Food fetishism

We all love cooking shows, don't we? But I spend a lot more time getting my food from the paper hat caste than making bread from scratch. And I know I'm not alone in this. So why is it that part of my brain wants to watch back-to-back foie gras battles and another part can't say no to greasy burgers?


Maybe it's because of the elaborate food-guilt-fear-of-death complex the health mafia have been pushing. Don't just think of yourself or the cows that are already dead, think of the children. Despite your best reasoning, you just want whatever delivers the most fat and protein the quickest. Besides, dieting makes you fat. If this seems ridiculous, just ask anyone who's ever been on one. If you eat less than you eat now, all you do is train your body to make do with less food. If instead, you excersise more, you'll lose weight. (Geoffrey Cannon and Hetty Eintzig, "Dieting makes you Fat" London, 1983.)Why, if this is true, do people still subject themselves to it? Perhaps because we feel more comfortable with masochism than with excersise.

But it's gone a lot further than that. Everywhere you look you'll run across yoghurt-like products that claim to help digestion by importing a bacterial culture into your intestines. This is patently ridiculous, considering that these bacteria have to travel through your stomach and survive the acid and all the other defense mechanisms before they get there. Chances are slim that any will live to tell the tale. They don't tell you that these bacteria are native to your intestinal tract anyway, and considering their method of reproduction, this is like bringing coal to Newcastle. One might even suggest that this is why it's so hard to disprove the claims. Nevertheless, the wealth of qualifiers in for instance Danone's research has an air of a reversed burden of proof. And, in case you were wondering, all the names are trademarks, not real scientific classifications. L. Casei defensis indeed. Another product you're better of stuffing up your ass.

Additives are mostly beneficial, frozen vegetables are as nutritious as fresh ones, all the meat you eat has been rotting for a few days, so you can digest it, the macrobiotic brown rice diet will kill you, Chinese restaurants regularly serve you six-month-old meat, etc, etc. The only conclusion you can draw is that now that smoking, drinking, sex and drugs are all "problems", food is the next thing to get regulated to death in effort to save people from themselves. As usual, no effort is made to look at real problems or reliable scientific conclusions, everything is left to rhetoric playing on fear. Who really gives a fuck which country has the thinnest children anyway? What do you want? A cookie?

I actually know why I don't go out of my way to improve the quality of my food, aside from the fact that it doesn't seem to matter. It just feels too much like excersise, and the best food is in your starving mind anyway.

Jesus has a brand new bag

One more religious post, because they got my ire up again and I don't have any wood to chop. I first became acquainted with the cheesy, but warm atmosphere of christian youth groups when I was about eight. I had a great time in a christian tent doing all kinds of handcrafts and singing songs for about a week, while my dad tried to win a sailing competition. Apparently I told my parents that Jesus was the captain of my life now. I have to applaud my parents for their self-restraint. If one of my kids said something like that, I don't know what I would do. One day, as the competition wrapped up, they were suddenly gone and I was in charge of my own spiritual well-being again.

It wasn't until years later that I had the misfortune of running into someone who for some reason thought I would love to hear some awesome christian music. I've forgotten this person's name, but I'll never forget the glib nebbish stylings of DC Talk;


I do kind of blame them for making fuddy-duddy christian record execs realise that Jesus-themed prog-rock wasn't really doing it for kids anymore, and that they had to conspicuously ape whatever style was in, without ever compromising the same old message of useful conformity, disguised as 'totally out there' rebellion.

CNN-reporter Christiane Amanpour's God's Warriors special report has been running this clip as a preview and it scares the bejesus out of me. Reject popular culture and embrace the fun-loving spirit of the Nuremberg rallies, it seems. After Jesus Camp, I hoped teenagers could at least still be counted on to be disgusted by their parents' beliefs, but apparently this is what they're doing now. It's painful to see them use the same techniques for ridiculously out of proportion drama that goths and rap artists use, and still ask them to reject popular culture. It already is popular culture, or virtually indistinguishable from it.

Unfortunately, Ted Haggard's appearances at future battle cry rallies have been discontinued. Thank god we don't have to see his sweaty self-loathing on TV for a while, at least until he forms a new church. He can even claim to be 'cured' now. Looking at the list of televangelists that have strayed in the past, I can't help feeling that it might be more masculine to actively campaign for gay rights. There is a thin line between love and hate, and I'd rather have people thinking I fight for gay rights so aggressively because I secretly want to beat them up. I can just see myself getting caught with a dead gay teenager in the trunk of my car, my massive sideburns and pompadour collapsing into a sweaty mess under the interrogation lamps. Screaming in front of TV cameras about the velvet mafia colluding with the christian right. It was a pink wing conspiracy.

Taking this into account, I wonder how long Ron Luce will last before he's caught naked, oiled and coked up in a pile of teenagers trying to "suck the poison out of him". Luckily, he's got a backup.
* "We will respect the authorities placed in our lives, even though some may not live as honorably as they should."
* "We refuse to be led by those who are morally bankrupt."
Smells like a fresh, young loophole to me.

The cool graphics can't hide the fact that this is christian fascism on the rise, and the more power they get, the bigger the persecution complex. Check out NormalBobSmith.com for some printable flyers you can distribute in your own community. You kids reading this blog are the future of the world, and it is your responsibility to mock these people mercilessly. Also, all adults are tools, obey only me.

Shades of Xenu

The United states of America has a long history of religious sects incorporating ideas like manifest destiny and life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness into their belief system and casting the continent in the role of promised land. This produces a lot of unintended hilarity. Without a couple thousand years of being the fabric of society, these new religions tend to sound as utterly insane as they are. If your only criterium for membership is faith, i.e. gullibility there's really no limit on how dumb your origin story can be. And you can't use the 'tradition excuse', except in the U.S. where tradition can mean anything you've been doing for over a year.

I thought it was just scientologists that added an extra layer of sci-fi, but apparently the Mormons had to jazz up their own origin story at some point.


I love Elohim's 'come to bed' eyes. How could a mere mortal resist? I'm pleasantly surprised by how much more random stuff apparently applies to the Mormons. A couple of years ago, I got to see the temple they opened in Zoetermeer. It's an impressive building that for some reason doesn't really communicate the whole 'church' idea. Here's a side view and this is the entrance. It'd be fine for a palace of justice or something, but a church?

I can't really find any good interior shots, so my description will have to do. Plastic, fake wood and some of the most tasteless pictures of Jesus ever airbrushed. Some of the highlights were the giant plastic oxen supporting the baptismal font, the eternal marriage chamber with mirrors on opposing walls, for that spooky visual effect that will really make you think about how you and your family are an indivisible unit that will live in polygamous bliss on star-base Kola, and the fantastic multi-coloured shag carpets, which made me think of a 1970's Hilton in Bangkok.

The interior was a bit of a slap in the face considering they advertised the use of the best local craftsmen and materials. I doubt there are craftsmen in any developed country who would consider that their best work.

Maybe a lack of taste comes with the territory. They believed the Malaysian carpet dealer when he said his family had been working on this carpet for five thousand years, waiting for a temple to be built. Say what you will about the non-stop child molestation, at least the Catholics actually get good artists when they need to decorate.It's no less gaudy and ridiculous, but at least they had the sense to do it on a massive scale.

Incidentally, the Mormon video led me to this set of videos,
For catholics; How to convert Mormons, a fascinating glimpse into the minds of a group of people trying to use unfamiliar tools like logic and facts to try to convince people that their bizarre assumptions are superior to the Mormons'. This is exactly why liberals can't convince these people, they're just too critical of their own motives and reasoning to ever stand a chance against this kind of monumental self-deception.

Don't abort that Baby

Everybody's already heard Steven J. Levitt's argument for abortion made in Freakonomics, but I just read another interesting one in Gödel, Escher, Bach; An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.

Apparently Hofstadter believes the debate to be a an isomorphism problem. It isn't completely correct to describe DNA as the same information that makes up an individual. In biological parlance; It is impossible to separate the genotype from it's chemical context and still expect it to result in a complete phenotype. It doesn't really contain instructions for building an organism, but a set of infinitely complicated triggers for even more byzantine processes, that with the help of a vast array of chemicals nowhere in the code might result in a human being in certain cases.

So the debate is once again shown to be a construct of overeager demagogues simplifying complex situations and railing against or for arbitrary rules. It should make you a lot less anxious about dooming any potential offspring when you masturbate.


Thank god I learned about the legal implications of onanism by watching Legally Blonde. Apparently you could be sued by your semen for willful abandonment. (Unsurprisingly, typing in the terms legally blonde and masturbation on Youtube didn't get me the clip I was looking for.)

To round off, the best example of the same argument in the other direction is a Ray Bradbury story(It's name escapes me, but is probably a wholly unrelated Shakespeare quote, as is his wont to do.), wherein children can be aborted to the age of eight and live in mortal fear of incurring their parents' displeasure.

The main character's self absorbed parents finally get tired of him running around and rationalise their decision to kill him with a pithy; "This is a lot better in the long run, we should never have had a kid, we're just not those kinds of people."
I couldn't agree more.