Time to stick my hand into the lucky dip of our incoming Google Searches once more and see what comes to the top…
difference between dove and sparrow
what is the difference between a dove and a sparrow
whats the difference between sparrows and doves?
difference between sparrows + doves
difference between a dove and sparrow
HOW ARE THERE SO MANY OF YOU?
This will never do. Let’s have another look.
sparrow tram
Ah, now that’s a good question.
OK, so let’s get back to my obsessive need to pick apart anything that kind of annoys me. City of Bones, wheeee!
I repeat, if you haven’t read City of Bones and plan to, don’t read on. I’m not kidding about this need of mine being obsessive. Though I’m sure there are none of you who fit this description, right? Especially no one who’s refusing to read City of Bones until I read Insurgent. Hahahahaha why would you even think that?
Anyway.
Excelsior!
Sadly, my original plan to show the flow of transport around Frankfurt over the course of a day failed due to the extreme lack of availability of timetable data in a halfway reasonable format. So instead, here’s some maps of Frankfurt and the surrounding area made by mucking about with OpenStreetMap data in MapPoint. Enjoy?
Hello, friends!
So, I like to read. And I like to read… opinionatedly. In fact, here is the beginning of an opinionated reading of the (appalling) Harry Potter fanfic, Dumbledore’s Army and the Year of Darkness. I’d give you a plot summary but I can feel the bewildered rage rising in me just by typing out its title, so I won’t. Read it if you dare, or if you have hours of free time you desperately need to fill. Sorry for my old LJ by the way. We were all self-important once. Some of us still are.
Anyway, I read this book recently, and I just need to share it with the world. That means spoilers, so beware. I also do these things in huge detail, if you didn’t check out my DAYD critique.
This book is called City of Bones, by Cassandra Clare.
Also, staying on the topic of maths, a little while ago, I put some stitching patterns for a couple of fractals, the Sierpinski triangle and the Pythagoras tree, up on Etsy. They didn’t really sell very well, and rather than paying to keep them listed, why not host them here, for free!
I’m putting them up with a Creative Commons license (CC BY-SA 3.0), because trying to own a piece of maths seems pretty daft, and these designs were made to be remixed anyway. Just link back to this post if you take them and do anything with them.
Click for full size
(Click here for a PDF version)
Originally invented by Wacław Sierpiński in 1915, the Sierpiński Triangle is one of the best known fractals. This pattern creates a frame based on the triangle, which can be adapted to fit almost any design. The corner pieces are 16 x 16 stitches, the middle pieces are 32 x 16, and the smaller triangles that fill in the rest of the border are 8 x 4. The border can be increased to any size by adding more triangles. For a more compact border, the large middle pieces can be removed.
This pattern is 112 x 64 and unmodified fits a design roughly 96 x 32 (3 or 4 lines of text).
Click for full size
(Click here for a PDF version)
The Pythagoras Tree is a compact fractal. The blackwork patterns used to create the bark can be swapped with any other pattern, or simply replaced with cross stitch if desired.
This pattern is 42 x 29. The pattern could be continued to double its size, but further iterations would mean a lot of branches in the middle would start crossing.
Enjoy! And if you use them, send us a picture! I’d love to see these in the wild.
If you’ve spent more than about seventeen seconds in Frankfurt, you’ll have met the Escalator Fairy: the strange malevolent force that ensures that there will always, always, always be at least one broken escalator between you and your destination – more if you’ve got heavy suitcases or are travelling with someone who has a disability.
But even when they’re working, the escalators in Frankfurt can be a source of limitless irritation. Not too long ago, Dove’s family came to visit, including her granddad, who needs a walking stick. We had to get a replacement battery for a mobile phone (or as the Germans would say, EIN HANDY AKKU) so we decided to go to the Saturn in MyZeil, the topologically non-trivial shopping centre on the Zeil.*
So, I think the record will show that I like War of the Worlds. A lot. And of course, this love extends to the famous rock opera by Jeff Wayne et al. Sure, it takes some liberties with the book, but of every adaptation I’ve ever seen, Jeff Wayne’s version is the only to be faithful while still being enjoyable. Some of the changes even improve the story a little – having the Journalist witness the events of Thunder Child doesn’t make sense geographically, but it’s better than Wells’s admittedly clunky idea of switching viewpoint to the Journalist’s brother. So yes. I like it.
But now there’s a new version! With Oskar Schindler himself, Liam Neeson! Kaiser Chief Ricky Wilson! Anne of Cleves impersonator Joss Stone! Dubstep Microsoft shill Alex Clare! X-Factor bastard and David Cameron’s best mate, Gary Barlow!
Is it better? Well… not really.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t compare them! And we’re going to do so in ridiculous detail, because that’s just how much I love War of the Worlds.
A few months ago, Dove wrote a post for one poor hapless soul who ended up on our blog after searching for “is sparrow and dove same thing?” Since then, we’ve had people find our site using “is a sparrow an a dove the same” “difference between a sparrow and a dove” “are doves and sparrows compatible” “is dove sparrow” and “sparrows+doves+same+thing“. Clearly, we’ve struck a nerve, and found a whole tranche of people who until now were fruitlessly searching the internet in the vain hope that they could one day learn if sparrow and dove is indeed same thing. We’re providing a public service!
So, I’ve looked through our site stats and found a few more searches that led people to our site, but which we were so far unequipped to answer. Let’s get started with this one from the mailbag.
“spugogi food in germony”
This is a tricky one to answer, because 50% of the words in that search do not exist! In fact, until I click publish on this post, no-one on the entire internet has ever posted the letter combination “spugogi”. So, what can it be?
Google corrects this search to “bulgogi food in Germany“. That’s a pretty reasonable search, and as it happens, I know a couple of good Korean places in Germany (if by Germany you mean Frankfurt) that do a great bulgogi! If you’re in the town centre, there’s Coco on Große Eschenheimer Straße (the road between Hauptwache and Eschenheimer Turm), which is modern and a bit cramped, but does good food and has excellent service, or, if you feel like a bit of a walk, there’s Mr. Lee at 153 Gutleutstraße (just south of Hauptbahnhof), which is more traditional but no less delicious, and has a wider range of dishes.
But! If you search “spugogi” on its own, Google corrects it to “spuggy”, which as we all know, is North-Eastish for sparrow. So, perhaps they want to know where to get sparrow food in Germany?
Seeds are fairly widely available at health shops, although they’ll cost you a lot. Most DIY shops and garden centres will sell proper bird food though. To be honest though, if Frankfurt’s greedy, fearless sparrows are anything to go by, German sparrows really don’t need more food – they’ll already happily land on your table at restaurants and pinch your bread.
But… perhaps by “sparrow food”, they meant sparrows you can eat! (IT’S A COOKBOOK) Well, I can’t help you with that I’m afraid, but I did find this useful book of German old wives tales, which says
“If a pregnant woman eats sparrow meat and drinks wine, her child will be unchaste and shameless.”
Learn something new every day.
Intoducing the new country........... GERMONY
Finally, perhaps spugogi isn’t a typo at all! Perhaps this person really did want to find spugogi in Germony.
Well, the name suggests sparrow bulgogi, which isn’t as bad an idea as it may sound. Sparrow meat is very dry, and apparently tastes best heavily spiced, so marinading and quickly grilling it is probably a good way to serve it! Sadly, no-one on the internet has (yet) had the idea of making bulgogi with sparrows, but here’s a recipe with chicken, which is as close as I could find on the web. Good luck finding sparrow meat though…
Alternatively, perhaps it’s spaghetti bulgogi? That’s an interesting idea – Bulgogi can already be served with noodles, so spaghetti isn’t a million miles away. Something along the lines of spaghetti with steak strips? This calls for some experimenting…
Check back soon to find out if spaghetti bulgogi is delicious or awful!
So, despite finishing my Rue months ago, I totally forgot to take a picture and blog her 🙁 Well, here she is.
Better late than never.
On Wednesday, the British Library brought back into publication a book that has been out of print for almost 150 years – Andrew Forrester’s The Female Detective, believed to be the first detective novel to star a woman.* The book only had a tiny print run (although some of the stories may have run in magazines before), and it’s extremely unlikely that, say, Agatha Christie read it before creating Miss Marple, so The Female Detective is really more of an interesting historical footnote as a prelude to things to come, rather than the dawn of a new genre. Still, how does the book – really a short story collection, rather than a novel – hold up on its own?
To give a non-spoilery review, all right! Some stories are good, some are not quite as good, some are rather dull, but unlike the curate’s egg, the good parts make up for the bad. The female detective in question, “Miss Gladden” or “G”, is an interesting character; she’s effectively the equivalent of a bounty hunter, freelancing for the police to solve the crimes that they cannot, but she has a strong moral code too, and the conflict between these three goals – money, justice and morality – drive her. Despite what you might expect from a book that calls itself The Female Detective, her gender doesn’t actually come up that often. Except for a few scenes where she pretends to be a friendly gossip to gain information, you could replace her character with a Victorian-era man and I doubt readers would be any the wiser. Whether that’s a good thing or not (is she strong, or lazily written?) is of course up to you.
Being a Victorian book, it’s kind of weird about race sometimes; one elderly man has “an extraordinarily sweet, loving expression of countenance—something like that of a very young and high-class Jewess” – even if you can picture a the sweet and loving face of a young and high-class Jewess, trying to transfer her face onto a old Christian Englishman is beyond the reaches of my imagination. Plus, of course, you do have to be willing to read long-winded 19-century sentences like “To curtail that portion of this instance of the but poor comprehended efficacy of the detective police which does not immediately bear upon the argument under consideration, it may be said in a few words that in the time which elapsed between the departure and arrival of the son, the house was very effectively stripped“, though it’s not necessarily any harder to understand than, say, Arthur Conan-Doyle is.
The Kindle version, which I read, was good, especially for an old, public domain book. It wasn’t just a lazy scan-and-publish job, it’s been properly typeset and the illustrations properly rendered. There are a few typos, but not many more than you’d see in a paper book.
The rest of this review contains spoilers, so be warned!
