The health fiasco

I got a new paintbrush today. It looks like this –

Yes it’s incredibly tiny and unlike model brushes of this size it’s really cheap. It’s for nail art and it’s perfect for tiny model work. Tiny model makers, look for nail art brushes on eBay. You’ll be surprised. Very delightfully surprised.

Okay, yes, it’s pink and has a pointlessly sparkly handle but it does what I want to do so that’s okay with me.

I also received a nice warm winter coat from my mother because mothers never believe you’ve grown up enough to survive on your own. It’s a good jacket though and probably cost more than I’d have paid for a jacket, and better than I would have bought myself. Maybe mothers have a point…

So today, even though it was Friday 13th, it was a good day. Aside from the internet going down for the first time. Well it seems appropriate for it to do that today and it wasn’t down for long.

But then I looked at the Daily Mail. I should have known better, it’s true. Looking at that hack-rag is high blood pressure time anyway but on Friday 13th it was a killer.

Did you know it was World Vasectomy Day? On Friday 13th. Who the hell thought that was a good idea? No way I was getting involved in that. You never know what you might wake up missing.

It was the health stories that really got me curling my lip, as usual. This idiotic diet plan in particular. They say that if we eat like they did before the invention of the motor car and the discovery of antibiotics, our lives will be just like theirs. Short and brutal.

Yes, it is true that mediaeval skeletons showed no sign of tooth decay but that was because they didn’t use them much. They had bugger all to eat.

Yes, it is true that in Victorian times they had less cancer and stronger immune systems. Few of them lived long enough to get cancer and there were no cars around until Daimler (I think) made some in the early 1900s. They only had little engines, they were rare and expensive and a man had to walk in front with a red flag to tell people ‘Danger, these things will go fast enough to kill you one day’.

My grandparents were alive before the invention of the motor car. But then I saw the invention and destruction of cassette tape, the 8 track car tape player,  the rise and fall of Betamax and VHS and the invention and demise of the CD. I think I win.

Now we have traffic fumes you can smell if you open a window on the third floor in this small town. At the time of this new-touted silly diet the only thing I’d have smelled on opening a window was horse shit and sweaty peasant. Not nice, but genuinely harmless.

As for the stronger immune system, I have one that’s stronger than most because I spent decades working with horrible infectious things. So did everyone in Victorian times. No antibiotics, no serious disinfectants, no realisation of the deadliness of bacteria. You had a strong immune system or you died. It was that simple. The human race selected for the strong only a hundred years ago. Now we select the weak.

It’s not the damn diet. Everything in that diet is available now and most people already eat most of it. Even me. Okay, the fish is often deep fried in batter but it’s still fish. I actually like beetroot. You can grow watercress on damp paper. Every kid did it – mustard too – when I was little. You can still get it for sod all money and a bit of growing.

And a ha’penny is not half of a modern penny. It is 1/24th of a modern 5p that used to be known as a shilling and which used to be damn well worth something. Do they teach these little fuckers anything any more? I should be a teacher. But in this modern silly world I would be lucky to last an hour.

I have a farthing somewhere. It is 1/48th of a modern 5p. Do the math, if you still can. Most my age will have no problem with it but you youngsters grew up with everything divisible by 10. The easy way. The drone way 😉

Model scales become clear when you know about the old 12 inches to a foot. 1/24, 1/72, etc. They are easy in Imperial units. Easy for the old mind. Not so easy for the new.

Anyway, back to the health bastards. They claim that eating anything with sugar in it makes you eat more things with sugar in them. They forget to mention that a) sugar is what every cell in your body runs on and b) it’s in all the damn plant material you eat because plants make it out of CO2 and water.

Look at this. Your taxes paid for this.

Studies have found that increased snacking is correlated positively with obesity, and obese individuals snack more frequently than people who aren’t obese.

Fat people eat more things. You paid someone to work that out. Studies have shown – they even used the phrase that translates to ‘the following statement is made up bollocks’. It’s nonsense. I snack all the time and burn it off. I know people on salad diets that look like they could successfully apply to be another of Jupiter’s moons. We are not all the same. Can science and medicine one day grasp this simple concept? It seems unlikely.

Pure rationing is coming. Courtesy of idiots pretending to be scientists.

And you know, you keep voting for the morons who believe all this shit.

Would you mind not doing that, please?