Simon Rumble’s blog

There is one consolation to the weather getting cold: I get to make more delicious but ridicuously easy casseroles thrown together with whatever I have lying around. Last night was one such night.

Most people probably don't have loads of cider lying around, but I was in Somerset last weekend and stocked up. The thyme in the window box died of neglect while we were away a month or so ago, so it's kinda equivalent to dried. The sage is still going, so that's fresh.

I made this last night and it was excellent. Now I'm going to enjoy the leftovers for dinner tonight!

Cider and sausage casserole

• 4 fresh pork sausages
• 100g diced chopped pancetta
• 1 large onion
• 3 large carrots, roughly chopped
• 1 large courgette, roughly chopped
• 2 cups green lentils (washed)
• 1 tbspn chicken stock concentrate
• ~1 L traditional west country cider
• sprig of thyme
• 6 sage leaves
• 2 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
• ground pepper
• worcestershire sauce
• 1 tbspn cornflour

Brown the sausages over high heat in (just brown them, you're not cooking them). Remove to casserole dish. Brown the pancetta and remove to the casserole dish. Roughly slice the onion and soak up the fat from the sausages and pancetta, cooking until the onion is slightly browned. Get the oven on to 160C.

Deglaze the pan with some of the cider, scraping up all the lovely goodness from the cooking. Bung everything except the cornflour into the casserole dish and fill with cider until the liquid level is just above the solids. Season with pepper and a hefty glug of worcestershire sauce.

Place in the oven for a couple of hours, stirring occasionally. After one hour, mix the cornflour with a small amount of extra cider, until smooth, and add to the casserole to help it thicken.

I served it over cous cous, because that's what we had in the cupboard. Would work equally well (better, even) with mash, rice, whatever.

Last night, I sent a text message to Holly around 19:30. It arrived this morning around 07:30. Twelve hours to send about twelve bytes of payload, at a cost of 3p. It's about the most expensive data transmission system in the world, and one of the least reliable.

For this reason, I'm going to start keeping track of when this happens and demand a refund. The cost to the company will be much much more than the 3p paid for the message. Maybe they'll get the message. Holly and I are on the same phone provider, so they can't even try passing the buck to a third party, not that that would be valid anyway since they're the ones charging for the service.

Maybe you should start complaining too?

Who would have thought that Arial Sharon, the butcher of Sabra and Shatila could start to look like a peacemaker. Could it possibly be that the man has realized that humiliating the Palestinians is never going to bring stability? I'm not convinced, but will watch with interest.

Israeli politics is bizarre for someone from the Westminster style of politics. I'm used to stable governments and parties with stable (ossified?) positions. In Israel, with its proportional representation, you instead get rapidly changing alliances and policies. Compromise: the essential fuel of democracy. It's chaotic and weird, but fascinating.

Australia won and we've qualified for the World Cup finals for the first time in 32 years! How fucking great is that?

A video someone sent me of the fateful penalty.

Today is a national day of protest against the Australian government industrial relations "reforms". For those not up-to-date, they're taking away a huge swathe of rights from Australian workers including nationally-agreed industry award rates, the right to appeal against unfair dismissal if you work for an employer with less than 100 employees, and remove penalty rates for Sundays, public holidays and unsociable hours.

Government departments have warned their staff that they could face fines and other penalties if they attend.

Here's the thing I don't get about these anti-strike laws: how can it be illegal to withdraw your labour? Isn't that just slavery under another name?

On this day thirty years ago, the most important event in Australian political history of my lifetime happened, and I was only four months old.

After the opposition Liberal (that is, conservative--yeah, weird isn't it?) party held the country to ransom by blocking supply, the unelected representative of our unelected head of state sacked the government. While, obviously, I don't remember these momentous events, they have shaped the history of my country.

What I think was the most disappointing aspect of the entire affair was that in the resulting election, the Australian people rewarded the party that had held a gun to their heads by making Fraser prime minister.

In a couple of weeks I'm running a murder mystery adventure. They're live role-playing events and lots of fun. Everyone dresses up as their character, someone gets killed and we all race around trying to find the murderer.

I've run these before and what you want to do is send out the character pages to the participants a few weeks beforehand, so they can dress appropriately and think about their character. Normally what I do is split the PDF (they're invariably PDFs, sold online) into each character and email it to the person playing that character.

So far so easy. Except... this time we bought off a company called Freeform Games and it seems they use PDF password protection. Digital Rights Management. What this means is that I _can't_ split the PDF. They expect me to print the pages out and get them to people -- all over London.

Fortunately we don't have the DMCA in Europe, yet so I can use tools to crack it. Gotta really hunt around to find the tools though. Found em -- thank you Skylarov!

I won't be buying off this company again!

The UK media seems to be focussing on the lack of integration of these kids into French society. I think they're more integrated than they appear. After all, they're taking their grievances to the streets, rioting and breaking shit. Not very French.

Riding past Madge's place it seems the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, is on a state visit. Chinese flags on The Mall, and coppers everywhere.

I'd love to see the conversation between Hu and Bliar:

Tony: So Hu, how do you reconcile using socialist rhetoric while running a corporatist, totalitarian state? More tea?
Hu: You know I was going to ask you the same thing, Tony.

British television has some very annoying habits. We won't go into the running of their best programming on Friday and Saturday nights, and their worst on Sundays. Or the fact they can't seem to start a movie at a reasonable hour.

What's more annoying is that whenever they run movies, they seem impelled to stop it halfway through for a news break. Why?

In the past it's just been ITV who did this. Considering there's now an entire channel devoted to ITV's news, why do they feel the the to destroy the flow of their movies? But just now, watching a really crappy film on BBC3, they did it too. So WTF is the point of BBC News 24 then?

Can't we just have a movie run all the way through?