Ronnie By The Sea

Can you Cook Frozen Hash Browns in Your Toaster? Personally I prefer cooking frozen Hash Browns in my toaster compared to buying the more expensive McDonald's ones. Normally I put them in the oven for 10 minutes over the packet directions to get a more crunchy hash brown. Prepare yourself for a culinary revolution.... you can cook them in your toaster! The way I did it was to nuke them in the microwave for one minute on high. Then, when you take them out they will be defrosted but soggy and fally apparty so gently place them in your toaster. My toaster has one heat setting, the only thing you can adjust is the amount of time it toasts for. So I cranked my toaster to 5 minutes - watched and waited, and then toasted them for another 5 minutes, and then another 5 minutes. 15 minutes total (after 1 minute in the microwave). Mum taught me never to put a knife in the toaster. So I used metal tongs instead. Obviously - don't put them in the toaster when it's ...

Throbbing, crushing, excruciating pain … Typically associated with lifestyle excesses, usually food and drink, there are other contributing factors: genetic disposition, metabolism and, even race. Gout is an “attack” disease, a form of inflammatory arthritis characterised by recurrent assaults of a red, tender, hot, and swollen joint.  Pain typically comes on rapidly in less than twelve hours. The joint at the base of the big toe is affected in about half of the cases. Feet, ankles, wrists, knees and elbows can also be affected. Gout has been known since antiquity, first documented in Egypt in 2,600 BC in a description of arthritis of the big toe.   In 1683, Thomas Sydenham, an English physician, described its occurrence in the early hours of the morning and its predilection for older males: The victim goes to bed and sleeps in good health. About two o'clock in the morning he is awakened by a severe pain in the great toe.  The pain...

Suppose you have this Scrabble board in front of you, and these letters on your rack: This could be your move, and score 62, (8 for “tonneau” [the cover on your ute] and 2 each for “it” and “no,” plus 50 for using all your tiles.) Well done! The next player’s rack looks like this: “Quin” scores 13. (Ok … “queen,” and “equine” would have been better … but that would spoil my story!!!) The next player’s rack looks like this: Yuk!!! … but lookee lookee … “Zyxt” - double letter for the Z, 20+4+8+1 = 33, times 3 for triple letter score = 99, plus 14 times 3 for triple letter score for “quint” = 42, plus 99 = 141. Very well done. But “quint”? and “zyxt”??? Quint is a run of five cards in the game of piquet, a French card game in the 16th century. Zyxt is the last word in the Oxford English Dictionary. It is an obsolete word from Kent in England meaning, when you drill deeply down into the etymology, “to see,” for example, suppose you wanted to say “Can you se...

In 2005, Marjie and I visited Lake Argyle near Kununurra in north west Australia. The earth-filled Ord River Dam, completed in 1971, is 335 metres long and 98 metres high. In 1996, the spillway was raised by 5 metres to double the dam’s capacity to 10,763 gigalitres, or 21½ times the volume of Sydney Harbour. With a surface area of about 1000 square kilometres, it is the largest reservoir in Australia. Originally built to irrigate rice crops for export to China, the plan was scuttled: magpie geese ate the rice shoots quicker than they could be planted! The waters of the dam flooded parts of a number of pastoral properties owned by the Durack family. Durack Homestead on “Argyle Downs” was the centre of a vibrant social life in the surrounding area. Given that the homestead would be flooded, the main building was dismantled, and later rebuilt above the waterline as a museum. These words were penned by a woman of the Malngin people, displaced by the flooding of her country ...

We often have sunset drinks on our upper balcony, overlooking the beautiful waters of Moreton Bay. A passer-by remarked how lovely it must be having drinks “up there on the poop deck.” WE knew what she meant, but our neighbour queried, “is that the part of the ship where the toilet is?”  Of course, the toilets are actually elsewhere. The poop deck is the part where the Captain stands, with his officers, to observe the goings-on on board! But officially …. According to my 20 volume Oxford Dictionary, the “poop” is “the aftermost part of a ship; the stern; also, the aftermost and highest deck, often forming the roof of the cabin built on the stern.”  It derives from similar sounding words in Old French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Latin.  Its first recorded English usage is in William Caxton’s “The Book of the Faytes of Armes and Chivalrye” in 1489: “The pouppe whiche is the hindermost partye of the shippe.” Caxton is said to have brought the firs...

Penguin Random House is now the world’s largest trade book publisher, employing more than 10,000 people globally. Each year, over 15,000 new titles, and 800 million print, audio and eBooks are sold. Their publishing lists include more than 60 Nobel Prize laureates and hundreds of the world’s most widely read authors. In 1935, the then Managing Director of book publishers Bodley Head, visited Agatha Christie in Devon, no doubt with a view to publishing some of her work. Returning to London, he was standing on the platform of Exeter Station, wishing he had something to read on the journey. The station kiosk had lots of popular magazines, and poor quality paper-backs, the same choice faced every day by the vast majority of readers, very few of whom could have afforded hard-backed books. As he waited for the train to appear, Allen Lane’s disappointment at the small range of books generally available, soon turned to anger, and then to a firm resolve to remedy the situatio...

Swim the Squid Lure like a Prawn / Shrimp Retreating The way a squid jig or squid lure works is by imitating the likeness of a prawn / shrimp right down to the way it swims when it is retreating from danger. Using a lure to catch a squid starts with learning how to make it swim like a retreating prawn / shrimp. When prawns swim normally they swim forward slowly. But when startled they retreat by swimming backwards in short bursts, with a halt in between. To replicate this action a squid lure or squid jig combines a factor of buoyancy with a counterweight, so you can swim it like a retreating shrimp. The correct swimming action of a prawn retreating is burst, halt, burst halt. The way you replicate this takes advantage of the balance between the slight buoyancy and slight weight of the lure. You jerk the lure forward a bit with your rod, then let it ‘halt’ then you jerk it forward a bit more, then let it halt…. then you just repeat this swimming action. The lure does m...