My God, It's Raining

So, today I went to see a dietician to try and sort out my potassium levels.  The thinking is that if we can control that through my diet, then they can give me as many anti-hypertensives as are needed to get my blood pressdure to settle down.

Low potassium diets are weird, though.  It’s completely counter-intuitive to everything you think would make a “good” diet.

Fruit and veg are all high potassium foods, for one thing.  Some are higher than others, but nevertheless I should generally stick to 4 small portions of fruit and veg a day, and avoid very high potassium ones like bananas outright.

I should always par-boil vegetables, too, and cut them really small to increase the surface area so that all the potassium leaches out into the water (which, I’m told, I should throw away – no more piping hot vegetable scum for me!).  “I hope you like mash,” says the dietician.

Milk, which I used to drink in hilariously vast quantities also, is out.  I get an allowance of half a pint a day, which is just insane considering I could happily drink a pint of the stuff right now.

No wholewheat or bran cereals.  All the husks and things – high potassium.

No chocolate.

NO CHOCOLATE.  It was my only vice, too.  I asked if I could trade up to something harder, like cocaine or fudge, but apparently the former is illegal and the latter is also bad for me.

I can, however, drink as much fizzy pop as I like.  All that advice about how it’s bad for you, rots your teeth, makes you stupid etc etc?  Out the window.  Aside from water and tea it’s the only bloody thing I can drink now.

That, and spirits.

Vodka, anyone?

Lisa and I went to see How to Train Your Dragon today.  Obviously, since we’re both relentlessly obsessed with all readily accessible forms of new technology, we went for the 3D option.

It’s a very good movie.  I’m not going to try and over-sell it, of course.  It’s not going to bother any awards ceremonies, it doesn’t have deep allegorical meaning, or any difficult-to-handle concepts.  It’s served up to the audience with the purpose of entertainment in mind, and it delivers exactly that.  90 minutes or so of tightly-written, popcorn fun for you to while away an afternoon with.

Thankfully movie makers seem to have got over the newness of 3D quite quickly (although you wouldn’t think it from watching trailers in a 3D screen) and while there are still obvious panderings to the technology (OH LOOK IT CAME STRAIGHT AT US OH WOW) they are thankfully few and far between.  Instead we’re given the opportunity to enjoy some excellent art.  The world of Hiccup’s Viking village (suspiciously populated with Scots accents) is full of effortlessly vibrant caricature, and it’s so well done that you find yourself quite taken with the oddly-proportioned villagers.  There are one or two lame ducks in the background filler – a strange half-smiling round-faced lady takes centre screen during a dramatic scene, kind of ruining the moment – but generally speaking it’s fantastic eye candy.

Also the dragons are cute.

In the Guardian this week, Julie Bindel writes joyfully about how Iceland, by banning strip clubs, is leading the way in feminism.

Reading it, it feels almost crass at how it is portrayed as an undeniable triumph over the oppression and objectification of women, which indeed it would be were it not for one simple fact; the law is gender neutral.  Naturally there persists a perceived bias in the shaded whisper-world of the sex industry, but nevertheless it cannot be rightly said that these laws exist to protect women alone.

But is it such a noteworthy triumph?  Surely column inches would be more usefully dedicated to the flip side of the point; that by rendering all such establishments and practices illegal, they will not cease entirely, and although there may be fewer of them around, the likelihood is that without the yoke of licensing and regulation to restrain them, the workers may well be at higher risk.

Such things would peter out over time, you might argue, but the sad truth of the world is that there are always people desperate enough to accept victimisation as their lot.

A more in-depth article would have peeled back that first shiny layer of triumphant gloss and asked the pertinent questions – how are you going to protect against the inevitability of unregulated clubs?  Where is the money to police those extra investigations going to come from? – rather than simply hooting in unrestrained joy.

Meanwhile, Lisa has been hard at work translating for me, as we’ve been following the development of a story over in Sweden about the town of Bjästa.  The tv station SVT runs a Panorama-style show, where they focus on and investigate stories that might not have got a lot of news time, but are of sufficient interest for them to investigate more in-depth.  It seems, as far as we can gather, that they got a tip about this town, that there was maybe a story about someone being wrongfully accused of rape.

So, off they went, and discovered that the story wasn’t quite as simple.

First off, the rapist, a 15-year old boy, wasn’t innocent.  He had gone into school one day and assaulted a 14 year-old girl in one of the toilets.  All of the evidence, forensic included, confirmed incontrovertibly that he had raped her, and he was indicted on this charge.

The boy, however, was very, very popular.  So popular, in fact, that although he couldn’t overcome the evidence against him in court, he could sway popular opinion in his favour.  As a result, he was pitied by all and sundry.  His victim was not so lucky.

She, instead of receiving the support and care of her classmates and community, was bullied.  Mercilessly so, up to the point that she had to leave school and was unable to attend her end-of-year “graduation” ceremony (in Sweden, students “graduate” from each year).

Her attacker, however, was able to.  He was in the process of appeal, and was given permission to attend the church service and the graduation proper.  In the church, he thanked the community for their support by handing out flowers.

Later, at the graduation itself, he raped a 17-year old girl.

Understandably, the webpage hosting the video of this report crashed, there were so many people trying to see it.

Understandably, there’s a great deal of outrage.

But how do you indict an entire community for being stupid?

Turns out you don’t. Just reading through one of the latest articles on Dagens Nyheter, the local residents are pleading ignorance, and attempting to turn the argument around with the claim of media bias.  It actually makes me a little bit sick reading a quote from one of the girls who accepted a flower from the rapist in the church. 

Vad visste vi? Ingenting.

What did we know? Nothing.

Same old excuse, every damn time.  It wasn’t me.  It wasn’t us.  It was someone else that hounded a rape victim out of the town.  Who was it?  Oh I wouldn’t know that either. No-one knows. We’re the victims now. Some of us have had nasty emails. People say mean things about us on the internet.

Can you believe it?  Some of them have had nasty things said about them on the internet.  I’m somewhat lacking in sympathy on this point.

If you’re not sure how this ties altogether, think of it this way.  It’s an example of how journalism can be used effectively to expose the sort of awfulness that lurks in the hearts of even the most innocuous-seeming people and places.  There is no triumph in this story.  There is no joy.  There’s just pain, and sadness.  What makes it even worse is the knowledge that for all but two people, this event will fade into insignificance.

So the Times Online has announced that it will be adopting a microtransaction model later this year, where a day’s access to their website will cost £1, and a week’s access for £2.

I can’t even be arsed getting irate about this.  It’s just such a hilariously bad idea that I actually want them to go ahead and do it, just so I can witness it dying on it’s arse.

It’s not like it’ll be missed,  anyway.  Rupert Murdoch’s obvious thread of bias that taints every single news source under his banner relegates all the content out of the realm of actual journalism and into some nether-land where by merely thinking something, you make it the truth.  I made the unforgivable error of buying the Times Education Supplement, only to discover that it painted a picture of the education system as a flimsy facsimile of education in an unspecified Golden Age, and that teachers (or at least the ones invited to write op-ed pieces) are all blithering, self-deluded idiots.  For example, there was a page 3 op-ed column titled “How Teaching Ruined My Marriage” which, on reading the actual text, should really have been called “Why I’m Going to Blame Everything Except Myself”.

tl;dr version – Times Online goes pay per view, rest of internet points and laughs, me included.

So I went running these past two mornings, which was a good thing because it’s been about six and a half years since I let slip my grip on a fitness regime that more than made up for my general lack of social ability.  My God, but it’s hard work getting back into it, though.  I still don’t like early mornings.  I know that for definite.  However, my afternoons and evenings seem to fill themselves with Things To Get Done rather quicker than I recall them doing in my youth, so early mornings it is.

Also I need new running shoes.  My current pair date back to 2004, I think, and are seriously starting to show their age.  The outside edge of the heels are worn down so much that I’m rolling my foot on every strike, and it’s making the outside edge of my legs ache something fierce.

Right.  Now to go see if I can talk Lisa into seeing Kick-Ass with me.  It’ll be super busy but it gets it out of the way.

Addendum: Soor Plooms are awesome.  That is all.

It’s St. Patrick’s Day, an observation which up until about twenty minutes ago had failed completely to register on my consciousness.  I therefore consider the day a total and utter failure, as I am determined to shovel as many named days as I can into the mental drawer that sees me blissfully ignorant of them until at least the day after.  It irks me that there are days for things that there really shouldn’t be days for, like “Middle Name Pride Day” and “Corn on the Cob Day”.

Hypocritically, perhaps, I cheerfully accept the existence of Talk Like A Pirate Day, but then that’s one of those things that no-one in their right mind remembers, and nobody actually observes it.  It’s like a parody of the whole charade, a completely useless and trivial and not actually very funny named day that sits right at the heart of why I don’t like them.

St. Patrick’s Day, you may argue, is different, due to the fact it is a Saint’s Day and blah blah Irish blah celebration blah. It’s an excuse for pubs and bars and people who manufacture seasonal decorative shit to shift as much product as they can in exchange for money.  You can go out and have a good time any night.  Waking up the next morning and pissing out the green dye they put in your beer does not heighten the experience.

Maybe I’m just jaded by the fact I once spent St Partick’s Day in San Diego, which was like a waking genealogical nightmare.

Shirtless Man With Green Face (overhears me speaking): Hey buddy are you Irish?

Me:  I’m Scottish.

SMWGF: Hahahaha I knew it buddy hey guys cmere and meet this guy he’s fucking Irish

(A small group gathers.  They are very drunk.)

SMWGF: Hey buddy say something for my friends.

Me: I’m not fucking Irish.

SMWGF: You said you were Irish.

Me: I said I’m Scottish.

SMGWF: Is that near Ireland?

Me: Excuse me, I have to go set fire to myself.

You can understand how that might start to grate after a few hours.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaanyway.  Lisa, her sister and I went to see The Lovely Bones.  It was very poor, as movies go.  You know when someone says “I hardly know where to start” and you roll your eyes because you know they’re about to launch into a monster tale regardless of their starting point decision making process?  Well I hardly know where to start.  There was so much that was wrong with the film, so much crap that kicked me out of my normal comfortable film-watching rut into the rough-shod terrain of flabbergasted disappointment that to try and organise it into some semblance of a narrative is beyond me.

Read more…

It’s Lisa’s birthday today, and in accordance with the traditions of birthday tradition, I spent the morning baking cakes for her.  She wanted me to make cupcakes, but couldn’t decide which types she wanted, so I used my own judgement to decide in the end.

First up; honey and granola cupcakes, with blueberries!

These are sweet, but have a nice texture from the granola (although I milled it by hand before stirring into the cake mix to reduce the particle size; they would have been horribly lumpy otherwise).

The other cakes I made by taking a basic cupcake mix and tossing in a handful of chopped raspberries and blackberries to flavour the mixture.  Half of them were iced and topped with a blackberry for a basic cupcake.

The other half had a scoop of cake cut from the top which was filled with raspberry conserve, chilled to set it a bit, and then iced.

So, those are the first cupcakes I’ve ever made and iced.  In spite of the repeated warnings throughout the cookbook about how desperately hard it can be to get a cupcake right, I found it pretty easy going, aside from getting the granola ones into their cake moulds.  The very low temperature of the oven meant that cooking them was a zero-stress doddle.  I think we can chalk it up as a success.

Lisa seemed to enjoy them anyway…

I would like to alert the world in general to the existence of Cadbury’s Caramel Biscuits.  Cadbury’s Caramel, as we all know, is a chocolate treat that sits in the central point of a Venn diagram composed of the three prime qualities of confectionary; Good, Right, and True.

Cadbury’s Caramel is Goodness, Righteousness and Truth.

Cadbury’s Caramel Biscuits, however, exist in a place known only as “toilet-ass-fail”.

I’m not sure how this has happened.  Generally speaking, biscuit, caramel and chocolate are difficult to combine in a manner that anyone would describe as a “failure”, much less one associated with the scatalogical contexts of both “ass” and “toilet” but nevertheless Cadbury’s have managed it.  I dread to think of how badly they’ve fucked up the sister product, Crunchie Biscuits, although I suspect we might have to draw the word “cloaca” out into the light, blinking and trembling in its shame.  Mind you, given the general lack of cloaca knowledge possessed by the general populace, the less exact but more descriptive “combo-hole” might be appropriate.

In short; Epic Biscuit Fail.

How could you, Cadbury?  How could you?

I was in a branch of WH Smiths at the weekend, browsing the bookshelves because they had a Buy One Get One Half Price deal on, and a couple of other deals that I can’t quite remember.  The basic deal with WH Smiths is this; they invariably stock a load of shit (ghosted celebrity novels, airport thrillers) but every so often you’ll find something actually worth buying.  It’s worth checking in every once in a while to see if there’s anything worth nabbing.

So while I’m in there, a couple are walking round with their son.  He’s maybe 11-12 years old and he’s getting pretty agitated, because he can’t find something, and apparently neither can his parents.  Eventually, they approach a member of staff, a slouching teen with a thousand-yard stare, and ask him for advice.

They are looking for books on CSI, the mother tells him.  The son is doing a school project on Forensics and they are looking for some books to help him out.

The teen lifts a slack hand to point over their shoulders.  “Crime’s there,” he says, before shuffling off at speed to avoid being asked for specificity.

I watch them go to the crime section with a pang of sympathy.  They aren’t going to find anything there.  Maybe some novelisations of CSI, perhaps, but nothing you could write a project on.

I go over, and approach the parents.

“Hi there.  I just happened to hear you describing your predicament to that very unhelpful member of staff there, and it occurred to me that I could help you out.  I’m a scientist by profession and know of a couple of useful books I could reccommend to you.  It’s unlikely you’ll find them here, but they should be available in a library, and there’s lots of useful stuff online.”

The mother looks me up and down, and then says, sounding quite bitter about it, “no, we don’t need your help.”

She then grabs her son and stomps off in a manner suggesting I’ve just implied that her ankles are fat, or some other terrible, unanswerable insult.

What is wrong with people?