Culture
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Fat
I watched a show on PBS last night called, “Fat: What No One is Telling You“. I thought it was a pretty interesting show, and one that many people might have a few things to teach many of us. From the website: FAT: What No One Is Telling You explores the myriad psychological, physiological and environmental factors that can make it so tough to shed pounds and keep them off. In this documentary, Executive producer Naomi Boak and producer/director Tom Spain, both Emmy Award honorees, share new scientific knowledge about hunger, eating, and human metabolic operation. This film also explains our psychological responses to food, and shows how external pressures…
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Etiquette
I like to read Miss Manners’ column in my local newspaper. I like how she explains the rules of etiquette, and what they’re for. Etiquette can sometimes seem arbitrary and confusing, but mainly it’s a set of rules that helps us disparate humans to get along together, without offending each other or hurting each other’s feelings. For example, a gentle reader writes in, asking how they should best go about telling their neighbor that their new painting is crass and ugly, or perhaps that cousin Bertha’s new baby looks amazingly like a small chimpanzee, and really, isn’t it my DUTY to let them know how I feel? Isn’t honesty the…
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The Good China
Whilst out and about, watching a certain Bride to Be try on beautiful wedding dresses, I have recently had occasion to peruse the bridal magazines that they have sitting around at the salons. Anyone remember these? They’re full of pictures of dresses, of course, tips on how to get in shape before the wedding, ideas for fun honeymoons, ettiquette advice, and checklists galore. Things to be done, and when (6 months before the date, pick your venue and your dress…3 months before the date, order invitations, etc.). They also have suggestions for your bridal registry. Different people register for different types of things, some for the conventional china and silver,…
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Wordless Wednesday – Don’t Bother Me, I’m reading…
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Pi
Oh, also, today is Pi day…3.14, you know. Pie Day was in January, but it seems like today would be another good opportunity to, well, eat some pie. Right? (And yes, I’m totally a dork. But I’m NOT singing happy birthday to Albert Einstein. I’m not THAT much of a dork.)
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Does Size Matter?
Magazine covers like this one make me angry. See how Kate Winslet is talking about how she doesn’t worry about weight anymore? At the same time, see how the biggest word on the cover is DIET? Do you think Kate would approve? I don’t. I think she would be resigned to it, and know that women’s magazines generally have diet articles and how to make a cake articles and so on. I glanced at the interview with the divine Ms. Winslet (otherwise known as Autumn’s future step-mom), and she talks about eating, not dieting, being healthy, having more important things to think about than numbers on a scale, etc. I…
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This One’s for the Local Folks…
Though you may have seen something similar with towns in your area in place of the towns around here…I received this as an email from someone at Maya’s school…kinda funny… NEW BARBIES FOR THE EAST BAY! Mattel recently announced the release of the improved limited-edition Barbie dolls for the East Bay market: “Walnut Creek Barbie” This princess Barbie is sold only at the Broadway Plaza Mall. She comes with an assortment of Kate Spade handbags, a Lexus SUV, a long-haired foreign dog named Honey and a cookie-cutter house. Available with or without tummy tuck and face lift. Workaholic Ken sold only in conjunction with the augmented version. “Pleasant Hill Barbie”…
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At The Mall
People didn’t really believe in war even while they planned it. The Salinas Valley lived about as it always had. ~ John Steinbeck, East of Eden Ted and I were watching “NOW” the other night, an episode titled “Back to the Front” that followed troops from Fort Stewart, in Georgia, as they prepare to go to Iraq on their second, sometimes third, tour of duty. Although I have a dear friend who was a Captain in the Air Force, she left the military prior to September 11th, and never had to leave her children and husband behind while she went to war. Neither did she have to wait at home…
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Evolution?
The other day, while listening to a backlogged To the Best of Our Knowledge (TTBOOK) on my beloved iPod, I was struck yet again by the argument between the creationists and the Darwinists. TTBOOK has been running a series called From Electrons to Enlightenment, and if you’re interested in how religion and science work together and where they argue bitterly, you might find this series interesting. Anyway, I was yet again hearing people argue about the beginning of the universe, and of life on Earth. Was the Earth and life on it created by God, in 6 days, as described in the Old Testament? Was the big bang the cause…
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A Question…
Me: Why do you think some people start their Christmas shopping in August, while others wait until December 23rd? Ted: Because some people are women, while others are men. Me: That sounds about right.
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I’m not sure how I feel about this…
I’m such a huge Buffy fan, and yet…and yet, not so sure that I’ll be enjoying reading about the adventures of the Scooby Gang via the comic book genre rather than seeing them on Tuesday evenings via my TV screen. Will it satisfy me? Will it satisfy Maya, who was crushed by the idea that Buffy was no longer the only slayer (well, aside from Kendra, who died, and Faith, who didn’t, but I digress…)? Will we become obsessed, I mean, MORE obsessed than we already are? Will we become huge comic book fans? I shudder to think. I’ve never really been a fan of comic books, except maybe Betty…
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WTF?
I wasn’t going to write about this today…I like the happy date-a-versary thing, and why be a downer and take away from the fun? But this story I read in the paper is needling me, threatening to drive me nuts if I don’t write something about it, to get it on ‘paper’ and out of my head. Iran is holding a two day conference to determine whether the Holocaust indeed happened. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called the Holocaust a ‘myth’, and Israel a ‘tumor’. Clearly, the goal here is to show that he is a President who can stand up to the West, as well as to support claims that…
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Holiday Depression…
I’ve been hearing lately about how the holidays are a hard time for so many people…how they depress people and stress the hell out of people, and I’ve been wondering, what is it about Christmas (and Hannukah…do any of my Jewish friends get depressed around this time of year?) that brings folks down? Isn’t this supposed to be a happy time? So I thought, what is it that we do to ourselves around the holidays? 1. Maybe too much pressure put on shopping and gifts, you think? In a culture where the majority of retailers go into the black finally in the last month of the year, and our whole…
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Wish They All Could Be…
What American accent do you have?    Your Result: The West Your accent is the lowest common denominator of American speech. Unless you’re a SoCal surfer, no one thinks you have an accent. And really, you may not even be from the West at all, you could easily be from Florida or one of those big Southern cities like Dallas or Atlanta. The Midland Boston North Central The Inland North Philadelphia The South The Northeast What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz I tried to make the text more readable, and only made it smaller…so here we go, I’ll paste it here, in case you’re wondering what the…
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Blogaversary
I first (well, not first) came to the bloggy world one year ago today. (I say not first, because I actually started a blogger account, wrote one post, then promptly lost interest back in the summer of 2002.) If you look at Cherry and Autumn’s Mom‘s archives, you’ll notice that they started the same month that I did. I’d like to claim that I started it all, that I was the leader of our little group jumping into this world, but the truth is that I was the holdout. I felt like if I started a blog, I wouldn’t really have anything to say. People would be bored and no…