The reason for the recent silence on this blog...

tl;dr: bla bla bla plasma bla.

my thesis, in nonuplicate. A hundred and sixteen pages long, including the French  (the horror!) abstract. May the gods of academia, i.e. the experts judging it, be merciful to it.

Faux Yogi Biscuits

The following recipe is, and I have this on good authority, extraordinarily healthy. It will make you live longer, happier, increase you jump height and your performance in bed. It will also help you lie better, c.f. the above.

If you are ambitious, you will of course want to make 'real' yogi biscuits, not faux yogi biscuits. Very well. That recipe is even simpler: First, go and catch yourself a yogi. They like to hang out near Buddhist or Hinduist temples, just follow the smell of incense. Rap the yogi smartly on the head - they generally do not put up a great struggle, as they are all vegan and hence very weak. Drag him home and grind him up. Add a bit of sesame if you want to, a dash of honey and put him in the oven.

Unfortunately, yogis are increasingly hard to come by here in Switzerland, probably due to overhunting by eager yogi-biscuit makers. Luckily my friend K. gave me the following faux yogi biscuit recipe, handed down in her family for generations:

You'll need:


*) 250 g of butter
*) 3/4 of a cup of sugar (brown, my girlfriend insists)
*) 3 cups of oat flakes
*) 2 cups of  whole grain flour
*) 1/2 a cup of awesome grains or nuts. (Sunflower, sesame, almonds, walnuts, go nuts)
*) 1/2 a cup of  raisins, soaked in water over night
*) 1 tsp of cinnamon
*) 1/4 tsp of salt or NaHCO₃ (baking soda)
*) pinch of powdered clove and ginger (the plant, not red-haired people without souls)

Preheat oven to 200°C.
Heat the butter in a water bath until liquid, then dissolve the sugar in it. Mix all the other ingredients in a bowl. Add the butter and stir. If its too dry, add a bit of warm water, the dough should stay fairly viscous, though. Use the lid of a nutella jar or something similar to form the cookies on a baking tray. Shove into the oven, and bake for about 20 minutes.
The biscuits will taste best after two or three days.

Green

My sofa always had a white cover - until last weekend, when I decided to wash it at 95 °C, together with my green rug. The result:

A really pleasant mint green. Serendipity!

Ugh. News.

The reporting about the Fukushima nuclear incident following the earthquake in Japan has been nothing short of atrocious. Even the BBC, normally my go-to place for serious world news, succumbed to inept comparisons with Chernobyl, gibbering headlines about 'melt-downs' and 'radioactive drinking water'.

Der Standard, a normally quite serious Austrian newspaper (with the best online-presence by far) even gobbled excitedly about a 'Super-GAU' - GAU is a german acronym for grösster anzunehmender Unfall, or worst-case scenario.

And on Wednesday this:

20minutes is a Swiss free-of-cost newspaper, so no aspirations of quality here, but still: The headline screams 'Le nuage radioactif passe sur la suisse', or 'Radioaktive cloud passing above Switzerland'. True, they do say (on page 2) that the radioactivity poses no danger to anybody in Switzerland, but still. Can you imagine a more lurid and sensational headline? Is a bit of journalistic integrity too much to ask for?

Forced to draw cute

Sigh. I was accused of only producing dark and gloomy work in my drawing-course. Of course I protested that this wasn't true, but couldn't point to any recent non-gloomy work quickly enough. Therefore I was condemned to paint something 'cute'; more specifically, in the words of my teacher: "A princess. Riding on a dolphin. And the dolphin is smiling."

Hence the above. I also tried out water-soluble crayons for the first time, and am not too impressed. I think I prefer straight-up watercolour.
I am not at all happy with the sky - I am beginning to think that clouds may be my nemesis. Whatever I draw next (hopefully I am done with 'cute'...) will have to have some clouds in it, because clearly I need the practice.


Water-soluble pencils on 300 gsm A3 aquarelle-paper.

Motivational Poster

F. and I are both big fans of Cannibal: The Musical,  so I made her a motivational poster the other day, to get her through a long day of meetings.

 

On a completely related note, the camera of the Nexus S is fabulous.

Rye bread

They don't know how to make bread in western Switzerland. It's all fluffy baguette and croissants - nice on a Saturday morning with du café and a pretty lady in your bed, but nothing you can really subsist on - not the wonderful, heavy and dark bread we have in Austria. So, after my success with the lazy-man's loaf, I decided to make my own.

First thing you'll need is a proper sourdough, since a 100% rye-bread won't rise properly on yeast (I know, for I have tried!). For the past two weeks I have been feeding my sourdough starter - I started from scratch with viscous paste of rye flour and water. My first attempt turned bad, but the second:

A sourdough starter. Each day I would feed it a few spoonfuls of rye flour and water, which it greedily devoured.

After two weeks its rising power convinced me, so I fed it up to about half a kg, made a very wet rye dough ( the starter, about 500g more rye flour, some salt, ground coriander and water). I let it rise for three hours, shoved it into the oven, and voilà:

Rye bread! I was a bit too light on the salt, and the next one will get some cumin as well, I think, but still, it was delicious. Next batch will be up tomorrow.

How to cut pizza

I cannot believe I never thought of this before:

The dainty hand of F wielding the sacred pizza-scissors.

Saves the precious, precious edge of your knife. Doesn't scratch the backing tray. Doesn't make a mess. Thought to me by my ingenious girlfriend F.

More adventures in watercolour

For three days now I've been painting watercolour sketches of myself with my new waterbrushes. I use a small hand-mirror, and give myself about 30 min after lunch. Here are the two most recent results:

A good way to get more comfortable with a new medium, I hope. I really like how you can't dither endlessly using watercolour - you make your stroke, and it's there. Erasing is nearly impossible, so you have to get it right the first time, or at least make the most of your mistakes. Or not, as is the case with the nose on the right portrait. Urg.

Waterbrushes

My new girlfriend (and more on this most excellent subject on a later date) gave me some waterbrushes recently. These are brushes with a small reservoir behind them, which feeds a regular trickle of water or ink into the brush. They are excellent for sketching on the road, since you don't have to fool around with pigment and open containers and whatnot. I filled one with water, another with burnt sienna, and together with my pentel brush they allow me to make two-tone sketches.

Last weekend we had a Vo-Vietnam training-camp in Bern, and during lunch-break I used half an hour or so to sketch my friend Phong. It even looks a bit like him, if you squint a little.

Luzern

Mi tresora F. and I spent yesterday in Luzern, with my friend M.

M. on the right. Myself on the left. Photo by the talented F.

Luzern is a very, very pretty city, on the shore of the Vierwaldstättersee, or 'lake of the place with four forests'.

In the background on the right the third of the four forests. I guess.

A famous sight is the newest bridge of Luzern, built in 1993 out of wood, which does not even carry cars or trains:

Seriously. You'd guess the bridge was a historic landmark or something, the way they carry on about it.

Frankly, I don't get why it is so famous, since it is only a copy of another wooden bridge, which coincidentally, burned down in the same year. Also, ware the attacking birds! Birds in Luzern are a constant threat to the unwary visitor, here is one on an attack run:

Look into its empty eyes and despair.

I hope you, gentle reader, will appreciate the photo I took instead of trying to safe myself! Thankfully my life was spared, since the birds of Luzern are also known to be myopic - a boon to all ugly men, or so it is said. I wouldn't know about that aspect, of course, since I had only eyes for the lovely F.

Luzern - lovely but lethal, at least for me.

Whether she wanted to or not. Did she manage to strangle me? Tune in next time to find out!

Concerning UV filters

The UV-filter is an anachronism in the digital age, the chips in modern digital cameras are insensitive to UV-light. Yet the humble UV-filter is still sold - I have one on every one of my lenses. Why? Behold:

The front of my nifty full-range lens, after I slipped on ice shortly after Christmas. What looks like a major catastrophe was just a minor set-back - the cheap filter had given its life to protect the lens. Its noble sacrifice will not be forgotten, and I also ordered a new one immediately...

Alien & Liane

Last year my big sister gave me a set of charcoals for my birthday. It took nearly a year, but I finally managed to draw something major with them - the assignment was 'Morphologies'. From a list of different body types I chose the extraterrestrial and the pregnant woman, since I hadn't drawn either so far.

It was really fun to draw with charcoal, and even if I did kind of mess up the poor girl's face, which looked much better in the sketch, I am quite happy with the result.

Lac de Tanay

Last weekend I and F. (who may very well be the reason there have been so few posts here lately) went up from Le Flon to the Lac de Tanay.


View Larger Map

The weather was amazing, hence my state of near-undress (which had nothing to do with wanting to impress F. by my manliness and general imperviousness to the cold. Ha! Which cold, I ask you?).

We found an excellent spot for a pique-nique,  under a southward-facing overhang heated by the sun

The lake was frozen, and exploration of the surrounding peaks will have to wait until the snow has receded a bit, but we'll be sure to return!