purplecat

B. may (or may not) feature in a new two-part BBC series, Secrets of the Jurassic Dinosaurs. The first episode will be on BBC 2 (and iPlayer) on Sunday at 8pm: details here.

I believe, when filming, he had both forgotten his shaver and fallen over and cut open his head so he may not look quite his normal self if he has made it into the programme and not merely ended up on the cutting room floor.

Over the summer the Teenager, who I perhaps should start calling Marmalade Sparrow, since that is her chosen web handle, put a huge amount of time and effort into drawing a comic. My understanding is that she has ideas for an ongoing story but this initial set of pages represents a prologue. I think its pretty amazing, but even allowing for bias, it represents a huge amount of work. I'm not sure I would have dumped it as two sets of 11 pages on Tumblr but then what do I know about Tumblr?

Here it is for those interested: Pages 1-11 and Pages 12-22.

I got this recipe off the internet as a carrot-based recipe. Our opinion was that it had promise but was too carroty (and too ricey). This is the modified version which just got enthusiastically hoovered up by B (though if he hadn't given up on counting calories for the day I suspect he wouldn't have eaten it all - for those interested in such things I reckon it works out as around 120 calories per 100g).

( Picture under the cut )

Serves 2 as a main.

1 tbsp cumin seeds
200g carrots, sliced
200g parsnips, sliced
100g turnip, sliced
1 onion, finely chopped
1 tin chickpeas, drained
1 tbsp olive oil
125ml vegetable stock
1 tbsp lemon juice
1/3-1/2 cup dried rice
1/4 cup sunflower seeds
30g feta cheese, crumbled or chopped as your cheese allows
Pepper to season

1. Preheat oven to 190 degrees C.
2. Grind the cumin seeds to a powder (toast first if you feel keen)
3. Combine the sliced vegetables, onion, chickpeas, olive oil and cumin in a roasting dish. Stir to coat everything with cumin and oil.
4. Pour over the stock and lemon juice, cover with tin foil, and bake in the oven for 30 minutes.
5. If using a rice cooker, put the rice on to cook around now, otherwise start cooking the rice after about 25 minutes.
6. Remove foil and return to the oven for about 10-15 minutes.
7. Remove from the oven, toss in the rice, sunflower seeds and feta cheese. Season with pepper.

In other news. The NuWho rewatch is suspended until NLSS Child feels up to Blink. She has seen bits of this in the Internet and a few years ago it led to a whole "I can't take showers because of falling statuary" panic, made the more bizarre because we own no statues, let alone any in the bathroom. She has agreed to watch it on a weekend morning (it having been made clear that not washing isn't an option), but I'm away this weekend so it may have to wait until next weekend.

Meanwhile, she has to read a number of different sorts of book for school, and has selected The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy as her humour book (a choice endorsed by her teacher). This has led to a certain amount of defensiveness on tame layman's part. He is currently forcibly playing her the radio series on the grounds it is superior and she should listen to it before reading the book.

B. spent quite a bit of time last year filming a TV series with Phil Manning. It's Phil's series but B. is playing sidekick in, we think, a couple of episodes (one on dinosaur locomotion and one on size). I gather it was pitched as "Top Gear meets Dinosaurs" and is an attempt to break away from the talking heads style of a lot of recent documentaries. It's going to be showing on National Geographic Wild channel, starting on Tuesday (3rd Feb) at 8pm. We don't get National Geographic Channel but I thought I'd flag the fact up for anyone out there who does. No idea whether B. will appear in the first episode or not.

This is a publicity page for the series

This entry was originally posted at http://purplecat.dreamwidth.org/33453.html.

Article in the Daily Mail (oh! the embarrassment)

As far as I can work out, one of B's postdoc's took a video of a walking Gorilla as part of a project on modelling locomotion. B. then showed it to some people making a documentary on Bigfoot who asked if they could use it. B said they needed to ask the zoo for permission first (the original permission for filming was for scientific use only). The zoo asked if they could use it too and put it on their YouTube feed where it suddenly became surprisingly popular and attracted the attention of such prestigious publications (*ahem*) as the Daily Mail.

B. is happy anyway, Daily Mail notwithstanding.

This entry was originally posted at http://purplecat.dreamwidth.org/32982.html.

This year, following a random link from neadods, I have followed the Organised Christmas: Houseworks Holiday Plan.

Well, I say, followed but I rapidly concluded that the people the website was aimed at had considerably more free time, and less need of a plan for organisation than I did. My favourite bit of entirely ignored advice was the suggestion that you make a decoration plan for each room of the house, not just for Christmas, but for your Autumn Theme house decoration and your Halloween Theme house decoration and so forth.

Anyway the tips that were definitely worth following, for my future reference and in case anyone is interested, were:

( Notes for next year )

NB. We had a lovely Christmas, and though I'm complaining about our families' joint ability to mess up our plans it was, in fact great to have a house full of people just generally having a good time... and I did manage to persuade them to delay the pancake making until Boxing Day so the kitchen was marginally less chaotic at 8am on Christmas morning than it threatened to be.