Paul Lynch’s Pages

I am a big fan of the Good Eats show, even though my only access to it is via YouTube, and I have Alton Brown’s three previous books from the series. There are 80 episodes covered in this first installment of three books (not two, as the Product Description claims), each with a short discussion of the themes of the show, a couple of recipes (called applications in the book), and some quotes and trivia. The recipes have all been reworked, some substantially; a few that I have checked have been exactly as given in the shows. Recipes have been adjusted to use weights (hurray!) rather than cup measures, where it is appropriate.

If you are looking for a basic cookbook, then this isn’t it; but then, it doesn’t claim to be. If you want to dig out some recipe that you half remember from an episode, or just would like a souvenir of the shows, you’ll be very happy. I have made a number of the recipes; most work out very well, but some have quirks that give inedible results (for me) – I’ll refer you to p156 and the “Duck!” recipe – which has become known in my household as “rubber duck” for an example. But I should emphasise that most recipes work well, especially the baking recipes.

I have a hate/hate relationship with BT Openworld.  Let’s be clear; I have no choice but to use them, as they have access points at all the places I visit and might need a connection.  All the old coffee shop access points in my area have been converted to BT Openworld, taking them at a stroke from free to expensive.  From the café’s viewpoint, an access point should surely only be a cheap box dropped onto their existing network, only a minor expense, but BT must be doing some hard sell about how difficult it is to maintain and secure, and selling them a separate line with some magical remote configuration options at a price, which requires a special redirect to a log in web page – showing how complexity just escalates if you ignore the obvious solution.

So take an iPod.  Imagine that you’re in a café somewhere, which happens to have a BT Openworld access point, and you have a burning need to connect – but you don’t have a BT subscription.  Pre-3.0, you’d open Safari to any page, you’d be told to pick an access point, and you’d be redirected to the BT login page.  From there you would have been able to navigate to anywhere BT would allow you, which would have included all their subscription plan pages.

But with 3.0, when you select the access point, you are taken to a special log on page within Settings.  For some reason your ability to navigate from there is restricted; possibly intentionally, or possibly by some sort of time out.  Whichever it is, you won’t have enough time to sign up for a subscription (unlimited time at BT Openworld access points is £12.50 per month, minimum contract 18 months, and you have to give multiple addresses as a credit reference – despite having given them your credit card details as well, which I consider to be needlessly intrusive).

The solution to this problem is to sign up beforehand – which is stupid.  Next problem is that I couldn’t get through their payment pages using Safari, on iPod or Mac OS X (Firefox on Mac OS X worked, in the end).  When you succeed, you get two separate emails sent to your mail address, as well as a page showing the user name and password, which you really need to write down, on paper.

So why write it on paper?  Surely you could copy and paste the strings directly from email, assuming that you had a connection while taking out the subscription?  Well, if you have this special log in screen, if you switch out of it, say to mail, to copy it down, you lose the connection and have to restart – and with two fields to copy, that’s not going to fly.

You could copy them both into a Note, on the same line, and remember how long the password/user name is, then copy and paste it into the two fields.  Password fields are obscured, so you have to remember the length.  If you gave up on that (I did) and are retyping from a scrap of paper, you’d better remember that the user name field is going to be auto-capitalised, and the log in page doesn’t show you an error message when it fails (Safari, JavaScript validation buttons, take your pick).

It is all too hard.  Part of the problem is Apple’s, who haven’t thought through the login process very well for the proportion of their users with iPod touch rather than iPhone, and making a retrograde change to the process; but it’s mostly BT’s fault for making it actively hard for people to buy their product.

Anglers talk of this book with reverence, or did so when I was in my teens.  Back then I can recall taking a look, and finding it rather impenetrable, written in an archaic style.

All of this is still true, but I found it an interesting read none the less.  There is certainly a lot of talk of different fishes, from salmon and trout through pike and perch to eel, roach, tench, carp, chub, minnows and “sticklebugs”.  For each he gives their habit, how to fish for them, and even how to cook them – and he has many recipes for the most coarse fish.

The real interest for me was in how accurate his observations can be, contrasted against how he had no idea of what happens to (what we now know to be) migratory birds during the winter, and the ideas of generation of fish from mud and slime, or geese from barnacles.  Some things, however, never change; he describes the chemical dosing of bait to better attract fish, and the secrecy of top anglers as to exactly how they construct their bait.

The book is structured as a dialogue between two men, known as Piscator (the narrator) and Venator, his student.  Complete with interludes where they sing songs in the inn, and donate the lesser of their catch to local farmer’s wives.  The initial chapter is more formal, as these two discuss the relative merits of their sports with two others in a structured style.

This style makes it hard to read, but you can pick up a feel for his life and nature from hints that drop – so many references to his angler friends who are now deceased, and his happiness and content to be, as he claims, of modest means and content with his lot.

This is the first in a series of posts reviewing books, as I read them.  Older book reviews here are mostly archives of reviews that I have posted to Amazon, some for computing books, others for cookery books.

I first read A Princess of Mars in my early teens (I was possibly 12 at the time, so not-quite-teens), while living away from home at boarding school.  I think I heard about it somewhere, and I know that I had read some of the Tarzan series much earlier (pre-teens).  It had a profound effect on me, alongside Robert Heinlein at the same time.  It was as a result of reading this that I took up fencing, for one thing.

It is a simple book, not very long when compared with current novels, told in first person by John Carter, from Virginia, once a Captain in the Confederate army, and at the start of the book a miner in Arizona.  One thing that I didn’t pick up on my first reading was the Southern voice in which it is told, something that I had never heard (or read) before.  There’s no point going into the wrong science – which was reasonably current when the book was written, at least as far as the landscape of Mars is concerned.  The scaling effect of gravity on John Carter’s strength, and his ability to jump, was perhaps more obviously wrong.

If you haven’t read this, then you should.  The first three of the series, which would include Gods of Mars and Warlord of Mars, are the essentials that anyone should have read.

An interesting diversion is how I got hold of it.  I had been looking for a copy of the trilogy in a desultory way for a number of years, and would happily have paid for a fine print edition, if such a thing could be found (highly unlikely).  I had gone so far as to order a single paperback edition from Amazon, which after many months ended up unsourceable.  Then I had been checking out book reader apps on my iPod touch, and formed a firm preference for Stanza over BookShelfLT.  At the time I had to reject it, despite the better reading controls, because BookShelfLT could give me access to the Baen Free Library, which had a couple of books I wanted to read – and weren’t in print on Amazon.

So, some time later, I found an upgrade to Stanza, which let me access Baen, and I was very happy.  I also discovered that Stanza had included a lot more online libraries, and found A Princess of Mars that way.