Author: lux

12 Slices of Roast Beef

Couldn’t sleep, so I was browsing the news sites this morning. I came across this gem from Salt Lake City: No-Carb Eating Couple Booted From Buffet.

Roast beef was the issue. As Reuters put it, “when [customer] Amaama went up for his 12th slice, the manager asked Amaama to stop.” Chaos ensued.

What rational person is going to think they’re controlling their weight by eating that much food? ‘Oh, but it’s low carb!’ you hear the cry. ‘Cut out the carbs and you can eat anything you want and still lose weight!’.

I call bullshit.

If each slice of roast beef averaged a mere 2 ounces, that’s just under a pound and a half of meat eaten. Let’s look at the calories in that (you remember calories, right?). According to the handy guide at http://www.calorie-count.com/, 3 ounces of cooked beef, all fat removed, has 232 calories. So those 11 slices of roast beef contained approximately 1700 calories – more if my estimate of a 2-ounce slice is too small or if all the fat had not been trimmed off.

It passes my understanding how people can think this is a good way to lose weight. The FDA recommends consuming approximately 2000 calories a day, depending on a person’s age and activity level. You can bet dollars to doughnuts (if you’ll pardon the carb-laden expression) that this goober ate much more than just 11 slices of roast beef that day. Whether he was exercising regularly or had an active lifestyle wasn’t mentioned in the article, so perhaps I’m doing the guy a disservice. Maybe he mountain bikes to work every day and rarely sits down on the job. But somehow, I suspect that’s not the case.

You want to lose weight? It’s simple but it’s not easy. Burn more calories than you consume. How you do that is up to you. Exercise or don’t, eat carbs or not – it doesn’t matter, as long as your net calorie count is negative, you’ll get lighter.

Maybe I should write my own diet manual. Call it “The Sanity Plan.” I’d make millions, quit my job, and spend my days doing book tours and being pampered. With merchandising tie-ins (I see ‘I want sanity’ t-shirts, maybe kitchen products), perhaps a chain of Sanity fitness centers, I’d be set for life.

Unfortunately, most of America is not ready for sanity. And people (I do not exclude myself) are generally lazy. They really want the magic fix-it that’s going to let them do as little as possible and still shed pounds. Sanity is too hard.

Ah well. Time to brew some coffee and get ready for work.

The Price we Pay

Since Vietnam, presidents have been concerned (and rightfully so) that their military antics would lose support once the public started to see the bodies of US soldiers arriving home in flag-draped caskets.

The Bush administration installed a simple solution: It ended the public broadcast of those images by banning news coverage and photography of dead soldiers’ homecomings.

Well, thanks Matt Drudge, and screw the Bushies. This is the price we’re paying for the Bush/Cheney fixation on Iraq:

PS – the person who originally took those photos has lost her job.

You know its a bad day when even Doonesbury depresses

I’ve been pretty down recently, so everything is looking like I’m seeing it through shades of gray. Still, I’m more than a little saddened by the current Doonesbury strip sequence, in which longtime character B.D. (who was shipped off to Iraq last year) has been gravely wounded. And for the first time (perhaps ever) in the strip, B.D. is seen without his helmet.

Maybe Doonesbury is just cynically exploiting the war to prop up his ratings (although I doubt that). Most likely, he’s trying to dramatize this difficult issue by bringing it “home” to the Doonesbury family.

The strips (three so far) are gripping and immediate. B.D. has just been wounded and is fighting for his life. Doonesbury deliberately lets all the voice bubbles in the strips float loose, not tied to any one character, to emphasize the disorientation and chaos of the event. A nice touch. The only thing missing is any sign of blood — but I suppose that might be too graphic.

At any rate, whether it’s because I’m depressed or because they’re good (or both) these strips have gotten to me. They’re worth a look, even if you’re not a Doonesbury fan.

To top it off, Senator Chuck Hagel goes onto CNN to say it might be time to reinstate the draft. “If we’ve got a generational war then all of us should take some responsibility for this country if it is a nation at war,” is how he put it.

And another 10 American troops have died in Iraq since my last post here.

Quagmire

American troop deaths in Iraq this month now number more than 90, and there’s still 11 days to go before the month ends. Yet in just 10 weeks, the US is supposed to hand over sovereignty of Iraq over — although to whom is far from clear.

This would all be funny if it weren’t so terrible. It makes me feel like we’re trapped, like a mouse caught on a glue trap, nothing to choose from except bad alternatives, and what’s worse is that it all could have been prevented.

And now people like Paul Bremer, as well as most of the military in Iraq, seem to think that only more violence is going to break this bad cycle and fix things. Have they learned nothing from the history of the Middle East this past 100 years? Increasing the violence is only going to breed more violence.

This is the kind of crap that makes me feel bad to be an American.