Wild Food is a book by Roger Phillips and is on Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s recommended reading list from his Rover Cottage Q&A.
The sub-heading on the cover is:
A complete guide for foragers
However, it isn’t. In the introduction it talks about how it is not a field guide to identification, and really doesn’t help you actually forage any food. It does however give you a great range of recipes and cooking options once you have gathered the ingredients.
It splits the contents into mushrooms, flowers, seaweed, vegetables and herbs, fruits and berries, and finally teas, beers and wines. It then goes through each of the ingredients and tells you what to do with them.
The book itself is really nice: a matt hardback cover with plenty of colour photos inside. I haven’t really used it though because every time I buy such a book, it seems to insist it is not a field guide, and you need to get another book for that.
It does pick up massive points though, because in my review of The New Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency I said I was always going to be disappointed in the future whenever a book did not have a section on brewing and wine making – this one did not disappoint!
My gran’s side is quite a large family and we used to get together on a regular basis. Unfortunately, as people have got older, it is become a little too much to organise a large party, so they have gradually faded away.
That is until my parents stepped up and said they would organise a summer BBQ.
We were reasonably lucky with the weather. There was a tiny bit of rain, but not enough to drive us inside, and the night was chilly but not survivable once we had the fire put going.
You may find that all the images you commit to a git repo are corrupting. This is especially true if you are using Windows and then pushing to a Linux origin.
One possible fix is to ensure the images are being treated as binary files. Of course everything is a binary file when it comes down to it, but this differentiates it from text. To do this, add the following lines to a .gitattributes file in the root of the repo.
*.jpg binary
*.png binary
*.gif binary
If you have images in there already, you will probably need to remove them and then re-commit them.
At the end of July we attended the Finnish picnic at Temple Newsam. It’s an annual event and we had great weather last year. This year, we were less fortunate.
It rained the whole day. However, we did not let that stop us and headed into the cafe to get some food there. Despite the lack of sun, there were still about a dozen of us.
July saw Leeds Samurai travel over to Manchester for a conference flag day. Ironically, despite it raining on every game day we have had so far, it was only when we went to Manchester, the place where it never stops raining, to have a dry day.
We lost our games to the Honey Badgers and Manchester Crows, but came up good against the Manchester Titans, taking our second league victory of the year with a last minute interception that secured a one point victory for us.
“Screw It, Let’s Do It” is one of Richard Branson’s autobiographies. Slash advice books. He says it is about lessons in life. Which is really what most of his books are about. Anecdotes about how to be a winner. Many of which genuinely are useful.
He is a man who makes snap decisions. In general, that is a bad idea. Or at least no better than a well thought out idea. However, it does fit with the Virgin brand of doing random things because they sound fun.
It also does a lot of crazy things. Balloon flights, weather hurricanes and Atlantic yacht crossings for example. He has had to be rescued on a regular basis. This is fine except that the flip side of that luck is that somewhere in the third world a child is being a particularly horrible terminal disease so that the universe can balance it all out.
He has built himself up from nothing, and that is very impressive. Though he did have a privileged upbringing having a wealth family and going to public school. He also has dyslexia and has not let that get in the way.
I really liked his quote on climate change. Something like “we’re a group of people who agree the building is on fire, but none of us will reach for the extinguisher”. He also advocates innovating our way out of the situation while still having fun. All good stuff.
In the end, I was inspired to go out there and do something. That will almost certainly wear off before I actually get round to doing anything, but it was a good feeling for a brief few hours.
Leeds Skeptics recently invited David Frank to present a talk entitled “sex, love & marketing”. It looked at how people market themselves on online dating and what interesting information we can gather from large scale data releases by major online dating networks.
Here are some of the highlights:
Online dating is rapidly becoming a mature industry with wide social acceptance – most people think it is a good way to meet people and 11% of Americans have used it
It is predominantly used by middle-class urban dwellers with some university education
“Do you like horror movies?” turns out to be a really good predictor of compatibility
And some tips for using online dating:
Get your friends to pick your photos as you will instinctivly try and pick mirror images of yourself rather than the best photos
Get your friends to peer-review your profile, just like you would a CV
Use an interesting username that is neither boring nor contains words with negative connotations
Use pictures taken on DSLRs – whether it is the skill of the user, the higher quality camera or extra care taken, the produce much more liked photos than camera phones
If you must use a camera phone, turn the flash off
People love some depth of field on profile pictures too
Selfies are good for women, but bad for men
Smile with teeth is best, followed by no smile, smile without teeth. A smirk is the worst thing you can do.
T-shirts or casual shirts are the way to go for men – tank tops and topless are the worst ways to go
Showing cleavage works for women, and this becomes even more successful as they age
Do not talk about god in your profile
Basically everyone hates misspellings, grammar, and short replies
Overall a really interesting talk. There was also a section on sex and fetishes. The entire thing was well supported by stats and evidence. You can find the full slides on David’s website.
Imagine walking up on the surface of Mars, to find that the rest of your crew had left you for dead and set off back to Earth. You have few supplies and no way to contact anyone.
I know what I would do. Crawl up in a ball and die. That is possibly why ESA are unlikely to select me for a manned mission to Mars. This question is the one put to protagonist Mark Watney. When we walks up on the surface of Mars, to find that the rest of the crew have gone…
Oh, and there are some spoilers in this article.
It is told from two perspectives. First of which is the log entries of Mark, which sometimes moves into a 3rd person description. The second is a third person narrative of what is going on back on Earth.
This is a little odd to go between the different forms, and also gives the lot away to some point. If Dr Hassall had not already ruined the ending for me, I suspect the fact that there was a separate thread based on Earth would have lead me to guess the eventual outcome.
In some ways, certainly in the first half the book, it would have been better to solely tell the story from Watney’s log entries. If you had to have a strand based on Earth you could have put the entire thing as a part 2 at the end of the book. Joe Berlinger wanted to do something similar when filming Book of Shadows.
However, as time went on I settled down into the format.
I enjoyed it throughout. The humour was quite dark and very geeky in places. There was a lot of science, though nothing that a lay person such as myself would struggle to comprehend (I think). Plus, as Mark points out, in some ways it is a story about a space pirate. An actual space pirate. That’s pretty cool.
Oh Atticus Finch. Not a big man, or a tough man, but a moral man. An ideal character to aspire to if like me, you are similarly old and tired. I like to think I would have done the same thing as Atticus, but who really knows.
It’s a pretty good book. However, I had already seen the film, and I am not sure I learned anything more by reading the book.
