When I traveled to Winnipeg last Christmas, I picked up the January 2007 issue of Discover Magazine, which is the annual stories of the year issue. At number 14, a medical story. In the February issue, Killer Fat. Both stories deal with the health effects of transfats - more precisely trans-fatty acids - and their ubiquity in snack foods manufactured with partially hydrogenated vegetable oils.
About six weeks ago, I bought a pair of running shoes. I had been putting on weight over the winter, because I have not been cycling or exercising, except walking to work, and consuming too many calories. I went for a first run on a Saturday afternoon, running over a kilometer, before breaking down and walking for a rest. I ran and walked back, and then I was sore for 3 days. The next weekend I worked on my kayak, pulling the old seat out, which involved lifting and peeling it off the glue - a prolonged resistance exercise. I was sore for another few days. At the end of that week, I was browsing in Munro's Books and found a remaindered copy of The Runner's World Complete Book of Beginning Running. It had a couple of chapters with programs for beginning to run. It looked like a useful book, so it was an easy deal.
It's time to shake up the category list. Social Practice becomes Zombies. In the next few weeks Culture will be folded into Zombies. Politics is Liege & Lief, which is obscure but accurate, with an arcane folk music reference. The old names were too formal, and I had too many subcategories. I will phase out some subcategories, add MT tags to my entries and let the tags lay the trail.
Why Zombies?
Daniel C. Dennett's 2006 book Breaking the Spell, Religion as a Natural Phenomenon reached the bookstores a few months ahead of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion.
I have not been posting regularly since the end of 2005, but I have kept up with Movable Type upgrades. The upgrade to 3.33 or 3.34 involved new features that had previously been implemented by the BigPAPI plugin, and made BigPAPI and plugins that depended on it stop working. I had been using CCode and TCode. I had not installed the new versions of CCode properly. It has to do with adding a script to the head of a template and adding a tag into two or three templates. Registered commenters were getting an error message, as I found out yesterday.
Once I turned off CCode, my junk comment folder began to fill up. That's not a problem - it doesn't get published and I just delete it. It looks like CCode plugin was working and doing its job, which is hiding the blog from spam comment bots. Giving the bots a false return must put a load on my bandwidth, but saves me from having to clean out the junk folder.
AL Daily had a link to the Detroit Free Press online, which ran David Crary's AP book review . The book is getting some buzz - this morning CBC news was running an interview with Jean Twenge, the author of Generation Me, Why Today's Young Americans are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled - and More Miserable than Ever Before. The publisher and the author have done a nice job with this site - a lot of information consolidated in one place. The theme of the book is that all those things that are supposed to boost self-esteem and make kids feel happy about themselves has created a generation of people with a sense of entitlement, persistently dissatisfied. People never feel as happy as they feel entitled to feel.
On that point, AL Daily has been running a link to Michael Shermer's piece in Scientific American, "(Can't Get No) Satisfaction" reviewing the more sensible books among the recent books about happiness. Happiness seems to be making publishers and bookstores happy.
