06 Aug 2005
Study Links Tobacco Smoke With Belly Fat

It's not a beer belly - it's a smoke belly! Smoking makes teens fat! I would only point out one niggling detail to these "researchers" - while the number of overweight teens in the United States has tripled in the past two decades, the number of smokers have been cut by more than half, and the number of teen smokers by more than two thirds. Sound's like a direct link to me, but i suspect it might be in the opposite direction!!! In fact, we have studies proving that! Check out French Women Don't Get Fat, the best selling book.

And while this is indeed a Study in Stupidity I couldn't bring myself to place it in 'Humor' - the motives here are way too transparent to be even remotely funny:

"The bottom line to me is: As we gear up to take on this epidemic of obesity, we cannot abandon protecting our children from secondhand smoke and smoking," said lead author Dr. Michael Weitzman, executive director of the American Academy of Pediatrics Center for Child Health Research in Rochester, N.Y.

So food is next on the Puritan agenda: but they don't want to lose their funding for tobacco studies! When are we gonna wake up to the real control agenda of these "activists"?

Exposure to cigarette smoke raises the risk among teens of metabolic syndrome, a disorder associated with excess belly fat that increases the chances of heart disease, stroke and diabetes, according to a study.

(link) [Washington Post]

00:00 /Politics | 1 comment | permanent link

Building a better pig

Somebody at US News is starting to get it: this article is a litany of the problems inherent in factory farming, the least of which is food that tastes awful...

Pigs aren't porky anymore. Instead, they're as lanky as marathon runners. While the pig's makeover is partly a triumphant tale of producers meeting demands for leaner, more healthful meat, there's a cautionary message here, too. Today's pigs all too often don't taste good. With pigs, unlike New York socialites, it really is possible to be too thin.

(link) [U.S. News & World Report]

00:00 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link

Fresh from the can

In an otherwise excellent article on the degradation of the American Way of Food, I would only disagree with the authors assessment of pre-WWII food as "awful". Maybe it was bad in the cities and the soup kitchens, but just talk to any rural denizen from the Depression Era and they'll tell you how good their food was. Locally, many of them are my customers - because they remember how eggs and milk really taste.

A shimmering canned ham, spiked with dried cloves and disks of canned pineapple. A side of molded Jell-O salad, pregnant with pimentos and shredded cabbage. And maybe a nice cake for dessert, made from a mix and spackled over with hot-pink frosting. This was modern cooking, 1950s-style.

(link) [U.S. News & World Report]

00:00 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link

Dress Style in the Two Millennia

A middle aged mom, who happens to be a lecturer in Old English [at Oxford?], ventures into a Goth clothing and accessories emporium in the UK ... fascinating stuff!

I sat in Affleck's Palace pretending to be invisible. What, you may ask, was a middle-aged lecturer in Old English doing in Manchester's High Temple of Youth Culture? The answer lies in motherhood. My son had long desired a Goth accessory known as finger armour, and with his thirteenth birthday money had purchased the item from Affleck's. In the joy of possession, he had thrown away the packaging containing the receipt. After he had worn the finger armour for the rest of the day and all evening, he appeared woefully to report that it had broken. Faced with a despairing son and an apoplectic father ('You never spent all that', he said, but what he was thinking was 'On jewellery - for a boy!') it was time for me to step in.

(link) [Dragons in the Sky]

00:00 /Asatru | 0 comments | permanent link

Author Brown 'did not plagiarise'

Well, whaddya know? A court actually shows some sense:

"Any slightly similar elements are on the level of generalised or otherwise unprotectable ideas," said Judge Daniels, of the US District Court in New York.

What was unprotectable? What was the plaintiff claiming copyright over?

He [Mr Perdue] alleged that Mr Brown copied the basic premise of Daughter of God, including notions of a "divine feminine" and the transition from a female to a male-dominated church under Roman Emperor Constantine.

Imagine that! The divine feminine cannot be copyrighted! Nor can far-fetched conspiracy theories! What's this world coming to? Sense? One can only hope ...

Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown wins a court ruling against writer Lewis Perdue over charges of plagiarism.

(link) [BBC News | News Front Page | World Edition]

00:00 /Copywrongs | 0 comments | permanent link