Albert Herring's New Writeups

Harissa (thing)

2012-06-19T09:03:44Z

Another variant, similar to Sneff's version 2 but with the red pepper more dominant. This is (with the stated quantities) fairly mild, eminently usable as a dipping sauce by people who do not want to treat eating as an endurance contest. Trivially adapted from something provided by our veg box people as a garnish/ingredient to be stirred into carrot soup, but it is extremely versatile and goes with or in all sorts of shit.

3 red peppers, roasted, peeled and de-seeded
6 chilli peppers, dried and soaked or fresh, or more to taste
1/2 tsp ground cumin (ideally freshly roasted and ground)
1/2 tsp ground coriander seeds (likewise)
1/2 tsp ground caraway seeds (ditto)
1/4 tsp smoked paprika
1/2 tsp salt
1 tbsp lemon juice or more to taste
1 tbsp red wine vinegar
a couple of cloves of garlic

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Anzio (review)

2012-01-22T13:42:45Z

Apartment bookings are down 50% on the Lazio coast this year, apparently. The Guardia di Finanza have been raiding the private beaches for tax evasion, too. But the bagnino seems cheerful enough as he warns us where the currents are.

The best bakery is down the alley to the right of the church. Take a ticket, and you probably have time to get a coffee at the cafe next door before you get served, where there's always a Le Monde on the table if you want to try and find out stuff that the locked-down media of Berlusconi's Italy isn't talking about.

It's not a resort for foreigners; they came through 70 years ago and not many came back. Send the family to the apartment for the whole of August, or commute back and forwards from Rome, however you work it. See the bagnino, rent a beach umbrella and a couple of deckchairs. Say hallo to the neighbours. The sempiternal Italian seaside summer settles into a rhythm that has a melancholy all its own.…

Are personal messages protected by copyright? (idea)

2009-07-29T22:46:49Z

Aside from copyright (and abuses and highly dubious interpretations of it), some consideration in cases of this kind also needs to be given to privacy laws and rights in various jurisdictions. I don't know much about rights to privacy in the USA where the site is based, but within countries which are signatories of the European Convention on Human Rights, this case would seem to me (IANAL) to be covered by article 8 of that convention:

Article 8 â Right to respect for private and family life

1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.

2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the

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Two-word poem (poetry)

2007-11-20T19:57:12Z

M'illumino
d'immenso

This is the entire text of the poem "Mattina", by Giuseppe Ungaretti, subtitled "Santa Maria la Longa il 26 gennaio 1917"; the more astute amongst you will appreciate that this means that it was written in wartime, and obsessive fact checkers will be able to locate this close behind the front line - Ungaretti was a serving infantry officer at the time. It is, perhaps by virtue of its brevity but not purely so, familiar to most students of 20th-century Italian literature; Ungaretti always tended towards the concise, but this is the apogee of that tendency. It is arguable whether it constitutes two or four words, but it is certainly two lexemes.

A simple translation into English is predictably going to be completely inadequate - the first line is both "I light (myself) up" and "I am/become enlightened", and the second (which is not a…

June 8, 2007 (personal)

2007-06-08T14:11:37Z

I've been a cyclist all my life. My parents met through a cycling club. My childhood - well, maybe when I've worked through the associated traumas I'll write more about that some other time, but it involved being cold and wet a lot and going a lot of places none of my peers had ever heard of. I measured out my adolescence in gradually improving 10 mile time trial times. Through my twenties I tried and mostly failed at most sorts of racing, and organized a few races as well. I worked as a courier in London for a time. I revived my university club for a while, and managed to be British Universities' 100 mile time trial champion (against fairly modest opposition) before going and racing (at a very low level) in Italy for a short while. I didn't get around to getting a driving licence until a couple of years ago.

Then in 1994 or so I got a job in Brussels as a translator, and it all started to fall apart a bit (although I was one of…

who vs. whom (recipe)

2007-04-18T00:39:33Z

A descriptivist view, or what actually happens

The most common current patterns of usage for "who" and "whom" in most "standard" English speech have diverged from the traditional grammatical distinction between "who"=subject and "whom" = direct and indirect object, described in various other writeups here. In practice, in any but the most formal sorts of speech and very frequently in writing, the situation for both the interrogative and the relative personal pronouns is that:

"who" is universally used in subject/nominative roles ("Who ate all the pies?") as an interrogative pronoun, and almost universally - except for occasional instances of hypercorrection - when it is a relative pronoun ("I met a man who ate all the pies.") regardless of register.
"whom" is generally used for an indirect object

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