Hehe. I have so much that I like to read every day that I'm having trouble keeping up. In order to do even a moderately thourough survey of all of it I would have to spend about four hours... and I read pretty quickly. This taken together with 8-10 hours of work, hopefully an hour or two of other reading, and maybe an hour or two of mindless entertainment leaves me with less time to sleep than I might otherwise like. Ah well. It's a fair price to pay.

...

There's been a lot of talk of America's obesity lately. I have a few choice words that sum up the problem: we eat too damn much. It's the simple. I won't even get in to the quality (or lack thereof) of the foods we eat.

I hear (and suspect it to be true) that Americans are eating out more. In case you missed it, restaraunt portions are too big these days. Whether you eat at the just-a-step-above-fastfood places or fastfood, itself, if you are eating it all, you are eating too much. How hard is that?

I love it that our society allows idiot smokers to win huge settlements from the cancer merchants. Apparently, after the big tobacco victories the lawyers think they have what it takes to take on fastfood. After all, fastfood is making people fat... just like smoking is causing cancer. Well, no shit. Look. It's the same thing. You know when you light up that you're doing something bad to yourself. You also know that when you put away a couple of bigmacs, large fries, and a 42oz coke you probably aren't doing yourself any favors.

It's time to grow up and start understanding and accepting the consequences of our choices.

For my own part I'm trying to cut down on crap foods and eat less.

As an added bonus pick up a copy of the recent Adbusters magazine about American eating (Backissue #44).

Extra

I just found this article (The Coming War With Iraq: Deciphering the Bush Administration's Motives) on Foreign Policy in Focus. It makes for an interesting read, I think. More than ever the US _needs_ to be spending money on alternate sources of energy.

Looking at my bookmarks file (as posted above) as raw html gave me another idea. How about graphical representations of bookmarks? One method that immediately occurs to is bar-charting them by information density. I suppose there are other more interesting things I could do, though. /random

I forgot to link this elsewhere. It's an interview "Cory Doctorow did with William Gibson. Gibson says a lot of really interesting things. What really struck me most was:

"I worry about what we'll do in the future about the instantaneous co-opting of pop culture. Where is our new stuff going to come from? What we're doing pop culturally is like burning the rain forest. The biodiversity of pop culture is really, really in danger. I didn't see it coming until a few years ago, but looking back it's very apparent.

Definitely worth a read.

Links

Can't you see I've lost control, I'm getting indiscreet. You're moving in so close 'til I'm picking up, Picking up this heat, this heat
fathom
large and in charge
i totally agree about people eating too much. a while back when i had to quit the whole caffeine thing for a month and then just ended up giving it up altogether... i started eating less. it comes and goes of course. i'm really bad about getting the 'ubersized' fries or whatever. which is really bad considering i shouldn't really be eating french fries to begin with.

i've been doing quite a bit of thinking on this. how can i eat more healthy considering my living arrangements. if i was able to cook portions for only myself that would help, but being that it's damn near impossible to cut down the recipes for most things i fix that's hard. so what am i left with? a man can only eat so many tunafish sandwiches.

i'm not even talking about dieting here, just eating right. whatever eating right is...

honestly i believe stuff like the akins diet, if that's what it's called, are pretty much bad in general. any time you condition your body to something you have to stick with it or the changes won't stay. i've heard plenty of accounts where people baloon after going off of those low carb diets. for some reason i get the impression that such diets aren't all that healthy in the long run.

so what do we do? eat less red meat. stay away from fatty foods (french fries, most sweets, cheesy stuff, etc). eat more fish. exercise (which most of us don't do at all). that's probably the bigest key.... exercise. we're lazy let's face it. time to put the fork down and go run a mile.
sarah
Aaah, Fat People
...a subject I know a lot about. :) One of the things that really got to interest me after I left the US was how fat people get to be that way, and how they're treated by society. Moving to Norway gave me a really interesting perspective on that, as there are very few fat people here. I'm bigger now than when you knew me before, but I'm not what's called "supersize". And I'm almost always the fattest person in the room in this country. When I'm in the states, however, I'm absolutely astounded by the number of fat people I see. What accounts for the difference? I think you're completely right about people in the US eating too much. Whenever I go back for a visit, I inevitably gain 10 pounds or so. The serving sizes are inexcusably huge, and Americans eat so much processed food. But the worst problem is that they don't move enough. With the way American society's set up, it's virually impossible for most people to integrate movement into their everday lives--instead they must carve out time for it and go someplace to "work out", which they just don't do. The cool thing about most European societies is that it's still possible to live without owning a car. It's possible to get plenty of exercise by walking to do your errands, or to the bus stop. My parents' housing development hasn't even got sidewalks, let alone any access to public transportation. Here's the interesting thing, though, and the thing that really pisses me off--despite what the media and medical establishment try to make people believe, fat isn't the problem--it's lack of exercise that makes people unhealthy. It's perfectly possible to be fat and healthy, and just as possible to be unhealthy at an "ideal" weight. Fat is physically obvious, however, which makes it an easy target. Our current obsession with weight is far from productive in the way of making people healthier--rather the opposite. And just 'cause fat's an obvious trait, fat people get treated like they're some sort of underclass, the justification being health or insurance costs. Sorry for the tome I've written, it's just that this is a subject I feel very strongly about. You've never seemed like the type to harass fat people, anyway. ;)
sarah
Gawd!
Sorry about the horrible monolithic paragraph. Next time I post in HTML I'll actually use HTML.
peep
I'm gettin' fat
Ever since I quit smoking & got a kitchen aid, I've been gaining weight.  The sad thing is that I live in a city where it's possible to get around without a car.  It's almost too bad that my girlfriend has one b/c I never use public transportation any more (although I've got some serious qualms with Philly's centralized, bus reliant transit system).  I should cut out all that food & spend my money on cigs & coffee.  Maybe then I could fit back into one of my pairs of leather pants.
peep
Ouch
Here in Safari land, my last comment runs off a little long. The wysiwyg must be actin' up.
loophole

Hi, Sarah. Good points. I think you're absolutely right. The more important factor is exercise. I've been trying to think of some american city besides nuevo york that is still walking friendly. It's a struggle. Tulsa is absolutely the pits for it. I hate having to drive every day, but I don't feel like I have a choice (mass transportation here is a joke).

We really have done our damnedest to eliminate every form of exercise we might accidentally get.

...

I need to put in some line breaking code and fix the settings on the textareas. A lot of things are coming out in huge long lines.

loophole

Bah! The wrap attribute for textareas is a netscape extension. I didn't realize that. *sighs* I guess you have to either start pressing enter before you get to the end of the textarea or I have to write proper word-wrapping code.

I guess I'll do the latter.

sarah
Some of Seattle's not too bad...

This Christmas I went to visit some friends who live in the U district of Seattle. I think that's the first time I've walked from place to place in the US since I lived in Norman. They also have a pretty decent mass transit system up there, apparently. Johannes and I had been thinking about moving to the Philadelphia or Lehigh Valley areas of PA, because that's near my parents, but the parts of Seattle I got to see on this visit have made me reconsider that decision. The U district seemed to have a lot of the good parts of the US along with a lot of the stuff that's nice about here. I think University districts are probably the healthiest places to be found in the states.

m4dd4wg
SEPTA
Peep, I was a SEPTA power-user for the nearly three years I lived in Philly, and, yeah, it's pretty ridiculous how all the rail lines go through city hall. I think you're pretty much stuck with buses, not because SEPTA and the regional planners want to modernize, the rail system, but because of the local politics. Have you looked at the plans for the Schuykill Valley Metro? I think its a good idea - it would allievate some of the "centralization" you mention, but I'll bet that the entitled, suburban fscks on the Main Line will fight it every step of the way. I really do think Philly's the way it is because the powers that be want it that way.
Sarah, I thought I liked Philly when I left, but now that I've been in Austin for a semester, I only remember the stupid, infuriating parts of living there. Jay likes it, tho.
sarah
Mmm, Austin!

Austin is a very special place. I love it, but I don't think I can justify living there. Do you happen to know a guy there at UT named Bruce Spink, studying philosophy? And yes, I know how large the campus is. :) He's your kind of person, though. He was my maid of honor in my wedding.

m4dd4wg
hell, no
Out of the 53,000 loverly students here at UT, I know exactly one person that isn't an RTF student. And he was Lurvig's roommate freshman year at OU. Oh, and Alex J., but we don't really talk.
peep
Jordan's in Austin?
I thought he was up north. Sarah, Philadelphia is a great walking city. If you have a job that's not off the main transit routes, it can get irritating, but even a Philly-hata like m4dd4wg has to admit that walking from AKA to south street for a burrito isn't that big of a hike. My problem is that I'm spoiled to expect the convenience of a car, but you can truly & honestly get around just fine without. Like m4dd4wg said, he was a power user of South Eastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority (SEPTA) as I was at one point. If you're thinking of moving here to Philly, or Seattle (where all of my family now lives), I would MOST DEFINATELY say the Philly is the more walk/public transit friendly area. Yes, we have our problems, but we also have 1/2 million poor people that rely upon walking & mass transit daily for life. Can Seattle honestly say that? Another note, you can get to NYC roundtrip for
m4dd4wg
No frickin jobs in Philly.
Yeah, its great you can walk between the little artsy areas in downtown Philly, but most of the good college degree- type jobs are out in the burbs, so you either gotta have a car or you gotta spend 3 hours a day on SEPTA. If peep wants to put me down about not liking Philly, maybe he should have spent more time hanging out with me the first year I was there, instead of expecting me to find friends on my own while I was spending my whole life on the train.
peep
????????
WTF????????????
sarah

Thanks for your perspectives, guys. I guess in the end, though, it's a matter of going where the jobs are. Because of that, it's going to be a few years before we dare move back to the states.

How was Alex the last you heard, BTW? He didn't seem too happy the last time I saw him. When I met up with my college friends in Seattle, I was amazed at how most of the people I knew at OU had screwed up their lives so royally (excepting the ones I visited, thankfully). I've wondered if the people I knew at JHS fared any better.