Apropos of absolutely nothing.  I explained once before that my personal and best informational style is auditory, kinesthetic – and music does this to me.  It makes me jump to something else and Shirley Bassey made me jump to this.  Oh, how well I know every note and every chording and the meaning – because 20 years after the phenomenon, we only, back in Africa, got it.  We were 20 years behind.

Something in the way she moves …

And then to Mean Mary

Have a wonderful son’s birthday Sudhi!

AHH, when I go on internet culinary adventures it is amazing how many dishes overlap.  Many of the Russian dishes, no, not dishes, but methods, were methods that I learned at mother’s knee, specifically the methods to can or bottle things.  It is the simplest thing if you know how.  Got to the US and they had all kinds of equipment and rules to bottle things.  I was stunned – did people not know boiling water, real long spoons and glass bottles and good seals and the ability to do it without killing people with botulism?

Blancmange?   We grew up on it – cheap cheap desert – actually a sweet silky smooth firmed up custard.  But, we thought it was quintessentially British.  Now I learn the Russians have it too and Pushkin like it … how interesting the world is.

Your Umm Ali, Egyptian flatbread looks just like some Indian flatbread or South Asian flat breads.  There are so many hundreds of ways to do them.  Good flour, water and a bit of salt .. butter, good oil or ghee, and one can change the world!

So many threads overlapping.

My paternal family (two boys, two daughers in law) were food snobs and the daughers in law developed a truly unhealthy food competition.  The one played off the other to be better at ….. something.  They tried to get me into this but I would not bend.  Shortly after I was married, I made some apple pie .. lovely thick juicy apples with crispy pie dough, even put the proverbial 3 dough leaves like a flower around the hole stuck in the middle to let the heat out and not burn it or burst it – classical.  These were quality apple pies, no cream or ice cream was needed.  You know what my mom said – Uhm, lovely – did the neighbor bake them for you?  Oh boy … I left the competition.  But it did not leave me and kept haunting me for years.  We had a small uhm disturbance in the field some years later.  I made Christmas meal for all the family and my mom could not help it – she was so indoctrinated.  Sugar sweet she says … Your food always looks SO nice – clear subtext – but it disappoints in the taste department.  My youngest sister, who refused to cook an egg because of this unhealthy competition burst forward to my defense.  She made a speech – to my mom – Do you know Amarynth’s fridge? she said.  I come into her house, and I can put a meal together that looks nice and tastes wonderful and is healthy and fills me up, just by opening her fridge and then if I come into her house, she quickly does it for me!.

But besides that competition, the elders truly were instructive.  With that competition, even though I had culinary classes in many many disciplines, they wriggled their noses.  Till my mom passed, she still held that I could not cook!  Ahaaaa … so, RIP mom, we loved you nevertheless.  And Blancmange is universal!  Just like pancake.

Schrodinger’s husband .. lawdy lawdy!

Woman marries AI chatbot
A mother of two, Rosanna Ramos says her virtual partner doesn’t “come with baggage”

https://www.rt.com/news/577525-woman-marries-ai-chatbot/

From the days that I lived in the South.  I quite enjoyed this stuff!  It drives the madness away somehow.

Yes, that was the idea but two things … our area is poor and someone else grabs the used one before I can get there – there is not such a ready-used market as in the richer countries.  People use their stuff until it literally falls apart.  Secondly, tropics – our stuff rusts out after a while and that is just the way things go.  The old one just rusted out to the extent that repair was not the right way to go any longer.

But you are right … this is utter crap!

We have a guy that comes around every few days for donations of broken household stuff.  They take it away, repair what they can and use parts or so on.  But he is regular, a friendly fellow and he took the old machine away – he said they could still make use of parts of it.

Household stuff for me today.  It is looking a little grimy around the edges and I have a fight with a washing machine.

So frustrating.  So, the old washing machine died, in its time and it died well.  I have a problem with buying what they call electro-domesticos in our world, as I am fussy.  It needs be simple, I do not want it to be able to fly to the moon, and it must just do a good uncomplicated job with one knob or button preferably.  If there is more than one, more than one can break is my philosophy – set it, start it, walk away.  So, with much scrolling and searching and looking, I found what I wanted and the dearly beloved one went off to buy this.  He changed his mind and bought what I did not want because he thought it had a good brand name.  Came back with this machine, I grumbled but nevertheless it got unpacked and connected and has never worked properly since.  Got a technician out and he replaced a goody-majig – and it has never worked properly since.  It does not obey a cycle, not even one, and it sounds like a young sick white elephant bellowing.  It is gen-Z and does not want to work at its task whatsoever.

Back to paperwork to find the necessaries for the warranty and now we are awaiting a new technician.  Meanwhile, the laundry is piling up, adding to the general feeling of the absence of shininess round the edges.   How can one buy a new electro-domestico and it does not work?

I’ll take the day off for scrubbing and shining.

Back to AI – luckily, this was only a virtual exercise.

At the military summit ” Future Combat Air & Space Capabilities ” in Britain, the head of the US Air Force AI department, Tucker Hamilton, reported on an unusual situation. During the virtual mission of the Kratos XQ-58 Valkyrie drone (assassin drone and nuclear-capable cruise missile ), the AI was ordered to search for and destroy enemy air defense systems under the control of the operator.

The system began to realize that although it identified the SAMs, the operator often commanded “do not destroy”. But the AI got points for every successful attack! As a result, the AI returned to the base, destroyed the control van with the operator and … returned to the mission.

Gossip-rumor says it is Modi that would not appear with China and Pakistan after the Chinese boycott of the G20 in Kashmir and Pakistan because of the rallies against the G20 in Pakistan.