (it's only brewed once a year and sells out instantly) so I grabbed a few cans. It was just as I remember, hazy, tropical, fruity and very satisfying on a Friday night after work. Unfortunately the name of the beer jinxed things a bit and it hammered down with rain the whole evening, ah well, it's the thought that counts..

Analysis

The latest analysis from the university of life is in..

Friday Smirk

Love the way that loads of Muslims on social media are jumping on the current BLM virtue signalling bandwagon and faux outrage about recent events in the USA and protests around the world. The only problem is that most of them have done a simple "search & replace" on words like slavery and slave-trading and changed them to "imperialist" and "empire" etc.. I guess it would be "haram" to point out that most Islamic regimes have always been world class in the art of exploiting slavery (still are) and building empires! I wonder what the Arabic for "people in glass houses etc.." is?

Confidence in catastrophe

Judging by the latest polling numbers the level of UK public confidence that our Government is handling the Covid-19 crisis competently is currently lower than any other European country. Back in March as we entered the current lock-down approval ratings were running at around 70%, now, after one of the highest death tolls in the world, the Cummings scandal and cover-ups over testing numbers, ratings are bumbling along at a miserly 40% (i.e. 6 out of 10 people think the Government is incompetent!). What amazes me is that 40% of people actually have a positive view of this Government's handling of the crisis, if you'd have asked me before I saw the chart, I would have predicted a much lower figure!

I seriously can't imagine what's likely to happen if we have a second spike of cases at the same time as a no deal Brexit, as a business owner, my mind is seriously boggled at the prospect. From a business perspective, things are hard enough right now as they are, but another 4-6 months of lock-down allied with the sudden imposition of harmful tariffs on the majority of our exports would likely turn crisis into catastrophe, and to cap it all no general election for another 3-4 years! 

Perhaps it's time to dust off my Irish ancestry!

R is down

Looks like R is coming down on the South coast..

Everything you wanted to know about sex, but were afraid to ask...

Well there's an almighty who-ha going on at the moment on social media, the twitter SJW mob in particular is hurling abuse at J. K. Rowing for tweeting the following,

What has ensued is a classic battle between the forces of reason and the forces of cultural politics. 

On the side of reason we have Biology and the scientific definition of "sex", here the picture is clear. We have people that produce small gametes (male) and people that produce large gametes (female) and this is binary. Now, there are a very small number of people (about 0.02 percent) who are intersex, meaning they have reproductive anatomy that is ambiguous, however this still does not mean sex is a "spectrum" (or even worse, arbitrary). The best analogy for this is a coin toss, it's either heads or tails and one excludes the other, however the coin could (in a vanishingly small number of throws) land on it's side, this is analogous to intersex but still does not mean that there's a spectrum between heads and tails, we never see a throw that results in a small degree of heads and a small degree of tails. 

On the other side of the argument we have the cultural relativists, the people who argue that everyone has the right to determine their own sex (by virtue of what they say they prefer to be) or none. There seems to be much confusion (between sex and gender) among this community and little consensus, other than, a strong emotional response to the thought that trans people (intersex or otherwise) might be discriminated against or questioned in any way. The position does seem to vary wildly though, with a spectrum of opinions varying from complete nonacceptance of any debate on the topic whatsoever and even violence through to arguments based purely on agreeableness and a desire to be inclusive; lack of rigorous definitions is possibly part of the problem.

Many people would argue that the definitions don't really matter and that what's important are the feelings of the people involved and the social handicaps of being trans-gender or intersex. Whilst this is certainly true to some extent and seems compelling, it's worth reflecting that the definition of male and female matters greatly in certain areas of our lives. Most sports for example where male's have physiological advantages that would make a mockery of fairness within female categories should biological males be allowed to compete in them. Also in areas of social care (rape crisis centres) and public female spaces, changing rooms for example or toilets where individual isolation is not possible. Also, there may be disastrous consequences looming for many people who feel it appropriate to surgically intervene in the lives of small children who display intersex characteristics, even to the extent that effeminate boys or butch girls are having "corrective" surgeries when fact they may simply be gay or lesbian. The whole area is complex and a potential future minefield, my view is that reasonable debate (a rare thing on Twitter) is probably the last thing that should be thrown under the bus by anyone at this critical point.

So, it seems to me that J. K. Rowling is factually correct, sex (as defined Biologically) does exist, cannot be changed and is vital to the identities of the vast majority of people. Of course facts tend not to matter to those engaged in ideological crusades or that are willfully (or otherwise) ignorant. However I believe that this represents the minority viewpoint and that more caution and debate is required. History shows us that whenever reality is distorted in an attempt to achieve perceived equality and justice; inequality and injustice are never eliminated, just relocated for a little while and usually at great Human expense.

Word salad

Apparently the first 4 words you see when you look at this block of letters says something about your character. Probably more accurate to say that it says something about which words are planted in it and whether you look top-down or bottom-up but hey ho, we seem to be entering the age of fantasy and delusion where feelings are more important than truth so fill your boots!

My words were "creation", "love", "gratitude" and "connection", which all mean I need a beer..

Living statues

I bet all those people who earn a few quid by posing as living statues for tourists are bricking it right now..

Nutella vibe

My local craft brewer Siren launched a new beer this week, it's a twist on one of their standard beers called "Broken Dream" which is a "breakfast stout", i.e. a dark beer that has a rich toasty coffee flavour to it (as opposed to eggs and bacon). That beer won best beer of Britain a couple of years ago and is well regarded by people in the industry and fans alike. This time they started with the standard beer and added hazelnuts and cacao nibs, giving a distinct Nutella vibe, it's a nice beer although I must admit, I prefer the original.

Government groupies

A tee shirt for groupies of this Conservative Government ..

Social distance

ha ha! I can think of a few people I'd like to socially distance from on an ongoing basis.. 

Indian flowers

Went for a nice long walk yesterday (in between rain storms), happened to notice these lovely flowers growing by the side of the road, no idea what they are but they looked stunning in the sunshine really vivid, just had to grab a picture.

When I got home we all decided to treat ourselves and have a takeaway curry, it's a tradition in our house to have a slap up takeaway of some sort once a month, I know they are pretty much the worst thing you can possibly eat (health-wise) but it feels good to throw caution to the wind every now and again. To go with said ruby I cracked open a beer from one of my all time favourite breweries, Burning Sky who are based in the heart of the South Downs in East Sussex. Called "out of vogue" it was a real "banger" as they say, a strong IPA (5.9%) in a West Coast style so slightly sweet, pleasantly bitter and with flavours of pine, citrus and flowers, a delicious beer especially with Indian food! Here's a picture of it, great artwork on the can too.

Important lessons

I think we learnt two important lessons this week from both the left and the right side of the cultural house.

1. Looting and burning other people's property is NOT the same as protesting.

2. Murder is NOT the same as policing.

So where does this leave everyone?

Hopefully the answer is obvious, but somehow I doubt it..

Friday Smirk

Excellent J&M pointing out the obvious fact that praying for things makes absolutely no difference to reality, however it makes the person praying feel better about any situation without the need for any effort whatsoever, so that's nice.

SpaceX lads..

Saw this and laughed out loud, now that would be an uber-prank..

Credulous

How would greedy, work-shy, pussy-grabbing, racist, amoral hucksters go about garnering favour with large numbers of credulous, doe-eyed voters who are looking for something they can't even agree upon or define in any rational way? 

Now let me think about that one for a second, oh yeah..

Tell us what you really think...

Nice work on the Guardian Twitter feed, no, really, tell us what you think :)

IQ

Excellent photo, typifies what's going on in America right now, IQ (on the side of the state) doesn't seem to be the prevailing mover and shaker in current conflicts between protesters and police. I did see one little ray of amusement in a video of a black man being harassed and detained by two officers in Florida, despite his obvious lack of doing anything wrong (other than protesting his innocence) It did look like it was going to turn out like many of the other police videos swamping the internet at the moment but unfortunately for the two cops he turned out to be an off-duty FBI agent. A fact that they only realise once they'd man-handled him into hand-cuffs, and looked at his ID card. A couple of more crest-fallen and scared idiots you have seldom seen, suffice to say the Agent demanded to speak with a superior officer and thoroughly dressed them all down in a very satisfying manner.

"Light em up"

Have we reached peak American craziness yet? The authorities seem to be attempting to enforce a "curfew" during a "lock-down" and if that isn't asinine enough, this video apparently shows militarized policemen yelling "light em up" and firing some kind of pellets at people standing in the doorways of their own homes. I can only watch with ever widening eyes as this "racial thing" they have going on over there seems to spiral ever downward toward the classic immovable object meeting an irresistible force in the shape of semi-automatic weapons in the hands of everyone, and the inevitable deadly violence that predictably follows.