I was going to add this earlier, but my computer was borked for the better part of the month.
When I come home from town feeling sick thanks to the pollution in the air, I think that’s a pretty good indication that something is seriously wrong. And I don’t even live in a heavily-polluted area.
Every year I ponder making up a list of things I DO NOT WANT and mailing it to my relatives. Then I just know they’d be offended and throw a fit or something and consider me an ingrateful little brat. Each year I find myself a wee bit closer to not caring, but never not-caring enough to actually make up the list.
This year, I’ll blog it. They probably won’t read it (most of them don’t even know I have a blog), but at least I’ll get to vent some aggravation.
1. Miniature figurines of cutesy-wootsie/super-deformed (in a non-Japanese way) and el-Cheapo Asian imports.
"Cutesy" has never been my style, ever. Even when I was a wee Syera watching Care Bears and Smurfs, my natural inclination leaned to something more closely resembling Peter Jackson’s elves’ tastes. Chances are high that if you find it sooooo cuuuuute, it will put me into hypoglycemic shock. It’s not that I don’t like cute per se; I like cute when it’s at a level that one would find actually find in nature. It’s that concentrated, unnatural cuteness that gets me.
Secondly, I don’t really have that much space for more clutter.
On the other hand, a shadow box (or something similar) to put the stuff I already have in would be awesome. Especially if it had a glass front to keep the dust (there is so much dust) out.
2. Bath/Shower Sets.
First off, I don’t bathe - I shower. Secondly… I don’t really use lotion that much. I use so little lotion that the bottles I was given for last Christmas are still sitting unopened in the bathroom.
I also don’t wear perfume, and I don’t really care for makeup. What I do like is Carmex. My lips dry out quite badly in the winter. I can has Carmex, plzkthx? Actually, it turns out Carmex is made with a lot of nasty toxins. (No, it STILL doen’t have glass in it.)
3. Gift cards/certificates
Many people consider money as a gift to be particularly tacky. However, retailers have managed to fool the majority of us into giving exactly that by selling the posher-sounding "gift certificate." In my opinion, gift certificates are the tackier of the two: they make sure the money is tied up at a specific store, rather than allowing the recipient to choose where they want to shop. Giving someone the freedom to pick their own gift kind of fails when the store you’ve lashed them to doesn’t actually have anything they really want in your card’s price range.
4. Art Stuff
Pretty much everyone in the family knows I’m inclined to pick up a pencil and start doodling something. What they don’t realize, however, is that I don’t really care for oil pastels, water colors, or markers. Most of my artistic time is spent drawing concept art for something that will be finalized on the computer.
Give me a set of decent mechanical pencils and/or a sketchbook and I’ll be happy. Really.
5. Puzzles/Board Games
Puzzles and board games may do it for some people, but generally speaking I have more interesting (and/or constructive) ways to fritter away my time.
Puzzles have two great flaws: the first is that they aren’t really practical in a world where five people compete for table space. The second is that I hate putting that much effort into something I’m just going to take apart again.
Board games have one great flaw: they get boring in a real hurry. They’re dreadfully repetative - after playing them a few times they tend to sink into the banality of preparing dinner, except preparing dinner is slightly more interesting. Another problem is that the potential players are usually too busy doing something more interesting and/or more constructive. Like reading Instructables or doing something with their rotary tools.
Welp, that should pretty much cover it. Maybe sometime I’ll get gutsy enough to tell the family. Or maybe I’ll have them read this blog. Maybe…
I’ve known a couple of instances where a vegetarian or vegan will make some kind of “vegetarian dish” that basically comes down to some kind of salad. Then they gloat about how everyone ate their “vegetarian food” without even realizing it was vegetarian. Because non-vegetarians never eat anything without animal products, ever.
It’s like someone on Atkins bringing a pot roast to a dinner and gloating over how everyone is eating the “low carb” food without realizing it.
I haven’t really had anything awesome to post lately. Alas. So I shall post some of my thoughts…
People gorge themselves into carb overload on Thanksgiving - candied sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, stuffing, bread rolls, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie… then they blame their lethargy on the turkey. Silly, eh?
Why do people insist on cooking all that stuff on Thanksgiving, anyway? Nobody needs to eat that much, and you’d save yourself so much stress if you simplified the meal.
Birthdays exist for two reasons:
1. Giving your “friends” and relatives something to forget. Thank you, everyone, for not remembering.
2. Making whiny brats feel entitled to get free crap.
For Christmas, I want nothing that was shipped in from China. Not that I’ll get that lucky.
It’s definite: PeTA couldn’t care less about the environment. Despite howling that ‘meat isn’t green’ on the one hand, they’re telling people to buy products containing rainforest-destroying palm oil. Since PeTA doesn’t care what gets destroyed or hurt as long as there are no animals in the end product, why don’t they just nuke the planet already? A pain-and-cruelty-free Earth! Wouldn’t that be nice?
It astonishes me how someone can grasp that sunlight traveling through a pane of window glass will create more heat, but cannot fathom how releasing gasses that do the exact same thing into the atmosphere could be warming up the planet.
If you believe that fat and cholesterol is responsible for our nation’s health problems, please Google “Inuit paradox.” Thank you.
Start as soon as your child is old enough to consume anything that isn’t milk. Begin with sodas, sugary juices, and fruit-flavored drinks.
As soon as your child is old enough to start chowing down on solid foods, give him all the cookies, crackers, and sugar-frosted cereals he can get down his gullet for snacks. Keep up with the pop and fruit drinks. If you’re worried about your child’s welfare at this point, remember that the Hi-C, Frosted Flakes, and chewy fruit candies are vitamin enriched, so it’s actually good for him.
Add fries, chips, ice cream, ramen noodles, and pastries to your child’s diet. See to it that the child consumes them daily, preferably at every meal. Or better yet, let your child make entire meals of these products. Don’t forget to include Spagetti-O’s, Lunchables, macaroni and cheese, and frozen dinners.
Never say no! Never impose limits! If your child demands candy, give him candy. If he wants the latest snack food he saw on TV with the happy cartoon characters on the box, buy it for him. Let your child eat as much as he wants! If he wants to down the whole bag of chips, let him. If he wants to scarf an entire jumbo candy bar in one sitting, then let him. If he wants to gorge on three or four Big Macs… well, just remember it’s because he’s a growing child and needs all that extra energy.
As your child becomes more rotund, just tell yourself that it’s because he’s big-boned or that he will “grow out of it.”
Leave snack items like chips, crackers, and candies within easy access of the child so he can satiate his rumbling stomach without bothering you. Don’t forget to leave pastries where your child can get to them.
Always remember that those who try to encourage your child to lose weight are just nasty and cruel and don’t understand what it’s like. Explain this to your child.
Do not teach your child any culinary skills more advanced than opening a can of pre-made food and popping its contents into the microwave.
If you follow these steps, then congratulations. You, like millions of other parents out there, will have an uncontrollable junk-food addicted behemoth on your hands. Give yourself a pat on the back!
Cult Diet? What…?
A ‘cult diet’ is basically a search for better health gone wrong: rather than the scientific approach such a journey must have, it follows a quasi-religious path. If something goes wrong, your diet is never to blame; you are. You MUST follow this diet; all others are somehow inferior.
This is a list of symptoms to watch out for. Thanks to Beyond Vegetarian and Orange Papers for information and inspiration.
The source material declares itself to be the only path to optimum health.
This has been shown to be false thousands of times. Any diet that claims otherwise is being dishonest.
The source material makes claims that contradict history and science.
For the record, humans have always been omnivores, and grains and pulses of any substantial degree came into the picture quite late. The notion that a “natural” human diet consists of nothing but raw plant matter is absurd.
The source material makes extravagant claims that do not have scientific backing.
Proponents of some extreme diets claim that their diets will allow you to live “over 100.” So far, this has never happened in practice. Many raw fooders have found themselves unable to stay on long enough to find out. Similarly, diets will also claim to promote “perfect health.” No diet has been proven to promote perfect health in everyone.
The diet is claimed to be “spiritually” superior.
Starvation and malnutrition can trigger hallucinations and delusions. Be careful of claims like these.
If the diet doesn’t work, it’s always the fault of the dieter.
Some will claim that if you fail on their diet, it’s because you did it wrong. Although this may be the case, it may not. If those involved claim that those who have failed are at fault even though there is ample evidence to the contrary, you know there are problems.
As of late we have been encouraged to replace our children’s soft drinks with juice. However, this may not be such a wise decision.
A 12-ounce serving of Coca Cola has 30 carbohydrates. Different sodas have different amounts of sugar, but it’s usually pretty close to this.
Going to NutritionData.com, we find that grapefruit and orange juice has 36g of carbohydrates in twelve ounces. Of course, these are low-glycemic sugars, and therefore are better on your body.
Apple juice comes up again at 36 grams of carbohydrates per twelve ounce serving. Apples are NOT low-glycemic.
Grape juice comes in at a whopping 48 grams. Whoa nelly!
For our apple juice, we are going to use the data for Mott’s 100% apple juice. NutritionData.com doesn’t have it, so we’ll get it from the site. According to Mott’s, a serving is eight ounces - less than a twelve-ounce serving of soda. For eight ounces you have 29 carbs. Okay, let’s divide that by eight… we get 3.625. Okay… multiply that by twelve and you get 43.5. Oy!
Then there are pseudo-juices like Hi-C and Sunny Delight. These add up to 33 and 43.5, respectively.
Here’s what we’ve got:
12 ounces of Coca-Cola: 30g carbohydrates
12 ounces of Orange/Grapefruit Juice: 36g carbohydrates
12 ounces of Apple Juice: 43.5g carbohydrates
12 ounces of Grape Juice: 48g carbohydrates
12 ounces of Sunny Delight: 43.5g carbohydrates
12 ounces of Hi-C: 33g carbohydrates
I’m floored - are you?
It seems that if you’re going to give your child juice, you might as well give them a can of sugary soda and a vitamin pill.
Today we picked up several reusable shopping bags. They were about a dollar apiece - much better than the three dollar price that had been rumored.
After using these bags just once, I can’t think of many reasons I’d want to go back. They hold more. They’re sturdier. the straps don’t dig into your hand the way plastic bag straps do.
In short, I highly recommend reusable bags, and not just because they’re reusable. 
On the final ten-mile stretch home, I couldn’t help but notice how many disposable plastic bags were out caught in weeds and fences. There must have been one for each mile, probably more. And this is a low-population area.
In 1957, Disney showcased an all-plastic ‘House of the Future’ sponsored by Monsanto. Stupid? Yeah. Of course, back then we knew it was only a matter of time before we were all living space-age lives just like the Jetsons. Oil shortages, the effect of plastics on the environment, and energy crises were the last things on peoples’ minds. We had something of an excuse.
But fifty years later, we know better. We know that plastic is harmful and unsustainable, and our early dreams of the future are too energy-intensive to be sustainable.
So what does Disney do? They make a new plastic House of the Future full of electronic gadgets even more stupid and pointless than the first.
No dreams of sustainability dancing through Disney’s head, oh, no. It’s all plastics and stupid electronic novelties. Pop-up faucets. LCD-display pictures hanging on the wall. LCD writing pads. An LCD dining table.
Disney, I am very, very disappointed in you.
You probably weren’t aware that there are two Atkins diets going around - but there are! These two are:
The Atkins Diet: the original diet as created by Dr. Robert Atkins. The Atkins diet emphasizes whole foods and unrefined carbohydrates. In order to do the Atkins diet, one must read up on the research and guidelines as set by Dr. Atkins and his associates.
The OMGATKINS!!! Diet: An extreme variant of the Atkins diet, and a complete media darling. The OMGATKINS!!! diet emphasizes eating pounds of butter on top of 10-ounce steaks, gorging on sausages, and never, ever touching a carb other than what might be in your Ranch dressing. In order to follow OMGATKINS!!!, all one has to do is watch television, wait for a news broadcast condemning the poor misguided souls following it, and do exactly what they’re doing. Alternatively, one can learn the ways of OMGATKINS!!! by reading part of the book, or by learning about part of Atkins from a friend.
Remember, the next time you hear about someone following the “Atkins” diet by eating nothing but steak, sausages, and butter, this is not the Atkins diet. Next time you hear a friend moan and complain that the Atkins diet just didn’t work for them because they couldn’t get enough carbs from their Tyson chicken breading, this is not Atkins. This is the OMGATKINS!!! diet.
The Atkins diet just isn’t newsworthy enough, so the media will always focus on the OMGATKINS!!! diet to make an impact. Unfortunately, the uneducated masses do not know enough to differentiate between the two. But now you do.
FACT: Atkins does not mean that you gorge on huge amounts of meat. There are many healthy fruits, vegetables, and grains. Also, because proteins and fats are more satiating than carbohydrates, people get full sooner and longer on less food.
FACT: Those on Atkins often have lower triglycerides (in healthy levels, too!) than those on the standard American diet - even the ones that don’t skimp on the saturated fats!
FACT: Atkins is flexible! Even vegetarians have successfully adapted the Atkins to their own needs.