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March 28, 2007Married to the Media: A Bad Deal All AroundRannoch Donald sends along this study from my alma mater:
A new University of Missouri-Columbia study found that all women were equally and negatively affected after viewing pictures of models in magazine ads for just three minutes.
I was also curious about how "all women" are defined (the study's abstract isn't any help). Were the 81 women in the study college students, or all ages? Mostly single, mostly married, or somewhere in between? Exclusively hetero? All we know is that they were "European-American" -- white chicks. If they were predominately single and hetero, there is some good news:
According to a New Zealand study on women and aging, single women have more orgasms than those with partners, leading researchers to conclude that removing men from the equation allows women to "better connect with themselves." ...
Finally, in the interests of gender equality, I should mention this study, which got some attention when it came out two years ago:
[M]en's self-rated body satisfaction decreased after viewing images of muscular men but did not change after viewing images of average men. Thus, it appears that men's body satisfaction may be influenced by exposure to brief images of muscular models. These results are congruent with results of previous investigations of the effects of viewing images of thin models on womens body satisfaction.
Posted by LouSchuler at 08:54 AM | Comments (0)
March 22, 2007Thursday Blog Meat: Satan, P&G Had no Operational Relationship; U.S. Defends Decision to Invade AnywayAs Rannoch Donald said when he sent this link, "unfuckingbelievable":
The Devil is not in league with global consumer brand Procter & Gamble, a U.S. court has ruled. P&G won a $19 million lawsuit against four distributors of rival Amway over rumors tying it to Satanism.
I got that link from Will Carroll of Baseball Prospectus, who in the same entry linked to this, a loving compendium of HBWs: hot baseball wives.
Juries trying criminal cases are likely to be more lenient when the person in the dock is physically attractive, psychologists say.
What amazes me, though, is how many fat guys -- including the megachinned Beck -- are yukking it up over Gore's waistline. Even on the relatively liberal MSNBC, Chris Matthews and David Shuster took their shots. Shuster looks to me as if he's gained 10 pounds in his face alone since I've been watching Hardball. Check out his bio picture, then look at this recent clip. Even on the tiny screen, you can see his surplus chin flesh bobbing along like a milk jug on the ocean. So why are all these guys spending so much time talking about Al Gore's weight? Especially when Gore isn't even pretending to be running for office, and in fact lays out such stringent anti-global-warming measures that he couldn't possibly by elected? Posted by LouSchuler at 09:30 AM | Comments (1)
March 16, 2007Rats!When I worked as a waiter at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles, we'd sometimes get people who'd never been in a five-star establishment. They'd look at the menu, searching for something that they'd recognize as food, and immediately wonder what we could possibly do to a hamburger to make it worth $15. (That was in the mid-'80s, so you can imagine what it costs now.) I never knew what to tell them. I'm sure the meat was high-quality, and I guess it counts for something that the chefs were all trained at the finest culinary schools in the world. But I knew that what they were really paying for was the pleasure of eating a burger in a five-star hotel, served by people like me, who expected to be tipped accordingly. I just couldn't tell them that. The actual rich people, the people who fit in most easily, often had the simplest tastes. They'd order the most basic steaks and sandwiches on the menu, and never ask for anything special, unless they wanted us to make the dish even simpler by serving it without a sauce or garnish. I bring up all that up because of this story, sent my way by Rannoch Donald, about the most expensive pizza in human history:
We've been dealing with the pocket-emptying effects of rising gas prices, new electric rates, and an increase in cab fare, but how would you feel about breaking the bank all for ... a pizza? Now you can find out thanks to Manhattan restauranteur Nino Selimaj, who has apparently brought from the heavens a real "pie in the sky" with his new $1,000 pizza.
So, with thoughts of drugs and pimped-out pizzas on my mind, I read this New York Times op-ed column on something else you find in restaurants:
Rats in restaurants, while distasteful, are more a distraction than a disaster for public health. As reported in this newspaper, flies -- each one a potential airborne disease carrier -- are a more dire threat. So are cows, sheep and pigs, whose excrement can contaminate food at its source with E. coli, as was recently believed to be the case with California spinach and with vegetables served at Taco Bell. And to echo the punch line of many a nature documentary, the greatest threat to restaurant sanitation is man: salmonella, for example, is typically initiated or spread through improper hand-washing, food handling or cooking.
Perspective and proportion are the first casualties of hysteria, and food scares touch upon deep-seated fears about disease and control of what goes into our bodies. The American food supply, however, is by objective measures the safest it has ever been.
"There's hardly any chance that it's been contaminated by animal feces." Yeah, that would've scored me some nice tips.
It’s really no wonder so many people are fat. The fast-food purveyor Chick-fil-a announced the promotion of a new high-everything milkshake available starting on St. Patrick’s day. Posted by LouSchuler at 08:59 AM | Comments (0)
February 28, 2007The Juice is GoosedI'm on deadline and had no plans to blog today, but the headlines are just too good. You probably know about the big steroid/growth hormone bust in Florida. Two specific names have been linked to the raid: Gary Matthews Jr., who had a career year for Texas in 2006 and signed a $50 million contract with the Angels this offseason; and a team physician for the Pittsburgh Steelers. But what really caught my eye is the new paperback version of Game of Shadows, the book that showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that Barry Bonds hadn't just used steroids, he'd used them in massive doses. Sports Illustrated's Tom Verducci offers some of the fresh dirt in the new version:
My favorite fact: the authors detail in their afterword the freakish growth of Bonds' body parts in his years with the Giants: from size 42 to a size 52 jersey; from size 10 1/2 to size 13 cleats; and from a size 7 1/8 to size 7 1/4 cap, even though he had taken to shaving his head.
Today's college students are more narcissistic and self-centered than their predecessors, according to a comprehensive new study by five psychologists who worry that the trend could be harmful to personal relationships and American society.
The study asserts that narcissists "are more likely to have romantic relationships that are short-lived, at risk for infidelity, lack emotional warmth, and to exhibit game-playing, dishonesty, and over-controlling and violent behaviors."
For example, she blames the "self-esteem movement" of the 1980s as being responsible for this epidemic of narcissism, along with more permissive parenting. So, clearly, it's the fault of the hippies and parents, especially, I assume, hippies who then became parents. But couldn't someone argue that powerful forces in society are more responsible than a bunch of pacifist utopians whom none of us paid much attention to in the first place? For example, could the fact that good-looking people make more money play into an increase in self-consciousness about one's looks? Could the fact that even relatively prosperous people feel increasing anxiety about their economic security have an effect on their kids, making them focus more on wealth and fame than on goals that might contribute something useful to society? No, no, talking about that stuff would cause too many of us to question our assumptions about the direction our country has taken in the past quarter-century. It makes us wonder if perhaps we've placed too much emphasis on wealth and status and not enough on what used to be called the common good. It makes us reassess our worship of presidents like Reagan and Clinton, who were celebrated for unleashing the forces of prosperity, and makes us wonder why in the world our celebrity journalists poked such vicious fun at Jimmy Carter and Al Gore, the only two political leaders in a generation who stood for anything besides unmitigated greed and personal power. No, we can't think along those lines. We can't stop and wonder who decided it was so important to focus on Al Gore's wardrobe and waistline in the 2000 election campaign, rather than on what he might actually do for the country as its chief executive. Or on what his opponent might not do (pay attention to warnings about imminent terrorist attacks, for example). It's a lot easier to just blame the hippies. They're too busy tending to their patchouli to even notice. Posted by LouSchuler at 11:11 AM | Comments (0)
February 01, 2007KarmaWhen you meet someone new, one of the most important steps in the mating ritual is learning the new person's stories. With my wife and me, the exchange of stories was especially crucial, since we had so much in common. We were attending the same creative-writing program, we were both Midwesterners who had graduated from journalism schools in adjacent states, and we were both coming out of relationships that had taught us exactly what we didn't want from future partners. The foundation stories are about family, of course. The next tier of stories is about past relationships. But because of our similar backgrounds, the work-related stories were some of the most important in establishing how we'd gotten to the place where we met. She was impressed by fact that I was the bad guy in one of my own stories, about how I got fired from my part-time sportswriting job at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. I was covering high school sports, and I just wasn't any good at it. I discovered the hard way that there's a world of difference between being someone who's a sports buff and former participant, and someone who can go into the locker room and interview coaches and athletes after a game and write a story that captures the action and emotion of the contest without making the losers of that contest look like ... well, losers. It was a story that didn't make me look good in any way, except for the fact that I came out it understanding I was ill-suited for that type of reporting. She found my lack of victimhood refreshing. Some of her work stories -- by no means the most important, just ones she threw out there -- were about her career as a reporter at the Los Angeles Daily News, which struck me as a comically dysfunctional place to work. A few of those stories included an editor named Doug Dowie, a pure nightmare of a boss. He was a former marine who just didn't get that reporters don't respond well to bullying and humiliation. Here's why I bring all that up: Kimberly got a phone call yesterday from a former colleague who told her that Dowie had been sentenced to 42 months behind bars because of his role in defrauding the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power out of a half-million dollars in bogus billing fees. The details aren't particularly important, unless you live in L.A. and are sick of politicians and other con artists treating your city as an ATM. (And of course you get find the details by clicking on the link above or this one.) The key piece of the backstory is that Dowie had become a public-relations executive and Big Swinging Dick in L.A. politics after he left the Daily News. That's how he was in a position to defraud the city. This is the part that Kimberly pointed out to me, with some sense of payback:
Feess [the judge who sentenced him] singled out Dowie for relentlessly pushing subordinates ... until they committed crimes while he insulated himself by not looking at the bills they fraudulently inflated.
Sometimes the worst people you encounter really do get their comeuppance. Posted by LouSchuler at 08:09 AM | Comments (0)
January 26, 2007Ram-on-RamI don't follow pro football closely -- in fact, I follow it so not-closely that I only watch the Super Bowl for the commercials, and take my bathroom breaks when play resumes. But even I know that this is the first Super Bowl involving two African-American coaches. My older brother and I listened to the Chicago-New Orleans game as we were driving out of St. Louis Sunday afternoon, and one of the first things the radio announcer said when the game ended was that the Chicago coach, Lovie Smith, would be the first black coach to take a team to the Super Bowl. I think the story line should be that Lovie Smith is the first person named "Lovie" who wasn't laughed out of his profession. But that's just me. So, with thoughts of identity politics already percolating in my head, I read this in yesterday's New York Times, about the scientist who had the misfortune of studying an obscure subject that somehow turned into a political football:
Dr. Roselli, a researcher at the Oregon Health and Science University, has searched for the past five years for physiological factors that might explain why about 8 percent of rams seek sex exclusively with other rams instead of ewes. The goal, he says, is to understand the fundamental mechanisms of sexual orientation in sheep. Other researchers might some day build on his findings to seek ways to determine which rams are likeliest to breed, he said.
And if you can keep the rams off their fellow rams, well, that's just a short step from breeding homosexual orientation out of humans. It's like Twilight of the Golds, only with sheep! Except ... that's not what the research is about. Not even close:
Dr. Roselli, whose research is supported by the National Institutes of Health and is published in leading scientific journals, insists that he is as repulsed as his critics by the thought of sexual eugenics in humans. He said human sexuality was a complex phenomenon that could not be reduced to interactions of brain structure and hormones.
Posted by LouSchuler at 07:50 AM | Comments (0)
January 15, 2007Monday Blog MeatIf it's Monday, that means there's a one-in-four chance that the kids are off school for some reason. Today it's Martin Luther King day. Next month it'll be Presidents' Day. We get a break in March, but then double up in April with the spring break/Passover/Easter juggernaut. I'm not complaining about the observance of any of those holidays in particular. I just wish the MLK/PD holidays could be combined into a single holiday. Call it Great Americans Day. We could have that holiday in early February, when the kids really need a break, as opposed to mid-January, when a holiday is a burden on parents still trying to recover from the kids' Christmas vacation. I don't say that to disrespect Dr. King, George Washington, or Abraham Lincoln. It's just that in this age of historical illiteracy, it makes more sense to me to have a holiday celebrating all the great Americans and all their great achievements. Then, in November, we use that holiday for a National Day of Voting. Call it Democracy Day, perhaps. In even-numbered years, the adults vote for congressmen, governors, and the occasional president. In odd-numbered years, the children vote in non-binding polls on the things they'd like their country to do. The point is that everyone celebrates the great individuals of our country's history on a single day in February, and then in November everyone practices what those great Americans gave us: democracy. Anyway, my point is that the kids are home from school today, I'm on deadline, and I have to travel later this week. So today's blog is a link dump, without a unifying theme.
A school program to fight childhood obesity that includes yoga is drawing complaints from some Christian parents in the Quesnel area in B.C.'s Cariboo region. They say yoga is a religion, and shouldn't be taught in public schools.
It reminds me of the Harry Potter flap, with Christians arguing the books are an endorsement of paganism and witchcraft ... which of course are competing belief systems. Personally, I think the Potter books are profoundly moral. There's good and there's evil. Harry, at various points, is tempted with worldly riches and social position, but shows no interest in either. He spends most of his time either being a kid or saving the world. Granted, there's no God in Harry's world, even though they celebrate Christmas. The magic is controlled by mortal beings. In that sense, it's like Star Wars. There's The Force, and some are better at using it than others. But there's no God or gods who can save the mortals from their own dilemmas. What all that has to do with yoga, though, is beyond me.
Another way to prevent dementia -- learn a foreign language:
Researchers in Canada, where the official languages are English and French, examined 132 patients with a diagnosis of probable Alzheimer's disease. Those who spoke two languages experienced the onset of dementia 4.1 years later than those who didn't, the researchers wrote in a study published in the February issue of the journal Neuropsychologia. The patients spoke a total of 25 different languages, including Polish, Yiddish, German, Romanian and Hungarian.
Take the common perception that employers discriminate against short men in hiring and income. That isn't exactly what happens. It turns out the much-touted income advantage of height is more closely linked to high school experiences than to hiring practices in the adult workplace. And when brothers are studied, one tall and one short, the two have exactly the same employment opportunities and income, regardless of height.
Treatment with growth hormone helps some, but not all, children grow taller. Medical tests cannot predict in advance which children will respond. In general, growth hormone works best when started younger, given in higher doses and administered for longer periods of time. On average, treatment helps children grow a little taller -- but not much. An analysis of studies published in 2002 in the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine found that children with idiopathic short stature who were given growth hormone for an average of 5.3 years had an average gain of 1.6 to 2.4 inches in height over what had been predicted when they began the drug.
But to take those kind of risks with children just because they're short? And to spend that kind of money to make it happen? Holy cow. That said, I do understand that it's kind of disappointing to realize your kids aren't going to be tall. My wife and I are dead-solid-average for American adults -- I'm 5-10, she's 5-4. I'm two inches shorter than my dad, and she's about the same height as her mother.* Both of us have taller siblings, which gave us hope that our kids would be taller than us. Our son may end up being taller than me -- he's about average for his age right now, but started out above average and may end up there again -- but both of our daughters remain stubbornly short for their ages. Our siblings' children are mostly taller than them, so in that sense we wonder what the hell we did wrong. Two of our kids figure to be smarter than us, and the third is stronger and faster and more athletic than either of us even dreamed of being when we were that age. So why did they get the short end of the stick? I have no idea how to answer my own question, but it would never in a million years occur to us to try to change that genetic roll of the dice with powerful and potentially dangerous drugs. I hate to judge other parents' decisions, but this is a tough one to understand. * Actually, she's the same height as her 65-year-old mother now. Her mother was actually 5-6 for most of her adult life, two inches taller than my wife. So each of us is two inches shorter than our same-sex parent, which is bad enough. But now our daughters may end up even shorter than my wife. Where's regression to the mean when you really need it?
I didn't actually miss the story; I just found it too damned depressing to write about on a Monday morning. Posted by LouSchuler at 07:36 AM | Comments (0)
January 10, 2007WaistedIn TC Luoma's Atomic Dog column on T-nation last week, he brought up this point about female beauty:
While it's often said that beauty is ever changing, skin-deep, and superficial, that line of thinking is largely bunk. Regardless of cultural preferences, two things remain timeless and irrefutable markers of beauty: facial symmetry and the mystical .7 waist-to-hip ratio, or WHR. If you haven't heard of the WHR before, Professor Devendra Singh of the University of Texas at Austin originated the concept in a paper he wrote in 1993.
Slim waists have been the mark of attractive women throughout history, says a U.S. scholar who has analysed thousands of ancient texts. Dr. Devendra Singh scoured references to fictional beauties from modern times back to early Indian literature.
There was trend for slightly larger women in the 17th and 18th centuries -- a trend typified by the paintings of Rubens -- but demand for a slimmer waist was generally constant throughout the centuries.
(Thanks to our man in Scotland, Rannoch Donald, for the link. Welcome back!) Posted by LouSchuler at 06:51 AM | Comments (0)
December 27, 2006The DecidersBack in high school, there was this girl named ... well, I can't remember her name, so I'll call her Stephanie, since I'm pretty sure that wasn't it. But more than 30 years after graduation, I can still picture the girl's face: oval, with full lips and enormous brown eyes, framed by long, straight, blonde hair. Since I went to a small high school in rural Missouri, there weren't really deep social divisions in the student body. Everybody hung out with everybody else. But when it came to dating, there was one unwritten, unspoken rule: The cutest girls in our school, such as Stephanie, were out of our league. We were in the shadows of two bigger public schools, and the prettiest girls in our little Catholic school accepted the social hierarchies of those schools, rather than the level playing field of our own. To us, it didn't really matter who someone's parents were, or what kind of car they drove; our classmates were judged on the things that mattered most to teenagers in the 1970s -- good looks, success in sports, and access to drugs and alcohol. But outside our walls, there was an entirely different game being played. The scions of the biggest local businesses were at the top of the social pyramid (they had the nicest cars, if nothing else), and the top athletes at those schools were close behind. You could be the best-looking guy at our school and the most popular and the best athlete and the guy with the brightest future, and you'd still be in a lower social stratum than the guys with the shiniest pickup trucks or who scored the most touchdowns for one of the public-school teams. Stephanie dated one of the touchdown-scorers at the bigger of the two public schools. I can't remember his name, either, but I remember he looked kind of like a Viking. Let's call him Brad, since that's as good a name as any for a handsome, broad-shouldered jock dating someone like Stephanie. After high school, I lucked out and landed probably the best summer job you could possibly have. I was a lifeguard at a local recreation camp owned by the Teamsters Union. The main attraction was the swimming pool, which employed a couple dozen lifeguards. It also had a nine-hole golf course, tennis and basketball courts, a summer camp for children, a restaurant and snack bars, campgrounds, picnic areas, and a few other amenities I can't recall and that wouldn't add much to the story if I could. It was a very labor-intensive place, and most of the employees were college kids on summer break. For us, it was a three-month-long party, and as a lifeguard, I found myself nearer the center of the action than I'd ever been before. The pool where I worked was the most trafficked area of the camp, and that made the lifeguards the most visible employees. For the first time in my life, being visible worked in my favor. I was still pretty skinny back then, but I was the right kind of skinny for a guy who worked in a Speedo. My romantic possibilities increased accordingly. What little social hierarchy there was at the camp was imposed by outsiders, guys from suburban St. Louis who'd been on swim teams at their high schools and who belonged to college fraternities. I'd grown up in the St. Louis suburbs -- very close to where these guys lived, in fact -- but my family had moved to the sticks when I was 14. Thus, I'd missed the transformation of my friends and neighbors into social climbers, and was startled to hear the suburban guys using designations like "loser" and "low-life" to describe people they didn't like. I had my prejudices, of course, but I don't think it had ever occurred to me to classify people in those ways. The part I found most fascinating is that the suburban guys had somehow appointed themselves as judges of all they surveyed. Stephanie, the pretty girl from my high school, worked at the Teamsters camp, but Brad didn't. They were still a couple, though, and she brought him to the one of the parties. That inspired the suburban guys to pronounce Brad not just a loser, but a "total loser." Imagine the cognitive dissonance: Throughout high school, I'd slowly internalized the idea that guys like Brad -- good-looking, popular athletes at the local public high schools -- are near the top of a social hierarchy in which guys like me didn't even have a caste. We were non-entities outside our own small high school. And here were guys who, by virtue of the fact they grew up 20 miles to the north and belonged to college fraternities, decided that Brad was nothing, a "total loser" in a competition in which none of us knew the rules. I guess I could've bought into their world view, but to tell you the truth, I thought the suburban guys were ridiculous. They weren't smarter or better-looking than anyone else there, and while they could swim better than any of the other lifeguards, they weren't particularly athletic. Only one of the three had a good physique. (He was also the only one who wasn't a total dick.) I dated better-looking girls than they did, and I suspect I had a lot more fun as well. If you don't consider yourself too good to socialize with anybody, you're free to hang with everybody. I had a small group I mixed with to play sports, another group for dating, another group for going to see movies like Star Wars, and everyone else for drinking and having a few laughs. I'm thinking about all this today because of a movie my wife and I watched last night. If you haven't seen Little Miss Sunshine yet, I highly recommend it. The main character, played by Greg Kinnear, is a motivational speaker held back by the fact he's unable to motivate anybody. His schtick is a nine-step program to transform people into "winners," and in the movie's opening scenes he's obsessed with classifying people as winners or losers. The other characters, correctly, see Kinnear's character as a tool, and his nine-step program as a complete crock of shit. The screenplay telegraphs early on that the motivational speaker, who considers himself a winner despite his failure to even make a living at his chosen profession, will get his comeuppance. When he does, it isn't remotely surprising. (He's convinced he's going to get a lucrative book deal, but if you've spent five minutes in the publishing industry, you know there's no reason anyone would hire an unemployed speaker to write a book about winners and losers.) I don't want to say it's a great movie, or even one of the best of the year. (I haven't seen enough movies this year to know. Most of the memorable ones I've seen were documentaries, but none of the critics are putting them on their end-of-year best-movie lists.) But it is a damned good look at the limitations of a world view that allows only two classifications of people. The point of the movie -- and I'm not really giving anything away by saying this -- is that you can't will yourself to be a winner if you aren't suited for the competition you've chosen. We all learn that lesson, in various ways and at various points in our lives. The best illustration is this bit I heard many years ago, and have used a few times since: A boy's first dose of reality is when he realizes he's not going to be the star quarterback. A girl's is when she realizes she'll never be a princess. Girls figure this out around the time they hit puberty. Guys figure it out in their mid-30s. If a guy's competitive, he finds games in which he has a better chance. Or he takes satisfaction in staying in the game, even if he knows his potential is limited. But, at the end of the day, winning and losing aren't black and white designations. Most of the good things in life happen in between the extremes. I have no idea what happened to Stephanie, Brad, or the suburban guys. I probably go months at a time without ever thinking back on high school or lifeguarding or the social strata of rural Missouri. I hope Stephanie and Brad are happy with each other, if that worked out, or with other people, if it didn't. And I kind of hope the suburban guys got some kind of comeuppance. I don't mean I wish bad things on anybody, but I do think those guys were in desperate need of karmic intervention -- It's a Wonderful Life in reverse, with Clarence the angel showing them what nimrods they've been. If nothing else, I hope their poor judgment came back to bite them on the ass once or twice. Here's what I mean about their judgment: The pool was managed by a guy who was a teacher and coach at one of the smallest local high schools. He was a real prick, one of the foulest people I've ever had to work with or for. What I remember most about him was his deep voice, like that of Ted Cassidy, the actor who played Lurch on The Addams Family and was the guy who got kicked in the nuts by Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I don't know if he was a good teacher or not, but I'm pretty sure the teams he coached never won anything. Even if they had, he'd still have been an unpleasant, abusive, alcoholic bully, the kind of guy who had to find a new wife every few years and got into fistfights with their ex-husbands. The assistant manager was a neighbor of ours, a big, good-natured guy who was a teacher and football coach at one of the bigger local high schools. His teams would go on to win state championships, and his one and only marriage worked out for him. If you could magically travel back in time to that pool in the summer of, say, 1978, and you were forced to classify the people working there as "winners" or "losers" in the game of life, you'd never in a million years pick the assistant manager as a loser. He was a nice guy, a talented coach, and a decent human being. Conversely, you'd never pick the pool manager as someone to admire. You had to fear him, given his position and disposition, but you'd find him contemptible in most other ways. And yet, the suburban guys spoke of the assistant manager with utter derision. They even added an extra syllable to his last name, turning a garden-variety German name into two words that you wouldn't use to describe someone worthy of respect. (Sorry to be so vague, but I'm deliberately avoiding the possibility that any of these characters would Google their own names and come across this post. I don't need the aggravation.) They didn't stop with his name; they made fun of the way he walked, the cadence of his voice, his intelligence (which was probably above average for a high school football coach), and anything else they could think of. At the same time, they treated the pool manager as an admirable character, and used him as the paragon against which the assistant manager should be unfavorably measured. By any objective standards, they should've admired the man who was not just a better coach, but also a better human being. And yet, the guys who'd introduced "total loser" and "lower form of life" to my vocabulary chose one of the least admirable people I've ever known as the guy they looked up to. Today, more than a quarter-century later, I can't think of a stronger indictment of the type of people who feel empowered to pass judgment on others. If the guy you admire is a drunk and a bully, and the ones who hold in contempt are decent and successful, what does that say about you? Posted by LouSchuler at 07:13 AM | Comments (7)
December 15, 2006Sizing Us UpNew York Times reporter Sam Harris dug through the Census Bureau's 2007 Statistical Abstract and came up with a bunch of fun facts:
We consumed more than twice as much high fructose corn syrup per person as in 1980 and remained the fattest inhabitants of the planet, although Mexicans, Australians, Greeks, New Zealanders and Britons are not too far behind. ...
For the first time, the abstract quantifies same-sex sexual contacts (6 percent of men and 11.2 percent of women say they have had them).
More Americans were born in 2004 than in any years except 1960 and 1990. Meanwhile, the national divorce rate, 3.7 divorces per 1,000 people, was the lowest since 1970. Among the states, Nevada still claims the highest divorce rate, which slipped to 6.4 per 1,000 in 2004 from 11.4 per 1,000 in 1990, just ahead of Arkansas’s rate.
With medical costs rising, more people said they pray for their health than invest in every form of alternative medicine or therapy combined, the abstract reports.
And check this out:
Not everyone who describes themselves as Christian or Jewish believes in God. Indeed, only 76 percent of Protestants, 64 percent of Catholics, and 30 percent of Jews say they are "absolutely certain" there is a God. However, most Christians who describe themselves as "Born Again" (93 percent) are absolutely certain there is a God.
Posted by LouSchuler at 06:44 AM | Comments (0)
December 12, 2006A Dispatch from the Trans-Cupcake WarsSome days I question my competence as a blogger. I call MPF "the official weblog of the American obesity epidemic," but when a story comes along that's right in my wheelhouse -- like the trans-fat ban in New York City -- I can't work up the energy to care about it. I'm not in favor of trans fats, but I do cringe when governments get involved in nutrition debates. Historically, they tend to jump in on the wrong side. Look at the original Food Guide Pyramid, for example. It was a virtual prescription for diabetes, and yet the U.S. Department of Agriculture continued to promote it long after we knew about the dangers of large quantities of refined carbohydrates. The only good thing you can say about the pyramid is that the government never forced anyone to follow it. Don't get me wrong; I don't think any harm will come from banning trans fats. But it's worth noting how we ended up with so many trans fats in our foods in the first place. Here's one example: Companies like McDonald's used to cook French fries in beef tallow. But, because of the fear of animal fats in general and saturated fats in particular, they were pressured to switch to vegetable oil. The type they chose was partially hydrogenated soybean oil, which includes a trans fat called elaidic acid, and what looked like a win for nutritional virtue turned into a major loss. (And that was before McDonald's started supersizing.) As Mike Roussell points out in this T-nation column, some trans fats occur naturally in beef, and are actually good for us. Our bodies convert these fats to CLA, which is currently thought to reduce body fat. So the debate isn't as simple as it looks. My other concern about banning trans fats in our nation's media capital is that it gives ammunition to all the people who don't want anything to be regulated. (Trust me, they'll use this mostly symbolic trans-fat ban to drum up fear of universal health care, which will be a major issue in the 2008 elections and beyond.) I don't mind setting those people off if we're talking about a legitimate public-health issue, like smoking in public buildings. But it's hard for me to imagine how my health is improved by the fact the guy next to me in a New York City restaurant can no longer order foods fried in partially hydrogenated soybean oil. But there is a current nutrition debate that hits closer to home:
Once a cupcake wasn't something to think about. It was just what your mom brought to school for your birthday. But this year, as schools across the country begin enforcing new federally mandated "wellness policies," many are banning the little treats. And parents are fighting back.
(Okay, that wouldn't happen, since Bastille Day is July 14, when kids are home for the summer, whining about having nothing to do, which is how they prepare for the 9-month school year, when they whine about having too much to do. And, okay, there isn't much call for acknowledging French holidays in the U.S. these days. But if it were in March instead of July, I'll bet some kid would bring in something baked or sugar-coated to celebrate it.) The upshot of all this is described by a commenter on Kevin Drum's blog:
You try to raise a non-obese, relatively healthy kid and you do okay until they hit kindergarten. Between the cupcake days, the party days, and the "specials" (teacher's day, Arbor Day, whatever), there's hardly a day that isn't loaded with extra artificial food coloring, high fructose corn syrup and fat. And then we wonder why the kids all misbehave. Blue, tattooed "froot" leather does not occur anywhere in nature! But try to tell that to most parents.
It's like complaining that children are illiterate, but then refusing to put books into classrooms. Seriously, it's that absurd. Posted by LouSchuler at 07:56 AM | Comments (4)
December 10, 2006The Consonant GardenerI've been reading a lot lately about this guy Obama, as has everyone interested in politics. And even if you don't care about politics, you can't escape the constant recitation of his name and speculation about his presumed presidential intentions. As you might expect, I like him a lot. (Sue me, I'm a liberal.) And I don't have any big opinions or insights into his personality or prospects. But I did have this weird thought the other day: Guess how many U.S. presidents' last names have ended in a pronounceable vowell? (Told you it was a weird thought.) The answer is one: John F. Kennedy, who also, I think it's safe to say, is the closest we've had to an "ethnic" president. (He was Irish-Catholic, and felt compelled to give a speech promising that he wouldn't take his marching orders from the Vatican.) If the criterion broadens to include presidents whose last names ended in a vowell sound, we have three: James Monroe, William McKinley, and JFK. Even if you include all the presidents whose last names ended in a vowell, pronounced or not, the list is still sparse: Millard Fillmore and Franklin Pierce make it a party of five. The list of "final-vowell-sound last names" gets a little longer, and slightly more interesting, if you add in vice-presidents who didn't later become presidents: Now you have Elbridge Gerry (the second of James Madison's two veeps), Alben Barkley (Harry Truman's guy), Hubert Humphrey (who lost a brutally close race to Richard Nixon in 1968), Spiro Agnew (Nixon's veep, whose sole cultural contribution was adding the phrase "nattering nabobs of negativism," a line written by future New York Times columnist William Safire, to our national discourse), and of course Dick Cheney. Of all these presidents and vice presidents, only Agnew (a son of Greek immigrants) and Kennedy qualify as "ethnic." We've had gifted non-WASPs rise through our political system, of course. Mario Cuomo was regarded as the Democratic frontrunner in 1992, before Clinton emerged. John Kerry got more than 60 million votes in 2004, although some of the attacks on him ("he looks French") seemed to be based on the idea that the current president is "one of us" while the Catholic (and ethnically part-Jewish) Kerry is "one of them." I can't tell you what any of this means, other than to suggest that Obama's assumed candidacy is one of the longest of long shots in all American political history. Not only is his skin dark, but his first name rhymes with the country we've been to war with twice; his last name sounds like that of Public Enemy Number One; and his middle name, Hussein, is Arabic for "all the bad things that keep you awake at night." But 2008 might be the most anomalous presidential campaign in U.S. history. Obama and Hillary Clinton (first woman!) are assumed to lead the pack on the Democratic side. And Republican front-runners include Rudy Giuliani (Catholic, vowell sound in the final syllable, three marriages), John McCain (Irish last name, divorced, member of the Keating Five), and Mitt Romney (Irish last name, Mormon). Out of all those, McCain is the most traditional choice. So even though he's not my guy, if I were a betting man, I'd say the early money should be on him. Even if there were nothing else to recommend him, his does have the benefit of being a white male whose last name ends in a consonant. Posted by LouSchuler at 09:01 AM | Comments (0)
December 06, 2006Wednesday WeirdnessA bunch of stuff that defies categorization:
A South Carolina boy, 12, was arrested Sunday morning after his mother called police to report that he had unwrapped a Christmas present without her permission. According to a Rock Hill Police Department report [a copy of which you'll find if you click the link above], the child opened a Nintendo Game Boy, though he had been directed not to by family members. When the boy's mother learned that the $85 gift had been opened, she called cops, who charged the juvenile with petty larceny. In an interview with The Herald newspaper, the boy's mother, a 27-year-old single parent, described her son as a disruptive child, noting that she hoped his arrest would serve as a corrective to disorderly behavior at school and home. I guess she's the last parent in America who hasn't heard of Ritalin ... for herself, if not for her son. Another contender for worst parent of the year:
For nearly 20 years -- ever since Pete Costello was 8 -- his mother has collected disability benefits on his behalf. In meetings with Social Security officials and psychologists, he appeared mentally retarded and unable to communicate. His mother insisted he couldn't read or write, shower, take care of himself or drive a car.
(Thanks to Rannoch Donald for the heads-up.)
A man who pleaded guilty to molesting two girls told a judge he did it because of his wife's excessive bingo playing. "My wife was never home," Floyd Kinney Jr. said during his plea hearing Friday.
Worldwide spam volumes have doubled from last year, according to Ironport, a spam filtering firm, and unsolicited junk mail now accounts for more than 9 of every 10 e-mail messages sent over the Internet.
The internet is arguably the apex of human technological development, the most complex and paradigm-changing invention so far in the history of homo sapiens. And what do we mostly use it for? Porn, Justin Timberlake downloads, and penny stock scams. Makes you proud, doesn't it?
Two percent of adults have more than half of the world's wealth, including property and financial assets, according to a study by the U.N. development research institute published on Tuesday.
(Thanks again to Andy Scharlott for this one.)
Flatulence brought 99 passengers on an American Airlines flight to an unscheduled visit to Nashville early Monday morning.
Fitness USA, a gym chain, is investigating an alleged civil rights violation involving a local Muslim woman who says her afternoon prayer was interrupted by a fellow patron, and that her complaint to management about the situation was rejected.
Speaking of Gruntgate: My friend Nick Bromberg quoted me in this story for the Columbia Missourian. Posted by LouSchuler at 07:28 AM | Comments (0)
December 05, 2006Pot: NotHere's a story from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that, in a just world, would be on the front page of every major newspaper:
Contrary to popular belief, smoking marijuana need not be a steppingstone between using alcohol and tobacco and experimenting with illegal drugs such as cocaine and heroin.
Just kidding. Another interesting finding of the study:
Among those who used marijuana, nearly a quarter followed the reverse of the gateway pattern. They tended to have less parental supervision and to live in neighborhoods with poor physical environments where illegal drugs were more available.
Finally, from the department of ironies:
It was easier to obtain marijuana than alcohol or cigarettes as a teenager, [a rehab patient] added.
So, thanks to the anti-pot propaganda, he became a heroin addict. And thanks to the fact pot is illegal, largely because of that same propaganda, kids find it easier to get weed from neighborhood dealers than it is to get tobacco or alcohol. Start selling pot over the counter, and regulating and taxing the shit out of it, and kids will find it just as hard to acquire as any other legal intoxicant. And at that point it becomes boring. Which, of course, is the goal. Tedium will work just fine, whereas prohibition always fails. Posted by LouSchuler at 09:44 AM | Comments (0)
The Beer HunterHere's a crime story you don't see every day:
A St. Louis man was shot to death Sunday night over a warm beer, police said.
Byrd is alleged to have grabbed a woman's buttocks. When a man standing nearby challenged Byrd, police said, the Rams player grabbed a beer bottle and struck the man in the head. The bottle broke, and the man was taken to a hospital and got stitches to close the wound, police said.
But it doesn't matter. The real issue here is that my hometown seems to be developing a bit of a problem. Time for an intervention? Posted by LouSchuler at 06:07 AM | Comments (0)
December 01, 2006Bullshit Is the New BullshitI spent yesterday afternoon digging through some studies for the new book, and then, while waiting for one of them to print out, decided to look around for some blog meat for this morning. I clicked on this link, headlined "60s Are the New Middle Age," thinking it was a story about how people in my generation are redefining midlife. Wrong!
Cosmetic surgery is altering not just how people look but how they feel by changing perceptions of middle age, a new study shows.
It's too early in the morning for a full-on rant, and I've learned it's dangerous to do that when I'm precaffeinated. Besides, I think most of you reading this blog know my standard complaint: My children, and yours, are going to grow up in this world having never seen an unaltered human being on television or in the movies. The women will have some combination of breast implants, capped teeth, tinted hair, and, if they're over 30, botox and brow lifts. The men will have it easier, but the ones over 50 will have the wrinkles smoothed and the Siamese chins amputated. The baldos will have hair transplants. So there's that. But then there's this, from yesterday's New York Times:
Five years ago, cosmetic medicine was primarily the domain of plastic surgeons, facial surgeons and dermatologists -- medical school graduates who undergo several years of training in facial skin and its underlying anatomy. But now obstetricians, family practitioners and emergency room physicians are gravitating to the beauty business, lured by lucrative cosmetic treatments that require same-day payments because they are not covered by insurance and by a medical practice without bothersome midnight emergency calls.
An article in yesterday’s Times about obstetricians who prefer working in Botox boutiques is a reminder that the growing gap between the rich and superrich has an impact on those of us who are neither. The article, by Natasha Singer, reported that family practitioners and emergency room physicians have also jumped over into the cosmetic treatment business because the money is so much better. ...
I like to think I'm equally indifferent to all whines, including my own. But sometimes, just sometimes, it's worth paying attention to the things people are whining about. Maybe none of this is really about cosmetic surgery. Maybe there's a bigger problem, a sense of impending, society-wide doom that makes people think they have to make money today because it's all going to hell tomorrow. I don't personally subscribe to that point of view -- there's always tomorrow, as the lovely Clarice once sang in this classic -- but it's interesting to note that a lot of smart people might be betting the other way. Posted by LouSchuler at 06:51 AM | Comments (0)
November 21, 2006Cosmo Goes PsychoHave you ever seen the movie A Face in the Crowd? In it, a hillbilly singer, "Lonesome" Rhodes, played by Andy Griffith, becomes an overnight sensation, and becomes so famous and powerful that he starts to become a political figure. The people closest to him are increasingly disturbed by this, since they know he's a really, really nasty guy behind the good-ol'-boy facade. (This isn't Sheriff Taylor of Mayberry.) One of them finally brings him down by leaving a microphone on when the singer is joking around with his pals during a live broadcast, letting the entire nation know what a creep the singer is. Which brings me to Michael Richards and his crazy tirade against a couple of hecklers at a comedy club. Richards isn't anywhere near the cultural icon that the fictional Rhodes was in A Face in the Crowd, or even in the same class as Mel Gibson when he went off on his anti-semitic rant against an LAPD officer. But he was caught on video, which makes this the most remarkable celebrity self-immolation I can recall. Here's his explanation:
Michael Richards said Monday he spewed racial epithets during a stand-up comedy routine because he lost his cool while being heckled and not because he's a bigot.
Comedian George Lopez told Los Angeles television station KTLA that he thought Richards' lack of stand-up experience may have been a factor.
Veteran comedians have a couple of lines that quickly put hecklers and "helpers" in their place. One of the guys I performed with used a line (which I'm sure wasn't original) that went something like this:
Hey, do I go to hotel rooms and sit on the edge of the bed and talk while you're working?
This year I want to have a white Christmas. I'm not talking about snow. I want to have a honky Christmas. "Honey, throw another Mercedes on the fire."
Offstage, though, there was no racial talk. Maybe I've whitewashed my memories, but I can't recall any tension at all. Most of the time we all went our separate ways after the shows, but sometimes we hung out together, and I just can't remember there being any kind of unease. And this was in St. Louis, a very segregated city, at a time when the busing controversy made racial divisions a front-page issue. That's why it's hard for me to believe that a guy like Richards, working for decades in L.A. as an actor, would have genuinely deep-seated animosity toward African-Americans. It'd be damned hard to work in the entertainment business if you did. And more than that, working with fellow entertainers (or, in my case, aspiring entertainers) tends to take the edge off whatever racial attitudes you might've had before going into show business. If there's any difference between a white guy trying to tell jokes to drunken strangers and a black guy trying to do the same, I sure never saw it. Which makes Richards' tirade inexplicable, and makes me think George Lopez has the best take: If you're in front of an audience because you're famous for doing something else, and you have no experience dealing with a disruptive situation that arises in comedy clubs no matter who you are, and you haven't prepared for disruptive situations, then you might just say the first thing that pops into your head. Even if it's a thought you'd never have in any other situation in your life. I'm not justifying what Richards said. I'm just trying to understand it. Posted by LouSchuler at 07:50 AM | Comments (0)
November 20, 2006Blasts From the PastA CIA conspiracy to kill Bobby Kennedy. Lyndon Johnson accusing New York Times reporters of being a "bunch of commies." This is news? I guess this is the best we can do before a holiday. And catching up on old stories can help us understand why some things are the way they are today. Today's media is tougher on Democrats than Republicans, in part because of the old belief that the media was biased against conservatives. Reporters seem to go out of their way to expose the most minor of scandals within the Democratic Party, while studiously ignoring stories that matter. Why is that? Partly, I think, it's because of the echo-chamber effect. If a paper does a story that reflects badly on the Democratic Party, it will get major play on right-wing blogs, talk radio, and eventually cable TV shows like Hardball. If a serious magazine like the New Yorker does a serious story about ongoing plans to attack Iran, it falls into a silent void. No one wants to talk about it, because it's too scary to contemplate. And humans, according to this, are really good at ignoring warnings about scary things:
[W]hen a warning is repeated over and over -- and then nothing bad happens -- the human brain is designed to discount the warning. From an evolutionary perspective, attention is a precious commodity, not to be wasted on threats that do not carry immediate consequences.
"Our minds are always learning the relevant statistics of what is and is not important," agreed Brian Scholl, a Yale University psychologist who studies attention and vigilance. He has explored a phenomenon known as "inattentional blindness," in which people fail to see things right in front of their noses because they are intensely focused on something else. "Attending to things is not without cost," Scholl said. "The whole lesson of inattentional blindness is you can't attend to everything."
Well, fill in your own ending there. Bonus points if it involves O.J. Simpson. Posted by LouSchuler at 08:30 AM | Comments (0)
November 08, 2006Don't Bother Us with FactsContinuing with today's theme that voters chose moderation over extremism, and echoing last week's post about the numbskulls in our government who think it's their place to preach abstinence to unmarried American adults, there's this:
Most Americans, regardless of their political leanings, favor comprehensive sex education in schools over abstinence-only programs, researchers reported Monday.
Is it any wonder that the opposition party, the Democrats, didn't cough up a single seat in the House or Senate, or a single governorship, in yesterday's midterm elections? Is it any wonder that a religious-right extremist like Rick Santorum lost by 18 points here in Pennsylvania? It's one thing to have deep religious faith and strong convictions. I think most of us, no matter our political leanings, respect that. But it's another to try to cram your religious beliefs down the throats of the rest of us. The strongest political conviction I have is probably this: The government works for us. When I cast a vote, it's because I'm trying to hire that person to work for me, with his salary and expenses coming out of my tax dollars. I've had that feeling my entire life, going back to college. I never skipped class because, in my view, I was paying that professor or graduate assistant to teach me. I paid most of my own tuition and expenses, and I just couldn't justify throwing that money away. If I paid him or her to teach and then didn't show up to be taught, it was no different in my mind than buying a plane ticket and then not showing up for the flight. My tax dollars don't discriminate between Republicans and Democrats. Whoever wins the election gets my money. I understand that if the guys I voted against win, they'll make decisions that will better reflect the views of the people who voted for them, rather than mine. That's why I vote. If my money is going to pay these people anyway, I'd rather they be the people I chose for the job. So I never expected a guy like Rick Santorum to see things my way in office. But when he and people like him support extremely unpopular policies, whether it's abstinence-only sex ed or a minimum wage that's too low in the eyes of Americans, they deserve to lose, and lose big. Posted by LouSchuler at 08:52 AM | Comments (0)
CenteredElection nights haven't been much fun for my wife and me the past few cycles, so it was nice to go to bed last night knowing the party I support was going to control Congress for the first time since the wipeout of '94. But the real news last night wasn't about the Democrats or Republicans. The key to the whole thing, from what I can tell at 7 o'clock this morning, is that the voters chose the political center. The politics of polarization stopped working. The emphasis on culture-war issues stopped working, or at least took a breather. The xenophobic attacks on immigrants didn't work. And Kevin Drum suggests that, after a quarter-century of increasingly negative and sleazy campaigning, that may be over, too:
This might be wishful thinking on my part, but I wonder if this year's campaign finally got a little too negative? Is it possible that the Lee Atwater-ization of the Republican Party has reached its limit, turning off more voters than it attracts?
It will probably turn out to be a good election for pro-environment and pro-conservation voters, although I haven't seen anyone spin it that way so far. Environmental issues get to the heart of what I want my elected officials to focus on: Preserve what works, fix what doesn't work, and for the love of all that's good in the world, don't create new problems. If the government doesn't need to be involved, let people make their own choices. I hope this election is a big step in those directions. If it's not, well, there's always 2008. Posted by LouSchuler at 07:01 AM | Comments (0)
November 07, 2006SS Family ValuesHere's something I didn't know about the Nazis:
Lebensborn, or spring of life, refers to a series of clinics scattered throughout Germany and neighboring countries, to which pregnant women, most of them single, went to give birth in secret. They were cared for by doctors and nurses employed by the SS, the Nazi Party’s feared paramilitary unit.
The upshot:
If anything, the reunion served as proof that racial engineering has its limits. The Germans here looked no different from those at any other gathering of Germans in their golden years: the men with salt-and-pepper beards and balding pates, the women with eyeglasses and frosted hair.
Posted by LouSchuler at 07:02 AM | Comments (0)
November 04, 2006Why Electoral Politics Is Like PlumbingIf you've ever looked for a plumber in the Yellow Pages, you notice a disproportionate number of them begin with the letter A. And not just A, but AA: Aabco, Aakbar, Aardvark ... The poor plumber who was actually born with the surname Aaron must be furious at all these phony AA-ers taking his rightful spot at the head of the listings. Unfortunately, we pick our electoral officials the same way we pick the guy who unclogs our drains, according to Stanford political science professor Jon Krosnick:
Candidates listed first on the ballot get about two percentage points more votes on average than they would have if they had been listed later (flipping a 49 to 51 defeat into a 51 to 49 victory). In fact, in about half the races I have studied, the advantage of first place is even bigger -- certainly big enough to win some elections these days.
In California’s 80 Assembly districts, candidate name order is randomly assigned. In 1996, Bill Clinton’s vote tally was 4 percentage points higher in the Assembly districts where he was listed first than in the ones where he was listed last -- a difference that persisted even after we took into account pre-existing Democratic registration levels in the districts.
But I'll tell you what: If I were going to form a new political party, I'd make sure it started with the letter A. Or, better yet, AA. And my first candidate would be a plumber: "Elect Andrew Aaron of the All-American Party. He'll get things moving again." Posted by LouSchuler at 06:52 AM | Comments (0)
October 31, 2006The Sound of One Hand SlappingIf you ever found yourself in a conversation about pornography with a lockstep feminist back in the '70s or '80s, her opening gambit would be something like this: "Pornography is bad because it objectifies women." The problem with that argument is that it plays a lot better with women than with men. It's human nature to celebrate beauty, and while one man's celebration might be another man's whacking material, it's hard to demonize objectification in the abstract. Sooner or later, the feminist would pull out the trump card: "Pornography leads to rape." But, again, that's a tough argument to make with an actual consumer of erotica. I subscribed to Playboy back then, and I guarantee there was nothing about looking at pictures of naked women that inspired violence. I always figured the opposite occurred, and that a guy who spent too much time with his private collection would spend less time and energy seeking an actual partner. To me, pornography was more likely to lead to passivity and loneliness than to aggression and violence. You could also flip the argument around: Do men in prison rape other men because they spend their days and nights looking at pictures of naked cowboys? So now, thanks to this Internet thingy, anyone capable of Googling a few choice keywords has instant access to all the pornography he can handle. If pornography leads to rape, then of course the sexual-assault rate should be skyrocketing. It's not, according to economist Steven Landsburg in this column for Slate:
What happens when more people view more of it? The rise of the Internet offers a gigantic natural experiment. Better yet, because Internet usage caught on at different times in different states, it offers 50 natural experiments.
What happens when a particularly violent movie is released? Answer: Violent crime rates fall. Instantly. Here again, we have a lot of natural experiments: The number of violent movie releases changes a lot from week to week. One weekend, 12 million people watch Hannibal, and another weekend, 12 million watch Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.
Posted by LouSchuler at 08:57 AM | Comments (2)
October 26, 2006For the Drunken Preteen Slut Who Has EverythingCan the news possibly get any stranger than this?
Tesco has been forced to remove a pole-dancin | ||||||||||||||||||||||
