Those who live in England will surely know of Delia Smith, who has pleased us with her cooking tips and books for thousands of years. Speaking not so recently, she wisely claimed :

If the entire planet became vegan, we’d die. It’s not practical. We wouldn’t be able to feed ourselves; you can’t grow vegetables in hilly country. My relatives come from Wales and you struggle to grow vegetables there, but the lamb is wonderful.

Our dear Delia obviously has no knowledge of land requirements, or indeed land structure outside Wales, for a vegan against a meat-eating diet. She would, presumably, prefer the “alleged” cutting down of rain forests for our ever growing need to satiate “protein” intake.

I have no problem with points of view. What annoys me is someone who professes to be knowledgeable in an area shows how stupid that person is. Another example, taken from her site :

On Junk Food : I’m one of those people who don’t believe there’s any such thing as unhealthy food. No recipes on their own can be unhealthy, if the rest of the diet is balanced.

Well, take a look in a dictionary once and a while and you’ll see junk food described as having little or no nutritional value, but with high sugar content.

Delia, you are a fool.

N.B. I do actually understand the point that Delia made about junk food, and agree with her. I just got a bit bothered by her first quote and wanted to continue a good old-fashioned defamation. Needed pedantry to do it, though.

I’ve taken the time to properly read yesterday’s personality-test result, and one thing struck me. I didn’t pay too much notice to it at first, though when I read the sentence again, I realised how easy it is to read what one wants to hear, while ignoring the obvious error in the whole. At the end of the summary it says that:

Idealists are rare, making up between 20 and 25 percent of the population.

I, like many people, like to think I’m a bit special, having an individuality about me that others do not. While it is impossible to gain any sense of real individualism in a test that classifies (into 4 groups, essentially), it still gave me a warm glow to see I was “rare”. I gleaned over the rest of the sentence, but on second glance it clearly states that I shares traits that 20-25% of the population do.

Since when has it ever, ever been “rare” to to be among 25%? If British Airways came out with a statement that if I were to travel to England on one of their flights, the chances are “rare” that I’d crash (mumbling “just don’t do it three more times or you’ll more than likely die in flames”).

No, rare to me (and many dictionaries) means uncommon, and I’d be surprised if, whilst playing football, the striker and the substitute (and two players on the opposing team) turned to me and said gleefully in perfect synchrony “Well, what are the chances of that?”