Ah yes it’s January, that joyous time of year when millions of Americans search for the best way to remove that new gut-pad or ass-extension they acquired over the holidays (in my case, “the holidays” started back in July).
The low-carb craze continues to sweep the nation, so that seems the popular way to go for many. You can amble off to the grocery store and find just about any of your favorite processed food items in a low-carb version (warning, every one of them tastes like moldy sponge). Even America’s most popular chain restaurants are hopping onto the bandwagon (although I am still waiting for Bacon Churners to become a reality).
For an elitist like me, the fact that “low-carb” is now mainstream means that this form of dieting is no longer cool and edgy. Whereas in the past low-carbers had to virtual-huddle together in secret internet enclaves to exchange our Beefy-Ranch Cheesecake recipes, today one can hardly turn around without bumping into something low-carb. Sure I lost weight on the Atkins and other low carb diets in the past, but the thrill of throwing my kidneys into ketosis is just not the same when the guy in the next stall is also peeing on a keto-strip.
So anyway, I have been looking less for a quick fix for weight loss and more for a stage-less (all of these low-carb diets have different stages) healthy eating regimen. I have had Walter C Willet’s Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating on my shelf for a couple of years now, and I think it is the way I am going to go. I first became interested in Willet when he came out with the Healthy Eating Pyramid in, I think, 2002. The book’s focus is on the new food pyramid.
The book doesn’t lay out a plan, per se, but instead it provides information on how different foods interact with your body. All of that information is based on good ‘ol fashioned science, and since science is bad, immoral, and out of the mainstream now, this facet alone makes the book cool and edgy. There is also a good section on how to interpret “news” stories that trumpet the “latest study” on how some foods are bad for you, cause disease, etc. Willet convincingly lays out the case for why the USDA pyramid is actually a pile of misinformation and why his pyramid makes more nutritional sense. As I said, it’s not a “step-by-step” diet book, but Willett does provide some sample menus and a handful of recipes. Most of the recipes are similar to ones found in the Mediterranean Diet, which is a diet Willet thinks is, for the most part, healthy. I have tried two recipes so far (Pork Tenderloin with Pistachio Gremolata Crust, and Chipotle Chicken Chili), both of which were awesome. Even though the recipes I tried so far contain meat, Willet’s pyramid supports a vegetarian diet and, in fact, Willet endorses such a diet. In all, I have lost about 3 pounds since I started following the book’s advice last weekend (although that may be because I am no longer eating a side of cake and cookies with every meal).
Anyway, I recommend Willet’s book. If you want to get a clearer picture of what his Healthy Eating Pyramid is all about before you buy the book, you can check out the Harvard School of Public Health’s Nutrition Source website. The site encapsulates much of what is in the book. Enjoy!
January 7th, 2005
Posted by
Rob |
General comments, Interesting stuff |
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From the “You Learn Something Everyday” department…
I was reading a post on Defective Yeti about urban legends and there was a link in it to this story about how the whole concept of Lemming mass suicides was a myth. In fact, Disney staged a lemming suicide in a 1950’s “nature” film, and that is where the idea of suicudal lemmings came from…
The myth of mass lemming suicide began when the Walt Disney movie, Wild Wilderness was released in 1958. It was filmed in Alberta, Canada, far from the sea and not a native home to lemmings. So the filmmakers imported lemmings, by buying them from Inuit children. The migration sequence was filmed by placing the lemmings on a spinning turntable that was covered with snow, and then shooting it from many different angles. The cliff-death-plunge sequence was done by herding the lemmings over a small cliff into a river. It’s easy to understand why the filmmakers did this - wild animals are notoriously uncooperative, and a migration-of-doom followed by a cliff-of-death sequence is far more dramatic to show than the lemmings’ self-implemented population-density management plan.
The whole article is quite interesting if you are interested in the true lives of lemmings. Oh, and the little buggers are pretty cute to boot.
December 20th, 2004
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Rob |
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I tried writing this nice conciliatory post about how silver the lining to this awful election loss really is, but I keep coming across little anecdotal snippets of people who waited in line for 10 hours in Ohio, 6 hours in Florida, and 4 hours in VA (my brother and sister-in-law) and I can’t quite get over the sneaking suspicion that the election was stolen. I just cannot believe that people would wait in line for a whole damned day to vote for the status quo. How many people could truly be that afraid of gay people getting married or whatever “moral values” means? Of course, like I said, these stories are all anecdotal and therefore don’t, include verifiable evidence of fraud. I still wonder why Kerry folded so fast. I think he should have waited the 11 days for the provisional count in Ohio and had his legal team kick over as many stones as possible in the interim. I think he failed us there, but there is nothing any of us can do about that, and I can’t hold it against him.
On top of that I heard Bush’s press conference this morning and I almost had a stroke. His arrogance goes to 11.
At this moment, my political feelings can best be summed up by the chorus to the Bloodhound Gang’s “The Roof is on Fire”. It’s probably not constructive to feel that way, but that’s the way it is.
I don’t have any answers. I don’t know what the Democratic Party is supposed to do now. I don’t know who should lead it. I don’t know if they should swing right or left or spin around in circles. I do think there is a lot of entrenchment and inertia in the party hierarchy on all levels and somehow that needs to be cleaned out. Of course I don’t have a clue about how to do it
My gut tells me that some really bad things are going to happen in the next 4 years. I hope to God that’s not the case, but, if the far right really is allowed to fulfill its agenda, I hope it wakes people up to the fact that the most pressing social problem in the nation is not gay marriage.
There are a few slivers of silver, I guess. On a personal level, I have made a lot of friends and gotten to know people I would never have met had I not become involved in the political process. Those friendships will carry on. We’ll need each other for moral support.
On a larger, less personal level, we on the left have some nascent institutions that weren’t there in 2000. We now have groups like the Center for American Progress, Media Matters for America, MoveOn, ACT, the New Democrat Network, and Democracy for America. We have a new media outlet in Air America that will continue to grow. We have an online community that has real power when it is united (see Dean and Sinclair). We need to support all of this stuff and probably more so than the party apparatus. If I had to guess, I would say these new institutions are where our success lies and our new leadership and direction should come from.
For now, I am going to take a step back from activism in the purely political realm. For the immediate future, I’m going to focus my energy on getting involved in my community. Initially I have chosen to volunteer with an organization that mentors kids in inner-city public schools. I feel that I can make a difference there, and Lord knows public school kids will need all the help they can get in the shadow of No Child Left Behind. I think a lot of Democrats who don’t know what to do next would do well to try the same. It can only be good for the soul after this awful, brutal campaign. On top of that, secular non-profits are really hurting right now. They need help and they are surely not going to get it from this faith-based administration.
As for this blog, all I know right now is that I have no desire to spend the next four years posting articles about Bush Administration atrocities. Others can do that. Additionally, as much as I enjoy it, I will probably not post many articles about process. I think that was part of the problem with the Democratic effort this time. Many of us, myself included, got too focused on polls and strategy and electability and just being anti-Bush. Somewhere in all that mess we lost our message, or at least allowed it to be diffused. The truth is I don’t want to be solely against something anymore. That sucks up too much energy. I want to be for something. Maybe I can use this blog to figure out what that should be. At the very least it will be a convenient place to post pictures of my cats and dogs.
So that’s it for now. It’s over. And it sucks. But we are still here and we have to move forward.
November 4th, 2004
Posted by
Rob |
General, General comments, Interesting stuff, Politics, Texas |
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Does anyone out there on the internets want a Gmail account?
I’ve got 2 invites left if you want to jump into the world of special email coolness*. Just leave a comment (with an email I can send the invitation to).
*As I mentioned in an earlier post, your comment will not show up immediately. I still have the “approve all” settng on the blog. I was getting too many surf-by nonsense comments, so I decided to end the fun for the fools leaving them.
October 22nd, 2004
Posted by
Rob |
General comments, Interesting stuff |
2 comments
Dick Cheney’s Alive!
I found the link to this video over on Kos. It may, in fact, be the funniest campaign parody thingee I’ve seen. It starts out a little slow, and there’s one brief segment that is marginally un-worksafe, but it’s worth checking out.
October 6th, 2004
Posted by
Rob |
Interesting stuff, Politics |
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Last Saturday, Mrs. gd! and I spent the day painting out living room/dining room. Usually I absolutely hate painting because the paint I choose rarely goes on easily and rarely looks exactly the way I want it too. Well, I finally found a paint that I like. I don’t do product plugs on this site, much, but I was so impressed Devine color’s paint that I just felt I had spread the word about this stuff. We painted our room “paprika“. I have never used paint that went on so smoothly and looked so uniform when the color dried. Another cool thing about this company, is you can purchase sample packets of their paint to test out on your walls, this beats trying to figure out how a room will look with one of those little paint chips.
If you live in Houston, you can purchase this paint (and the packets) at Southwestern Paint on West Gray.
The only bad news is that we liked how the paint came out so much that we are going to paint the TV Room and the Kitchen this weekend.
August 17th, 2004
Posted by
Rob |
Interesting stuff |
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Krispy Kreme’s new line of frosty beverages includes “Original Kreme” which is supposed to taste like a glazed donut in a cup. According to Krispy Kreme’s website:
Our signature taste, which defines our Original Glazed doughnuts, is captured in a creamy, frozen blend. This drink is rich with just the right balance of flavor and sweetness. Add coffee and it’s like having our coffee and a glazed doughnut swirled in your cup!
Actually, calorically spreaking it’s like having 2 glazed doughnuts “swirled in your cup”. A small 12 oz. Original Kreme contains 440 calories while a Krispy Kreme glazed donut contains 220. The 20oz size is nearly equivalent in calories to 3 and a half donuts. Talk about confectionary convenience!
I’m not sure why I find this so amusing, but I do.
July 21st, 2004
Posted by
Rob |
Interesting stuff |
one comment
The Minneapolis Star Tribune has an excerpt from Garrison Keillor’s book , Homegrown Democrat . In the excerpt Garrison Keillor talks about how the idea of a being a Democrat is intertwined with the belief in idea of a social compact. While Keillor’s portrayal of Democrats is perhaps a bit idealized, he does capture the spirit of what, in my opinion, it means to be a Democrat, and the kind of response I think of when asked why I am a Democrat/progressive/liberal:
There is a message here: if lower taxes are your priority over human life, then we know what sort of person you are. The response to a cry for help says a lot about us as human beings. You’re at a party late one night and there’s a scream from out on the street, and some people stick their heads out to see if there’s trouble and other people don’t bother. Maybe they’d rather not know.
A Democrat knows that the leaf turns and in the human comedy we are one day spectators and the next day performers. The gains in life come slowly and the losses come on suddenly. You work for years to get your life the way you want it and buy the big house and the time share on Antigua and one afternoon you’re run down by a garbage truck and lie in the intersection, dazed, bloodied, your leg unnaturally bent, and suddenly life becomes terribly challenging for six months.
[snip]
The fear of catastrophe could chill the soul but the social compact assures you that if the wasps come after you, if gruesome disease strikes down your child, if you find yourself hopelessly lost, incapable, drowning in despair, running through the rye toward the cliff, then the rest of us will catch you and tend to you and not only your friends but We the People in the form of public servants. This is a basic necessity in a developed society. Men and women make love and have babies in the knowledge that if the baby should be born with cerebral palsy or Down syndrome or a hole in its heart and require heroic care, the people of Minnesota and of St. Paul will stand with you in your dark hour. If you are saddled with trouble too great for a person to bear, you will not be left to perish by the roadside in darkness. Without that assurance, we may as well go live in the woods and take our chances.
This is Democratic bedrock: we don’t let people lie in the ditch and drive past and pretend not to see them dying. Here on the frozen tundra of Minnesota, if your neighbor’s car won’t start, you put on your parka and get the jumper cables out and deliver the Sacred Spark that starts their car. Everybody knows this. The logical extension of this spirit is social welfare and the myriad government programs with long dry names all very uninteresting to you until you suddenly need one and then you turn into a Democrat. A liberal is a conservative who’s been through treatment.
July 21st, 2004
Posted by
Rob |
Interesting stuff, Politics |
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Roger Ailes has a lovely tribute to the newly-indicted ex-Enron CEO.
July 8th, 2004
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Rob |
Interesting stuff |
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You know it is time for a haircut when you look down at the floor, see the shadowy silhouette of your head created by the overhead lights, and the first thing that pops into your head is…
Hey, Krusty the Klown!
You know it’s time to go home and rest when you spend the time it takes for the elevator to arrive trying to make that silhouette look more like Krusty.
February 23rd, 2004
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Rob |
Interesting stuff |
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My two favorite television shows are:
The O.C.
and
Joan of Arcadia.
They are not the types of programs I would gravitate toward naturally. Being an effete liberal elitist snob, I initially watched both in hopes of having something new to ridicule in the smoke-filled salons of my fellow leftist sympathizers, but instead became hooked on them both.
In my opinion, they are two of the best-written shows on television right now. All the characters in each series are interesting enough to stand on their own. The cast of Joan of Arcadia is especially strong, and the show avoids being preachy or even the slightest bit religious which is surprising for a show about a girl who talks to God on a daily basis.
A close third is Line of Fire which is currently on hiatus, but I really hopes comes back.
That is all.
February 19th, 2004
Posted by
Rob |
Interesting stuff |
3 comments
If there were any justice in this world, the Jayhawks would be one of the biggest bands around.
February 13th, 2004
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Rob |
Interesting stuff |
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As you may have noticed, I haven’t been very good at posting to this blog for the last, oh I don’t know, year or so. A couple of weeks ago, a fine gentleman by the name of Tom Ball asked me if I would be interested in joining his new progressive online news magazine, The Daily News Online. I agreed. Starting this Thursday, I will be writing a weekly column on the site. I may even write articles more often if my fancy is so tickled (Note to Justin Timberlake: this is not an invitation to rip the red lace coverlet from my fancy–I have no idea what that means).
I figured making a commitment to at least write one thing a week would get me off my tail and back in the high-stakes, rough-and-tumble world of amateur political commentary. Plus I need something else to do now that I will soon be walking away from the smoldering wreck that is the Howard Dean campaign.
Anyway, the Daily News Online is up right now and you should go check it out. There are a lot of other great bloggers who will be writng there as well.
I will be keeping get donkey! around and will be cross posting my DNO columns here. I will also continue to use this space for posting the ever-popular kittie photos and whatnot.
So, again, please go visit the Daily News Online and be sure to tell your friends it is out there. I’ll be seeing you over there soon.
February 9th, 2004
Posted by
Rob |
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If anyone has seen the film Swimming Pool (which is worth seeing for the perfomances of the 2 lead actessses alone), and would like to weigh in with their interpretation of what exactly was going on in the film, please leave a comment. I have my own take on it, but I’m not sure Mrs. ged donkey! buys it, and I want to see if I am the only person who interpreted the film the way I did.
August 25th, 2003
Posted by
Rob |
Interesting stuff |
2 comments
