A New Start

Song: Sun Equals Fun

Sun equals fun

Jim Davis and Andrew Hughes. Sun Equals Fun

http://mho.auditionus.net/MH/MH073/MHO_MH__073_0601.mp3

FT: Despot Decor (haha)

despot decor Download FT_Despot Decor_Dictators of taste - FT

 

 

FT: Train Making, Engineering, Robert Winston

FT: Train Making, Engineering, Robert Winston, models Download FT_Train-making with the FT_ Robert Winston - FT

FT: Matt Groening

Doh! The answers to life’s problems really are on TV

By Matthew Garrahan

As a child growing up in Oregon, Matt Groening spent so much time watching television – generic, widely lampooned sitcoms such as Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best – that his teachers told him he was wasting his life.

There was something about those TV impressions of buttoned-down, postwar Americans that fascinated the young Groening, who longed for a darker, more unpredictable portrait of family life. Yet while they were bland, the programmes and their one-dimensional characters ultimately provided some of the inspiration for The Simpsons, the anarchic, animated comedy show he created and which this week was saved from cancellation at the 11th hour.

More

On this story

• Editorial Yakety yak no more
• Terminator reborn as superhero Governator
• Dubai seeks leading role with Hollywood studios
• MGM scrambles to restructure debt
• Woman in the News Kathryn Bigelow

Click to enlarge

Fox, part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, had threatened to pull the plug on The Simpsons after an acrimonious pay dispute with the actors who provide the voices for Homer, Bart and other characters. But the network unexpectedly ordered two new series, so extending the hold Groening’s creations have had over US cultural and comic life for more than two decades.

The Simpsons has passed Gunsmoke as the longest-running scripted show on US TV and will reach the landmark of 500 episodes next February. Over the years the antics of the Simpson family, particularly Homer’s struggles with marriage, fatherhood and a dead-end job at a nuclear power station, have shaped how Americans see themselves – and how the rest of the world views them.

The programme has generated billions of dollars in advertising and merchandising sales, and spawned a Hollywood film, a theme park ride and a video game. It has attracted plaudits and criticism in equal measure: Time magazine hailed it as the best TV programme of the 20th century, while in 1992 George H.W. Bush said he wanted “to make American families a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons”. In an episode that aired shortly after the then president’s comments, Homer Simpson said: “Hey, we’re just like the Waltons. We’re praying for an end to the Depression, too.”

For Groening, the show is a celebration “of the idea of the American family”. As he once explained to the BBC, family, in this sense, means “people who love each other and drive each other crazy”.

Born in Portland in 1954 – he took names for some of his characters from the city’s street names – Groening’s own childhood was a model for The Simpsons, albeit in less exaggerated terms. Homer was named after his father, a filmmaker and cartoonist who made surfing movies and would take the Groenings to Hawaii. His mother, Margaret, was a housewife although it is unclear whether she had Marge Simpson’s trademark blue beehive.

Like Bart Simpson, Groening has a younger sister called Maggie and an older sister named Lisa. He decided not to use his name in his fictional family and chose Bart because it was an anagram of brat. When it came to naming his own son, Groening chose Homer (though his son these days prefers to be known as Will).

He loved cartoons, particularly the work of Charles Schultz and his Peanuts strip – a depiction of childhood riven with loneliness and insecurity that Groening has called “one of the great works of the 20th century”. Another influence was Ronald Searle, an English artist best known for his St Trinian’s school strips. “It’s very dark and disturbing ... but as a kid I loved it,” he told the BBC.

After leaving school in Oregon, where he had begun to fine-tune his skills as a cartoon artist, Groening attended The Evergreen State College in Washington state. “Every creative weirdo in the Pacific north-west gravitated to this school and hung out there,” he once said. He met other cartoonists and edited the college newspaper. On graduating, he moved to Los Angeles, in part to be close to the heart of the film and TV industry.

While living hand to mouth in a cheap apartment – and miserable at his lack of progress – Groening began to develop characters for his Life in Hell comic strip, which he sent to friends and family in Oregon as a way of depicting his frustration at life in Los Angeles. He landed a deal with the now defunct Los Angeles Reader newspaper, where he was an editor and occasional delivery man. Life in Hell was eventually syndicated to more than 200 newspapers across the US and, crucially, caught the eye of Hollywood producer James Brooks.

When the two first met, Groening panicked, fearful of giving away the rights to Life in Hell and instead sketched The Simpsons while he was waiting to meet Brooks. After a short Simpsons skit had appeared on The Tracey Ullman Show, Brooks and Groening never looked back.

With his floppy hair, goatee beard and owlish glasses, Groening bears no physical resemblance to any of The Simpsons characters. Over time, the focus of the show has shifted from the spiky-haired young Bart Simpson, to Homer, a wisdom-defying, beer-bellied everyman who spouts philosophical pearls of wisdom like: “Trying is the first step towards failure” and “When will I learn? The answer to life’s problems aren’t at the bottom of a bottle. They’re on TV.”

For Groening, cartoons are the perfect tool to capture the inherent comic conflict in family life. “Cartooning is for people who can’t quite draw and can’t quite write,” he once told an interviewer. “You combine the two half-talents and come up with a career.” He has also shown that, when done correctly, it can be very lucrative: The Simpsons has made Groening one of the wealthiest individuals in media with a fortune estimated at more than $600m, thanks to an ongoing share in the profits generated by the show and its spin-off activities. And yet he has described its blockbuster success as a happy mistake, a by-product of the great loves in his life. “I would be doing the same thing whether or not [The Simpsons] was successful,” he once said. “I just love cartoons and I love writing.”

The writer is the FT’s Los Angeles correspondent

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011

Economist: Letters

Poetic form

 

SIR – At 11 words, Harold Pinter’s shortest poem was certainly enigmatic: “I saw Len Hutton in his prime/Another time/another time” (“The known and the unknown”, August 20th). So was Simon Gray’s response when, a few days after sending him the poem, Pinter phoned Gray to check if he had received it. He replied he had, but “I haven’t finished reading it yet”.

Kaushik Basu
Chief economic adviser
Ministry of Finance
Delhi

* Letter appears online only

FT: The job: Chick sexer

August 14, 2011 7:45 pm

The job: Chick sexer

As told to Friederike Heine

John Loughlin, Broiler Breeders Australia

My job is to determine the sex of day-old chicks in order to split them into broilers for meat or layers for eggs, using a method known as vent sexing. The chick’s genital eminence is the size of a pin head – the bird must be held under a 200W light bulb to illuminate the genitalia. I then squeeze the anal vent, which allows me to see whether the chick has a small bump, indicating that it is a male.

More

On this story

• The job Agricultural meteorologist
• The job Gumologist
• The job Drug security director
• The job Plant pathologist
• The job Food historian

I normally sex 6,000-10,000 chicks a day – the average chick sexer will sex about 1m chicks per year. The most I ever sexed in one day was 14,200 and my record for one week was 53,000.

There are different types of sexers – so-called “colour” or “feather” sexers are able to determine the sex of chickens by external characteristics when the hatchlings are four to six weeks old. This sort of sexing does not require a lot of training, whereas “vent“ sexing is a lot more tricky.

I have worked in the industry for over 40 years, and it has changed a lot. Certain strands of sexing have died out completely because the process has become automated – many people now use machines. Apparently there is now even an influx of Indian sexers who are cheaper to hire. I may be quite costly, but my accuracy rate never fails me.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

FT: Chief Googler’s ‘amazing’ clichés are dull and void

Chief Googler’s ‘amazing’ clichés are dull and void

By Lucy Kellaway

When Larry Page opted to spend $12.5bn of Google’s money on some mobile handsets, patents and set-top boxes, he described his thinking thus:

“Together, we will create amazing user experiences that supercharge the entire Android ecosystem for the benefit of consumers, partners and developers. I look forward to welcoming Motorolans to our family of Googlers.”

More

On this story

• Lucy Kellaway Six little words and one very big question
• Lucy Kellaway Staying on through worlidays
• Lucy Kellaway Unrequited love and corporate idiocy
• Lucy Kellaway Cheers to the half-empty glass
• Lucy Kellaway A need to please can get you into trouble

These 32 words were last week repeated uncritically in newspapers all over the world, but no one seems to have stopped to wonder: what on earth was he on about?

On Twitter a few people squirmed at Motorolans and Googlers. “Is this some dreadful 1950s sci-fi B movie?” someone tweeted. Otherwise Mr Page’s statement slipped down easily enough. At first sight, it appears to be more or less in English, with no leveraging or scaling or reaching out. However, on closer study it turns out to be devoid of any meaning: I have been trying to translate it into simpler language, but can’t find anything to grab hold of.

The reason it slips down so easily is that if you ignore words like “the” and “we”, the cliché content is close to 100 per cent. Indeed he has jammed so many into such a tight space that it is worth doing a little unpacking, word by word, to see if some meaning can be found after all.

Together. This gets the message off to just the right stirring, inclusive, democratic start. All takeovers have to been seen in terms of togetherness, even when, like the acquisition of Motorola Mobility, they are defensive and more about patents than people.

Create. This is the verb of the moment, preferred always to “make”, “produce” or “sell”, because it is so much more, well, creative.

Amazing. Nothing could be less amazing than to find this adjective used here. The only amazing thing is how inappropriate it is. To amaze means “to fill with great surprise or sudden wonder”, but when I go out to buy a mobile phone, sudden wonder and great surprise are not top of my shopping list.

User experiences. I’m taking these two words as a pair, and a wretched pair at that. What is a user experience exactly? Are you having a user experience as you read this column? If so, I hope it’s amazing.

Supercharge. It seems that no modern leader, or at least no modern male one, can resist the idea of sticking extra voltage into whatever he’s talking about, even if the thing itself wasn’t built for it. David Cameron last week said that he wanted to put “rocket boosters” under the welfare system, which sounds like a poor scheme to me.

But the Ecosystem is even less suited to receiving additional power, as the point about ecosystems is that they generally like to be left alone. It is anyway a tired and not especially useful metaphor which, like DNA, is supposed to glance at something elemental and natural, whereas mobile phone software is surely as unnatural as it comes.

Entire. One can’t ever have too much emphasis in a statement of this sort. Never mind that it’s a nonsense in this case, as an ecosystem is by definition entire as it doesn’t come in halves.

Benefit. There is nothing wrong with this word, though one queries the use here. The point of the deal surely isn’t to benefit consumers, etc, surely it is to make money and beat patent with patent.

Partners. This is a weasel noun which pretends that the companies Google does business with have the same interests as its own. In fact the “partners” to whom Google currently supplies its Android “ecosystem” are surely feeling pretty scared about a deal in which Google now owns one of their competitors.

Family. If Google is a family, is Larry Page the father? In that case he’s gone a bit over the top in having 29,000 kids of his own at Google and now adopting a further 19,000. That’s even more than Angelina Jolie. The point about families is you can’t choose them, you share towels and toothbrushes, you look like them, you love them and hate them and are pretty much obliged to have Christmas dinner with them – none of which applies to Googlers or Motorolans. The family metaphor is sound on one thing: when another family is acquired by marriage the step children are guaranteed to hate each other.

Thinking about these clapped out business clichés, I’ve had a sudden revelation. You can put them in a different order and the meaning is the same. Consider this:

Consumers, partners and developers will together supercharge the entire user experiences to create amazing benefit for the Android family of ecosystems. I defy anyone to say this isn’t just as good as the original. In fact, I think I rather prefer it.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

Poem - O'er seas that have no beaches (Mervyn Peake)

O'er seas that have no beaches
To end their waves upon,
I floated with twelve peaches,
A sofa and a swan.

The blunt waves crashed above us
The sharp waves burst around,
There was no one to love us,
No hope of being found --

Where, on the notched horizon
So endlessly a-drip,
I saw all of a sudden
No sign of any ship.

Mervyn Peake, 'A Book of Nonsense' (1972).

ST: A wobbly slice of melon

Lifestyle

Home > Lifestyle > Taste > Story

Jul 31, 2011

A wobbly slice of melon

A best-selling agar agar creation that looks like watermelon took Stella Lam over 10 years to perfect

By Eunice Quek, Singapore Cooks

The cool 'watermelon' dessert created by Madam Stella Lam has a crunchy, savoury bite and a fluffy texture. -- ST PHOTO: CAROLINE CHIA

 

Retiree Stella Lam's 'watermelon' agar agar looks deceiving, but the proof of it is in the eating.

Madam Lam, 61, has had to convert many sceptics who cannot understand why she would make jelly masquerading as a watermelon.

Last year, she sold the agar agar to raise funds for a mission trip to Vietnam in the Church of St Teresa which she attends.

But it proved a challenge, as her fellow parishioners had to be convinced to even taste the agar agar.

Says the former cashier: 'I had to persuade them to try it and they were surprised at its fluffy texture. So, I ended up selling all the 10 pieces I made.'

Unlike the usual agar agar sold here, this cool dessert - perfect for beating the heat - has a crunchy bite. The use of whisked egg whites gives it a spongy texture.

Sesame seeds give the jelly a savoury bite, and stand in as watermelon seeds to complete the look.

On some occasions, she uses black sesame seeds and even grass jelly pieces for the 'seeds'. Such experiments have had mixed responses from her food tasters: The primary and secondary school students of her younger daughter Diana Lim, a tutor.

Her elder daughter Lena is a housewife. Both sisters are in their 30s.

Madam Lam explains: 'The black sesame seeds, which tasted a bit bitter, did not go well with the coconut flavours of the agar agar. They did not like the grass jelly pieces either, so I decided to stick to the white sesame seeds.'

This home-made delight has taken Madam Lam more than 10 years to get just right.

She recalls first trying the agar agar in the 1970s, when she attended a church function. The next time she tasted it was in the 1980s, when her niece brought a version of the same jelly to another event.

The recipe, handwritten on a pink piece of paper, is neatly filed with other recipes clipped from newspaper or obtained from other members of her church group, Golden Years.

The group sees 12 women from her church getting together for prayer meetings or cooking sessions.

At home, her husband, Mr Robert Lim, 63, is the main cook and whips up simple dishes, such as steamed fish and stir-fried beef. Madam Lam can cook other dishes such as fried rice.

In her five-room HDB flat's simple kitchen, with traditional steamers and a wooden rice pot, she prepares her watermelon agar agar with no fancy plating nor elaborate garnish.

When it comes time to cool the agar agar mixture, she grabs a plastic fan and fans it with the gusto of a satay man.

The younger Ms Lim, who first tried the agar agar when she was eight years old, is probably the biggest fan of her mother's whimsical dessert.

She says: 'My mum would never fail to make the agar agar for my school teachers on Teachers' Day each year. She would ask me which teachers I want to give the agar agar to and I made sure I gave them only to the ones I liked.'

euniceq@sph.com.sg

---

MAKE IT YOURSELF: 'WATERMELON' AGAR AGAR

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

INGREDIENTS

2 packets agar agar powder (white, 12g each)

8 Tbs fine white sugar

3 bowls of water, room temperature

5 eggs

6 to 8 Tbs fine white sugar

1 packet fresh coconut milk (250g)

2 Tbs sesame seeds

1 Tbs red food colouring

1 Tbs green food colouring

METHOD

1. Separate five egg whites from egg yolks. Put the egg whites in a big mixing bowl.

2. Whisk the egg whites till fluffy and add the 8 Tbs of fine white sugar. Continue beating for a few minutes till they form stiff peaks. Set aside.

3. In a pot, mix the water, agar agar powder, 6 to 8 Tbs of fine white sugar and coconut milk. Bring it to a boil, stirring constantly.

4. Once it boils, remove from the heat and let the mixture cool for about 15 minutes, stirring occasionally, till the steam has dissipated.

5. Add the mixture to the whisked egg whites and beat till evenly mixed.

6. Scoop the mixture into five serving bowls, preferably with a round base. As it cools, the agar agar will start to set in the bowl.

7. Drop about five drops of the red food colouring in the centre of the agar agar mixture.

8. Add about half a teaspoon of sesame seeds (above, left). Carefully stir in the colouring and sesame seeds from the middle of the bowl without touching its base (above, centre). Leave a border of the white agar agar mixture without the colouring. This forms the 'rind' of the watermelon while the red part with sesame seeds is the watermelon's 'flesh'.

9. Repeat steps 7 and 8 for the next four bowls.

10. Refrigerate the bowls of agar agar for about 10 minutes.

11. Once the agar agar has set completely and is firm, remove from the bowls. Wear a pair of gloves and gently rub the green food colouring on the outer surface of the agar agar (above, right) and place back in the bowls.

12. After refrigerating for another 10 minutes, remove the agar agar from the bowls. Slice into wedges and serve cold.

Serves five to 10

FT: Letters - Economists Have Never Heard of Sex

 

Economists have never heard of sex

From Mr Philip Wood.

Sir, One question posed by Alan Beattie is whether lawyers or economists actually rule the world (“Take a deep breath, economists, it’s time for the lawyers”, June 18). The real question is, who should rule the world? I think economists have a lot going for them. But there are some crucial things missing.

First, although economists have vaguely heard of the rule of law, they are not quite sure how it fits into the metrics. They are primarily interested in function, efficiency and the weighing of costs and benefits.

Second, lawyers from ancient times have been close to emotions and how they should be tamed. As to economists, when John Maynard Keynes referred to “animal spirits” or Alan Greenspan to “irrational exuberance”, these were considered flashes of rare profundity. Rational economists adhere to the notion that we are not stupid, never panic and never do anything out of rage, envy, lust or greed. Economists have never heard of sex.

You can see these contrasts symbolised in the works of the titans of the two disciplines. Compare, for example, the limited scope of the code of conduct enunciated by one of the great heroes of economists, Adam Smith, with the code of one of the first major lawyers, the man with his 10 bullet points on the top of a mountain.

So, as regards the rightful rulers of the world, my money is on the lawyers.

Philip Wood,

Shere, Surrey, UK

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011