Erykah's Blog

Eggs, oh eggs
Oh eggs, how much do I love thee? *swoon*

Something very weird happens on days when I have eggs for breakfast. I'm just so much more cheerful, energetic and, frankly, bouncy. I'm not suggesting that all clinically depressed people ditch the pills and just switch in eggs for breakfast, but if an omelette may help a little... I say why not try it. :D

Today I had bacon and egg "muffins" (care of the Nerys and India's Idiot Proof Diet cookbook). Switched out the sausage (because I forgot to take any out of the freezer) and I'm still funny on cheese, so I left that out. I also use coconut oil instead of groundnut. Used Anchor Extra Thick squirty cream because I'd run out of fresh. Delicious hot or cold! Make in batches, keep in the fridge, microwave as needed. :D

Previous batch with sausage.

Also note about the squirty cream. See this can with it's great big chocolate cookie face on it...

The Extra Thick is the only one in the range which contains no added sugar. All the others, with varying sugar contents from "oh, okay" to "fuck me, how much!", have pictures of fruit on them.

This is almost pure cream and therefore fine for a high fat, low carb diet if fresh cream isn't available. I keep some constantly in the fridge as a back up. Ignore the crap about serving on hot chocolate, put it over nice anti-oxidant rich berries to make everyone around you jealous and say "are you sure you're on a diet?"! The coffee advice is nice though (as a treat)... but I'd add some whiskey too. *wink*

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Sherlock and the case of not understanding basic cyber security
My slight re-write of yesterday's Sherlock to make one thing a little less stupid. This may also count as a review. *spoilers*

Holmes: It's a top secret intra-government database. It'll be protected by a password policy incorporating a random series of both alpha-numeric and non-alpha-numeric characters in a variety of cases. It's a password style that's designed to defy logic and reason, so it's beyond even my amazing skills of deduction. It's precisely designed to be. It would take a supercomputer to crack it in the time we have available before that nice werewolf boy goes barmy and kills himself because of an astonishingly ridiculous plot twist that I just can't solve unless I see a photo of the guy and have my vague suspicions about this contrived acronym confirmed. I mean, really, I should have probably looked at him better and maybe noticed something like dirt on his trousers from wandering in the woods regularly, and maybe he had some sort of residue that would tie him to rigging up equipment in a forest clearing... perhaps tying in with earlier when we visited the clearing. Maybe we should have visited in daylight instead of only in the middle of the night when we couldn't really see anything that might have given us some actual evidence to go on (like the wires, pressure pads or fog machines). Then we wouldn't have needed all this bollocks about mind palaces based on a word and a tenuous connection to an obscure CIA program that I may have read about once, wherever the heck it is you accidentally manage to read about top secret US government weapons programs. But when you've eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Phew, thank goodness I got that fan service line in there, that'll distract them from the giant leaps of illogic in this episode. By the way, sorry about terrorising you by telephone, Watson**. It was all done scientifically, except it actually wasn't, and it was only a slightly evil thing to do to a military vet who canonically suffers from PTSD (sometimes). Oh look, this soldier guy's got quite a few books about Maggie Thatcher...

Watson: Never mind all that. No one will care and they'll praise the writing of this episode as flawless because of the truly witty one liners and incredibly pretty visuals. It'll go down as a classic, even though it doesn't deserve it, on the strength of the other episodes of this show being really rather good. But the password will be a long random series of numbers, letters and characters?

Holmes: Yes! *paces in impotent frustration*

Watson: Like that one. *points at the post-it note* tacked to the computer monitor where the guy has written his very complicated password down so he can remember it*

*credit to Luke Darby for the post-it note idea.
** Telephone Obsession. It's infecting Gatiss.

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Equality and privilege in four (and a bit) really simple graphs
Please excuse the crudity of this model, I didn't have time to build it to scale or to paint it. (points if you get that reference *wink*)

This is my explanation of how the process of achieving equality is believed to work and how it actually should work. I've labeled the graphs with men and women, but it can also be applied to religion, sexual orientation, etc. anyplace there's a dominant group and an other or others.

We start with a graph of what a lot of people probably think the current situation is:

In this belief, the place men are at is what we're aiming for, and women are not there but somewhere near it (YMMV as to close how or far you think we are).

Now with this graph in mind it's understandable that people don't like the idea of affirmative action. After all, wont this be the result if we give women special advantages that men don't get...

Oh noes! Matriarchy! *screams in terror*

The problem is that the first graph is wrong. That's not where it actually where we're at. The graph of the current situation starts out looking like this:

Again YMMV on where the women exactly start out. The important part is that the position that men are currently in is not at that equality line. It's easier to grasp what I'm on about if I add an little extra bit of text to this graph...

So, the correct way to frame this is actually what happens if we stop giving the affirmative action to men for a while and give it to women instead...

Bingo! That's the theory anyway. :)

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This is what you sound like...
...when you blame the victim instead of the rapist.

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Public Health
Fascinating documentary about the birth of the British National Health Service and the contemporary opposition to it. Nye Bevan was properly awesome! :-D (The opponents of the NHS actually compared Bevan to Hitler too!)

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To cheat or not to cheat on your diet
Okay, the title of this post is actually complete crap, because it's not about "cheating" and I'm personally not "on a diet". It's more nuanced than than that. It's about when to indulge a desire for something you know may be bad for you, but you really do want to eat it anyway.

For those moments, this pdf link is absolutely priceless! *grin*

Whole9′s Guide to Nutritional Off-Roading