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Ingrédients

• 1/2 pastèque (environ 2 kg avec la peau)

Préparation

Vider la pastèque avec une cuillère à glace. Mixer la pulpe, passer à la passoire en appuyant sur la pulpe pour en extraire le plus de jus possible. Remettre la pulpe restante (donc vidée d'une partie de son jus) dans le mixer et mixer à nouveau. Passer à la passoire à nouveau, en appuyant. Il reste une petite quantité de pulpe et plein de pépins. Passer le just à la sorbetière. Verser dans des bacs à glaçons et piquer un cure-dent dans chaque «  glaçon  ». Mettre au congélateur.

Commentaires

• Produit des «  glaçons de pastèque  ». Lorsqu'on suce ces glaçons, on aspire un jus sucré et on se retrouve avec un morceau de glace moins rouge et moins parfumé.
• En pot, la glace devient dure comme de la glace, au contraires des sorbets de fruits. Qu'est-ce qui donne au sorbet sa consistance molle ? Le sucre ajouté ? Les pectines (ou autre gélifiant ajouté) ?

Ingrédients

• 1,5 kg rhubarbe
• 500g sucre

Préparation

Éplucher et couper la rhubarbe en morceaux. Faire cuire avec le sucre environ 20 minutes. Passer à la passoire, presser la pulpe dans la passoire pour extraire autant de jus que possible. Laisser le jus une nuit au frigo avant de passer à la sorbetière. La pulpe est mangeable comme une compote.

© Amazon.fr

Published in Plum Pie in 1966.

Bertie learns that his now friend Roderick Glossop is depressed because his fiancee refuses to get married before Roderick's daughter Honoria is married. Aunt Dahlia happens to be working with Blair Eggleston, a young author who produces a serial for her paper, Milady's Boudoir. The author has told Dahlia that he is madly in love with Honoria but is too shy to propose. Bertie then decides to court Honoria to make Eggleston jealous and force him to propose to Honoria. Bertie goes however a bit too far since, after kissing Honoria in front of Eggleston, he learns they had been engaged since the previous evening and that this move made him break the engagement. Honoria of course considers herself to then be engaged to Bertie. To force her to break their engagement, Bertie, on Jeeve's advice, hires an acrtress, Trixie, to pretend to be engaged to him in front of Honoria, but this scheme has been unnecessary since Honoria and Eggleston are already reconciled. The agent of the actress howerver blackmails Bertie to marry Trixie or get sued for breach of promise. On the day the blackmailer comes to Bertie's place to collect his money, Jeeves and Dahlia manage to convince him that Bertie is actually living far beyond his means, has not actually any money to pay him, and would be sent by Dahlia to Canada with a very small allowance.

© Amazon.fr

Published in The Man with Two Left Feet in 1917.

Aunt Agatha sends Bertie to New York to prevent his cousin Gussie Mannering-Phipps to marry a vaudelville actress by the name of Ray Denison. When Bertie meets Gussie, he discovers that Gussie is playing on the vaudeville stage as well, Ray's father, a famous vaudeville actor himself, refusing that his daughter marries outside of the profession. Reaching a dead-end, Bertie ask Aunt Julia, Gussie's mother, to come to New York and reason with her son. But the mother used to be herself a vaudeville actress, and was turned into a respectable lady by Aunt Agatha and by force after getting married. When Aunt Julia meets Ray's father, she recognizes him as an old accointance from when she was on the stage. The man reveals that he had always been in love with her and since their are both widow(er)s, he asks her back to come back the stage and to marry him.

The DICT-NetMOT Gateway I wrote some time ago suffered from an annoying bug: when the list of dictionaries at the source website is updated, the gateways uses the wrong dictionary (not-so-long story short: dictionaries are identified by index, and when the indexes change, it looks up in the wrong one). This has happened one time too many it seems, because I decided to fix this and get the gateway to download the list of dictionaries instead of using a hard-coded list. Currently the list is downloaded only on startup, so if it changes, the gateway needs to be restarted. If I am motivated, I may get it to reload automatically after a given timeout. EDIT: I was motivated, I just changed it; it now reloads after 1 day. (2010-06-29).

Short names for dictionaries, used as DICT identifiers, are generated automatically, so this may not work properly for dictionary names I haven't seen yet (there is a risk of short name collision, there is not checking against it).

Dictionaries which should be looked up by default can be specified with a (hard-coded) list of regexps against which the dictionary's long name is matched.

Also, some unidentified time ago, I updated the gateway to use the new NetMOT interface. I noticed that it started to use AJAX to provide the user with a list of suggestions while typing in the query box. I then used this feature to add support for ‘prefix’ and ‘glob’ matching strategies (‘prefix’ is mandatory in the DICT protocol, so before that the implementation was incomplete, but who cares?).

“malted wheat and German Hallertau hops. Fermented with a special Belgian yeast to give a European style Wheat Beer”

I'm not sure I would have identified it as a wheat beer, but then again I'm not a specialist. Pretty ordinary, slightly bitter with a metallic taste. Contains barley and wheat.

St. Peter's Brewery, Bungay, Suffolk, England. 4.7% alcohol.

© Amazon.fr

Published in 1974.

Bertie's physician suggested him to go and rest in the countryside. Bertie decides to rent a cottage at Maidens Eggesford, where his Aunt Dahlia is staying with friends of hers, the Briscoes. Colonel Briscoe breeds horses, and his horse's only serious competitor is Mr. Cook's horse, his arch-rival. On his first day at the village, Bertie accidentally meets Cook, who, learning that Bertie knows Briscoe, is convinced he has come to sabotage the training of his horse by pinching the cat. The cat appeared one day and since then, Cook's horse refuses to train if she is not around. Moreover, Major Plank is staying at Cook's place and, although an attack of malaria prevents him from remembering in what circumstances he had previously met Bertie, there is a risk in the future that he would remember that he is convinced Bertie is a thief. When Aunt Dahlia, who had bet a very large sum of money on Briscoe's horse, learns about the cat, she asks Briscoe's niece to help her pinch the cat. Thanks to a local poacher of her accointance, the cat is stolen and delivered to Bertie. Bertie then pays the poacher to take it back, but the cat follows him back to Bertie's place and refuses to leave. At the same time, Cook's daughter Vanessa, whom Bertie had met once at a party a year ago, quarrels with her fiance Orlo, the son of Cook's former business partner, who has entrusted the control of Orlo's inheritance to Cook. The reason of the quarrel is that she finds Orlo didn't ask her father hard enough for the release oh his money. Orlo needs the money to be able to marry Vanessa, but her father refuses her to marry the communist he is. Vanessa therefore announces Bertie they are now engaged, and that she will make him loose all his bad habits (smoking, drinking cocktails, going do the Drones' club and reading light books). Orlo is of course furious and threatens Bertie, but since the former, an insurance salesman by trade, managed to sell Bertie a life insurance, killing him would be bad business. Bertie manages to convince Orlo that Vanessa actually still loves him, and encourages him to ask again for his money. When Jeeves comes back from visiting his aunt at a nearby place, he tells Bertie that the cat is actually his aunt's, and they use the animal to force Cook into releasing Orlo's money and dropping the charges agains Bertie for cat-theft (Plank having meanwhile remembered his first meeting with Bertie). Briscoe's horse eventually wins the race and everything ends well.

Pour filtrer le contenu «  moins intéressant  » du blog, c'est à dire les résumés de livres, de films, les bières et les chocolats, il suffit d'ajouter le paramètre subset=life à l'URL du blog. Pour les plus fainéants, voici des liens directs vers les version HTML et RSS du blog.

To filter out the “less interesting” content of the blog i.e., the book and movie summaries, the beers and chocolats, you just have to append the subset=life parameter to the blog's URL. For the laziest of you, here are direct links to the HTML and RSS versions of the blog.

Jos haluat suodattaa “vähemmän kiinnostavan” sisällön pois, eli kirjojen ja elokuvien yhteenvedot, oluet ja suklaat, sinun tarvitsee vain lisätä subset=life blogin URL:iin. Tässä vielä laiskimille suoria linkkejä HTML- ja RSS- versioihin.

© Amazon.fr

Published in 1971.

Bertie's friend Harold ‘Ginger’ Winship is, under the pressure of his fiancee Florence Cray, running for Parliament in Market Snodsbury. Aunt Dahlia asks Bertie to come to Brinkley Court and canvass for him. The first person Bertie meets is Mrs. McCorkadale, Ginger's opponent; the meeting is disastrous, which convinces Bertie to give up. Mrs. McCorkadale is however fair-play enough to go and see Aunt Dahlia to warn her that a man called Bingley (a former valet, who had been at Bertie's service in a previous episode) wanted to sell her dirty information about Ginger which Bingley got from the book of the Junior Ganymede Club a club of valets and butlers who keep records of juicy information about their employers. Bingley had stolen the book and while Bertie's attempt at recovering failed, Jeeves' succeeded. Moreover, Dahlia had invited Roderick Spode, Lord Sidcup to keep speeches in favour of Ginger. Finally, Dahlia had also invited a businessman called Runkle from whom she hopes to extract money; the man was Tuppy Glossop's father's employer and made a fortune from an invention by Tuppy's father, but never paid him back anything. Since Tuppy and Dahlia's daughter Angela are engaged, Tuppy needs money to get married, and Dahlia wants to get the money for him. Ginger's problem is mainly that he had fallen in love with the secretary he had engaged to help him in his campain, and needs Florence to break the engagement. Meanwhile, Spode taking a liking on running for parliament, he decides to give up his title to be allowed to run for it. Madeline, his fiancee who dreamt of becoming Lady Sidcup then breaks the engagement and turned once again to Bertie. Finally, Dahlia being unsuccessful at softening Runkle up wants to blackmail him by stealing a piece of silver he wanted to sell to Dahlia's husband Tom (who had fled the house since he hates guests). When Bertie is trying to put the silver back in Runkle's room, he is caught and accused of theft. Eventually, advises by Jeeves, Ginger decides to make a speech where he encourages his supporters to vote for Mrs. McCorkadale. This prompts Florence to break her engagement to him. Since Spode got a black eye from a thrown potato during Ginger's speech, he decided to give up becoming a member of the Parliament, which makes Madelin restore their engagement. Florence then proposes to Bertie, but Runkle tells her that Bertie is a thief, and she takes her proposal back. Finally, thanks to the information found in the Junior Ganymede Club's book (Bingley having been in Runkle's service), Dahlia manages to blackmail Runkle and extort him to money she wanted.

“golden beer with a soft fruit flavour and a bit of sweetness”

Just another ale. Contains malted barley.

Daniel Thwaites, Blackburn, Lancashire, England. 4.1% alcohol.

© Amazon.fr

Published in 1963.

Bertie's friend Pinker tells him that his fiancee Stiffy Bing wants him to go to Totleigh Towers to do something for her. Knowing Stiffy, Bertie refuses at first, but when he learns that Gussie is angry at his fiancee Madeline because she put him on a vegetarian diet, and that if they break up, Madeline will turn to Bertie, the latter decides to go to Totleigh Towers and try to patch their relationship. Sir Watkin Basset, Madeline's father and Siffy's uncle, is a collector, and he recently acquired for a very low price a very valuable statuette. Stiffy wants Bertie to return the statuette to the seller, an explorer named Planck, because she believed Sir Watking cheated him. But Sir Watkin only pretended to have paid a low price, to make Bertie's uncle Tom Travers, another competing collector, jealous. Thanks to Jeeves, the statuette is returned to Sir Watkin's collection room, and Bertie escapes the wrath of Roderick Spode, now Lord Sidcup, who is persuated that Bertie has come to the house to steal the statuette. Later, Gussie flees the house with the cook and Sir Watkin is happy to learn that his daughter will not marry Gussie after all. He's so happy that he even promises a vicarage to Pinker, who was waiting for it to get married to Stiffy. But when he learns that Madeline got engaged to Bertie (because she believes he is in love with her), he takes his word back. Thanks to Jeeves, Pinker gets a vicarage at the neighbouring village from Planck, who was at the same time looking for a new vicar and a player for his rugby team. Stiffy then gives him the statuette, which she had again pinched from the collection to blackmail her uncle to honor his word. Bertie passes it to Jeeves. Meanwhile, Lord Sidcup tries to convince Madeline, with whom he had been in love for a very long time, to marry him instead to Bertie. She makes her mind to do so when Jeeves tells her that Bertie is a kleptomaniac and that he just found the statuette hidden in Bertie's sock drawer. Bertie is then arrested and put in prison, but Jeeves manages to get him out by promising to enter Sir Watkin's service (which he plans to quit after a week to return to Bertie's service) against him dropping the charges against Bertie.

“chestnut beer… a full malt flavour, a dry bitter finish and prominent hop aroma”

Quite strong malt flavour. Otherwise not so interesting. Contains malted barley.

Daniel Thwaites, Blackburn, Lancashire, England. 4.4% alcohol.

“…fruity, moderate bitterness and spicy. Hooky Gold marries English tradition with american pizzazz – it is the first of our beers to use an American hop – Willamette, together with English Fuggles and Goldings.”

Very flowery smell, but got boring near the end of the glass. Contains malted barley and wheat.

Hook Norton Brewery, Hook Norton, Oxon, England. 4.2% alcohol.

© Amazon.fr

Published in 1960.

Bertie learns in the Times that he is engaged to Bobbie Wickham. Soon after, he is asked by Aunt Dahlia to come to Brinkley Court. Her goddaughter, Phillis Mills is already staying there and her stepfather, Aubrey Upjohn, Bertie's former schoolmaster, accompanied her; he is to deliver a speech at Market Snodsbury's grammar school in a few days. Moreover, Dahlia's husband Tom is negotiating with an american named Mr. Cream, who came to Brinkley Court with her wife, a mystery writer, and her son Willie. The latter has a reputation of a playboy, and Dahlia doesn't want him to get engaged to Phillis who is a bit of a slow thinker, and likely to fall for him. At Brinkley Court, Bobbie tells Bertie that the announcement was a plot to make her mother feel relieved when she tells her she is actually engaged to Reginald ‘Kipper’ Herring, a friend of Bertie's who is a columnist at a paper and recently wrote an acerbic critic of Upjohn's book on English grammar schools (of which Bertie and Kipper have terrible memories). Moreover, Bertie discovers that Roderick Glossop, the loony-doctor, is posing as the butler; he has actually been asked by Aunt Dahlia to evaluate the sanity of Willie Cream. Since Dahlia is temporarily away from the house, Bertie, as the acting host cannot tail Willie all the time to prevent him from proposing to Phillis, so he invites Kipper and asks him to replace him. Bertie then learns from Jeeves (who is currently on vacation) over the phone that Willie Cream is also a kleptomaniac, and soon discovers that Tom's silver cow creamer has disappeared from the collection. After Bertie fails twice at searching Willie's room, Glossop manages to recover the object. Meanwhile, Upjohn has seen the critic on his book and wants to sue the paper, meaning that Kipper would loose his position there and be barred from getting a new one. Soon after, one learns that Phillis got engaged to Willie and after a heated discussion with Upjohn, Dahlia (who came back) discovers that the Cream have two boys, Wilfred and Wilbur, and that the playboy is the other one; exasperated by Upjohn's smug attitude, she asks him to leave the house. Jeeves, who had come back on Bertie's call for help, packs his belongings and pinches the text of his speech. Since Upjohn is unable to deliver a speech without his notes and that the speech is impotant since it would start his political carreer, Bobbie blackmails him to drop the lawsuit for the return of the speech. Some time earlier, Mrs Cream had discover the silver cow creamer hidden among Glossop's belongings (who doesn't know that Tom actually sold it to Willie) and called the police. Since to defend himself Glossop would have to reveal that he was called to spy on Willie and thought the latter had stolen it, thus jeopardizing Tom's negotiations, Jeeves suggest to tell that Bertie is the kleptomaniac.

I'm 86% geek, to be accurate:

86% Geek

Was there anyone to doubt it?