Hype cycles are the invention of a big American technology consultancy firm who use them to show the way very new types of technology move from ‘stupid idea, it’ll never work’ right through to general acceptance as something that just ‘is’. A hype cycle is basically a graph that plots a line that rises very steeply [...]
A few months ago, we spent a weekend in Berlin, an edgy, intoxicating, graffiti-covered city tortured by its own past, the streets forming the canvas on which the horrors of the last century were played out. It was cold. Very cold. A type of unrelenting cold that attacked at the very core, damp, miserable, wretched, weather [...]
http://youtu.be/9dqQblZYQ1w “In his way, the meat cutter is an artist”. Here’s a wonderful little American promotional film from the Fifties, that walks through the process of butchering a side of beef into cuts suitable for selling shrink-wrapped in those new-fangled supermarkets. Just look at the marbling on that beef. Try to ignore the naïve sexism [...]
One of the many curious things I remember about my childhood is corned beef hash, an odd dish of potato and corned beef served up on those nights when mum seemed to have run out of inspiration. It was always made of mashed potato, with corned beef similarly mashed right into the potato, then fried until [...]
I was at the market the other day. I’d gone for some sausages, but left with a handful of pig’s ears (more on which later), some pork belly, a ham hock, a kilo of mutton and a huge tray of beef ribs, about 5kg of mammoth ribs, each about a foot long and loaded with [...]