CanWest News Service headline: Childhood obesity increases risk of hearing loss. Medpage Today headline: Childhood Obesity Appears Linked to Middle Ear Effusion. CanWest lede: Fat children may be at increased risk of permanent hearing loss from chronic ear infections, new research suggests. Medpage lede: The average body mass index in a group of children with … Continue reading »
Posted in April 2007 …
What Was Your Kneejerk Reaction?
After thinking about my own this morning, and reading different ones elsewhere, I’m wondering what your kneejerk reactions to news of the shooting were. This might not work out so well, since I hardly have any readers, but if you immediately thought, “Oh, it must be ______” or “This clearly means ______” when you heard, … Continue reading »
Kneejerk
My first thought upon hearing about the Virginia Tech massacre: Marc Lepine. My second thought: Some girl dumped him. It’s sounding like my second thought was correct. And now I realize how much I didn’t want it to be. Because a zillion other people had kneejerk reactions in keeping with their pet causes yesterday. Lots … Continue reading »
Today’s Rant is about Neither Sexism nor Fatphobia
(And the tiny crowd goes wild.) In my capacity as a Bibliophilistine, I was reading the Guardian Books blog this morning, and I came across a line so throwaway I’m not even going to link to it or take the author to task for it specifically. But I’ll tell you what it said, so you … Continue reading »
On Being a No-Name Blogger Using Her Real Name
In a coincidence that’s meaningful to no one but me, I decided to start writing under my real name (and fantasizing about developing a broader readership) right around the same day I first heard about Kathy Sierra. Since then, I’ve been following the endless discussions about cyberbullying, anonymity, blog civility, to what degree this is … Continue reading »
Best Post I’ve Read All Week
… and I’ve read a lot. How not to be an asshole: a guide for men. It’s so good, I don’t even feel the need to rant for ten pages about how sad it is that it is so very damned necessary for a man to say all this, because he might actually be taken … Continue reading »
One Obesity Gene Found
The reporting about it still makes my head explode–”Fat’s genetic! Which means… fat people have to work a lot harder not to be fat, which is still obviously the priority!”–but they’ve found a gene with a seemingly undeniable link to fat: The finding is significant because the changed version of the gene is relatively common, … Continue reading »
Barbara Walters: Slut!
Media Matters has an awesome hate speech round-up, focusing on bigoted idiots other than Imus, including Glenn Beck, Neal Boortz, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Michael Savage, Michael Smerconish, and John Gibson. My personal favorites: On the September 9, 2005, edition of his radio show, Beck referred to survivors of Hurricane Katrina who remained in New … Continue reading »
Boyfriend of the Day
Paul Waldman: And it isn’t only extremists like Savage who are having trouble stomaching the idea of women in positions of increasing power. We now have a female speaker of the House, and the strong possibility of the first female president; the prospect is sending some men over the edge. MSNBC host Tucker Carlson recently … Continue reading »
Diets Don’t Work, But…
Brain: How are we going to get the earth to lose weight? Pinky: I know! We can get everyone to go on a diet! Brain: Diets don’t work, Pinky. Pinky: Not even if you call them “a whole new way of eating”? Brain: No.
