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24 May 2010

Tony + Keith = Middle-eastern Happy Times

I was reading Economy of the Palestinian Territories thinking to myself that it all seemed a little surreal. Like a document that hadn't been written by someone who'd ever actually spoken to a Palestinian.

And then I read this...

In 2009, efforts continued to build Palestinian local institutions and governments from the ground up. Much of this work was done by Tony Blair and U.S. General Keith Dayton.

InstitutionBuildingCapacity(TonyBlair + GeneralKeithDayton) > InstitutionBuildingCapacity(4,000,000 Palestinians)

It makes you wonder why we even bother dealing with the people who live in Palestine, when building a government and civil society from the ground up can basically be done by two hard-working white people.

23 May 2010

The Scallop Burger

The Scallop Burger is the food non-animal-eaters have dreamed of since the very first animal-eaters started opening the fish and chip shops many millenia ago. Over the years I have come to appreciate the finer details of The Scallop Burger and notice the little nuances that really make one special.

The ideal Scallop Burger will have two potato scallops not one.

It will have a toasted or grilled roll because even two scallops just don't have the heating power to penetrate the cold, cold salad additions.

It will have beetroot. This really is the item that starts to move it from a cold tomato roll with fried potato to something great.

Lettuce and tomato are standard but must not be neglected.

One must ensure that neither butter nor cheese rear their pesky evil heads because kindly (albeit evil) fish and chip shop owners frequently insert them in misguided acts of dear sweet loveliness.

The Burger will have sauce. Probably BBQ but for some tomato may be preferred. It is the sauce that finally draws The Scallop Burger away from any lingering association with "health" food.

The clincher however, the addition that makes The Scallop Burger the equal of any fish and chip shop burger, the final touch, is the humble onion. Fried. Obviously. This elevates our burger to new heights. The difficulty with it being that the potato scallop's habitat is the deep-fryer while onion prefers to nest on a grill. The fish and chip shop owner may be somewhat reluctant but if you took care not to call them evil out loud back when they tried to offer you cheese, then they may oblige. And I assure you, it is worth asking.

20 May 2010

Muckaty Voices

6 May 2010

ArgumentError: comparison of Fixnum with nil failed

Using acts_as_nested_set in ruby and something like taxon.move_to_child_of(parent) you can get this error if your table data is incomplete. You may have functioning nesting through the chain of parent IDs but you need the left and right fields as well. If either the left or right field is null you will get an error like this one for certain move operations. This can easily happen if you've created some dodgy fixtures for instance.

Trying using Taxon.rebuild! to repair the table.

5 May 2010

Anarchism

Anarchism is not a romantic fable, but the hard headed realisation based on 5,000 years of experience, that we can no longer entrust the management of our lives to priests, kings, presidents and other such con-men Ed Abbey

3 May 2010

Very Strong Sunglasses

I mostly like this because I think it's funny how much that odd man seems to enjoy hitting the dummy.

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