Try the decaf

According to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, one of the reasons for the revolt in Libya is that members of Al-Qaeda have been spiking Nescafe with hallucinogenic drugs. Nescafe, really? Did something get muddled in the translation?

It is said that no publicity is bad publicity. But in my mind that jar of granules will never be quite the same again.

A Mars a day…

Isn’t it heartening to see that some shops are doing their bit to address the nation’s poor record in obesity and tooth decay?

COOL BEER. Or not.

I have a reconditioned beer cooler in my garage. I bought it on eBay a year ago and it didn’t cost a bomb and it isn’t that big, about the size of a microwave. I don’t drink much beer but that’s not what it’s for, I bought it to help warm my greenhouse. It would be nice if I could say the idea is my own, but I saw it on BBC Scotland’s ‘Beechgrove Garden’ programme. The cooler will act as a heat pump and will, hopefully, raise the temperature in the greenhouse a few degrees, just enough to prevent frosts zapping the seedlings (we get frosts as late as early June). The heat isn’t free. Like a fridge, it needs electricity. You get Owt for Nowt, as my Granddad would say (no points for guessing which county he came from).

Heat pumps have been described as fridges that work in reverse, but that’s an odd explanation. They are better described as fridges that take heat from the ground instead of from your food – and just like a fridge they put that heat into your house. As you can see in the photo, I’ve got as far as fitting two brass connectors to it. All I have to do now is to lay about twenty metres of pipe in a shallow trench in my garden and then cut through the concrete floor of the greenhouse – which probably explains why the cooler is still in my garage.

Watch this space….

Grand Designs?*

I have been wearing glasses since I was 35 and I’m still not used to them (not the same pair, obviously). I have just bought a new pair. My last ones cost a bomb (don’t they all?). They were ‘designer frames’, though I’m not sure what kind of designer because the lenses kept falling out, a problem that no amount of screwdrivers or superglue would solve. Perhaps the designer was trained to design ejector seats, or those emergency doors on aircraft that fall off on their own. Anyway, isn’t everything designed by a designer of some kind? If it wasn’t, then everything we touched would fall to bits. Okay… irony there, somewhere.

It is possible that the makers expected their glasses to be worn only in TV adverts or optician’s showrooms rather than in the real world. My current glasses are coping well. I have been shifting firewood, hammering blocks of steel, reassembling an aged motorbike and painting the hall (not all at the same time). So far, the lenses have stayed in place.

*A UK Channel4 TV programme with a presenter who knows what he is talking about and isn’t afraid to say what he thinks.

Orange Cheddar

Why is Cheddar Cheese in Scotland ORANGE? I used to live 15 miles from the town of Cheddar in Somerset and believe me, Cheddar Cheese is cheese-coloured, it is creamy yellow. The real stuff does not have orange colouring added to it. So who makes it, and why?

Cheddar Cheese is definitely not ORANGE. Point made?

(I know, I really must get out more…)

Telling porkies

If you have been told that all pigs are pink (as in storybooks and model farms), then think again. These ginger porkers are at Whitmuir Organics at Lamancha, not far south of Edinburgh (here). If you want your kids to see real pigs – organically raised pigs – (or if you want to see them yourself) then visit Whitmuir.

Just be sure to wear wellies…

Also at Whitmuir… I’ve heard of free range hens, but this is ridiculous:

But the eggs they lay make AMAZING soufflés (if you are into that kind of thing)… and if I can make soufflés, then anyone can.

Goldfingers

I popped in to a jewellers at Ocean Terminal in Edinburgh to have my wedding ring enlarged. The ring is a wide gold band that hasn’t fitted properly for about ten years and the reason, I told the young man, is that they shrink over time. Okay, he didn’t believe me either and I had to admit that my finger might have thickened a little over the years, like the rest of me. Yesterday evening I went to collect the ring and realised that having it enlarged actually cost more than the ring did in 1970 (though no great surprise there). The price of a similar gold ring now is more than ten times what it was then (again, no surprise).

When I took my wedding ring into Ocean Terminal the escalators weren’t working, though they could still be walked on, like stairs. Because the escalators were stationary you might think that people wouldn’t worry about which ones to use. Not so. Rather than walk down what, when working, would have been an ‘up’ escalator, some preferred to walk right around to the other side so they could walk down another stationary one. There’s nowt as queer as folk.

do-it-yourself weather

If you are in the UK, and if you use THIS, in conjunction with THIS, you can have a stab at your own weather predictions. Click the arrow above each picture to get an animation of past/current rainfall and cloud cover.

Upon reflection…

I’ve been having problems with reflections in the screen of my laptop and I have, for a while, been trying to get a sheet of non-reflecting film to stick over it. I finally managed to find some on eBay. It was cheap, a thin plastic sheet sandwiched between two even thinner sheets of polythene. It came with fairly detailed instructions:

Reducing external light, regulating to the extent easy to be seen.
Peel off the mold release sheets on the protection films and attach the silicone films on the mold release sheets onto the screen. Please cut off power supply before you peel off mold release sheets, place the protection films on the screen and attach them with gentle press by using specific tools. It is recommended you use the horizontal attachment. After attachment to the screen, peel off the mold release sheets… please use the parts of the acute angle of the tools for surface ends… (more, lots more).

(There will be no prior notice of any changes in the specification of this product while it is necessary to be improved, so we beg your pardon in this connection).

I struggled for about 10 minutes before realising that if I completely ignored the instructions, fixing it was simple.

The product is excellent! My glare problem is cured!

Fuel Crisis

I’ve just discovered that at the weekend my old BMW motorbike dribbled rather a lot of petrol over one of my shoes. The shoes appear to be undamaged but the stuff stinks. I pointed this out to the Four Year Old and said it was a nuisance. He didn’t agree with me. ‘Not a nuisance, Papa, a problem’. I wasn’t going to argue with the FYO over semantics and I admitted that it was both a nuisance and a problem. He told me in all seriousness that I needed a petrol getter-outer. I asked him what that was and he explained in some detail that it had two long handles and when you pull them together it gets out all the petrol. I wondered if there was a commercial use for such a device but decided that only stupid people allow their shoes to become soaked in petrol and they probably wouldn’t think to buy one.