red lentils with tomato and spinach

I made red lentils with tomato and spinach for dinner! Yes, from an actual recipe! I even had all the ingredients on hand except that I used chard instead of baby spinach.

It was sufficiently edible. Cooking it was very easy, and was only briefly interrupted by me dropping a wine glass on the floor directly under my heel that I was in the process of lowering to said floor. I used spare pieces of chard to mop up the small drops of blood.

I ate half of the meal and left the rest for tomorrow's lunch. Kissy helped me clean the saucepan.


[Recipe from stonesoup virtual cookery school.]

Brisbane BCC waste vouchers

I have the standard rate-payer's set of Brisbane City Council waste vouchers for ewaste, green waste, and general waste. Traditionally, I keep them in a kitchen drawer until a fortnight before expiry and then stuff them in my neighbour's letterbox in the hope that they'll be used by a family of four who have overflowing rubbish bins every single damn week. However, I have recently started keeping foodstuffs in my kitchen drawers so I need to do something more experimental with this year's vouchers.

So, who wants them? They expire on 31 July 2012 so there's no hurry to claim some. I'll probably repost this on 31 June 2012 if there's any left. (BTW, we need a metric calendar system.)

When meeting the lucky winner(s) to present them with their vouchers, I reserve the right to hand over a small stash of my own ewaste. :)


(And for the pendantic among us, which includes me, yes I KNOW the title contains a tautology. "BCC" with no context doesn't immediately bring "Brisbane" to mind [an important consideration for a post that is viewable around the world], and "Brisbane City Council" is too long to make an efficient title, and "Brisbane CC" is so little used it doesn't invoke any meaning.)

For sale...

Copied from a random email:

For sale...

For sale:

one fucking useless cat

Penguins. You can't trust them.

See the animated gif

Found at warrenellis.com

A biography of John Howard

From the Hansard, 6th April 1998.

In the Grievance debate on 6th April Mr ALBANESE (Member for Grayndler) said:

Today my grievance is against the Prime Minister (Mr Howard) for his failure to provide leadership. You can trim the eyebrows; you can cap the teeth; you can cut the hair; you can put on different glasses; you can give him a ewe's milk facial, for all I care; but, to paraphrase a gritty Australian saying, 'Same stuff, different bucket.' In the pantheon of chinless blue bloods and suburban accountants that makes up the Australian Liberal Party, this bloke is truly one out of the box. You have to go back to Billy McMahon to find a Prime Minister who even approaches this one for petulance, pettiness and sheer grinding inadequacy.

etc...

Read more. Go on. Go now. It gets better. :)

Part of a human stomach dissected by Edward Jenner, England, 1790-1823

From www.sciencemuseum.org.uk:

large version of image

Edward Jenner (1749-1823) was the pioneer of vaccination but was also known for his delicate dissections. Here, the section of the stomach has been flattened and injected with wax to show the veins and arteries as well as the delicate membrane of the stomach wall. It may have been used as a teaching aid to show the structure of the stomach. Dissection was an increasingly common part of medical education at this time but due to a lack of bodies preparations such as this were important to show students the workings of the human body. Without wax injection, the blood vessels could not be as easily identified.

I want a fan that looks just like this!!! Preferably made out of a real stomach too.

10 Canine Commandments

Found at dogs.icanhascheezburger.com

Dude is too Super Cool for his Traffic Ticket

This is adorable and only 30 seconds long.

Traffic changing birds' songs

From ABC News:

New research has found some Australian birds are changing the way they sing so they can be heard over traffic noise.

The University of Melbourne study compared the songs of silvereyes living in cities and rural areas. It found silvereyes in urban areas sang songs and contact calls more slowly and at a higher pitch than their country relatives...

"If you're in a noisy environment and you're trying to be heard, you'd generally speak more clearly and slowly - that's what the city birds are doing as well."

[Senior research fellow Dr Kirsten Parris] says there are two possible explanations for the birds' behaviour. "The first is that it is an evolutionary shift - birds with slower, higher-pitched voices are more successful at finding mates and so are better breeders," she said. "The other is that the birds shift their own voices to suit the environment, what the researchers call plasticity."

Dr Parris says the findings show city noise may affect the birds' breeding, as the birds are being forced to use mating calls that instinctively are not as attractive to one another... "Basically the birds are presented with a trade-off between being heard at all and having the females like what they hear."

Read more

Dalek Dress and TARDIS Dress

From lesather's Flickr photostream: