Oda Rygh

I visited my sister the past week.

She walks everywhere. EVERYWHERE.
In addition to this she left cooking to me. During our time together we ate:

Sausage and vegetable gratin
(fry sausages and vegetables. Add soured cream. Pour over broccoli, cover with cheese, oven, done)

Curry
(fry onions in spices, add chicken and veg, add coconutmilk, wait, done)

And we ate out. At a chinese.  Chinese thick soups are usually thickened with Agar Agar, not starch, and are atkins-safe. And ONE tiny little piece of ricepaper kinda drowns in the amount of filling in a spring roll. Yes, I had two starters.

I got horrendously drunk one night there, but avoided the snacking that comes with drinking.

So when I returned to my Mums, I weighed myself and, voila. 6 kilos less.
The combo of excersise and eating right actually works.

Damn.

Dear Sarah Boyack,

I am writing you with grave concerns regarding the digital economy bill.

My concerns are on many levels. First of all the issues regarding the recent amendment: a UK vertion of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), a stain on the UK as a liberal democracy where one cannot be punished untill proven guilty by court of law.

Secondly the strain being put on the ISP industry to protect the wilting copyright holder industry. Sacrificing an industry of the future to protect the industry of the past is akin to banning industrialisation to protect weavers.

Thirdly I am shocked by the level of ignorance regarding technical issues displayed in both houses, by all parties, regarding how the internet works. It is allowed to not be informed on all things, but most MPs, especially frontbenchers, should be able to find a person who can brief them in laymans terms, before there are major debates.

I am a norwegian national, but your constituent. I have educated myself in the UK, found a british man, and bought a house with norwegian money in the middle of a housing crash. I have subsidised UK students through my paying of tuitionfees for four years. I am a taxpayer who have never claimed benefits.

-And this travesty of a bill is making me want to take my taxmoney, my education, my man, and leave. Not just for this one bill, but for which signal this bill sends regarding the priorities of their elected officials: Who is more worth, what liberties can be curbed, and how much research we can be bothered doing before voting.

Please vote no.

Yours sincerely,

Oda Rygh

As I am too ill to think, have not slept at all, and am feeling the stress of not going to have any money next week due  to being off work, I am making one of the cheapest soups possible: Mushroom potage.

In it: an onion. Some closed cup mushrooms. Some chestnut mushrooms. (any mushrooms will do, but I have a ting for the flavour of the chestnut mushrooms…) some worcerstershire sauce. a spoon or two of sour cream. Salt. Pepper. This is essentially Umami on a plate, and very high in protein and all the other things that mushrooms have in them.

Being ill is the single most boring thing to happen. Last time it was parmageddon/hamtrax, but this time it is plain old cold. I technically could go to work, but I would be unable to do my job (talking at people) and I would infect the entire office with my slimy chesty coughs. But! exiting thing! I have lost another pound since I started low-carbing. So far four pounds down. BMI down to 30.14.

Primal Soup is essentially pale green scum. It came to be after I bought myself a kenwood handblender.

In the freezer I had an old bag of broccoli and cauliflower florets. I boilt them in a vegetable stock with half a leek untill tender and zoomed it with the blender. After which I added some old cheeserinds from a wedge of Dolce Latte I didn’t manage to finish a month ago, and some lumps of hard cheddar that had been left out. And zoomed it again, then added salt and white pepper.

For garnish in the primal soup there is the emergence of life in the form of simple proteins (in this case some smoked ham in very thin slivers in the middle of the bowl).

Let there be life!
(omnomnomnom)

So we have decided to go Atkins/low-carb for various reasons ranging from a BMI of over 30, my love for food, and the promise of the wedding dress in a year or two. The boy has refused to get a Kilt till he is slender and slim as well. So, onwards to skinnyness!

Why Atkins (Or South Beach, or Fedon, or Low GI, or whatever)?

Well, here follows a breakdown of reasoning:

Efficiency: It works. It works fast, it works steadily, it gives measurable results week for week. It, like all diets, works perfectly as long as you stick with it.

Sticking with it: I love food. But that is not why I gained weight. I gained weight NOT eating the food I love. I gained weight eating takeaways that were sub-par, chips that were soggy, drinking beer that was cheap and flavourless, eating large piles of icecream in depression that I didn’t even think about eating. I particularly remember a week I had gorged myself on cheap, fatty, carby foods and ordered a kebab. I didn’t manage to finish it, because the first thing I ate was the side salad. I hadn’t had vegetables in a week. This is not the food I LOVE. This is the food i eat when I am feeling too ill to love anything. It is comforteating. It is placing myself in a food-trance. It is Hyper-Stimuli in order to drug myself into a food-induced stupor. And I got over it six months after my degree when i got a job, had financial stability, and got a clue about the future. Sticking with eating the food that I love is not going to be difficult.

Love of food: What I cannot eat on this diet (every day or in large quantities that is): Stuff that when is broken down in my body turns into sugar. Or simpler: Stuff that is white or contains stuff that is white (sugar, flour, rice, potato).

Things that are ok to a varying degree include: Steak with asparagus, mushroom omelette with a side salad, stir-fry with cashews, steamed salmon with broccoli and hollandaise, carpaccio, greek salad, cream of cauliflower soup, cheese and ham salad, tuna steak with roasted peppers, Salade nicoise, Falafel, scottish breakfast with bacon/egg/sausages/fried mushroom/baked tomato, crudites with raita dip, deviled eggs, Fårikål, meatballs in gravy with stewed cabbage, smoked sausage and cheese, vinaigrette, gin and tonic, sour cream, chilisauce, grilled mediterranean vegetables… and so on. There is a reason why Nigella Lawson called atkins the diet of foodlovers. Imagine a diet that lets you avoid all the filling up bits and just have the tasty stuff. It is like that. If you can cook. If you can’t, you may resort to eating nothing but bacon and fried eggs, with good results in term of losing weight, but rather poor results in term of health.

Health: Being fat is not really that unhealthy. If anything a slight overweight increases your lifespan (yes, really: Orpana, Heather M. et al. (2009) BMI and Mortality: Results From a National Longitudinal Study of Canadian Adults) Living in the ways that make you fat however IS unhealthy. And once you are a little bit fat, you are likely to become VERY fat, and that is not at all good for you. Things that are unhealthy: Massive fluctuations in bloodsugar, high levels of stress hormones, grazing on things that are essentially fat and salt and sugar, not getting enough veg and vitamins and minerals, drinking too much, not having enough water, not having enough fibre, not moving enough.. So other than making me slightly less fat which is vanitybased and not at al because I am healthconcious, low-carb makes me not snack on bad things, makes me eat non-starchy vegetables at every meal, keeps my bloodsugarlevels even, and got rid of my anaemia due to not having enough meat and leafy veg. Oh, and I don’t drink beer, but am thirsty for water all the time.

TMI: Horrible periodpains? Constipated? Deadly farts of doom? You may not be eating very well. I digest far better after only one week on atkins. And I am no longer needing to drug myself down with codeine to keep periodpains off. My spots are reduced, my skin is more colourful in the right way, and I am loving it.

The bad side of Atkins: The first week is hell. Your body will resist losing the addiction to sugars. You will be hungry ALL THE TIME. You might get a headache, you may get bad breath untill you realise just how much water you need to drink, and nothing you eat will feel like enough. The first week is not fun at all.

Then on the other side of it you feel better. You get more energetic (May even feel like going for a walk..), you sleep better, you digest better, you weigh yourself for the first time and realise that after a week you have lost a pound, or two, or three. The first weeks you lose all the weight ever. Most of this is water (If you like me have a water-retention issue, this is amazing in itself.), but some of it isn’t. And your lunchbox is envied throughout the office, with its bits of cheese and cucumber and tomatoes and eggs and ham, and bits of grilled vegetables. And you feel good.

I will blog about this fairly regularly from now on. From the point of view of a foodlover, and in hope of being unable to quit it due to having it all on the internet. My BMI started at 30,74. It is now 30,30 after 5 days. I have set myself a six month target of looking amazing at the Discworldcon Gala Dinner in a tiny corset. And staying that way till I get married to a young strapping lad in a tailored kilt.

I just had a tweet of mine, regarding Nick Griffin appearing in Question Time, quoted by the CNN on “International Desk”.

Typically, I missed it, and there are so far no posted vids or transcripts. But it happened, and I have a few million viewers who saw it happen and was told by a CNN anchor.

So that goes onto the CV I guess…

The youth of today:

“The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for
authority, they show disrespect to their elders…. They no longer
rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their
legs, and are tyrants over their teachers.”

“The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have
no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all
restraint. They talk as if they alone knew everything and what passes
for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for girls, they are
forward, immodest and unwomanly in speech, behaviour and dress.”

Quote: Well, both are commonly attributed to Socrates.

Some things never change.

This is the response I, and all other signatories to a petition, got from Number 10.

Thank you for signing this petition. The Prime Minister has written a
response. Please read below.

Prime Minister: 2009 has been a year of deep reflection – a chance for
Britain, as a nation, to commemorate the profound debts we owe to those who
came before. A unique combination of anniversaries and events have stirred
in us that sense of pride and gratitude which characterise the British
experience. Earlier this year I stood with Presidents Sarkozy and Obama to
honour the service and the sacrifice of the heroes who stormed the beaches
of Normandy 65 years ago. And just last week, we marked the 70 years which
have passed since the British government declared its willingness to take
up arms against Fascism and declared the outbreak of World War Two. So I am
both pleased and proud that, thanks to a coalition of computer scientists,
historians and LGBT activists, we have this year a chance to mark and
celebrate another contribution to Britain’s fight against the darkness of
dictatorship; that of code-breaker Alan Turing.

Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on
breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that,
without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could
well have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can
point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt
of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that
he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross
indecency’ – in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence – and he
was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison – was chemical
castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own
life just two years later.

Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing
and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt
with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his
treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance
to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and
the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted
under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more
lived in fear of conviction.

I am proud that those days are gone and that in the last 12 years this
government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal for our LGBT
community. This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s most
famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and long
overdue.

But even more than that, Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to
humankind. For those of us born after 1945, into a Europe which is united,
democratic and at peace, it is hard to imagine that our continent was once
the theatre of mankind’s darkest hour. It is difficult to believe that in
living memory, people could become so consumed by hate – by
anti-Semitism, by homophobia, by xenophobia and other murderous prejudices
– that the gas chambers and crematoria became a piece of the European
landscape as surely as the galleries and universities and concert halls
which had marked out the European civilisation for hundreds of years. It is
thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism,
people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war
are part of Europe’s history and not Europe’s present.

So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely
thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved
so much better.

Gordon Brown

For those of you innocent of the fashions in alternative lifestyles, polyamory is the practice of being in love with, and having committing relationships with, more than one person. It differs from open relationships in that there is more than just sex involved.

I don’t get it. Well, that is not strictly speaking true. I do get it. Who doesn’t at some point think about having your cake, eating it, and then get cuddled by it afterwards? Twice? Having one cake that likes foreign movies and one cake that likes long walks also seems tempting as an idea. Not to mention the savings one can make by living in a household of more than two adults who all have an income.

I still don’t get it. Perhaps because I am the jealous sort, and the fact that I get to have more than one pie to eat means that all those pies get to eat other pies too. And they will. Even putting aside my own rather childish lack of understanding of “sharing” (I had many sisters, it gave me a good sense of “mine” and “yours”), I have issues understanding..  well..  Logistics.

Polyamory seems totally impractical. From a calendar-management point of view. And from an organisational structure point of view. How do you actually organise the relationship-map? And how do you keep up. It seems like a year 2000 dot.com business nightmare with steady promotions, branching, people being made redundant..

And that might be it. Polyamorous relationships are good training for a position of HR manager or veryverybusy PA.

And it makes hilarious short films. (NSFW)

So I went on a bus. And accidentally went ahead of an elderly gentleman.

I said accidentally, because that was what it was. The bus-stop was full of people, I had forgotten my glasses, and I was late for something. This man then started to yell at me. This is fair enough, I did after-all cut in before him.  I said something apologetic, told him I hadn’t seen him, and let him move in ahead of me. But he continued to yell.

Apparently i am personally responsible for all that is wrong with the youth of today with their bad manners, teen pregnancy, drinking, skiving, and lack of respect for the elderly.

Wait a sec… Respect for the elderly? This man was in no way old enough to have fended off the nazis singlehandedly, had a far as I was aware not himself produced any of my textbooks, was from his vocabulary not much to look up to in the form of intellectual capacity, had just said that I was going to get drunk and then pregnant ENTIRELY based on my age and an accidental queue-jump, and he demanded respect. Not as a human being, but as a member of a group(Of which there are some members  have the greatest respect, but that is by the by), and that his belonging to this group gave him the right to publicly insult members of another group. Due to a hierarchy of status and inherent worth between them.

No matter which groups are considered more or less worth others, and no matter how old the person having these opinions are, I have very little respect for that sort of thinking.

Of course, I could have confronted him with these opinions and drawn lined between his group-hierarchy way of thinking to far less pleasant systems of discrimination, and thus challenged his world-view, perhaps brought a new perspective to him, or have his opinions explained clearer, put in a context…

Some would say that this would be cruel to an old man who is set in his ways and who will never change his ways of thinking. Or in other words that his opinions are of little importance since he is going to die soon anyway, so we might as well humour him. That would be respectful to the elderly.

So I showed him that respect.