I was muttering recently about dietary restrictions and limitations and how the PG want me to start incorporating GI principles into my usual Hay diet. Not best pleased about the entire arrangement, am I.

But Frood just called to ask how the job interview went and while he was on the phone he asked whether I wanted baked spuds or chilli for tea tonight. We had risotto yesterday so I said chilli. It’s a proper meat chilli.

“Ah,” says he. “Are you all right with just leaves with that?”

“Eh?”

“Well, to make it Hays.” Bless him.

“Oh I usually have it with flat bread. That seems to work okay.”

I can’t eat meat chilli with rice. It makes me ill. Then it occurred to me to check the GI of the flat bread that I have resorted to as an accompaniment to chilli.

29. As opposed to around 69 for rice.

As they used to say on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In: “Very interestingk.”

They’re just dangling rope for me to hang myself with now. I can tell.

So for today’s pool session we’ll be joined by our old chums Seal and Dolphin.

Yay!

It has been simply years since I had much to do with those two. And it’s nice seeing them again. Really it is.

But guys, I only have a very limited amount of time to swim in my lunch break and if you want me to get in my thirty lengths (33 today, actually) then you’re going to have to stop distracting me.

“Ooooh! What’s that shiny thing on the bottom right down there by the drain? There’s only a small chance the pressure on your goggles at 4m will pop your eye out. It might be interesting. It could be… TREASURE! Ooooh! Treasure! I like treasure! Quick! Let’s go see! Let’s go get the TREASURE!”

It wasn’t until today that I noticed the similarities between the Old Man and my prime puppy trainers, particularly Dolphin, at least in terms of being easily distracted by shiny things.

Dolphin isn’t really very camp. Neither is Seal. They’re just both very easily excited by stupid crap on the bottom of the pool. Like elastoplasts. And clumps of hair. They are especially excited by all things shiny, like lost earrings. I used to find loads of them when I was a kid.

It’s difficult to maintain your freestyle rhythm when one of them suddenly blats you round the side of the head (water in mouth, lots of coughing) to yell “LOOK! TREASURE!” because there’s some piece of green shite stuck to the drain. As far as they’re concerned it might be one of those hair band things and they’re great because they almost float so they’re just right for pushing around and sticking on the end of your nose and pretending they’re jellyfish or seaweed.

I really did miss those two.

Hints and tips on how to recognise over-training.

Took Frood out to break his fixie virginity yesterday, as Blackbird is about the right size. I was on Shackleton. He loved it. I think I’ve found the ideal solution to our pacing issues and I haven’t had to go near an argument machine. We both just need to be riding similarly geared fixies!

However, I creamed my right knee bunny-hopping over one of the ridges in the road down at the harbour in Elie. It’s doing the ‘wince if you’re going up or down stairs’ routine today — especially down stairs. Got it strapped up, but I think I should have used the big knee support rather than the neoprene tubigrip.

Guess I won’t be running tonight, then.

Go Finland! Go Finland! Go Finland!

It was always going to be them or Lithuania. Lithuania was the Fat Les of Eurovision. But they had a Harry Hill look-a-like, not a bunch of Orcs.

If you haven’t seen today’s Scotsman, get it and read the Robert McNeil page. You have to subscribe to get it on the website, sadly. That article about pants is hysterical.

I can still remember how to swim! After about 3 years of not having been swimming at all!

30 lengths of a 25m pool in about 20 minutes isn’t too bad, all things considered. Shoulders need a bit of work — they’re still a bit dodgy after the Thistle Ride, because they’d been playing up for ages and then I muscled Shackleton up out of Bo’ness on a 70″ gear. Didn’t expect my right ankle to whinge, but it did.

Now I just have to work out a budget for all the training requirements they are lining up for me.

Maybe I should get me one of these.

I’m about to join KRT. I think. Or possibly Kirkcaldy, depending on whether I can stand the blue and orange. Which tastes like… like… raw beef wrapped in humbrol-painted polystyrene.

I want to get my running up to 3 times a week. With a long run at weekends (up to about 10 miles or so – offroad).

And fit in gym sessions for strength training.

And getting on for a century ride on Sundays when I’m not audaxing.

And then there’s swimming, which will have to be before work or at lunch.

And I haven’t found a martial arts class yet, but that will have to find space somewhere too.

Help!

Chris Brosius is having an exhibition at the Klein Art Gallery called the Individuality of Scent. It’s on tomorrow and for various obvious reasons I can’t make it, but if anyone out there in blogland can, I’d love to hear about it.

In my recent wanderings I have reacquainted myself with the Psion Guild. It has been nearly 8 years since I last had any dealings with them. There was this big thing about how we were all evil and mad and dangerous and needed to be saved from the evil symbiote vampire that was Core, to which end they were going to burn us out. Or something.

Maybe that whole thing was how come that journalist contacted me asking me why there was a price on my head in the vampire community; and how I was made an honourary member of the Highgate Vampire Society without being asked.

Although it’s not why I was reported to the FBI. That’s a different story all together.

Either way, I thought I’d see if I could find out if there was anything, anywhere, that might indicate what they thought of us these days, and I came across the following:

Excellent psychic combat techniques under “Miscellany”.
*WARNING*
Construct on website may be aggressive and invasive. Do not access the site without ample defenses, or if you are a novice.

This had me somewhat confused. Further investigations revealed that a member of the Guild had found a ‘construct’ on our site that he described as being a worm that attempted to infiltrate the reader through the third eye and change his thought patterns so that the reader regarded us positively and was possessed of a desire to join.

First things first. We scanned our CGI bin and our root directory for wooey.foo but found nothing.

Next thing to do is check our various tenants. Blank faces all round there. It was possible that someone had one up as an experiment but everyone denies it.

As those who have contacted us in the past with such messages as:

“Yo! Sis! You an’ me, we’re like >THAT

will be able to tell you, generally we are actually fairly resistant to people attempting to join our little gang of flakes and weirdoes. So the idea of there being some sort of inflatable pineal worm on our website caused us some consternation.

After some further investigation we believe we have found the solution.

Many readers will be familiar with the concept of the ecological niche. A particularly fine example of this are the hot smokers found along the mid-oceanic ridges. These are, of course, also known as hydrothermal vents and are a byproduct of the geological process of oceanic plate formation. As the two plates move away from one another, hot magma wells up from underneath the Earth’s crust, creating what most would consider to be incredibly hostile conditions for life.

And yet, as Alvin discovered, these places are teeming with life and, indeed, it would seem that hydrothermal vents mimic the conditions of the early Earth and may even give us some insight into how life started on this planet.

Other examples of ecological niches include the underside of damp logs, hot springs, the African Lakes and even the tundra. What they all have in common is that the organisms in there have a particular facility for dealing with that particular niche. So at the hot smokers you’ll find the worms, now made famous by the little yellow submarine. In the African Lakes you’ll find the many species of Acara fish that are found nowhere else.

We think that what we have here is a version of an ecological niche. We think that maybe, just maybe, our website has attracted a community of scavengers whose normal sustenance is the easy pickings found in the more gullible members of what is commonly known as the pagan community, particularly the energy-worker community. They are somewhere between scavengers and viruses, parasites that change the behaviour of the host to make sure they are provided with an ever-ready food supply. Parasites that change the behaviour of the host are well known to science — toxoplasmosis changes the behaviour of rats, so they are more attracted to cat urine, enabling the next stage in the life cycle. See some more examples here, here and here.

These parasites evidently wish their hosts to expose them to as many potential new hosts as possible, and so instil in them a desire to be amongst others, people other than their usual group, who are likely to have been infected already. Because we turn them away, we produce a steady supply of people who go away disappointed and yet still seeking other groups to join. We suspect that those turned away by us may not find satisfaction in the groups they do eventually join and may always feel a hankering to try something new.

As far as we can tell these parasites resemble woodlice rather than worms. Scavengers: feeding on the detritus and waste that is the by-product of energy work and using those energy workers as hosts for their breeding cycle. They seem to exist in meme-space, but there is, as any experienced cyber-pagan knows, a significant degree of crossover between meme-space and the internet.

We would like to thank the Psion Guild for bringing this effect of our website to our attention and giving us the opprtunity to uncover this brand new genus in the taxonomic table of all things Weird. We’ll get the bleach out.

Well. The thoughtform that is the concept of bleach, anyway.