Being the latest in my occasional rants about foodstuffs. This has nothing to do with he book (2). In one of my sporadic and ill-informed attempts to eat more healthily I decided that I would forego all chocolate, biscuits & c and instead eat cereal bas. Cereal bars are healthy, right? Everyone knows it. Anyway, after scouring the shelves I came across granola bars, granola being a kind of rolled oats thing that was at one point pretty synonymous with health food.

So far, so good. I buy the granola. I eat the granola. It's one of those crunchy things, rather than the chewy things, so at each bite large portions of it fragment into oaty shrapnel, but that way you actually eat less of it, so it's even healthier.

After consuming the granola I decide to look at the nutrional information to see just how much more healthy I am than before.

The bastard things have 16% fat. I have basically been eating something that's apparently around 1/6 lard. By contrast, the decidedly not-health-food oven chips my culinary genius served up today came out as 5%. Granola is three times as fatty as chips.

Nuts to health food, so to speak. You can't trust those hippies an inch.

In other news, Private Eye's book review turned its attention to fantasy once again, which happens rarely but memorably, and only to those novels which are successful enough to entrench themselves in a broader spectrum of imagination than genre specialists. Stephanie Meyer and David Eddings have both had the spotlight on them, at one time and another, which shows just how many copies they sell. I should be so lucky. Anyway, this time round it's the Grand Old Man who gets picked up, as the Tolkien estate has released another after the Children of Hurin (also reviewed in the Eye). The review itself is sympathetic to Tolkien, and mostlydiscusses the shorfalls of the current biographical landscape. However, what struck me most was this:

"Tolkien, an Oxford don of the crustier sort, used his books as a way of sublimating an intense romantic side which found outward expression in a hankering to dress up as a Viking warrior."

It is, therefore, a crashing pity that ol' JRRT was several decades too early for Larp, frankly.

(1) The loose chain of associations that led to this one is entirely the fault of Bloom County, the cartoon by Berke Breathed. "No matter how thin you slice it, it's still baloney" is apparenly an American saying, basically meaning that it's still rubbish, however you dress it up, but I first came into contact with it in a Bloom County strip, where it referred to hidden messages in backwards-played rock albums (I think). Similarly, as in my mis-spent you I had very little to do with health food, I first came across the word "Granola" in Bloom County too, as the surname of Opus' girlfriend Lola. Trivia over.

(2) Except that there is no granola in my world. The giant insects ate it. And then felt ill and bloated.