completeconfusion

The Ketogenic Diet for epilepsy restricts carbohydrates in order to reduce seizures. The glutamate diet combats seizures by restricting glutamate in the diet - a common protein that's also a neurotransmitter, which humans really have a taste for. Agricultural foods have been selected for very high amounts of glutamate, over centuries, and of course, we have quite a taste for monosodium glutamate.

Add in one more fact... not only do we burn protein when carbohydrates aren't available, but glutamate is even used as a food for cultured bacteria - it's easy energy.

So it occurs to me... maybe the Ketogenic diet is merely an indirect way of restricting glutamate, by causing the body to burn off more of it. Maybe that's why it works.

First, the best headlines of the week, from the satirical site The Onion:

Casual NASCAR Fan Fails To Appreciate Subtleties Of Eight-Car Crash

Over-Competitive Lance Armstrong Challenges Cancer To Rematch

I'm not recommending the stories, there's not much to say after the headlines, but I laughed at the headlines.

Now on to the TV series Jericho, my first best hope for this TV season, for which I have little time. I won't be watching it anymore - I've concluded it's a Zeno series, which I'll explain in a moment. But I will tell you the end, to save you some time, dear reader...

The nukes were all from a right wing conspiracy to cleanse and remake America, a la Timothy McVeigh. I don't have any inside sources but the misdirection has been as clumsy as in Survivor, so it's more than a guess. Plus, Hollywood doesn't have an enormously complex political agenda. Trust me, that's the big ending, the big explanation: to quote someone else, "It's a slam dunk." The political right and or Lunatic Christian Right (LCR?) did it.

What's a Zeno TV Series? It's when the plot advances only half as much each episode as it did in the last episode... progressing toward a limit that it will never reach. In other words, Jericho's writers are deliberately wasting my time doling out astonishingly little real information, and no catharsis in the backstory.

LOST is an innovation in TV... (I lost track of it so I'm not watching that either.) The backstories provide catharsis while the real plot moves slowly forward, sans catharsis. It's a way to compensate for the greatest weakness of standard TV series, that the writers must restore the status quo at the end of every episode, cycling endlessly.

Neil Simon's brother (a venerable TV writer, worked with Woody Allen etc) explained this cycle to me, to my disgust, at a TV writing seminar long ago. It put me off writing for TV. But LOST has begun to innovate around that problem. Unfortunately Jericho doesn't really understand the new formula, and doesn't provide catharsis in the backstories, while deliberatly pissing away the lives of its dwindling number of viewers each week while not advancing the central story. Much as I love end of the world stories, I'm out.

The last Zeno series I briefly watched was that marine Invasion of the body snatchers thing a year or two ago. I'm giving up sooner this time 'round.