Fizzy drinks

Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco wants large grocery stores to pay a tax for selling sodas. This inspires mixed emotions for me. I like the idea of the government using tax to make people better, but aren't there more pressing issues? I've been known to polish of a liter of RC Cola per day, and I'm hecka healthy. It is good that he only wants to tax big stores, though. That way the little guy can compete against the Wal-Marts and what not.

Still, why not start by taxing meringues? I hate meringues.

Eat shit

I don't mean this blog to turn into an anti-Will Saletan blog. I mean, he's hecka lame, but I do have other interests -- D&D, Battlestar Galactica, anime, etc. -- but people seem more interested in my observations on sociology. I even got a comment on the last post, but i think it's in Portuguese.

Anyhow, instead of discussing my latest D&D triumph, I'll tell you that Saletan, again, hates on the wide-of-bottom. We really should be added to the protected classes under hate speech laws. Later in that same column, Saletan talks about recycling sewerage into drinking water. Now, I'm pretty keen on being green, but I doubt that crap-water could taste anywhere as good as the crystal-clear tap water we used to drink in Manayunk.

Hey hey hey

Saletan's latest Slate article claims that Black people aren't as smart as whites. As a sociologist, I have to believe that the studies were flawed. After all, all of the Black people I knew at Penn were hecka smart.

Saletan seems to have a hateful grudge against African Americans, as well as a distaste for big folks. Perhaps he was traumatized by Fat Albert as a child.

Genius!

Well, I've figured out why no one reads this blog. According to this website, Sxosteknology is written at a "genius" reading level. Although the site appears to be based on an attempt to get people to place ads in their blogs, I will regard its rankings as genuine and my readership as hecka smart.

Bigger is better

More news today that being big will not kill you. Indeed, according to this New York Times article, overweight people "have a lower death rate." I don't really understand how this is possible, since there is a 100% death rate for everyone, but I'll have to read the actual study to figure it out -- the mainstream media have a hard time explaining science accurately. The article describes the results of the study, which may be the same study I wrote up yesterday:

Linking, for the first time, causes of death to specific weights, they report that overweight people have a lower death rate because they are much less likely to die from a grab bag of diseases that includes Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, infections and lung disease. And that lower risk is not counteracted by increased risks of dying from any other disease, including cancer, diabetes or heart disease. As a consequence, the group from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Cancer Institute reports, there were more than 100,000 fewer deaths among the overweight in 2004, the most recent year for which data were available, than would have expected if those people had been of normal weight.

Saletan disagrees, naturally, but we all knew that hater would hate. So, big fellas are hecka healthy after all. My buddy Tim Finnigan says that it's bullshit, but I think I'll outlive him by a long shot. I only hope that little red-headed brother of his survives him.

Livin' large

Is this a rare repulse in America's War on Fatties? According to the Washington Post this recent study shows that being big isn't as awful as the skinny mafia has led us to believe.

"What this tells us is the hazards have been very much exaggerated," said Steven N. Blair, a professor of exercise science, epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of South Carolina. "It's just not as big a problem as people have said."

Now, I don't know what "exercise science" is, but I'm glad to see a news report that, for once, tells people that there isn't a problem. Of course, the article calls it "counterintuitive." Even as they report the true science, the anti-fatty patriarchy demands obedience to their prevailing paradigm.

Readers of this weblog know that I am wide-of-bottom, but my health is hecka good. Perhaps this news will get people to lay off of fatties and focus on bigger scientific issues, like climate change or stem-cell research.

You hear that, Saletan?

Popular

Google tells me that this blog is not widely read. Perhaps events of my daily life and my sociological observations are not sufficient to generate web traffic. In the interest of getting more readers, I would like to make a few points:

• Ron Paul is hecka insane
• Abortion is good
• We should pull our troops out of Iraq
• There are differences between men and women
• PCs are superior to Macs
• Captain Kirk would kick Captain Picard's ass.

All right, haters, let the comments roll.

Fatties of the world, unite!

Will Saletan, the writer I love to hate, posted an article today suggesting that the zaftig are far more numerous than stick-figure pinheads like him had ever imagined. I'm not terribly surprised. I went home to Manayunk for the weekend and saw big folks a'plenty around Philadelphia. Even at the Penn-Yale football game, where most people are rich enough to eat well and exercise, there were some big folks.

That's just another reason to prefer Franklin Field to your modern stadium -- bleachers are easy on the bottom, unlike the airplane seat I endured on the way home.

Crazy-cons

I've just read a story about someone in England who left 8 million pounds to the Conservative Party. The judge struck down the gift for insanity, and awarded the estate to the dead guy's son. If only we could enact a similar law for votes, we might have avoided that debacle in 2000.

Nah, the Supreme Court would've still found a way to steal it for Bush.

Re-elect Gore!

La Pièce de Résistance

Finally, Will Saletan gets one right. When he's not hating on the ample-of-bottom, he's not all bad. I agree that ages of consent are too high here in the U.S. We should emulate our enlightened European friends, and drop it down to sixteen.

If the laws were different, I definitely would've gotten laid in high school. Or college.

Government Cheeseburger

Apparently Los Angeles wants to ban fast food in poor neighborhoods. I have mixed feelings on the idea. I like that they're doing something to help the poor and downtrodden live healthier lives. We need government to help people make smart choices sometimes.

But banning fast food? I enjoy a trip to Jack-in-the-Box now and again. The "Ultimate Burger" is hecka tasty after a long day of sociology research. I mean, they look at you kind of weird when you roll through the drive-thru in a Segway, but they'll give you the food. Eventually.

Maybe what L.A. should do is, instead of banning fast food, mandate that they serve only selections from a city-approved menu. As long as the Ultimate Burger is on that menu, I'd be satisfied.

Tim Finnegan

My goodness, William Saletan really hates fat people.

My good friend, also named Tim, has been visiting this week. He doesn't sympathise with the adversity a pudgy fellow has to face, but since he teaches at a public school in Newark, he probably deals more with other kinds of adversity. Still, it's heka surprizing, since most Green party members like him are known for their compassion and acceptance of all people, even the zoftig.

Getting it awwwn

A new survey caught my eye today. The gist of it is that smart people are far more likely to be virgins. Specifically, "[e]ach additional point of IQ increased the odds of virginity by 2.7% for males and 1.7% for females." I must have been really smart in college. Things have improved in that department since I moved west, probably because I am surround by more smart people here in Seattle than I was when I lived in Manayunk, although my one unfortunate dalliance with the ladies occurred while I was at Penn.

Even more interesting was the graph showing virginity my academic major. 0% of the art majors were virgin -- no surprise there. I wasn't sure what category sociology majors fell into. Anthropology is kind of similar, and is one of the more promiscuous majors. It's also similar to psychology, which has a majority-virgin population.

The study also said that Princeton was the most virginal of all the Ivy League schools. Again, this is not much of a surprise to anyone who has ever known anyone from Princeton. Oh, heck no.

An Explanatory Paradigm

I read an article today about how dieting can make you gain weight in the long run. Being a pudgy fellow myself, this paradigm seemed to ring true. My sociology training tells me that the whole skinny-normative pattern is a learned behavior imposed by the patriarchy in order to deny agency to the large-of-bottom. Bill says I just need to get on the treadmill. I say Bill is a tool of the establishment. Dieting is not a way to lose weight, but merely a Symbolic Interaction, playing out the metaphor of man's domination by residual Jack Sprat-ism.

Pair-a-dice

I'm trying to come up with a solution to a common problem -- unwieldy die rolls. Normally I use two d10 to stand in for a d100, but Bill and I always forget which color die we chose to stand for the tens and which for the ones. Bill's good with computers, so he searched the Internet and found a die that claims to be a d100, but we've determined that it produces an uneven frequency distribution. I wouldn't want to be caught using loaded dice! Heck, no!

So, we set to making our own d100. I'm not sure my math is right, but I think to have the surfaces big enough to land on, it would have to be about 70 centimeters in diameter. That will be hecka loud rolling on my apartment floor, but that's the price of good gaming. Hopefully, we'll get to carving it this weekend.

Lasers?

The Mission Galactica marathon was everything I'd hoped it would be. My friend Bill says I should upgrade to Laser Disk, but I'm not so sure. It already cost me a bundle to change over from Beta to VHS. I'm not sure I want to make the switch again. Besides, my only copy of Chess is on VHS, and I'd hate to miss out on my fortnightly viewing of that musical. You just can't beat Björn Ulvaeus for lyrics.

Oh, heck no.

VCR repair is hard to find

Well, I got my VCR back from the shop. My old repair guy closed up, so I had to go to a new one three miles away. That's hecka far on a Segway, let me tell you. But it's good to have ol' Bessie back in service in time for the Mission Galactica marathon this weekend. Gonna be good times.

I am a bloggard

My VCR's in the shop, so I thought I might try my hand at this "blogging" all the kids are talking about. That's all for now.