The Nut Diet - Free With This Blog

I am delighted to introduce you Thought Experimenters to a new Australian social networking site called fatsecret. This is, as everything else is these days, for people who wish to lose weight. 'The secret is out' is their slogan. If this were true, of course, then there would be no need for this site. Never mind, I like the pie chart of members' favourite diets. I have only heard of 'Atkins' and 'Other'. The remaining three diets sound like a thrilling combination of holidays, violence and plumbing - 'South Beach', 'Fat Smash' and 'Fat Flush'. Personally, I have no use for any of this as I discovered some time ago how to maintain my pleasingly slim figure. I call it The Nut Diet. Before each meal I eat a large handful of mixed nuts. This proves so filling - or, if the nuts are from Tesco, nauseating - that my appetite is at once reduced, sometimes to the point of encouraging me to avoid the meal entirely. I could have made my fortune out of this, but I have a caring-sharing nature.

Nobody Makes Anything Any More

A magazine called Business 2.0 has listed the the job categories in which pay rates are rising most rapidly. Only one of these categories - engineering - involves actually making anything. In the pictures only the engineers have their backs turned to the camera; presumably they are dismayed to find themselves in the company of such frothy career options as webmaster or call centre manager. The 'Administrative Support' people are the most troubling, I think they're going to kill that woman, and the beaming hotel staff in 'Hospitality' just make me want to complain. To be honest, I don't make anything either, but I have always consoled myself with the thought that most other people do. Evidently, this is either not true or their wages are falling.

Life on Mars

Having foolishly watched the first and last episodes of Life on Mars when it was broadcast, I am now filling in the chasm through DVDs. Everybody is right, it's superb, a television event as distinctive and strange as The Prisoner. But why, apart from internal plot reasons, does Sam go back to the seventies? Because, I think, it is the most recent period that seems exotically remote, like Mars. The eighties and nineties are not that different from now and even the sixties are recognisable as the present's precursor. But the seventies are an anomaly; everything about that decade seems more brutal and raw than anything we now know. Coincidentally, in the midst of my Mars-fest, this column by Niall Ferguson appeared. He wonders, for political and economic reasons, if the seventies are making a comeback. All of the portents and possibilities are familiar - inflation, a sliding dollar, stockmarket meltdowns, oil shocks. In Britain, we just need a phase of overbearing trade union power and we might as well start buying Mark III Cortinas and striped shirts with huge collars. As Mars makes clear, the seventies were harsh years. But - spoiler approaching - in the end Sam Tyler chooses 1973 for all its brutality rather than the bland, bureaucratised world of the present. Out on the streets with that magnificent monster Gene Hunt, he can at least feel something. He should, perhaps, have stuck around; if Ferguson is right, we are about to start feeling again. It won't be pretty, but, if you have any Tylerish tendencies, it will be exhilarating.

Poetry

For the first time in my life, thanks to the wonders of this web thing, I have judged a poetry competition. Here are my winners and here my judgments.

Beards, Earthquakes and Talking Buildings

This earthquake in Kent, which seems to be the only news story in the world this morning, produced a consolingly bearded seismologist on television this morning. (I'm anti-beard, downright beardist in fact, but academics on television news shows should have beards.) He said we know a lot about quakes in Kent because of Canterbury Cathedral. It's an ancient structure with long terms records which include reports of the earth shaking. There are downsides, of course, but, on the whole, it is a wonderful thing, living in an old country where academics on TV are nervous and have beards and the buildings tell us stories.

Seeing Spiders

Leontes in A Winter' Tales laments the curse of knowledge:

'Alack, for lesser knowledge! how accursed
In being so blest! There may be in the cup
A spider steep'd, and one may drink, depart,
And yet partake no venom, for his knowledge
Is not infected: but if one present
The abhorr'd ingredient to his eye, make known
How he hath drunk, he cracks his gorge, his sides
With violent hefts. I have drunk, and seen the spider.'

This is how genius says ignorance is bliss and makes you shiver in the process. This story reminded me of the speech. Body parts of British soldiers killed in Afghanistan have been mixed up. Families now know this so they cannot be sure they have the remains of their soldier. They have seen the spider. What would be different if they did not know, if they partook of no venom? This relates to the matter of the noble lie, is it any longer possible? Whole industries now exist to show us spiders and so, of course, we find them everywhere.

Death and Glass

There's currently a Smirnoff ad about a man's corpse being transformed into a diamond. And, today, Scotty is being beamed up for the last time from New Mexico. The instinct for attaining immortality through one's remains is as strong as ever. Glass often seems to be involved, As readers of this excellent book will know, in 1801 the French architect Pierre Giraud came up with the idea of turning corpses into glass from which edifying memorial medallions and tablets could be made. The latest developments in cryonics - see also this sweeping and lovely survey - involve the vitrification of the body. Also death is often seen as a mirror, impenetrable glass. It is, I suppose, about perfection. The ugly coprse in the Smirnoff ad is converted into something hard and beautiful and Scotty finally gets all the pooer Kirk needs. Over time, we converge on the same imagery for our consolation.

Those Beans

Concepta and Tom P. put their elegant fingers on the burning question of the week - what was Hugh Grant doing with those baked beans? Surely he can afford something better and, even if he can't, why would anybody wish to eat thousands of these ovoid, oversweetened clones of Charles Kennedy, swimming in a sticky 'sauce' that coats your palate with a thick layer reminiscent of...? No I'd better not. Anyway, I have the answer. Poor Hugh was scammed by the same company, a subsidiary of Zak Bastard Global, that sold sheep to Japanese women as poodles. He thought they were rare Italian truffles made exclusively available to film stars with floppy hair. Actually, the sheep-poodle (shoodle?) story wasn't true, but, trust me, the bean truffle (buffle?) one is solid as a rock.

Plato and Jessica Lynch

I spoke to Jessica Lynch this week - it was for a subsequently aborted Sunday Times column - following her testimony to congress. She was straightforward enough; in fact, she was rather touching when I asked if being pretty and blonde had anything to do with the Pentagon's enthusiasm for making up stories about her. 'I'm sure out there there is a pretty blonde female in the military that is a hero, but it just wasn't me...' Of course, the story demonstrates the fantastic ineptitude and cynicism of Rumsfeld's Defense Department combined with the supine malleability of the media. Both are well covered here. But there's another, very different point. The newspaperman Maxwell Scott says in John Ford's great film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 'This is the west, sir. When the Legend becomes fact, print the legend.' It's the same attitude taken by Lisa Simpson when she discovers the story of Jebediah Springfield is not all that it appears to be. The message is: persist with the noble lie, it will be better for the people. The Pentagon story about Lynch unravelled absurdly quickly either because it was an incompetently constructed noble lie or because noble lies are no longer possible in a media-saturated world. Obviously one could also add that this lie was not noble at all because it was dispensed by cynical people devoid of wisdom. But I may be saying that because media-saturation favours that kind of insight. In Plato's Republic would I have simply accepted the words of the elders, cynical or not, and been happier as a result? Remember, before you answer, the modern, media-saturated world promotes its own lies and illusions with its own claims to nobility.

Celebrity News

Hugh Gere has been arrested for throwing baked beans over Shilpa Photographer. An Indian judge has issued arrest warrants for Richard Grant and Daily Shetty after they kissed and kicked each other in public. Prince Harry is being sent to Iraq to be kidnapped. 'It will produce such public revulsion against the war,' said a Downing Street spokesman, 'that we can pull out with honour. This is a Blair legacy project.' And - hot one this - Jeffrey Archer has had a blog makeover. 'We are especially pleased,' said Web designer Zak Bastard, 'with the way his suit clashes with the fetid oxblood of the background. Also, of course, with the fact that he didn't seem to notice.' Addenbrooke's Hospital is a recommended link for readers overcome by aesthetic seizures.