Teiresias's New Writeups

oatmeal stout (person)

2008-01-07T23:25:10Z

Essentially a Stout brewed with a proportion of oatmeal replacing up to 5% of the more usual barley in the brew. This delectable type of beer was popularised in the early 19th Century due to its largely spurious 'health benefits' over other beers, to the point that it used to be prescribed to the elderly as a restorative.

Tasting Notes

In general, Oatmeal Stouts tend towards the medium to full bodied end of the scale. They have an almost unreal smoothness, richness and a slight sweetness to them, largely due to the higher levels of protein contained due to the use of oats. A personal favourite of mine is Samuel Smiths' Oatmeal Stout, which was one of the first to revive this style of beer in the late 1970s.

Sources include
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stout
http://beeradvocate.com/beer/style/69/

Brian Lara (person)

2004-08-21T17:06:34Z

Record-breaking Batsman and Captain of the West Indies Test Cricket team

Brian Lara is currently the best Test Match batsman in the World game, holding the record for the both the highest ever Test score and the highest domestic total. Not since the days of Don Bradman has anyone built massive scores as often and as quickly as Lara.

In the beginning ...

Brian Charles Lara was born on May 2nd 1969 in Cantaro, Santa Cruz on the island of Trinidad, as one of eleven children born to Bunty and Pearl Lara. In true West Indian style, cricket was the local obsession, and by the age of three, Brian already had a bat in his hands. His father was a huge cricket fan, and enrolled Brian in the local Harvard cricket clinic at the age of six.

At the tender age of 14 whilst playing in the the local U16 schoolboy season at home he scored 1,418 runs with 7 centuries in the course of a season, but he just failed to make the…

Plimsoll Line (thing)

2004-07-14T21:30:57Z

The History

In the 17th and 18th centuries the Industrial Revolution swept Britain. The British Isles became increasingly dependant on merchant shipping for imports of the raw materials needed to support her. These transport links became the veins and arteries of this fledgling trading empire, meaning more and more ships to futher and further flung ports, bringing back.

Such a demand for transport led to corners being cut by many merchants in their attempts to undercut the competition. In this era prior to the undersea telegraph lines, satellite communications and the Internet, very little was heard from a merchant vessel for weeks, or sometimes months, until it arrived at its destination, if it arrived at all. The number of ships sunk with the loss of all hand was becoming ever higher, to the point that the public began to become concerned, and demanded that something should be done.

Up stepped Samuel Plimsoll

…

doosra (thing)

2004-04-13T23:51:18Z

The 'doosra', an Urdu word meaning 'the other one', is a delivery in cricket made famous by Sri Lankan off-spinner, Muttiah Muralitharan. Murali is a finger spinner - in that he uses his fingers rather than his wrist to make the ball rotate, but with the doosra he also rolls his wrist over the ball, altering the direction of spin, and thus the behaviour of the ball.

Essentially the doosra ball is the moral equivalent of the better known googly ball, in that it spins in the opposite direction to the bowlers stock delivery. In the case of the googly the ball moves across the batsman from off stump to leg stump, in the opposite direction to a normal leg spinners delivery. The doosra works in the same manner, in that an off-spinners stock delivery usually moves from off to leg, whereas the new ball moves from leg to off.

There has been a great deal of controversy over the new delivery, mostly accusations that…

A Tourist Guide to Southwest England (place)

2004-04-06T20:01:26Z

This Green and Pleasant Land

Never a lovelier scene my eye has viewed
Than Dartmoor - that romantic solitude:
There mountain torrents rush through rock-strewed glens,
A hundred springs gush up from secret dens;
There, rock-piled slopes with rugged chasms yawn,
As if by thunderbolts asunder sawn; - Samuel Wills

From the Mists of Time The Tourist Trail

The West Country is home to some of the most stunning examples of natural beauty in the entire British Isles. Stretching from the rugged cliffs and surfing beaches of Cornwall to the windswept moorlands of Devon and Somerset, into the spectacular scenery of the Mendips and if you continue east you find the sea-stacks in Dorset, and to the north lies the megalithic treasures of Wiltshire.

There is more to the West Country than picture-postcard…

Isambard Kingdom Brunel (person)

2002-10-22T09:42:48Z

Isambard Kingdom Brunel, 1806 to 1859 - Engineer and Architect to the British Empire

In all that constitutes an engineer in the highest, fullest and best sense, Brunel had no contemporary, no predecessor. - -The Engineer, 1910.

The Early Years

Born in Portsea on 9th April 1806, to a French monarchist father, Sir Marc Brunel and his English wife, Sophie Brunel, neé Kingdom, Isambard Kingdom Brunel was the youngest of the couple's three children.

Engineering talent seemed to run in the family. Isambard's father, Marc was reponsible for inventing the first machine which could reliably manufacture block and tackle pulley systems, an idea which was sold to the British Admiralty and employed all over the world. To give his son a good start for his future engineering career, Marc had Isambard educated in both the French and English education systems, with his schooling being split…