4 fattening foods to avoid this summer

Summer is coming, if you live in the northern hemisphere of Mars.  If you're worried about how to get that perfect spacesuit body, here are 4 fattening foods to avoid that you might not know about!

Lard

Lard is the big diet fad this year, as it's 99% sugar free.  Lardsicles, lardwiches, lardacinos - people everywhere are singing their praises.  But did you know that as well as being 99% sugar free, lard is only 1% fat free?  And scientists at Princeton have recently discovered that this may result in lard being up to 99% fat!  This may not sound too bad, but some of those scientist's friends have recently theorized that dietary fat may be an important contributor to total caloric intake, which itself is believed to be related in some as yet unknown manner to your energy intake/output balance, which Sanskrit manuscripts recently found in Paulo Coelho's underwear drawer attribute to how fat you are.  So try eating less lard and see if it helps.  You don't have to go entirely without though - colonic irrigation using lard is still okay.

Crushed Glass

Crushed glass is the big diet fad this year, as it's 99% fat free and 99% sugar free.  Glassicles, glasswiches, glassacinos - people are just munching that stuff up.  And sure, in the short term it seems like bleeding vigorously from the mouth and anus would be an easy way to lose weight.  But in the long run, perhaps in 2 hours, perhaps in 3, you'll end up in an intensive care ward getting parenteral nutrition while you wait for your entire digestive tract to be transplanted.  And do those bookish, bespectacled ICU-types really care about the state of your muffin top?  They do not.  They'll just pour those milkshakes into your veins and plump you up, up, up, up, up.

Water

The list of people who don't know that water is fattening is so lengthy, it would be easier for me to just give you the list of people who know that it is.  But that's just what they're expecting me to do.  Shhhhh...  They're listening... Just think of it this way - eliminate all water from your diet and watch your hips melt like ice.  Do it.

Cancer

It's becoming increasingly common these days for people to think that they can lose those summer pounds and tone those abs simply by eating cancerous facial tumours from Tasmanian Devils.  Facialtumoursicles, facialtumourwiches, facialtumouracinos.  Big mistake - for two reasons.  First, they are so delicious, especially with a garlic and cayenne aioli dip, there's no way you'll be able to stop at just one.  And second, you will of course be infected with Devil Facial Tumour Disease.  And while you might think that this would be a good thing, because the enormous and disfiguring facial tumours will physically prevent you from eating, unfortunately the cells will also disrupt the glomerular basement membrane of your kidneys, giving you a raging case of nephrotic syndrome.  You'll retain fluid in all your tissues and will swell up, up, up, up, up. I can't believe it's not butter!

So those are the four surprising foods you should avoid eating this Martian summer.  I expect you'll all be slimmer, less haemorrhagic, and much, much drier the next time we speak. But that's just what they're expecting.  Arrivederci Roma!

Science

Hatchling

Mama, do you know how to make science?

Smaller Half

How to make science? No, tell me.

Hatchling

You need, you need, vinegar! And bottle poda. And green colouring.

Smaller Half

Bottle poda?

Hatchling

Yes. And you put them all in, and it goes up, up, up and all over, like a volcano!

Smaller Half

Do you mean baking soda? 

Hatchling

Yes. Baking soda. To make science.

Gargan Death Carrot

Yesterday I was alerted to the existence of the Gargan Death Carrot.

I know you think I made that up but I didn't.  Admittedly, even Google only seems to be aware of it tangentially, and Wikipedia not at all, but I can assure you it is real.

If you want to verify the truth of what I am saying, travel to the misty shores of far off Adelaide.  Go to the Botanic Gardens, just to the east of the Royal Adelaide Hospital, where the bamboo sways to unfelt breezes.  And find therein the eternal Museum of Economic Botany.  Enter by the door on the south side, amidst the deepest shadows.  Turn away from the temporary exhibit of Banks' Florilegium and the grim posturings of Robert Hughes displayeth on video beside.  Turn ye to your left and inspect the display of the members of the carrot family in the glass cabinet before you.

And quake as you behold the Gargan Death Carrot.  Marvel at the shrivelled pieces of unrecognisable vegetable matter in front of you.  Wonder at the simple description that from it can be extracted a resin that is mixed into plaster.  And leave, because that's it.  Yes, having included an exhibit called the Gargan Death Carrot, the curators then failed to provide any information on it beyond some simple home decorators tips.

What is the Gargan Death Carrot?

Is the carrot deadly?  Is it poisonous?  Is it very sharp and pointy and can be hurled like a spear?  Is it hard and useful as a bludgeon?  Or perhaps it incites in its devourers a murderous rage?  Perhaps, like the mandrake, it shrieks as it is uprooted, slaying all those in earshot.

Or is it a symbol of death?  Did the Society Of Assassins in distant Garg have as its symbol the native carrot, for reasons unknown?  Or were condemned criminals permitted one final meal of Gargan carrot, which is so delicious that consumption is otherwise only permitted to the Prince Regent in his Black Tower?  Or were slices of carrot used to weight down the eyelids of the dead, granting them eternal rest?  Are the shades of the dead welcomed to the gardens of paradise by the carrot?  Or perhaps the dead are terrified of the carrot, so bunches hang in every peasant hovel to guard against witches and hobgoblins.

I looked long and hard through the rest of the exhibits, searching for similar items of eldritch lore.  I sought out, but did not find, the Guinean Haemorrhagic Yam.  I heard rumours of the Batavian Agony Pea, but could not confirm its whereabouts.  And the Apoplectic Prussian Leek was conspicuous only by its absence.

The wheels of knowledge turn slowly.

Nutri-brain

Registrar

So once the mRNA is produced, what happens then?

PTR

I have the word "ribosome" in my head.  But maybe that's just something in my breakfast cereal.

As it turns out, ribosome was the word I was after.  The other word that I was afraid I was confusing it with was "riboflavin", a.k.a. vitamin B2, which is essential to life because it makes your pee yellow.  All those nutri-grain ads on the idiot box when I was a kid nearly derailed my medical career.

My vulnerability to the all-pervasive cereal advertising industry in lieu of any kind of actual medical training is regrettable.  But still, I can walk the walk and talk the chalk or something like that when I have to.  Check out this picture from a talk I gave earlier this year on tuberous sclerosis:

It's complex but I think it captures the essence of what I was trying to say, which is that I had no freakin' idea of what is really going on but it's probably too complex to matter in an informal talk.

Proof that slugs can't read good

Vital statistics

People have been demanding that I publicly release the all-important birth parameters of the Hatchling.  So here they are.

Age: zero.
Density: 1.01 kg/m3
Temperature: 310.15 K
Head circumference: 0.0001836 nautical miles
Resistance: > 1000 ohms
Str 3
Int 18
Wis 12
Dex 4
Con 16
Cha 25

I am going to make it through this year if it kills me

Well that's the last time I try to draw anything with this stupid touchpad...

Poppers

Something that I think is pretty strange about South Australians is the way they refer to Poppers as Fruit Boxes.  In case you have no idea what's going on here, I'm talking about the little cardboard cartons filled with fruit juice.  Where I come from we call them Poppers because that was the dominant brand.  Here they call them something else, but for the same reason.  Confusing. 

It was even more confusing when my Smaller Half and I were walking through the red light district of Paris a while back and saw a lot of signs advertising "poppers" and "zingers".  Turns out they were not talking about beverages or chicken burgers.

Anyway, it annoys me that the name Fruit Box is so literal.  Do you think László Bíró would be the man he is today if he'd called his invention Ink Tube?  No.

So I was sitting here just now slurping on a Fruit Box.

PTR 

Slurrrrrp.  Slurrrrrp.  Slurrrrrrrrp.

Smaller Half

For God's sake - breathe!

PTR

I can't breathe - this is how you get the juice out.

Chalk up another victory for Science! 

Why fish don't get headaches

It's easy to forget, when in the midst of trying to learn all sorts of complicated sciencey stuff, that we actually don't really need to know it.  Sure, the stuff we've been learning is useful to help us learn other stuff, but in the long run I question how much of it really sinks in.

For example, a doctor recently quizzed me about why fish oil is an effective anti-inflammatory.  I said, "Hmm, it's something to do with arachadonic acid and prostaglandin synthesis but I can't quite remember."  He said, "No, it's because the fish live off smaller fish that live off plankton which eat other smaller plankton and so on, and the creatures at the bottom of the food chain synthesize a substance not unlike aspirin and it accumulates in the bodies of all those predators until it becomes concentrated in the fish oil."  Really.

In hindsight it's possible that he was pulling my leg.  It's the kind of thing that I would say to someone.  But this doctor doesn't strike me as a prank-pulling jackanapes like myself.  On the other hand, it's also unlike him to be so wildly inaccurate about something.

I'm spending tomorrow in bed to figure it out.

The Scottish train

I was thinking on the train on the way up to Edinburgh (but quietly, so as to not make it obvious I was Australian) that it would be great to have a sushi train on the train.  A train within a train, if you will.  It could scoot up the side of the aisle and when you got hungry or bored you could pick off some fresh sushi and have a  little snack.

It would be fun if the sushi train was on a bullet train and ran in the same direction of travel, so you could advertise the 300 km/hr sushi train (or however fast the bullet train is).  I'm pretty sure that it might have been this kind of thought experiment that led Ludwig von Einstein to conceptualize his Theory Of Relativity - once the sushi travels fast enough it become infinitely tasty!