Note to file: sex still sells
Calvin Klein pushes the envelope again and the network news once again feigns concern. Some of us with daughters continue to worry about long-term serious damage rather than momentary titillation.
Adult baby food
Dr. David Kessler has written a new book called "The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite." He was recently interviewed by Katharine Mieszkowski of Salon.com. You can also listen to their discussion here. I was intrigued by Kessler's notion that much of the food to which people become addicted is "adult baby food":
We're eating, in essence, adult baby food. Twenty years ago the average chews per bite was about 20, now it's two or three. The food goes down in a whoosh and it's very stimulating. It's layered and loaded with fat, sugar and salt. It's as if you have a roller coaster going on in your mouth. You get stimulated, it disappears instantly and you reach for more.
But it's not just the fat or the sugar. We dress up food really well here in the United States:We make food into entertainment. We make it into a food carnival. Go into a modern American restaurant: the colors, the TVs, the monitors, the music. You do it with your friends. We've taken sugar and added all these multiple levels of stimuli. What do we end up with? Probably one of the great public health crises of our day.
Go visit Salon for the entire article. Lots of worthy observations. For instance, he discusses why people get fat (it's not because fat people enjoy eating more than skinny people). Also, there is no body "set point" to protect you from gaining weight. Kessler offers lots of ideas for not allowing your brain to get hijacked by high calorie food. On a related note, I've had to constantly monitor my own eating and exercise to keep myself where I need to be (I'm now 5' 11" and 170), and I use a variety of techniques I described here, especially the need to avoid refined carbohydrates and to constantly aim for whole grains and lots of vegetables and whole fruits (not juice).Doctors who perform abortions, etc
This article at Salon.com asks many good questions about abortions. For instance, for those of us who are "pro-choice," is it really OK for a woman to have complete discretion to have an abortion? What about after she has 12 abortions? What if she aborts because the child would have been a girl and she wants a boy? What if she aborts because the fetus has a deformed arm? This article also provides some stats about the terms during which abortion doctors are willing to perform abortions:
Of the only 1,787 doctors who perform abortions at all, 67 percent perform procedures only in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. Another 13 percent perform procedures between 12 and 20 weeks. The remaining 20 percent of doctors report performing some abortions up to 23 weeks, but once you hit that 24-week limit only 8 percent will perform an abortion. And we know there are now only two doctors who will perform abortions after 24 weeks.
Comedian Janeane Garofalo, who sums up religion as the fear of vaginas, offers a new solution to the abortion dispute. It begins at about the 4 minute mark, and she calls it "the buddy system."Federal Bill introduced to decriminalize marijuana
Citing John Stuart Mill, Barney Frank has introduced a bill to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana and use of marijuana in public:
Frank has filed a bill that would eliminate federal penalties for personal possession of less than 100 grams of marijuana. It would also make the penalty for using marijuana in public just $100.
This bill would make sense for many reasons including these. Or listen to the reasons of this conservative judge. Or consider these reasons.Unnerving bus trips south of the border
I'm never forget my bus trip to Otavalo, two hours north of Quito Ecuador. I was traveling with my friend ("Susan") back in December, 1998. We decided to take the public bus from Quito. The trip only cost a couple dollars. All kinds of people, and several kinds of animals (e.g., chickens) piled onto the bus and off we went toward Otavalo, over some rather serious hills. It turned out to be a bus ride strong of heart. The bus driver took us around some rather serious mountain curves at high speeds that suggested that our high center of gravity would topple the bus over the edge of the road and it would then tumble down the mountain and burst into flames. This sort of accident never happened, but I was fairly certain it was going to happen. In fact, I was absolutely certain that it was going to happen on several occasions. Susan and I both agreed that we should not be alive today based upon that bus ride. Not only did the driver take the bus around sharp curves, but he passed other buses on the outside while going uphill around many of those same sharp blind curves. I will admit, the bus ride only cost us two dollars each, but we assumed that we would feel safe to our journey. Even before we got to the twisting mountain roads, the bus sped along since straight highway at about 60 miles an hour, even though there was a 3-foot shoulder on which tiny children were walking to school. Some of those children looked to be only four or five years old. I couldn't believe that the bus was actually shooting past these children, only two or three feet away. It made us all the more nervous to see flowers and crucifixes marking the highway deaths every few miles. Actually, I haven't come to the part of the story that made me the most nervous. While we were speeding around mountain curves, passing on the outside, the driver called to his assistant and told him to check out a mechanical problem with the bus. The driver did not pull over. Instead, the assistant opened up a panel on the floor of the bus (just to the right of the bus driver) and was reaching down into that big a hole with some tools while the bus was speeding around the mountain curves.