I’ve long known I’ve an alter ego who plays jazz saxophone in New York – ever since first putting my name into a search engine.

Recently, hockey player Alex Foster has burst onto the Canadian scene.  He’s six years younger, two stone lighter, infinitely fitter and much better on skates than me.

Then there was the other Alex Foster blogger, who writes “Books and Coffee“.  This Alex Foster is an introvert, and female… and actually a character from a novel, not necessarily a real person.

But today’s surprising news is that Alex Foster is a further character:

Alex Foster is a British interrogator who finds himself in conflict with the interests of the Americans and the local Germans. 

No wonder I’m always tired, what with the jazz and the ice hockey and the interrogating.

more animals

LibDig – not what differentiates a pitbull and a hockey mom, but a new tool to help further promote the best of libdemmery on the net.

Congrats to Ryan who has got a working form of Digg, specially for Lib Dems, up and running in just a few weeks.

The idea is simple. If you like an article, you submit it to LibDig, using the handy bookmarklet which you can drag to your bookmark bar (in my case, between “Post to del.icio.us” and “Add to Google Reader”), so that you can recommend it to other Lib Dems. It needs a working Lib Dem Account, which anyone with a current party membership can sign up to from the site.

As we were leaving Bournemouth this year, I texted a colleague to say “If we get a site that does this, can we call it LDIG?” – an in joke based on the party’s Euro-enthusiast wing called LDEG – Lib Dem European Group – and not a million miles from LDEPP, which is what our group of MEPs are called, the Lib Dem European Parliamentary Party.

Sadly, it was not to be as our technical friend Ryan thought the joke to inward looking and too open to misinterpretation. He has kindly encouraged us to refer to it as that internally if the joke still makes us happy, so I will be stubbornly calling it that, even if I end up being the only one.

NOT-TO-BE-CONFUSED-WITH…

• LibDig.com – apparel for librarians
• LibDigOnAPig – James Graham’s suggestion for the branding of the US content

Over on the gourmet group on cix ((I couldn’t possibly call myself a gourmet, I’m almost entirely gourmand, but cix:food hardly ever seems to have anything in it)) someone has posted a link to this delightful set of recipes for quinces.

I love the writing and the spelling in this highlighted passage:

Take the kernells out of eight great Quinces, and boile them in a quart of spring water, till it come to a pinte, then put into it a quarter of a pinte of Rosewater, and one pound of fine Sugar, and so let it boile till you see it come to bee of a deepe colour: then take a drop, and drop it on the bottome of a sawcer, then let it run through a gelly bagge into a bason, then set it in your bason upon a chafing dish of coles to keep it warm, then take a spoone, and fill your boxes as full as you please, and when they be colde cover them: and if you please to printe it in moldes, you must have moldes made to the bigness of your boxe, and wet your moldes with Rosewater, and so let it run into your mold, and when it is colde turne it off into your boxes. If you wette your moldes with water, your gelly will fall out of them.

… is really making me regret not having a gelly bagge of mine own.

Or, indeed, any quinces.

The closest I’ve ever been to quinces was a jar of jam I brought back from France. On the way back from any driving holiday, we always stop off at a hypermarket and load up on things that are cheaper or nicer in France than in the UK, so often end up with car fulls of wine, coffee filters and Bonne Maman jam. One of those, in recent times, has been gèlé de coings, which was a sort of pale orange, clear jelly, which, to my gourmand palate, didn’t really taste of all that much. It was sweet, light, almost lavender-y in taste. The current ones on the go are chestnut and Normandy apple jelly with calvados from a farm-producer called Le Clos d’Orval but if I’m honest, my pedestrian tastes prefer… strawberry.