life with booyaa

despite being really annoyed by getting such rubbish in the mail - thanks to the scum at the gardening catalogue with their "we'll sell your identity to the highest bidder" attitude - i had to laugh when i got this bundle through the mail.

in a plastic wrapper came this bunch of about 20 colour-printed cards, about the size of index cards and on fairly good quality heavyweight paper. each card had a double-sided advert on it. big image, catchy taglines on one side and the fineprint/details on the back. these covered things like aids to help the elderly deal with daily life, like bathroom rails and heated slippers. there was tat for the house and garden. clothes catalogues for grandparents. everything was targetting the older generation demographic. even my mum - a grandparent and, it has to be said, now getting on a bit - would turn her nose up at 9/10ths of these. then, in the midst of all this depressing rubbish was an advert for fairly serious sex toys. i'm not talking your off-white unrealistic plug-in vibrator. or the "comfort massager" type pitch i've seen occasionally. oh no. state-of-the-art realistic look and feel stuff, with extras ;)

i know sextagenarians still have sex. that's not what i mean. but someone who buys a plastic all-in-one garden gnome birdbath and feeder, a beautifully decorated lace-effect non-slip teapot stand and a cheerful, authentic singing bluebird musical rotating decoration (pictured on a lace mat on top of the television, of course) is surely not going to be interested in a 12" black latex dildo. someone please tell me i'm right.

i came across the west wing drinking game here, and many other lovely lovely things. and it's not about the drinking, it's just a comfortable place to go and recognise all that was great and good, familiar and smart about this now on-its-last-legs show.

some months ago southwest trains started a refurbishment program of their commuter trains. this involved new rolling stock but also old trains were painted, given new upholstery and - here's the good bit - many of the trains now have wider doors. the aim was that as people could get on or off the train 2 at a time it would be quicker and trains would run on time (yeah right)

so, how's it faring? well, it would work in principle but they forget to factor in the utter stupidity of the general public.

mostly people on the platform stand in front of the train doors restricting the passage of those trying to get off the train. this results in only one person at a time being able to get off the train. so, basically it's a complete waste of time and money.

am i turning into an old moaner or am i right?

bit bleedin' scary if you ask me.

a grauniad journo tried out a supposedly above board tracking service that is cheaply available on the internets. he was doing it on the level, with his stalkee's consent and in the name of investigative journalism. but think about it for a moment... am i paranoid or is this truly the stuff nightmares are made of?

read all about it

was that sufficiently daily mail headline for you?

on the way home i read in the horrendous freebie evening paper from the same stable as the substandard,London Lite, that - OMFG!!! the poor, blighted people of richmond (surrey, not yorkshire. or virginia for that matter) will have to pay horrendously high, unfair car tax for parking their family vehicle outside their home.

now, let's get this straight. first this is richmond. stinking rich people live here. or there. we no longer officially live in the borough of richmond, we just wish we still did. and the 'newspaper' gave an example of a two-car family with two 4x4s. this is all made to sound like the lib dem council had lost the plot and were creating untold trouble for these reasonable people who need a 4x4 to take young jemima and thomas to school. yes, of course they need a massive, opaque-windowed lexus to get through the 30 mph road, and you need a land rover discovery to get up richmond hill to the private school in ham. rubbish. if a family is selfish enough to have two 4x4s then they deserve to be taxed to high heaven. and they must be completely thick, too, to not have a smart. which is the only car you can park round richmond anyway. makes me seethe.

for a slightly different, and altogether more reasoned view than my angry rant, read this, from one of booyaa's running blog contacts.

it's esperanto for the web generation.

it is, of course, intriguing to my linguistic side, that someone can make up a language and let it out into the world. i wonder what will happen if it does take off. will it be controlled by the company who made it or will it naturalise and evolve thanks to the users? as there will be no native speakers as such and those that use it will be crossing the traditional linguistic boundaires it will be interesting to see what becomes of it.

get the lowdown and the particularly bright and bouncy press release from techcrunch.

no really. this is definitely for me.

heh.

what have i been saying all these years? finally. some boffins have proven that powerpoint rots your synapses.

well ok, not quite. it's linked to cognitive load theory which, as an ex-teacher, i'm only too familiar with. we can only take in and retain a finite amount of information. powerpointitis, the deadly disease which makes boring people use the worst possible built-in templates, add a squillion graphs and pie charts, embellish the dry data with 'colourful' clip art etc, is responsible for cognitive overload in presentations. basically, the slides are so busy and people are so rubbish at organising the information logically that your brain can't take it all in. so it is absolutely the presenter's fault that everyone is yawning. proven.

see, i told you about the evils of ppt some time ago. you could have listened...

apparently teh intarweb has got too big for its own boots. 'experts' are claiming that it's about to cave in on itself. jesus. i mean, if it did i'd be stuffed. how would boo and i live without IM and email every day at work? what would become of my job? no point in creating usable websites if there's no network to access them on.

but, come on guys. quit the scaremongering already. have you never heard of the boy who cried wolf?

here's a reasonably sensible article over at the bbc's click website, which of course you won't be able to read if the internet's collapsed.

... or so say the folks over at the uber review.

jet packs are for sale, they tell us. the packs aren't actually on sale to the general public, but you can have a 'ride' if you've got a quarter of a million dollars to spend on a three minute thrill. but it's just the start. five years from now and we'll be jet-packing to work. in space suits. to protect us from the atmosphere that we've polluted so much as to make it impossible to sustain human life. but hey, we've got jetpacks, who cares? </irony>

read all about it at the uber review

except of course that's pasteurize, with a zee, cos i'm betting these guys are merkins.

how fabulous, to have great faith in such a wacky combination and to care about it so much you feel the need to build a website to get the word out to the masses.

ah the power of the internets.

check em out: whatwouldjesuspasteurize.com

i have to say if you subtract jesus from the equation i'm with them. i think it's outrageous to force pasteurisation on almonds and finding raw nuts is hard enough as it is without this legislation coming in. it's just, you know, that whole jesus thing. nuts. (sorry)

someone out there in the great us of a wants video game addiction to be a properly recognised, um, addiction. so the guys in charge of such things are researching the possibility of giving gaming as an activity an official branding of potentially addictive. the luddite over at wired then raises the question: what happens next? do wiis and playstations come with surgeon general's health warnings plastered all over them?

makes for interesting reading.

right, so booyaa has been joining in on raw dinners all week. today he had green juice for breakfast, too, and he's bouncing around like a mad thing. he has officially re-certified himself as being 150% more booyaa!

it's amazing, the difference, it really is noticeable. no sluggishness, no lazing around after dinner with no desire to do anything other than watch tv. he's up and about, washing up and cleaning the mess i've made in the kitchen, really, well, 'bouncy' is definitely the word. in the mornings he's been up before i've taken tea in, which usually is a two step process to get him out of bed, and he's done household chores he doesn't ever think to do, i always have to ask him to help, before he's left for work in the morning. bizzarro!

best of all, he's really enjoying the food, it's not a chore or a sacrifice. he's loved everything we've eaten this week and he snarfed extra large seconds of the raspberry sorbet and chocolate sauce tonight and even likes the green juices.

so raw is doing him lots of favours, it would seem. and the transformation is so fast! it's only one meal a day for five days and he's thriving on it. i remember a long time ago reading the question 'ok, you were ill and got healthy on raw foods. so what happens when a healthy person tries it?' here's your answer. they become little dynamos of energy and packed full of feel-good factor :)

food diary
green juice (kale, apples, oranges, mint, carrots)
banana
lambs lettuce & tomato salad with 'scones' from couple of days ago, 2 squares chocolate
romaine roll-ups (chopped peppers, spring onion, sweetcorn, apple with creamy mustard dressing piled onto romaine leaves, vaguely rolled up. then the filling splurges out as you eat it)
raspberry sorbet and chocolate sauce a la karen knowler

for booyaa's food diary replace lunchtime salad with a chicken sandwich and scotch eggs (yeah, i already rolled my eyes so hard they squeaked)

there's some great stuff out there on the ether for faw foodies, and as raw food creeps mainstreamward, you see a fair bit on the ubiquitous YouTube. I'm not a fan of the site and don't spend any time there other than when a blog i trust points me in that direction. so, dutifully, i followed a link which has been causing some controversy...

duriasm: shazzie gets steamy

be warned part one: this has an over-18 label, which means that you have to log in and prove your age. god's sake.

and be warned part two: when it says you can log in with your gmail account you think it's nice and easy so you'll do it, but once you've done that, and they've got your email address, they then insist you create a YouTube login anyway, drives me mad that sort of stuff. blatant lies. hate hate hate it. oh dear. i should have some chocolate, see if i can replace those feelings with loved up bliss instead.

so now i have a friggin youtube account. sorry. i was supposed to be letting that go...

while i was there i found myself watching this, which freaked me out. totally. i don't care if that makes me closed-minded and conventional.

urine for a treat: people drinking pee, but not for sexual gratification, no. for health. now i'm all for peeing on nettle stings when you're out walking but, warm pee for breakfast? no thanks. i'll have to go and watch the shazzie video again to take my mind off it.

hello. my name's lou and i'm a twitteraddict.

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i found i would keep checking twitter to see what sarma and heidi were up to mostly, or glean the odd bit of wisdom from dru. so this weekend i finally caved in and got a twitter account. big mistake. i can see this getting addictive. i'm going to have to change my phone plan so i get more free texts. i was thinking of upgrading my phone soon, to the supersexy LG Prada phone, but i won't be able to as it's rubbish for texting. oh no! twitter is already taking over my life...

oh yes, and when i said, two weeks ago, that i wasn't going to get a twitter plug-in... well, that might change, too.

discovered on lifehacker, chore wars is an rpg of sorts.

you sign up your merry band of adventurers and set up your quests. each quest is based on a household chore, so, for instance, recycling, taking the rubbish out, cleaning, doing laundry and so on.

our group is called the fellowship of the dishcloth and we're both magical creatures. i'm the pantry elf and booyaa is red-eyed creature called arkanus. his knowledge of LotR and Kingdom of Loathing has helped considerably in setting up our adventures.

we've got a bunch of regular tasks set up as well as some one-off tasks. they all have silly names, such as grooming the dragon = washing the dishes, casting a spell of protection on armour = washing clothes, raiding the lord's larder = grocery shopping and so on.

one friend i mentioned this to thought it was defeating the object. that whole procrasatination thing - writing the list rather than doing the task - but it's all set up now and we just do our job and claim our xp. unfortunately i know boo is going to read this and it might break the spell but... he is a lot more eager to do the washing up these days! ;)

click... click.. click...

having been away for a week and eating restaurant food, i came home to a strong desire for soft green salad leaves (i suppose because the heat there creates transit issues, the salads were all tough leaves, like frisee and radicchio), spring onion, tomatoes and sunflower seeds. and bananas. no bananas for a whole week was just too weird.

i've really enjoyed sleeping in my own bed with my darling booyaa beside me to snuggle into as i sleep (and how i've slept!) and wake up to...

it's the weekend so i get to decide what to do with my time, which is a huge difference, the evenings weren't really my own last week, but even more so things like the temperature of the house, watching heroes, wearing slippers when the floor gets cold. having my kitchen back and making piles of food, eating when and what i wanted. all sorts of things i didn't realise were part of how i live are suddenly sources of great comfort.

yeah, home is good.

dubai was interesting. it was hot but good hot. i liked the heat, i just didn't get much chance to enjoy it. the interiors are ice cold with uber ac everywhere. madness. i had to buy a cardigan while i was there, as i was too cold indoors *rolls eyes*

work was ok. it was challenging, but doable. the people were nice. staff, everywhere i went, were extremely kind and helpful. whatever else i think about the monstrosity that is this utterly artificial construct, was softened by lovely people who support the crazy concept of making the biggest tourist destination in the world by turning the desert and the ocean into habitable land masses. the money and energy being sunk into the place is scary, breathtaking and utterly criminal. it's offensive, at best, to think of the good that could be wrought in the world with the kind of financial backing given to creating this city from sand. it wasn't the desert heat making my blood boil, i can tell you.

i took lots of snaps on a city tour on my crappy little camera phone but so far my bluetooth pics upload won't bend to my will. if i get the things off my phone ever i will post a link here.

y'know this happens so frequently and i still can't get my head around it. i've been veggie for aeons. seriously. my mum will tell you i was born veggie because i refused to eat most meat from being a tiny baby and picked at a few things during my youth, mostly mince and bacon. but when i officially became veggie in my teens there were no other veggies in my social circle. i didn't know, in person, a single vegetarian. there were no veggie restaurants in the north of england that i knew about. there probably was one in newcastle, as it's a big university city, but nobody i came into contact with 'got' vegetarianism. so, i learned the hard way when going out to eat. i got offered all sorts of rubbish and usually ended up cobbling together side dishes to make a meal. it was rarely healthy. but that was over 20 years ago (yes, i know, showing my age. shut up.) can't we move on?

nowadays there's always a veggie option on a menu. there are, if you're in a really wide-awake restaurant, vegan and gluten-free dishes, too. but, again, depending on where you go, the veggie option on the menu is, by today's gastro standards, abysmal. there seem to be trends, too. just over ten years ago there was the pasta option. everywhere you went they offered you pasta as the veggie alternative. then, maybe 7 or so years ago and lingering on today in the less aware establishments, is the ubiquitous goat's cheese concoction. perhaps with roasted peppers in a tart, or caramelised onions in a filo parcel. but it'll be goat's cheese. more recently pasta has got posher, so that's come back a bit, with a bit of a twist in the sauce, or perhaps stuffed with the nation's current favourite trendy gastro must-have, ye olde butternut squash. but you might also get stuck with veggie curry and rice.

now, without, hopefully, sounding too ungrateful, i'd like to propose that the chefs and restaurateurs out there get a bit of fricken imagination.

i'm particularly miffed about some of the options i've seen recently touted on christmas menus. everyone else gets yummy roasties, at least three types of veg, yorkshire puddings, often a choice of meat for those wise enough not to want boring turkey, and your various stuffings, sauces and gravy. what is the veggie option? pasta and sauce. or curry and rice. WTF? why in god's name would you want that?

why would a vegetarian NOT want a roast dinner? tell me, just how festive is curry, or mushroom pasta? why can't we have all the yummy veggies that go with a traditional christmas dinner, with no meat, i don't even care if you don't bother with a nut roast. just make some veggie sauce (rich brown stuff with a splash of madeira or port, perhaps) and you keep us all happy. and surely that's easier than having to make pasta to order? don't tell me you're cooking all the roast parsnips round the goose, cos i don't believe you anyway.

i'm generally quite tolerant and i know where i can and can't get well-fed, but last week a flyer came through the door at work for christmas party lunches at a local pub, and it left be fuming and frustrated. it was like we'd gone back 10 years. it laid out a few set lunch menus, varying in price and quality. one menu i looked at offered, for the main course, the meat eaters a choice of anodyne chicken and sauce, roast beef and yorkshire pudding, or traditional turkey and cranberry, all with misc veggies. so far so good. the veggie option was... pasta arrabiata. and they were charging £60 a head. sixty quid? when all i get is packet pasta and a tin of tomatoes with some chilli in it? no te lo crees ni tu, sunshine.

we were told recently, by a group of UK researchers, that beetroot juice is good for you. like we didn't know that already. but now there is medical evidence out there, enough that they're recommending a daily glass of beetroot juice as a way to keep down blood pressure. unfortunately, not everyone seems to be convinced, as the british heart foundation is keeping its options open and saying a balanced diet with plenty of fresh fruit and veg is good for you but they're not sure if beetroot specifically is worth focussing on. man alive. you'd think they'd be happy. but no. if all you need to do is drink beetroot juice then they're out of a job, so best keep everyone guessing for a while longer. *rolls eyes*
seen at: bbc news

not sure if this next one is good or bad yet. mayor ken's hatched a plot to have free bikes in the city. hurray! but apparently there are so many drawbacks to the scheme that it's going to be rendered useless. first off, they're not free. £100 deposit, free for the first half hour and then a quid an hour but getting incrementally more expensive, supposedly to encourage people to give them back promptly. but surely they should be truly free? i mean, they're ugly and obviously the city's free bikes, so you'd think they wouldn't all get nicked. maybe i'm being optimistic and/or naive. if you tag them all you can find them if they're not checked in within 24 hours. end of story. anyway. we'll see how it all works and i hope that it works well enough to put more bikes out there, reduce or remove fees and improve cycle paths. am i dreaming?
seen at: the grauniad

and last but very definitely not least: gross out time. only an american could create this and believe it was a) worth the toxic by-products created in its manufacture and b) anticipate a market for it. behold, the "4-in-1 Hot Dog Maker" a monstrous contraption which warms the sausages and buns, boils eggs (i had no idea you were supposed to eat boiled eggs with hot dogs. how clueless am i?) and pops corn. doesn't chill your beer or keep the tv remote from getting stuck between rolls of belly fat, i'm afraid.
seen at: uber-review

get stuck in to these food and nutrition-related bits and bobs i've come across recently.

shock finding that nutritional value of your food affects your health!
wired snuck in a little article about magnesium which caught my eye. not so much the magnesium but the general thrust was that nutrition is the basis of health, which i've said for aeons, though nobody seems to take it seriously enough. summarised nicely in this quote, right at the end of the article, by one of the researchers into the effect of a lack of dietary magnesium on the human body:

We're very interested in the way that you eat on a day-to-day basis can catch up to you," he said. "You can make it through the day, but you cause stress to your organs, to your body, and eventually end up promoting long-term disease.

so much for the global economy. what the world eats: shocking.
next up, a stunning look at how the world eats. it's a time magazine photo-journal of a dozen or so families around the world, clustered around their dining table/kitchen counter/mud floor with a week's worth of food. amazing. a must see. so see it. here.

mouths are demanding better quality food
entertaining video up now, by a host of mouths demanding real food. yes, i know, sounds crazy. and it is :) on youtube.

brits are a bunch of wasters
this made it to the radio 4 news so presumably i'm not the only one to be appalled. 3.6m tonnes of food are thrown away in england and wales every year. that's a phenomenal amount. and a fair chunk of it is still edible. the implication in the bbc article is that people don't know how to store food properly, throw things away because they don't know if it'll still be ok and are just plain wasteful. and it goes straight to landfill, creating unsightly and unhygienic mountains of waste, producing methane, then there's all the energy gone in to producing it, transporting it etc all gone to waste, too. outrageous. and then they say we need GM crops to sustain us. no we don't. we just need to learn to use what we've got better. i hate mindless consumerism but i'm also amazed that people can afford to be so wasteful. thank god we can now compost most of our waste. makes me feel at least i'm doing my bit.

currentconfig.com have pulled out all the stops here. this is one of those things you know, dammit, are right, but it always felt like gut instinct. now you have reasons. valid, robust, scientific ones at that.

why [over+toilet paper=good] and [under+toilet paper=bad].

here's the skinny. go get some learning.

a new take on mashups

a polish soap opera about a young woman leaving her family behind to go to college gets dubbed and turned into the story of a dysfunctional - and frankly crackpot - irish family suffering the culture shock of leaving their hometown of cork to move to dublin.

the visual aspect is actually quite slick, and the timing of the new voiceovers is impeccable. the stories the team come up are completely bonkers.

there was a pilot followed by an 8-part series. totally out there. watch part one and if you're not hooked then you're evidently too sane for this world.

if you're female and use the web you can't have escaped the zillion ads for something called 'the pink patch'. the pink patch claims to help you lose a lot of weight in a very short amount of time, it works on the nicotine patch principle, with a slow release of, er, a magic weightloss potion, but, hey, it's for girls, so it's pink.

the first time i saw an ad for it i was so outraged i actually went to the site to see how they could possibly claim the results they tout on the ads. but, you know, it's pretty normal, frankly, for this day and age, for marketers to lie blatantly, so i shrugged and ignored it.

then i saw a headline that the ads had been pulled from facebook. hurray! i went to read all about it only to discover that the first google ad under the article was for, guess what? yup, the bloomin pink patch. irony rules ok.

go see it for yourself.

thank god. i was fuming, but they've softened the blow.

from where i'm sitting it's hard to feel good about bailing out banks who are responsible for their own collapse. the top echelons and ubertraders get paid phenomenal amounts of money and silly bonuses. i mean, one bonus is more than i will make in my lifetime. then they come cap in hand begging for us, the lowly taxpayer, to stump up the cash they so carelessly lost through mismanagement.

thank god mr brown and company put the proviso on the deal that bonuses were moderate and tied to real performance and not just champagne-fuelled fuzzy feelings.

phew. so glad that's off my chest.

at this rate, perhaps booyaa and i will be able to buy somewhere to live in a year's time. there's gotta be a silver lining, right?