Posts by Ben Chapman
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Hard News: Not yet standing upright, in reply to Katharine Moody,
The problem for the Foundation wasn’t that they didn’t approve of the Hundertwasser Flag being considered
Agree – it was a distasteful knockoff. But why then didn’t they submit his design I wonder?
The Hundertwasser Koru Flag is beautiful. It really is a work of art.
The original Koru Flag was submitted by someone. It is not clear that this is the copyright holder though.
Interestingly, Hundertwasser intended it to be a secondary flag.
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I had expected this flag vote to get more interesting as it progressed.
The submission process was kind of fun. Hopefully everyone had their favourite after that (mine was Hei Matau).
Then the long list should have raised expectations and prompted some debate. And the short list should have led to heated arguments about the deeper meanings of the designs.
Instead it has just got increasingly discouraging as it has gone along. It is pretty much hopeless now, if it wasn't so at the long list stage.
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The most excitement I have had reading this year has been The Particle at the End of the Universe about the Higgs boson. I've been pretty much completely out of science for about 10 years while raising my children, so coming back to it with such hard stuff was a real rush.
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Just got back from Particle Fever, a documentary about the Large Hadron Collider and the discovery of the Higgs boson.
It was great to see behind the scenes of a story that got me so excited while it was playing out in real life. The movie doesn't dwell too much on the details of the physics, and concentrates instead on a number of physicists at CERN or doing research connected to the Higgs boson. It was very interesting to see the vast scale of the LHC and CERN and the number and variety of people involved in it.
When it does deal with the science and its meaning, it quite nicely demonstrates it with snatches of animated diagrams – just enough to show that what the people are saying make sense and for you to draw your own conclusions of its significance (I had brief sense of vertigo when I started to consider the possibility that our universe, which we are each an insignificant speck in, might be just a point, a speck, on a continuum of universes of varying cosmological constant, or a number of continuums ... whoa).
Highly recommended.
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Feed: My Life in Curry, in reply to Ben Austin,
Speaking of Butter Chicken, a friend and I went for lunch one weekday to one of the Cuba Street Indian restaurants and as we walked in the door, the waiter’s first words to us were “Butter chicken, beer?”.
I’m not sure what that says about him or us, but we didn’t order either, which seemed to disappoint.
My sister went to that restaurant (which would be Tulsi) once with a couple of friends and the maitre d’ asked them when they entered, “So – three butter chickens?” They were appalled and left. However, I was in there once, waiting by the counter, and watched as a group of four people came in and one by one ordered butter chicken for themselves.
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Feed: My Life in Curry, in reply to Russell Brown,
Ahem. Pepper. Which comes from the subcontinent. Including long pepper, which the Romans knew about. It was largely displaced by the more effective South American chilli pepper, but it’s not true that the Indians didn’t have a way to make a hot dish.
And mustard and garlic and ginger... They can all give food heat.
Incidentally, in my experience from living in India, many Indians don't like hot food. Chilli features in Indian food outside of India more than it does in India.
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Feed: My Life in Curry, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
Eating fruit *with* curry is widespread in South Asian cuisine; apparently the British just missed the step where you don’t cook it *in* the main meal…
Putting fruit in curry is perhaps not all that common in South Asian food, but it certainly isn't unknown. Both mango and banana are used in curries. Admittedly, they are likely to be unripe, which perhaps puts them on the other side of the culinary fruit–vegetable divide.
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Feed: My Life in Curry, in reply to Susannah Shepherd,
I remember that, and have been known to make it (usually with whole meat rather than sausages though). I was always under the impression it was a South African variant on curry although I have no idea why I think that.
Speaking of South African curry variants. During the World Cup, there was a South African food fair in central Wellington. One of the stalls was selling 'bunny chow', which although it was only described as curry with bread, I thought I would give it a try – probably because of the awesome name. The woman serving me took a small loaf of bread and cut a piece off. I was assuming then that I would get some curry with that piece of bread. But instead she hollowed out the loaf and poured the curry into that. So I left the stall with a loaf of bread brimful with curry. Nice enough, but big enough to feed a family.
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Japanese kare raisu – best hangover food ever.
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Feed: My Life in Curry, in reply to Russell Brown,
But the dhansak I used to enjoy in Clapham was probably Bangladeshi. It’s a totally different dish when I’ve had it here.
I'm no expert, but my understanding is that dhansak is Parsi, so probably originates from Mumbai or nearby.