Bev Wigney's "Incredible beauty" choices

Bev Wigney's always fascinating Burning Silo is the host this time for the

Circus of the Spineless, edition #22
and her choices are just incredible.
This edition is one of my favourites, of my very favourite circus.

By the way, there's nothing spineless in the observations. Go to the circus. Have fun, be awed and inspired.

A deformed she-oak by the highway

Regular slashing keeps the bank uninteresting, unless you're walking.

This detail from a Casuarina , commonly called a she-oak (though she-oaks look like pines), was so startling, I thought at first glance that a snake had shed its skin in the scrawny 1.5 metre sapling.

"We measure our works against . . ."

From a letter I just received, quoted here with the writer's permission:

"We are stuck with a western frame of reference, with the notion all things west are desirable, such that even in our schools, we are fed this kind of thinking. Sure, there are nationalist movements and such, but our literature still has a long way to go. We measure our works against America, we long for the American Dream. Our literature will never be 'free' or truly 'ours' until we recognize our own values, our own merits."

The joys of bad housekeeping: The slattern and the lantern fly

Will a 'self-cleaning' oven save you mindless hours spent scrubbing, scourer in hand and cleaning fumes up your nose? asked the April issue of Australia's Choice Magazine.

Why pay more for a needless labour-saving device?
The consumer organization that publishes Choice performs a needed service, advocating for consumers on many important issues such as healthy-food labelling as opposed to healthy food, but on this question, I must ask you —

about those mindless hours:
Do you spend them cleaning your oven? If so, then may I suggest that you don't need a self-cleaning oven, but counselling?

Or better yet, spend your first freed hours reading Florence King's Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, one of my all-time favourite books.
Beating Beeton in every way, including originality, this joyous bible for bad housekeeping and attitude has been a tower of temporary props that has served me perfectly well ever since I first read it, to hold up my views on the relativity of impeccable properness.

Burning sterilises
And the inside of an oven is too dark to see, and you're not eating the walls and floor of it anyway, are you? But what do you look like and smell like after a session spent with your head and arms in an oven's maw?

Worth above rubies
Cleaning an oven is only the most egregious of badly used mindless hours, but what joys can be found if you reach the level of the Proper Slattern!

Night view of a properly cared for window casing:

The next day, after a proper cleaning:

Lantern fly - Eurinopsyche arborea (I think), Fulgoridae

Portraits of muck in a rainbarrel's lid: The Invertebrates of Illawarra

It's been so wet, finally, that the lid of a water barrel has filled with rain and the inevitable muck.

It's been windy, too, so the water was moving in a slow swirl, and some of the muck was fidgeting.

The group floated away. Did Dutch burghers give as much trouble?

All of the above portraits are free of artifice, but in the one below, I commanded the darkness and the light.

Medicating the food supply so some can get a partial dose

"Eat 11 slices a day to get the necessary amount."

Mandatory fortification would deliver pregnant women half the dose of folic acid needed to avoid the neural tube defects, which affect 350 newborns a year.
- Bakers may be forced to add folate, Sydney Morning Herald

How does the decision to make folic acid mandatory in bread so that some pregnant women can get the benefit of a partial recommended dose (excluding the rest of the population, especially children and the aged, from concerning themselves with the adverse effects of folic acid intake) add up to "a triumph for humanity and common sense " ?

Mark Lawrence, an expert on folate fortification, believes a proposal by Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) to add folic acid to all bread-making flour, is premature and constitutes a "population-wide experiment".

Dr Lawrence, a senior lecturer in the School of Exercise and Nutrition Science at Deakin University, said it was well documented that folic acid supplementation reduced the rate of birth defects such as spina bifida. But the level of fortification proposed by the food regulator (approximately 200 micrograms of folic acid per 100 grams of flour) would reduce neural tube defects by an average of only 8 per cent - or 26 conceptions - a year.

Meanwhile, an entire population, not just women of child-bearing age who were the target of the proposal, could be exposed to potential health risks, he said.
- Health Risk Fears as fortified flour faces acid test, Sydney Morning Herald

The "common sense" is revealed later in the article:

However, the regulator's chief scientist, Marion Healy, said the benefits of adding folic acid to bread far outweighed any potential risks . . . Nevertheless, the food regulator had taken a cautious approach and proposed a very low level of fortification, she said. Women planning a pregnancy would still need to take a folic acid supplement.

What if you want to make your own bread?

Britain's Food Standards Agency board on Thursday gave the go-ahead for plans to add folic acid to foods . . . The FSA, a government body designed to protect the public's health and consumer interests in relation to food, voted to back mandatory flour fortification last month.At its board meeting on Thursday, the FSA said the voluntary addition of folic acid to products such as breakfast cereals and spreads should be controlled to prevent over-consumption.
- UK's FSA backs folic acid in flour, curbs on food, Reuters, June 14, 2007

Following a trend

Lessons from other countries
In recent years the US, Canada, Chile and the Czech Republic have all introduced mandatory fortification of flour with folic acid to ensure that all pregnant women are receiving adequate amounts of the nutrient. Despite the fact that the amount of folic acid added into the food supply does not provide enough to fully protect unborn children, recent reports from Canada and the USA indicate fortification of cereal grains has been very effective, with reduction in neural tube defects of between 27% and 50% (SACN 2005). Rates of cardiovascular disease also appears to have fallen. Unfortunately, there are as yet no data from these countries on population trends in the incidence of B12 deficiency or any related neurological damage that can help to clarify the risks involved.
- Folic Acid: Time to fortify? EuroFIR (European Food Information Resource Network)

And what are the implications for bread and flour makers, if they wish to advertise?

On so many grounds (balanced diet, obesity epidemicising, health risk to the a much larger population than that targetted, and substance abuse), I can't see how they can get away with it, compared to the zealous banning due to false fears regulators have of anyone pushing "an egg a day". But then, what has regulation to do with science any more than common sense?

The Lancet asks: Fortified Europe?

The Mindless Materialism T-shirt & the AWM

New! The Mindless Materialism™ T-shirt is the second in my new designer line of items that you can enjoy not having.

Did you miss the AWM?
Today, hundreds of thousands of children released yellow balloons that said: The death of millions is a statistic.

Just kidding on what the balloons said. If you missed the first item in my line: the stainless steel and hubrimium, waterproof at 300 metres, AllTogether World Maudlinometer ™, the world's first lachrymograph, a precision instrument engineered to work in all atmospheres, that's terrible. I'm really sorry.

The next model will be able to measure 150% higher levels than the AWM-M1. At present, I can't even send you a free balloon in consolation, as all the balloons have been bought up, despite best efforts. But don't despair.

Soon, you too can enjoy not having have your very own AWM-M2, Supplies have been banned in the UK for possibly resembling an egg.

Can an offended doorjamb ever be placated? Read "So Sorry"

Funny and so very true: So sorry on Binky's delightful blog about She who she calls The Boss,
24/7 A Mother's Work is Never Done.

Reminds me of when I was a judo student. On the rare occasions I successfully threw someone, I always blew the moment with the S- word.

Eoin O'Dell's smorgasbord of critic issues

For those who aren't sated yet (and who could be, whose sense of taste has ever been assaulted by something of purported quality?) Unpalatable - defamatory restaurant reviews is the article to read.

So hyperlinked that it should carry an overindulgence warning (NOT TO BE TAKEN IN ONE DOSE) it is the work of Eoin O’Dell in Cearta.ie: the Irish for rights, a blog that champions so much that I believe in that one of these days, I'll have to question O'Dell's integrity.

What makes Unpalatable so delicious? In one encyclopaedic (and sure to be updated) entry, expertise and fancy mix. Dr O'Dell is a Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Trinity College's School of Law, yet he not only writes lucidly and in the fewest words, but:

I’ve always quite fancied the idea of being a food critic: I like food, and I can be critical (just like the guy in the cartoon on the left . . .); what's not to like? Well, a flurry of litigation in various jurisdictions over the last few months has made me reconsider.

The cartoon's hilarious, and linked to a Book That Needed to Be Written.

Cocoon, by day and night

On a eucalypt now, in a sandstone forest in southern New South Wales.

The texture and cut of the fibres might make anyone who's made a fibreglass kayak itch with remembered irritation. The spider is dead.