There's no news like a lack of news

A long car journey today gave me ample opportunity to savour Radio Four's dreaded hour and a half of news headlines (between 5 and 6.30 if you want to enjoy it yourself. It's almost a pleasure when the Archers comes on) and I was amazed by the amount of non-news on the Foot and Mouth incident. It strikes me that news outlets assign the number of minutes each story gets according to importance, rather than how much there is to say. I accept that another outbreak of Foot and Mouth would be a dreadful and significant event, but I don't see why I need to hear constant speculation and reminders that the situation has not changed in any significant way since yesterday. When there is news, tell me it, until then let's hear about something else. It's a bit like the compulsory ten minutes of time allocated every evening for over a week to telling us that areas of the UK affected by flooding have been damaged just as badly as everyone thought they would be, but no worse.

Dogtooth's recent mockery of Green envirobeefery bought to mind a new training regime which I have myself adopted. I get on a treadmill and rack it up to a goodly pace, and then fix my eyes on the calorie counter. A medium sized egg is 80 calories, so I run until I feel tired, and then see how many eggs worth of calories I have burned. I then go home and consume that many eggs. I sort of think that moving the calories through my system, rather than letting them hang around in my subcutaneous expanses, has the effect of flushing out unhealthiness, or something of that sort. At the very least it allows me to eat a lot more eggs than I otherwise would.