Flammkuchen

Sorry that it's been so long. Anyway.

My 100th post is coming up, so it's time for an overhaul - that's why from now on you'll find my blog under a different url, committingcriminology.blogspot.com - this is also because it's no longer Leicester Uni Adventures as I'm no longer a student at Leicester. Expect further changes in the next couple of weeks.

I now live in Leeds, or in Headingley to be exact, in a house with five other students - third years, fascinating from an anthropological point of view - and have not been up to much lately other than attend Leeds Uni's Crime Fiction conference, and taking the train to Manchester to see Kristy, who's moved to Oxford this week (somehow Manchester ended up the easiest place for us to meet, long story). I like Headingley, it's a nice place, half a mile from shops (ten minute walk, which is great because I've had something like Fresher's Flu the last few days and I'm quite capable of starving myself if I don't feel like going to the shops - half a mile is just the right distance for me to not have an excuse to go out) and with a great public transport connection to Leeds city centre (and the Uni, of course). My housemates seem friendly enough, so that's cool too.

It's been a bit sunny too, yesterday and today, and Kristy gave me a lovely photo book of our trip this summer, so all in all I was reminded of Heidelberg - and with memories of Heidelberg come memories of Flammkuchen. It's not a difficult thing to make, so I decided to give it a shot today. The traditional version first, I'll make the veggie one next weekend (I do think I prefer the veggie version, to be honest - the traditional one is a little heavy. You'll see why). As coincidence has it, today the Dutch newspaper I regularly read online has a fairly big thing on the German elections. I suppose it's a bit of a German day today then.

You'll need the following equipment:
A measuring cup
Baking paper
Baking tray

Optional:
Mixing bowl
Mixer
Rolling pin

Ingredients:

Dough:
200 grams (7 ounces) plain four
110 millilitres water (tap water is fine)
1 teaspoon salt
1.5 teaspoon olive oil

Traditional toppings:
200 grams crème fraiche (Sainsbury's has some decent ones, also 50% less fat ones but I was being unhealthy with it anyway so went for the full-fat one)
100 grams diced bacon (I diced two rashers of thick-cut smoked back bacon, but it depends on your own tastes. I suppose smoked bacon is better than unsmoked in this case though, despite being bacon even smoked has enough difficulty to hold its own in this dish)
Half a diced onion (or however much you want - I like onion, but don't need it to overwhelm me. Also these are big, big onions I'm using. Just make sure it properly covers your dough)

Vegetarian toppings:
200 grams crème fraiche
Cherry tomatoes
Rocket
Pesto
Onion optional (I don't recommend it, this combination has more delicate flavours than the above sturdy one, but to each his or her own)
Pine nuts (they make everything better)

Preheat the oven to 230 - 250 Celsius (depending on how long you want it to take and whether you mind checking up every minute if you do it really hot)

So, you start by making a dough - in a mixing bowl with a mixer, or on the counter top with your hands if you like it messy. Hands and surface must be clean. You simply slowly (a bit at a time) add water to the flour, which makes for a dense and sticky ball of dough. Add the salt and oil, which makes it extremely sticky and a bit stringy too. Don't get dough on your shirt, and if you do, keep your shirt on until you're done because you don't want to make more than one dirty. If you're making a messy dough (like I did), you'd be better off wearing an apron.

Stretch the dough on the paper on the baking tray - with your fingers if you don't have a rolling pin (or perhaps with your fingers even if you do, because this is really sticky dough and will most likely stick to the pin rather than your paper). Get it nice and thin without any holes.

Spread the crème fraiche on the dough. You'll get a fairly thick layer, but that's how it's supposed to be. Sprinkle on the onions and bacon, or your other toppings (you can stick your bacon and onions in a frying pan first for a bit if you so prefer). It's supposed to look a bit like this:

Stick the tray in the oven and bake for about 15 minutes (do check often because it's fairly easy to cook this thing to a crisp, which is such a waste of a good dish). Once it's done it looks like this:

Eat. Recommended for drinks is a lager (personal recommendation is a nice, clear Heidelberger 1603 but if I did that here I'd probably end up the same as whenever I get my mum to bring me a bottle of a nice French wine I used to drink during holidays in France - it never tastes as good as it did there) or a dry white wine that holds its own. If going for non-alcoholic (I may be living in the UK now but even for me 2 in the afternoon of a regular Sunday is a bit early), keep it simple with a (sparkling) mineral water.

Enjoy it. I know I am :)

What is it about boobs that makes people act like idiots?

Today I read an article in De Volkskrant (well, its online version) that I thought so good that I felt it needed to be translated. It's an incredible example of how sexism is still pervasive and why sexism is just STUPID AS HELL.

The original article (http://www.volkskrant.nl/vk/nl/13166/Joyce-Brekelmans/article/detail/3502529/2013/09/02/Wat-is-het-toch-met-borsten-dat-mensen-er-zo-raar-van-gaan-doen.dhtml) is by Joyce Brekelmans and was published on www.volkskrant.nl on 2 September 2013.

'What is it about boobs that makes people act like idiots?'

It isn't the case that Joyce Brekelmans would like to become a member of the SGP [Dutch Fundamentalist Christian Party] or the Woudrichem Fishing Club, but sometimes someone just needs to say out loud that it is pure bullshit to not be allowed to do something just because you're a girl.

It never occurred to me to want to become a member of the fishing club of Woudrichem, but it's incredibly lame that I'm not allowed to do so in any case because I'm a girl.

I don't think having a meat-rod is a necessity to sit on a fold-up stool on the waterside whilst looking into the distance, donning a stupid cap. You also don't need a third leg to play football, but when she was a child, my sister still wasn't allowed to play with the local football club. She could play with the boys a bit futher away - good for them, because she was awesome at it - but when she started puberty it was all over. Breasts as the ultimate off-side [translator's note: don't think "off-side" offers the same connotations as "buitenspel" (which also means being put outside the game in Dutch) but I decided for a literal translation here].

What is it about boobs that makes people act like idiots? When last week, Bits of Freedom activist Ancilla Tillia tried to awaken the Netherlands to privacy issues, she was told that as an ex-Playmate she had no right to complain. As if the Google-ranking of her nipples has anything to do with the policies of Ivo Opstelten [Dutch minister of Justice and Safety], about which she was expressing her concerns. Maybe I didn't pay enough attention in Biology class, but as far as I am aware, taking off your jumper does not equal a frontal lobotomy.

My own naked everything isn't available for publicity, but if I would ever want to draw attention to these two important issues, I would hope to be able to continue doing my work after that. Whatever the Gordons [Dutch telly persona] of this world think of that.

In 2013 there are still people who are so incredibly scared of the magical effect a pair of women's breasts have that they keep trying to forbid girls participating in things. Even in the Netherlands, where we, in comparison to a majority of women, men and children all over the world have an incredibly privileged situation. Isn't it somewhat bizarre that I was forced to do gymnastics in PE whilst the boys got to play football? That I wasn't allowed a job in the Tour de France-crew because "women would mess up the social atmosphere"? That, as a student, I was not allowed to work as a barmaid because working the bar was guys' work and girls had to do the waitressing? That a guy friend of a girl friend now joins his father-in-law to the Freemasons because his daughter, who would love to accompany her father, isn't allowed in?

And then we still are in a privileged situation, as for instance the Afghani Malala would gladly change places. It would just have been nicer to have known beforehand that those pleasant boobs - which I once desperately wished for - could be such party poopers. It isn't that the membership of the Dutch Fundamentalist Christian Party, the Woudrichem fishing club or the group of people that Gordon thinks have a right to speak out against privacy invasion is very appealing, but sometimes someone just has to say out loud that it is pure bullshit that you are not allowed to do something just because you're a girl.

Making a Mochary of Tax Law*: My Dissertation

I handed in two hard copies of my dissertation last Friday. I still have to hand in a digital copy on Blackboard, but I haven't the courage. I keep wondering - what if it's not good enough? What if my conclusion is too weak, what if my argumentation is not solid, what if my literature review is flawed, what if my methodology is unsound? The only thing that I do not worry about is whether my sample size is large enough - 488 articles is definitely large.
This is the capstone of my Master's degree - an MSc, that is, no matter how often it is called an MA - and I just want to finish it properly. I am hoping for a Merit, as that would put me at a Merit degree, but at this point I would even be happy with a Pass, just so I can pass my degree. It is dreadfully scary to hand in a body of work consisting of 20,000 words which will determine whether you will receive a Postgraduate Diploma or that actual Master of Science-degree in January. But I suppose I must.

I very much enjoyed doing the research. Stuck behind a desk for hours on end, reading about corporate crime and tax law and corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis? Yes please! Messing about with SPSS, trying to get results that make sense and then actually getting those? Hell yes! Reading articles, thinking "this looks quite objective, doesn't it?" and then, when looking beyond the surface, noticing that "oh hey, this isn't objective at all!". Noticing that news writing contributes to a vicious cycle of social stratification, finding out news is all economics and politics and dominant ideology. Realising that the language of news writing works to  negotiate the social contract. Fascinating. 

But that's all very abstract, and hard to put into words - therefore hard to properly maintain when you're trying to cut down from 28,000 to 20,000 - and then the fear that you've lost depth, strength, solidity, soundness, and gained flaws. I hope to put that right in my PhD, win back my depth and solidity, but 100,000 words is still not very many when you're dealing with something so interesting as this, which is both so abstract and practical. But let us focus on the practical findings of my dissertation for now.

My research question was how UK newspapers portrayed the tax avoidance of Facebook, Starbucks, eBay, and such companies - multinational companies - and the backlash. This is extremely recent stuff, as the story broke in October 2012 and has still not finished, and it struck me as odd for it was not actually a proper news story. It was big, true, but the general readerships could hardly be expected to *care* about multinational companies working within the bounds of international commercial regulations. A corporation's main goal is profit, and it will do everything it is allowed to do to get that profit. So there is no novelty in this, and no novelty should equal no news. Besides, even when corporations do break the rules of international commerce, the backlash is hardly as large as it was now. Cartels? An article in the finance sections of broadsheets, perhaps a follow-up, that's it. Child labour? Myeah, that'll generate some outrage, some people will turn to companies that aren't known for using child labour, and some politicians might say "shouldn't do that!", nothing big though. Environmental crimes? Difficult - Shell's crimes in Nigeria hardly make the papers at all, but the BP oil spill generated quite some fuss. But, you know, that was dead fish and the Gulf of Mexico and stuff. Proximate drama. But taxes?
Taxes?

(Sorry, been wanting to use this meme for a while now)

No one gives a shit about taxes. If anything is written about taxes, it's about how you can save on your tax payments by minding this this and that category. And as no one knows how corporation tax works, other than that corporations have to pay a certain percentage of their profits, few people usually care. After all, some of these companies haven't been paying taxes for literally years and only now it generated outrage.

So that's all interesting, but that's all context. My question was, how did they portray it? Did the newspapers make a big fuss? Did they side with the outrage or with the papers? Judging from the fact that the OECD was considering changing regulations and that people kept being outraged, I hypothesised that yeah, these newspapers will be stirring up a fuss. But their reporting initially seemed quite balanced. Objective. As newspapers are supposed to report things.

So I did a corpus analysis of all articles and took 7 articles for a critical discourse analysis. I'll not go into the specifics here, email me for a PDF copy if you want one, but what I found was that yeah, these newspapers were kicking up as much as a fuss as the politicians calling Google 'evil' and those protesters calling for boycotts of Starbucks. In fact, they seemed to be the instigator of some of the outrage, by for instance only presenting those opinions which said that these "multinational corporations should pay their fair share of UK corporation tax" (this is a composite sentence of the main lexical items the corpus program showed me. Absolutely fascinating).

The next question, of course, is why. But I just spent 20,000 words detailing how UK newspapers to an extent criminalise the otherwise legal behaviour of not paying your taxes where you are not obliged to pay your taxes. The moral question of whether a company should be obliged to pay taxes in territories where they make billions of pounds of revenue, but where they do not technically, according to the OECD regulations of the taxation of multinational corporations, have to pay taxes, has been answered, by these papers, with a "Yes". But why? Why now?

This will have to do with the economic crisis, I hypothesise. So the next research question will be how the portrayal of corporate fraud (or crime, but that's perhaps too broad for 100,000 words) in the UK has developed over the course of the global economic crisis. But that's for my PhD. And something I can't wait to get started on.



*This is taken from a Starbucks-related pun in The Mirror. I loved it, and it has become the title of my dissertation. Tabloid puns are the best.