My New Love

First, a little background.  I've been prone to disease most of my life, cold's and flu have a distinct attraction to me, they love to burrow in and make my body their playpen for a while.  All it takes is being in the same room as someone who has a contagious viral infection and I have it (unless I take some rather OCD hazmat precautions and don't touch anything/breathe).  This is quite an irritation.  Especially as when I have said cold, there'll generally be a day or two of severe throat pain, constant sneezing/nose blowing and complete lack of energy, followed by another week or so of nose blowing.  Not the most joyful experience in the world.  In an average year I used to have anything from 6 or 10 weeks out ill.

Now when I cut out evil gluten, this improved and I got ill far less frequently.  Whether it was psychosomatic or  whether my system was a little less 'fucked' from being poisoned constantly, I am not sure.  Either way, I seemed to fight off infections a little more.

Then came this lovely substance.

NOMS!!!

(ps. I know this is technically not just zinc, but

the zinc on its own didn't look so delicious)

Now, I would describe myself as a skeptic with an open mind.  If something has been proven to work, it works, otherwise it's most likely hippy naturalistic crap (don't get me started on the fact that qualified doctors here prescribe homeopathy).  I know there is a placebo response and it can have quite a large effect on some conditions, but mostly there has to be a reason why something works and a scientifically significant, observable effect.

Most of you may be of been already aware of the apparent link between eating zinc and reducing the symptoms of colds.  I was not.  So when I heard they had conducted a study on the effects and, from the condensed version I heard, found it to be effective (although with the proviso that if you took enough zinc to help, the nausea from the side effects could be worse), I thought I'd give it a try.

The result being that the past few times I've been ill I've either not noticed it, just feeling worn down for a couple of days with a sniffly nose, or the length of the symptoms have been drastically reduced to an afternoon or at most a day before being back to complete normality.  No runny nose, not much of a sore throat.

I assume this is how most other people have colds, its not so much of an hindrance to every day life, crappy, but not stuck in bed for a couple of days crappy like I've experienced most of my life.

The main problem with this though, is why the hell wasn't I told about this 20 years ago?  The first study was done in 1984 and seemingly everyone I mention it to is like "oh, yeah, of course zinc helps with colds".  What worries me is what other little nuggets of essential information have I been deprived of?

The only other problem being that I'm not taking as much zinc as is noted in the paper, but its still having a significant effect.  Placebo?  Psychosomatic?  Real?  That I had a Zinc Deficiency before the pills?  Who knows.  All I know is I'm ill a hell of a lot less.

Therefore, I Love Zinc.


PS. It also seems that taking pills is better than lozenges as it causes less side effects : Zinc Study

Yeast Based Experimentation

I have recently become more and more irritated with the state of gluten free bread here in deutschland.  You see, early this year I visited the home land, the UK, and sampled some of the gluten free breaded delights there.  Compared to the brick like monstrosities you get here, they were heavenly.

So, after a sufficient period of cathartic complaining, I decided to do something about it.  Much googlings later and I arrived at this.

A little tub of goo I've named George.

You see, there are two steps to making good Gluten Free bread.  The first is the same as regular bread, getting a good yeast.  The yeast gives the bread a lot of its flavour, a lot of its texture and determines how light and air pockety it is.  Apparently the best thing to do, is to have your own live yeast culture growing away in your kitchen, all made from 'WILD' yeast.  So this is what I did.  A secret combination of gluten free flours (coconut, rice and braunhirse), water and a couple of red cabbage leaves later and these little things were forming.

Bubbles!!  Which means George is alive and well.  I have to feed him every 12 to 24 hours and give him some attention by stirring him around and mixing him up.  He's just like a little stinky pet.  I've had him for a week or so now and he's quite ravenous, bubbling like a lunatic if i leave him alone for too long.

The second part is getting the right combination of flours, this is the tough one.  Plus, you need to mimic the gluten content of normal bread to get the right texture.  My first experiment came out ok.

The dough was of a more cake/batter variety so its settled into some odd shapes.  But the inside was of a good consistency.

George seems to of worked his magic quite well.  The only problem was the taste as a little on the brown bread side, a little too vollkorn for my liking.

Next time, more corn, less braunhirse.

Inept Queueing

I went to watch a film last week, Attack the Block if you must know, which was part of the Fantasy Film Fest here in Berlin, and not just any old showing, it was a special event of the festival with the Director in attendance.  None other than the Joe part of the great Adam & Joe combination.

So, whilst trying not to jump around in giddy excitement, I boarded the train nice and early with the idea of getting to the cinema half an hour before, getting nicely into the queue and therefore getting a nice good seat. Where I'd not only be able to not only view the film in glorious comfort, but to be able to view said director close enough that I cannot blank him from my vision with surreptitious use of my thumb.

At first, everything was going rather well, there was a queue already formed, so I joined it and started patiently waiting.  After a short amount of time, i noticed that there was a smaller queue forming to the right of the main queue.  After a little more time I noticed people just milling around at the sides.  Then I realised, I'm in Germany, not the UK, queueing is not something terribly important to people here.  The result being that this happened.

"A clusterfuck of Morons"

The idea seemed to be that no matter what time you arrive, you just stand as close to the door as you can get and then when people start to move in, you lightly push and as if by magic, you get in.

It wasn't that there was any violence or crushed bodies, everyone seemed ok with the fact that if you're stood at the back, you have to wait until all the people that pushed in were assimilated into the queue.  So people that arrived 2 minutes before got a better seat than those who'd been there for 40 minutes.

Now, you could say I'm being English, or that "who cares about queueing, you square!  If you want to get to the front you should!  Just push!!"  Well, I think it comes down to basic decency and respect for the other humans.  Why should I push to the front and give a giant "fuck you arsehole!" to the people behind who had the foresight to get there a little early.

I think its because, here in Berlin, people are of the "screw the rules! i'm an anarchist! i'll do what i like!!" mindset.  Which is good, it gives Berlin an edge that you don't really get in other places and I love it.  The problem being, I don't see where pushing in a cinema queue is "sticking it to the man" or pushing out the boundaries of what it is to live as a human being.  It just boils down to basic selfish behaviour  made palatable by a veneer of political ideology.

There is nothing alternative about it atall, its just self obsessed tits being selfish pricks.  The result of all of this being my view of the director (and his surprise guest sidekick Nick Frost), was this.

Thumb Coverable

Fuckers.