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Following on from the first set of notes about my sci-fi reading over the past few weeks, the rest of the roundup is below. Again, spoilerish.

You say that like it’s a problem, not an opportunity.

Consider that pork fat and potato are always a magic combination. Now contemplate the role of gypsy bacon.

Mmm, two types of pig meat.

So, as before, you slice your potato slices and boil until cooked. While you do that, you dice a slab of gypsy bacon and throw it in a pan with your leftover pork fat from the roast.

Once it’s getting close to the nice crisp finish that bacon ought to have, you start chucking your chunks of pre-cooked potato into the pan, frying them up in the sizziling fats, stirring the whole mess together until the potato is golden brown.

Drain the fat off, serve with token vegetables.

If you’re like me, you believe pork is the king of meats: Pigs are friendly and delicious.

A hunk of roast pork for dinner for the holidays is a fine thing, but generally you have leftover pork. One thing you can do with it is cold meat sandwiches; another is to join me in the land of heart-attack meals.

Peel and slice up some potato and chuck it in boiling water until it’s cooked to the point where you’d be happy to eat it.

While you’re waiting for the potato to cook, put some of the leftover fats from last night—you did save the fats, right?—and stick ‘em in a frypan. Slice up your cold, fatty pork, and gently heat it in the pan; you want it to sizzle to a lightly crisp exterior, warming through, and for the fat to render down until it’s crispy. Heating it quickly will just burn things, so take your time.

Stir the pork around the pan so it doesn’t burn.

Once the meat is as crispy as you like, fish it out of the fat and drain it. Leave the fat in the pan. Drain the boiled potato slices, and dump them into the pan and fry until golden with pork fat. Ladle the potato out, chuck it on the plate with the meat. Serve with token vegetables.

Oh, and save the delicious pork fat. There’s more to come.

We took Ada to the zoo for the first time, for which she was predictably uninterested; however there was a highlight: the zoo’s three Serval kittens are being walked around the zoo on leashes.

Rule 1 of fatherhood: Let sleeping babies lie.

It’s impressive watching how quickly babies learn and progress; in Ada’s first week she barely opened her eyes; by her second, she was beginning to open them and look around. In her fourth, she’s beginning to notice if anyone’s looking at her and complaining vigourously if she’s not getting enough attention.

She’s stopped hitting herself in the face as often, as well, which is a mixed blessing. On the one hand (ho-ho), it means she’s less likely to claw her own eyes out; on the other hand, many comedy gold moments are no more, like the time she threw a howling fit which stopped only when she punched herself in the nose. Or her hands-on-side-of-head-howl that looked like an Edvard Munch painting (accompanied by cries of “No noes! Oh noes!” from her heartless father).

Orion Books, under their Gollancz SF imprint, have put out a selection of top science fiction works; I’ve been reading my way through the some of them, since they’re mostly novels I haven’t read. They’re nicely bound, well-presented, and have some reasonable shorts essays in the preface. Note some of these may be spoilerish.

So it turns out when Borat claims to be speaking the language of Kazakhstan, he’s actually speaking Hebrew.

That’s just too amusing.

Bonus points for the first person to spray themselves head to toe and announce, “Look at me, I’m sealed for freshness!”

Leslie Potts, Minister for Health, anyone?

Stylish. Some nice moments. But, overall, one of the dumbest films I’ve seen in a while. Not, say, Matrix II and III dumb. It’s also fun, which I can’t say for the Matrix movies.

But dumb. Real dumb.