So the Bank of Ireland's €1.6m-a-year group chief executive, Mike Soden, has suddenly resigned after admitting he accessed the website of a US-based escort agency on his office PC on the seventh floor of the bank's Baggot St HQ.
"I have taken this decision for personal reasons," he said in a statement. "This arises from access by me on my PC to internet sites that contain content that infringed the group's policy on these matters. The content accessed was not illegal but did contain links to material of an adult nature."
So looking at one slightly dodgy website is a resignation issue, but ripping off customers to the tune of millions (as in all those recent AIB scandals) isn't.
And guess what BoI uses to monitor its employees' Internet usage and detect such material of an adult nature? Websense.
But was his naughty use of the Internet the real reason he was going?
Shane Ross in the Sunday Indo notes that "It is unlikely that he would have survived another year of falling share prices or business failure."
He goes on: "He ran the Bank of Ireland like a fortress. He seemed frightened of contact with the outside world, sticking to the traditions that mark the bank's board and customs. I should know. I have never been able to reach Mike Soden. He refused to respond to a single call over the years. He declined interviews with the Sunday Independent, conversations, even challenges to debate. He was a public relations disaster, terrified to come out to play."
So, what's his pension going to be like then? And what's the betting that BoI shares jump up tomorrow morning?
"Nanopublishing" is "an online publishing model that uses a scaled-down, inexpensive operation to reach a targeted audience, especially by using blogging techniques."
One of the earliest online mentions was by the excellent techno journalist Jim McClellan, in an article called "New biz on the blog" in The Guardian (January 30, 2003):
"One name for this slimmed-down approach to online publishing is 'thin media'. [Nick] Denton's label of choice is 'nanopublishing', a term coined by Jeff Jarvis, head of content, technology, and strategic development for Advance. This is part of the Newhouse media group that owns Conde Nast, among other things. In the past, Jarvis started Entertainment Weekly. Now, he's a committed blogger and his company has put its money where his mouth is, that is, in Pyra, the company behind Blogger.
Jim wrote about the Net for the Observer newspaper some 10 years ago, and his weekly column was a real must-read. Oh, and check out Joe Magee's great images for his pioneering articles.
What's REALLY seasonal at the moment? So fresh and seasonal yet you won't see it in Gordon Ramsay's fancypants kitchen tonight?
Elderflowers. That heady, musky, muscat scent. That creamy-white froth of brilliant, delicate, tiny flowers along our country hedgerows and back roads.
The elders seem to be flowering earlier than ever this year - yet one more sign of George Bush's criminal intransigence over Kyoto. They're known as "the Englishman's grape" - the nutritional values are apparently very similar - they're only ancient, and they're great for the cholera or the dropsy or summat:
"The first shoots of the Common Elder boiled like asparagus, and the young leaves and stalks boiled in fat broth, do mightily carry forth phlegm and choler. The middle or inward bark boiled in water, and given in drink works much more violently; and the berries, either green or dry, expel the same humour, and are often given with good success to help the dropsy; the bark of the root boiled in wine, or the juice thereof drank, works the same effects, but much more powerfully than either the leaves or fruit. The juice of the root taken, mightily procures vomiting, and purges the watery humours of the dropsy..."
- Nicholas Culpeper, 17th century herbalist
So there you have it. But gather the flowers well away from polluted roads and building sites - the flowers absorb pollutants and diesel shite. Eat them straight off the branches if you like, but NEVER use the leaves, bark or roots - consider them toxic.
Elderflower fritters
Pick complete flower heads, wash and drain them. Hold the flower head upside down, dip in a thin pancake batter. Gently drop into hot oil. Cook until light brown. Remove, drain on a paper towel. Sprinkle with caster sugar and (optional) cinnamon.
With gooseberries
Elderflowers have a long association and affinity with gooseberries - even though my gooseberries ripen a full two months or more after the elderflowers. But that's the point: you're looking for the hard, green gooseberry fruit, far too under-ripe to eat raw, yet wonderfully tarty in a fool/compote/tart.
Top and tail gooseberries. Place in a pan with elderflower heads (or some elderflower cordial), a tablespoon of honey, lemon zest and a splash of water. Simmer gently for 10-15 minutes, until the gooseberries begin to mush up. Sieve into a bowl. That's your compote.
For a fool, whip double cream to soft peaks. Fold it into the compote. Pour into large wine glasses, chill for two hours. We all need to chill. Serve with a wee sprig of elderflower in each glass. Sorted.
Elderflower lemonade
Boil four litres of water in a large pot. Let it cool. Fill a large (five-litre) glass jar with elderflowers, press them down slightly. Add a sliced-up lemon (no pips), a teaspoon of citric acid and the water. It should just cover the flowers. Cover the jar with a clean cloth and leave on the windowsill. The next day, bring out a spaghetti colander, a clean hankie and another pot. Use the first two objects as a filter and pour the liquid through to the pot below. Squeeze the liquid out of the wet mound of flowers and lemon slices. Add 500g of sugar. Pour the liquid into dark sterilised bottles in a cool place. Wait. Drink.
As for the elder's berries, you know they're ripe when the clusters begin to turn upside down. Snip off whole branches (avoid picking over-ripe berries). Wash well and strip them from the stalks with a fork's prongs.
Add the berries to apple pie (two parts elderberry to three parts apple), blackberry jam (50:50) or ice cream.
Elderberry ice cream
Recipe #1: Put elderberries in a saucepan with a little water, a sprinkling of sugar (go easy - you can always add more later) and the juice of half a lemon. Put the lid on, and gently simmer for about 45 minutes, or until the berries have gone very soft. Leave to cool, push the berries through a sieve, discard the pips that remain. This gives about a pint of rich elderberry syrup. Taste, add more sugar if required.
Whip half a pint of double cream until it stands in peaks, and in a separate bowl whisk two egg whites until they're stiff enough to tip the bowl upside down.
Fold the cream, egg whites and elderberry syrup together gently. Pour into a suitable freezer container, stick it in your freezer. Wait. Take out. Eat.
Recipe #2: a rather excellent one by St Delia of Norwich for Gooseberry and Elderflower Ice Cream.
700g young green gooseberries
8 tablespoons elderflower cordial
3oz (75 g) sugar
For the custard:
10 fl oz (275 ml) whipping cream
3 large egg yolks
2 oz (50 g) sugar
1 rounded teaspoon cornflour
1 dessertspoon liquid glucose
Put the cream in a saucepan, bring it up to just below simmering point. Meanwhile place the egg yolks, 2oz (50g) sugar and cornflour in a bowl and whisk together till smooth. Add the liquid glucose to the hot cream, whisk until the glucose melts and blends in. Pour the whole lot over the egg mixture, return everything to the saucepan and continue whisking over a medium heat until the mixture thickens to a custard. Allow to cool.
Meanwhile top and tail the gooseberries and place them in a saucepan with 3oz (75g) sugar. Put a lid on, cook gently for 5-6 minutes till soft. Sieve to extract all the pips.
Stir the elderflower cordial into the gooseberry purée. As soon as the custard is cool enough, combine the two together. Put in freezer or ice cream maker in the usual way.
The aul blog has been getting a lot of hits lately from people looking for the Lucan Gazette - I happened to mention an old newspaper by that title (from Ontario rather than County Dublin). Among old newspaper titles from Dublin, what about the following...
ANTIDOTE: OR, PROTESTANT GUARDIAN (1822)
ANTI-UNION EVENING POST (1799)
APOLOGIST: OR THE ALDERMAN'S JOURNAL (1749)
CASTLE COURANT (1726)
CENSOR EXTRAORDINARY (1749)
CITIZEN'S ARTISAN (1877)
COMET (1831)
DAILY COURANT (1716)
DALTON'S DUBLIN IMPARTIAL NEWSLETTER (1734)
DETECTOR (1800)
DIVERTING POST (1709)
DUBLIN CASTLE (1702)
DUBLIN COURANT OR DIVERTING POST (1705)
DUBLIN GENERAL POSTMAN (1714)
DUBLIN IMPARTIAL NEWS LETTER (1714)
DUBLIN INTELLIGENCER (1756)
DUBLIN LANTERN (1895)
DUBLIN MERCURY (1705)
DUBLIN POST BOY (1727)
DUBLIN SPY (1710)
DUBLIN WEEKLY INTELLIGENCE, CONTAINING A FULL AND IMPARTIAL ACCOUNT OF THE FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC NEWS (1710)
EBENEZER RIDER THE DUBLIN DAILY POST AND GENERAL ADVERTISER (1738)
EVENING IRISH TIMES (1858)
EVENING TABLET Dublin (1850)
FINGAL FINGERPOST (Donabate, 1943)
INSUPPRESSIBLE (1868)
IRISH FELON (1848)
IRISH LANCE (1880)
IRISH TURF TELEGRAPH AND DRAMATIC GAZETTE (1875)
MAGEE'S WEEKLY PACKET; OR HOPE'S LOTTERY JOURNAL OF NEWS, POLITICS AND LITERATURE (1777 )
PHILANTHROPIST AND NATIONAL TEMPERANCE ADVERTISER (1838)
POSTMAN AND THE HISTORICAL ACCOUNT. REPR. AT THE BACK OF DICK'S COFFEE HOUSE (1703)
PUE'S OCCURRENCES (1703)
STAR AND FASHIONABLE WORLD (1824)
THOMAS HUME'S THE DUBLIN INTELLIGENCE (1716)
TICKLER (1748)
VINDICATOR: AND MIDLAND & NORTHERN GAZETTE (1878)
WALSH'S DUBLIN WEEKLY IMPARTIAL NEWSLETTER (1728)
WHALLEY'S FLYING POST (1704)
And, no, I'm not making these up. Check the National Library's online database of titles if ya don't believe me.
He made a mistake. He suspended his judgment. Even at first glance the pictures were clearly a hoax.
At least the Mirror kept to its line about the WMDs.
And at least it forced the British government to admit that torture was in fact going on. So even if the pictures were not genuine, their publication had revealed some ery uncomfortable facts.
But was it more than just a set-up by a handful of pranksters, a pair of squaddies acting on their own?
And it's interesting how the Irish edition of the Mirror shoved the story back to page 8, and preferred to run instead with the "DIRTY DEN BAN" story on its front page...
I often get friends asking what to do with a rabbit, when to eat it, where to get it and so on. Here's my rabbit FAQ, and a couple of very different recipes...
Q: Where do they come from?
A: Other rabbits. Oh, sorry, gotcha. Rabbits were introduced to Ireland by the Normans ("What did the Normans ever do for us...?"), and some say rabbits didn't become familiar in the most westerly andnortherly parts of Scotland until the late 19th century...
Q: I mean where do you get them?
A: Butchers (on Dublin's northside try the ones in Moore Street, on the southside try the best butchers in Terenure). They come fresh, frozen, roadkill, air rifle, say no more. Your local butcher might have a few frozen ones, though I prefer them in their fresh state.
Q: When do you eat them?
A: Any time really. They're best around September to November - though there's no season as such - they don't need to be hung.
Q: Which ones are best?
A: While farmed varieties are now popping up on butchers' counters, the wild version tends to be older and tougher. And that's good, not bad: it means they're perfect for stewing, and more gamey too. And you're better off with a doe (female) than a buck (lad).
Q: Why are they so popular/unpopular?
A: The humble bunny hasn't a great reputation in Irish kitchens at the moment. It's probably due to
(a) the terrible myxomatosis virus (now very much a thing of the past)
(b) the scary big tumours that some wild Irish rabbits have just at the moment
(c) the glut of rabbit recipes by grannies during "the Emergency" aka WWII
(d) Bugs Bunny and
(e) your local pet shop. Cuddly wuddly bunny wunnies. "You've seen 'Watership Down' - now eat the cast."
On the other hand, rabbit is free-range, organic, lean, healthy, very tasty and relatively good value for money.
Q: Generally how would you cook them?
A: Grilled, stuffed, or baked (with onions, waxy spuds and rosemary) or in game terrines or pates, or even as a satay with a spicy sauce. Basically, the bottom line is to treat rabbit meat much as you would chicken or turkey. It's usually classed as a white meat - unlike hare, its wild cousin - because the meat is relatively pale and tender. Rabbit also goes well with bacon, cider, apples, pigeon meat or ceps (the wild mushrooms). Think autumnal. Or think "bunny burgers" (make burgers with four parts minced rabbit meat, and one part sausage meat or minced belly of pork (the rabbit is so lean that it needs a little bit of piggy fat in there, to keep it juicy).
Q: Have yez any basic recipes?
A: Here are two very different recipes, which both start with a marinade - where you first joint the rabbit and leave it in a marinade mixture such as:
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 large glug of red wine
1 large glug of red wine vinegar (or a smaller glug of balsamic)
2 chopped shallots or 3 cloves of crushed garlic
a few squashed juniper berries and a sprig of rosemary (both optional)
2 bay leaves or a sprig of thyme
some salt and roughly ground black pepper
Marinade the joints in a covered dish in the fridge for at least four hours (or preferably overnight), turning them a couple of times. Then take them out and pat them dry with some kitchen towel.
Next up, proceed to recipe #1 - from Nigel Slater's "Appetite". Grill the rabbit joints over hot coals, and serve dusted with coarse black pepper and sea salt and a lemon wedge. Or wrap the marinated rabbit in bacon and roast them on a high setting. Easypeasy.
Recipe #2 is a take on Theodora Fitzgibbon's traditional Irish rabbit stew. Pat the marinated joints dry as before, and fry them in two tablespoons of olive oil until browned. Lift them out and put them into a casserole dish. In the same oil, fry a sliced onion, 3-4 sliced carrots and a pinch of fresh/dried marjoram. Stir in a little flour and let the flour cook briefly - for half a minute. Gradually add a pint of chicken stock (or half chicken stock, half cider), cover and cook in a moderate oven (180C, Gas Mark 4) for half an hour, then lower the heat to 150C (Mark 2) for another 90 minutes until tender. Serve with some spuds.
Ischia-style rabbit
In Southern Italy, rabbit is often cooked in a sauce too. Here's Antonio Carluccio's "Coniglio alla Ischitana". Heat some oil in a pan, add 1 kg of rabbit chunks, brown them on all sides, but half way through the browning add four chopped cloves of garlic and half a mug of dry white wine. When the wine has evaporated, add another half a mug or big glug of white wine, and simmer gently for 10 minutes. Add a tin of plum tomatoes (roughly chopped - and strained to remove the seeds if you've time but I could never be arsed), and cook for 20 minutes till the sauce thickens. Add the rabbit's liver if you have it (finely chopped) and half a dozen basil leaves, and season with salt and freshly ground pepper. Cook for another 10 minutes, adding a little water if needed, until the rabbit is tender.
Rabbit with chocolate
Finally Elizabeth David has one recipe that takes two days! It's called "Sauce au vin du Médoc" (rabbit, beef and pork or hare stewed in red wine).
Unlike a straightforward rabbit stew, she suggests adding either hare or pork, and about the same amount of stewing beef. But the gist of it is that:
basically it's a stew to which you add a square of plain chocolate and a teaspoon of sugar - stop sniggering because chocolate is quite common in Italian, Spanish and South American rabbit/hare dishes.
simmer the stew at "just a murmur", for about three hours, then allow it to get quite cold. Then on day two (yes, day two), simmer very gently again for about two hours, and serve with large chunks of lovely fresh bread.
Ms David warns that "it needs an act of faith to try it, but when you read the recipe carefully you see that it is not really so strange and wild as it seems at first glance." And as usual, she's absobloodylutely right.
The Radiological Protection Institute (www.rpii.ie) is gonna be in the newspapers tomorrow morning, with new data about radon levels in homes around Castleisland in Co Kerry. But here's a strange one: most of the homes they contacted wouldn't fork out 40 euro for a radon testing kit (why should they?), but where exactly did the agency get the initial contact names in the first place? Is it true that many of the names were of children rather than of adult heads of households? Did the RPII buy the list of names and addresses from a commercial data supplier, based on something like... mobile phone ownership?
Most people in the print industry in Ireland would still probably be Quark heads (or working on a really clunky system made "just" for newspapers called something like 4b2 or Hermes or - God forbid - Atex). But lately I've been talking to more and more people who are finally beginning to contemplate something that was unthinkable six months or a year ago: a switch to InDesign.
Regular readers of this blog will both know that I'm a big InDesign fan. But let me state it again: QUARK MUST DIE! InDesign rules. In fact it rocks and it rolls, I want it to have my babies, and my grandchildren too, it should stand in the presidential elections, and in brief it is only the dog's bollix because...
(a) It's far cheaper than Quark - and that becomes even more important when you're not just one or two people in a tiny office but a large newspaper group and talking about maybe dozens or even hundreds copies and "bums on seats".
(b) And for that price and them bums, look what it comes bundled with - Photoshop et al (all the other software that your designers/subs are gonna need anyhow). It's also far more seamlessly integrated with Photoshop and Illustrator, unsurprising given that they are both Adobe stuff. I love the way you can place native Illustrator and Photoshop files in an InDesign document and they automatically update as you make changes to the supporting files, or at least you have an "update link" yellow warning flag. Quark is a bit thick in that respect.
(c) And InDesign runs on both OSX and OS9, while Quark was late in bringing out an OSX-compatible version of XPress.
(d) If you're an individual user you might love OSX, but for companies it's a logistical nightmare: if you're upgrading a load of your Macs, OSX also forces you to get a clatter of new software, despite all that "sure no probs it'll still run 0S9 and older applications" line by Apple sales people.
(e) InDesign really doesn't take that much retraining for Quark users: most Quark veterans I've trained have grasped it very quickly - after just an hour or two of mucking about. Then by the afternoon they'd be flying, and within a week they can't imagine life without it. The interface and tools aren't so radically different (hold on, where's the Quark ruler - but look how you can group and stack your tool bars), it's really more a question of relearning a very small number of your most frequently used shortcuts (eg ungrouping objects, placing objects, exporting etc)
(f) For that retraining, InDesign has good onscreen help files. Good, though admittedly not great (eg some of the links in the HTML version point to wrong pages).
(g) Sysadmins and tech support like it. Up till at least version 2.0, InDesign was easy to install too, without Quark's expensive and messy network-aware licensing system shite. Network aware my arse. And maybe it's just me (or maybe just that the last time I was using Quark it was on a bunch of very badly configured Macs running OSX) but I find InDesign far, far more stable than Quark.
(h) Its type engine has more powerful typographic capabilities too. And it's easier and better for producing PDFs.
(i) And what about Adobe InCopy? Might not make sense in a small mag, but if you're running a larger production house, with more of a division of labour, InCopy is just the ticket. It's a nifty tool that works in parallel with InDesign and allows your editorial departments to organise a much more collaborative workflow. Eg you can lock text boxes in a layout and assign them ("sign them out") to copy subs. They can then make subbing changes in this particular lot of body text, or headings headings or captions, while your designers still retain the design characteristics of the page.
(j) InDesign does some design tasks much easier such as shadow effects, and I adore its smart facilities in marking up copy such as its "dropper", where you can apply a text style to other chunks of text.
(k) It has a much bigger maximum page size dimension (if you're worried about these kind of things)
(l) Don't get me on about the scripting, macros, add-ons and plug-ins, or the brilliant way it imports XML. I don't even know if Quark can handle XML feeds.
The bottom line, though, is that Quark (the program) = Quark (the company). Nobody calls it "Xpress", just as nobody using InDesign calls it "Adobe".
And Quark (the company) became smug and complacent. That's reflected in its attitude to its customers, and in how it has fallen behind in product development of Quark (the program).
InDesign is made by a company that has already created industry standard applications for photography (Photoshop), drawing (Illustrator), and a certain kind of portable document (Acrobat).
Adobe comes across as far more customer-oriented and responsive, in terms of everything from training and user groups to its pricing structure. It might not have Quark's market share, but it probably has a much more guaranteed future as a corporate entity.
Yeah, the Quark is dead, long live Adobe's InDesign!
Step 1: take two images at random from an "AmIHotOrNot" type site - but it really ought to be one of those sites that compares two photos head-to-head and lets them slug it out by popular vote.
Step 2: Use one of those "morphing" programs (you know, like they used on that old Michael Jackson "Black or White" video) to create a composite image of the two.
Step 3: Submit the result back to the site. Now go back to step 1. Repeat until you have combined all existing photos to create a synthesis of new photos of a very small set of fictional people who are as attractive as possible.
My month (August) is marigold, according to those helpful people at Pantone. Yet I just can't stop thinking of washing dishes and rubber gloves.
And my day of the month is "Peach Bloom", which looks a bit like a fake tan. What a load of arse. So much for Pantone being "Forty years of the perfect match".
Nowadays, when friends who can't boil an egg say to me: "Mick, you can cook. Where did you learn to cook?", I explain: "Vesta. Everything is down to them."
We were five of us kids, and Our Mam had to go out to work. We weren't exactly poor like Alice Taylor, but everybody's mums had to go out to work in them days, except the really posh snooty bastards. Our Mam had to work in the hospital ("To Keep Yez In The Style Yez Are All Accustomed To"), so she was always dead busy and up to her tonsils. This in turn meant that just about everything she did had to be done in a Jiffy. Never in two Jiffies mind you, cos Jiffies only ever came in ones.
Fortunately for us, though, we happened to be growing up bang in the middle of the Space Age, what with the Americans still plonking their flags on the Moon and still riding around the Universe in spaceships that were made out of Teflon frying pans and everything. This was the age of instant stuff - non-stick saucepans and time-saving gadgets and things that always came in a Jiffy. In fact, everything was becoming instant, from Instamatic Cameras to Vesta Chow Mein.
"Vesta" - God, even the name sounded so foreign and bloody exotic. It sounded a bit like that Vespa motorbike that the bus conductor down the street who was a Weekend Mod used to wheel around on Sundays. Or it was like the Vesta Virgins from that Procol Harum song. Yeah, Vesta was sexy and foreign and doubly trebly exotic, because it was magic food. Everything that the Vesta people came up with would come in these really cool wee packets, exactly like the grub that the Apollo Astronauts would take up with them for their dinner while sitting in a tin can. Vesta was just like that (only without the straws of course). Just add water, heat it up, stir it round for a minute and.... "VOILA!" Instant feast!
Let me explain that Our Mam had been kicked out of French class by the Louis Nuns many centuries before, a few weeks before the Whitaker-Lemass plan was hatched, so French wasn't exactly her specialist subject on Mastermind. In fact "VOILA!" was now just about the only French word Our Mam knew, apart of course from:
(a) vol-au-vents (pronounced "voller vongs")
(b) RSVP ("responsay shivou play") and
(c) Semelemer Tina
We never ever got to find out who or what the feck was "Semelemer Tina", though she always went with "Dingdang Dong" so maybe she was some kind of church bell or something. "Voila" was obvious though - basically it was mumspeak for "really really really really quick".
You can forget your Ryanairs and your Easyjets: Vesta was far quicker. Vesta was about really quick culinary tourism, with everything IN JUST 20 MINUTES! And where was Vesta flying us off to this week (IN JUST 20 MINUTES)?
BUDAPEST!
BOMBAY!
SPAIN!
Or even COMMUNIST CHINA!
In 20 minutes Vesta would be magically transporting us, just as the pictures explained on the front of the packet of Vesta Beef Curry (bland muck), Vesta Hungarian Goulash (vile disgusting muck which we all hated so we only did it once while on a caravanning holiday), Vesta Chow Mein (brilliant chemical muck - who needs a chemistry set for Chrimbo when you've Vesta Chow Mein, eh?) or Vesta Paella (a sheer culinary masterpiece, EAT YOUR HEART OUT JAMIE BLOODY NAKED CHEF!!!).
The Chow Mein box even had a handy map of China in the corner, and wiggly Chinese writing, so you'd be getting a quick lesson in geography and typography too.
Our gourmet adventure (aka "doing the messages") would begin in The Supermarket of a Saturday morning, shortly after devouring all the week's comics - Buntys and Beanos were the other half of our staple diet in them days. Supermarket shopping appeared to be mainly about two key things: (a) discovering Completely New Stuff, and (b) making sure that said items wouldn't weigh down Our Mam's shopping bag. Fortunately most of the Completely New Stuff each week always happened to be dried and instant... so it was as light as, well, um, a few dozen packets of Instant Whip.
You never could second-guess what amazing fantastical new chemical breakthrough had just been achieved by them clever lads in the white coats in the space-age labs of Erin, Knorr, Jif, Cadbury's Smash or Bird's Angel. You never ever knew what particularly interesting New Stuff your mum might stumble across in the aisle and decide in an instant to "give it a go".
These boffins had recently invented something called "emulsifiers". So now your dad could do the spare room with a paint that would never ever drip. And it meant you could have Butterscotch Angel Delight too, which, come to think of it, wouldn't drip either. In fact, just about every known substance under the sun could now be emulsified and/or dried, e.g.
Marvel Milk
Coffee
Coffeemate (tasted like emulsified paint)
Minestrone Soup (ditto)
Parsley
Paxo stuffing
Gravy
Mash Potato (definitely came from outer space)
Surprise Peas
Diced Carrots
Broad Beans
Mixed Vegetables (peas, diced carrots and broad beans)
And something called Whitworth Marrowfat Peas.
Mind you, some of these instant things had to be soaked overnight, with a huge white pill that looked like granny's Steradent tablet, in order to dissolve the marrowfat or something. But who cared? These were still the very kind of dried, semi-instant, space-age luxuries that Neil Armstrong would have died for. We were living in the days of dried bloody everything really.
Marvel Comics even had these ads at the back where you could send away to America for "Magic Seamonkeys". They apparently came in a packet of seeds, and you'd just add water to get your own instant aquarium full of miniature Seamonkeys. Puts Dolly the Sheep in the ha'penny place. Who ever heard of dried feckin sheep anyway? But dried little Seamonkeys were only massive, the bee's bloody knees, way up there with invisible ink and X-ray Specs. And you didn't need to be Clark Kent to know what X-ray Specs were all about: they were for seeing ladies without their clothes on, or for checking inside various boxes that might contain Very Mysterious Things.
The Vesta Chow Mein box contained at least three or four packets of mysterious chemical substances. Packet #1 was the Beef Granules. Add water, apply heat, and these grains would transmogrify into something that wasn't anything remotely like beef or carrots - or granules really. Actually the stuff was grey and tasted just like the cardboard box it came in.
Then there was the noodles. Here's posh: you'd get not one but two types of noodle - this was long before silly "supernoodles" came along, and these were proper genuine Chinese noodles (see map on packet). One lot you'd plop into the pot of boiling water to become a tangled mass of soft squidgey white noodles, while the other lot you'd tip into the deep fat frier and - VOILA! - in approximately three nanoseconds the transparent strips would go all cloudy then burst and curl up into these amazing huge crispy brown things, just like crispy bacon rinds or your granny's toenails.
Finally there was Packet #4, the tiny sachet of soy sauce for all five of us to squabble over. Well worth fighting for too, because we were a fairly large family and you had to fight over every last spud in order not to starve in them days and, besides, didn't the soy sauce look and taste remarkably like the gloopy brown liquid that came with... Green's Ready To Mix (JUST ADD MILK!) Creme Caramelle?!?!?
Best of all, though, was Vesta Paella. Brilliant. Cue flamenco guitars - pass me my red matador cape, matey, we're in Barcelona already. "IT SAYS HERE FRY THE RICE WITHOUT BROWNING", "HOW THE FECK DO YE DO THAT?" "WHAT YE DO IS YOU "SORTY" THE RICE, WHICH MEANS GAS MARK ONE OR SOMETHING" (sorry, I forgot to mention that "sorty" was the other French word that Our Mam knew). And unlike Vesta Chow Mein you'd have only one saucepan when you were doing the dishes after. Doubly brilliant. And unlike most of the other things that Vesta's boffins dreamt up, the end result was actually rather edible. It had real prawns, real tubby rice grains and a really scrummy smell. Somehow the thing on your plate even managed to look ever so slightly like the picture on the box.
Once upon a time, newspapers used to be black ink on dead trees. They came in shades of pseudo-grey on white rectangles, that would fold together into a sort of complete, self-contained entity with very clear boundaries, called "an edition". Today, as newspapers go hypertextual, they could have very different ways of organising themselves and visualising their news.
One of the first things to be eroded when newspapers go online is the notion of a discrete edition, with a finite number of pages/stories. Online news archives are at least as important for their readers as their latest edition. "The news" becomes a constantly revised archive, with fresh editions (and "breaking news") merely the quickly freezing tip at the very top of this iceberg.
Individual news articles also take on more of a life of their own when they go online. They may happen to originate in one particular title or source, but then they join much larger rivers and oceans of stories.
Take Google News, the amazing offshoot of the search engine Google. Its news pages are constructed by machines and algorithms, not human editors. There's no human intervention (at least on a day-to-day basis) whatsoever. Google News trawls more than 4,500 news sources, and automatically groups the related headlines and photos "to present the most relevant news first". The impression is of a doorway into a meta-newspaper, or a huge clippings library. But it's still all very text-based.
Newsmap goes a stage further, aiming "to demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media". It adds a visual "skin" to Google's newsfeed, presenting it as a constantly changing visual landscape. Dynamic "treemaps" divide the stories into colour-coded horizontal bands. Larger font sizes also indicate the "size" of these soups of story-collections.
The pioneer of treemaps, Ben Shneiderman, recalls his research at the University of Maryland in the early 1990s:
"In response to the common problem of a filled hard disk, I became obsessed with the idea of producing a compact visualisation of directory tree structures."
The disk was shared by 14 users, so it was difficult to determine how and where space was used. Shneiderman played around with tree structures, diagrams of node-links, but they became much too large and cumbersome. So he experimented with a tree in a space-constrained layout, with file size reflected in colour-coded shapes. Circles, squares, triangles. But still it wasn't quite right:
"While puzzling about this in the faculty lounge, I had the Aha! experience of splitting the screen into rectangles in alternating horizontal and vertical directions as you traverse down the levels."
Today treemaps visualise not only news stories but everything from stock exchange data to satellite management systems and tennis matches - and even clusters of power in society. Imagine a treemap of Ireland's politicians, company directors, major shareholders, and the same old faces sitting on the boards of our various public bodies and authorities. Any volunteers?
Newsmap is simple and elegant, though as a rolling visual representation of news streams it's not exactly an animated heatmap or 3D landscape that you can fly through with a joystick. Not yet anyway. And it's not exactly about "reading" the news in a traditional sense either. Sure nobody "reads" any more. Nowadays, so they say, everybody scans and browses, we surf, we click and and we peck. Or we shop around for the news...
'Amazoning' the news
So how about "Amazoning The News"? A speculative white paper by that very title (by Ellen Kampinsky, Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis) asks: what if news websites told their stories the way Amazon sells books?
Amazon emphasises online social interaction around stories. What appears on the page would be determined by sets of reader preferences. Stories would have reader reviews, and show that "Readers who read this story also read... these pieces in the Belfast Telegraph and the Donegal Democrat" and so on. A story's ranking would show whether it's popular with conservative Irish males aged 25-34, and you'd be rewarded with "points" for reading it (and more points for emailing it to a friend). The points, of course, would then be redeemable for other products on the site, such as pay-per-view content...
The Amazon metaphor might not be quite right. But it's all a far cry from most online newspapers today. Amazon and Newsmap suggest very compelling new ways of structuring your "stories", drawing upon the visual vocabulary of the Web.
Some more links and treemap apps
Treemap 4.0 demo (Windows). Since February this year, version 4.1.1 has also been available.
Treeviz for Apple Macintosh - a free treemap download from 1991! The reason it's so old is that it's part of Brian Johnson's PhD work on the visual representation of hierarchical information spaces at the University of Maryland.
TruePeers compares personalities with a cluster-style PeopleMap, and includes a Year 2000 election comparison among the 42 US Presidents. Or as they put it, "What do all US Presidents have in common? They are world-class networkers!"
Bonjour! Christophe Bouthier, a postgrad in Nancy, maintains a rather good free Java library
The Hive Group in San Mateo, California, has a toolkit called Honeycomb for putting up new Web-based treemap interfaces. Check out the demos. "View and Interact with Data in a Whole New Way!"
Panopticon is a Swedish-based company selling financial treemap software (they use the term "heatmaps") including Web versions and an Excel plug-inny kinda thing.
The Daily Mirror has published some controversial pictures purporting to be about British troops torturing and humiliating prisoners in Iraq. The Mirror continues to stand out on a limb - and fair play to it for sticking by its, er, guns and not following the populist or jingo line on the war, and no doubt there has been torture by the US and British forces in the country. But something about the photos is definitely not quite right.
As I posted on P45 today, the Mirror shots are much more "journalistic" looking than the US shots. There will be debates about the content about the pics - whether the particular soldiers wear those particular floppy hats, and whether the prisoner was wearing "western" underwear - by Benetton perhaps. That's about the content of the pictures. But what about the form of the pictures?
In my job I have to deal with hundreds of photographs a week. You can generally tell which ones have been done by professional photographers, and which ones have been submitted by ordinary members of the public. You get a feel for what's a professional photo and what's an amateur snap.
The shocking pictures of US troops standing over naked Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison appeared to be genuine, and had the hallmarks of "amateur snaps" - not just because of the shocking content, the soldiers smiling at the camera etc - but because of the form: they had all the typical traits of snaps in terms of their lighting, focus, composition, you name it.
The Mirror pics, on the other hand, appear to be the very opposite. For anyone in a newsroom who deals with pics, they clearly and immediately look "theatrical", more professionally framed, more dramatically lit than the US shots. Something doesn't quite fit.
And why are they in black and white? On a colour front page? In a newsroom, if you have a colour page and colour photos, you'd just about always go colour with your pics. There'd have to be a very compelling reason not to.
So were the pics only taken in black and white? Who takes only black-and-white pics? If you're a soldier taking snaps, why would you take B&W pics in your digital camera, or have B&W film in your film camera?
They're simply too good. They must be fakes. And relatively elaborate ones too, given the amount of people the pictures involve, and type of equipment and uniforms etc. So who would fake them? Somebody out to make a quick buck out of a tabloid newspaper? Or somebody out to get the Mirror?
Surely this newspaper must have enough enemies within the establishment by now for it to be the suitable target of a very dirty tricks campaign. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but stranger things have happened.
There we were, meself and Dave from Blather, having a quiet pint, and Dave mentioned that the ham-fisted dredging techniques used by the fishing industry in some parts of the world were endangering not only scallops and other marine life on the ocean floor but the poor scuba divers in the vicinity - the trawlers were completely ignoring the warning flags that they display when diving is taking place. So I said this top of the head thing: "I know what to do... The Man Who Never Was!!!"
Now for those of you who haven't read the book or seen the film, I better explain...
During WWII, British Intelligence ("intelligence"? Stop sniggering at the back) were trying to get the German High Command to shift its troops away from Italy prior to the invasion of Sicily (I'm paraphrasing here). "Everyone but a bloody fool would know it's Sicily," said Churchill. So what they needed was a totally convincing diversionary tactic. They attempted to create the illusion that the Allies had a plan to invade Greece instead. It was one of the greatest hoaxes in military history, up there with the Trojan Horse and the wonderful illusions of Jasper Maskelyne in WWII.
A suitable dead body was subsequently procured. The man in question was handed over by his next of kin, on a hush-hush basis, knowing only that it would go towards a very good cause. He'd recently died of pneumonia, so the cause of death was excellent, and the fluid in the body's lungs should reinforce the notion that it had been floating at sea for several days.
They then dressed the corpse in the uniform of a reasonable-ranking British naval officer/courier, and stuffed his pockets with the secret papers showing the "invasion" plans, and various other flotsam and jetsam such as theatre tickets to make it all look genuine and build up the false biog. Then they kept him in ice and stashed him in a submarine, which launched the body on a tidal route that they predicted would float him towards the Spanish coast, where the authorities would obviously send the papers on to the Germans. True story, and it worked a treat.
Anyway, Dave already knew all about the film and twigged straight away. All we need now is a handful of volunteers who would bequeath their dead bodies to The Cause. They would be put into swimming togs, with scuba diving equipment or snorkels and so on. The dead bodies would probably be individually quick frozen (IQF), in a similar technique to the one used for frozen prawns nowadays, though that's admittedly a slightly hazy bit - pints had been taken, remember. They would then be weighted down on the seabed, just waiting to pop up to the surface as soon as the dredgers started their dirty work.
