“O tempora o mores”

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Masthead of The Age newspaper. I can relate to the lion's expression.

“O tempora o mores” is a famous sentence by Cicero in his First Oration against Catiline.

It translates as “Oh the times! Oh the customs!”

In his opening speech against Catiline, Cicero deplores the viciousness and corruption of his age.

In this post I too rail against the viciousness of the age.

Or more specifically, The Age.

Today’s lead story, taking up over half of a broadsheet page but with all of the intent of the grubbiest tabloid, was on Greg Norman’s marriage break up.

Is this truly the most pressing or interesting story in the world today?

Is it really news?

Do I really need to know?

Time to cancel the subscription, me thinks.

Sometimes you just need to remove the negatives from your life.
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Grumpy Blogger moment. Again.

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My poor dogwood - brown and crunchy.

Life has been a pain of late. The finances, as represented by the shares that were funding my retirement, is on the pox side of ghastly; job prospects are slow and far from encouraging; my garden has been cooked and crunched by the "non-existent" climate change; my state has been been hit by the longest drought, the hottest temperatures and the worst fires on record. Also apparently a non-result of a non-climate change.

My enthusiasm is not high.

What I have learnt from my garden is that plants, when stressed, discard the unnecessary. Leaves are discarded, in some cases whole branches are discarded, to save the core plant.

I must learn from that. I have been discarding unnecessary stuff.


Inspired by Braja, one irritant I am going to discard is word verification.

I don't use it myself. I have finally tired of it elsewhere.

Come this weekend I will no longer be commenting on blogs that require me to use it. It is such a pointless thing to do and just makes commenting a greater pain than necessary. There is nothing personal in this, it is just self-preservation.

Grumpy? Maybe but that's the way it will be.

Oh, and if your blog takes 30+ seconds to load because of all manner of widgets, gidgets and gadgets in the side bar, please forgive me if I move on before it finishes loading. I have other things to do.

Now, for a nice cup of tea and a wee lie down...
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Coffee Gripe #2

Have you ever gone to make yourself a cup of instant coffee and not been able to find a tea spoon to open the lid of the can?

And when your finally claw your way into the tin, you find that there is a teaspoon INSIDE the tin?

What ever were they thinking?
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Coffee Gripe #1

The Australian National Heart Foundation makes the following claim on their website:

Certain methods of preparing coffee (such as boiling ground coffee beans for long periods) may lead to a higher blood cholesterol level.

What am I to make of that?

A couple of points:

Coffee contains no cholesterol as cholesterol is only found in animal fats. (I am assuming that they are not boiling the beans in milk.)

Coffee contains scant levels of fat, mostly flavouring oils, and the levels of saturated fat will be at levels only two fifths of four ninths of scant.

So I can't see coffee being a direct cause of blood cholesterol.

But could some extractable compound in the coffee be able to trigger cholesterol production, just as statins can reduce it? Maybe.

To prove it you would have to do a randomised clinical trail where some people are given over-boiled coffee and others are not, while controlling for diet, medical history and genetics. Whether the ethics committees would let you attempt to intentionally raise a person's blood cholesterol in the name of research is a moot point.

I have asked the NHF for a reference to this research.

I'll let you know what they say.
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