Spooky. I’m getting a flood of hits yet again in 2023 on a ten year old story.
Candidate for the 2014 Darwin Awards, Aaron Wintin, 18, was showing off to his friends. Wintin was one of that breed of person too stupid to be able to pass a driving test, so just drove without a licence as he saw fit. When police saw him driving and tried to pull him over, he reversed at them, attempted to hide in a barn, and then drove through villages at speeds of up to 120mph.
Police caught him with a stinger device, and he continued to drive at 70mph until his tyres shredded.
Laughably, his four young passengers were said to be “shaken”. Of course they were, the little darlings – though I bet they wouldn’t have been making such a pathetic claim if they hadn’t all been caught. After all, they could easily have got out of the car while Wintin was hiding in the barn for 30 minutes. This all happened at 3am when these little dears should have been at home in bed.
Wintin’s character is easily ascertained when you consider that he was already on a conditional discharge for criminal damage. Yet another pathetic mitigating plea was heard:
Jonathan Straw, defending, said Wintin, who is due to become a father in July, lost his job as a chicken catcher after his employer learned of his court appearance.
He urged the court to impose a suspended sentence, adding: “He is just 18 with no real experience of the criminal courts and no experience of custody. The overall effect on his future life will be grave.”
The court wasn’t taken in by this crap. Wintin was sentenced to six months at a young offenders’ institution and banned for four years. It’s just a shame his passengers – who were clearly from the same low strata in society – weren’t given similar sentences.
Incidentally, I am getting a surge of hits on this story as of December 2014. Six months after I wrote the piece, and multiple hits daily. I wonder why?
I get quite a few hits on this exact search term. I’ve said in my own recipes that you can’t make a decent curry (or Chinese, for that matter) without oil and salt – so if you’re looking for a low-calorie, low-sodium meal without either of those you’re going to have to get used to it tasting a fair bit different to one that’s made the proper way if you start leaving these ingredients out.
Oil (or fat) has a number of functions depending on what it is that you’re cooking. Simple pan frying, for example, uses oil as a lubricant and you can get away with – say – frying an egg without oil (or with the tiniest amount) if you use a good non-stick pan. It will taste slightly different, but passable. Bacon and sausages contain their own fat and so the cooked taste isn’t affected as much if you “dry” fry them (though they might be a bit dry).
When deep-frying, though – and I’ll get to the curry question later – it is the fact that oil boils at a high temperature which is the really important factor. Consider making chips (or French fries). Your potatoes are cut up and ready to go. If you drop them in boiling water (which boils at 100°C), 10 minutes or so later you simply end up with boiled potatoes – still edible, but nothing like chips or fries. However, oils like Sunflower and Rapeseed Oil (Canola) can be heated to close to 200°C, which is almost at their smoke point. The smoke point is when the oil begins to (obviously) smoke and alter its chemical structure (i.e. to break down), and this influences the taste of whatever it is you’re cooking. It’s also why you can’t use the same oil too many times, as it degrades and begins to taste bad (it can also become toxic, as unsaturated fats break down into saturated ones and other chemicals are produced).
When you drop your chipped potatoes into the hot oil, the water in them starts to boil and escape as steam – this is why the pan appears to “boil”, even though it is just very hot. However, the high oil temperature also seals the outside of the chips so that the steam can’t easily escape, and this has the effect of cooking them from within. It also keeps them moist. Furthermore, the high temperature caramelises (or browns) the outside, and this gives the tasty golden brown colour you associate with chips and fries.
To cook chips or fries properly at home, the best technique is to double fry them – first, at about 140°C for about 5-6 minutes until the chips are nearly cooked (just before they start to brown – squeeze one to make sure it’s not hard), then remove them and heat the oil to about 180-190°C and fry them again until they are golden and crisp. A deep-fat fryer is best for this process so you can control the temperature more easily, but a pan and thermometer will work. Alternatively, instead of the first frying step, you can place the chips in boiling water for 6 minutes, drain them, plunge in cold water, drain, and then fry them at 180-190°C.
If you try to cook chips at a single temperature they either turn out soggy (lower temperatures) or burn on the outside but remain undercooked inside (higher temperatures).
But what has all this got to do with the curry question? Well, with curry, high temperatures are vital in order to develop the correct flavours. Curry is not supposed to be a boiled dish, and the only way to get the high temperature for the cooking process is with oil. If you just heat the dry pan and then add water-based ingredients like onions and tomatoes they will cook at around 100°C (and stick easily). Oil helps with lubrication and cooks them at close to 200°C – which is very different, and contributes dramatically to the all-important curry taste.
Furthermore, the essential oils in the spices which give the dish its flavour are soluble in the oil, but not always in water. So as well as allowing the “cooked” taste of the spices to develop, the oil allows those flavours to become properly dispersed for when they land on your tongue. I’m sure I once read that oil-based flavours interact with your taste buds differently to water-based ones, but it is certainly a fact that the mouth feel of oil alone has a very specific effect on your brain. A wet, water-based curry doesn’t feel right when compared with an oil-based one like you get from the takeaway.
Remember that you can drain off excess oil from a curry quite easily, and in any case you don’t have to eat it if it’s formed a pool on your plate. All you do is allow the curry to stand for a few minutes until the oil begins to separate, and either pour it off or use a large spoon to ladle it out (push the spoon down gently and collect the oil as it runs into the bowl). However, remember that curry is supposed to have oil in it, so leave some in.
How can I eliminate oil in my curry?
If you mean not use any at all, you cannot. An oil-free curry it isn’t a curry anymore, just something you might try to call “a curry”. The high temperature you can heat oil to, and the simple fact it is an oil in the first place, is what makes a curry taste the way it does. Watery curry doesn’t taste right, doesn’t look right, and doesn’t smell right.
Too much oil can simply be poured or spooned off, as I explained above.
Another chiller tells how John Jones, 29, led police on an 80mph chase along Blackpool’s Golden Mile in the early hours at a time when there were still a lot of people around. The court was told that he was “away with the fairies” on drink. He had no driving licence or insurance.
Yet another pathetic mitigating plea was lodged:
Preston Crown Court heard the defendant could not recall much of what happened and was someone who had suffered agoraphobia, anxiety, depression and panic attacks. He was also said to have lost friends through drink driving incidents.
All the more reason to lock him up and throw away the key. Instead, he was given a paltry 12-month suspended sentence, banned for three years, community service, and a three-month curfew.
This is a chilling story. Peter Conroy, 73, knocked down two pedestrians, one of whom died six weeks later. He claimed he was wearing the wrong glasses, but police found his eyesight made him unfit to drive whether he was wearing the correct ones or not, and that he had lied to the DVLA in order to keep his licence.
Conroy said in court that the women “ran across the crossing”, but CCTV footage revealed he was lying about that, too. Audrey Noden, the woman who died, was 93. John Siddle from Lincolnshire Road Safety Partnership said:
Ninety-three-year-old women don’t run anywhere.
In spite of the CCTV evidence, Conroy still denied he was at fault. He eventually admitted to causing death by dangerous driving. The court heard that Conroy had glaucoma, was blind in one eye, and short-sighted in the other. Yet he told the DVLA he was fit to drive when he had to renew his licence at 70.
Conroy was jailed for 2 years and banned from driving for 10 years. I can’t work out why he was banned for a finite period – it should have been permanent.
Part of me almost feels sorry for him. But most of me doesn’t. Lying to the DVLA is a common practice among elderly drivers.
I’ve mentioned several times about how the vegetables who “run” Nottingham City (and County) Council are determined to destroy this city. Aside from the appalling eyesore that is the skyline in Nottingham (get a different architect to design every new building, make it completely different to the one next to it, and be creative with turrets, spikes, and cheap materials that will discolour in the sun and rain within 12 months), there is also the waste of money known as “The Tram”.
I’ve also mentioned the latest drive towards 20mph speed limits on as many urban roads as possible (and reduced limits everywhere else). It’s worth pointing out here that the Council has given up asking the public for its opinion, and is simply changing 30mph zones to 20mph without any sort of warning whatsoever now – and even if it IS telling people, it isn’t telling the ones who drive those roads but don’t live there. After all, 20mph is about screwing the motorist and catering for all the Earth Mothers who live in the God-forsaken estates where these 20mph limits are being placed, so no point telling those who actually use the damned roads, eh?
But I digress a little. Nottingham Council’s pathetic argument in favour of 20mph zones is that other cities have done it. Oh yes, and some out-of-context RoSPA advice which evidently says that all Council employees will suffer a curse for a thousand years if they don’t impose 20mph limits on at least 60% of all roads by the end of the decade.
Well, it seems that Brighton has a similar problem with vegetables running local government, and it has prompted the formation of a group called Unchain The Brighton Motorist (UBM). The group consists of – according to the super sleuths at The Argus – a number of local business leaders, including taxi firm, cafe, restaurant, and hotel owners, along with solicitors and accountants.
The group… describes a blanket extension of 20mph speed limits across the city as a “declaration of war” on motorists.
They’re right, of course. But they are missing something far more insidious, which is really what’s at the root of the problem. You see, UBM is also backed by The Tourism Alliance – which includes The Sea Life Centre, the Hilton Brighton Metropole, and the Palace Pier – which means that virtually anyone who has a business interest in Brighton is against council policy. It also means that the only people who are actually pushing 20mph limits are the clowns who work for Brighton and Hove City Council, and perhaps a few members of the public who normally busy themselves by being members of the Neighbourhood Watch but who are looking to make their lives just a little less boring than usual (i.e. by being members of silly activist groups). All the people that matter are against 20mph limits in Brighton.
I first heard of UBM when I saw an ASA ruling involving them back in February. The insidious nature of the council’s policies becomes apparent when you note that…
Fifteen complainants, including Brighton and Hove City Council and members of 20’s Plenty for Us, Brighton and Hove Friends of the Earth and B[ic]ycles, challenged whether the following claims were misleading and could be substantiated…
So you have an elected council – a political body – which is using the ASA to push its own private political agenda and stifling anyone who opposes it. That cycling groups or the mummies who comprise the “Twenty’s Plenty” groups should also be crawling to the ASA doesn’t come as much of a surprise. But the council?
The council and the evolutionary throwbacks from those other groups must have been wetting themselves when the ASA upheld all the complaints on this first round. But it didn’t stop there, because in April there was another ASA ruling involving UBM and two complainants…
One complainant, a member of Brighton & Hove Friends of the Earth… Both complainants, including Brighton and Hove City Council…
Brighton City Council again clearly sought to stifle those who oppose it by twisting the ASA around its little finger. The ASA, however, appears to be wising up and this time it only upheld three out of the six issues raised. That was round two.
Round three came with this week’s ASA rulings. Who complained? You guessed it…
Brighton & Hove City Council challenged whether the claims…
This time the ASA has clearly become fully wised up and rejected ALL the complaints.
Kudos must go to UBM for bringing this issue out into the open. Something like it is needed in all cities where politically correct fools who have no other skills or qualifications manage to squirm their way into local government and interfere with the livelihoods and lifestyles of the majority of the population.
Apparently, East Midlands airport has been closed today because a cargo plane suffered a “landing gear failure”. The picture below shows the nature of the “failure”.
It’s a bit like that episode of The Simpsons where Sideshow Bob’s brother has rigged a dam with dynamite, and – with Bob hanging on to one of the charges – says, as he prepares to push the plunger:
You might hear a slight ringing in your ears – fortunately, you’ll be nowhere near them.
A reader sent me a link to a recent press release, which reports that fewer learners are having crashes while on their driving tests. I was aware of it because the author, Pete McAllister, had asked me for my opinion before it was published. I was meaning to get around to reporting on it myself, but I got side-tracked and forgot. It’s a bit embarrassing really, as the “experts within the driving instruction industry” referred to includes me!
At the time I didn’t know what the actual figures were, and my comments to Pete reflected that. In a nutshell, it all comes down to what caused/avoided the accident in the first place – was it the skill (or lack thereof) by the test candidate, lack of skill by the other driver, or a change in the behaviour of the examiners? Overall, it’s probably a combination of all of those things, but if I was putting money on it I’d bet most heavily on the examiners being more proactive in dealing with situations, though I doubt that the DVSA would admit to it.
However, once the report was published and I saw the figures, my immediate reaction was “what decline?” If you ignore 2014 data (because they’re incomplete), the car accident data look like this when you plot them on a graph.
There aren’t enough data to conclude that the trend is downwards. In fact, if I was analysing these data, the only figure I’d be interested in would be 2012 and why it was so high. Overall, the trend is more or less flat, and it certainly isn’t showing a major drop.
To be fair, though, the “massive drop” referred to is with the 2014 data, which so far sit at only 20 crashes (presumably for the first quarter). That would point to a figure of around 80 for the year. And that IS a big fall if it continues for the whole 12 months.
Assuming that the 2014 data remain as low as they currently appear to be, I honestly don’t know what has caused the fall. Certainly, nothing I’ve seen on any of my own tests can explain it. However, if you start to speculate, you need to have much more information – who were the candidates who had crashes previously, and what were the circumstances? Has that demographic changed in any way? I don’t think the DVSA holds that kind of detail.
I still favour the idea that examiners are more prepared to take action, and it would be useful to know if the number of abandoned tests has gone up in any way as a result. Maybe someone should do an FOI request to find out, because the DVSA would definitely know that.
My old computer has done a sterling job over the last four years or so. It had a Q6600 quad-core processor in it, and at the time I built it that was pretty nippy. However, although it was still perfectly serviceable I felt it was time for an upgrade.
I’ve mentioned before that I’ve always been interested in electronics. I started off with radios and other gadgets when I was a teenager, and progressed to computer tinkering in the early 80s when I bought my first home computer (an Atari 800XL, later followed by an Atari 520ST). Back then there was no internet as such, and bulletin boards were the way to “get online” (a bulletin board was another computer you dialled into using the phone line, and was usually operated by an enthusiast like yourself). Back then phone calls in the UK were on price bands based on distance, and I remember running up a £200 bill one quarter – which would be around £600 today – calling long-distance to one that was based in Aberdeen (it was called “The Twilight Zone” if memory serves). The modem I was using was one I built myself, and it ran at the majestic speed of 300 baud – nearly half a million times slower than my connection today!
I bought my first PC (running Windows 3.1) around 1992. In those early days of the PC computer retailers like Escom and Tiny were where you went to wanted one and didn’t want to splash out on an IBM. I started with an Escom PC, followed by a Tiny a few years later (then another Tiny a few years later). One of the drawbacks with Tiny computers was that they used miniature power supplies (especially built in Korea, I think), and these were notorious for burning out and for being difficult to replace for the simple reason that they weren’t easily available. On the second Tiny, mine did burn out, and it was then I got into repairing them – first, using direct replacement PSUs (a suppler appeared in the magazine classifieds who could get hold of them), and then using full-sized ATX PSUs when I discovered they would fit in the cases. Tiny used the miniature PSUs because they were cheaper, and their PCs were otherwise completely standard (well, more or less – the ATX units were a bit of a tight fit, but the crucial footprint was the same for fitting them). I replaced PSUs for a few people whose computers had simply stopped working, several of them being Tiny machines.
It was when my second Tiny computer finally gave up the ghost that I built my first complete PC from scratch. Since then, I’ve built a new one for myself every few years, and also for other people. My last one was housed in a beautiful limited edition mirror-finish case (Antec P180), fabricated from Japanese steel, and it’s run faultlessly under Windows 7 Ultimate during its lifetime.
I’d been tempted to build one in a new case, but I simply don’t need two PCs. So I decided to reuse the P180 case, keep the optical drives (which are perfectly OK), and use my existing hard disks (HDDs) as storage – the old machine had HDD space of 1.75TB. However, the biggest difference between it and my new build (apart from the CPU and cooling system) would be the fact that the new machine would boot from a solid-state drive (SSD).
The idea of having an SSD-based system occurred to me a couple of years ago, but the technology simply wasn’t good enough (or cheap enough) to make it worthwhile. I needed to have a boot drive of at least 500GB, and the drive would have to have decent read/write speeds. A couple of years ago you’d be looking at spending thousands to get anywhere near that. However, you can now buy a 480GB SSD for around £180 (as of April 2014), and prices are falling all the time. Incidentally, SSDs are 2.5” devices and they are tiny – easily sitting in the palm of your hand.
The specification for my new machine was as follows:
Intel Core i7 4770K @ 3.50GHz CPU
Corsair Hydro Series H60 liquid cooler
ASUS Z87-PRO motherboard
32.0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 RAM
Crucial 480GB M500 2.5 6GBps SSD
Seagate ST3000DM 3TB HDD
Gigabyte GTX 660 OC 2GB GFX card
Windows 7 Ultimate
My Microsoft Surface runs Windows 8.1, and although that’s great for a touchscreen-based system, I’m not yet convinced it would be any good on a normal PC. In any case, I like Windows 7 and it is very stable, so that’s what I stuck with. I couldn’t resist buying a large capacity 3TB HDD to supplement what I already had to help me with my music and photo collections. I also opted for a liquid cooler this time instead of the normal CPU fan.
All the kit was bought from Ebuyer, and I assembled everything on Sunday. After a minor glitch where one of the RAM cards wasn’t seated properly, it booted up first time and I was away. The new machine – with all my software installed – now boots from cold in about 20-30 seconds (compared to the few minutes for my previous HDD-based system).
As you can see from the above image, the new machine boasts a Windows Experience Index score of 7.8 – just 0.1 below the maximum possible at the moment.
The liquid cooler is also quite spectacular. My system idles at a temperature of 28°C and so far has only gone up to about 40°C maximum under normal use. Running Intel’s Processor Diagnostic Tool (i.e. “stress test”) only took the temperature up to 66°C – 40°C below the maximum – and the system passed with flying colours. It should keep me going for a while yet.
Sharmiz Roshan, 24, was already banned and had numerous driving offences against his name. At least one of them had involved a custodial sentence, and he was even subject to a suspended sentence at the time he was caught driving again. Police spotted him driving a white Porsche while they were in attendance at a crash scene where 11 people had been injured, including a 12-year old boy. Roshan had been caught on CCTV behind the wheel, but denied he was driving.
His defence lawyer, Nick Ross, said:
…the Porsche was rented by Roshan’s friend and he “succumbed to temptation”.
He understands the stupidity. He is ashamed and embarrassed. He wishes to give the guarantee to the court that this will not happen again. This is the wake up call.
Roshan works as a mechanic and has found his religion again.
What pathetic bollocks. Roshan has proved what kind of scum he is by virtue of his record. His brain is so warped that absolutely nothing could “wake” him up, least of all religion. It was just an attempt to weasel his way out of trouble.
Fortunately, he was as good at weaselling himself out of trouble as he was at driving without getting caught. He was jailed for 34 weeks.
Well done to Anna, who passed today first time with just 5 driver faults. I really wish all my pupils were like her – she was a fast learner, anxious to be a safe driver, and very pleasant with it all. As I said to her more than once, she was easily capable of passing, even though as we got closer to her test her nerves did start to kick in a little. But it didn’t matter in the end, and she has a car all lined up.
It also puts my pass rate for the year up to 55% – I finally managed to break away from 50%, although my hard-core of serial failers has held me back a bit this year. Mind you, of my passes 75% have been first timers, so it’s not all bad.
Well done to Anna, who passed today first time with just 5 driver faults. I really wish all my pupils were like her – she was a fast learner, anxious to be a safe driver, and very pleasant with it all. As I said to her more than once, she was easily capable of passing, even though as we got closer to her test her nerves did start to kick in a little. But it didn’t matter in the end, and she has a car all lined up.