What's that in the river?

no," it's not an elephant: it's a hippopotamus"

From Toxel:

Wooden hippopotamus made by talented Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman can be spotted floating down the river Thames in London, England.

the quote is Flanders and Swan, and yes, there is a song for it:

Stuff around the net

via Boingboing: The Deep math of folded pizza

 Gauss’s remarkable theorem assures us that one direction of the slice must always remain flat — no matter how you bend it, the pizza must retain a trace of its original flatness. When the slice flops over, the flat direction is pointed sideways, which isn’t helpful for eating it. But by folding the pizza slice sideways, you’re forcing it to become flat in the other direction – the one that points towards your mouth. Theorema egregium, indeed.

-----------------------------

Via Tea At Trianon:

the history of Hamburger.
excerpt:

The groundwork for the ground-beef sandwich was laid with the domestication of cattle (in Mesopotamia around 10,000 years ago), and with the growth of Hamburg, Germany, as an independent trading city in the 12th century. Jump ahead to 1848, when political revolutions shook the 39 states of the German Confederation, spurring an increase in German immigration to the United States. With German people came German food: beer gardens flourished in American cities, while butchers offered a panoply of traditional meat preparations. Because Hamburg was known as an exporter of high-quality beef, restaurants began offering a “Hamburg-style” chopped steak.

---------------------------

ViaSenseOfEvents:

the theology behind the reason why gay marriage will never be approved by some christian churches.

The story Christians have been telling for 2,000 years goes something like this: The God who made the Universe is also, by his very nature, Love, and he made human beings with a very lofty vocation. Humans are meant to reflect His glory in the world; to be like God, that is to say, to be lovers and creators. Everything in the Universe has been put here to be used by God's children to reflect his loving glory — and to teach them about God's love. This is particularly true, or so the story goes, of the unique sexual complementarity between men and women. The sexual act is meant to reflect God's love by fostering a union at once bodily and spiritual — and creates new life. The complementarity of the persons in a marriage reflects the complementarity of the Persons of the Trinity, and the bliss of marital union is an inkling of the bliss of the union of the Persons of the Trinity. The fruitfulness of the marriage act reflects that God is a creator and has charged man to be an agent of his ongoing work of creation. And, finally, if God's love means total self-giving unto death on a Cross, then man and wife must give themselves to each other totally — no pettiness, no adultery, no polygamy, no divorce, and no nonmarital sexual acts. According to the story that Christianity has been telling for 2,000 years, Christianity's view of sexuality isn't some encrusted holdover from a socially conditioned patriarchal era on its way out, but is instead deeply connected to its understanding of who God is and what human beings exist for.

naah: Too complicated and nuanced for a sound bite, so don't expect this in the MSM

 --------------------------------------------

also from SenseOfEvents:

------------------------------------

RIP: Russian Space Geckos have gone to the great lizard lounge in the sky

---------------------------------

One of the few G rated postings on GrouchyOldcrippleBlog:

when Venn met the lost webpages of the internet.

Stuff around the net

What did the simple folk eat (in the Dark Ages)? Podcast link

------------------------------

Yum! Tomatoes

30 recipes here.
including how to peel and seed tomatoes

actually, we eat locally and our local tomatoes are Roma variations: Small, pear shaped/oval and a bit sweet.

--------------------------------------------

Great Dane one, Socks 43.5

Reminds me of the ongoing joke on Joe Morelli's dog in the Stephanie Plum series

-------------------------------

It's good to be the king (but the queen, not so much...)

Poor Berengaria: Her famous husband was busy fighting and she had to chase him around the Mediterranean...and when the crusades stopped, things got worse.

-------------------------
from Freelance history writer, via TeaAtTrianon

Margaret of Austria..

.Charles was not particularly attractive. He was thin, under-grown with a hollow chest, crooked legs and a head that was too big for his body. But Margaret was three and probably didn’t notice his appearance. The next day, the marriage was consecrated.Margaret lived in the beautiful castle of Amboise. Louis died shortly after her marriage and Anne de Beaujeu was regent for the new King Charles VIII. Anne appointed Madame de Segré as Margaret’s governess. Margaret’s time at Amboise was pleasant. She studied, played with dolls, and performed official duties, all dressed in dignified and tasteful clothes. She was taught the fine arts like drawing, painting, singing and how to play the lute, dancing and embroidery. All in all, it was a happy childhood for Margaret, full of warm affection. 

wed three times, refused the 4th marriage.

musical download of the week

-------------------------------------
My granddaughter was once a Barney fan. But there is hope: Now she's into Marilyn Manson.

;-)

Insomnia download of the week

=======================


and yes, TFIOS is there too.

Family news

Lolo is feeling better, but not getting out much due to wheezing (it's cloudy out and a lot of people are here asking for help paying for medicine for wheezing kids).

 I keep the aircon on all the time, on "fan" to filter the air when it's cool outside, and that helps.

 The "drier" motor died yesterday. Here, washing is done by hand by most folks but we have a wash machine. However, washer's here don't have a "spin" cycle, so you have to buy another machine, a "drier", that spins. The help comes and goes so quickly here that the new help tends to overload and the belts break and finally the motors burn out. Our laundry is done on the roof, the better to dry the clothing in the wind. 

The last time the washer died, I bought a new washer  for Leila to do our laundry downstairs.

She is our cook's daughter, and cleans the room and does the laundry for us two days a week. The good news is that she is "family", like the cook (whose family works for our family for years). The bad news is that I am always being hit for extra money for medicine, school fees etc. which we give because she and her mom are "family".

 This explains two things: one, why salaries are so low (they make up for it by "gifts") and why Chano and Joy have trouble keeping help (they figure you should work for the amount of money usually paid in our area as their salary, which is too low, but if you ask for money, they take it out of your next paycheck. Everything clear and exact. Locals figure they can earn more elsewhere and often disappear after a few months for better paying jobs).

 Well, anyway, I ended up buying a washer/drier (two tubs) instead of just a drier. The good news is that we now don't have to worry about our old washer dying, the bad news is that the drier is small so only will take one bedsheet at a time. Which is fine, since usually the wash is wrung out by hand and mainly it is the towels and bedsheets and jeans that need to be spun dry before hanging them up.

 Leila suggested keeping it downstairs, so they can do the wash in the side kitchen that we only use for parties/events. That way the cook or our maid can supervise it's use. She hangs clothing in our yard, but now we have laundry lines in the spare kitchen to hang up stuff when it is raining, such as now.

The windows are open, and this makes it easy to dry clothing, except for the 100 percent humidity that prevents stuff from getting dry. The answer for this is to iron clothes. And luckily the "gift" that came with the washer/drier was a dry iron, meaning Leila doesn't have to wait til the upstair iron is not being used before she dries our clothing (mainly tee shirts and cotton underware that doesn't dry well).

 I should explain we live in Lolo's old house, a one story ranch style house with a garden in front. Chano lives in an apartment over the meeting room, and the spare storage rooms are used for ironing upstairs, along with the offices, guest rooms etc. The rice packing is down downstairs in our old office, which is spearate from the kitchen areas and next to the meeting room.

 --------------------

 I should also add that Ruby bought Persuasion and the Giver to read. She is on a Jane Austen kick. she also has my LOTR book, but I suspect that will take awhile to get through.

Wait til he reads Heinlein

I ran across a comment about this item that claims modern "young adult" novels (and films?) promote right wing ideas.

YA dystopias teach children to submit to the free market, not fight authority

The Hunger Games, The Giver and Divergent all depict rebellions against the state, and promote a tacit right-wing libertarianism. 

and lower down it notes:

What marks these dystopias out from previous ones is that, almost without exception, the bad guys are not the corporations but the state and those well-meaning liberal leftists who want to make the world a better place. Books such as The Giver, Divergent and the Hunger Games trilogy are, whether intentionally or not, substantial attacks on many of the foundational projects and aims of the left: big government, the welfare state, progress, social planning and equality. They support one of the key ideologies that the left has been battling against for a century: the idea that human nature, rather than nurture, determines how we act and live. These books propose a laissez-faire existence, with heroic individuals who are guided by the innate forces of human nature against evil social planners.

 Yeah. It complains it's not like the "good old days" when HGWells supported Stalin, and influenced the SciFi writers to posit left wing ideas and take over the sci fi establishment.

Hoyt has a lot of complaints about the difficulty of publishing such sci fi on her blog and how the trade associations dislike those who oppose their line of thought. 

She is an immigrant from Europe and recognizes this as a way that the experts control their population: How dare they criticize the experts!

They’ve – by which I mean the cultural establishment – tried to bring the same here.  I’ve railed here before about how cozies were – in effect – blacklisted by the publishing establishment because “amateurs can’t be better than the professionals.”  And how my books couldn’t have funny policemen because “Policemen are professionals and must be respected.”  And I’ve talked about how shocked I was when a bunch of high school kids came to beat me on my blogbecause I’d criticized their teacher (I actually hadn’t.  I’d criticized the curriculum which is is not teacher set, but they lacked the semantic ability to distinguish these) and how dare I?  She’s a TEACHER.  I’m supposed to respect her.  (She also was considerably less educated than I, much younger and I have reason to believe she sent the kids over to harass me – the harassment stopped when I threatened to scan in some of her (outrageous) grading handiwork and post it. – which leaves me in doubt of her moral character.)
While these things annoy me and shock me, as does anyone preventing my questioning him by saying “I’m the expert” – it is still new here.

and how does one learnabout American culture? She says by reading Heinlein.