Frozen Beef? Neigh, Lad

A Big Moke?

As we learn more and more about the processed food we have been eating and the deception - knowing or otherwise - practised upon us the consumers, the news is unremittingly bleak.

It now turns out that what we thought was horsemeat might in fact be donkey meat - a fraud within a fraud. Will this abuse of our trust never end? I fear not. Yet all is not bad news.

I am diametrically opposed to all forms of organised religion, as readers of my blog are probably aware. For me, religion is nothing more than an insidious means of controlling our thoughts and actions based on the non-existent rewards or punishments to be reaped in a completely unproven afterlife, while our spiritual "leaders" wheedle money out of our pockets. This  money would evidently be better spent on the material comforts of our present existence and, if we have money to spare, on the comfort of those around us.

Strangely, therefore, I find myself in the novel position of shopping in halal butchers' shops. At least there I know that lamb is lamb, that beef is beef, that chicken is chicken and that (were they to sell it, and please forgive my ignorance) horse is horse. This is a guarantee far greater than that of our local supermarkets because the halal butcher would not only be risking his profits but his very soul if he sold non-halal meat to his customers. In fact, as far as quality and price goes, the beef that I have bought there is better by far than anything to be found elsewhere in the city, as indeed is the service.

There are quite a few halal butchers here in Seville. Unfortunately, as far as I know, there are no kosher ones. If there were, I would probably go there too.

Second time round?

I would not, however, eat a kebab (or kybob as they called them in the 19th century) because recently I discovered that the cylinder of "meat" that we see revolving in our local kebab house has probably been imported frozen from Germany and, as a processed meat product, may not be all that it says it is. In fact, the Sevillian preference is for "beef", as lamb is not very popular here. There are obviously  proper, home-made kybobs where customers can actually see the individual stacked cuts of meat revolving, but in Seville we invariably see unprepossessing cylinders of preprocessed goo, looking for all the world as if they have already passed through the digestive tract of a giant.

On an ecological note, now that we have discovered that we have been unconsciously eating horse and donkey meat, perhaps we should now consider eating kangaroo. I am not being facetious - when I was a child in the early 1960's in Liverpool we often had tinned kangaroo stew and it was delicious - like beef but a lot cheaper. Numerous studies have shown that kangaroos do not fart methane and therefore do not contribute to the greenhouse gases in the same devastating way that beef cattle do. The meat is also a lot leaner and, as a result, healthier. If we eat unlabelled horse and donkey, then why not labelled, cheaper and environmentally-friendly kangaroo?

The only problem with halal and kosher butchers is that they obviously do not sell pork, and what non-Muslim carnivore doesn't enjoy their bacon, pork chops, sausages or cured ham? At the moment, I think that the present substitute meat scandals do not apply to pork.

Yet...

... What do cannibals call human meat?

Long Pig.

Perhaps we need to start checking up on our crematoria. I hope I am only speculating wildly.   Soylent Green, anyone?

Valencia Science Museum - within Spitting Distance of the Centre

Image courtesy of presseurop.eu

I've only been to Valencia twice - over 10 years ago. The last time I was there I visited the recently-built Science Museum, strikingly designed by architect Santiago Calatrava. At that time it seemed to be full of ... empty space, along with the obligatory jet fighter hanging from the ceiling on a piece of string. And a spit machine. 

In  the human body display section there was a spit machine. It explained what saliva was and what it did. The best was yet to come. If you put a paper cup beneath a spout, it gobbed out a dribble of (I hope) synthetic spit.  Either that or there was a salivating Valencian midget sitting in the stainless steel cabinet.  Strangely, there were no bins or instructions for the disposal of your newly-minted goblet of gob. Perhaps this was why the machine displayed liberal, bubbled, crusts of dried saliva. Whether they had been produced by the machine itself, or were the result of contributions selflessly donated by an enthusiastic public, is something upon which I'd prefer not to speculate.

Would you buy a used spit machine
from this man?

The youngest of my children went there again last year. Before she went I told her about the spit machine that she had been too young to appreciate on her first visit. When she arrived, full of great expect(or)ations, she made a beeline for the human body exhibits. Sadly, the spit machine was gone.

Now the still-crusted exhibit is probably gathering dust in  a corner of the museum's storerooms. In the streets of Valencia wanders a jobless, anonymous, salivating midget, evacuating his underemployed excess spittle in the form of pavement oysters. Phlegmatically accepting his fate, this wizened dehydrated homunculus muses on his glory days. Was he paid by the hour or by the litre? Alas, we shall never know.

Image courtesy of cadalyst.com

Therefore, there is now no real reason to visit the museum at all. It can go back to fulfilling what seems to be its principal use: an impressive backdrop to hundreds of futuristic car adverts. 

A Horse! A Horse! My Findus Is A Horse!

Although I was barely out of nappies at the time,  I remember the phrase "Where's the beef?" (in other words: Where's the substance of your policies?) being used by Walter Mondale's campaign in the primaries  to become the Democratic candidate for the 1984 US presidential elections. As we all know, it was the more memorable Republican Ronald Reagan who won the elections for US President but it was the phrase that stuck in my memory.

The history of the phrase, part of an advertising campaign for Wendy's hamburger restaurants, can be found here.

Sadly, thirty years on this slogan has crossed the Atlantic to haunt our supermarket aisles. In so much frozen food, where indeed is the beef? The greatest quantity of beefing, in my opinion, should be among consumers concerning how horsemeat has got into so many precooked  frozen products. We have yet to see if "fresh" products such as mince (ground beef) are affected too. Have a look at this Wikipedia entry on pink slime - a rather nasty beef (horse?)-based additive.  Here is an extact from the article (my bold and underlining):

In 2001, The United States approved the product for limited human consumption and had now begun to be used as a food additive to ground beef and beef-based processed meats as a filler at a ratio of usually no more than 25 percent of any product. The production process uses heat in centrifuges to separate the fat from the meat in beef trimmings. The resulting product is exposed to ammonia gas or citric acid to kill bacteria.

The product is sold in the U.S. to food companies which use it as a filler product in ground beef production. It was reported in March 2012 that approximately 70 percent of ground beef sold in U.S. supermarkets contained the additive at that time.

For a long time now there has been a lot of breast-beating over the death of the local High Street and the rise of the out-of-town shopping parks. I know that the expense of city centre parking is a great concern, but if there ever was a time when we should be thinking about shopping locally, that time is now. At our local butcher's we can actually see the part of the animal that we are buying and our mince will be minced in front of us. Perhaps we also need not only  to watch cooking programmes, but actually get back into the kitchen and cook.   

As yet here in Spain there seems to be very little reaction to what is going on in the Pan-European frozen food industry, even though the chains probably sell the same products as in GB but with different labels and packs. Perhaps people and supermarkets here are not so concerned because pre-cooked meals here are not the norm. Everyone here cooks every day and food in the freezer  tends to be mostly home-frozen food.

Real tomatoes from Los Palacios, almost as good as
the famous Worthing tomatoes.

Then there is the vegetarian option. I am a carnivore, red in tooth and claw, but is vegetarianism is a serious option for those who really want to be sure that what they eat is really what it is supposed to be? Obviously we can debate organic and non-organic farming, the use of pesticides etc. etc. etc. until the cows (horses?) come home. I only have this to say: I once did some work for a chemicals company that produced certified organic plant foods, de-stressors and other products. Some could even guarantee a certain shape and diameter of tomato! This only goes to show that our food  can be manipulated, whatever we decide to buy and eat.

What is the solution? Be an active consumer. Pick and choose, don't just pick up the nearest shrink-wrapped tray of "fresh" food. Shop locally. Buy your meat from a local butcher. "Ugly" fruit and veg will tend to be real, taste better and be cheaper. Tomatoes grown in Los Palacios, near Seville, for example, tend to be large, irregular and sometimes scarred, but they taste delicious - real. Not like the red bags of water to be bought in the supermarkets.

Image from retronaut.com

Ever since we came down from the trees, man has always hoodwinked and abused his fellows. This is nothing new. For example, bread in 19th-century Britain was adulterated with ground bones and chalk - perhaps it still is in smaller, unscrupulous bakeries. This is the latest in a long line of deceptions and will definitely not be the last. Three months from now we will be scandalised by something else. I believe that intellectuals call this the human condition.

Why Regrowing a Beard Is a Good Idea

Not so long ago, I wrote about growing a beard. I listed 10 disadvantages and 15 advantages. I now want to add one more to each list:
Disadvantage
You don't know what has happened to your face in the intervening years.
Advantage
You don't (want to) know what has happened to your face in the intervening years.

I do. On Monday morning I had nothing to do, except lie in bed tugging at my ... beard. Stupidly, nay, very stupidly, I yielded to the temptation of shaving it off. After taking a pair of hedge clippers to my face, burning out the electric motor and resorting to scissors and razors, I finally managed to hack my way through the jungle and reach the gleaming pearly skin.

It wasn't pleasant. Looking back at me from the mirror was a moon-faced old man!!! I'd only had the beard for 2 years, but my self-image - of which I was absolutely convinced - was that underneath all that hair there lurked a rather sprightly youngster, all cheekbones and jawline and quite possibly the same as the one that glared out of photos taken of me in my Gothic phase from the 1980s, with perhaps a little (OK, a lot) less hair on top.

Nothing of the sort. I saw my father. No man wants to be like his father, so this came to me as a bit of a nasty shock. And it was a shock to my children. I sent them a photo and asked them their opinion. Suffice it to say that it frightened my youngest daughter.

I've decided to re-grow my (much-missed) beard and keep it. Permanently. When I take off my tartan slippers for the last time, curl up my toes and am cremated, the place is going to stink of burnt (facial) hair. Never again will I commit such barbaric barbery. This spell of momentary madness has set me back at least a year in my fantasy of growing a beard long enough to plait. Ho hum.

Chris Huhne and Spanish Politics - A Rant (You have been warned!)

On the face of it, there doesn't seem to be much, if any connection. However, if we examine things a bit more closely,  it is the divergences that are more interesting.

We all know the story of Mr. Huhne persuading his then wife to take his speeding points on her licence, her subsequent revelation of the fact, his outright denial and then finally on the eve of his trial for perverting the course of Justice, his admission of guilt (saving the taxpayer, as well as himself, the expense of a trial) and his resignation as an MP. It has taken him 10 years to get this far, but at least in the end he came clean and did the honourable thing. He has not been sentenced yet, but it is highly likely that he will be sent down.

Now let's jump to Spain where resignation is a word that politicians do not understand even in Spanish (dimisión). There are so many scandals in Spanish political life at a local, regional, national and now, apparently, at central government level that I cannot be bothered to describe them, but here are a few links in English for you to look at: Bárcenas, Gürtel and Urdangarín - the King's son-in-law. And here's one in Spanish about a pensions and redundancy pay scam in Andalusia Party officials accept bribes on behalf of parties of every hue and skim off a bit of  cash, be it public or private, for their trouble - we're talking about millions of euros in a country that pays its unemployed nothing after 2 years and where some pensioners struggle to survive on a €400 monthly state pension.

It is not unusual for political parties to get low-interest loans from the banks and and then have the debt miraculously waived. I wonder why. Hmmm.

For years it has been my opinion  that democracy doesn't exist in Spain - the electorate just has the right to vote once every four years. The political classes meanwhile are answerable to no-one, certainly not to the citizens who are still voting according to which side their grandparents or great grandparents were on in the Civil War about which, incidentally, they know hardly anything because History is almost as dirty a word as resignation. In the villages they may know nothing about History, but everyone remembers who shot whose relatives and this still influences voting habits.

It's incredible, but the PSOE, the ruling Socialist party in the Andalusian Regional Government has been in power since the first elections to the regional parliament shrugging off scandal after scandal and wasting taxpayers' money on luxuries and self-aggrandisement.

In its fiefdoms, the right-wing PP is just as bad, as is the communist IU in its own areas. To give an example of the level of the parties' profligacy in regional government, until recently there were more official cars at the disposal of elected politicians and their hangers-on than there were official cars in the whole of the USA!

Now it turns out that, according to some sources, under-the-table payments go right the way to the top in the national PP government. The PSOE and other opposition parties are raucously demanding resignations and elections - demands that are falling on deaf ears -ears every bit as deaf as theirs were and are to their own scandals.

In a recent article, a Spanish author pointed out that the political parties always point the finger outside their party and never turn and look at the moral decay within their own political organisation. Greed and self-interest are the name of the game.

Spanish politics has never really been democratic. The electorate don't vote for a candidate, they vote for a closed list covering an area that returns several councillors, regional or national MPs or MEPs. Even if someone were to, gulp, resign they are immediately replaced by the next candidate on the list who hadn't been elected on voting day. Voters are, therefore, denied the chance to change their opinion in by-elections  and send the government a message because by-elections quite simply don't exist.

As a non-Spanish resident, I cannot vote in general elections, even though I pay taxes in Spain, but then again, why bother? The system has been designed to serve the interests of the political classes, not the people who vote for them - including quite a few of the 6 million unemployed.

Low Revs on Top Gear

Now please don't get me wrong; I am a staunch Top Gear fan and so much of a petrolhead that I had to give up smoking so that my brain wouldn't ignite, but I have to say that episode one of the new series was just a teeny bit on the tired side.

Taken from the Top Gear online magazine

They seem to have fallen into the trap of rehashing old ideas - something that I fear is what happens when TV programmes run out of steam, or in this case torques. The Pagani Huayra feature was classic TG while the rallying Bentley was excellent.
Unfortunately however, the P45 feature was flat, flat, flat. Nothing could ever come close to the original Peel P50 video. I remember  I laughed so much I feared I was going to have an asthma attack. This revisiting left me cold. Why bother? The usually wittily clever news section was pitiful as Hammond seemingly got his adolescent jollies from reading a child's book on tractors. Much "hilarity" was also wrung from the fact that now the VW Touareg's name does not exactly seem to be a wise choice.

I suppose there are only so many ways that you can pit a fast car against a man in a jetpack, helicopter, bobsleigh etc. Apparently there are only three types of joke. Let's hope that the spark of originality shown in the Bentley feature becomes a bonfire of enjoyment in the rest of the series.

Strange Beasts Take up Residence in the Shed

Laying the eggs for bookworms?

 Last night one of the three most beautiful women in the world sashayed into the shed to stay the night, bringing with her three strange beasts, one of which took residence on my wall, impervious to a good swatting with a rolled-up newspaper. Could it have anything to do with the fact that it's made of coconut shell?

On the wall and staying there. 

I have commissioned at least three of these ladybirds and plan to have them beetling across the wall, like the plaster ducks that used to be so popular in times gone by. I seem to remember that in Coronation Street the Ogdens had a set of them flying across their parlour "muriel". I have now taken delivery of the green one; the red one is the artist's and resides in her bedroom. As the supply of raw materials depends on someone else's ice-cream eating habits, the collection will, I feel, grow slowly.

Breakfast for the excessively
sweet-toothed

It is always a pleasure to spend time with your children, especially as they grow older and have their own interests, circles of friends etc. (see my previous blog  All I have is a photograph). We chatted for a while and then went off to sleep.

The following morning, bright and late, we went out and walked to the metro station where my daughter took the train back home to study for next week's exams.

It was a brief visit (at least it spurred me into cleaning the bathroom!) but we both enjoyed the time together and I'm looking forward to seeing her again in the next few days.

Pay me later.

Small businesses like this will never expand and

dominate food distribution, but they are 

the bedrock of the real economy and 

of local life

On BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Tuesday at 07.22 there was a report on the concept of fairness in chimpanzees. It was a fascinating interview and has something on what I want to comment on today.

This morning I went shopping in a local fruit shop, only spending €2.80. When I handed over a €50 note (a thing of great beauty and extremely rare in stricken Seville - almost unicorn-like I would venture to say), the greengrocer told me to pay him next time I was there. He waved away my suggestion to hold onto the goods while I went back to the shed and told me to pay him next time.

€2.80 is neither here nor there, so this might not seem worth writing about. But it is. It was only the second time that I have been there; the last time I went was over a month ago. Also it shows at the most basic level that all human relationships are based on trust. Neither must we forget that many a mickle makes a muckle. 

Good, honest produce at affordable 

prices (6kg of oranges 

for €2.50). Unlike horseburgers passed off as beef,

apples and pears are easily and  visually distinguishable 

from each other.

Abuse of that trust leads to the economic situation that we find ourselves in today. This really does not affect the financial masters of the universe who have dropped us in it - after all they are still getting their bonuses and making money hand over fist while the wealth gap between them and the rest of society yawns ever wider. They have been doing the equivalent of buying in the local shops with an unchangeable €50 note then reneging on the deal while asking for another €5 note so as not to break into the fifty.

Yet the key to social cohesion is that normal

people still trust each other. My greengrocer, you Dear Reader, our friends and I myself,  when I pay the €2.80 that I owe, are the true unsung heroes of humanity. I think we all deserve a pat on the back.

Why Growing a Beard is a Good Thing

As the hair recedes from the top of my head, it sprouts from my chin. Initially, MBWNMI, or my beard was not my idea (very bad joke, sorry), but I soon warmed to it as I weighed up the disadvantages:
1) It makes you look old.

2) You dribble soup on it. Here's a solution
3) Ladies, be careful not to annoy people with long Monty Python sketch quotations (See 1 & 2 below).
4) It can drive you crazy at night if you fall foul of the "beard inside or outside the sheets?" conundrum that so exercised Captain Haddock in the Tintin books.
5) At first it itches.
6) It needs trimming.
7) It frightens children (though this is not necessarily a disadvantage).
8) Birds nest in it - I believe that some old gentlemen in Switzerland boast impressive cuckoo beards.
9) Some beards just look stupid.
10) People might mistake you for Jesus.


And the advantages:

From incrediblethings.com

1) Nowadays it's an equal opportunities facial adornment.
2) If you're a woman, you can wear your she-beard and pretend you're in The Life of Brian stoning of the adulteress scene. Or if you have a real beard, you can hide it behind the she-beard.
3) Soup dribbled onto your beard doesn't stain your shirt, but you might have to pick out the bits.
4) It's economical. Razors and shaving foam last longer because there is less face to shave.
5) You can use the razor economies to shave your back and, if necessary, the palms of your hands.
6) It's cosmetic. If you have a double chin, it may help disguise it. Not my case, I hasten to add.
7) If you're wanted by the police, you can shave it off and look baby-facedly innocent. Ditto.
8) You can play with it when you're bored.
9) And if you're lucky, seem very intellectual too.
10) People might mistake you for Jesus.

11) You can pull individual strands out and use them to tickle/annoy your partner or children - this is best done on their neck or back or up their nostrils when they are half asleep.

12) When it gets long enough, you can stick part of it in your mouth and disgust family and friends (best done in private), but don't forget to wash it afterwards. I think that as far as disgust-your-family activities go, it ranks second only to tricks with false teeth and glass eyes.
13)  When it gets even longer you can have an impressive goatee.
14) When it gets even longer than that, you can plait it and pretend you're a Viking.
15) When you plait it, you can attach little parachutes to the end and let it stream out behind you when you're on your motorbike (not really recommended at high speeds and when you've got someone on the pillion).

That is why, on balance, growing a beard is definitely a Good Thing.

A Sunday Stroll...

... is a good way to arrange your thoughts, enjoy a good read in a park and prepare yourself for the rigours of the working week.

It can also be full of surprises, good or bad. This Sunday's surprise was indeed a pleasant one. The Nervión quarter of Seville is a mix of the modern and the traditional as far as architecture is concerned. There are areas of low-rise houses and others of the usual modern dreck, all jostling cheek by jowl.

To get to a local park I decided to walk parallel to the modern avenues, through the smaller, turn-of-the 20th-century streets and found this:

Once a carpenter's, now a restaurant 

 As we can see from the tiling at the top of the façade, the ground floor was originally a carpentry. Probably the other floors were flats occupied by the business owner's family. This was quite common in Seville - a whole bourgeois family building, owning and occupying a large building with the commerce on the ground floor and the others being given over to accommodation. In fact, I have a friend who is the member of one such family. This hearkens back to the medieval days of the merchant living above the shop with his whole household of family, servants and apprentices.

This particular business was built in what is known as the regionalist style - a reinterpretation of the traditional Andalusian / Moorish architecture - hence the arched windows and the square-roofed tower to the right. On the left we can also see a smaller, domed, tower - the dome being covered in tiles.

I did not go in, but I assume that the restaurant will occupy what was once an open courtyard with a fountain in the middle

A rather grand entrance - and probably 

eminently practical when the carpentry was in

operation.

Surprisingly, the building is in a narrow street  that is only  wide enough to allow a single lane of traffic and had it not been facing another perpendicular street, I would not have been able to take the picture of the whole façade. 

Strangely enough, the street has no name on Google  maps. If you are interested, it is the street behind, and parallel to, Luis de Morales and is called Santo Domingo de la Calzada.

Apophis 2029/2036: WE ARE DOOMED!!! - a rather knotty problem.

I remember not so long ago hearing about a sect here in Seville, that, based on the famous Mayan bits of string, predicted that the Earth was going to be destroyed by an exoplanet called Colibobulo, or something similar. At that time, according to the High Priest of Colibobulo, it was hiding behind the Sun getting ready to pounce upon us in a most uncivilised manner just when we got round the corner, rather like a celestial footpad.

The High Priest of the sect persuaded his victims to hand over their worldly goods in exchange for salvation (can you name any religion or sect that doesn't?). Oh, how we laughed last December! Now it turns out that there's a 300-metre diameter asteroid called Apophis that came quite close to us last night. You can hear an interesting talk about it on BBC Radio 4's Material World  here. 

Apparently the asteroid comes back in 2029,  2036 and at a later date that doesn't concern me because I'll be well dead (providing I survive the other two dates). I'll be rather miffed if we get hit in '29 or '36 considering the amount I've paid into my pension, but at least in that case my kids won't have to pay for my cremation - or indeed theirs!.

PS. According to the pattern in my Fair Isle sweater, the world will run out of custard in 2134. HORROR!!!!

January 6th

Here in Spain children get their presents on January 6th which jolly well may be a  good tradition but it has its drawbacks. Classes usually begin the day after. This year Spanish children have two whole days instead of one to break their toys / drop their iPhones down the toilet / complain that Juanito has got a better present than they have etc. etc. etc..

The obvious advantage of having an English father and a Spanish mother is that my kids get two opportunities to break the presents and / or complain. Luckily now they do neither - these days it's me who breaks the prezzies, but  who could ever complain about the presents that our children give us? When children realise that Father Christmas / the Three Kings do not exist, they start to buy or make and give their parents presents. Such things are to be treasured for what they represent - filial love and loyalty.

Last year I was given a Kindle by my three. As a bibliophile and reading addict, they could not have thought of a better present. It is my constant companion on train rides, flights etc.

With children, it definitely is the thought that counts - even if they give you a diamond-encrusted Rolex. I once had a rather bitter, twisted workmate who thought that his children owed him everything. After all, he had given them the greatest gift of all - life, hadn't he?. Sadly for him, he never did realise that, emotionally, children give far more than they receive. The fleeting seconds of orgasmic pleasure are nothing compared with the lifetime of love and satisfaction that children, whatever their age, are capable of giving their parents. My three, like yours, are no exception.