I've been absent from here for over a month, but with very good reason. Work took me to Indonesia, for the first time, and a wonderfully interesting trip it was too. I can't say more than that, or post any photos, at least for now, but it did result in a rambling soliloquy about Indonesian food over at Eat This Podcast and a slightly more detailed post about one of the multitude of crackers in which Indonesia seems to specialise.

And speaking of Eat This Podcast, I was absolutely thrilled and delighted to be nominated again for a James Beard Foundation Award. Maybe this time ...

That will do for now.

It took me four days to make a Swedish rye sourdough loaf, and half a day to write it up, but it was well worth it. My conclusion:

This is a seriously good loaf. I sliced it upside down, as the top crust was a little brittle and I feared it would break up if I attempted to slice it normally. The...

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As the talking point of the show, the sculpture became the receptacle of all kinds of theories, fears and longings. This being the age of Freud, a gastro-sexual interpretation was inescapable: the spoon was phallic, the cup vaginal, the hair pubic. For some, the tongue-shaped spoon brought to mind unpleasant sensations of a furry tongue.

Fascinating story.

A year or so ago, I stopped pirating TV shows and movies. The whole process just became too fraught, what with finding the torrents, watching out for the bad guys, and never quite knowing whether the resulting file would even be watchable. Plus, it was becoming easier to watch legitimately. Last night, attempting to watch London Spy from the BBC made me long to dig out my old eye patch.

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You’ve seen evolutionary maps before. Even Charles Darwin used the metaphor, envisioning an earlier species that gave rise to new ones, each new species splitting off as a branch of an ever-growing tree.

That's where this piece of ignorant schadenfreude in Wired lost me. To suggest that Darw...

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