Due to misplanning we were left with 500 g of fresh Brussels sprouts that expire today.
What should we do with them? We had planned to eat fish, but that doesn't match. With a
bit of web searching (Google Gemini is my
friend) I found this recipe: fry them and glaze them with honey and soya sauce:
The usual issues, of course: the quantities. The recipe called for an avoirdupois pound of
sprouts, close enough to 500 g not to make any difference. And of course the glaze was all
in cups and spoons. 3 tbsp honey, 2 tbsp soya sauce, 2 tbsp of
water and (watch carefully) 1 tsp of cornflour. How do I convert that to real units? A US
tablespoon contains 15 ml, so the water and soya sauce are relatively clear. And the honey?
It seems that a good median density is 1.41 (coincidentally √2), so my honey would be 63 g.
I wonder how people measure honey with tablespoons.
The big surprise was how much of an area the sprouts take up. I had to use my largest
frying pan, 36 cm, and barely got them all in:
My Brussels sprouts recipe required 100 g ½ cup of sliced
onions. I thought finely sliced. Idea for a mandolin. But which one? My old slicer
(white plastic on top) is too fine, so I used the new one:
The Brussels sprouts recipe refers to Brussel sprouts, not Brussels sprouts. That seems
wrong to me. Is it an Americanism? Off to ask some AI bot, probably Google Gemini, and was told that yes, “Brussels sprouts”
is correct. The city is called Brussels, not Brussel.
Oh. What a short-sighted answer. Presumably it's also never referred to as Bruxelles or Brüssel.
My Brussels sprouts recipe wasn't
really enough for a dinner. Looking through my recipe
index, came across this recipe for
chicken and dòufu stir-fry. It seems that I was quite happy with it, but that was
10 years ago, and I
don't seem to have made it since.
After last week's call, I had no fewer than three reminders of a call at 13:00 today to
discuss upgrading our PV installation, two of them from a number (0483 909 812) that was reported as “DB Realty”. Today the call came as planned from a
number that wasn't identified (0451 532 572). The caller identified himself as Andrew
Parker and may have mentioned his affiliation, but I didn't get it. He wasn't from
Modern Earth Energy, but some
kind of consultant to help me avoid the fly-by-night (my term) nature of the industry. They
would also not be doing the work: that would be some company in Ballarat.
He went on to say that based on my usage, I would need an additional 6.8 to 7.1 kW,
generating an average of 32 to 35 kWh per day (optimistic based on my records; on a good day
in mid-summer I get 50 kWh from my 10.8 kW array, and currently it's just shy of 30 kWh),
meaning that I would have no electricity bills from October to April, and an average of $30
a month in the winter.
And that was the sum total of his analysis of the installation. No discussion of additional
batteries, which are essential if I want to make it through the night.
The main issue was financing. It seems that I'm eligible to (another) state rebate of $1400
and a federal rebate of $3150. The rest will be financed by a weekly payment of $34.32 for
72 months, which will cover the system, installation, 20 year warranty and inspections. No
indication if there's anything that it won't cover. That corresponds to about $1,785 per
year, considerably less than the $2,450 that I currently pay for electricity.
And they could do all the work on Thursday! They don't even know what the work is! At no
point did anybody ask me about what we have installed, though they were aware that there was
something. And he expected it to get done on a single day, where it took Effective Electrical two days to do a normal
installation! And he didn't ask who did the previous installation; all other things being
equal, they should get the preference. Somehow the experts are missing. And (Maundy) Thursday! When do you not
want to do potentially difficult work? On the day before a long weekend! In the end we put
it down to next Tuesday, though my guess is that they won't do much more than take a look,
scratch their heads and go away again to consider.
The installation will be underwritten by a company called Brighte, pronounced “bright”, and he needed personal
details to make the application. The usual nonsense: name, address, date of birth, driver
license number, including that completely illegible number on the back, credit card
number. Damn, I don't give my card number over the phone! But clearly this bloke is
legitimate, or doing a very involved scam. So I gave the old ANZ card number. I'll still have to
monitor the transactions frequently.
As promised, almost immediately a call back from Brighte, which my phone refused to accept.
No retry, just voice mail, which I had to listen to 4 times to get the details: call 1300
274 448, go through an endless list of voice menu choices and quote a six-digit number.
Somehow that worked, and I was connected to Nina, who went through all the things all over
again and pointed out things that Andrew should have told me but didn't: they charge $2.30
per week for the financing (included in the quoted $34.32) and $75 at the beginning. The
total sum to pay would be a suspicious-sounding $9,990, which on further calculation ($34.32
x 52 × 6) proves to be their way of saying $10,708. But on the whole things looked
relatively professional, and I should save money. I'll be interested to see how things
develop. There's a very good chance that the whole thing will fall through. A lot depends
on what they intend to install and how close they come to their claims.
After that, lots of emails, including one asking me to set a password. Did that, logged in
and found:
And that's all. If they have a real web site, they have blocked it. What a horrible idea
being forced to communicate in writing by mobile telephone, quite apart from the
security implications!
The letter S is strange. Over the centuries it has had a number of different forms:
in many languages, including English, lower-case s was written ſ in the middle
of a word up to the early 19th century. It's only a rumour that the change came to avoid
things like Where the bee ſucks there ſuck I.
In Greek, it Σ is still written σ in the middle of a word and ς at the
end of a word. In German it's even worse: apart from s and ſ, there's
also ß, a double s whose usage has changed over the years and geographically
(typically not used in Swiss German). The ſ has disappeared from modern German as
the script changed from Fraktur to Antiqua.
But that wasn't so long ago, and people seem to have forgotten it. The Sprach-Brockhaus
dictionary that I bought nearly 60 years ago was set in
Antiqua, but it included the long ſ where appropriate. But now even things set in
Fraktur frequently use the short s where the long ſ is required. Don't people
know any better? A typical case is the word „Gaſtſtätte“, which increasingly is being spelt
„Gaststätte“. Here (from the German
Wikipedia page) an example of incorrect spelling (above) and correct spelling (below):
Today we watched another episode of „Sisi“, a series apparently designed to make “The Crown” look historically authentic.
In this episode King Ludwig II (died 1886) proposes to Sophie Charlotte in
Bayern (in 1867), the daughter of deceased Max in Bayern (died 1888). But in one scene I saw:
„Die Begleitung deſ Königſ ſorgt für Furore“. Ouch! That hurts much more than
„Gaststätte“. It should be „Die Begleitung des Königs ſorgt für Furore“ of course, though
nowadays people would write „Die Begleitung des Königs sorgt für Furore“ (“The king's
companion causes furore”). One ſ, two s. I can only assume that the people
who made the series did recognize that s can sometimes be long in Fraktur, but they
all (and there must have been a number involved) didn't know when or how. And it seems that
it's not an isolated case, as this
section shows. Sic tranſit gloria mundi.
This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have
a horror of reverse chronological documents, so
all my diary entries are chronological. This page normally contains the last two days,
but if I fall behind it may contain more. You can find older entries in
the archive. Note that I often update a diary entry
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