Verdict: pleasant. I wish it were heavier, though.
Great! Now to hone it so it will stay sharp for next time!
An apple is too easy a test. You're going to need some tin cans and a silk scarf.
Perhaps one of these would be more to your liking?
I knew a guy in high school who claimed that his family took ceramic knives onto airplanes because they wouldn't set off the metal detectors and hey, you might have to stab someone on the plane. (They were hardcore libertarian gun nuts, of course.) It occurs to me that this wouldn't work anymore now that most airport security uses millimeter scanners rather than metal detectors.
Of course, heebie usually drives when she takes long trips, so she can take all sorts of weapons and no one will know.
You're going to need some tin cans
Yikes, not with ceramic.
People have been slicing open goats with metal knives for millennia.
heebie: if your other knives aren't razoe-sharp (as my steel knives are not, all languishing in tropical maltreatment) then be careful you don't cut yourself! they are great but quite brittle and prone to break if dropped, so, yeah. IME they make a perfect paring knife, but the other knives should be old fashioned obsidian. actually, the ceramic knife is very like an obsidian knife--they would be made so sharp, the edge diminishing to molecules, so sharp that scalpels with obsidian blades were used in eye surgery before lasers!
likewise, I think dropping a well-made obsidian knife would be an occasion for much cursing and possibly getting flayed alive.
As far as 3 goes I'm not sure ceramic knives really need that treatment. Honing is mostly because steel blades tend to deform under pressure and the hone straightens them out again. But if they are enough like steel that they need that what I've heard at least is that it's better to do it before using the knife rather than afterwards. (The cleaner the edge the less it will deform when using it, because there's less to catch on things as it goes through them. And if you hone the edge before you put it away you're probably going to tap the edge against something at some point before using it again, even if it's only a little.)
I'm pretty sure you don't want to hone a ceramic knife.
That is, it's not only not necessary, it's actively bad.
I'm pretty sure you DO want to make chicken gizzard confit, though. So good!
I'm pretty sure 3 was a joke based on the fact that you're not supposed to hone ceramic knives.
How fragile are ceramic knives? I remember first hearing about them in high school while working in a restaurant kitchen during high school and thinking they sounded neat but impractical, because who doesn't drop a kitchen implement from time to time? Or maybe I'm just extra clumsy.
To be clear, this was during high school.
Dropping knives sounds like a dangerous habit.
IME they make a perfect paring knife, but the other knives should be old fashioned obsidian.
Insisting on using artisanal obsidian knives in your kitchen would be amazingly chichi. (I mean, not that there's another kind of obsidian knife, I suppose.)
Or, if you wanted to go the other way, insist on totally knife-free cooking. Don't cut the meat - tear it into chunks with your hands. Don't slice the vegetables - just shred them, or (for things like garlic) crush it with a blunt instrument. This could be a new trend!
Obsidian knives are a thing? Who knaps them?
The guy who ran the excavation of the early Palaeolithic site at Boxgrove in England wanted to know whether Acheulian hand axes were any good for dismembering animals (nobody really knows what their primary purpose was), so he made one and gave it to a local butcher who proceeded to dismember a dead animal very efficiently and pronounced the hand axe an excellent tool for the job, but I don't believe they've become widespread in the modern meat industry.
Acheulian hand axe
I want one so bad. I'd chop the fuck out of shit in homage to my grunty ancestors.
I've seen people use Palaeolithic and Neolithic tools on a few TV programs, and they are very effective. Those rectangular flakes slice through thick hide and sinew like the proverbial hot knife through butter.
I also saw someone on another TV program demonstrate how good a heavy spear with a fire-hardened point was was with a spear-thrower. Basically, about as effective as a gun at bringing down heavy game, assuming you had the aim. I can't recall what the exact target was, but it handily put a big hole in bone.
A former work mate of mine, * was an ex-archaeologist, and used to have a hand-axe on her desk as a paper-weight.
* and popular fantasy author:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steph_Swainston
28: I think you maybe have to get closer with the spear.
re: 30
I know you are making a joke, but, iirc, the effective range was pretty long. Obviously not rifle range, but long enough to be well out of goring range.
I wasn't making a joke. I don't know about goring range, but you don't need to sneak up as close with a rifle.
I'm pretty sure 3 was a joke based on the fact that you're not supposed to hone ceramic knives.
After someone bit, I was going to say, "No, they're supposed to become more and more serrated over time."
Obviously not rifle range, but long enough to be well out of goring range.
I don't think I could throw Göring very far at all.
I'm sure I mentioned before my suggestion that we have a grizzly season, with the stipulation that you can only use an obsidian knife, 8" or less, that you've knapped yourself.
I'm sure I've mentioned, before my ankle ruined things, that I wanted to try persistence hunting of a deer.
I'm also suggested that wolf trapping should only be done by hand -- slipping a harness onto the wolf.
The Fish & Game Commission is not adopting my ideas.
37 IKIMHB (ARMF) that a buddy of mine did this with some pronghorn back when we were in college. He was something of a Trotskyite, but I don't think that played into it.
(Further to 38.1, then you have to domesticate and keep the wolf.)
36: IIRC some areas of the US have different hunting seasons depending on what weapon you're using. So the deer season might start on 1 November, but only for those using bows. The season starts on 8 November for black-powder guns, and on 15 November for modern rifles. (Not sure when it starts for mountain howitzers, if ever. http://www.buckstix.com/howitzer.htm)
Clearly the thing to do is to extend this in both directions, depending on the lethality of the prey and of the weapon used. So the sort of pathetic waste of rations who hunts songbirds with a shotgun can only do so one morning a year. The deer season is, say, thirteen weeks with a rifle, fifteen with a bow, or 26 for persistence hunting. The grizzly-with-obsidian-knife season is all year round.
You aren't allowed to hunt songbirds.
Pennsylvania has a porcupine season, which is something I did not know.
And the rifle season for deer is currently only a couple of weeks, outside of a few special circumstances (elderly, disabled, young)
I guess maybe you're allowed to hunt starlings. Those kind of sing.
Anyway, it's rather complicated. I also had no idea that there were nearly two months when you couldn't kill a crow at all and that you can't kill them on Monday through Thursday regardless. I thought you could just kill a crow whenever you wanted.
Definitely no griz hunting during hibernation!
Deer are a plague. A pack of domesticated wolves ought to do the trick, though. I just can't believe that the F&G people won't see reason.
45: really? That's not very long. In Scotland it's July-October (stags) and October-February (hinds).
Songbirds: I was thinking of places like Malta, Cyprus, Sicily etc where they seem to delight in shooting pretty much anything they see.
Definitely no griz hunting during hibernation!
Just include a nudity requirement and that problem won't arise.
49.1: The general pattern here (and by here I mean outside of the city) is for everybody to go out on the first day of the season, which is always (usually?) the first Monday after Thanksgiving. You can tell when you're in real Appalachia as opposed to suburban Pittsburgh by whether or not the schools are open that day. Anyway, if you don't get a deer on that first day, it gets more difficult because the deer get really shy.
Ohio in my youth had no rifle season at all, deer could only be hunted with shotguns and ball shot. I think that may still qualify for some part of the restricted, non-rifle rules in some states.
Whether the slugs with spiral grooves and lands (which to some extent, by making the slug spin, compensated for the inherently short range of the smooth-bore shotgun) were legal then I don't know. It'd have made them more accurate, but might not have increased the range too much—the real reason why rifles were banned was that rifle rounds carry too far for the densely-populated state.
The one time I pulled a shotgun shell apart, or maybe it was my older brother who did it—not a recommended practice, but boys—the slug was spherical, a true ball.
Ohio still had that rule when I was there.
Part of the problem with deer hunting here is that the places where it is safe enough to hunt and the places where the deer live don't overlap very well.
Can one domesticate a wolf?
Yes - with difficulty. Dogs are bred to be domesticable. That's why their ears look like that. (Really; there's a multi-generation study running in Russia trying to breed domesticable foxes, and one of the side effects of being domesticable is that your ears go floppy.)
55 is true. You can hunt deer here inside city limits, but only with bow and arrow. Apparently.
Dogs are bred to be domesticable
Right, but dogs aren't wolves. I remember hearing about a multi-generation study in Russia involving I thought wolves so possibly not the one you mention but perhaps I'm wrong and it was foxes, and results IIRC were decidedly mixed.
Given that a local suburb had civil disobedience and protests about a plan to trap deer, I can't imagine that the introduction of domesticated wolves would be widely accepted as a means of controlling deer.
Hokey Pokey would be way excited, though.
In another suburb, a "marksman" hired to cull deer near houses managed to hit a baby that was indoors.
I feel like "domesticable" isn't quite right there. Dogs aren't bred to be domesticable, they're domesticated, by breeding. So too are those foxes, or they're on the way to it. I think you could have a tame wolf (or not), but domestication is a population-level quality, isn't it?
Unfortunately not. The baby lived, but I haven't seen further reports.
It's not exactly my area of expertise, though, so I may be wrong about these terminological distinctions.
a multi-generation study running in Russia trying to breed domesticable foxes, and one of the side effects of being domesticable is that your ears go floppy
Also piebald coloring. I saw a program about that study, principal investigator a Ludmilla something. A masterpiece of scientific design. Simple thesis, whether breeding simply for low-aggression would do the work. And choosing foxes as the test animal removes the issues involving the dog/wolf breeding confusion, because dogs are wolves genetically. By choosing foxes she created a model not questionable as wolves would have been whether they were really wild or not. Also foxes probably easier to handle.
I guess it wasn't a special marksman. Just a
special permit. It really annoys me the way that stuff just drops out of the news. I can't find anything to say what happened to the shooter, so I assume he got off. I suppose the lack of further articles is good news in that it must mean the baby didn't die.
I did find more. No charges and the baby is home, but blind.
66 Neoteny in general, IIRC. Though I don't know about human babies crawling around with floppy ears.
They tend to get shot when people mistake them for basset hounds.
Even though wolves and dogs are genetically the same species, wolves don't 'domesticate' (redfoxtailshrub is right about the terminology) even if you bring them up the same way as a dog. I mean, it seems like it should work but apparently wolves turn into huge jerks when they're teenagers and you can't live with them in the house any more (cue jokes).
What little I know of wolf-dog and coydog hybrids suggest the same thing. They're behaviourally weirdly far from domesticated dogs and although they can be okay with people, most people keep them outside and adjust their behaviour (the human's behaviour) in ways they don't for regular dogs.
In what sense is "regular" used? Are you saying that wolves will shit in the house?
In my time spent among the Horse People, I was surprised to learn that fox-hunting is still a thing around these parts. I was even more surprised to learn that "fox-hunting" is really just short hand for "dress up in old-timey clothes; ride horses in the woods, taking along a bunch of barking hounds; and then drink bourbon and eat pimento cheese in a field."
Since they don't ever kill (or even find) a fox, I suggested they move on to something useful, like culling deer or figuring out how to kill all the mosquitoes, but no one seemed interested.
How about eating cheese without pimentos?
74: Did the Horse People let you ride on their backs?
I like the little cheese wheels that come with red wax.
78: Were they invented in Nebraska, too?
They were probably invested by some dour Swiss guy.
72 - I think most of the species in the canis genus can interbreed with each other (dingos, dogs, wolves, coyotes, etc.), so it's not strange for dogs to breed with wolves. The differences are really cool, though: dogs are very social with strangers (human and dog) in basically the way humans are, whereas wolves are very much not. Dogs understand human social cues (better than chimpanzees even!) and look to them for help in some cases, but wolves never do that. My favorite one is that dogs understand pointing, even ones that were raised without human contact and even though they lack the required bodily organ for it.
We tend to think of dogs as domesticated, but honestly given how long we've been living with them compared to other animals I think 'symbiotic' might be a better way to think about it. I've been trying for ages to think of a good example of humans-adapted-to-dogs, since there must be one, but I'm never entirely certain. Not having a good comparison case makes it trickier, but the bit about floppy ears mentioned above seems like it might be a good candidate for that: we find them (and large paws) cute, even though they really aren't features you see in infant humans. (If anything big floppy ears is a sign of age in human beings.)
72 is what they told us at the wolf sanctuary in NM. Several of the animals there were wolves that people had tried to raise as pets.
They were probably invested by some dour Swiss guy.
It's not supposed to be easy. Anyone not up to the challenge can just leave the wolves in the wild. And hope they eat more of the damn deer.
So how far are we from a chariot pulled by wolves, while other powerful wolves run alongside you and hunt deer and strike fear in your enemies? Asking for a friend.
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I am unexpectedly at a loose end in Dayton this evening, on the off-chance that anyone is local and wants to meet up.
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Do they still have the buses with the overhead wires?
I don't actually know. I was the only passenger on the bus* from the airport, but I didn't think to look overhead. I think it was just a regular bus, though.
*I'm pretty sure $1.75 is the cheapest I've ever gotten from airport to hotel.
87: Sorry, I don't think I can handle one more road trip right now and I'm hoping to get to bed early. Hi from not-far south, though!
I didn't even know Dayton had a commercial airport. Don't bother trying to see the aliens. The cover-up is so engrained that the Air Force people just hang up when you call.
89- Entry from the airport to the subway system is free in Boston.
91: Maybe if you explain you just want to see where Slobodan had been.
Historically, a nickel. But they eliminated exit fares around the same time they implemented the BRT line from the airport (which initially charged the same as subway entrance but was converted to free about a year ago.)
90: Totally understand! Incredibly short notice at any rate. I just didn't realize none of my compadres would be arriving/available until tomorrow.
92: Verrrrrry interesting. By comparison, I think the Regional Rail from the airport to Phila is around $10. There is no subway (there).
In other news, I have managed to find good food (yay), a used bookstore (double yay) and possibly a yoga class to keep me entertained. Hopefully they won't mind if I bring a hotel towel as my yoga mat.
Is there some kind of elected position in Montana from which Charley could issue these edicts? If so, we should unleash the power of the blog to have him elected there. It might be quicker than waiting for the glorious dawn of Halfordismo
Also, stealing an election would make a great bodning experience.
KILL ALL THE CELERY
This is unrelated to my killing spree in the other thread. Celery is just gross.
I did not know domesticable was the adjective of that verb.
Your looks are domesticable
And non-comesti(ca)ble
Yet you're my favorite piece of art....
Celery can be amazing when prepared well. I was surprised to learn this as an adult because very clearly none of the ways I had it before that point counted. Most of those were celery-with-peanut-butter on them type stuff though which is most of the explanation.
Celery does bring a nice flavor to things like soup and roast chicken, but the secret there is to keep the celery in big pieces so you can throw it away after all the flavor is cooked out.
I differentiate between the flavor of celery (can be delicious) and the aggressive stringy texture of the green bunches that are usually the only form available. Celeriac and the blanched white and compact hearts of celery bunches (they look like the heart of a cardoon plant) are the solution to the texture problem, and if the flavor is all you want in a stock, soup or whatnot you can sub in celeriac leaves or celery seed in a pinch.
104 - Or to use it in really small pieces so it just kind of vanishes into the liquid, like onions and carrots do if you cook them long enough.
Fuchsia Dunlop has a recipe in her latest book for ground beef and celery that blew my mind a little. I never thought of beef as having an herbal flavor, but when paired up that way it really brings out that aspect of it. It's just celery, ground beef, chilli bean paste, ginger, and maybe a splash of black vinegar at the end. Part of the reason it works I think is that the celery is cubed up pretty small so the stringiness of it vanishes. (Also she suggests chinese celery which isn't a bad idea at all: it's better in things where you actually want a pronounced celery flavor.)
Also really fresh/young celery can be great, if it's picked before it has a chance to get really stringy. I'm not sure why but some time after I left everyone in Lancaster county got really excited about "Christmas Celery" and made it into some kind of tradition or something. (I was profoundly baffled by this when there for christmas a few years ago. Celery? Celery.)
It kind of made sense though because it really was great: very sweet and fresh tasting with none of the aggressive bitterness of normal celery.
There's celery as a delicacy in its own special dish in _Freedom from Want_. It's high in phosphorus, needs rich soil, always something of a luxury crop.
I'm squinting at the picture on Wikipedia. That's a really paleo Thanksgiving.
Turkey, celery, grapes, and salt and pepper.
ajay should pitch 25 to the Chinese government. At present it's amazingly hard to buy knives here (because of recent unfortunate incidents at train stations, I imagine?) and I had to equip my new pad by asking a local ironmongers if they had anything under the counter.
As kneejerk authoritarian responses to things go, it does seem amazingly poorly thought through: everyone still needs knives for cooking, and making them very difficult to buy inconveniences several hundreds of millions of housewives, but surely won't reduce the number of people running amok.
Celery soup with apple (pureed) is absolutely delicious.
113: When knives are outlawed, only outlaws will have well-prepared meals. The state should search for jihadis among the well-fed.
Apologies if my 114 was inappropriate. Moderators feel free to google proof or delete if Seeds requests or even if you think so too.
I was in Shandong a while back and cooking knives weren't common there, so I don't know that it's specific to the outer provinces.
I didn't think of it as particularly law and order related, though I guess it could have been. The shops had plenty of sharp heavy kitchen cleavers though.
No one told me this transforming book was about vampires. It would have been an easier sell. Its reverse spinach or something.
117: No worries! I'm in the capital.
And it's noticeably difficult to get both knives and cleavers here, although I don't know how recent that is as a development. They're unavailable everywhere, from big places like IKEA and the major supermarkets, down to the little market stalls that sell every [other] conceivable kind of kitchenware.
IKEA will still sell you a knife block, unhelpfully.
I heard you can make a shank out of Jolly Ranchers.
Promising if risky business opportunity: smuggling knives into China.
The knives you'd find were probably made in China. You'd redirect knives made for export instead of smuggling.
Hm, good point. You'd need some solid connections in the factories.
CONFIDENTIAL TO ROBERT HALFORD: Metal fans happy