Thread 3 - TalkExiles: "The Planet Goes On Being Round"

[Kucingsparkles]

Continuation of previous lifeboat threads 1 and 2.

Gather here all ye refugees from the JTT Flat Earth Society, welcome to the reassuringly oblate spheroid of MN! Ye all already know the answers to the questions "How the heck do I format my post?" "Why can't I edit my typos?" "What do those acronyms mean?" and most importantly, "Where is everybody that I used to know?"

So really we're all here just to chat randomly.

I have very trenchant and often unpopular opinions about pets. I will keep my silence except to say abominations like cat cafes and dog restaurants should be nuked in to orbit (with the dogs and cats safely removed first of course).

I think I share most of those.

I am trying to bake a cake. And I am doing what I hate when other people do it, and changing the recipe! It's a yeasted fruit cake. AIBU to think that 125 g of butter is a hell of lot for 225 g of flour? Also, "beat in the softened butter". With what? A whisk, I don't think so. Sure, in a food processor, if you have one (I don't). Rightly or wrongly, I knocked the butter down to 90 g, and carefully melted it first.

I'm guessing you'll just get a different texture to the cake than you might have done otherwise. I'd beat in the butter with my hand-held mixture, and depending on the other ingredients 125g of butter doesn't seem far too much, though you might knock it down to 112g on the 'half fat to flour' principle for pastry.

We didn't have our turkey until last Tuesday as we went out for dinner on Christmas day, so the last of our turkey shreds is going in a turkey curry tonight. I already have the turkey and vegetable soup in the fridge.

Sorry, Angelico - I was so thrown by the dog nonsense I forgot to comment on your PhD plan. That sounds really interesting. Could you track down the potential supervisor at her new location, or are you set on LSE?

That dog cafe is ridiculous but I am a little bit in love with Cole who is a total dude.

Cat cafes are different. They are food for humans with cats wandering around the place to get petted and sometimes to be adopted. I would definitely go to a cat cafe. I would not take a dog somewhere that offered a $75 tasting menu because I am not a total mental.

We have just got back from a walk in the local woods where I had to rescue a terrified Cockerpoo from the middle of the South Circular, calm it down and try and find its owners. Eventually found the owners - two young inexperienced children who had been tasked with "taking the dog out" - a very energetic and poorly trained dog that slipped its collar at the first opportunity.

I am now muttering grumpily about bad pet owners

A PhD sounds very exciting @angelico53. Social psychology is fascinating.

I have never been to a cat cafe but coffee and cats sounds heavenly to me. Dogs on the other hand… not so keen.

Have spent eight hours on my assignment with only a 20 min break for lunch. I wanted to get it finished but I’ve still got 100ish words to go on adaptive mechanisms in pathogens. I’m annoyed I couldn’t push myself over the last hurdle but I can’t take any more today, I can feel my brain disintegrating.

How exciting about your potential PhD, @angelico53!

(We were at a cat cafe yesterday. I feel the weight of @Ginmonkeyagain's disapproval.).

I don't like animals where food is.

I don't either. I feel sick when I see cats all over the food preparation area on come fine with me. And I just hate when you're eating at someone's house and there's a dog under the table, breathing hot breath onto your legs.

Yuk.

With effort I managed to train my cat not to go on the kitchen counter. I know he doesn’t go on it when I’m out either as I have a home security camera, and he’s too scared/lazy to do anything out of the ordinary when I’m not around anyway. As much as I love him I don’t want him on any space used to prepare food. I feel the same about children.

Children on kitchen counters I mean, not the preparation of children.

Oh yeah, food prep areas are not for people whose hand washing is, with the best will in the world, not completely surgical standard. Even when noses have recently been explored.

IReallyLikeCrows · Today 17:43

I would not take a dog somewhere that offered a $75 tasting menu because I am not a total mental.

Neither would I! Especially not with my Labrador, whose idea of food heaven is a few bits of much trodden in kebab, a scrap of white bread, soaked in the rain for two days, or a month old chicken carcass!

StephanieSuperpowers · Today 18:27

I don't either. I feel sick when I see cats all over the food preparation area on come fine with me.

Fuck, yes! Tiddles has just come in from burying his shit and you've let him on the work top?

Tiddles has just come in from burying his shit and you've let him on the work top?

... and murdering some birds and/ or mice. One of our cats sometimes leaps onto kitchen the work surface to escape the loving attention of our dog. Drives me mad but the cat was here first and MrsBN only accepted the arrival of the dog under sufferance so I can't do much more than chase the cat off rather than evicting him.

the kitchen work surface

I wouldn't need an edit function so often if I didn't make so many last-minute edits. That's ironies.

I'll admit my hard line comes from growing up on a farm where it was a dead cert all domestic animals would have been investigating/eating/rolling in something very unsavoury.

I'd be really interested in what others have seen, if anyone has.

I concur! Comparing mine and DH's PhD theses to those of current candidates, ours look small and brief by comparison (molecular biology and biochemistry type stuff). Looking back to when I was writing mine up, I recall looking through the theses of my predecessors from the decade before in the institute library, and being startled by how small and brief those looked compared to what I was expected to produce. At this rate, future PhD candidates will be expected to submit something the size of 137 volumes of War And Peace.

@angelico53 - do you need to do this at a UK university, or have you considered somewhere in Europe, where fees can be low-to-zero, even post-Brexit? I'm thinking specifically of the Karolinska. So much is done online these days that a couple of trips a year to Stockholm wouldn't be a hardship with zero fees.

I really hope you can get to do your PhD, angelico. I don't regret much in my life because it's not worth it, what's gone is gone, but I do sometimes regret bailing on my PhD. I had good reason to do so at the time but blah.

When The Five by Hallie Rubenhold came out I had a real "It could have been me!" moment. It probably couldn't have been me because the work and the research she did was exceptional.

StephanieSuperpowers · Yesterday 18:27

...come fine with me

A fly on the wall docu about traffic wardens.

The Happy Valley thread is doing a roaring trade this morning, were you guys watching last night?