Posts by Gabor Toth
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When it comes to pork rinds Snix are fatilicious (and made from NZ grown pigs) but microwave rinds are even better - unfortunately they've been off my supermarket's shelves for about a year. So when I want to snack on a dead animal's skin, Snix it is.
The other option is to make your own. I was introduced to this "craft" by my parents and I remember chowing down on these from a very young age (Töpörtyű as they are called in Hungarian). Due to a 5-year O.E. in the UK I tend to call them Pork Scratchings - but have discovered you can make them out of just about any fatty skin. I occasionally make some after ripping the skin off a couple of chickens which I'm preparing (we call these "Chicken Itchings" in our household), but even better is duck skin.
Simply take your fatty skin (be it pork, duck, chicken, whatever) cut into small pieces, place in a heavy bottomed pot with a small amount of water and cook over moderate heat. After a while the water starts to evaporate and the fat starts to render. Remove the scratchings when starting to turn brown and drain on paper towels. They keep well in the fridge, but salt just before eating if you do this as the salt attracts moisture and they go soggy. Eat with fresh bread and beer - then go to the gym the next day to atone for your sins.
The rendered fat which is left behind after cooking can be used for Pate, Confit and other heart-attack inducing delicacies. -
A long long time ago my brother went on his OE. His hobby at the time was racing a speedway bike, but he was going to be too poor to buy a bike when he got to England, so to save on expenses he took his own bike engine over. As carry on luggage... (They let you do that in the olden days.)
Until the introduction of x-ray machines for NZ domestic air flights, sport-pistol shooters traveling to away-competitions used to take their gun cases on board as carry-on baggage all the time.
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I did this ... only to have the bag's handle come clean off in my hand as I set it down. Attached to the handle was ... the only tag.
Heh!
(warning if at work - loud volume at the start) -
*that's* a great athlete.
Seeing as we are nominating greatest Olympians, I'll put my bid in for fellow compatriot, the Hungarian fencer Aladár Gerevich with his team-mate Pál Kovács a close second.
Gerevich's record was...
1932 Los Angeles - Gold in team Sabre.
1936 Berlin - GoldThen because of WWII there was no Olympics for 12 years!
followed by...1948 London - Gold x 2
1952 Helsinki - Gold
1956 Melbourne - GoldIn 1959 the Hungarian National Fencing Academy decided that Gerevich was too old to be selected for the team. In true fencing fashion, Gerevich then challenged every member of the academy who was a potential team member (some of whom had not been born when he won his first gold medal) and won every bout. Having convinced the academy that he should make the team - he went to the 1960 Rome Olympics...
...and won Gold... -
The Fencing uniforms comments of my last post) wires for fencers have been around for a while. They still have the shorts with the high socks though.
Electronic scoring for Foil and Epee has been around for ages and was relatively easy to do because those two fencing disciplines are all pointy-jabby. Stick a button on the end of the foil (i.e. sword) and you're away. Sabre on the other hand (which what was on telly the other day) is all slashy-slashy where cuts count as much as jabs. This made electronic scoring quite difficult and for many years this continued to be scored by "humans" (up to four officials required in top competitions). Now with a fully metallic upper-suit covering the head and torso, sabre has also gone electronic - so yes the big silver welding helmet thing (much bulkier than the masks used by Foil and Epee fencers) and the flashing lights are quite new.
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I am going to ignore TVNZ news for the next month; they always spend too much on these overseas pageants and then dominate their news broadcasts with hundreds of pointless live-crosses to nothing in order to justify the expense.
Our household has almost entirely switched over to TVNZ7 on Freeview for our domestic television news - primarily the 8 to 9pm news hour. The difference to the increasingly crappy 6pm “One Network News" is so great that it is amazing to think that these two evening news broadcasts come out of the same institution.
Apart from the fact that it is at a far more sensible time, there are no pointless live-crosses, no advertisement breaks, decent interviews that go on for several minutes, minimal "coming up later..." teasers and a weather forecast which simply tells you what the weather is going to be tomorrow without infantile banter about "switching on your leckie blankie...". It is a genuine hour-long news broadcast.
Unfortunately, despite our ravings about Freeview to various friends, family and colleagues, no one else we know has got themselves a set-top box. My advice to anyone who asks is to put aside that cell-phone upgrade they were thinking about and get a STB instead. Freeview is rather excellent and it deserves to be supported.
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Oh crap - I meant this company
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The two privious Jewish PMs of NZ were the forever forgotten Francis Bell (Mum was Jewish but converted to Christianity)
He's not that forgotten as actually his name is remembered when ever this company (which he helped found) is mentioned. He would probably rank as one of our most intelligent PM's - it's just that he preferred his books and legal cases to being PM (and also being a judge - a position which he also turned down several times). He was also a well respected Mayor of Wellington where he helped drive forward the introduction of a sewage system (against the wishes of folk like Charles Plimmer who believed dumping cartloads of "nightsoil" into the harbour on a daily basis would be much cheaper...), and established the formal reporting of legal cases in NZ (which continues to this day through the NZ Law Reports which have been published annually since 1881)
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When walking around in USA I was shocked to find out they noticed pedestrians (never happened in Auckland). Asked a few people who said they were taught in school Driver Education, they got cheaper insurance by completing the course and the lessons stuck.
Another reason is a belief among some Americans that there are pedestrians who are actually trying to be struck by a motor vehicle to sustain minor injuries - so that they can then attempt to sue the driver of the vehicle for an obscene amount of money.
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We all have things that we haven't done ( and would never contemplate doing) but just imagine if we were defined by that?
Though I am (just) old enough to remember his arrest, because of an interest in architectural history, I will always remember him first for his association with Ernst Plischke and this...