Behold me as I enact scientismness

I know that people treat mental health science as not proper science. But you have to admit that there is at least in psychiatry and psychology not just the eternal why and what helps but an attempt to create an evidence base through empirical means. Kinda.

This week I took a wrong turning on the way to my friend's house. It was a happy accident indeed because I walked past a place called The Academy of the Science of Acting and Directing.

Yeah. Initially I chortled. And chortled. I was still chortling about it a few days later, picturing an entry for a peer reviewed journal named The British Journal of Advancements in Applied Drama where aspiring researchers might submit articles using a double-blind randomised control trial method - neither actors not audience know what play they are watching or performing. At the end someone throws the results into the Statistical Package for Acting and Directing Sciences (SPADS) and if things go very wrong and some of the audience kill themselves Big Hollywood sends some memos wondering whether there is a way to manage the data so as not to cause distress to their shareholders. Later the whole mess is investigated by a thespian version of Dr David Healy, possibly played by Daniel Day Lewis.

Then my curiosity got the better of me and it turns out there is an actual attempt to apply scientific endeavours to performance. And there's going to be a journal based upon research inspired by a Russian named Stanislavski, a man with a great moustache and legacy, using theory-practice linking. He even advocated paradigm-shift.

Science is not the white coat, after all. Science is about searching for the best answer. Or any answer.

The question which has been troubling me this week connects to the question of pickled onion flavoured crisps. I'm sure that there is an excellent word in most languages which sums up tart+vaguely repellent+interesting+mouthwatering, but English doesn't do the trick. It's the wonderful and slightly punishing sensation which leads me to eat one or two pickled capers straight off the teaspoon from the jar in my fridge. On the packet of pickled onion Monster Munch one of the constituents of the flavouring is celery seed oil, which seems pretty innocuous. But nowhere in there is actual pickled onion.

What I'd like to so is freeze-dry some pickled onions and use the powder as a garnish. I have no idea how to make this happen. I think that I should write to Heston Blumenthal and ask him to help me.