Nutella

I’ve loved Nutella for as far back as I can remember. However, for a very long time, I have avoided it because it was made with partially hydrogenated fats (now more commonly referred to as trans fats), which I’ve known since the 1970s were Bad For You. (More.) I do not know why it has taken the rest of the world to catch up on that one—that information was freely available to any nerd anyone who read Science News.

Anyway. I have recently discovered that Nutella has been reformulated to that it no longer uses partially hydrogenated fats. I think I heard choirs of angels singing when I discovered that fact. They use modified palm oil now, which is perhaps only mariginally better, but I’ll take that margin. (My cholesterol levels have always been quite healthy, thankyouverymuch.) So, lately, I’ve been having Nutella as a dessert almost every day—Nutella on brownie bites, Nutella and crepes, or just Nutella on a spoon. I’m not picky.

My beloved has expressed a concern (tongue firmly in cheek, of course) that, with my new enthusiasm for Nutella, perhaps there is some kind of addictive chemical or other in it, and that it is all probably part of a plot for Alien Domination.

To which I say, if this is part of some alien plot, then beam me up.

Burnt Cookies

This is just a quick question/rant, and I sincerely would like to have someone answer it. Why do people donate burnt cookies (or burned other baked goods) to bake sales? I am talking about cookies that are completely black on the bottom, not just a little darker than they should be. (And even those should be kept at home for the family, not donated to a bake sale.)

I mean, seriously. They have to know those cookies are burned beyond edibility, and they also have to know that people won’t eat burnt cookies. People especially don’t like paying for burnt cookies in all innocence and trust that they were paying for a good product. It is so disappointing to purchase a tasty-looking cookie or brownie or whatever, and then when you unwrap it and bit into it, you find that it has that chalky, charcoaly burnt taste and texture. So you just throw it away, which the original baker should have done in the first place. (Well, in our household, it would be composted, so at least it wouldn’t be a complete waste.)

Anyone have the answer? Yes, I know that they usually have committed to supplying five dozen cookies or whatever. But for heaven’s sake, if these people burn some of the cookies, why don’t they just bake some more? What makes them think it is okay to donate inedible food? Don’t they realize they did not, in fact, meet their obligation after all, even if it looks like they did?

And then I have to ask myself, why didn’t I ever just take the cookies back and ask for good ones? Because I was being polite, I guess. But it is so totally not polite to foist burned food off on someone, and it doesn’t serve anyone to let them get away with selling inedible food. They might as well have had lumps of charcoal out—that would have been more honest. The next time I get burned cookies at a bake sale, I am going to take it back to them and ask them nicely to give me unburned ones. There is no possible other right response to that but to apologize and make good on the error.

The Issue of Faking It

Some people fake it, not necessarily all the time, but some of the time. At least, they only fake it some of the time at first. Unfortunately, the more they fake it, the more they lose the ability to know what is real and genuine, and then the more they have to fake it.

I am not talking about sex. I am talking about psychics. I sometimes come across Web sites expressing disappointment in some psychic or channeler or other, and I think it is time to talk about it. Of course, I already cover some of this topic in my article here, but I am adding to that information to specifically address the issue of psychics who fake it and the repercussions that such actions have.

The biggest issue is that people expect psychics to be 100% accurate 100% of the time. In addition, if the psychic is a channeler and especially if the psychic is a trance or whole-body channeler, there is an expectation (very often on the psychic’s part as well) that the psychic must be completely infallible and will never make a miscall or show any signs of being a human being and must have access to supernatural information all the time that they are channeling. And that not a trace of their humanity or human fallibility can leak through while they are channeling.