Yesterday was a good day. I kicked off by waking up a bit late (~10 am) and lounging about, something I certainly never have time for during the week. I spent some time trying to work on the introduction to the Review but with little success. About midday I cycled over to the lab, I had wanted to roller-blade, but not with a backpack full of notes and stuff. I didn't have much more luck trying to write at the lab, but I did read introductions from other reviews which gave me some ideas.
I came home about 2 pm and talked Allison's ear off on the phone. We want to drive from Los Angeles to Portland in the few days before Xmas. She mentioned she had been in love with the new gas-electric "Insight" which she said looked like a little two-door spaceship. ;) I thought it would make a cool little adventure to be recorded, part of the mythos of the "Great American Road Trip".
I was expecting Avi to be here at 3 pm, but he was running late and didn't arrive until 4 pm. I wasn't ready because I had been granted some inspiration on the Review, but it only took me a little while to grab my notebook, a few pens and my polyhedraic dice...
Yep folks, it was a gaming Saturday night out with the guys.
Ed had been going through a rough spot so we were playing at Avi's house in the converted garage. In all there was Avi, Ed, Ivan, Richard and myself, and we were missing Anthony and Ed's ex-girlfriend. Ed was running a full-blown PowerPoint presentation for his Call of Cthulhu campaign, so it was nice to get back into it. Compute teething troubles meant we didn't kick off until about 7 pm, but it well worth the wait. Clues were discovered, sanity points were lost, pizza and coke was consumed, curve-balls were encountered and it was all very enjoyable. Afterwards we played "Spades", a game I was initially unfamiliar with, but which I now play acceptably. I got home about 2 am.
In other news I finally broke my drought and bought a CD, "Depeche Mode: The Singles 86-98" which I like a lot even if the price was rather steep. In addition, this happens to be diary entry number 600. Since I've been writing for over 4 years, that roughly translates as one entry every 2-3 days, although these days entries tend to be of several days since it is harder to upload them, this contrasts with say 1999 and 2000 where I was writing rather prolifically. Of course at that point I was right in the middle of the transition thing, so I had a lot to say.
These days I prefer not to write much about that side of my life at all, it's pretty much come full circle. I am accepted, I am stealth and I like it just fine that way.
One of the first things I noticed when I came to the US was the bread. It was so incredibly sweet. It didn't take me more than 20 seconds to figure out why, one of the major ingredients on the side was listed as "High fructose corn syrup". I can't imagine why people would want to put that in bread to begin with, but I imagine it serves a two-fold purpose. One, sweet bread probably appeals more to the average American palate, which is already swimming in a highly sweetened environment, those companies which sell "ordinary" bread would lose out. The second reason would be to sell of the glut of corn-based products from the Mid-West so that farmers will continue to grow crops which aren't really needed.
I did for the longest time want to get a bread maker so that I wouldn't have to put up with the overly sweet bread. They cost between $50-100 dollars and so I decided to put it off for the immediate future until I had a permanent kitchen to work out of.
One point of trivia which readers might find of interest is why companies add Thiamine to bread. It turns out this is a very nice piece of medical epidemiology. For the longest time, there was a syndrome called "Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome", where chronic alcoholics would progressively lose memory function. The reason is that alcohol destroys Vitamin B1, aka Thiamine. "Thiamine pyrophosphate (TPP) is a derivative of thiamine (vitamin B1). Nutritional deficiency of thiamine affects especially the brain, because TPP is required for carbohydrate metabolism, and the brain depends on glucose metabolism for energy."
While a well-balanced diet normally replenishes B1, many poor alcoholics could only afford the cheapest food available, that is bread which due to modern milling techniques contained little B1. A study proved that addition of B1 to bread not only staved off these deaths, but also provided a source of the vitamin to other people who were deficient. It has been suggested that B1 should also be added to beer to directly head of the negative effects.
The moral of the story being that if you drink heavily, don't forget to take a vitamin pill soon after. Other vitamins and minerals need replacing also since alcohol acts a diuretic and flushes them out of your system.
As you can probably tell I really enjoyed being in my toxicology class.