I have long objected to health mullahs and their war on what we want to eat. Their rationale is that people are really, really stupid and are solely educated by advertising so it needs to be controlled – or foods banned entirely. I disagree we are really, really stupid and instead submit we are really, really fat.

But you know what? We would be the envy of every culture throughout history. It used to be you had to be rich to be fat – now you have to be rich to be thin. Plentiful food at low cost is Utopia and the goal of a progressive society.

And no one cares about progress and society like the New York State Fair. Check out this beast: a quarter-pound of hamburger between slices of a grilled, glazed doughnut. Throw in cheese, bacon, lettuce, tomato and onion and you’ve got yourself a 1,500-calorie meal, including the major food groups, for $5.

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If you want to get people on bikes, there has to be a compelling reason that offsets looking like a dork in a helmet or showing up sweaty at work. One reason that may work – convincing women they should like sweaty dorks on bikes.
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If you hear someone today, especially a kooky cultural militant, use the term ‘Victorian’ as a sneer, they likely mean repressed. They have read too much Freud and not enough actual history. The Victorian era was actually a hotbed of artistic, literary, religious, social and political ideas in Britain, along with prosperity and imperial expansion of what they regarded as the most benevolent kind.

They simply used good manners and dressed well. When an unmarried couple visited, for example, the social rule was to put them in separate bedrooms and ‘ignore footsteps in the hallway at night’. Really, not a bad time at all.
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In 1993, the U.S. Congress did what few government agencies had done before or have done since; they pulled the plug on an expensive boondoggle because no one knew what it would cost or if it would work.   That boondoggle was the Superconducting SuperCollider and, to put it in context, it would be the successor the the LHC if it were built today, and the LHC is years behind schedule.  So you can imagine how far away its successor was in 1995.

Estimated cost – an unreasonable yet bold $4.4 billion.  Actual projected cost by the time it was canceled – a downright silly $12 billion.

All that was left to show for $2 billion spent was 17 shafts and 15 miles of tunnel out of the 54 had it been completed.    No  liquid-helium-temperature superconductivity, no ultra-high field magnetism, no nothing.    The vision of Ronald Reagan (I know, I know, Republicans hate science – that myth was a load of nonsense then like it is now, Reagan just didn’t have to deal with insufferable, left-wing science bloggers) was gone, though we are left with one of his many quotes.   When Pres. Reagan proposed canceling a half-measure project and instead doing something bold – “throw deep” he said, in quarterback mode, the following exchange took place: (more…)

Cheryl Cole has the body most women want, say cosmetic surgeons. And maybe a few men, says me.

Liberate, a consortium of BAAPS and/or BAPRAS accredited cosmetic surgeons in the UK, surveyed 3000 women between the ages of 18-34 and  determined who cosmetic surgeons should be preparing to sculpt average women into – Cheryl Cole.

Never heard of her?  She is sort-of famous in England for marrying a soccer player and parlaying that into a singing career.   Or the other way around.  It doesn’t matter, she’s joining Paula Abdul and Simon Cowell on the U.S. version of “The X-Factor” pop competition and Simon Cowell is never wrong, so you will have heard of her soon enough. (more…)

It’s cultural trivia to 95% of the world but a big event is about to occur. No, I am not talking about the latest wedding in the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha family (oops, sorry, they go by Windsor now), that between Prince William and his commoner girlfriend Catherine, I mean the beatification of Pope John Paul II. To my knowledge, he had no hot women around him, nor did he do any science, but he is a fascinating guy because he obviously did a lot for people while being Pope during the greatest sex scandal in Church history. However, lacking hot women or science, you might want to skip this if history and culture are not your thing.

What does beatification mean?
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When I was a kid, burglars had more stones. They knew you probably had a gun so they did their best to make sure you weren’t home but, if they were wrong, they expected to get shot. It’s a hazard of the trade.

Not today. Timothy Chapek, 24, living in uber-left Oregon, was so paralyzed with fear that breaking and entering might be, you know, risky, he called 9-1-1 when the homeowner returned home because he was worried Hilary Mackenzie might have a gun. She didn’t even have a gun, he was just worried she might have one.

Really??
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21-year-old Marisol Valles decided to apply for the job AS police chief of Praxedis G. Guerrero because literally no one else would take the job. Warring drug cartels had already beheaded other city officials.

Possessed with the unbridled optimism only college students can have, Valles took the job and began in October with the intent of cleaning things up. No more. She has fled the country after recent death threats. Why did she take a job as police chief and then declare she would do no police work and instead forget the drug dealers and focus on “community building” to improve the town? Because the academic world of criminology requires no actual understanding of crime or what cops do.

Officials had denied she had fled and instead said she came to the United States to get her son medical attention – you know, that same medical attention no one can supposedly afford to get in the US but is allegedly better in third world countries like Cuba. Turns out she never came back and is seeking asylum. Good luck getting it. To get asylum in the US, you need to show a government threat and clearly the Mexican government is not after her, it’s instead the criminals the Mexican government is too corrupt to stop.

Take a young girl in a period piece and have her torn between two oddly out-of-place haircut sporting young men, one or both of whom may be werewolves, and what do you have?    

You have a ‘sexy’, faux Gothic thriller adventure romance from the director who brought sparkly vampires to the big screen.   Namely “Red Riding Hood” for tweens.  And “Twilight” fans. And Faux Hawk fans.

Faux Hawk. Everyone in old timey days wore them.

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If you watched “Glee” last year you probably got a little annoyed at their attempts to showtune up otherwise pretty good songs. But along the way they showed a few flashes of brilliance, like casting Idina Menzel as that annoying girl’s mom, and getting Joss Whedon to direct an episode where we discover the most talented kid on the show is the one we never get to see, because he is in a wheelchair.

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