A kitty picture's too easy here. See Doonan's creds. Wouldn't you hate to recognize yourself as one of these anonymous waistlines always used as stock footage when TV does obesity stories?
1) It's easier to back up electronic data than years of progressively treated urine samples, for example. Behind lives and livelihoods, ruined research is another serious loss from Katrina.
2) At "progressive" bookstore City Lights in Berkeley, still-professor Ward Churchill's plagiarism-whiffed, faux-Indian screeds are a-okay, but Orianna Fallacci's warnings about the violent, regressive, homophobia of Islamofascism is too heinous to stock. This is what mere "open-mindedness" has been reduced to, illogical and self-destructive political conformity.
3) Tort reform on the move in Mississippi, and so far, it's apparently helping.
4) A rather thoughtful article on the kneejerk, moralising hatred of fat Americans by ourselves and the rest of the world. Daniel Ben-Ami points out how the secular left claims to believe in no god and therefore no sin as such, but hold up gluttony as an immoral corruption. Forget freedom over your own body if you prefer to skip Pilates and Kabbalah water for an extra croissant. The overeater deserves the harshest judgment, and society must control your base appetites for food if you cannot and will not yourself.
Now I, too, admit to wondering what friends and family did as certain unfortunate people ballooned to 500+ pounds, requiring removal by industrial cranes to hospital facilities. When you can no longer move to get the food, a diet ought to be a logical certainty. Just because you've become accustomed to a pound of bacon a day doesn't mean I'll bring it to you if you've become incapacitated by your own size. But we could easily wonder the same kinds of things about drug addicts or gamblers within loving families, and we'd be called insensitive, unrealistic jerks. The coastal types who forgive endless addictions, betrayals, adulteries, and pederasty among their own would cry fascism over mandated birth control for the unmarried young and poor, though (the notion is also against my ideals of individual freedoms) it would likely reduce the future number of poor, as births to young women out of wedlock before marriage are chief predictors of lasting poverty. But be fat, and you're lucky to get even their pity much less their defense. Contempt and a call for national exercise boot camps is more like it.
Ben-Ami also reminds us that productivity isn't a zero-sum game- our plenty isn't stealing from anyone else's. We could easily (provided politics aligned) employ the methods that have made our food cheap and plentiful to help painfully malnourished waistlines around the world.
5) I always find Simon Doonan , Barney's creative director, refreshing in opinion, expression, and aesthetics. As to his Hello Kitty/Simpsons nativity: it is retail, darling, relax a bit. In a long piece for a fashion magazine whose name I can't recall, he wrote wittily but also with touching realism (though he may just be a splendid liar) about his mother, notably the evolution and later intractability of her signature, beehive-esque hairstyle. In this Post feature, he consults job seekers.
6) I do not own cats, but owning dogs hasn't ever made me hostile to them. But still, I assess myself as inordinately fascinated by catblogging. You tell me why. Thanks to Defamer, to the irreplaceable Daily Kitten, I now must add Stuff on My Cat and Cats In Sinks.
No comments:
Post a Comment