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Minor Strangeness (IHTM)

A while ago I bought some of those Mr. Kiplings small cakes and I didn't think they tasted like the marzipan I was used to either.
 
We recently got a little puppy - cross Jack Russell/Chihuahua (wife's choice!), called Pippi.
Pippi sleeps in my daughter's bedroom and gets fed basically as soon as we all wake up in the morning. Today, my son came in with me and my wife and we were all talking about a game on his tablet when I heard Pippi's food being poured into her plastic bowl in my daughter's room.
I got up a few minutes later and looked in. Puppy happy to see me, food in bowl, daughter fast asleep in her bed.
After I had a shower my daughter came down and asked if I'd fed Pippi, to which I replied, "No, you did. I heard you doing it." She looked baffled and denied it, saying she'd been asleep all morning. I didn't think much more of it although she was quite adamant she hadn't fed the dog (there's no one else in the house).
Then, when everyone left for the day and I was home alone with Pippi she was lying sleeping in her bed, covered right over by her blanket in the dining room. I went to the toilet and heard one of her little toys jangling, a green ring she likes us to throw for her with a bell in it. Came back out the toilet a minute later, green ring now right beside my chair, Pippi fast asleep and tucked under her blanket...

You can see her in the top photo as she is right now, still asleep. Then a couple of other photos of her being the boss.
We have a 6 year old staffy/jack russell cross. Have always had staffies/bull terriers before so can account for all the staffy in her. And it's the jack russell that's the weird part. She communicates in growls (never heard a staffy growl), she's scowling all day (staffies good natured and smile) - all the grumpy, miserable bits of her personality are the jack russell gene. Someone else I know with a different kind of jack russell cross told me their dog's exactly the same...
 
A while ago I bought some of those Mr. Kiplings small cakes and I didn't think they tasted like the marzipan I was used to either.
I reckon the whole industry has changed the ingredients without telling anybody.
 
Ground almonds are not cheap, so there may be a financial incentive to replace them with fillers and almond essence? :sherlock:
You may be right. Food manufacturers are always finding ways to make an extra penny or two.
 
We have a 6 year old staffy/jack russell cross. Have always had staffies/bull terriers before so can account for all the staffy in her. And it's the jack russell that's the weird part. She communicates in growls (never heard a staffy growl), she's scowling all day (staffies good natured and smile) - all the grumpy, miserable bits of her personality are the jack russell gene. Someone else I know with a different kind of jack russell cross told me their dog's exactly the same...

I had a JRT cross, always friendly to humans but not to other dogs.
 
a change in other products
Yup, pretty much all manufacturers of all things are constantly trying to find ways to produce their goods more cheaply, and not only in reaction to increases in taxes or cost of raw materials.
They have this way of doing it incrementally though, over a long period of time, hoping that the regular customer doesn't notice.
A classic example of this is the size and price (in the UK) of a standard 'Mars Bar', which alternately decreases in size while the price remains the same, or stays the same size but the price increases.
Where this method fails though is that we notice it when we haven't bought a specific item for a long time (probably why you noticed it on the Mr Kipling baked products).
I had a similar thing happen recently when I bought a 5 pack of pepperami, which were only about 5 inches in length, but the last time I bought them they were about 8 inches long.
And don't even get me started on 'Wagon Wheels' which years ago were definitely about twice the size that they are now.
 
Wagon wheels were the size of my head when I was a kid.

I work in a supermarket and producers are quite canny at trying to misdirect the consumer. Crisp bags appear to stay the same size but the amount of content shrinks. Four mars bars in a pack for one pound sounds like a bargain. But they really are quite small.
 
Not remotely Fortean, but...

Is it just me, or has the taste of marzipan changed?
I've just had a mini Battenberg cake and the other day I had a Bakewell slice. Both tasted just weird to me. They're not how I remember marzipan used to taste.
AFAIK, I haven't had the Covid, so my taste buds haven't changed.

Anybody else notice this?
There's something called fake marzipan. I guess it's made because it's cheaper.
 
Yup, pretty much all manufacturers of all things are constantly trying to find ways to produce their goods more cheaply, and not only in reaction to increases in taxes or cost of raw materials.
They have this way of doing it incrementally though, over a long period of time, hoping that the regular customer doesn't notice.
A classic example of this is the size and price (in the UK) of a standard 'Mars Bar', which alternately decreases in size while the price remains the same, or stays the same size but the price increases.
Where this method fails though is that we notice it when we haven't bought a specific item for a long time (probably why you noticed it on the Mr Kipling baked products).
I had a similar thing happen recently when I bought a 5 pack of pepperami, which were only about 5 inches in length, but the last time I bought them they were about 8 inches long.
And don't even get me started on 'Wagon Wheels' which years ago were definitely about twice the size that they are now.

And Curly Wurlys. When I were a lad we used to fence with them.
 
I'm assuming you mean fight each other with them as though they were swords, and not using them to enclose an area with a wooden palisade?
Either way, curly-wurlys would have to have been a lot bigger than they are now.

Use as swords! But you could have built a fence with them. Farmers bought them for that purpose.

 
I'm assuming you mean fight each other with them as though they were swords, and not using them to enclose an area with a wooden palisade?
Either way, curly-wurlys would have to have been a lot bigger than they are now.
It's the same as Wagon Wheels. They were never actually used as wagon wheels for some reason.
 
OR
Perhaps its
The MANDELA EFFECT....!!

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Today we continued our tour of old island churches under Rotterdam. In one of the villages a pigeon swooped in from a side street and bounced against the green door on the right. This was strange. Then we saw that the pigeon had been fleeing from a small falcon. The falcon sat atop its prey and started plucking pigeon feathers. We retreated to a safe distance to let it do its thing in peace. Unfortunately then a man came from the side street and shooed the falcon away. Too bad, we were cheering the falcon and not the pigeon ...
 
overthinking_in_progress_poster-rfcc984c0406c44aabc602f77de0e6b89_0a5w6_8byvr_630.jpg


maximus otter

Oliver Postgate and the Guild Socialist tradition

Oliver Postgate has died. There is an excellent obituary by Philip Purser in today's Guardian.

As Philip Purser points out, Oliver Postgate was born into the British left. His father, Raymond Postgate, was a Communist in the early 1920s, before he wised up, mellowed, gently expanded and edited the Good Food Guide. Oliver's auntie, Margaret Postgate, married G.D.H. Cole, the one twentieth century British socialist who managed to be somehow quintessentially Fabian and anti-Fabian at the same time. All three were active in the Guild Socialist movement of the 1910s and early 1920s.

One of the great treats of parenthood is having an iron-clad excuse for revisiting one's childhood loves - or what one now imagines them to have been. And Oliver Postgate's corpus is high up there amongst the things I have been busily revisiting with my son over the past two or three years. We have the DVDs of Ivor the Engine, The Clangers and Bagpuss. We have a couple of Noggin the Nog books.

Is there any connection between these classic children's TV programs and the sort of radical milieu which Oliver Postgate grew up in?

Philip Purser suggests as much, and Zoe Williams explores the point further. I agree. The programs and books have a definite ethos, without ever being preachy.

In Ivor the Engine, the characters are defined by their jobs ('Jones the Steam', 'Dai Station') and, although capitalist relations of production are there in the background, they clearly see their jobs in terms of simple good service to the community, rather like the imaginary good citizens of a Guild Socialist utopia. The community itself is a strong, but benevolent, force.

http://www.nextleft.org/2008/12/oliver-postgate-and-guild-socialist.html

Hah!
 
In one essay, entitled Does Children's Television Matter?, Postgate wrote: "Suppose, if you will, that I am part of a silent Martian invasion and that my intention is slowly to destroy the whole culture of the human race. Where would I start? I would naturally start where thought first grows. I would start with children's television. My policy would be to give the children only the sort of thing that they 'already know they enjoy', like a fizzing diet of manic jelly-babies. This would no doubt be exciting, but their hearts and their minds would receive no nourishment, they would come to know nothing of the richness of human life, love and knowledge, and slowly whole generations would grow up knowing nothing about anything but violence and personal supremacy. Is that a fairytale? Look around you."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/dec/10/comment-postgate-bagpuss-television
 
I'm sure the advert for wagon wheels used to say something like 'This things bigger than both of us".
 
A Belgian farmer accidentally moved the French border.

"A farmer in Belgium has caused a stir after inadvertently redrawing the country's border with France.

A local history enthusiast was walking in the forest when he noticed the stone marking the boundary between the two countries had moved 2.29m (7.5ft).

The Belgian farmer, apparently annoyed by the stone in his tractor's path, had moved it inside French territory."

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56978344
 
I will post this here, although I could have posted in the dreams thread I suppose. On 23 April, my grandmother passed away at the grand age of 100. I was called by her care home on the Monday and told she was dying, and went in to see her every day until she died. In the run up to her death, I was not sleeping well, she had not left any instructions and there was a lot for me to sort out. Usually when I dream, my dreams are narrative in nature, some kind of surreal storyline carrying me through a series of adventures. On Thursday night, I slept profoundly with a powerful non-narrative dream, just an overpowering image of a bunch of red roses, nothing else. I woke up with a tight knot in my stomach, thinking "today is the day".

At just before 11am on Friday, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. A reflection, as of sunlight, was dancing across the corner of my office. The corner in question is the most shady corner, no direct sunlight ever falls there. However, due to the particular arrangement of my office and the corridor, it is hard for light even to reflect there. I investigated and just could not work out where the light was coming from, and was unable to block it with my hand, most odd. The "reflection" lasted a few minutes and stopped. A short while later, just as I was about to pick up the phone to arrange that day's visit to my grandmother, I received a call notifying me of her death.
 
I had a JRT cross, always friendly to humans but not to other dogs.
I had a Border/Jack Russell cross. She was friendly enough but the most miserable dog I've ever owned. She rarely looked happy, except when she was very young and used to tease the big dog. Once she got past about the age of three she always behaved as though life had basically disappointed her. She was very lovable though.

And yes to the marzipan. I bought a Co Op Battenburg the other day and the marzipan was dry and bitty. I always remember the mazipan being something you could peel off and eat separately, but this stuff disintegrated in your hands and mostly fell off the cake before it even got as far as my mouth.
 
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