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Britfood

Food & Drink

Now that we’ve all somewhat recovered from the gluttony of Thanksgiving and all the leftovers have finally been polished off, I believe it’s safe to approach the topic of food once more.

Some research was done in Britishland to see how its inhabitants view the country’s “traditional” dishes.  The foods were ranked on how the respondents placed them on a tier (“God” all the way down to “Crap”). (At this point, my Murkin Readers should refrain from saying “It’s ALL crap” because that would be wrong, and you would be at risk of being labeled “ignorant” by the owner of this here back porch.)

Here are the results:

Now, I have tasted every single dish* in the above, and in fact, I grew up eating a lot of them.  Some are not only beloved, but can be regarded as part of the extreme top of Kim’s Food Triangle.   (*I have never touched Jellied Eels, whose existence can only be ascribed to Satan’s Work, and the thought of ingesting the slimy shit makes me throw up in my mouth, and not a little either. )

Nevertheless, I beg to differ with many of the rankings, thus:

Some explanation ad comment:

  • Crumpets (a.k.a. English muffins) are really just toast, i.e. an accompaniment to a meal.  (Crêpes are another matter altogether, but they’re European, not British.)
  • Cottage- and shepherd pies taste like bland gray hamburger meat covered with mashed potato.  Ugh.
  • Steak ‘n kidney pie could easily make my “God” tier, come to think of it, as could bangers ‘n mash.
  • Welsh rarebit:  chunks of crispy toast in hot beer cheese with fresh tomato pieces… nom nom nom.  If I want to lure my kids over for dinner, I only have to say that this will be on the menu.
  • All the lower-tier dishes pretty much belong there, and I will only eat them out of politeness to my host.
  • I have no idea why sausage rolls weren’t included;  in fact their omission makes the entire study even more suspect than it already is.

All the rest should be self-explanatory.

Oh, and by the way: a “ploughman’s lunch” is not  as pictured in the chart;  made properly, it consists of a cheese roll, an apple and a pint of beer — being what would fit in a farm worker’s lunch bag without falling to pieces and/or messing up the inside of the bag.  I don’t know where they got all that other crap, but it’s bullshit.

Here’s my personal Trifecta Of Yummy:

Brekkie:

Lunch:

Dinner:

Were it not for the fact that Doctor Killjoy believes that weighing 500 lbs is A Bad Thing, I’d eat that lovely stuff each day forever.  With a sausage roll for tea.

Not In My Day

Men & Women

Good grief.  I admit to being not easily shocked by people’s vicissitudes nowadays, but even so, this one left me gaping:

A married history teacher slept with at least five pupils at one of South Africa’s most elite schools, an investigation has revealed.
Fiona Viotti, 30, who is the niece of former South African national rugby coach Nick Mallett, was found to have slept with the boys at Bishops Diocesan College in Cape Town between 2013 and 2019.
The school called in lawyers to investigate Viotti after an 18-year-old pupil claimed he had been involved in an ‘intense’ sexual relationship with her, saying she became controlling when he tried to end it.
Investigators hired by the school found that she had been bedding pupils for at least six years, targeting boys who were over the age of consent.
Ms Viotti is also known to have filmed explicit videos of herself which were circulated within the school and online, but investigators failed to determine who she initially sent the footage to.
The probe found that she breached school codes and the code of ethics laid down by the SA Council of Educators [ya thank?–K.] likely meaning she will never teach again.
However, she will not face any disciplinary action from the school since she has already resigned. [!!!!!]

Needless to say, hubby has ditched her, and she is “receiving psychiatric help”.  Stupid bitch.

What makes this case interesting is that she’s a total babe, which would make her irresistible to most men, let alone callow adolescents — and yet she’s a pervert withal.  (Oh, of course  she’s a pervert;  if this had been a 30-year-old male teacher shagging his teenybopper girl students, he’d now be in chains [2,000-word rant about double standards deleted].)  Oh, and I should point out that in South Africa, the age of consent is sixteen.

En passant, I should also point out that Bishops D.C. is indeed one of the top high schools in South Africa (almost on a par with my alma mater  St. John’s College).  But clearly they do a better — or worse, depending on your viewpoint —  job of teacher recruitment than we did.

No Surprises There

Education

Like we couldn’t see this one coming:   we suck.

Results of the 2018 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) found American teens showed no actual improvement in reading, math, and science compared to the 2015 results.

Our ranking improved, though. Why?

The ranking of U.S. students improved only because the scores of students in other countries dropped.

So we’re getting dumber at a slower rate than the rest of the world’s kids?  How nice.  And guess what?

As Education Week reported, PISA reading results indicate American teens are able to comprehend the main idea and draw simple inferences in a medium length text, but comprehension and comparison skills when other texts and ideas are introduced – so-called critical thinking skills – are lacking.
Despite a decade of the Common Core State Standards, an Obama-era progressive education reform that was touted as one that would improve students’ critical thinking and eliminate the achievement gap between white and minority students, U.S. public schools appear to be failing in both areas.

So Common Core is failing… along with just about every other nostrum provided by the education establishment, most notably No Child Left Behind, which should now be renamed “Every  Child Left Behind”.  Here’s some more on the topic.

But all is not lost:  I see that SecEd Betsy DeVos has managed to shed 600 useless functionaries from the Education Department in just a couple of years.  Go, Betsy, go!  MOAR reductions!!!!

Neck What?

Grooming

I see that Insty is all over this thing called  “neck gaiters” — and I had to follow the link he posted just to see what the hell he was talking about.

Oh.  What we used to call “neck warmers”, I suppose.  Of course, people of my age have always had neck warmers, only we called them “scarves”.  Here’s your humble host, wearing one of the objects in question:

You will note that the thing is quite long, so that you can wind the thing around your neck multiple times if the weather turns Minneapolis on you, or else loosen it if a winter’s day in Rome turns out warmer than expected (as was the case above).

And the scarf’s advantage over the gaiter is that if your neck starts getting hot, you can simply loosen it to adjust the degree of warmth, whereas the gaiter is kind of a binary thing — it’s either on or off.

Failing that, of course, you can always wear a gilet with a zippable high collar:

…which I seldom zip all the way up because it’s a little tight — kinda like one of them gaiter things — and if I (literally) get too hot under the collar, I have to unzip it, whereupon my neck is exposed the the cold — once again, just like a neck gaiter.

Now that I think of it, the problem may be with the word “gaiter”, which to me has always referred to the things we wore over our army boots in high school:

…so using a footwear word to refer to something one wears around the neck is akin to calling gloves “foot-socks”.

Anyway, I think I’ll stick to my scarves.  I have about half a dozen of them, ranging from thick wool to loosely-woven cotton — and differently-colored withal, to add a touch of color to my otherwise-quite monochromatic outfits.  Plus, I’ve worn them in cold weather for decades, and I’m not one for change.

Not even if Insty likes neck gaiters.

Ditto

Conservatism

Yeah, you can count me among those people who no longer go to the Drudge Report for daily news.

I don’t know when it happened, but I think Matt decided that the role of his website is to be the “loyal opposition” to whoever’s in power.  Obama as POTUS?  Run links to anti-Obama events.  Trump as POTUS?  Ditto.

Or maybe, as a homosexual man, he believed the propaganda that Trump was going to set up gulags for fairies, hence his change of attitude.

That’s fine, I suppose.  Trouble is, I just couldn’t be less interested about another anti-Trump news outlet:  we’ve got plenty enough already with CNN-CBS-MSNBC-ABC-NBC-NYT-WaPo etc.  So like many, I’ve switched to WhatFinger News for my news jollies.  To be honest, I prefer the old Drudge Report because he always showed both sides of the aisle — but he doesn’t anymore.

Hell, I go to Insty more often than any of them, really.