Start: 95.4 Last week: 88.9 This week: 87.0

Did I really dump almost 2kg in a week? Yes. But it's not quite what you think.

I've been putting off an absolutely routine, age-related procedure for almost a whole year now, put off myself by the necessary preparation and fear of the unknown. Everything I read, and there's lots of it, seems to me to be unnecessarily coy about the whole thing. So OK, I know not to drink red juice after the sluice-out, apparently because it can be mistaken for blood. But what to expect of the sluice-out itself? Stay near a toilet and have something to read aren't all that informative. Knowledge is power, and reassurance, and preparedness, and all that, so here's the guide to:

How to really prepare for a colonoscopy, really

Eats Wombat pointed me to a story by the indefatigable Jay Rayner in last Sunday's Observer. My big beef about takeaway chicken explains why cheap chicken -- the kind Brits scarf with such relish -- is likely to contain pork and beef protein. To keep the water in. Why? Because water is free. So if you can persuade a piece of chicken to absorb a load of water you can charge chicken prices (not that high, but hey) for nothing. And the easiest way to do that is inject the chicken bits with protein powder.

We used to have World Food Day on 16 October every year. This year the FAO decided, in its infinite wisdom, to acknowledge the fact that the we-meet-so-they-can-eat shindig goes on for the best part of two weeks. Enter World Food Week.

The best part, for me, was the opportunity to see Marion Nestl...

That’s it. I’m officially calling it off. My long-standing love affair with ecto is officially over. ecto is what is known as a third-party blogging client. A bit like email software, it lets you write a blog post while offline and then upload it when you’re happy with it. Last night it ate a long...

I'm with Boing Boing (and everyone else) on this. You can’t go around suppressing well-deserved criticism as copyright infringement just because you haven’t got a leg to stand on. Or rather, you have got a leg, but it’s been so spindlified in Photoshop that there’s no way it could possibly bear t...