The drug consumption rooms of Denmark...

"... where adults with serious addictions can bring their illegal drugs and take them, legally, under the watchful eye of a nurse."

Inside, to the left, behind a huge window, is cluster of smokers with improvised pipes, enveloped in haze. To the right is a long, stainless steel table where several people sit, injecting themselves with heroin, cocaine or both. Some finish and leave quietly. A few slump over the table, asleep. One man gets up and paces frantically back and forth, swearing and shouting. In the middle of it all, sits a nurse in street clothes, calmly taking in the scene.

Every day, these nurses witness up to 800 injections.

What could be less sexy than "Sex as Exercise"?

Other than the horrid illustration accompanying the article "Sex as Exercise."

I loathe the present-day tendency to frame everything in terms of health. Sex is exercise. Food is medicine. Medicinal marijuana.

Surely we could use some analysis of whether our obsession with health is... unhealthy.

"Since 1965, women with children have logged increasingly more time watching television and driving..."

"... and increasingly less time playing with children, doing chores, and exercising, according to a new report published this week in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings."

In 1965, mothers of children aged 5 to 18 spent 14.2 more hours a week being physically active than being sedentary. In 2010, they spent 3.8 more hours a week being sedentary than they did on physical activity.

Interesting, but why did they put driving in the same category with watching TV? Because one sits to do it? Chauffeuring the kids around used to count as one of the child-rearing tasks. I suspect the reclassification has to do with the focus on the woman getting enough exercise. We're so much less concerned with what's good for children that helping them get to their various events and social occasions is equated with lolling about in a recliner.

And why was "playing with children" seen as physically active? Much playing with children involves sitting around while they do things with toys and games. Building blocks, dressing dollies, playing Candyland and Old Maid, operating the electric train — these were all done sitting down. Yeah, there are those running and jumping around kids' games that we played in the 60s — tag, hopscotch, monkey-in-the-middle — but Mommy didn't play those games. It would have been bizarre for Mom to join in on, say, jump rope.

Much of the work of raising children has to do with simply being present and watchful over long periods of time. It's not an exercise routine. If Mother is concerned about burning calories she's probably less vigilant. I grew up in the 1950s and 60s, and my mother didn't play with me. But she was around, relatively nearby when I played. Kids played with kids. Go out and play. Find something to do. And we did. Whether she sat down and whether that sitting involved a TV doesn't matter. It so happens that my mother stood, read the newspaper, and listened to the radio. But you see my point: Child-rearing is not an exercise routine, and our present-day focus on adults getting exercise should be kept separate.

People today are really confused, it seems to me in my old age.

"Bad Eating Habits Start in the Womb."

According to the NYT.

I'm choosing to post this now because I believe in the value of the unborn comments within you readers.

Professor Nutt has a new drug, to get you drunk without drinking.

"Nutt, a neuropsychopharmacologist at Imperial College London and former drugs advisor to the U.K. government, said the drug would be consumed as a cocktail drink and targets neurotransmitters in the brain to mimic the pleasurable effects of drunkenness...."

"I’ve done the prototype experiments myself many years ago, where I’ve been inebriated and then it’s been reversed by the antagonist [i.e., antidote]," Nutt told the BBC. “That’s what really gave us the idea. There’s no question that you can produce a whole range of effects like alcohol by manipulating the brain.... I think this would be a serious revolution in health ... just like the e-cigarette is going to revolutionize the smoking of tobacco... I find it weird that we haven't been speaking about this before, as it's such a target for health improvement."

Nutt is seeking funding, but I don't think he'll get it. For one thing, wouldn't the government need to approve this drug and wouldn't it say no? Another thing is, drinking has a whole culture to it, which gives it a social and political acceptability that you'd never get for a new drug that gets you high. Drugs aren't supposed to get you high. That might be an acceptable side effect, but it can't be the end itself. You need some tradition behind your recreational drugs. That's why eventually they'll allow us to use marijuana and not just for the medicinal use. A tradition has developed around it over the years.

"This is where the obesity-as-disease concept leads us – to a situation in which people demand that medicine shoulder the responsibility."

Karen Hitchcock, an Australian doctor who works in a bariatric surgery clinic, writes about the medicalization of the obesity problem.

I ask a young 200-kilo [440-pound] patient what he snacks on. “Nothing,” he says. I look him in the eye. Nothing? He nods. I ask him about his chronic skin infections, his diabetes. He tears up: “I eat hot chips and fried dim sims and drink three bottles of Coke every afternoon. The truth is I’m addicted to eating. I’m addicted.” He punches his thigh.


Addicted. The word is useless in my clinic, a mere barrier to any hope of self-determined change. My patient is not addicted; he’s a very lonely, unemployed young man who has gradually become socially isolated to the extent that the only thing available to him for comfort and entertainment is food. He has no friends, no money to buy other consumables, little education, no partner, no job. Some days he doesn’t leave his bed. The choice for him is to eat this food or experience no pleasure. The surgeon and I discuss his situation, concerned that he may overeat after the band has been fitted. We tell him that surgery may not be appropriate for him, given his situation. The patient is perturbed. “Well, what are you going to do for me if you won’t do the operation? Don’t you have some kind of ethical responsibility to help me lose weight?”...

For whatever reason, the majority of human beings respond to advertisements inviting them to enter a pleasure state by eating a day’s worth of calories in one sitting, again and again. In the face of this, we are stuffed. We could say, “You are free agents, totally free, so pay for your own consequences.” We could make people pay at the point of choice, via a food tax, or we could limit choice. The other option, always unspoken, is: let us have our cake. Let’s just eat and eat, get fatter and fatter, and work out how best to live with it. This is where we are heading now: fatness, outside of morality, as an accepted consequence of the world as we have made it.

Much more to consume at the link. 

"Don’t you just wish you were a dog, sometimes? Don’t you wish that all your intellectual human knowledge about sanitation..."

"... and all that ingrained human near-instinctive revulsion at dirt and contamination would just vanish in an instant, so you’d be free? Free of shame, free of rules, just able to eat anything you want whenever you want, to roll around on your kitchen floor and come up with a faceful of ketchup dribblings, then lie there and lazily lick it off your chin? Nobody’s watching. Nobody’s here. You can do it. You can do it right now. You’re free. You’re free."

Exactly how many cups of coffee to drink, taking all the pro-coffee and anti-coffee study results into account.

The answer is: 3.

"We think of it as the best thing in the world... and they think of it as toxic and nasty and disgusting."

We = organic farmers. They = U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

It = shit.

"Nicholas Mevoli on Sunday upon surfacing from a record attempt. He died a short time later."

Photo caption.

“Water is acceptance of the unknown, of demons, of emotions, of letting go and allowing yourself to flow freely with it,” Mr. Mevoli wrote in a blog post in June. “Come to the water willing to be consumed by it but also have confidence that your ability will bring you back.”

Confidence... but there is a rapture of the deep, nitrogen narcosis, which "may have prompted Mr. Mevoli to disregard symptoms of danger and suddenly renew his quest to dive deeper."

He paused and seemed to turn back toward the surface at 68 meters, or 223 feet, but then turned around and proceeded to dive deeper. 

"All of the effects of alcohol are sort of amplified with age."

For a lot of reasons.

"No, the [Chick-fil-A] CEO did not jump out of the hidey-hole slide, point at me... and yell 'You're one of the gays!' as I had imagined."

Writes Carolyn O'Laughlin, the Director of Residence Life at Sarah Lawrence College, in The Wall Street Journal (which I'm reading because a reader emailed asking what the author's point is, whether her position as Director of  Residence Life at Sarah Lawrence College is relevant to that point, and why The Wall Street Journal is publishing this sort of thing).

O'Laughlin is a member of a 4-person family consisting of 2 adult women and 2 male children, and they're on a road trip where they want to stop at the restaurant with a play area, and it happens to be a Chick-fil-A, which she put on her "list of places to avoid" when its CEO "went on record indicating his support for only families that meet the 'biblical definition of the family unit.'"

But O'Laughlin has a moderate approach to using her spending power to nudge businesses. She wanted to favor J.C. Penney, for using Ellen DeGeneres and "families like ours" in their advertising, but there was a pothole in the parking lot, so she went somewhere else, and she'd like to reward Starbucks, but it's overpriced, so she snubs it.

Noting that life is "complicated" and you've got to see the "nuance" and be "practical," she goes to the Chick-fil-A, buys the food, but hates the atmosphere — not because it's anti-gay, but it's noisy and chaotic (because of the very play area that made her overcome her political aversion to the place).

"Let's get out of here." I say to my boys.... Standing outside, my wife and I look around with road-trip decision paralysis. A kind Chick-fil-A employee comes toward us with four trays. "Y'all could sit on these if you'd like," she says. We smile, thank her, and set up a picnic on the grassy island between the parking lots of Chick-fil-A and Burger King. We're having it our way.

So what's the point? It seems to me that the point is that life is complicated, and we make individual choices to suit our own needs and tastes, some of which include politics and morality, and part of what we get to choose is how hardcore we want to be about where we go and what we buy. Also, the lower-down employees of a company are individuals with their own lives, making their own choices, just like you, and it's good for everyone to remember that.

This not the point of the article, but just something I'd like to add: Picnicking at ground level in a parking lot is not a good idea. Not only is it unfair to the business that has provided tables and chairs and wants to project an image of tidiness, but it's not a clean place to eat. Grassy does not equal clean. Grass doesn't magically repel the filth from the cars, and it attracts dog poop, human sputum, and dog and human pee.

Good luck getting the trans fat out of microwave popcorn.

If the FDA proposal goes through. It's not easy.

"We've mastered it, and I'm not going to tell you how we did it," says a spokesperson for Orville Redenbacher (AKA ConAgra.) It took them 4 years "a lot of money." So... another win for Orville, that crafty geezer.

Time to end Halloween.

Really this is the last straw. No, not Michelle Obama saying "Kids Will One Day Trick-or-Treat for Vegetables."

This lady, thinking she's got "the spirit of Halloween":

The woman who answered the door was wearing an apron covered in blood and had a mask covering her mouth and was waving a fake knife. She had a table out and on it were things like hearts and intestines and mince....

The woman reportedly grabbed one of the girl’s hands and gave her one of the hearts, and the children thought it was a fake heart. After placing the lamb’s heart – which was wrapped in a plastic bag – into the children’s hands, the woman picked up a fake knife and chased after the group.

Now, seriously, why isn't that the spirit of Halloween? How are people supposed to know how to do a night of transgressiveness that's scary and creepy, but just the right way?

I never want to read another story about a little kid that went as a KKK guy, when it's just completely normal to go as Satan. He didn't get on the right wavelength of EVIL. You can be Attila the Hun but not Hitler. You're supposed to understand that. When you are 7.

Come on, time to quit altogether. Why are we handing out candy? Why are we answering the door at night to strangers? Why are we sending kids around to the houses of strangers? Why are we publicizing children's costumes mistakes? It no longer makes any sense as anything other than a party time for adults. End Halloween.

"No place on earth celebrates the loogie quite like China does."

"At any given moment in China, there are millions of people hawking enormous globs of phlegm and expelling them in great cascading arcs until they splatter on streets and sidewalks. It’s done for medicinal reasons, a way of expelling bad elements from the body. The government has observed that westerners find the habit strange and more than a little icky and so they’ve undertaken a campaign to stifle the spitting. I can only hope that they fail. Having grown up in a loogie-sensitive culture, to suddenly encounter a nation of hurling spitballs is one of those up-is-down, black-is-white experiences that periodically makes traveling so gratifying. I should note that I mean that in the broad, philosophical sense and not as an endorsement of spitballs and the like."

Said Maarten Troost in 2008 in an interview about his then-newest book "Lost on Planet China," which I'm just noticing today along with his now-newest book "Headhunters on My Doorstep: A True Treasure Island Ghost Story" and his 2006 book "Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu."

As you may know, I'm addicted to listening to audiobooks to get to sleep. (I use this small under-pillow speaker so Meade doesn't have to hear it.) I have about 100 audiobooks, but only about 10 of them are really any good for falling asleep. I've listened to some of the books hundreds of times because they work so well for me, for various reasons. I need a gentle voice. Fiction never works because it's always read dramatically on these recordings and because if you drift away from the thread of the story and come back it's hard to reconnect. It needs to be interesting sentence by sentence and also out of context. One of the books that has worked — over and over — is Troost's "The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific."

Looking for some new sleepable books, I saw there were 3 other books — with the same narrator — and I bought them all.

The quote at the top of the post might remind you of the chapter about China in David Sedaris's new book "Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls," which I also use, in audiobook form, for sleeping, even though its usefulness for that purpose is undercut by the musical bumpers between chapters and, in at least one chapter, noise from a live audience. Unlike Troost, Sedaris isn't enigmatically bemused about phlegm:

I saw wads of phlegm glistening like freshly shucked oysters on staircases and escalators. I saw them frozen into slicks on the sidewalk and oozing down the sides of walls. It often seemed that if people weren’t spitting they were coughing without covering their mouths, or shooting wads of snot out of their noses. This was done by plugging one nostril and using the other as a blowhole. “We Chinese think it’s best just to get it out,” a woman told me over dinner one night. She said that, in her opinion, it’s disgusting that a Westerner would use a handkerchief and then put it back into his pocket.

“Well, it’s not for sentimental reasons,” I told her. “We don’t hold on to our snot forever. The handkerchief’s mainly a sanitary consideration.”

"A growing trend to leave salt off the table in restaurants should fill me with satisfaction."

"I have said for years that it doesn’t belong there. In a restaurant, the chef should determine the seasoning of the food, and you may judge the restaurant on the choices made. If you want to decide for yourself, eat at home. Salt no more belongs on a table than do cloves or cinnamon or, for that matter, pepper.

But Mark Kurlansky — author of the book "Salt: A World History" — is not happy about this trend.

"What Happens When You Stand For 2 Years."

"I didn’t develop any knee, foot, back, or hip pains. I don’t feel exhausted at the end of the day or week.... My posture improved. My neck and shoulders no longer pitch forward. My legs became more muscular. I no longer get back pain...."

I enjoyed reading that. You know I'm a big fan of my motorized sit/stand desk, and I need more reason to opt for the up position.

Somehow, this topic got me around to buying an Indo Board IndoFLO Balance Stimulator. It hasn't arrived yet, but I'll let you know how it works out. This video influenced me. (If you are younger/more athletic, consider this.)

"Your Unhealthy Love For Public Health..."

"... In 14 Images."

"You know, it's hard to die. It takes a long time, and it's not easy to get killed."

A Rush Limbaugh pronouncement, made the other day, that's stuck with me. I like it out of context, but here's the context:

People in this country have been so bombarded with "This is gonna kill you and that's gonna make you sick," or "this genetic trait's gonna kill you" or whatever, the people of this country have been so bombarded with the fact that they're gonna die tomorrow that they think the only way to stay alive is to have health insurance.

This has been one of the biggest scams that's ever been perpetrated on the people of this country.  I am not kidding you.  I honestly believe this.  Now, I know some of you are shouting, "Hey, Rush, don't downplay this.  Health is a big thing."  I know it is, but, you know, it's hard to die.  It takes a long time, and it's not easy to get killed.  When it happens, those are rare criminal examples, but they're not the result of lifestyle choices.  There's no insurance policy -- go talk to this poor kid in Duncan, Oklahoma.  There's not one insurance plan he could have had that would have kept him alive because the culture killed him.  And the same thing with Shorty.

It's hard to die... but the culture killed him.

Don't wash the chicken.

You're going to cook the chicken, but rinsing it off while it's raw disperses germs into the air and onto various surfaces. Take a look:

What are you going to do?
	I was never a chicken washer anyway, and now I'm steeled in my old ways.
	I always knew about this problem and have been advising others not to wash for years.
	Others pushed me into washing, so I'm glad to know now that I don't have to.
	I will now win the household fights about whether or not to rinse the chicken.
	I've been a rinser and now I'm going to stop.
	I've been rinsing so long that it's hard to admit I was wrong, and I'm not sure what I'll do.
	I'm a chicken-rinser and I'm not stopping now.
	That link goes to NPR. They say don't rinse the chicken, I say: Rinse the chicken!
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