As the bowl of petunias said ...

... Oh no, not again!
For what seems like the hundredth time, I've been presented with "Your Mail index has been damaged. To repair it, quit Mail".

This is stage 1 of the pain. Stage 2 occurs when Mail crashes again during the index rebuild (about an hour in).

A bit of detective work many moons ago revealed that it always crashed at the same point in the rebuild, and tracking the timestamps on the .imapmbox folders under ~/Library/Mail suggested that the last one to be touched was responsible. Deleting it allows the rebuild to succeed (I know this folder will be downloaded from the IMAP server afterwards, so there's no harm done).

All mail clients suck, and in my experience Mac Mail sucks the least, but this particular issue is maddening. It might be time to give Thunderbird another try.

Restaurants forced to display calories on menus?

One of the segments on BBC Breakfast this morning considered the idea of compelling restaurants to list calories on menus.

Do people really need to count calories in order to tell when they're getting fat? Is it so difficult to take corrective action if your weight edges up? To exercise more, perhaps, or eat at home for a little while, where you can count calories to your heart's content.

Will the people most at risk from obesity pay any attention to the calorie counts? And is it any of our business whether they do?

How much expense and hassle would the requirement impose on restaurateurs? Would the counts be accurate? And isn't the whole point of going out for a nice meal that you're indulging in good food? Do you really want calorie counts there to spoil your fun?

A viewer from Switzerland emailed to ask whether it's reasonable to expect your friends to provide calorie counts when you're invited over for dinner. What is it about commercial transactions that makes the hand-wringers feel that interference is justified?

The key question is not whether money changes hands, but whether all parties act voluntarily and honestly. If customers demand calorie counts, restaurants should be free to provide them, and if they do, they have an obligation to provide accurate information. But if customers are happy to visit a restaurant despite the absence of calorie counts, nobody has a right to intervene.

This is all so obvious that it really shouldn't need saying. Not for the first time, I find myself empathising with Wonko the Sane.

The National Union of Journalists

The BBC reports:

The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) is set to ballot its members for strike action over the BBC's proposed pension changes.

Union representatives say the ballot will go ahead unless the BBC guarantees by 21 July that the value of pensions already earned will be protected.

Meanwhile, on Magrathea, I hear there's a risk of a national philosophers' strike ...

I hope the NUJ go through with their threat; the sooner State Television collapses, the better. I also hope that people are willing to pay for the subset of BBC programmes that are truly brilliant; I doubt many would voluntarily pay for a continuation of the current Eco-Communist PC propaganda.

Exactly the wrong shade of pink

And for all the richest and most successful merchants, life inevitably became rather dull and niggly, and they began to imagine that this was therefore the fault of the worlds they'd settled on - none of them was entirely satisfactory: either the climate wasn't quite right in the later part of the afternoon, or the day was half an hour too long, or the sea was exactly the wrong shade of pink.

-- the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy