Posts by B Jones
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your fancy imported bug is just ordinary old yeast.
Only in the broadest sense. Your supermarket dried yeast (__saccharomyces cervisiae__, or sugar-eating beer fungus) makes perfectly good bread and ginger beer, as I understand it, but the original ginger beer plant is a symbiont of saccharomyces pyriformis and something vermiformis. My dad made the standard yeast sort last summer, and was tipped off to the other by my cousin, who's a winemaker.
I'm making the stuff as an attempt to recreate the wonderful drink I had as a kid, which commercial brands Phoenix and Hardieboys only begin to approach. It's a nostalgia-driven project, and going all-out at the start is kind of insurance against disappointment.
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That's fantastic, thank you. I've heard of the tap by the Speight Brewery in Dunedin but didn't realise Wellington had an equivalent.
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My mum dug up my dad's old super 8 films from the 70s and is getting them converted to dvd, but the results are mixed. Lots of messing around with zooming and panning, lots of flower shots, and hardly any of actual people or things that have changed over time. The only good subjects in my family were my cousins who were too young to be camera-shy.
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Local water as a key ingredient - I've just bought a ginger beer plant from the US, and the instructions on that say not to use chlorinated tap water as it interferes with the yeast growth. It's not something I've ever considered in making either bread or ginger beer, but it seems logical given chlorine's effect on other organisms.
Swapping for a non-chlorinated source of water might make a difference, even if you can't import the acqua ferrarese.
Using bottled water for the entire volume of my ginger beer seems unreasonable, but I reckon I'll keep the plant itself in the purer stuff until I get a bit more confident in keeping it alive.
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So, hang on a sec, previously both parents could be working full time on the minimum wage (thus earning 47,000 gross), and their kids wouldn't be eligible for a full student allowance?
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It would be interesting to know the number of people this is projected to affect - IIRC, even back in the early nineties, the parental income threshold, while supposedly the average household income, was well short of the average household income of people with university aged children, who generally had 20 years of work experience and no longer had to look after kids or pay for childcare.
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What a skill to have if you are a leader trying to inspire followers.
Apparently Richard Seddon had an incredible memory for people. On his electioneering tours of the country, he'd see people he'd met once a year ago, and ask how their kids/business/whatever they'd talked about back then was going.
I have a good memory for anecdotes like the one above, but it tends to lose the appropriate citation.
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It's not only strange, it's very very risky. Unless you're Phil's girlfriend, of course.
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when I see someone write "Well, Josh, what I think is that..." online, my initial reaction is that they're being condescending, even though on a forum like this you often have to make it explicit who your comments are directed at.
Well, Josh, that's exactly what I do and I agree with you entirely.
Except if I wasn't going for comic effect, I'd say:
Josh - that's what I do too.Names are for getting a person's attention or identifying one person from another, not for throwing randomly into conversation with the person so named. I always feel like someone's trying to drum something home to me when they use my name when it's perfectly clear they're talking to me and nobody else. I don't think it causes offence unless you get to the point where you refer to someone else present as she or he, and they say who? the cat's mother?
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Ok, small sample size error coming, but my numerically challenged ex was very good with the bit part actors, whereas scarily numerate bf is awful at it. Couldn't spot Edward Furlong in CSI:NY last night as the kid from Terminator II. He doesn't do street names, but he can always tell which direction he's pointing in.
I'm in the middle on the actor front. I don't often forget names, but I'm bad at applying them to the right faces, especially ones I haven't often seen or have met in groups or different contexts. On the other hand, I rarely forget the spelling of a word I've seen before (Sakashvili?), and I memorised part of the Owl and the Pussycat before I could read.