Adipose Nation

We take a break from the odor to bring you the most useless piece of health "reporting" I have seen in a long time, courtesy of Reuters: All U.S. Adults Could be Overweight in 40 Years.

If the trends of the past three decades continue, it's possible that every American adult could be overweight 40 years from now, a government-funded study projects.

Actually, I shouldn't blame the reporting too much. This is actually some decent reporting on a stupid study. We'll gloss over the "Government-funded" part of the lede (although one wonders how much we paid for what is essentially a graphing and extrapolation problem that a reasonably competent eighth grader could handle) and get to the meat. Extrapolating the trends of the past 30 years out, in 40 more years, every single adult in the US will be overweight.

Kudos to the reporter for pressing the point that this will never actually happen. For one thing, as long as Hollywood is still in the U.S., there will be at least a handful of normal-weight or underweight people. For another, there is almost certainly a point at which anyone who is even slightly susceptible will be overweight. Data on childhood obesity show we may be hitting that point in the younger set, with childhood obesity levels plateauing. The methodology of this "study" is akin to a quote I heard some time ago (which appears to be Google-proof, so I can't source it), "At the rate the Mississippi River is growing, in 100 years, it will reach Brazil."

There is a batter-dipped nugget of truth hiding in the article, though. Overweight is becoming normal, something I have become particularly conscious of as my depenguification efforts get me closer to the clinically Healthy weight range.

It has been an interesting transformation, psychologically. When I started my depenguification last November, I was 45 pounds from "normal." That seemed like a LOT in raw numbers, and even more in the mirror. Having always been heavy, but with a frame that tends to wear extra pounds about as well as they can be worn, I had difficulty seeing where the 45 pounds could be hiding. In the supermarket dairy aisle, 45 boxes of butter seemed like a huge volume, and it didn't seem like there was room for that much excess fat anywhere on my body without evicting a spleen. And that was just to get to a BMI of 24.9, when the Healthy range is 18.5-25.

I have since found and lost 38 of those pounds. Believe me, they were there, and now that I am 7 pounds from the upper edge of the Healthy BMI range, I can definitely see where the rest are, too. Here is where the tale takes a turn to the shallow. For a while, I was going to be content with having lost around 20 pounds. That put me at about the weight I was at when I graduated high school, and 20 pounds is nothing to sneeze at. Sure, I was still clinically overweight, but no longer in the obese range. It seemed like nice progress. Then, Emp. Peng. and I rented The Transformers DVD. There is a scene where Megan Fox, wearing something that barely qualifies as a halter top, raises the hood of the Camero and leans in. In that moment, I decided I wanted that tummy. I told you it was shallow. I realize that I have about as much chance of achieving the physique of #16 on Maxim's Hot 100 list as my Mr. Potato Head has of achieving sentience and winning the Nobel Prize in Physics. Still, there was proof that such a tummy was possible for someone. There is an outside chance I could at least get close. If nothing else, there was a target to shoot for.

That is the danger, as much as the health concerns resulting from a 100% overweight population, if the trend line continues. Our perception of normal gets distorted (and yes, I see the irony here that my Dream Tummy is not normal either, being under the healthy weight range). When we re-normalize physiques so that overweight is the new average, we lose the ability to perceive what a healthy-weight body should look like. When I first started my depenguification efforts and declined offers of unhealthy foods with the comment that I was trying to lose some weight, the almost universal reaction was "You don't look like you need to lose weight." Mind you, at the time, I was clinically obese. I can't discount that such comments were mere politeness, but that does strike me as anecdotal evidence that, even at the current rates of overweight and obesity, we are getting to be terrible judges of what healthy builds look like.

Skunk Saga, Chapter III

OK, it seems there are some pros and cons to ignoring a skunk carcass in the hostas and hoping it goes away. On the plus side, it actually did go away. The prospect of having to inter the aft portion of a deceased skunk kept me up most of Saturday night, but by Sunday morning, there was naught but a tuft of black and white fur where the skunk had met its end. Relieved of the duty of skunk mortician, I went about my business until Monday night, when, in the middle of watching Friday night's episode of Stargate: Atlantis on the TiVo, Emp. Peng. and I noticed a certain unmistakable odor wafting through the living room, seemingly originating near the window air conditioner. The aroma also settled into his office, which has a window located carcass-adjacent. This was, to put it mildly, not good. However, there was nothing I was going to do about it at 10:30 p.m., so we set the Ionic Breeze up to try to clear the odor out of the office and once again resorted to the "Ignore it and hope it goes away" tactic.

Once again, the strategy worked. By morning, the odor was gone, as were any remaining skunk fragments. Life was good and fresh. Until about 10:30 p.m. that night, when the smell was back, bigger than before. This time, I hit the porch light to get a visual inspection, fully expecting to see that the skunk had a relative taking its revenge on us. It was a somewhat more distant relative than I expected. There, just off the stoop, was a fully three-dimensional and mobile opossum, apparently looking around for anything he had missed. Opossums being carrion-eaters, it is a reasonable conjecture that he is the one who extracted the skunk carcass for me. I suspect it is also reasonable that he did not take care to avoid the scent glands and is now roaming the area bathed in a full dose of skunk musk.

The thing I am learning about skunk musk (other than that I am in the minority of the population that doesn't find it an offensive odor): it lingers. After two nightly passes from the Bearer of The Skunk Musk, there is a persistent, faint skunkiness around the entire front of the house. I expect that at this point, it is a matter of waiting for it to dissipate naturally, since there is no fixed point-source of the problem.

It does give me a good idea for a home security system to deter the door-to-door religion salespeople and trick-or-treaters, though. You take an infrared detector and a vial...

Nice run while it lasted

So much for Woodrow's friend. I'm not a wildlife expert, but that sure looks like a skunk carcass between the hostas and the dicentra. Not that I'm planning on getting up close to check for sure that he hasn't just found a really odd place for a skunk to take a nap. For that matter, it's a really odd place for a skunk to keel over.

This, of course, leaves me with an interesting problem--namely a skunk carcass about 10 feet from my front door--that is only going to get worse if scavengers don't find it soon. Suggestions?

Five Things Fast Food Restaurants and Strip Clubs Have In Common

1. The product looks much better in the ads
2. Stupid, yet practical (for the job) dress code for employees
3. Both take care of basic biological needs in the most unsatisfying way possible
4. In spite of bad reputations, they manage to stay in business
5. Los Angeles is limiting where the establishments can be located.

The fast food restaurant folks are not any happier about #5 than the strip club owners are.

The Marmota Brought A Friend

Woodrow has been making daily foraging runs to the orchard lately, and he seems to have found company. This morning, I looked out the window and saw a skunk wandering across the side yard.

Greetings, ICBD Readers

Since Emp. Peng. pointed the internet to me as the Rookery's resident expert on the Large Hadron Collider (and I would like to point out that, outside the Rookery, I am not much of an expert on the topic), I figured I should provide the rundown of the reasons that the LHC will not annihilate the planet. Actually, I will provide a link to an actual astronomer who has actually gone to the LHC, explaining why the LHC will not annihilate the planet. And a link to his followup post. While I am at it, I'll give a tip o' the beak to Phil Plait, my favorite blogger to whom I am not married. He has a marvelous way of making physics and astronomy comprehensible to those of us who decided not to take calculus.

There are two main reasons some people think the LHC may obliterate the planet. First, the collider may create little black holes, and having one of those on Earth is probably not a good idea, as far as the continued existence of the planet goes. For the second potential doomsday scenario, the collider might create theoretical particles called strangelets, and if too many strangelets get together, it will be like the Tribble episode of Star Trek, except that instead of William Shatner getting buried by Space Gerbils, all matter in the vicinity--including William Shatner, us, and any space- or Earth-based gerbils--gets converted into theoretical particles. Neither one of these is a cause for concern, though. The folks running the LHC, who would be right in the thick of any annihilation, aren't worried about it, and they understand the math behind why they are not. Since I do not understand the math, I will defer to them. The non-math-intensive reasons they are not concerned:

1. The physics that would allow for the creation of black holes in the LHC also require that the black holes evaporate. The physics that would allow for a black hole to not evaporate instantly do not allow for the creation of black holes under the circumstances that the LHC will provide. Either we get black holes that go poof! or no black holes at all. Whichever way it ends up, we are pretty much safe from finding out firsthand what spaghettification feels like. And, yes, "spaghettification" is the technical term for what happens when you are subjected to a massive gravity fields and your feet get attracted to the gravity well faster than your head.

2. No one is entirely certain strangelets are real. In the event that they are real, better circumstances than the LHC for creating them exist naturally on the Moon. Since the Moon has not been converted into Theoretical Space Gerbil Particles, odds are we won't be either when the LHC gets up to speed.

Now, Here's An Interesting Development

The key ingredient for my Scoop of Bliss grows wild at the fringes of my yard. I'm looking at taming some into a hedge, but that is not the point of this post. The point of this post is that I discovered recently that my primary black raspberry patch is conveniently located directly inside a patch of poison ivy. The strange thing is, I discovered this by identifying the vines running 25 feet up adjacent pine trees and noticing that the same stuff was growing in a much shorter form in the berry patch--the berry patch I have been wading knee-deep in for two weeks now, wearing shorts until a few days ago when I got tired of the thorn scratches. I have gotten scratches and mosquito bites aplenty picking the berries, but nary a hint of any sort of painful, blistering rash.

Random Conversations over Overpriced Gas

After filling my tummy with a soft pretzel at Sam's Club--for reasons yet to be determined, Sam's has the best soft pretzels this side of Philly--I headed over to fill up the car. I have no idea how people with huge cars deal with that task. My Prius has a 10 gallon tank. Any bigger than that, and I would have to bring along a sudoku to the filling station. Today, the job of alleviating my pump boredom fell to further observances of fuel cap placement as it relates to the automobile's country of origin. I am in a long-term observational project to determine a pattern to whether a gas cap is placed on the driver's or passenger's side. I was so engrossed in contemplating the Ford behind me that--contrary to most of my observations to date--had the gas cap on the passenger side, that I did not notice the man in his early 60s on the opposite side of the pump from me, staring at my chest.

Guys staring at my chest is not usually a blogworthy occurrence. I get that a lot (thanks, Mom, wink). This guy was different, though. Rather than trying to pretend he did not see me noticing what he was up to, he actually initiated conversation with, "I was just reading your shirt."

I had to look down to see which shirt he was talking about. After all, who remembers what shirt they put on? This morning, in my pre-coffee bleariness, I had pulled on my shirt advertising Austin Grossman's novel, Soon I Will Be Invincible. On the front, it has emblazoned in big letters, "This is what a supervillan looks like." Emp. Peng. has the other one in the set, "This is what an evil genius looks like." I borrow that one for Mensa meetings sometimes. The man in the Men's Garden Club baseball cap continued, "So that is what one looks like."

Yup. A gal pushing 30, leaning against an aqua Prius and shaking the last remnants of a brain freeze from the 4-berry milkshake that didn't taste half as good as the black raspberry ice cream. The quintessential supervillian. I answered with the only thing I could come up with on short notice. "Of course. If we looked like we look in the comics, people would find us."

Scoop of Bliss

This works best (read: at all) if you have access to fresh or frozen blackcaps. They grow wild here at the Rookery. With fairly constant access to the main ingredient for several weeks, I am starting to resume my former penguinesque physique. I won't say it is necessarily worth it, but it is gooooood.

2 cups black raspberries (if using frozen, thaw and keep the juices)
1 squeeze lemon or key lime juice
3/4 cup + 3 tablespoons sugar
2 cups heavy whipping cream
2 eggs (or 1/2 cup pasteurized egg-in-a-carton if you're going to be a wuss about salmonella)
1 splash (about 1/4 cup) milk

Toss the raspberries with the lemon or lime juice and 3 tablespoons sugar and let sit for 1 hour. Raspberry juice will start to leak out. After an hour, stir the berries and run them through a blender for a few seconds to get berry puree. Set the puree aside for a moment. Run 2 eggs through the blender until well beaten, then add 3/4 cup sugar and pulse for a few seconds longer to combine. In a medium bowl, combine the egg/sugar mix, the whipping cream, and the splash of milk. Add the berry puree. Freeze in an ice cream freezer until the paddle stops spinning. Serve with a side of defibrillator paddles.

Marmota Watch Update

After an extended absence that made me wonder if he had succumbed to predation, Woodrow has shown his fuzzy snout again. Seems that he was just waiting for the midsummer buffet to start. Yesterday, he was perched under the apple tree nibbling the June drops. He even made a foray over to the pear tree, looking for his preferred foodstuff--when both trees are dropping fruit, he keeps the area under the pear trees clean enough to eat off--but seeing none, scampered back to his den. Lucky for me, Woodrow does not seem to have figured out that groundhogs can climb trees. That, or like so many of the varmints around here, he is just inherently lazy and figures he can wait for the fruit to come down to him. That is much the same strategy as I used when deciding whether I should bother to learn to walk.

Emp. Peng. Has a Blog

Check it out. Now I will definitely have to start posting more regularly. He is not instituting the PG-13 rule I have here at Penguin Perspectives, so be prepared for some occasional Language We All Use Yet Pretend People Are Too Delicate To Hear.

I Have Seen The Future, and it is Spoutless

The very day this article appears in the New York Times touting a new environmentally friendly redesign of the milk jug, I happened to be at Sam's Club--one of the early adopters of the new jug design--and in need of milk. Welcome to the future of your milk jug, folks:

Here at Penguin Perspectives, we strive to do all the awkward stuff first, so you don't have to wind up on the great cosmic blooper reel. In that spirit, here's a rundown of the new milk jug experience.

The new design eliminates the little plastic ring around the cap, replacing it with a foil under-seal. The difference is that I needed a fork to get the ring off and a knife to get the foil seal off. The pour experience, much maligned in the NYTimes article, is on par with a lemonade pitcher. As a matter of fact, if you can hit a glass pouring liquid out of a pitcher, the new jugs won't be much of a challenge. The milk aperture is a little on the wide side and there is not a lot of headspace, making flow control on the first pour or two somewhere between "dicey" and "nonexistent." I made my first experimental pour into a juice cup, and while I did not spill, I had filled the 8-ounce cup with my first slosh out of the carton. The flow control got better once there was about an inch and a half of space between the top of the jug and the milk level. In sum, don't try to add milk to your morning coffee out of a newly-opened jug if you would like the milk:coffee ratio to remain tilted in favor of coffee. In future jugs, I will check to see if merely punching a pour hole into the foil underseal fixes that problem.

With the new jug design lacking more than a vestigial spout, I had assumed that my days drinking straight from the carton were over. Not so. It takes considerably more lower lip dexterity, but still a manageable feat. And no, I don't drink from the carton when we have guests at the Rookery. Then, I get a glass.

Bucket Not Included

Polish and Canadian researchers have determined that 90% of people can carry a tune. The data were obviously not collected on Karaoke Night.

I really must stop being annoyed by this

So this afternoon, I'm at the sink draining a can of chunk light tuna in water (and as a side note, when did "chunk" tuna stop having chunks in it larger than individual tuna cells?) when I see the notice on the side of the can:

Allergy warning: contains tuna

If that is what it takes for a tuna-allergic customer to realize he or she is about to embark on a tunapalooza, rather than, say, the big letters on the front of the can that say "Tuna" or the big sign that says "Tuna" over the shelf display in the supermarket...well, there is a fine line between deserving a Darwin Award and asking for one.

Headline Sampler Platter--Because With Food Prices Like This, You Can't Afford the Entree

Honey bee crisis could lead to higher food prices

Midwest flood may cover nation in higher food prices

Costly corn creeping into grocery prices

Before the midwest went underwater, the news was abuzz with how much the skyrocketing cost of fuel was adding to the grocery bill. Maybe the media should save some time and energy, and tell me what isn't making my milk cost more every time I go to the store.

Either that, or we all take a lesson from this headline from KHNL in Honolulu, Hawaii: Rising Costs of Food Leave Some Looking for Other Options. Other options to food are starting to look better and better every week that I go grocery shopping. Oh, and note to Hawaiians: having eaten poi, I can confidently say that you guys have already found another option to food.

I Am The Queen of Dorkopolis

Tonight, Emp. Peng. and I got invited to a wingding where, among other things, they were serving jello shots and pudding shots. I have a glancing familiarity with jello shots, although (as will become clear in a moment) I have never actually imbibed one. Pudding shots, though, were a new one on me. Apparently, they are sort of like a dollop of chocolate mousse spiked with Bailey's Irish Cream. I was curious, so I got one.

It was not for another three hours that I found out one is not supposed to eat them with a spoon.

Waddling in Memphis

Emp. Peng. and I were migratory again last weekend, this time to Memphis. It was not a destination of our choosing, and (with respect to any Memphibians out there) not really a place we would go back to. That does not mean it is completely without its charms. A few lessons learned:

1. Elvis had, um, interesting tastes in interior decorating. While I do not intend to implement it in the Rookery, green shag carpet actually works surprisingly well as a ceiling cover.
2. Tequilla bad. Very bad.
3. Barbecue good. Very good.
4. When the Purveyor of Barbecue offers a bib, take it.
   
5. Do not ask the Purveyor of Barbecue for butter. You will not get it.
   

One night, we went to a place called Jim Neely's Interstate Barbecue for dinner. Emp. Peng. and I both had the Sampler Platter, described on the menu as "A Trip to Hog Heaven! Pork Ribs, Beef Ribs, Links, Beef Brisket, Pork Shoulder, B-B-Q Spaghetti, Beans, Slaw and Bread." One of our dining companions described it as "Almost as good as sex." The meat really is that good, and that messy. Having gnawed through approximately 1/3 of a mammal worth of meat, leaving a stack of bones in a puddle of grease and barbecue sauce, Emp. Peng. asked the waitress for a bit of butter to go with his bread, only to be told "We don't do butter here. It's bad for you."

"Bad for you" seems to be the guiding principle of Southern cuisine, where the Official Appliance is the Fry Daddy. I am not sure it is legal to serve something south of the Mason-Dixon line that does not contain lard, bacon grease, or both. The only vegetable I saw the whole time there was the dish of cole slaw served with the Sampler Platter, and even that was drowning in enough mayonnaise to cause a coronary event in a small whale. We did see some fruit, both at the continental breakfast and between two slices of Wonder Bread slathered in Skippy, coated in butter and grilled to a golden brown (BTW, yummy, but I can see how it would kill a man).

Given that, Emp. Peng. considered butter an odd place to draw the line.

Are Penguins an Aphrodesiac or Something?

News story from Reuters today is headlined, "Antarctica Base Gets 16,500 Condoms Before Darkness," and while that would seem like a fairly self-explanatory headline, the reporter does point out that this is a year's supply for McMurdo Base.

Let's do the math. 16,500 divided by 365 works out enough prophylactics for 132 encounters per day, every day, or 264 scientists not watching the penguins on a daily basis. In the winter, that is more than are actually at McMurdo. Even for the summer population of 1,000, that is a lot of pair bonding.

Apparently, being surrounded by an ice shelf and two penguin colonies is better than oysters or powdered rhino horn. I bet the oysters and the rhinos like it better, too.

Maybe It's the Lips?

I may be something of a city girl, inasmuch as I prefer to vacation in facilities where the walls are made of wall, but I am somewhat sanguine in the ways of the meat. While I have never personally slaughtered a chicken, I know where McNuggets come from. Bad example. I don't think anyone, including Ray Kroc, knows where McNuggets come from. Let's just say that I am under no delusions that boneless, skinless chicken breasts sprout in little styrofoam trays at the supermarket. While I promised Emp. Peng. that the Rookery would be a "no livestock" zone (the resident cat lumps often straining the definition of "live," let alone "stock"), I have no compunction about paying someone else to raise my livestock for me. No omnivore does, but in my case, I pay the person directly.

The farmer I get my beef from is branching out into poultry. Yesterday I put dibs on 4 chickens that Kathy tells me will be free range if they ever get up the bird cajones to leave the barn. As part of the dibs-calling process, Kathy walked me through the per-chicken costs ($1.75 to slaughter and de-entrail them, 10 cents for whatever "De-necking" means, etc.). Since these will be custom slaughtered per pre-order, I have options about whether I want my birds whole, split, quartered, or the seven-piece cut.

Hold the phone. Seven pieces? Chickens, like most birds, mastered bilateral symmetry ages ago. Draw a line down the middle of a chicken, and you end up with one of everything on each side. That should leave an even number of chicken parts. We can't figure out what that seventh piece is.

Get out the Ear Floss

Emp. Peng. is a member of the National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors--NAIFA for short. Tonight, the local group had a wingding at the local theater, with hors d'ouvres and a social hour in the basement of the local theater, then a night of live improv comedy. He had told the theater usher to direct anyone here for the NAIFA event downstairs. About a half hour after the social hour had started, we were wondering why more people were not there. Turns out the usher thought that downstairs was where the theater was holding the NAFTA event.