Tag: privacy

To the Lady in Workout Clothes ahead of me at the Grocery Store

Hey dear, let me tell you why you’re never going to lose that 10 to 20 pounds around your hips and waist and why your hubby is never going to lose the gut unless you change your ways.

I’m not going to put all the blame on the expensive whole wheat crap that you think is good for you, even though you should probably only eat half that at most, and even though there is a case to be made for that being your biggest problem. Many experts think that’s good stuff, but you still should put some of it back on the shelf.

I’m not going to be too hard on you for the gallon of frozen yogurt. Again, you think you’re doing the right diet thing, even though it’s still got far too much sugar in it to be truly healthy. Maybe you only eat a tablespoon a day? Maybe I wasn’t close enough to see that it was one of those fat-free or sugar-free chemistry sets masquerading as real food?

I’m not going to put all the blame on the plentiful sports drinks in your cart, even though there is simply no way you are working out hard enough for them to be beneficial to you. Have you ever looked at the nutrition panel? It’s probably replenishing every calorie you “worked” off, and many of those drinks contain corn syrup. If you seriously worked out hard enough for these to be a good idea, you would never dream of wearing your disgusting sweaty workout clothes to a grocery store — even fresh out of the wash!

I am going to rag on you just a little bit for the 3 boxes of different kinds of crackers. For pity sake, if you want to eat something that goes crunch, try an apple or a carrot! You might get some vitamins out of the deal.

I am going to rag on you just a little bit for the fact that the only protein I saw in your cart was a pound of ground beef. Come on, that’s going to last a week? If you don’t eat some protein, your body is just going to steal it from your muscles. In case you didn’t know, muscle is what keeps you from looking like a complete blob.

But the one thing that I think is your biggest problem was the stack of 6 frozen pizzas. That proves that you only give the faintest lip service to eating healthy: pizza is neither low carb nor low fat. Ever. Just, please, tell me that’s not a one week supply. Lie to me if you must. You want a pizza? Learn to make that stuff from scratch. I can guarantee you’ll eat less of it because it’s harder than stuffing that frozen crap in a hot oven, it will be better tasting because you’ll use better ingredients, and healthier. Why healthier? You’ll actually burn some calories kneeding the dough, shaping it, and putting quality stuff on top!

Want to make that gut vanish? Try eating real, minimally processed food. Sure, you’ll have to spend more than 3 minutes preparing it, but you and your husband will both be better off.

I’d like to say at least your dog eats well, but you didn’t buy any dog food.

In Closing: would you like to play a game?; playing it safe; poverty tax; ever wonder what the numbers mean?; duh; travel tips; “let’s just take these laptops with no anti-virus to a hacker’s conference! What could possibly go wrong???”; parks; make “the Pill” OTC, prevent abortions; we don’t need “administrators” with no common sense having any authority over children, ever, for any reason.

Cat Ass Trophy

Or, Caturday, Film Festival Edition

Ok, I like cats well enough. I even have a cat. Sure, I occasionally look at pictures of cats online, with or without witty catpions (intentional misspelling). I’ve been sucked in by video of Maru the Box Cat at least once. I have posted about Stationmaster Tama and  library cats. IBKC and Cute Overload are linked in the sidebar. But you know, I think this cat thing has officially gone off the rails. 

Thursday night in Minneapolis, ten thousand people turned out for a festival of short films starring cats:

The crowd — easily double what organizers expected — packed the lawn outside the museum, spilling onto the sidewalks across the street. There were local cat lovers and out-of-state fans of Fluffy; many wore kitty-theme T-shirts or simply ears and whiskers. Some took real cats on leashes. A few dogs came, for irony.

They all settled in for a screening of cats behaving badly, or cutely, or mysteriously, sometimes all at once. That much of the audience had already seen the clips on YouTube did not seem to diminish the enthusiasm. Quite the contrary.

Keyboard Cat and Nyan Cat allegedly wanted to be paid to attend. Inasmuch as Nyan Cat is animated, I’d like to know how that would even work. I won’t link to those furry freeloaders now just on principal.

Did they actually use film, or did they just cue up 60 tabs in YouTube?

In Closing: more stuff to do in Vegas; we don’t need no steenking warrant; just say no to huge birthday bashes for little kids; “The recovery continues to be skewed toward low-wage jobs, reinforcing the rise in inequality and America’s deficit of good jobs”; of course job growth is variable by region (which is why we need streamlined short sales now) Double Dose of Ezra; is that where I’ve heard it before?; Etch-a-sketch; mathematically impossible; yes the Republicans have a place for single women, I guess; low carb diets do work; the study never said skinny monkeys, just underfed monkeys; and great timing.

Sorry for the break

I’ve been in a seminar all week and haven’t really had much to say worth posting. Hopefully next week will be back to normal.

In Closing: looks like a great way to drown; doesn’t everyone need one; wealth gap; “you people“; is the media going to let them get away with an outright lie?; an odd proposal with interesting connotations (Zoolander Zoolander Zoolander); and you don’t normally find something this cute in a wrecking yard.

Shorties: The Hands of Fate

The Things One Finds: Roman beads in ancient Japanese burial mound.

Well, we all gotta go sometime: Ok, sure, we have more heart disease and cancer. We also have a whole lot less tuberculosis, flu, gastrointestinal infections, and diphtheria.

Because the real purpose is to make Chertoff a nice chunk of change: Not a single terrorist has been arrested through the use of whole body scanners.

It’s a good start: Two slimeballs convicted, one for molesting kids and one for standing by and doing nothing about it.

Oh really, USA Today??: “Supreme Court’s health care decision could affect millions”? Really? You don’t think that’s a given? By the way, it’s not a health care decision. It’s a health insurance decision and don’t ever forget it.

This is what rock bottom looks like: Former high school principal “went on a drug- or alcohol-induced rampage on Friday, stabbing several people — killing two — before driving his car into a crowded porch and brutally attacking a couple at a motel they ran. ‘You’ll be very proud of me, I just killed 10 drug dealers,’ Giancola told his mother afterward….”

Jill’s Got a Point: If already-low taxes and record profits aren’t enough to make “job creators” actually create jobs, what is?

Hillary’s at it again: saying radical stuff like how women need to be able to decide for themselves whether to have children. Hey Hillary, be sure to keep that message going once you get back to the States, mmkay?

How to Prevent the SWAT Team Bashing Your Door Down at 3 AM: boils down to “don’t be poor.” Because middle class and wealthy people never ever run drug operations or anything like that. Never. And the low level poor people never work for higher-ups who have money and don’t live in “the hood”. Couldn’t possibly happen!

Why That Burger Doesn’t Look Like the Picture: Truth be told, it’s a pretty good reason.

More Comedy Gold from USA Today: Are they running a newspaper or what? Apparently there are some Baby Boomers who have money to blow on $100,000 classic car restorations. Seriously? Because most of the Boomers I know are worried about whether they can afford retirement. Don’t get me wrong, I love to look at old cars and I have a soft spot for classic VWs. Even so, I can’t justify spending that kind of money on any car. I keep thinking “That could buy 3 nice sedans. Or maybe a sedan, a pickup truck, and a convertible.”

Another reason to take the bus: License plate scanners are on the rise, telling authorities (and anybody who cares to subpoena the records) everywhere your car has been for the last 2-5 years. Expect this data to end up in a criminal or divorce court near you.

And last: Here’s what 100 grams of protein looks like.

Griswold v. Connecticut

June 7, 1965 was the day that the Supreme Court decided that women had the right to contraception. More precisely, the Supremes ruled that ordinary Americans have a right to privacy, and little is more private than what a married couple do in the privacy of their home. It was later rulings that extended the right of contraception outside marriage.

That was over 40 years ago. Women of my generation have never known a time when you couldn’t get the means to control your whether or not you could get pregnant. We’ve lived all our lives knowing that reliable birth control was a prescription away. Things weren’t so rosy for the generation immediately ahead of us.

Yet despite the fact that birth control is almost universally used by women, despite the fact that it’s good for our health to control the size of our families, and despite the fact that it is good for the economy that we can choose not to get pregnant, this fundamental right is under fire. There are people who want to make sure we can’t get it, people who want to make sure we can’t afford it, and people who want to make sure that we can lose our jobs for getting it. How exactly does that last bit figure into the right to privacy?

None of this is about how wonderful babies are. None of this is actually “pro-life,” because if they thought about it for 5 whole seconds the so-called pro-life movement would realize that contraceptives prevent abortions by preventing unwanted pregnancy. The desire to limit access to something almost all women use is one thing and one thing only: anti-woman.

In Closing: short stories; age gap; Carol Burnett does her best James T. Kirk; couldn’t have to do with dumping underwater houses; and oh hell no you’re not charging me extra for the privilege of sitting with my family.

R.I.P. MCA

Today we have the sad news that Beastie Boys member Adam Yauch — also known as MCA* — has passed away. Although it is widely known that he was battling cancer, there is no word yet on whether he in fact died of cancer.

Since he was a Buddhist, it is perhaps more appropriate to say that I hope he made it to enlightenment this time around. Peace.

Not to hijack this event, but I would like to point out that this was a man who could afford the best treatment for his illnesses. If his insurance company said “you can’t do that,” he could say “Visa/MasterCard is my secondary insurance and they will cover it!”

Seriously, do everything you can to make sure you have cancer screenings.

In Closing: a judge uses common sense; free online yoga classes; there’s jobs in Walker County; Vogue bans “too skinny” models — well, underage too skinny models (wake me when size 8 is normal).

 

* Make a note, you are unlikely to see me link TMZ again any time soon. Tell you children about this day! Ok, maybe not.

So glad somebody told me what it was…

Enlightening.

In closing: Sears; Fat costs us all; Japan has cute technology so powerful that even the Emperor and his wife are cute; Lululemon; Jobs report stinks; maybe we could fix that with some infrastructure building; silly USA Today thinking facts matter; novel; it’s privacy week; yeah, because making sure all high school graduates can read is a vast conspiracy; and Mark Twain.

Climbing the Mountain of Paperwork

This week’s Life Well Lived question is:

How do you organize paperwork both online and off? Share your tip(s) to managing physical and digital clutter!

Be sure to visit BlogHer’s main post on the topic and add your comments. While you’re in the area, don’t forget to enter the current Life Well Lived sweepstakes.

I will be honest. Stuff tends to pile up on my desk. Thankfully, my brokerage has a really great digital document storage system to help me keep that stuff organized properly.

File folders are great things. Heck, folders in general are great things. It makes it a lot easier to keep related items together: bills to be paid, receipts, tax documents, Christmas cards, appliance manuals, whatever. When you’re done, it goes into a filing cabinet where it’s easy to find right up until the day you don’t need it any more and can shred it. Pro-tip: label folders with a fine point marker or permanent ink pen and do your best to make it easy to read.

This still leaves a pile on the corner of my desk that I must go through and ruthlessly prune about once a month.

I organize email with folders too. A folder called “Receipts 2012” contains exactly what you think it does. Maybe there’s one called “Smith” that has all my correspondence with a client named Mr. Smith. It also contains scans of his documents and emails back and forth to the title company. And once my transaction with Mr. Smith is done, the whole folder gets archived.

I’d like to say my hard drive is that well organized. Thank goodness OSX does a lot of this stuff automatically: apps end up in the “Applications” folder without too much effort on my part. “Downloads” go into the right folder unless I specifically save it elsewhere — and yes I periodically have to purge that folder.

So that’s my tip. No fancy organizers beyond a vertical file holder on my desk and a filing cabinet in my home office. Cheap and easy to implement.

In Closing: Jon Lovitz 3, anti-Semite teenagers 0; 6000 Japanese vocabulary words; War on Drugs is a failure; drone on; life in space may have come from Earth; security theatre; no kidding; follow up on unlicensed doctors; tornado alley is bigger, climate change deniers blame almost anything but climate change; over 1 in 5 health care dollars spent is because of obesity; and no, it’s not illegal to use a cell phone while driving in Nevada! It’s illegal to use one without a hands free device.

Book Review: Diary of a Mad Fat Girl

This post is in connection with the BlogHer Book Club. I am being compensated for this review and received a free copy of the book itself. Join the conversation!

My first clue that Diary of a Mad Fat Girl by Stephanie McAfee might have a little disconnect was when I laid eyes on the cover: a pair of slim legs draped over a wood privacy fence, not a hint of cellulite, not an ounce of flab, topped with a flouncy pink miniskirt that no overweight woman I’ve ever known would be caught dead wearing. Now, I wasn’t expecting extreme corpulence, but our protagonist describes herself as size 16 high school art teacher. Frankly, I was expecting, well, somebody who looks more like the author.

One of the more remarkable things about this book is that it was originally self-published as an e-book! It was so successful online that the author was able to get a literary agent and a publisher. This is in fact the author’s first novel, and as such I am going to cut her some slack for some heavy-handed foreshadowing and a delightful deus-ex-machina. Whoops! I dare not say more! Nobody likes spoilers.

If you’re a fan of small town intrigue or school district politics, you’re going to love this one. Most of the major characters have known one another since they were children. The prose is amusing, the dialog perfectly suited to the characters, some of the situations delightfully silly. Serious topics like spousal abuse and homosexuality are treated with dignity. If you’ve read my reviews before, you know I’m very picky about endings. Without giving anything away, there was one aspect of the obligatory happy ending that didn’t really fit right. Assuming you can take the sexual themes, an amusing book worth checking out

In Closing: Try to use them all!; contraceptives; urban unrest; Hail Seizure; Call Center Bill; guaranteed prisoners (somebody explain to me how a for profit company can provide the same quality for less money than a government body that doesn’t need to make a profit? Don’t yell pensions because some government agencies have proven they can already screw workers out of those); costs more and pays less; stop buying them; this must stop; on moral decline; judge speaks common sense, that someone in a public place has a limited expectation of privacy, even if he/she is a cop; nothing to hide; and what really causes heart disease.

It’s “Seriously??” Week!

I present 3 items that should make you say “Seriously??”

Reuters even adds “seriously” when they point out that Stephen Colbert is leading Jon Hunstman in South Carolina polls. They want to make sure you understand that Reuters is not prone to printing jokes.

The New York Times on the other hand, maybe. One of their editors actually wondered in print if readers wanted journalists to call people out on false statements. Seriously?? Well, normally one reads the news to find out what is happening, and that implies a certain level of truth. How silly of me to think that fact checking was part of the job. Makes me glad I don’t give the NYT a dime for their content. I also don’t read it.

And for our last brain-bender, someone wants Mitt Romney to release his tax returns and substantiate a claim he made in public that he created 100,000 jobs while working at Bain Capital. That’s reasonable enough, right? The weird part is that this demand did not come from the left or any Democrat, and these days I must say not even from one of the people running against him for the Republican nomination. Nope: this came from Sarah Palin. Seriously??

In Closing: yes; check your settings; it still stinks; and not-quite-immaculate conception.