nothings fun anymore

Do I take a Bible to read on the plane?

Pros:
no chance of running out of stuff to read
thin pages so high page-size ratio

Cons:
some of it's pretty dull (exact proportion unknown)
might make me look weird

Some companies, such as Direct Line, change their prices on a daily basis to balance their short-term workload. In other words, if they're busy, they'll increase prices to attract fewer customers and less work.

I hope I'm keeping track of the numbers right.

Sleeper
Woody Allen in slapstick mode as a man in a coma revived after centuries. Involves a lot of people running around chasing other people in a comedy fashion. I wouldn't say it's a work of genius, but it's quite funny, though probably more for the wit than the running around.

Demon Seed
James lent me this because it's one of his favourite sci-fi films. I didn't realise until I started watching that it's based on a book by the epitome of airport thriller writers Dean R Koontz. It's vision of a super-intelligent computer and automated house is wonderfully 70s. Proteus does seem to be the Anakin Skywalker of computers though. All that awesome intellect and knowledge of humanity, but absolutely no persuasive skills. Oh, you rebutted my one sentence argument... Then I will have to kill you! Also, let's give this computer a really sinister voice. Or maybe he's the MacGuyver of computers, able to create a reconfiguring, levitating polygon and a tailored embryo using just a laser and a mechanical arm. There's some kind of message about inhumanity and the environment, but I think it got lost somewhere.

Blue Velvet
This is actually the first David Lynch film I've seen, so I braced myself for a baffling story of mysterious symbolism. I was rather surprised to find a linear plot, clear good and bad characters and a neat resolution. It does have a "strange and brutal underside to the normal looking town" theme to it, but this is made less threatening by the fact the two sides are very clearly spatially and thematically separated. The ending is parodic in its upbeatness, even down to the mechanical robins straight out of Mary Poppins. It reminded me of the basic structure of a fantasy story where chance leads the hero into an alternate world, at least until its problems are resolved. (It also reminded me somewhat of A History of Violence.) None of which is to say there's not a depth to the film and its symbolism, and there are a number of very memorable scenes, mostly based around Dennis Hoppers legendary satanic performance.

This is Amy's book, but she left it here so I read it. I'm relying on her to proofread this for me. Michael Pollan's an appropriately named food writer, best known for The Omnivore's Dilemma (which I haven't read), a book about the ethical and social implications of the way we eat. In Defence of Food looks at the "problem" of what we eat from a health-perspective - although the two perspectives are mostly aligned - and comes up with a set of rules, or guidelines, for eating. I think most of what Pollan says is not new, but I wasn't aware of a lot of it.

Before he spells out these rules, Pollan discusses the effects of "the Western diet" and the rise of nutritionism. The Western diet means lots of processed food, lots of sugar, food designed for storage and transportation, widespread use of mysterious chemicals, consumption of a limited variety of species (particularly corn, wheat and soy), a shift from leaves and fruits to seeds, high meat consumption (compared to most but not all traditional diets). Plus some other stuff I'm sure I've forgotten. It also extends to industrial agriculture at one end and patterns of eating - snacking, eating quickly, etc. - at the other. The contention is that this diet is responsible for or contributes to a raft of health problems such as diabetes, cancer, heart disease and, of course, obesity. Strong evidence for this is found in the observations of anthropologists and scientists in the field that when traditional cultures adopt these eating habits, they develop these diseases.

Set against this is "nutritionism". Nutritionism is a science and, when done properly, a genuine science. The trouble is that it's also a very unsuccessful science. It started in the 1800s when a German chemist identified the three components of food: carbohydrate, fat and protein. Of these, protein was the most important, as it promoted growth. The parallels to agriculture, with the isolation of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, and the pre-eminence of nitrogen, are not coincidental. Of course, it wasn't too long before people realised that if you just ate these three things, you got ill, so the search was on for other nutrients. This set a pattern for nutritional science - the "oh actually, we missed this..." as well as the promotion of one nutrient as the best (or worst). The backlash against protein came with Mr Kellog, who drove it out of our morning meals because it caused masturbation, a charge MODERN SCIENCE HAS NOT REFUTED. Overall, a century and a half of study has produced hardly any consensus and some disasters (the shift from animal fats to trans-fats), while people's actual diet seems to have deteriorated.

The problem is that the reductionist approach, not just of breaking diets down into individual foods, but of breaking foods down into their constituent chemicals. By doing this it misses nutrients, the relationships between them, and the effects of the broader pattern of eating. The most we can say, according to Pollan, is that a range of health problems are linked to diet and people eating "traditional diets" suffer less from these problems. Attempts to figure out exactly what in those diets makes them good have had very limited success. The good news is that there are a great variety of traditional diets, from eskimos who hardly eat any plants to vegetarian Indians to the French with their love of highly milled flour.

There are a couple of things in here that I would have liked a little more definition of. What exactly is a processed food? I suppose maybe it's not something you can define precisely, only see different levels of processing. And what exactly is a traditional diet? It's obvious Pollan's not talking about, say, the traditional diet of the urban British working class. Traditional rural might be a useful distinction, or traditional pre-industrial. Here's somewhere we can take advantage of modernity, in getting fresh perishable foods into the cities to facilitate this kind of diet. A further question, though, is should we adopt a traditional diet as a whole, or can we mix and match between them? The former is a lot harder than the latter. Particularly with regards to the availability of good quality food. A mediterranean diet clearly does not match very well with the crops produced in the UK (at least, not until the country warms up a bit more...). It's a little surprising this important issue isn't brought up at all.

The book is probably best seen as part of an ongoing attempt to establish a positive food culture in the US (a process also going on in Britain). A culture that is healthier, better for the environment, animals and producers, and also makes us appreciate food more. Because for all our over-eating, the attention and time we give to food has fallen.

Enough background; what people really want is to be told what they should do, so here are the rules. Not always meant to be taken completely seriously:

Eat no more than 25 points a day - no wait, that's Weight Watchers.
Eat mostly plants, especially leaves
You are what you eat eats too
If you have the space, buy a freezer
Eat well-grown food from healthy soils
Be the kind of person who takes supplements
Eat more like the French, Or the Italians. Or the Japanese. Or the Indians. Or the Greeks.
Regard nontraditional foods with skepticism
Don't look for the magic bullet in the traditional diet
Have a glass of wine with dinner
Pay more, eat less
Eat meals
Do all your eating at a table
Don't get your fuel from the same place your car does
Try not to eat alone
Consult your gut
Eat slowly
Cook and, if you can, plant a garden

Further explanation will be provided if anyone's interested. I'm going to do a rough assessment of my diet and eating habits against these soon.

Normally when I go out it's with headphones secured-in-ears, aurally isolated from the world. Am I too cut off by this? This week and last week I tried going out shopping without them in, to see the difference.

I expected the main difference to be traffic noise, but that's not the case. Most of the walk to the shops is through quiet montpelier. Only the stretch from the girls' school to the arches along the main road is dominated by traffic. The main thing I notice to start with is the sound of birds - the chatter of starlings in the trees, the whoom of pigeons trailing a woman in a green sari putting out a bag of food for them. Some people having band practice in an upstairs room.

Of course, I'm soon reminded that part of the reason for headphones is specifically to cut myself off from people and make it easier to avoid them. There don't seem as many people around bristol begging as there used to (strangely), but there are still the big issue sellers, the shop assistants, the leafletters. This week outside the amnesty bookstore, people campaigning against SATs.

It makes me a bit less awkward in stores, not having to shift my bags and take out or put back the headphones. I do have to listen to the local radio when I'm in them though.

I think a bit more, which may be a good or a bad thing.

In conclusion: no statistically significant relationship, so the null hypothesis cannot be rejected.

This week I didn't get that much food, but I did buy some books - trainspotting, candide and other stories and the secret agent.

Dom bought a bunch of magic: the gathering decks last week. Some of my friends used to play back in school, so I know the rules enough to play, or at least to get beaten. Which is what tends to happen. Eleven games, three victories, two of which were in exactly the same way, with the same deck. (For M:TG players: a green deck which generates 1/1 creature tokens, plus overwhelm, giving +3/+3 to all creatures = easily 15+ damage in a turn, even if your siege wyrm is having a nap.)

I got some new scales, which are effectively a birthday present from Amy, so now I can weigh things accurately. I'm trying to weigh as much as I can, just when I got a sugar thermometer I measured the temperature of everything I could (conclusion: most things are below 50 degrees, the thermometer's starting point).

I'm not entirely convinced by the video, but this is one of many low songs that I love.

Lisa: "sometimes I feel you think everyone else in the department - and possibly the company - is very dumb. But that doesn't make me not like you!"

(save the rare ones) and start again.

But I'm not really sure why.

Or whether it's a good idea.

I think I'd need a collecting and listening strategy to rebuild, and that's what I'm lacking. I should do a week on early post-punk, a week on krautrock, a week on bleeding edge electronic music, and so-on. Or something.

For the last week or so I've been nurturing a jug of sourdough starter. This morning I made bread from it.

For the uninformed about bread, rather than using commercial yeast, to make sourdough you mix up flour and water for a while, to develop a yeast culture. Not only is this a local variety of yeast, with different characteristics to commercial kinds, but you get a balanced set of bacteria with it. The byproducts of these bacteria give sourdough its distinctive taste. It's a sort of localist-anti-capitalist bread.

From what I've seen, sourdough is extremely popular among foodies in the US (even excessively so according to something I read). You can get it here, but it's not such a big thing.

Your starter is meant to smell "yeasty" and "fruity". I thought mine smelt more like paint, but it was making bubbles, so I assumed there was yeast in there, just no fruit.

One of the downsides of sourdough is that, even once you've got the starter, the process of making it is even more drawn out than making regular bread. Sourdough you have to first make a "sponge" by combining some starter with water, and waiting for the yeast to get to work. Then you make up the dough, and let it rise. This rise is liable to take longer than with commercial yeast, but there's no way of telling just how slow or quick your starter will be. Then you knock back and give a second rise, also slower than with regular yeast. As each rise will take an absolute minimum of a couple of hours, and may be best left overnight, it's not a good thing to do on a work day.

I didn't have high hopes for this first attempt, but it did rise, slowly. In fact, the first significant problem was that I didn't make the dough firm enough. For a light textured loaf you want the dough as wet as you can handle (and very strong flour) but dough that's too wet won't hold its shape. As happened in this case, meaning I had to transfer it from a baking tray to a small loaf tin after quarter of an hour as I saw the dough slowly spreading out flat.

I then left it to rise overnight, and got up early to bake it. Now, to my surprise, I have a perfectly reasonable sourdough loaf. The crumb is a bit more dense than I'd like, but it's acceptable - it's nowhere near being a brick. The crust was excellent, though short-lived. Supposedly sourdough makes a particularly good crust, possibly due to the alcohol in it evaporating. What was particularly surprising was how pronounced the flavour is. A lot of speciality breads - eg. overnight bread, rye bread - are really not particularly different in taste from regular bread. There's no mistaking this stuff though, as the sourness hits the sides of your tongue. It also smells very distinct, reminding me of something I can't quite place.

Now I need to figure out what the best thing to do with it is. Off to try toast.

Right, I am off to see Aymee for two weeks on the 21st. If things go well with the place she's interested in, she'll be living in Jersey city, which is just over the river from manhattan (which I still have to learn to spell correctly).

Now we need more ideas for things to do in New York, New Jersey and the vicinity. Otherwise we might just end up going out to buy food a lot. I'm the worst tourist.

Jersey City, Hoboken and probably some other places must be interesting, from one point of view, because they're cities in their own right (officially at least), but they're right next to the more interesting, more popular, and better-looking city of New York. Do they have their own identities, turn into commuter cities, or fill up with the cast-offs and second-rates of NYC? I suppose that New York itself is divided into boroughs which are larger than these cities. So I imagine they work just like (comparatively small) boroughs of NYC, but without the glamour of Brooklyn, The Bronx et al. Maybe they're full of overlooked wonders.
On the evidence of that incoherence, urban sociologist or ethnologist does not look like a promising career path. I'll have to see what I think when I go there.

From above it looks like a smeared oil painting.

I suppose it serves me right for not sorting out a dentist in bristol, but my procession of trips down to bridgwater to see the dentist continues. It's a good thing I have the holiday left to take all these half days off.

This was appointment number four, following check-up, pain check-up and initial root canal work. The good news is that since the last appointment I haven't had any problems at all. Today I think they did some more work on the roots, with a tiny file, and put in a filling. I had another injection, that made tears roll out my eyes. This one was actually painful because it must have hit a nerve, sending a nasty twinge through my gum and lip. The dentist did some soldering in my mouth, so I suppose I now have some kind of circuit board fitted in there.

The bad news is that it turns out I need yet another appointment, when I thought I was almost done. I'm also concerned that the filling put in today has already gone from much more proud than the temporary filling to noticeably less. But the temporary filling was fine despite my worrying, so probably I should relax. As long as it doesn't go down more it won't be a problem.

Congratulations to the Daily Mail for publishing an article that has generated more complaints to the Press Complaints Commission than the PCC has received in the whole of its five year history.
Helped along a little by Charlie Brooker.

For comparison, this is twice as many as were generated by the Ross/Brand furore. Complaints for that went to Ofcom, the independent regulator for TV and Radio. The PCC, on the other hand is run by the newspapers. Peter Wright, editor of the Mail on Sunday is on the committee, while Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail, is chairman of the committee that produces the PCC code. You can guess which out of Ofcom and the PCC is the more effective regulator.

It's not the most important news in the world, but forgive me some pleasure at watching the Mail getting attacked. Especially when it's by a public campaign of the kind the Mail likes to orchestrate. And the original article was pretty fucking awful.