What to make of eating 68 hotdogs in 10 minutes

I watched this video with amazement. The winner of this year's Fourth of July hotdog eating contest ate 68 hotdogs (and buns) in 10 minutes. Notice, then, the post-contest interview, where winner Joey Chestnut smiles and talks in spurts. But I kept wondering whether he was about to vomit. After all, he just ate 68 hotdogs (and 68 buns) in 10 minutes. That's about 16,500 calories of meat and 5,300 calories in hotdog buns. If Joey retained all that food in his stomach (which I doubt, but maybe I'm wrong), he gained about seven pounds in ten minutes (since every 3,000 intake is the equivalent to a pound in weight gain). If you can set aside your concerns about the contestants' health, you can appreciate that what happens in these contests is no doubt remarkable. Athleticism? Why not? That's what it seems like in this post-contest interview:

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Our insane drug war, revisited

Mother Jones has hammered our drug war with undeniable facts . . . well, undeniable unless you are a government official in charge of the "drug war." In fact, as authors Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery advise us, the entire history of the U.S. "war on drugs" is actually a governmental war on truth.

[T]he drug war has never been about facts—about, dare we say, soberly weighing which policies might alleviate suffering, save taxpayers money, rob the cartels of revenue. Instead, we've been stuck in a cycle of prohibition, failure, and counterfactual claims of success. (To wit: Since 1998, the ONDCP has spent $1.4 billion on youth anti-pot ads. It also spent $43 million to study their effectiveness. When the study found that kids who've seen the ads are more likely to smoke pot, the ONDCP buried the evidence, choosing to spend hundreds of millions more on the counterproductive ads.) What would a fact-based drug policy look like? It would put considerably more money into treatment, the method proven to best reduce use. It would likely leave in place the prohibition on "hard" drugs, but make enforcement fair . . . And it would likely decriminalize but tightly regulate marijuana, which study after study shows is less dangerous or addictive than cigarettes or alcohol, has undeniable medicinal properties, and isn't a gateway drug to anything harder than Doritos.

If you want to see a bunch of demoralized people wasting time, park yourself at your local drug court and watch a judge slapping faux sentences on marijuana users and small-time peddlers. Everyone involved knows that the system is a joke--a money sucking time-wasting absurd joke that ruins lives, because every so often someone gets ripped from his or her family, thrown into prison for years. The crime (just to remind you) is that these users wanted to feel pleasure. And sometimes its more absurd: the criminal wanted to escape stress or anxiety and he didn't have a fancy health insurance policy that would allow a doctor to hand him legal pills that do the same thing. And maybe he didn't want to legally rot out his liver with alcohol, which is the other way of getting a similar high. As I've made clear many times, I am not promoting drug use of any kind. I just had serious surgery and I could have loaded up on narcotics that were made available to me, but I didn't because I don't want that or need that. I'm a lucky person in that regard. I am not interested in altering my mind through chemicals. I am trying to convince my daughters that they should strive for clean drug-free living. But I am aware that many people want or need relief from stressful lives (or from their own misfiring brains) or maybe they want the option to simply chill out. I certainly don't want to stand in their way any more than I would tell a patient to not take those pills prescribed by her doctor. It's time to stop spending billions of tax dollars on a drug war that doesn't stop drug use and only ramps up violence, destabilizes governments and steals critical services from taxpayers. The drug war is highly immoral, but we won't be able to fix the situation until we have the courage to have an honest conversation. Related posts:

The most harmful thing about marijuana is jail (reporting on the opinion of a conservative judge).

The Economist's argument to stop the war on drugs. (includes the mind-scrambling statistic that the U.S. spend $40 B each year trying to stop the use of illegal drugs).

Johann Hari's argument that It's time to stop the drug war. (more shocking statistics)

It isn't dangerous to use marijuana. (Really, no more dangerous than Doritos)

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Planning one’s death at the end of a long illustrious life

Conductor Edward Downes and his wife Joan decided to end their lives on their own terms:

He spent his life conducting world-renowned orchestras, but was almost blind and growing deaf – the music he loved increasingly out of reach. His wife of 54 years had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. So Edward and Joan Downes decided to die together.

Downes – Sir Edward since he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1991 – and his wife ended their lives last week at a Zurich clinic run by the assisted suicide group Dignitas. They drank a small amount of clear liquid and died hand-in-hand, their two adult children by their side. He was 85 and she was 74.

Many people feel that suicide necessarily cheapens one's life. In many cases, I don't agree. I do think that the choice of when and how to die belongs to each person individually, as long as the decision was not made impulsively or under the influence. If the day comes when I decide that I can't bear the pain, or that I no longer find joy in my life, I would hope that I wouldn't need to travel all the way to Switzerland because inter-meddlers think they know better than me about the meaning of my own life.

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The Missing Past and Short Attention Spans: A Space Odyssey

Stan Lebar worked for Westinghouse in the 1960s. He led the developmental team that produced a state-of-the-art camera for NASA---the camera that was taken to the moon on Apollo 11 and recorded the first moonwalk. Most people have seen those images, many times---grainy, fuzzy black & white pictures of something that looks kind of like an astronaut slowly descending something that kind of looks like a ladder on the side of a large object that we are told is the lander. Whatever. We suffered through these scenes, probably many of us annoyed at the quality, impatient that better pictures weren't available. (Better still pictures became available, shot with specially-made Hasselblads, that remain absolutely stunning in clarity and detail, so made up for the sub par video, at least for some of us.) After all, even Hollywood, using by today's standards primitive technology, could create vastly superior space vistas---compare the images from the 1966 film 2001: A Space Odyssey with the NASA footage from a few years later and you grasp the disappointment. (It has long been my opinion that support for the space program waned because NASA managed to take something as exciting and sexy as space exploration and turn it into the equivalent of a lecture on statistics. The late, great science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein chastised NASA at Congressional hearings for not doing more P.R., better P.R. When he was told that the government didn't do P.R., he had further things to say about campaigns and such like and then pointed out "NASA has a press department, doesn't it? That's the job of the press department." Anyway...) The camera built by Mr. Lebar's team was far superior to the poor images we all saw---and continue to see. The recording medium, however, was incompatible with broadcast television at the time.

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