Five months late, but this interview between the FT and Bono ahead of the UN sessions reviewing progress on the Millennium Development Goals, is interesting if only for this quote:

AB: What will you actually be doing in the days ahead?

Bono: A sleepless cocktail of rabble-rousing, meetings with politicians, chief executives, faith leaders and NGOs. People such as Nicolas Sarkozy, President Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania and Gordon Brown.

AB: What exactly happens in the meetings you have with these world leaders?

Bono: Judo in a suit.

No, seriously, this and the set of blog posts are an encouraging and well-written read, if rather full of statistics.

Following up on my recent post about Paul McKenna’s diet, have you heard of flexitarianism? I hadn’t either. But that’s a name that’s being put to the idea that we’d be better off going veggie until supper. Perhaps the largest argument is for ecological reasons, to help reduce cattle-produced greenhouse gasses, which should help reduce global warming. And it may help our health, too. More people are suggesting that our bodies aren’t designed to process as much meat as rich Westerners tend to have, and that we should take more to the Oriental approach of meat once a day (or less).

Mark Bittman’s new book, Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating makes the case for this, and is apparently well worth the read.

I’d been meaning to find some more varied and healthier options for lunch than my usual high-carb meat sandwiches. This has prompted me to try having soups, noodles, and rice-based meals instead of those sandwiches. I went to the local Chinese supermarket to get some noodles, but I now realise I don’t have the facilities at work for cooking most of their noodles. Even finding a microwave is hard. Perhaps I should try to find healthy Pot Noodles, where you only need a kettle …

All these films got me thinking about how many we see in a year. Adding up the ones seen on cinema, rentals and TV, I reckon it’s about 60 in the last year – that’s one every 6 days. Or perhaps more worryingly, 5 days’ worth. Hmm.

… at least for Martha. She’s signed up for Cineworld’s Unlimited offer, where for £11.99 a month, she can see as many films as she wants. Add in Orange Wednesdays, and the LoveFilm subscription (yes, we’re going to stop that one), that makes for a lot of films in the last few weeks.

Starting with the least impressive and working up:

No Country for Old Men – I guess you either really like a Coen Brothers film, or you just don’t get it. For us was one of the latter ones. Slow and glorying in unredeeming violence, it hardly had a plot, and had an ending that we couldn’t figure out. The only stand-out part was a terrific portrayal of psycopath by Javier Bardem, and a an subtle but still impressive turn by Kelly Mcdonald. ★★

Possession – adapted from A.S.Byatt’s novel. Hopefully the novel is richer than this unlikely and formulaic film version. Me: ★★ Martha: ★★★

Revolutionary Road – Martha found it charming and gentle, but I found it slow and depressing. (And Kate Winslet curiously wooden, as if the effort to do the American accent was too much for her.) We saw it with some other friends, and none of us felt enlarged by it. Me: ★★½, Martha: ★★★½

In the Valley of Elah – Another slow one, but with more interesting plot, with some tension and more interesting characters. ★★★½

Seven Pounds – Martha saw this with friends. Martha: ★★★

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – An intriguing tale, from the novel by F.Scott Fitzgerald. Some amazing SFX, and some interesting exploration of the life lived backwards. But it never quite engaged me in the way I hoped it would; I didn’t find Benjamin’s childhood years had the tension it should, and his senescence was hardly touched on. I prefered Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow, which has a related plotline, and for me held the tension better, and got more under the surface of the life backwards plot. Me ★★★½, Martha ★★★★½

Doubt – Just seen my Martha. Great performances by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep. ★★★★½

The Reader – just seen by Martha. Sounds like a much better performance by Kate Winslet. ★★★★½

Secret Life of Bees – just seen by Martha. ★★★★½

Slumdog Millionnaire – deservedly winning Baftas and lots of other awards for director Danny Boyle and others involved. Go see it. ★★★★★

I’d been feeling that money was getting tight, and more than what seemed reasonable from just the general price inflation recently. So I checked our joint salary income and compared it to what the Retail Price Index (cost of standard goods) has been doing.

The falling income (dark blue line) isn’t a surprise, as I’ve had a pay freeze for a while, and Martha’s mostly doing voluntary work or study. But it’s interesting (and not a bit depressing) to see how the growing RPI noticeably diminishes our effective income (red line). That’s a drop of about 30% since we got married.

[Note to mathematicians: each line is relative to the others, as the units for each are different.]

Reading some WordPress blogs, I realised I should check out the speed of the blog (ie, how quickly pages load). The first step was installing Yahoo’s YSlow extension for Firefox, which gives very detailed information on what’s going on. (Turns out turning on the built-in developor extensions to Safari gives most of the same information.)

Pretty poor: typically 13 seconds, loading 400KB over 44 requests (assuming no caching). Not quite as slow as a dead sloth in tar, but definitely room for improvement.

Enter stage left the very nifty PHP Speedy WP plugin that does lots of clever things. It’s main strength is in automatically combining together all the separate CSS and JavaScript files that WordPress and the various plugins generate for a single page. It also strips out unnecessary comments and whitespace from those files. (The Script Compressor plugin does the same minimisation.) This combined with persuading my web hosting company to turn on gzip compression for page responses — what was that all about, Speed Hosting?? — has been a big difference.

It’s now taking 208KB over 26 requests, reducing to just 8KB and 10 requests and 1.6 secs if you’ve visited the site before. That’s more like it!

Martha watched Paul McKenna’s diet programme a few days ago, and was rather taken with it. No surprise: a diet where you can eat what you want, when you want. Quite what makes this a diet? Firstly stopping when you’re feel full – important if obvious. And secondly eating more consciously. Not eating in front of the TV or reading a book, but concentrating on the food, and the sensation of chewing the food fully. I certainly have tried to stop eating when full, though I now realise that’s harder when out visiting friends, or when watching TV. Looks like we need to get over the etiquette of clearing your plate when a guest, and take the Eastern model that it’s polite to leave a little, to show that they’ve been generous enough hosts.

It turns out to be a whole 6 weeks since I last went for a run, partly through illness, and partly because I’ve got out of the habit. It was getting on for freezing this morning, but I didn’t realise that until I’d got dressed for the run, so went ahead anyway. I was most surprised to hear at the end of the run Paula Radcliffe congratulating me on my fastest mile yet (oh, the marvels of iPod/Nike+). Perhaps it was the cold? Certainly can’t have been the practice …