Mishaps and other haps

Maybe it’s something about the Midwest … the prodominantly rural, conservative Midwest.

Wisconsin is working on a state amendment to ban gay marriages.

South Dakota is trying to muster up a challenge to Roe v. Wade.

You know, I’d expect attempts at this kind of small-minded legislation in the South.

But I guess the Midwest is not too different, really. Like the South, college towns and metro areas here provide some balance, but not enough.

Also, I’m not too sure how long universities will remain “lights of hope” in this era of darkness since college students are being encouraged to “turn in” profs who express political opinions in the classroom (so much for the FSM shirt, Mlitiagrl).

The fundamental point of a college education is to teach people to think and it’s not possible to do that without bringing controversy, different points of view, BRAINMEAT into the classroom. If you whitewash education for adults by eliminating intelligent discussion from college classrooms, you will create a generation of brainwashed zombies who have no analytical skills. A few people will be alright, but that’s only because they learned those skills somewhere else.

Sad that it takes so much effort to win civil rights and so little to lose them. I guess we should expect segregation to be reinstated next?

OMG, Montanni levelled TWICE today! Ding 50! I feel like I have been playing WoW all day and … I have been, pretty much.

Montanni worked on some quests for the Blood Elves out in the Blasted Lands this morning, ran Sunken Temple with people most of the afternoon, and spent two or three hours helping Qlash kill some firbolgs for faction rep out in Felwood.

Was a good way to spend the day. I haven’t played much in weeks– had been stuck at 48 forever. Should play more tomorrow night … see if I can actually finish any of those Blasted Lands quests.

Back at home this afternoon after spending about four hours waiting on more car repairs. I feel kind of numb after spending that long waiting in a crowded service center lobby with the constant, repetitive drone of CNN in the background. On the bright side, my car is in good shape and is now up-to-date on maintenance.

Yesterday evening, I was uberproductive in the cooking arena. I picked up 3.32 lbs. of garnet yams on the way home and proceeded to turn most of them into African groundnut stew (with okra) and yam/cannellini hummus. Both projects turned out well, so my cooking for the weekend is finished.

Since I was occupied most of the evening with cooking, clean-up, and hanging out with people downstairs afterwards, I failed to write up another post I had been thinking about yesterday. The abridged version follows:

I had a lot of afternoon left last Monday after our meeting about house financing and I did not go back to work, so while PhysOrg and Inle worked on another run-through of Baldur’s Gate, I engaged in some nostalgia of my own.

I popped in one of my favorite childhood movies, The Last Unicorn. I had been meaning to pick it up on DVD for a while, so I finally purchased it the other day, along with Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

We did not own a VHS copy of The Last Unicorn when I was a kid. This was unfortunate for my parents, since they ended up renting it for me about 500 times. I think I may have seen it in the theater when it came out in 1982, but I’m not entirely sure.

I guess I was kind of surprised at the fact that other people my age remember and enjoyed this movie. During my third year in college, two roommates and I spent an afternoon watching several movies we had enjoyed when we were young kids in the 80s. One of them was The Last Unicorn.

PhysOrg and Inle remembered it, although they are a bit younger than me and were probably not obsessed enough with it to ask their parents to rent it 500 times.

TV shows and movies for kids were kind of awesome in the 80s. There were some programs that weren’t so great, but there was a lot to choose from. It was the time of EXPANDING CABLE OPTIONS. I have a lot of happy viewing associations with that time period.

As reported by the New York Times last Sunday, two scientific studies have recently raised a lot of concerns about the benefits of 1)low-fat diets and 2)calcium supplements.

The calcium supplement study found that routinely taking calcium supplements did not seem to contribute substantially to bone health by reducing bone fractures in older women.

Here is some interesting information from the Vegan Society that talks about the bone health/calcium issue. Note particularly the blurbs about salt and potassium. My disclaimer is that I am not vegan, but I have found some of the most legitimate and interesting sources of nutritional information to be well-written vegan cookbooks and websites.

Also, this Harvard University site is full of info about the bone health topic.

Anyway, to cut to the point, the calcium supplement study didn’t control test subjects’ diets to create the best circumstances for absorption of the supplements. Researchers simply handed out pills or placebos. Salt and potassium are not the only dietary substances that can inhibit or promote calcium absorption. Maybe that wasn’t the point. The point was to determine whether supplements benefited people regardless of whether they changed their diet, but perhaps it *does* show that you can’t just expect one aspect of diet to determine overall nutritional results. Things interact.

A great deal of skepticism has ALREADY been placed upon the findings of the low-fat study. It attempted to examine whether a low-fat diet reduces risk of heart disease and some types of cancer and found that low-fat diets were not all that helpful. Now I use the word “attempted” because it sounds like there were serious flaws in this study. So far I have read that the study didn’t differentiate between “good fats” and “bad fats.” The study only involved older women (not looking at the benefits of a low-fat diet throughout life). The percentage of dietary fat was not reduced enough to be “significant” and not all of the participants followed through with the diet. Sounds like a lousy study.

Most of the news headlines I have seen say things like “low-fat is out” and Fox News, as you might guess, has declared that low-fat diets are absolutely detrimental to health, as well as disgusting (not trying to insult health-conscious individuals, are you, Fox?). How Fox News stays in business is beyond me. I guess some people like being fed lies?

And in what way is this unbiased reporting?

Think about that the next time you turn down the scrumptious banana-pecan French toast with a side of sausage in favor of choking down some tasteless low-fat cereal with skim milk.

You know, there might be some days when I would prefer the French toast (minus the sausage, sorry Fox News). But um … “tasteless” cereal? Excuse me? I totally pity your inability to find foods that are both tasty *and* healthy enough to eat on a regular basis.

But what can you expect from such an overtly biased news source?

Conclusion: The findings from this study should be compared alongside studies of people who have been vegetarians for decades or for all of their lives. I’m not saying that all vegetarian diets are low-fat, but certainly they tend to have less animal fat than the diets of your average random sampling of the U.S. population.

Diet doesn’t necessarily *prevent* disease, but I’m pretty damn sure from everything else I have read (in my accumulated years of interest in the subject) that it has some influence.

I have been kind of distracted by various things this week, including gaming and car maintenance/repairs, so it seems like time has flown by since Monday.

Although I have caught a smidgin of the Olympics over the past two weeks, I totally missed the three nights of women’s figure skating that I wanted to see. I have been regretting that this morning as I was reading about the final turn out of the women’s competition last night, but there is not much to be done about it. I prefer the Winter Olympics to the Summer games, mostly because of the skating. However, the important bits can be summed up in three minutes of reading newstype and that’s OK. I’ll live.

I had a good evening anyway and spent some time reading Jane Goodall’s Harvest for Hope, one of the three or four books currently in my reading “stack.” This one has only been in the stack since Wednesday and I am reading it kind of quickly (for me) since I’m about halfway through it. There are some problems with the book and a lot more rambling than I would normally tolerate– but the subject, how our dietary choices impact the environment, is an important one to me. I think I’m going to have to read The China Study. From what I have heard about it, it is a little more the kind of thing that would be both engaging and non-rambling. I have to say this about Jane Goodall, though– she is a very charismatic and intelligent person. The arguments she makes are arguments I have heard before. There are some unessential bits in the book, but she is not off-base at all.

Lately, I have been increasing my daily reading circuit to include more weblogs outside my personal group of friends and family.

Most of the blogs I read do not strive to be political, not primarily anyway.

Nonetheless, the experiences I have witnessed as a routine reader have made me aware of some of the larger political issues surrounding online publication, issues and rewards that come with expanding readership, and the utility of blogs.

This has been more pertinent as the readership of certain blogs has grown– because if few people are reading your blog, only a limited group cares (and you probably know most/all of them in person).

These topics, among others, are being widely discussed in the larger blogging community:

1) Have some blogs become truly reliable sources of information that may rival or supersede news publications?

2) What legal rights and responsibility do you have for material you generate online?

3) What is the protocol for dealing with people who peruse your blog in ways that are detrimental to on-topic conversation and content?

4) Real-world privacy issues.

About the “widening readership” issue:

I have read a few blogs that eventually shut off their comments section because of trolling and other general reader abuse of this feature. While the commenting feature is now standard with most blogging software, I am happy that it can generally be shut off at will.

On the one hand, there is freedom of speech. However, there are generally forums for various controversial topics that can handle debate more easily and more efficiently (and probably more publicly) than a blog. There may be a hierarchy in some forums, or all registered posters may be treated equally. Unlike a blog, though, a forum is designed for discussion en masse.

I don’t believe in treating people nicely if they are simply out to de-rail a blog by attacking the author or the author’s lifestyle, sidetracking readers, posting nothing of value (“first post!”), or using it as a place for their own personal correspondence with other commenters (get your own damn blog, or use e-mail!).

One of the problems I have seen as “small” blogs grow “bigger” is that they have to deal with this element of their readership (hopefully a minority) in some fashion.

Growing pains, I guess.

We had a pretty successful meeting yesterday.

Turns out that pre-approval only lasts for 90 days, so we should wait until May to do all of the credit stuff with the bank if we are aiming to move into a house at the end of July, when our leases generally end.

PhysOrg has pointed out that we might consider “shopping around” with different banks, too. So we have time to consult with some other people on the matter (who have experience buying) and consider the lending plans at multiple financial institutions.

But the mortgage advisor punched in the numbers and did the figures and gave us a couple of loan options to consider, so we are making progress and it seemed that we could reasonably borrow enough money to find a place that will meet our needs.

Theoretically, my salary should increase between now and May and my debt should go down. We all have a few more months to save up money and/or decrease sources of debt. This should put us in even better standing by May, when we return to the bank and start talking to a buyer’s agent.

I was ready to fall over almost an hour ago. So I am going to bed in a minute, really.

Half a day’s work tomorrow, then I am meeting up with people for our session with the lending advisor. We’ve been doing some house browsing online. Mlitiagrl seemed especially excited this evening.

I had the opportunity to try a bit of black rum this weekend and I wholeheartedly approve. It makes a great rum & Coke, but the Bananas Foster tonight was also splendid and exotic. Ice cream + bananas & cinnamon in rum sauce … mmmm …

Yesterday was generally a very good day.

I was up early to take my roommate to work because her battery froze sometime Friday night and the car would not not crank. While I was out in the morning, I made a run to Ancora for freshly ground coffee, stopped to pick up something for my sister, and made a grocery store run.

I ran into Chuck, a guy I work with, at Copps. That was amusing, partly because I never expect to see people I work with out in public and partly because of the way the encounter happened. A speedy, bird-like running thing flew by me as I was walking through the produce department. I did not see its face, but I wrinkled my face up and looked disdainful, like “why is that guy running through the produce department, almost knocking me over?” Then the flying thing came swooping back, saying “sorry” this time as it almost knocked me over again. I noticed it was wearing a hat, but looked vaguely like a guy I work with named Chuck.

I saw it again in line, confirmed it was either Chuck or a close enough look-alike to risk embarrassing myself by waving. So I waved vigorously. It smiled, like maybe I was some crazy woman who thought she had seen someone she knew. When it finished up at the register, it came over and we talked for several minutes because it was, indeed, Chuck. Apparently he knew I was there the whole time because he did not seem surprised to see me.

I came home, visited PhysOrg for a bit, rousing his sleepy butt (and other parts) from his warm bed. He took off to visit his mom and I decided to stay home and work on some laundry and other things.

The laundry was accomplished. I completed a small project for my sister (who might have an upcoming birthday). Later, inspired by a coupon from my roommate, I headed out to Borders to pick up one item. I came back with several shiny things. All was good. A little later in the evening, I spent time with people and we found a movie about Josephine Baker to watch. Unfortunately, I had to crash when the WoW started up. My aggro rate is so much higher when I am tired.

In a spectacularly pathetic move, defaultlisa managed to cut herself this evening … WITH A VEGETABLE PEELER.

Ironically, it did a much better job of slicing her finger than peeling the vegetable she intended to use it on.

Luckily, there was Valentine’s dinner tonight to cheer her up, complete with pasta, wine, coffee and pie.

Yay for newly-established traditions!