Now that the Airbus A380 is flying, will France’s Jacque Chirac order one for his state aircraft - just so he can claim he’s got a bigger one than George Bush?

Forget low-fat or low-carb. The latest big thing in dieting in Volumetrics:

Welcome to Pennsylvania State University’s Laboratory for the Study of Human Ingestive Behavior, one of the world’s most sophisticated centers for the study of what and how humans eat. The queen of this quirky culinary empire is Barbara Rolls, professor and Guthrie chair in nutrition at the university. For nearly three decades, Rolls, 60, has researched food choices, portion sizes, the caloric or energy density of foods, and myriad other factors that influence the human appetite and what satisfies it.

Most recently, the lab has been studying the impact of energy or calorie density–that is, the number of calories in a given weight of food–on satiety and weight control. Rolls calls this research “Volumetrics,” and her new book, The Volumetrics Eating Plan, arrives in bookstores this week. Part weight-control program, part cookbook, it is an effort to put into practical form a lifetime of study on why people eat what they do and how to satisfy the human biological drive for abundant food while achieving a healthy weight.

[…]

Paradigm. If the majority of the public, outside of a few weight-control programs, has been oblivious to the role energy density could play in cleaning up the American diet, so have many nutritional scientists. “This is a paradigm shift,” agrees Gary Foster, clinical director of the Weight and Eating Disorders Program at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Volumetrics is “an overarching concept, less based on macronutrients, though clearly, high-fat foods have higher energy density. It’s a more unifying approach to diet, and there are data to support it.” The downside, Foster says, is that energy density is not listed on food labels. Rolls hopes that will change: “If we had an energy-density number on food labels, it would give people an immediate way to compare foods and the calories in a portion.”

“My sense is people are becoming disenchanted with a low-carbohydrate diet, which is a high-energy-dense diet,” says Columbia University’s Xavier Pi-Sunyer, a member of the dietary guidelines advisory committee and director of the Obesity Research Center at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center. “So this would be a return to a lower-energy-density diet. And that is in line with the new guidelines.”

“Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become …”
–Che Guevara–

…or wasn’t that in the charming little inspirational from “The Motorcycle Diaries?”

I’m not sure what’s weirder, really really rich people who make their living here but who live abroad applauding one of the most ruthless motherf*****s of the past century, or the juxtaposition of what was really a sweet little idealistic song attached to said mf?

What’s really scary to me? I KNOW I’m in the minority in our country simply because I know who Ernesto Guevara de la Serna is. Most Americans probably think it’s a quaint little tale of adventure with pretty ethnic music.

And it just pisses me off that Antonio Banderas and Carlos Santana made it all the more attractive. I LIKE those guys.

I know I’m late on this but it’s been a weird day.

All the news that’s fit to link. The Blogger News Network.

Via Instapundit...cuz you never check him out anymore either.(?)

…so would it suprise you that I’m less than sympathetic with the Catholic League being upset about a comedy show making fun of the Eucharist? Is it just me or do they seem much more upset that Catholics are being made fun of than they are that the Eucharist is being blasphemed?

With all due respect Mr Donahue, all things considered, we don’t get to whine about comedy picking on us okay? We just don’t. When we’ve cleaned up our act…maybe…but not yet.

Via Malkin, whom I’ll leave alone from now on…she just can’t seem to help herself.

Where I spent Sunday afternoon, after the first trip of the year to the Antique Rose Emporium….

here… and here

Of course, these pictures are from last spring, when the wisteria was in bloom… but it will be looking like this in about three weeks.

I just think of it as my private patch of paradise….

1. I don’t remember going to the movies at all, this last year. Honestly, nothing I read about any of them in the reviews would have moved me off a rock ledge overhanging a thousand-foot drop, let alone wasting nearly $10 and two and a half hours of my life.

2. Ooops, I did go to one movie, but only because Blondie dragged me to “Phantom of the Opera”. Nice costumes, very operatic music, principal performers’ voices not really strong enough for the materiel, though.

3. The Oscars are different from how many similar entertainment award shows— how?

4. Four hours of self-congratulatory pap, by over-dressed, over-bejewelled, over-paid nit-wits. Sorry, guys, I am easily bored; I already know I would want those four hours of my life back.

5. I go to movies to be amused, enthralled and entertained; not to be grossed out, have my intelligence (and my values) insulted, or be deafened by the soundtrack. Curiously, this means I have never gone to a Tarantino movie. I may have seen an early Stanley Kubrick movie or two, but I just may be remembering reading the Mad Magazine parody.

6. Characters in movies as sick, psychopathic, or just plain nasty people; somehow these are the award-winning performances, but if I wouldn’t want to spend ten minutes with their real-life version…. Why the hell should I spend two-hours plus, with them in the multiplex?

7. Curiously enough, the movies from the past that over time emerge as truly stellar, intriguing, develop a popular or cult following… they were usually pretty well ignored by the Oscars for the year they were considered.

8. Hollywierd is an insular little world, and for the last thirty years dripped covert contempt for those of us in fly-over country. This year, that contempt became overt. Right back at ya, Hollywierd.

9. I actually have a life, and have to go to work tomorrow, where no one there gives a damn about the Oscars, either.

10. There’s no Lord of the Rings move in the running, this year, so why bother?

In Wes Cravens newest big screen comedy( I mean Scary Movie), I laughed(mostly at the bad acting), I cried (mostly at the bad acting), and I almost pissed my pants, laughing so hard.
I think good old Wes is trying to make the transistion from Master of Horror to King of comedy. The script work was ( I shudder to think of it)……elemantary school at best, and the actors (all new up-and-comers ) probably did’nt get paid enough to actually do any acting, and should stick to television.
So in retrospect if you want to see a comedy I highly suggest this Scary Movie Wannabe.

As I have never heard this song before, it is likely a bespoke jingle. But I can’t help but wonder: The song from the Toyota Avalon commercial, with the Yield sign kite, origami rabbit, and dancing shoes :

It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.
Sun’s shinin’ bright,
and I’m feelin’ good.
Turn your head and
take a look around…

Is this an actual popular song, or just something ginned-up for the Toyota commercial?

…Who else sees the similarities between tonight’s episode of BSG, and Silence of the Lambs/Dead Man Walking?

I was looking through my own archives this week, and realized that essay-wise, I periodically came back to the “Great War”, 1914-1918…(here, here, here) which struck me as bit curious. Vietnam was going on up until I started high school, and the effects of that war were still deeply felt when I started service life. We went back to the swamps of South-East Asia, metaphorically speaking, all during the most recent election; it is old and well-trodden ground for pols and reporters and other chatterati.

When I was growing up, though, the war that we harked back to most frequently was of course, World War II. (here, here, here, here) I was born barely a decade after it was all over, my parents were teenagers during it, but many of their slightly older friends were participants; books, movies and television shows all harked back to it, even the plastic airplane models that JP built. That earlier world war seemed merely a prelude, an opening gambit. Seen through the medium of jumpy, coarse-grained film footage, very obviously cranked through a camera by hand, it all looked impossibly archaic… the uniforms and accoutrements, weapons, transport and gear all clearly, distinctly of another age, and faintly ridiculous at that.

And yet the sheer, bloody brutal bungling of that war, the monstrous wastefulness, not to mention the shattering changes that came out of it— the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the end of the Ottoman empire, the end of the Romanovs and the ascent of the Soviet— all of this cast a long shadow. It is a given that the dropping of an atom bomb on Hiroshima, opening the nuclear age and the Iron curtain, dropping across Eastern Europe, all cast a shadow too, but more a political shadow.

Look at the pictures of ordinary people, read novels and other accounts of ordinary lives, before and after the Great War, and compare that with the same, before and after the Second World War. My parents and grandparents lives really didn’t materially change much: the lives they led in 1939 were pretty much the same that they had in 1945, the things they had, and the amusements they favored didn’t change all that much. Unless there are specific references to the war, a mystery novel from the late Thirties reads pretty much like a mystery novel from ten years later. The movies they watched, the radio shows people listened to, all stayed pretty much a constant.

But to go back and consider the difference between the world of 1910 and 1920… just to look at the way people dressed, amused themselves, used the available technologies. To read contemporary literature, to look at how the people who lived through the Great War looked back at the time before it, is to know how heartbreakingly aware they were of what had been lost, and how much everything had changed. The automobile was not a rarity, neither were bicycles, trains, electricity and telephones, but they weren’t all that common as they would be later. It was a horse-drawn world, just as it had been for centuries before. Clothes were elaborate, manners ornate, even the middle classes had servants. The place of monarchy and the nobility was secure, everything was for the best in this best and most cosmopolitan of all possible worlds.

And then in the space of half a decade it had fractured into millions of pieces: the murderous war, the flu pandemic at the end of it, the revolution in Russia; the pillars of everything comfortable and familiar were rocked, and the world we have now, ninety years later is the result. With the best of intentions, those who were still alive at the end of it— politicians, intellectuals, soldiers— tried to cobble something together, out of all those smashed pieces of that proud, forward-thinking, immensely confident tower that had been their world.

I think I keep coming back to it because 9/11 had the same effect in the course of a single day; not so much on the physical aspects of our lives… not much has really changed there, save for seeing the American flag in many more places and much oftener than before… and of course for the military being very much better thought of than before. For many of us, certain intellectual verities were smashed in the course of a single day day: amongst them that we were at the end of history, mad Islamic revolutionaries were nothing to fret about, we were secure, and had nothing to fear from anyone– and if we did, it small stuff and really our own fault. But it turned out that we weren’t at the end of history. The really shattering part was that we do have enemies willing to kill any number of us in the most savage ways. A lot of my own writing— and of lots of others in the blogosphere— is an attempt to come to grips with that, to sort out what has happened, what is going on, and what we should do about it… and what the world we build afterwards should look like.

This article (free registration required) I received from the Washington Post’s Tech News E-Mail took me back:

Downloaded and Ready to Rock
iPod Nights Turn Amateurs Into Digital DJs at D.C. Club
By Jose Antonio Vargas
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 25, 2005; Page A01

I’m not even going to excerpt it; you get the idea from the title. I’ve been navel gazing on our new toys, our iPods, as I play more with iTunes and my ability to make playlists. The simple ability to sit down at you computer and drag and drop playlists is both very cool and very sad at the same time.

Remember when you were young and single and had a LOT of free time on your hands? Yeah, me neither, but I somehow managed to spend a ridiculous amount of time making mix tapes. I still have some around the house in boxes and old AAFES bags. Every stereo in the dorm had not only a turntable but two cassette player/recorders. Mine had “fast dubbing” so I could record tape to tape twice as fast. There was the geek with the reel to reel but he listened to wayyy too much classical. And of course, the obligatory idiot who had to put Bose 901s into a 8′x8′ dorm room. He may not have been in your dorm…but you could hear him. The Base Commander could usually hear him, and you can be sure the Wing Commander knew the young idjit’s name because he somehow managed to crank out “Welcome to the Jungle” five minutes before the “no-notice” recall was supposed to start.

It used to be you borrowed a friend’s album…you cleaned it, because no one and I do mean no one took better care of other people’s albums than you did. You needed music, you had minimal cash, you needed your reputation. You made sure your needle was clean. Maybe blast the turntable area with a bit of canned air. You got your Memorex or your TDK out of the shrink wrap. You tried to remember the last time you cleaned the heads of your cassette recorder and you gave up and cleaned them again too. All that before you cued up the tape past the leader hitting play/record/pause…holding your finger on pause as you oh so lightly let the needle land into the intro groove just as you released the pause button. Minimal sizzle…no pop…a clean recording…in real time so you had to listen to what you were doing. And that was just for one master album.

Mix tapes were best done on Saturdays…maybe get started a little before noon. You’ve had breakfast at the chow hall. There’s still adequate beer left in your lil ‘fridge from last night. Time to get to work. You’re mixing. You don’t know what yet but there’s been a playlist forming in your head for about a week or so now. This nagging chord that fades into a riff that you just know will be sweet if you can put it together. Crack a beer…check your notes…you think you’ve got the first side done but what to go out with? Wait…damn…you’re 15 seconds over on side one.

You get the idea.

And as much as it gives me the tinglies to simply be able to drag and drop my playlists, juggling orders with the ease of cut and paste, deciding on the two second pause between tracks with the click of the mouse, I kind of miss all the work. I know…it’s happened. I’ve grown a bit nostalgic for the way things used to be. I know it’s better to spend 10 minutes doing what it used to take all afternoon to do…musically anyway…but I kind of miss the feeling of there being a craft to it. It’s all cerebral now. It’s easier to make the mix, but I miss the old tools.

Guess that makes me old huh?

Yesterday’s successful missile intercept is making the headlines today. But deeper investigation reveals that this is really no big deal.

The Aegis SMD system is basically just a ship-borne version of the well-developed Patriot PAC-3 system, and has been effective is about a half-dozen tests before this one. It’s nice to know that our fleet defense capabilities will soon be ratcheted-up a notch. But the success of the Ground-Based Interceptor (GBI), the system which will defend the homeland, has been hit-or-miss (pun most certainly intended). Much of the technology is the same between SMD, PAC-3 and GBI. But the GBI program appears to me to have some engineering management issues.

Found this story today.

I’m thinking there’s a lot of missing elements from this one.

New comment on your post #3198 “Little Angel”

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Interesting, but you’re obviously not very highly educated.

You can see all comments on this post here:
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Actually I am very well educated. Vindictive too.

This from AP:

“What’s your job?” he was asked by someone off-camera. “I am a lieutenant in intelligence.”

Then a second question. “Which intelligence?” The reply: “Syrian intelligence.”

And so began a detailed 15-minute confession broadcast by al-Iraqiya TV on Wednesday, in which the man, identified as 30-year-old Lt. Anas Ahmed al-Essa, said his group was recruited to “cause chaos in Iraq … to bar America from reaching Syria.”

“We received all the instructions from Syrian intelligence,” said the man, who appeared in the propaganda video along with 10 Iraqis who said they had also been recruited by Syrian intelligence officers.

Later, al-Iraqiya aired another round of interviews with men it said were Sudanese and Egyptians who also trained in Syria to carry out attacks in Iraq.

Syrian officials could not immediately be reached for comment on the claims, which were not possible to authenticate independently.

An Iraqi special forces commander, Brig. Gen. Abu Al-Walid, said his forces arrested the men in Mosul on Jan.

It occurs to me that, while a full-scale invasion of Syria may not be practical at this time, turning Lebanon into their own little Vietnam should be quite doable.

Who am I going to pay attention to when it comes to teenagers hurting themselves? The gal who’s consistantly got a stick buried so far up her butt that the point sticks out of her mouth when she talks, or the gal who used to have a cartoon character of a little dead girl riding to hell in a shopping cart on the banner of her blog?

I’m just sayin’…

Our old CRT Monitor was on its last bit of flicker. The colors were dying. The brightness was set at nuthin’ because if you went higher it simply washed all out, and the contrast was cranked all the way up and still…you couldn’t see much.

So I went to the store and bought this. I’ll be checking it out on a couple of my favorite games and then I’m sure that Beautiful Wife and Boyo will dive into Morrowwind with it.

I know it shouldn’t make that much difference but 20″ vs 19″ is a lot of ocular real estate. Plus, I didn’t realize just how bad the old monitor sucked until this one came on. Yes…I’m trying digital mode for the first time. It seems to like digital mode just fine.

All you geeks out there, please leave comments about the pros and cons of digital vs analog display properties.

And no…I didn’t pay that price for it…I paid less…AND got a $100.00 rebate. I’m not unhappy.

Yes…that does just about wipe out the tax return for this year. Thank you Uncle Sugar for hanging onto my money for me. If it wasn’t for my IRS Savings Account, I don’t think we’d ever buy anything new.

UPDATE: The feline roommates are quite upset with me, especially Miko…who jumped up to get her butt all nice and toasty and managed to stay balanced on the 1 inch width of the new flatscreen for a full 2 seconds before having to jump off. I applauded as she did her “I meant to do that.” cleaning of her face. She’s having none of it.

My mother worked in Public Affairs for as long as I can remember. So I always knew what you say at one end of the microphone can be turned into something bad after it gets to the editing room, and then released at press time. Reporters can be sneaky. If they are looking for a story, they will find one ( or make one up). I personally avoid them. The only ones I will talk to are from the military media (AFRTS, AFN…..etc) They have nothing to gain or loose, and off the record is OFF the record.

So, I may distrust the media at large, but I would never have targeted them…….EVER. They are doing their job, just like me.

During my stint at the 1st OIF, in the first days of the SCUD attacks, when the SCUD dive was the dance of the camp, the shelters could only hold so many people. During the day you ran for what ever one was closest; the ones near the operations center of the camp was always over-crowded during the day. A reporter was one of the last to run for shelter, I didn’t know who he was, what agency he was with. I always tried to get the corner of the shelter ( in case it collapse I might be able to survive it). I noticed right away he didn’t even have his kevlar helmet on…. but I had had my flack, kevlar, LBV(load-bearing-vest) M16, and gas mask. I grabbed his arm and pulled him towards me and put him in my corner and moved to stand at the entrace of the bunker.

Why did I do this? Simple… I had on about 15 pounds worth of gear and he didn’t. I didn’t think anything of what I might have lost, if a missile had struck the camp.

I still don’t know his name, but it doesn’t matter, he is a human being and he should expect no less from anyone in the military.

On tonight’s episode of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy - Michael S. Thom brought out what I might think is the perfect Zen relaxation tool: a motorcycle wheel on a truing stand. I have, since the age of twelve, trued my own motorcycle wheels, and built my own bicycle wheels. And I can think of no more calming redirection of focus, than truing a spoked wheel.