My brother read this on a blog and sent it along (a response to a younger reading worried about aging):
I recently finished a book called Ruined by Reading: A Life in Books--a slim memoir of the books that have affected her through her life. I've never read The Little Princess* but I like what she took from it:"We groped for the knowledge The Little Princess confers, which is that we truly are what we feel ourselves to be, that we can trust our inner certainty regardless of how others perceive us or what they wish us to become. This truth comes to everyone eventually, one way or another (at least I hope so), but I was lucky to find it in a book."
PARIS - How would the Last Supper look if it were painted according to today’s appetites? Would it be a simple, frugal meal, or cosmopolitan and supersized, in the spirit of our times?That intriguing question is addressed by a pair of U.S. academics who analyzed 52 of the most famous paintings of the Last Supper painted between 1000 and 2000.
Over a thousand years, the portions of food placed before Jesus and his disciples grew astonishingly, the researchers found.
Using computer-aided design technology, the pair scanned the main dish, bread and plates and calculated the size of portion relative to the size of the average head in the painting.
Over a thousand years, the size of the main dish progressively grew by 69.2%, plate size by 65.6%and bread size by 23.1%, they found. (The National Post online)
"He [her husband] loves the hairy legs," she says, "and if Sid likes the hairy legs, there you go." She adds: "I tried shaving one time, and it was so uncomfortable and painful. I said never again would I do that to myself." Besides, says Mo'Nique, "I'm 42 and I'm very hairy." (usa today)
"Did the Post go too far? Of course not. The photo deserved to be in newspaper and on its Web site, and it warranted front-page display. ...There was a time, after court-ordered integration, when readers complained about front-page photos of blacks mixing with whites. Today, photo images of same-sex couples capture the same reality of societal change."
"Diets are based on the unspoken fear that you are a madwoman, a food terrorist, a lunatic. ... Losing weight on any program in which you tell yourself that left to your real impulses you would devour the universe is like building a skyscraper on sand: Without a foundation, the new structure collapses."
Let's see, the Carb Queen has gained and lost the same 200+ pounds numerous times, going from food plan to food plan, and last I read before she shut down her last blog was she was going to try intuitive eating and give up on dieting;
Pasta Queen has been plagued by headaches that no doctor can find a cause or cure for AND she has moved to an apartment complex that doesn't have a walking track right outside the door and has regained about half the weight lost while writing the book;
Diet Girl got married, I think moved to the USA, and is struggling to maintain her weight loss but AFAIK most of it has stayed off (So far). I guess it helps to have a husband who's heavily into sports and exercise;
I haven't read the book but heard that the Finally Thin lady spends a few paragraphs explaining why she chose WW (again - she did the plan multiple times and always regained) and the rest of the book on recipes and the usual generic diet hints (Drink water!). The other books I either never read or read anything about.
You forgot to include the latest "sure fire" thing for weight loss, Beck Diet Plan (write yourself loads of motivational sayings on index cards and read them every time you think of eating).
And of course, there are still dozens of food plans you ignored, such as the low fat starch based vegan ones, the high fat and protein based low carb ones, and everything in-between. The Atkins people just released a new one, with a whole section devoted to combining the 2 - how to do low carb and be vegan.
Do they "work" and cause you to lose weight? I'm sure they *all* do, at least temporarily. But who wants to eat that restricted way for the rest of their lives, having to cut out more and more foods and calories, exercise longer and harder, just to maintain those hard lost pounds? Not me!
Poor Whoopi Goldberg! She is not only hideously ooogly but stupid to boot! ... Today on The View poor ugly Whoopi ... stated that “blacks and whites live in different worlds.”
...Angry White Dude does agree with poor ugly Whoopi that whites do live in a different world than most blacks. While whites are the majority of the population, we are not the majority of criminals. That dishonor goes to blacks who are only 13% of the US population. Whites don’t have children out of wedlock at a rate of over 70%. That “different world” again goes to blacks. School dropouts? Guess who? Welfare recipients as percentage of population? Yep, you know. So I do agree with poor ugly Whoopi that whites and blacks live in different worlds. What a pity!
I’ve had much of my humanity stripped away over the last week, as people discuss me as a concept, more than a person. The Southwest Air incident (or as it’s been called in the more polite corners of the internet, “ChubbyGate”) has hit home with folks, apparently. It became an issue, splitting people into sides - and boy, had I forgotten how much the Flabby are detested. In the last few days, I’ve seen some intense hate-rhetoric online, all stemming from some subtly anti-fat propaganda that made me wonder if Goebbels had really died in the bunker, or if he’d ducked out, came to the states, and gotten a job in Dallas.
"Ha ha haaaa the bad guys
