Of raisins, and weight

I woke up early today, to the happy discovery that I only weighed 172 lbs. This is not the greatest achievement of my life, or even of this month (how I remember back to the Glorious Fifteenth, when I weighed a mere 171 lbs), but it was an achievement of sorts.

Well, sort of. I now have almost three weeks worth of data, which means I can draw a graph, like this one, to track how my weight has fluctuated:

And, being of a statistical bent, I can plot a moving average through this, along with the mean for the month, and see how my weight appears to oscillate. This is a Valuable Scientific Method, which I am employing to see if my girlfriend's insistence on me eating carton after carton of dried fruit is having an effect on my manly physique.

Last week, it certainly seemed to be having some sort of effect on me. If my some sort of effect you mean "bloated, and bent over double with intestinal cramps" which was fun for a few hours, but hardly a way to spend the whole week. My girlfriend played the role of sceptic to my bolder hypothesiser, suggesting that it could have been something else apart from all those raisins, but I employed Occam's Razor: I hadn't had massive and debilitating stomach cramps before I started on the Raisin Diet, and afterwards, I did. Quod est demonstratum, as the Greeks say.

(Of course, by that they apparently mean "[some bloke by the name of] Quod is on the level of demons", but I figure that they can say what they like, as they have more important things to worry about, like being bankrupt and having a vaguely useless set of Olympic facilities cluttering up the country; these are larger problems than worrying about whether what you say makes a blind bit of sense. Unless you know somebody called Quod, and you're a bit religious.)

Anyway, I ceased with the raisins, and got better, and to celebrate, had my beard trimmed today. By somebody using Occam's Razor, or at least so philosophical about shaving that he'd come to be quite sceptical about the whole enterprise, and therefore given up on it before he'd quite finished, leaving me with a slightly skew-whiff beard and a hirsute neck.

Luckily, no urchins were around to pursue me through the streets of Hong Kong, with jeers of "beardy-neck!" or other such insults, so we made our way home untroubled, whereupon my girlfriend beat me at canasta and I got into a sulk that even watching Jason Statham and Jet Li in Rouge/Rogue Assassin could not deliver me from.

Life is so, so hard sometimes. So, so hard, I sometimes wonder how I can carry on. I do so, for all of you.

Is this thing on? Hello? Hello?