One of the common arguments against the Paleo diet is that it’s too expensive to maintain. The diet’s preference for grass-fed beef & game, wild-caught fish, local organic plants, eggs, fruits & nuts, and unfiltered raw honey has put a rather high price tag on the diet’s reputation. Things don’t get easier either when lots of Paleo recipes online call for almond flour, or coconut products (exotic products that are not available at all in many rural places, e.g. my hometown in Greece).

The truth is though that you don’t have to go for these types of food if you don’t have the money for it. If you really want to follow the diet’s core you can still buy the cheaper corn-fed meat, farmed fish, veggies and fruits from your local super-market. Even with this lower quality food, you’ll still be miles ahead than with the standard Western diet. And that’s something significant already, if you’re serious about your health. Remember, Paleo is not a weight loss diet, even if overweight people happen to lose weight on it. Paleo is a lifestyle, a return to balance and normalcy.

Since I started Paleo I’ve been swarming to local farmer’s markets. Most of the vegetables & fruits there are cheaper than in super markets, and of much higher quality and freshness. Because I don’t buy sugary/grain products anymore, and since I stopped going out to (starchy) restaurants, I believe we’ve saved money overall. I don’t buy higher quality meat & eggs yet, but I’m thinking of going towards that path too — although my husband still resists to the idea.

One thing that got me thinking is that if Paleo was the prescribing diet for a number of “modern-world” ailments in the Victorian Era, it wouldn’t have been feasible to follow it — unless you were an aristocrat or a rich businessman. While fish, game and good quality farm meat would have been easy to find, plants and fruits were difficult to find in that era. Pretty much, the only mass-produced non-grain plants that grew well in UK were tubers, which are loaded with starch. As for fruits & honey, they would be rare and expensive to find in the market. Just think how good we have it nowdays, where the various foods are easily available.

And this brings me to the Mediterranean diet, which is named by some nutritionists as the “healthiest diet in the world” (especially the Cretan version). The Mediterranean diet is not that healthy actually (especially these days). It’s simply healthier than the standard Western diet because people could produce a lot of different veggies & fruits and nuts and honey on their own — since the weather allowed it. They were blessed to be part of the advanced Europe and maximize their yields. This led to a somewhat balanced diet between fresh produce & wild plants, and starches.

Judging to how my grand parents lived, and how my parents grew up, there was some bread, rice and pasta, but it was overrun with plenty of fresh veggies from their own garden, even more wild greens (e.g. amaranth greens, sorrel), cheese & lactose-free probiotic yogurt from their goats or sheep (they’d go up to the mountain all by themselves and come back alone at night), eggs from their own free range chickens, fish from the river, and some meat occasionally (either from a goat that broke a leg and had to be killed off, a hen getting too old to have eggs… or some game like wild birds, hares, and boars found in the mountain above the village). Sugary products were extremely rare. Even fruits were rather rare, except when in season.

So there was some balance there. I started hearing about uber-modern diseases (e.g. multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia) in these villages in the late ’80s. “Cancer” was a word I didn’t hear before 1985 in respect to my local people. Before that, most people there would just die of natural causes (with stroke and heart-related disease following). In my opinion, the Mediterranean diet only has a positive effect when you live the kind of hard life these people lived, and use that high quality of plants and meat they had. But it’s still not an ideal diet.

If the Mediterranean diet is, let’s say, 25% better than the Standard Western one, then Paleo is many times as good. Paleo is believed to be able to reverse some “incurable” modern diseases, and heal the body after years of grain & sugar abuse. The forums are full of accounts of people who had various conditions reversed (and I’m on that camp too). The few cases of heart-disease or strokes that took down these Mediterranean people before the ’80s (when the Mediterranean diet became Westernized and hence worse), could have been avoided if these people were Paleo- or Primal-dieting (they could have kept their yogurt & cheese). All they had to really do is to say “no” to the tons of grain products that “International Help” gave away to families, especially in mountain villages.

I was extremely surprised when I saw someone this past Summer in Greece taking out of his pantry a large pasta box and a big bag of rice. I took a good look, because I wasn’t accustomed to see such quantity at someone’s home pantry. These were not commercial bags of food. They were sent from the European Union to “poor” Greek families (not that poor btw). I really had no idea that grains were pouring into Greece in these modern times too (despite the financial crisis). I thought that the “international help” of food stopped in the ’80s. But no. They continue raking people’s lives and health with their free non-food foods: “let’s give everyone cheap food. And make them all eventually sick and skyrocket the health system’s costs instead.”

In all truth, grains are easy to produce, and so it does sustain the world’s population in one way or another. Without grains all the 7 billion of us on this planet would be unsustainable. But instead of feeding people undigestable crap, maybe we should rethink about our (exploding) numbers first. I prefer quality, not quantity. And that goes about people too, not just food.

The successor to the S95 is here. Canon just released the CMOS-based S100, the first camera with the brand new Digic V chip in it (which hopefully alleviates most of these issues that plagued older Canon cams). The camera has a 1/1.7″ sized sensor, an f2.0 lens, and a 5x zoom. Personally, I would have preferred to sacrifice the zoom down to 3x and get an f1.8 lens instead, but hey.

The biggest new feature I was waiting for this year was full manual control in video mode, since the main competitor to Canon’s S-series, the Panasonic LX-series, do support this since last year. Canon didn’t give us manual control though. So, according to the manual, here’s what you get with the S100 in video mode:

– 1080/24p @ 38 mbps and 720/30p @ 24 mbps (new).
– Force aperture to open-up with the built-in 1/8 (3 stops) ND filter (new).
– Use external RCA monitor as a recording display (new, HDMI port is playback-only).
– Wind filter for the stereo microphone (new).
– Zoom while recording (new).
– 120 fps slow-mo at 640×480 (new).
– Shoot using preset focal lengths (no step-zoom) (new).
– Exposure compensation (P mode).
– Exposure lock.
– Autofocus lock.
– Manual focus.
– Miniature Mode.
– Auto & Custom white balance.
– Custom colors (set sharpness, contrast & saturation to minimum values for “flat”).

Personally, I will buy one (especially since I gave away my SX200 IS to my brother, so I’m without a good P&S atm). It’s not 100% what I wanted (faster lens, manual video control, additional 1080/30p option), but it’s the closest one out there to what I want. Unfortunately, the LX-series don’t offer enough bitrate and sensible frame rates to me, so I can’t consider them. I expect Canon’s new Digic 5 to produce a clearer picture in video mode than any older Canon camera too (and this includes dSLRs).

As I wrote in the previous blog post, I’m currently following the SCD diet, in order to kill overgrown bacteria & yeast. After I get even better in 2-3 months, I will move towards a Paleo/Primal combo diet. I plan to follow these diets for life with fanatical adherence (I don’t have a choice), but as time goes I will allow a few more foods in, foods that I believe are not as damaging (time will tell). These are:

1. Olive oil
Some Paleo dieters don’t use olive oil at all, some only use it raw in salads, and some even cook with it. I’m Greek, and I believe in the benefits of olive oil. Before the Paleo diet gained popularity, the best diet in the world was that of Cretans’ in the ’60s. Lots of olive oil, raw artichokes etc. There are too many studies about how good olive oil is, so I don’t think it’s fair to put olive oil in the same bag as the rest of the “vegetable oils” that are forbidden in these diets.

2. Yoghurt and possibly some cheese
I plan to try this lactose-free yoghurt, and see how it goes. I wish they had the same lactose-free product from goat instead, but they don’t. As for cheese, most hard cheeses don’t have lactose in them, so they might be safe. I don’t plan to try dairy until one month in the diet, to make sure I give my gut a chance to have its gut flora rebooted. If I notice that dairy still bloats me, I will cut it down completely and live off of calcium-enriched orange juice, almond milk and vitamin pills.

3. Green beans (pods) & peas
I’ve read that lectins on the young green pods are almost non-existent, so there’s no reason not to eat them. I mean, sure, I do get the bloating from dried beans and lentils, but I’ve been eating green pods all my life and never had problems. Peas seem to be better in that respect than actual dried beans and lentils too. Despite this, I don’t plan to use peas very much, just in case I’m wrong…

4. Sweet potatoes and Parsnips
While these tubers are allowed in the Paleo diet, they are loaded with starch, and since my stomach is fragile atm, I can’t risk eating them. Maybe I will be having them once a month, after 3 months on the diet.

5. Almond/coconut milk/flour
These are allowed in the Paleo diet, and unfortunately I see people using them a lot, to feed off their carb cravings. These should be used sparingly in my opinion, because, let’s face it: would you eat a whole bag of almonds in one sit? Not likely. So why make an almond flour bread then? Makes no sense to me. It’s too much. Nuts can create problems in big quantities, even to people who don’t have nut allergies.

Finally, I don’t plan to eat okras at all. No scientific reason, I just hate their sliminess. 😛

Yo! What’s up everyone? Back from 50 days in Europe! I had a blast, and… after years of pain, I got my health back! Tadaaaaa!

If you’re a long-time reader of my blog, you have probably read about how my health has sucked in the last 10 years. In the last 4 years especially, I’ve been sick, almost every day. I never talked about it in much detail, since my “incurable syndrome” was a rather embarrassing matter.

But I think the time has come to tell my story, since I’m now feeling healthy for the first time in a long time. I’m still in the very beginning of my journey, but I’m feeling right. I am convinced that this approach is already working, and that it will continue working for me for the years to come. That’s why I am sharing the information with all of you out there, so that people can learn from my experience.

As I remember, it all started a few weeks after coming back from my wedding in France in 2001, I was feeling sick. I had diarrhea twice a day. I thought it would clear up. It never did. It soon became a nightmare. My bowel movements became even more frequent and watery. I felt pain, I was bloated, and I could not leave the house. Any kind of travel, no matter how long or short, would stress me like hell, with a single thought on my mind: “where are the bathrooms?” I came close to having bowel accidents twice, both times in France, once while visiting the Palace of Versailles (it had a 50 meter queue!), and once at Gare d’Austerlitz. Therefore, I think France ought to build more public restrooms…

When I came back to the US after that first vacation in 2003, I decided to see a doctor. He ordered various tests and a colonoscopy (which thankfully was under anesthesia, a detail that doctors skip in Greece in order to save money). The tests found that I had no diabetes, I had no cancer, I had no food allergies, and I was not gluten-intolerant. The doctor even said that I had a beautiful colon (I will never forget that, haha!). One of the tests found that I had an overgrowth and/or infection with Clostridium Difficile (a super-bug, yay!). I got the antibiotic Flagyl for 10 days, and I felt better for about a month. Then, the same thing started again. I was put on Flagyl again, and this time around I saw no remission at all, not even for one day. Obviously, the bacteria had evolved as a consequence of the first treatment and they adapted to Flagyl.

The doctor ordered a SIBO breath test (“Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth”), so I was sent to one of the best hospitals in the world, the Stanford Medical Center. They found bacteria overgrowth (what else is new, right?). So I was put on Vancomycin. Which worked. For 10 days. As long as I was on this super-strong antibiotic. On the 11th day, the bacteria started their little orgy again. Somewhat later, I was put on Rifaximin, another strong antibiotic, which did absolutely nothing for me.

I was running out of options, and my diarrhea, bloating, pain were running rampant. I once had to go to the bathroom 13 times in a single day. I felt some brain fogginess, fatigue, hair loss, eczema, dandruff, heart arrhythmia. I was diagnosed with elevated DHEAS hormone levels. I started to feel early signs of diabetes, getting easily tired, but feeling better within 2 minutes of eating something with sugar in it. Since I avoided leaving home as much as possible, my weight kept going up, from 127 lbs (58 kg) when the first symptoms appeared all the way to 165 lbs (75 kg). This sickness made me go from barely overweight to seriously obese. In this last year I’ve even see a bit of black blood in the stool (which would indicate my baby first steps towards Crohn’s, or ulcerative colitis).

Somewhere along the way, after none of the anti-biotic treatments seemed to be working, my doctor decided to classify my symptoms as IBS-D (“Irritable Bowel Syndrome, predominantly diarrhea”), an umbrella name for such symptoms with no identifiable cause and no effective treatment. I’ve read somewhere online once that as many as 15-20% of Americans and British have some form of IBS. He hypothesized that it might be stress-related along with recurring bacterial infections. He also gave me some stress-relief drugs and gut-flora drinks that did nothing for me. During my last vacation in Greece, my mother insisted that I should see a doctor there, whose best guess was also that my symptoms were stress-related. He gave me another drug to try, which did nothing either. As for over-the-counter probiotics (iFlora, Florastor) they didn’t do anything either!

I fell into a depressive state. I could not leave the house any more. I always felt sick, and I my gut was crying for attention all day long (and a few times at night). Over the last 2 years I’ve been pretty convinced that I would die by the age of 50. Even though I’m an atheist, in despair I was praying that some deity would just kill me in one swift move, so that I would be done with my pain. I was tired of it all. I felt that I had lived enough, that I had seen a lot of cool things in my life (more than the average person has), and that I was indeed ready for a quick, painless ending. I’m not afraid of death. I felt my husband was being held back from having the life he wanted to have (he likes to travel a lot). If I died, I would free both him and myself from the situation. Up to a week ago, while still on our vacations in Europe, I just wanted for everything to end (even though those vacations were otherwise great).

One of worst things the USA ever created is this food pyramid

And then, things took their course, and the truth revealed itself to me step by step.

Since I don’t speak French, I can’t socialize a lot while in France, so during the week of vacations that I spent there I started reading my mother in law’s cooking encyclopedia (published in 1976). The cooking style was traditional, and not about the “nouvelle cuisine” movement that started in France in the ’60s. There were plenty of pictures in the encyclopedia, but the amount of meat and starch in them made me want to throw up!

So I started discussing with my husband that the modern cuisine is much more elegant. Smaller portions, more green vegetables, nicer presentation, dishes that feel “fresh” rather than “loaded”. So I decided to buy a few cookbooks of my own in order to pass the time (I can understand and read a bit of French, especially when it comes to cooking, even if I can’t speak it or write it). I opted for books with recipes that my body seemed to crave for: salads, light dishes, low cholesterol recipes. That was on Wednesday, two weeks ago.

Because we’d be traveling quite continuously from Saturday through Monday, starting on Friday I decided to not eat much, in order to try to keep my symptoms under control. In addition to trying to eat less for a few days, being enthusiastic about how fresh the recipes in my new books looked, I decided to cut out all the starches too. That Friday, we visited one of my husband’s relatives who battled Crohn’s years before. She mentioned that she felt better using only diet. Her health had been compromised seriously, and her doctors wanted her to have surgery but she refused. Years later, she seems to live fine without major problems.

Later that night, I started searching online on my condition and various diets that I might have to follow in order to see relief (if they were such diets at all in the first place). The first clue I got was via some rave reviews on Amazon about the No-Starch diet book for IBS. I was ready to start this diet, but someone, in the reviews section I think, led me to another book: “Breaking the Vicious Cycle: Intestinal Health Through Diet” by Elaine Gloria Gottschall. I was astounded by the positive ratings and comments, which were even more positive than the no-starch diet book. This book has a better Amazon rating than Asimov’s “Foundation”!!! People were commenting that the diet cured them of their gut issues. Could it be that simple?

I had nothing to lose and I started researching online on the SCD diet (“Specific Carbohydrate Diet”) that the book advocated (I ordered the book but it hasn’t arrived yet). The premise is that when eating complex sugars and starches, most people to some degree develop damaging bacteria and yeast. Some become intolerant as kids, some later in their lives. When eating such foods, they go down the digestive track undigested, where yeast and bacteria feast on. Hence, my SIBO was born: the micro-organisms overgrew, colonized the small intestine, the gut realized that something was wrong, and tried to “remove” all the bad things by creating a “cleansing diarrhea”. This is a usually-inflammatory, auto-immune disease, and I was told over and again that eliminating the symptoms would range from ‘very hard’ to ‘impossible’! The book’s idea is to cut down the food that these bacteria eat, and that will eventually kill most of them and bring the gut back to balance.

In the last 10 days I started following a loose version of the diet (all the necessary information is on the book’s web site for free), and went from 4 loose stools a day, to 3, to finally one… healthy, well-formed stool, one such that I haven’t seen it as such for many years. My bloating was gone within 1 day. My cramping and gas were gone too in 3 days. My energy was back, despite having to battle jet-lag! I am not foggy and tired any more. Within only a few days on the diet, my eczema (another auto-immune symptom) on my ears and nose has almost disappeared. My period is currently lite, and painless. I am feeling good for the first time in a long time!

Reading online other people’s stories and own accounts, the diet seem to have made asymptomatic a lot of people with Chron’s, Ulcerative Colitis, Acid Reflux, IBS, Celiac disease (for those that a CFGF gluten-free diet is not enough) and other gastro-enterological problems. And it doesn’t stop there. If we are to believe people online (e.g. read their testimonials on blogs, youtube and amazon comments of the book), the diet reportedly also has a positive impact: hypertension, high blood sugar, amenorrhea, PMS, ADD/ADHD, diabetes Type II, acne, fibromyalgia, depression, migraines, lupus, multiple sclerosis, hay fever & some allergies, asthma, some types of arthritis, fistulas, and get this: it’s said to bring quite some life back to kids with autism! Sure, it could all be a big joke, a fad, or it could only work for a few cases. But having seeing the diet deliver to myself in a few days, I’m more open to believe these miraculous claims than not. Besides, these possible cures make sense to me anyway, since a lot of these diseases have their roots on auto-immunity & inflammation, which is what diets have an effect on (for better of worse). A French published doctor explains it all here, and his similar diet had similar miraculous effects too to his study subjects. His results are here, in French (three PDFs).

While I always knew that “healthier eating is more healthy” (duh), there was always some debate among specialists as to what’s actually healthy. But after I tried SCD I never knew it could be so immediate. That is what actually took me by surprise in the whole story.

This blog post is not an ad btw, I don’t sell anything, neither I endorse other people’s products (the author of the book is dead btw, and the diet is based on studies first made in 1926). This is just my true story, from the bottom of my heart.

So, my original plan was to follow the SCD diet for 2-3 years, hopefully get “cured” as other people claimed to have, and then get back to the Standard American Diet (SAD, indeed). But as I was keep researching online, I realized that this was not an option. Yes, after you get “cured”, you will get 1 month, 3 months, or maybe 6 months of symptom-free “normal” diet, but then the problems will start again. My body has shown me that I’m simply predisposed for it. I obviously can’t digest most starches, complex sugars, and milk properly anymore. Eating the sugar/starchy-full MacDonalds burger would send me in the toilet after a few bites (in 2-3 minutes)! Eating the rice-loaded sushi (my favorite food), would send me to the toilet within 10 minutes. Eating milk bloats me immediately too. But I have no problems with nuts, honey, fruits, vegetables, fatty meat/fish, or eggs. Which are the natural things that people ate before the Agricultural Revolution 10000 years ago. Most of us evolved to only eat these things — not dairy, not grains, and not some of the toxic tubers or legumes. The rule of thumb is that if something is edible raw, then we probably evolved eating it, making it a “safe” food. If not, or it requires lots of processing before it’s eaten, then it’s probably a bad food for most of us. The idea is rather simple, really.

So I was in search of a diet for life, after the SCD-bacteria-overgrowth-specific diet would work its magic as a starter for my condition. So I found the (similar to SCD) Paleo diet and the South Beach Phase II Diet. I decided on the Paleo diet, as it’s ~95% the same as the SCD diet, and with the same reported health benefits (read paleohacks.com for health testimonials)! Of course I read the news, so I knew about these two diets for a long time. I just wasn’t interested in Paleo because I never believed its benefits. I didn’t really want to leave rice behind, and honestly, I still had a bit of problem with the diet’s position on green beans (pods), and olive oil (hey, I’m Greek!). But it otherwise made the most sense for the long run. It’s logical, and scientifically it makes sense for nearly everyone (not just patients), people who follow it swear by it, and weight loss is inevitable. I’m not even trying to lose weight right now, I just want to feel healthy. Losing weight is a very welcome side-effect of these diets. On these diets, underweight people (e.g. Crohn’s patients) put on weight, and overweight people lose weight! These are NOT weight-loss diets, they are simply diets that make you look normal! They are life-changing diets-for-life!

You are probably thinking now that the carb cravings will be so immense that I won’t be able to sustain these diets for a long time. Well, I have no cravings at all right now, 10 days into the diet, because fruits and fruit juices are allowed on both diets. I eat my fruits, veggies, meat, fish, eggs, a few nuts, and I’ve found this yogurt, which might work for my case (I will know soon if my gut agrees with it). Paleo does not allow dairy, but SCD requires such a yogurt in order to “reboot” the gut flora after the die-off. I’m so motivated right now that even starchy/sugary food from the best chef in the world would not sway me away from the diet. I want to get better. I want to live normally again, and make up for ten years lost to being miserable.

For the first time in my life, my condition feels manageable. I’m still only at the beginning of all this, and not quite 100% healthy yet, but so far I’m getting the most encouraging results I’ve had in 10 years. My doctor had cursorily mentioned diet changes and gave me a generic copy of text to read that “maybe could help”. Make no mistake, I think my doctor is actually a very good one. He did everything that was standard for my condition, and he even had an open mind suggesting that SIBO has something to do with the food we eat. Unfortunately, most traditional gastro-enterologists would say that “food has nothing to do with most these gut diseases and syndromes”. And yet, myself and so many others are living proof that food was the primary component of our illness. After I get even better, I will schedule an appointment with him in order to explain what worked for me. I wish I had a way to help more people with similar conditions. This blog post is the first step. It breaks my heart reading people’s stories on various disease-dedicated forums, but since no one is signing in with their real name (embarrassed for their leaky-gut condition, as I was), I can’t find them, email them, and tell them about my break-through. At best, most people just try the CFGF glutten-free diet, which doesn’t go far enough to prevent the bacterial overgrowth, in my opinion.

Paleo/Primal: The real food pyramid for humans

Of course, these diets will not work for everyone with gut problems, but I can imagine how they can make life better for many people. For people with actual traumas, parasites or mutated bacteria (that feed on everything, and not just carbs) or for people with expansive food allergies (e.g. nuts, raw food, eggs etc.), these diets won’t help. At least for people with massive intolerance towards some food stuff, they can start on these diets, and then remove categories of foods one by one to see which one makes them sick.

Speaking for me, even in this early stage, my gut tells me that I’m on the right track and on the road for healing. I will definitely keep you all updated, if you don’t mind reading about bowel movements and other yucky stuff!

Oh, and now I can go out and shoot more videos. The last one I shot was last year. I simply could not leave the house anymore.

That’s all over now. I can now live again.

UPDATE: The exact diet I follow, 6 weeks on the diet, 4 months, and a year after.

For over a year now I’ve been thinking about a TV series “franchise”, but a conversation about it I had with JBQ today made me decide to write about it. I hope some TV exec reads about it, likes it, and materialize it — given enough funds.

The idea is to have five one-hour TV series (Mon to Fri), 12 episodes per season each, for 3 seasons (hard deadlines and concrete stories, no fillers). The year is somewhere around 2230.

Series 1: Takes place on Earth. The old country tries to hold together both the planet, its colonies, its corporations, and a new (perceived) enemy for human kind: the transcending to complete cyber entities.
Series 2: Takes place in orbit, between a space station that it fights to not get out of commission, and a space Elevator. The two compete as to which one will be the main hub for commerce and supplies.
Series 3: Takes place on the Moon, on a mining colony. It’s the oldest space colony, out of fashion, and therefore it doesn’t get enough favors from Earth’s government.
Series 4: Takes place on Mars. The machinations and politics of a colony of 250k people trying to gain independence.
Series 5: Takes place on Io. The orbiting spaceship and research colony on the surface are on the farthest reach in our solar system, almost forgotten, but they hold an ace on their sleeve regarding the next big step of the human kind.

Each series will have its own storyline and characters, but the bigger issues will be inter-connecting, as everything usually is when it comes to politics. Every episode title would also include the date, so future viewers can find the correct order of how to view all 5 series in a way that it’s most satisfying and logical. In terms of atmosphere I’d gun for something between the third season of Babylon 5, LOST, and SGU. Many different topics would have to be explored, including genetics and eugenics, the role of politics, corporations and military in any decision made and how this affects everyone, what it means to be human etc, etc.

I want to challenge my viewers. For example, when one decision is made by some figure of authority, which might be the correct decision for his/her people, it might have devastating consequences for the people of the other series. In politics, often there is no black and white, and usually what’s good for one country it might be bad for another (e.g. lobbying on keeping low wages for Haitians in order to keep having cheap Levi’s in the US). I want people to think about these things, and such TV series can help with that if done right.

At the very end of the series, I’d like to show what sacrifices must be done, what alliances, destruction, and even… DNA changes must happen to get to that next step of the human kind: the new ability to create stable wormholes, and explore & colonize the galaxy. But this won’t come cheap. I can promise this much.

Update, 5th Oct 2013: Production-wise it’d probably be overwhelming to have that many series with interconnecting characters and storylines, where everything has to check out between all of them. I think that 3 series, with 8 episodes each, for 3 seasons, is a much more realistic goal: Earth + space station, Moon + freighters, Mars + Io.

A smart way to emulate the “flashbacks” from LOST would be to show in one of the series that something happened on the other, but without knowing the details, until that series goes live a few weeks later. For example, in a videoconferencing with Moon taking place in the Earth series, it’s mentioned that 5 people died, one of them high ranking. But only when the Moon series goes on air, we find what happened, and who exactly died. Or, we could have a main character officially quit, or arrested, but again, we won’t know what happened, until we see their point of view a few weeks later.

So basically, the storylines can intertwine in a smart fashion to create suspense, mystery, and a believable universe where every decision or action in one place, can affect other places, so far away.

Another thing to mention is that I’d expect a huge cast for each series, not the usual 6-8 characters per show, but more like 8 main characters, plus another 30-40 recurring ones (plus guest stars from the other series, when the storyline warrants it). Kind of like LOST, that is. It’d be a complex, deep show, but that’s exactly its beauty.

Finally, for all this to work as intended, the story must be worked out from the very beginning. Not made as they go along, but rather, most details have to be worked out from the beginning of the whole story until its end — before filming even starts! The studio must guarantee these 3 seasons for each series (72 episodes overall).

The moon last night, captured by my husband’s telescope and my Canon SX200 IS digicam (shot handheld, through the eyepiece).

Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0/US.

I think the last 10 years have been detrimental to Greece’s family values, at least at the parts I’m from. The ’80s were the times where our status from third world country changed to almost-first, the ’90s were the establishment of that new status, and the ’00s was all about the decline of the public ethos. Just like a newly-rich person frantically dives himself into whores and cocaine.

All I hear now over here is about how drugs have taken over the youth. When I was a teen I’ve never seen any hard drugs in my area, and only very few youngsters that we knew smoke a joint every now and then. Now, children as young as 12 are having sex, and stay out partying up to 3 AM. In comparison, I was 16 when I started going out with friends, I was always back by 11:30 PM, and I didn’t lose my virginity until I was 19 (to a fiance no less).

An even more common gossip than the youth pAArtying, are about the adults. I’ve never heard of so many cases of spouse-cheating than I do now. I really don’t think we ever had so many cases of cheating in our town and surrounding villages. There were always some such cases (heck, I always considered my own dad a womanizer, for example), but definitely not to the degree that I hear these days. I hear about teenagers getting into the middle married couples (often with children) and ending up divorcing them. I hear about middle-aged married men with children sleeping with 75 year old women for money or for fun. I hear about previously fine 45-ish year old married women suddenly charging for sex at this age. Not to mention the porn movies some women from a nearby village shot, that I heard about. I’m truly shocked about what’s going on in the last few years over here, and I’m not a person that gets shocked easily.

There were many times in the past when Greeks made fun of the divorce rate in the US. They portrayed the Americans as people without family values. Now, Greece’s divorce rate is as high, if not higher. Sure, I had two failed engagements myself in the ’90s, but I never cheated, and I’d like to think that I wasn’t cheated upon either. In fact, I’m still friends with my second fiance, and there’s no bitterness between us. We just fell out of love, and we took our separate ways. Since then, I got married, happily for over 10 years now, with an amazing French guy. Instead, all the couples I’ve heard that they divorced around my Greek parts in the past few years, were almost all cases of known cheating.

To me, that’s pure and plain declining. People with too much money or time on their hands. Boredom even. I might be sounding “old”, evangelizing the good old days, but it’s not so. I always saw myself as a moderate, so I always try to keep the best parts of each lifestyle: the freedom of the modern lifestyle, but also the family values of the old ways. Besides, the good old days were not that good either, there were constantly problems of money and convenience. But I prefer a whole village in poverty, eating nettle soup & wild amaranth greens and herding goats, than women soliciting and charging 20 Euros for a blow job, just because they find it easier to do just that rather than go and find real work.

Remember, these are lands where everyone knows everyone else. Reputation is everything. It’s your make and your unmake.

One of the top-3 features I check when I buy new laptops or smartphones is the availability and quality of their webcam. Every time I comment about it people keep telling me that they never really use their webcam and that I overreact about them.

Not so. I actually use the feature extensively. When I’m in the US, I Skype with my mom, and cousins in Greece & Germany extensively. Now that I’m in Greece, we actually still use this small Ubuntu netbook I had given my mom to video-chat with my cousins and their small kids who live on the other side of Greece. My uncle and aunt, who live close to us, visit us a few times a week, and then we call them in order for them to see their grand kids and chat.

Each session takes from 30 mins to 45 mins, and while they have a free call to each other via Vodafone, they much prefer the video chat, by far. It’s so nice to see them happy, and embrace the wonders of technology (especially since my cousins’ webcam is of higher quality and they’re crystal clear in our screen). My aunt is now considering of learning to use a computer and install an internet connection, just for the video chat (just like my mom did last year at the age of 55). I suggested the iPad 2. When my mom’s Linux netbook goes kaput, I will get her an iPad too. It’s a much more suitable option for her kind of usage (light browsing, email, facebook, video-chat).

I was considering myself the new Macbook Air, to replace my DELL ultra-portable laptop which has touchpad driver problems, but while all new Apple products got an HD webcam this year, the new Macbook Air didn’t (the quality difference between 720p HD and VGA Apple webcams was demonstrated on youtube and was significant). Since a webcam is a vital feature for me, I won’t get a Macbook Air. At least not this year’s model.

Found some old pictures of mine at my mom’s collection, and I snapped them away with my digicam (some artifacts on the pics, sorry).

This was shot between 1975 and 1976 in Skiadas, when I was 2-3 years old. I do remember that day. We had recently returned from Athens, and a freelance photographer came to our mountainous village. My dad had recently also bought this motorcycle (Honda CB50, he had it running until the mid ’90s), so he took me with him in our village center (where our main church, school, and village office used to be — now it’s all deserted). I remember my mom objecting taking the picture, citing lack of family funds. My dad did so anyway.

The second picture was shot around 1990 or 1991, in our current town, Louros, celebrating (I think) my cousin getting engaged. Here, I line-dance with my uncle. Funny I used to dye my hair back then.

Seeing that picture I realized that I wasn’t too bad looking when I was young. I still have that out-of-an-alignment tooth, but other than that I wasn’t too bad. In my teenage and young years while in Greece, only one guy ever showed interest in me (that I happened to not be interested in him myself). I always felt a fish out of the water (and still am here), I had different interests than every other girl around me (thank Star Trek for that). This gave me a reputation of a low key, out-there person and classmates would only occasionally befriend me for advice, but not for deep friendship. They respected my opinion and seek it when in doubt, but that’s about it. I only felt in my element when I left for UK, and later for the US.