• 9oz butter
• 3oz light brown soft sugar
• 6 oz golden syrup
• 2 oz maple syrup
• 13 oz porridge oats
• 1oz each dried cherries, blueberries and cranberries.

Grease and line an oblong tin of about 14 x 9 inches. Or yay big. Leave the greaseproof paper dangling over the edges – this makes it easier to remove the finished flapjacks. Grease the tin but not the paper. Preheat oven to gas mark 4. Stick everything except the oats into a saucepan and set over a low heat. Stir until the butter has completely melted and the mixture is smooth (except for the lumps of dried fruit). Add oats and stir together well. Pour mixture into the prepared tin and smooth down with the back of a metal spoon. Bake in oven for about 20 minutes, until it is just turning brown at the edges. Do not leave any longer than this otherwise the resulting flapjacks will be tough and lose their moistness.

Once baked, remove from the oven and score lines across the top for the individual flapjacks. Leave to go completely cold and then lift out of the tin using the greaseproof paper and cut along the scored lines.

Yummy and addictive. And so not low or even moderate GI. But there’s soluble fibre in the oats and they make fantastic cycling snacks.

I think I’ve worked out what I’ve done to my knee.

I think I’ve wrenched the MCL there on the right. Bugger. This does not fill me with the same sort of woe and despair as the thought of tearing my ACL does, especially as I can apparently still run and walk and swim on it without it hurting too much. Doesn’t hurt at all when I cycle. So I don’t think I’ve torn it. Just bruised it a bit. Or whatever the technical terminology is.

Oh, and when I went snorkelling yesterday at Elie, taking advantage of the gorgeously baking weather, the vis was really poor and I got smashed into a rock, so I emerged from the sea dripping wet and with blood pouring out of my leg. Nice. Plus I forgot that the neoprene boots would rub the sunscreen off and I have very sunburnt feet. Ow.

But hi to Katie, whom we met in Embra yesterday and who went on to be talked through rescuing a fledgling corvid. Me on one end of the phone, Katie and the baby jackdaw — now called Brian — on the other. I did try not to laugh at the noises. Brian is apparently doing well.

And also much respect to Run and Become, who were very patient with me on Saturday until eventually I settled on a pair of Asics Trabuco VIII trail shoes. In bright orange and silver. Very non-girly.

Frood bought a pair too — only the men’s version, obviously — completely independently. How strange. I mean, he was going to be buying shoes, but strange that he should buy the same shoes.

Of course when we went running last night I ended up melting into a panting heap while he found it relatively easy, even though he hadn’t been running since school. Bastard.

There’s an interesting article in this month’s East journal comparing carbon credits and neutralisation to Catholic plenary indulgence.

Plenary indulgence was, of course, the pin upon which the film Dogma hinged. I liked the part where Serendipity the Muse says: “The plenary indulgence loophole? …Leave it to the Catholics to destroy existence.” Anyone who has ever been in the company of a bunch of grizzled old Gimps whinging to one another will recognise that particular form of griping.

So anyway, Bill Leverett makes the point that not all the offsetting programmes out there are good, and a lot of them are just cashing in on people’s environmental guilt. The plenary indulgence loophole about which Serendipity was so scathing was one of the factors that led to the Protestant reformation, largely because of aggressive, unscrupulous selling of indulgences that didn’t really do what they were supposed to.

A good scheme should have additionality: no point claiming to be neutralising your impact if your money is just going to support something that would have happened with or without you coughing up for it. It should have permanence: fossil fuels are releasing carbon from a permanent store into the atmosphere, and so anything that can release and will release the carbon you pay to be sequestered isn’t doing the job of compensating. It should have simultaneity: in order to mitigate the effect on the climate, an equivalent amount of carbon should be sequestered at roughly the same time as that being released. Finally, it should be obvious that we should be able trust the project: you need to know that your money is being spent on locking carbon away to make up for that which your activities are releasing, otherwise there is absolutely no point.

This raises an obvious issue with the most popular carbon neutralising projects, which involve trees. Trees eventually die and the carbon they store goes back into the cycle. Also, a tree will eventually reach the point where it will no longer store any additional carbon. They also fail on simultaneity.

Unfortunately the only real solution is to reduce your carbon footprint in the first place. But in the meantime, don’t get caught out in the plenary indulgence loophole: if we buy into that too much then we’re going to end up sorely disappointed.

Snaffled from Estara:

You Are a German Shepherd Puppy

Intelligent, quick witted, and a bit aggressive. You’ve got the jaw power to take a bite out of anyone you choose.

My knee still hurts. I am grumpy.

But I can’t think what it was.

Abhasana has requested that I talk some more about my breasts. I’m not entirely sure what to say about them. There are two of them, they have darker areas on the front commonly referred to as ‘nipples’, they are fairly evenly matched for size, are free of tattoos and have so far escaped being scarred in some accident or other (unlike most of the rest of me), neither of them has a name, and Frood says they (each) are a perfect handful.

Although I suspect this latter is dependent on the hands in question being his. Or at least the same size as his.

There’s that bloody ant again.

My knee still hurts, by the way, although I think it’s just a strained ligament or tendon. It gets painful under rotation with a straight leg, down on the inside of the knee. Other than that it’s fine. I can run on it, cycle on it: I just can’t do breastroke kick. So I might have to take a break from the pool for a few days, or at least allow my distance to take a knock because I can’t do crawl for 40 lengths.

Not yet anyway. Although on Friday I discovered that I can still swim a length underwater (well, other than the painful knee), and more easily than I used to be able to. So there’s striking a blow for experience over youthful enthusiasm.

I’m rambling here… oh!

I remember!

I really fired this thing up to tell you all about this bloody weird dream I had the night before last in which my feet were bitten off by a shark whle on a job. I came round from whatever incident led to this and Munky and gecko and Maura and Estara and Ro and a few other people were there and they were all telling me how sorry they were and how dreadful it was but it was fine because prosthetics these days are really very good and I wouldn’t miss them. I looked down initially I felt stumps and there were my bandaged legs, still bloody, but I blinked and then there were my feet. I could feel them.

Everyone told me that I had phantom limb disorder, that my feet weren’t really there and my brain was filling in that they were, even down to making me see them there. I just pointed and said: “Look! Toes!” I could wiggle them. The toenails were quite dirty.

I remember crawling about on my hands and knees for a while because it was too painful to walk, but eventually I made myself stand up. My feet were still there for me even though everyone else was horrified because I was apparently walking on bloody stumps.

Not that exciting, then.

Last night — well, this morning, after the alarm radio had gone off, which explains a lot — I dreamt that I had to go and rescue Wolverine. When he was provoked into being angry and violent he was his usual, hairy barbarian mutant self, but someone had done something to him so that whenever someone shouted at him in a DJ fashion (“It’s the top of the hour! Time for a record. Here’s Free with You Ain’t See Nothing Yet and then we’ll take you right over to the news room…”) he turned into Chris Moyles.

Which, frankly, is a fate worse than death. Poor bastard.

Suggestions, comments, ridicule and mockery in the usual fashion…

Because I really needed to waste valuable thinking power on goggling at the very concept of After the Rapture computer games.

Soldiers battling demons? Sounds like Revelations meets Buffy to me. No swearing? Good grief.

I’m planning on watching that documentary that’s going to be on Monday night about the new Neo-Con Christian Fundamentalist Right Wing colleges currently churning out the next generation of American politicians. Oh. Wait. Did I just miss it?

My new Lumicycle lamps arrived. Yay! I now have a lovely silver lamp that will take my 35W without blowing up — my but the machining on the new ones is nice — and a 15 LED lamp that I shall try out just as soon as I can face going out late enough for it to be properly dark. Even at 1am the sky is still fairly light at the moment.

Just waiting now for my order to come through from SIS, although having had some rave reviews of that Nocté stuff I’m wishing I’d delayed my order to add some of that as well. The PG is giving me a hard time about lack of sleep interfering with my body repairing at the moment (more on that elsewhere later).

Watched an interesting documentary about the original The Omen last night. Much was made of the putative curse. Talking about it with Lucifer later (he does make good coffee — at least, whichever minion does it for him makes good coffee) he didn’t disagree with Frood‘s and my conclusions that it’s entirely possible he would put a curse on such a thing, both for the jollies and for the extra publicity. There’s also no point in him doing it with the new one because the old one did it already.

He doesn’t really like repeating himself. There’s a long story there, a tale of thousands of years of pent-up frustration that has now petrified into bitter resignation and a sort of Buddha-like calm about the whole thing. Morningstar is an angel too after all.

Just making a note to myself of these DoWrap things. I have fancied one for a while, and the only place I have seen them mentioned other than a recent C+ thread is Asteroid M, where yours truly is, while not exactly persona non grata, at least not entirely welcome.

Science in Sport Nocté. I’ve heard of Rego but never bothered with it. My major problem with most of these things is that they contain too many carbs. Sadly, these days I’ve become ever so slightly obsessed with amino acids, so anything that starts talking about amino acids has the same effect on me as an “eat what you like and lose a dress size” diet has on the sort of woman who thinks that a Special K pedometer is a useful training tool.

The Morningstar and I were discussing The Omen the other day, and the date of its premiere.

I had this email, if you’ll remember, from some idiot telling me I was dark and mysterious and powerful and he wanted to learn how to be like me and so to confront his inner demons. I replied that I’d recommend a visit to Lucifer, only I suspected that the Morningstar would skin him alive and turn his brain into silly putty. So next time I was passing I inquired as to whether this particular moron had seen fit to come begging for the secrets of Hell.

He hadn’t, as it happened, apparently owing to some rather cowardly opprobrium over some youthful vices. Thought he might not get out again.

However. There we were, sipping the darkest, oiliest, most exquisitely aromatic espresso one could ever imagine, standing on the edge of Dis and gazing out across the tortuous, tormented landscape. The sunset was really rather beautiful. One simply does not get colours like that on the earthly plane.

“So,” I said. “Are you making an appearance for the premier?”

“I had considered it,” said Lucifer. “Red carpet, adulation, the delicious taste of conceited celebrity worship. It’s all very me, as you know. But I don’t do trite, darling. Trite is for the lesser demons. I’m ruler of Hell. It doesn’t matter how expensive the suit or knowing and supercilious the smile, it would be so damned trite. Sweetheart, it would be like putting a fish with horns on the back of the Lotus.” He lit a cigarette. I think it was Turkish. It smelled of spices and had a faint undertone of charred skin.

“Besides,” he continued. “You know that whole 666 thing is a mistranslation anyway. Gematria is all very well if you live with your mother, wear a snorkel jacket and still consider spaghetti hoops the epitome of haute cuisine but this is the age of the internet. These days primes are the thing. Why bother with a boring number like 666 when there’s the Sieve of Eratosthenes to play with?”

So, no. I don’t think he’ll be making a personal appearance, although a minion or two might turn up and I think people who worry about that sort of thing will be managing to have a crappy day without any help from him.

Maybe Beelzebub will. I don’t think he’s got anything better to do today, although he was talking about putting his running shoes through the wash.