Who/whatever’s fault it is, the one “explanation” that keeps coming up is that we are simply hardwired to be gluttons. Cue a recent piece from The Telegraph:

‘We live in a fat society. That’s the real problem. Here in the greedy West, our entire society is behaving just like a fat person, shuffling towards an early grave, and trying very hard to remain in denial. Why are so many of us obese? Because we eat too much. Why do we eat too much? Because we’re genetically designed to live in hard times, so our metabolisms are built to crave calories. It’s why we survived as a species for all those millennia before we learnt to farm. Now, calories are not hard to find. We’ve discovered ways of delivering energy that are cheap, tasty and lucrative. It’s a perfect storm. Deep inside all of us, our Stone Age brains crave fat and sugar. Don’t worry, says the Fat Society – here it is!’

Right, so we’re genetically programmed to stuff our faces. Fair enough. Except that also means that those of us who are not obese are freaks of nature. Fine, I can live with that. But here’s where it gets interesting, and which brings me to the Internet and why I care about that (besides not being able to live without it). The big question here is some variation of whether Google is making us stupid, as Nicholas Carr famously posed the question that later became a book. Carr (and people like him) believe that the Internet affects us on a deep neurological level, ie. that it actually changes the structure of our brains and how we process information. Scare-mongering, risk-selling folk like Carr insist that the reason we should be worried is because of something called neuroplasticity, which is basically the brain’s capacity to change over time thanks to new environments, habits etc (cue the London cabbies who have bigger brains than the rest of us).

It’s a hot topic because the scientific jury is still out. Some, like (cognitive scientist) Stephen Pinker answer ‘not at all‘, while (neuroscientist) Joshua Greene adds that ‘The Internet hasn’t changed the way we think anymore than the microwave oven has changed the way we digest food‘. Being an evidence-based kinda gal, I’m going to stick with the science as it is, which when it comes to the Internet and what it might be doing to our brains is that there is no cause for panic (yet). Scientists are – for the most part – the level-headed folk, and for that we thank them.

Now I don’t know enough about neuroplasticity to weigh in on the debate, but it strikes me as rather interesting that the people shouting out about the biggest “risks” involved with the Internet (it will make you stupid), and obesity (it will get you) stand diametrically opposed on the issue of how much we are capable of (neurological/biological) change. If we really are programmed to eat like gluttons and are genetically powerless in the face of food, then surely that cancels out the possibility of neuroplasticity (ie. shouldn’t our clever brains have figured out that the feast or famine response is really not appropriate anymore?). If, on the other hand, our brains can change as fast as people like Carr claim, then the whole hardwired-to-be-fat scapegoat vanishes too, non?

Unless I’m missing something, someone, somewhere has missed a rather large logical gap. But hey, this gives us a couple of new options: if we can change, then the future will be full of stupid, thin people. If not, we’ll all be fat and clever.

Go on, have a(nother) brownie. You know you want one.

I’m glad no one was impertinent enough to suggest that I do the same, because the only adjective I could think of to describe this doctor is impatient. Or rather, IMPATIENT. I guess that isn’t the best quality with which to introduce yourself to 40 students who you have to spend four hours a week with for the next twelve weeks. Against their wills, I might add.

Look, sometimes I think it’s entirely justified. Like when a waitron takes f.o.r.e.v.e.r. to bring the bill, or worse, that second drink. Or when some eedjut driver is meandering on the road, or pulls over without indicating, all while talking on their eedjut cellphone. And let’s not talk about those meanderthals that populate our malls (meanderthal citation: Philosophe, sometime in the twentieth century)

But all in all, it’s probably not a good way to live life, especially since it means I frequently forget to take pleasure in whatever I’m doing simply because I like the idea of being done with it (cue writing, swimming, teaching etc). I was reminded of this on the bus ride home from campus, where people like me (impatient to get home) have to sit and watch students just chillaxing, chatting on their phones about where to hook up on Long Street, sometimes two of them in some banter which you just know hasn’t yet reached the point where they get to touch each other, but that that’s all they’re really thinking about. There were several examples of this latter scenario, which reminded me of that lovely courting game, by definition impatient, but in execution a drawn-out, frustrating, exciting game of patience and plotting. At least the best versions of this game are.

Ah yes, those delicious, excruciating days of waiting to see the android of your eye again. How pleasant to think of it, to imagine scenarios, the first kiss…

I do miss those days. But I wouldn’t go back even if I could. Not even if the Doctor himself offered me a trip back in time. Imagine knowing how my life was going to turn out and being stuck in that “what if” phase. I reckon that would be worse than trying to navigate through Canal Walk on payday. But there’s probably a better chance that the Philosophe will be inclined stick it out for the lifetime he promised if I can manage to be a little less

and just a bit more

Provided, of course, that being patient doesn’t make me blue in the face.

I’ve been experiencing various levels of annoyance at various times over the last few days. Much of this is heat(-wave) related, but mostly it’s from witnessing the brouhaha over the Paula Deen “scandal’ in the food media world. Practically every media outfit has their own take on it, but the facts are these:

- Deen (the “butter queen“, or as Frank Bruni put it, the ‘deep-fried doyenne of a fatty, buttery subgenre of putatively Southern cooking’) recently announced that she has Type 2 diabetes;

- She has known this for three years already;

- She is receiving money from Novo Nordisk to plug Victoza, a new diabetes drug (with as yet questionable benefits: those evil Danes!). Victoza is pretty expensive compared to other drugs on the market – think $500 a month vs. $20 a month.

The scandal includes any or all of the following:

a) she has deceived her audiences

b) she is a shill

c) she is a shilling a product that ordinary (read: poor) people cannot afford 

d) she is still fat (well, no one says it like that, but that’s what they mean when they comment on her not having made ‘significant lifestyle changes’)

e) she wasted three years not teaching her viewers how to cook healthy food.

Now, I’m not going to enter into the shilling debate. This piece in the LA Times did a fairly good job of convincing me the major problem with this, which is the illusion of a quick-fix solution that Deen’s deal with the evil Danes promotes:

‘The life of a diabetic is somewhat less than swell — but Novo Nordisk is selling swell, alongside drug companies that promise to medicate away depression, gas, incontinence, clogged arteries and fibromyalgia. … Support and encouragement is one thing, but what we’re being sold is magical thinking. In the battle between healthcare reality and fantasy, Paula Deen is small potatoes (steamed, skins on, no butter), but what she represents matters: another attempt to market immortality to a culture that’s particularly in love with misbehaving, followed by an easy fix.’

What does irk me, though, are the various permutations of a) and e), above. Suddenly now (or then, as it happens) that she has diabetes, Deen is only allowed to cook “healthy” food on television? Suddenly she now has a responsibility to make her audiences healthy too, and thereby fix the diabetes/obesity crisis? Maybe it would be a good idea for her to stop tasting and eating the food that she is apparently so good at making (even though she has pointed out that – surprise surprise – what we see her make on TV is not actually how she eats every day, and that her shows are for entertainment), but that shouldn’t stop her fans from making her fatty, buttery recipes if they damn well please. Should watching Anthony Bourdain sucking foie off a plate come with a diabetes advisory?

Bruni’s piece does an excellent job of describing the classist hypocrisies at play in much of this finger-wagging. But I am less disturbed by that than the evidence, once again, of how ready people are to blame their problems on someone else, and to expect someone else to fix them. It’s also an appetite for scandal which turns out to be a really convenient excuse to not think clearly about the actual issues, which as chef José Andrés also points out in this CBS interview, are quite simply not Paula Deen’s to fix.

Rant over. Now go buy the book.

The best part? You can do this too!

All you need is:

1 good brownie recipe waiting for a new identity;

1 batch of goat’s cheese fudge lurking in the freezer (preferably homemade, and preferably blessed by Norwegian angels);

120 exam scripts to mark;

An oven.

In the approximate words of the immortal Nigella Lawson (or the Barefoot Contessa, or that Italian babe with the big head [GdL], or that annoying Brit who keeps annoying people whose job it is to involve themselves in childhood nutrition [JO], et al.), See how easy it is?

I like Twitter. I like it much more than Facebook, its evil not-so-twin. I particularly like the fact that, unlike Facebook, Twitter doesn’t force you to take part in social politics, like be-”friend”ing someone you went to school with two decades ago and never spoke to, and suddenly you are “remembering” when it’s their birthday and joining their other 500 “friends” to say Happy Birthday! Have a wonderful day!, to which they respond the next day with “Wow! Thanks all for the wonderful wishes. So special to be remembered!”. Yeah right.

#FollowFriday/#FF seems to me to veer dangerously close to this type of inanity. (For those of you with your heads in the sand not on Twitter, go look at How #FollowFriday works).

I understand the endorsement factor. Being included in a #FF tweet tells other people who might not otherwise find you worth following. But like the “friend” situation on Facebook, it messes with natural selection. I don’t want to follow someone because someone else says that I should. I choose to follow people based on discovering that their Twitter activity somehow adds value to my life. Sure, sometimes I’m wrong, and I may miss someone important, but I would rather miss someone important than end up following a bunch of people who haven’t earned my attention.

The beauty of Twitter is that by paying attention, you end up finding the people you want to follow without silly “traditions” like #FF. Like a particular columnist? Start following them on Twitter, and it’s likely that soon enough they’ll re-tweet someone else who you then discover is also worth following, and so on. Or if you retweet them, they may start following you, and so on. It’s the activity of attention that makes Twitter worthwhile – not attention for the sake of attention.

Which is why I also don’t like this “tradition” of welcoming new people on Twitter and asking your followers to follow them. I have good friends in real life who I enjoy having a glass of wine and a natter with. Chefs whose food I happily pay good money to eat. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to start following them just because they join Twitter. Show me that you’re worth following, and you’re in.

And if I then retweet or mention you, please don’t bother thanking me. I get that it’s polite to acknowledge acknowledgement, but can’t we just let the subtleties of interaction be without all the extra noise (“Thank you.” “No, thank you!” “No no, it’s you who must be thanked!”)? My mention of you is (perhaps) an endorsement to my followers to follow you, and you can thank me by continuing to add value to my life by tweeting interesting things. That’s it.

I am by no means a Twitter celeb, and neither is that my aspiration. But I guess some people who read this might get irritated by the grump I’ve got on. Maybe they will even unfollow me. That’s too bad. But if you’re following me for any reason other than the fact that you enjoy what I bring to the table, then you’re following me for the wrong reasons. Sorry, that’s it.

All I hope for is that Twitter doesn’t turn into Twitbook. So #TGINLFF. (And don’t get me started on #woofwednesday.)

On the bright side, while I remain mostly technologically defunct until we get all our stuff “back”, I have stepped up in the world of mobile telephony. Not only do I finally own a smart phone (and now I finally get What’s [TF?] App), but apparently the *best* one in, like, the world. (Apple geeks, back off):

No, I am not in Barcelona, and those are not my peeps. My own phone is of course much cooler, being kitted out with the weather for Cape Town, and some wavy grass instead of children playing on the beach.

So now I shop at the Apps market, and my phone can do pretty much everything except give me a massage. But if it had been really smart, it would also have been able to weigh up the odds of enjoying a night out yesterday by a comparative analysis of

1. all the user-comments from that (ridiculously expensive) restaurant in the last year or so,

2. my unpredictable mood swings thanks to having been burgled three times in five weeks, and

3. my bank balance.

Had it performed that (com’on!) basic little service, it would have saved me going to bed feeling ripped off and grumpy (which is no fun for the Philosophe either).

But we learn. So tonight I will keep my wallet off the streets of Cape Town, and look forward to a delicious bowl of stew that comes from my own freezer, and probably some dessert from in there too (I have a memory of making black pepper ice cream not so long ago. Impromptu apple crumble?). And when I’m not eating, I’ll be an angry bird on my “smart” phone.

I woke up early today to get some work done before the “other” work took over the day (going to campus, teaching, marking). As usual, I spend my first cup of coffee trawling through my Google Reader and Twitter to catch up on the night’s news. Among these tidbits I found news that Heston Blumenthal et al. were now pledging to save the world. This is (interesting/odious/ridiculous) news, so I tweeted it.

A few hours later, paying attention to my Tweetdeck as I do, I noticed that two people whom I follow, and who I know follow me too (“disclaimer” [?]: one of them was my husband) tweeted the exact same piece of news.

Now the Philosophe and I have had numerous (philosophical) conversations about the business of re-tweeting, and the irritations that follow when people don’t observe the “rules”, which are really just the best-practice norms that we should be observing all the time: acknowledge your sources.

So I of course immediately thundered down on him that he had violated the code. To which, in his (just) defence, he said that he hadn’t seen that I had already tweeted it.

Fair enough. I imagine the other person hadn’t seen my tweet either. So it wasn’t a case of anyone not acknowledging their source, because that source was clearly not me.

But no. This is what irks me. For all the glory of Twitter as the news feed where you can filter out the crap and only pay attention to what you find worthy of your attention, what’s the point if you don’t actually pay attention to the people who you choose to follow? If there is “too much” out there, or if you are following too many people, then doesn’t that defeat the purpose?

Am I whining because I didn’t get my two minutes of re-tweet glory? Perhaps. But I’m much more concerned about this as a confirmation of the fact that social media platforms just encourage our narcissistic tendencies. Tweet tweet: as long as I’m making noise, who cares about the fact that someone else may be saying something which just may be worthwhile? (Or even the same bloody thing?) Is anyone actually stopping to think along the way?

From Neal Gabler’s very good, but depressing, essay on living in a post-idea world:

‘We have become information narcissists, so uninterested in anything outside ourselves and our friendship circles or in any tidbit we cannot share with those friends that if a Marx or a Nietzsche were suddenly to appear, blasting his ideas, no one would pay the slightest attention, certainly not the general media, which have learned to service our narcissism.

What the future portends is more and more information — Everests of it. There won’t be anything we won’t know. But there will be no one thinking about it.

Think about that.’

So you get robbed, and you put in new locks. You sleep badly for a few days, but eventually fatigue sets in and you have to get over it.  Ten days later your excellent insurance company delivers a brand new laptop which begins to make up for the irritations, the time lost, and the holes the assholes made in your world. Life approaches normal. How do you say? Oh yes, “shit happens”. How cathartic. You remember how to relax.

Then they come back. They take your brand new laptop and everything else they can get their grubby hands on (passports!). Your house is covered in foreign fingerprints you can’t see – and neither can the illiterate cops.

But of course. It could have been worse. We could have been here when it happened. We could have lost important work (praise be to Dropbox!). They could have taken my Kenwood Chef! They could have taken the single malts! They could have taken a shit on the floor!

They didn’t. But if that’s supposed to make it somehow better, it doesn’t. Neither does it make it better that “they” are quite likely among, or friends of, the group of builders renovating close by, who we continue to see every day, and who have been able to watch as we slowly turn our home into an impenetrable fortress. Will they bring a bazooka next time?

Things will be replaced, and deep sleep will return. But sadly I am not sure if I can re-find the Cape Town I have lived in for most of my adult life: the one un-threatened by “them”, and the nauseating idea of “next time”. I suspect I’ll be keeping my young friend close at hand, just in case:

I was actually looking forward to yesterday, because well, it was Friday. Which meant final lectures of the week, which meant a nice evening with a friend to look forward to, followed by a weekend of quiet time for some “real” work.

First, it rained, and here is the umbrella that I should have had with me, but didn’t:

Yes, it rained so much that I even contemplating cancelling the night out, and turning it into a nice night in instead. Fire, red wine, and good food, without having to go anywhere. That would have been nice. But my friend likes ‘out’, so we headed out, like people *should* on a Friday night. We even got adventurous and went to a restaurant neither of us had tried before. We drank nice wine and I ordered an ostrich burger which was just what I felt like.

The burger was full of gristle. I had two bites. The onion rings were nice though.

Then I came home, while my friend went off to a fancy dress party dressed like a demon. (She wore cool black wings.)

But I couldn’t get in because someone had bolted the door from the inside. Since it wasn’t me, and since the Philosophe is attending peace talks in Oslo, I fairly quickly deduced that this was bad news.

So I phoned the cops and waited hopefully outside for them to pitch up in the next five minutes to rescue me, and to get me into my home.

I ended up sitting in my car for an hour.

When I finally got inside (escorted by armed forces), it looked just like it does in the movies when someone walks into their house to find it has been ransacked and burgled. That was pretty sucky.

So were the next few hours, of statements, and locksmiths, and trying to find sleep many hours after my bedtime.

This morning: fingerprint detectives, insurance claims, and trying to figure out which detergent best removes the dirty feeling of strangers having rummaged through your stuff.

I know that it could have been worse than it was, and I’m glad that it wasn’t. But for a Friday, I think I deserved better. So to the idiots out there who can’t get into my laptop anyway,

They call them Popsters, they say,

Yes, we tried them frozen. Munch better? Not so sure. It was some pretty crunchy chocolatey goodness, but they could have been Maltesers. Or chocolate malt balls (same thing?). Whatever. The freezer pretty much killed any popcorn flavour. Then again, who really wants to eat frozen popcorn? If we’re talking the magnificent, incomparable popcorn ice cream, then sure. But frozen popcorn seems as silly as hot ice cream.

And in other news, it’s apparently Christmas in July.

Ugh. You’d really think once a year was enough.