Special - not Magic - K

When it comes to dieting, isn't it amazing how some people can 'get it', yet at the same time completely miss the point?

Take this segment from the article above for example...

"Second of all, Special K cereal does not cause weight loss in any way whatsoever. It’s just calories. There are no weight loss vitamins, minerals, ingredients or magic fairy dust in it that makes it any different than any other calories. Sure, it’s low fat, and that’s always nice. Sure, it’s low in calories too, but so is everything else that’s low in fat. It is calories and nothing more.

Do you know what that means? It means that if someone is going to claim Special K makes you lose weight, or even just slightly helps you lose weight, you can equally claim that it makes you gain weight. Why? BECAUSE IT’S CALORIES. They control what your weight does, not specific foods. Eat too much Special K and you’ll gain weight no different than if you ate too many potato chips."

Personally I've never interpreted the Special K pledge ads as obliquely implying that anything otherworldly transpires to bring about weight loss when you eat a bowl of the cereal. Is it not more likely that people who assume otherwise are allowing their yearning for a quick fix to cloud their judgement and then kicking the cat when their misguided optimism is dashed?

Deriding Special K for its capacity to help people shed excess pounds - merely - by virtue of its low fat, low calories constitution is tantamount to accusing an aeroplane of deceiving its passengers because it can only fly with the aid of its wings and jet engine.

Of course you could indulge yourself with a mouse's nibble of double-chocolate gateaux for breakfast and lunch for two weeks and still experience the same degree of weight loss, but that would hardly sustain you until tea time would it. The aim is obviously to devise a cereal that is simultaneously filling and healthy. The fact that it tastes like sawdust (I can relate because I get into lots of wild-wild-west bar brawls) only serves to backup the science behind Special K; it contains far less artery clogging gunk than a full English breakfast, hence substituting one for the other, over time, works wonders by reducing your paunch. Captain Pedantic, it's time to hang up your cape.

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Dogs can't look up

I never thought I'd find myself having a heated debate about dog's capacity for grape consumption of all things.

I was standing in the park the other day waiting for his royal highness to finish watering the lamp posts when he came bounding over to me, suddenly distracted by the bunch of grapes I was eating. His tongue was sloshing back and forth so maniacally I suspect he must have mistaken them for mini Cadbury's cream eggs, albeit those rare-as-rocking-horse-deposits, green, rubbery ones. Not wanting to deprive him, I hurled a few in his direction and watched while he scooped them out of thin air like a lizard catching flies.

It was at this point I was approached by a complete stranger who was overly concerned that I was feeding my dog grapes. The conversation went a lot like this...

Park-loitering nutter (henceforth known as PLN): "You know you shouldn't give grapes to dogs."

Me: "Oh really, why's that?"

PLN: "You just shouldn't, it's not good for them."

Me: "Hmm, so do they have trouble digesting them properly or something?"

PLN: "Err... well... I don't know, but I'd stop it if I were you."

Me: "If us humans can eat them without keeling over with uncontrollable abdominal spasms I doubt very much they can be harmful to dogs."

PLN: "Well if you're happy to take the ris--"

Me: "Risk of what exactly? They're grapes not used heroine needles for Christ's sake!".

You know how sometimes posts sound funnier in your head? If this were someone else's blog you'd have to pay me to read this drivel.

Anyway, we went back and forth for a while longer, our voices getting higher and more exasperated with each exchange. For a fleeting moment I was struck by the absurdity of standing about in the waning light of a freezing cold November evening arguing about the intricacies of the dog-grape complex, but I wasn't going to let it go. I was dumbstruck (and more than a bit intrigued) by the notion that this guy was prepared to defend his stance so vehemently when he had no evidence of any kind - not even a dubious, hand-me-down anecdote from a three-times-removed demented auntie - that what he was proclaiming contained an ounce of truth.

What's the most ridiculous, entirely baseless advice you've had unsuspectingly foisted upon you?

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Greetings from the north pole

I learnt today that here in the Greatest of Britains (not any of the lesser ones), if you write to "Santa, Reindeerland, SAN 1TA" before the 13th December, Royal Mail will deliver your letter directly to the red-coated, beardy bloke himself and hang around long enough to return with his personal reply.

You can imagine how this must have come about can't you. Every year 56 squillion (give or take a few hundred) sprogs and sproglets scribble down their Christmas wish lists, address them to Santa at the north pole and pop them into the post box expecting him to make their wildest dreams come true. The posties can't stamp them with 'address unknown' and return to sender because they'd shatter the illusions of all those cutey-wooty ikkle kiddies and risk psychologically scarring them for life. Neither can they just bin them because then they'd assume Santa received their letters, but was too mince pie-eyed to care.

It microwaves the icy cockles of my ticker to think the big, bad, faceless Royal Mail are prepared to dedicate so much time and energy to serving the needs of our nations young'uns.

Does this happen anywhere else in the world?

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Wake me up before you go go

If a movie is on very late I tend to schedule it to record with EyeTV, set my Mac to automatically shut down shortly after it finishes, and then go to bed. Nevertheless, very often I'll wake up in the morning to find my computer is still switched on because OS X's 'Energy Saver' utility has failed to act on my so-clear-Britney-Spears-could-understand-them instructions.

Since discovering that it only does this when it's in sleep mode, I've tried to make a habit of shaking my Mac back to life before catching some zzzzzs (gosh darn it I'm hip). Many times I'll forget because I like sleep mode and have it enabled whenever possible.

For a long time I searched for a way to coerce the two functions into playing nicely together. After much Googling I'd pretty much thrown in the towel, chalking it up to duff never-to-be-fixed software, when today I came across an OS X support article which explains why my beloved Mac isn't being allowed to rest in peace at the end of a busy night's recording.

Apparently you have to set your computer - which is already running - to start up moments before you want it to shut down. Considering how illogical this seems you'd think such a nugget of information could be imparted by way of a simple tool tip.

I wonder if doctors operate on the same principle when it comes to coma patients. "No I'm sorry, we can't pull the plug on your clinically dead daughter until she's fully awake and sitting bolt upright ready for action".

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Deciphering the indecipherable

Sometimes the information you really want is only available on a single web site, and that web site happens to look like it was whipped up by a blind, drunk Thalidomide baby.

As much as you might like to, you can't just FTP into the author's web server and give them a stern lesson in web design. So what other avenues does this leave open to you? The easiest technique I know of is to 'zap' these bride-of-Frankenstein's-monsters with a web page de-cluttering bookmarklet.

These are like favourites or bookmarks, except the hyperlink is supplanted by a string of javascript code. When activated (by simply clicking on them in your browser's toolbar or bookmarks archive) they perform a predefined action upon the web page you are currently viewing, or provide a shortcut to other web services, a thesaurus query engine for example.

The linked page offers a wide variety of bookmarklets designed for reformatting web pages to make them more readable and printable. Some apply individual changes, while others can be considered meta-bookmarklets as they aggregate the effects of many of the more specific ones.

To put them to the test I set out to find the world's most hideously, eye-stabbingly awful web site in existence. I don't know if Hayden Video Weddings is quite the pinnacle of web site indecipherability, but it must come pretty close!

Below you can see the before and after shots, having applied Jessie's multi-zapper (roll over the image to flip back and forth between the two).



Wow, that's what I call a make-under! Following an audit, the health and safety authorities stormed the Hayden Video Weddings HQ. Those responsible were heavily fined and strong-armed into redesigning the site to preclude subsequent visual assault (allegedly).

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