Life is Healthy

There's a way you can test your body fat percentage online. All you need is a cloth tape to measure different parts of your body.

The test tells you how much fat you have and how much muscle you have. The test is supposed to be quite accurate (within a couple of percentage points either way) except for very fit people who can get up to 5% higher number for their body fat than what they actually have (because they have much more muscle than the typical person) and very skinny but unfit people may show 5% less body fat than they actually have because "though they look thin, unfit skinny people really have more than the usual amount of fat inside their muscles, which you can't see from the outside."

The most valuable aspect of taking this test is doing it over time. If you plan to start exercising, you will see noticeable changes in the measurements over time.

Try the body fat percent test here.

The average American man has 22% of body fat. The average American female has 32%. But these are not healthy percentages.

A healthy normal body fat differs for different people. According to the makers of this test, healthy percentage of body fat would be 15% for a Caucasian male and 22% for a Caucasian female. Whereas it would be only 12% for an African-American male and 19 percent for an African-American female. Asians have the highest 'healthy ratio' at 18 and 25 percent for males and females. The difference is due to the bone frames having significantly different weights on average. Asians are much more likely to have porous bones that don't weigh as much relative to other races.

I've never heard this type of distinction before. Someone please tell me if this is complete bunk.

Many things are abandoned on pavements around my home. At one end of the scale there are the old fridges that regularly line my local streets. If Eddie Grant lived around here he might write a song called Electrolux Avenue. (I think I should take the rest of today off – I’m clearly not going to come up with anything better than that gag.) But that is quite commonplace, and also not really abandonment. Lots of people don’t have cars in which to take large items to a municipal tip, so it’s perfectly acceptable to put old white goods out on the pavement, phone the council and let them do the rest.

There was also a problem in recent times of abandoned cars, but again it’s usually pretty clear how they got there. This isn’t even a great place to abandon a car – it’s actually at quite a busy set of traffic lights.

And then there’s the irrefutable fact that it’s only half a car. I’ve seen abandoned vehicles stripped quite efficiently, and I concede that it’s fair enough that people recycle spare parts like this (so long as the car is actually abandoned, otherwise it’s technically carjacking), but this one looks like piranhas with Asbos have been at it.

The only explanation that I can come up with is that someone drove up to the traffic lights, very pleased with their new car. Perhaps someone who had a long and sad history of being ripped off by unscrupulous salesmen, but this time nothing was going to go wrong – they’d got an absolute bargain. Windows down, radio on loud. The lights turn green and they pull away, only for its cut-and-shut nature to become suddenly and indisputably apparent. But maybe they had the radio on very loud to some kind of industrial techno station that plays music mainly made up of sampled metallic bangs, and didn’t notice anything till they got home. (The Mini is front-wheel drive, so this is quite plausible.) They might have thought “It does sound like there’s a small hole in the exhaust, but I can get that fixed at Kwik-Fit – the car is still a bargain, make no mistake about that. That draught? It’s just because the windows are wound down. The sparks that seem to be issuing forth from the bottom of my seat? Er...” I just hope there wasn’t anything important in the back, like some shopping or a small child. Or a fridge that they were taking to the tip.

What would be fantastic is if someone found the front end abandoned on a pavement somewhere. If we could match the chassis numbers we could devote the next year of our lives to reunifying the two halves into a whole again. If we are going to do this, then you should perhaps know that all I know about cars is how to fill the windscreen washer, so you’d better be prepared to do all the other stuff. I’m guessing there will be quite a bit of welding involved. But it will have a really clean windscreen.

Alicia Silverstone, age 30, became a vegan recently. Her story is featured in next month's Shape magazine.

She says that at first she seemed to be eating all carbs; lots of pasta, bread and fruit smoothies. This caused her some energy crashes by midday. After she changed her diet and added a lot more vegetables and whole grains she started to feel good all day. She had much more energy and also noticed great improvements in her skin, hair and body.

For the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday she looks forward to a vegan feast of salads, green beans with almonds, stuffing, fall vegetables like brussels sprouts, tofu casserole and pumpkin pie.

Update January 2010: See the scoop on The Kind Diet by Alicia Silverstone

The Bottled Water Lie

By Michael Blanding, AlterNet. Posted October 26, 2006.

The corporations that sell bottled water are depleting natural resources, jacking up prices, and lying when they tell you their water is purer and tastes better than the stuff that comes out of the tap.

When Antonia Mahoney moved to Boston from her native Puerto Rico 35 years ago, the first thing she noticed was how much better the water tasted. Over the years, however, the water she was receiving from her tap began to lose its appeal. "Little by little, the taste changed," says the retired schoolteacher, who eventually gave up tap water altogether and began paying over $30 a month to get bottles of Poland Spring water delivered to her house.

Walking through Boston's Copley Square on a sunny day last month, however, she was intrigued by a banner advertising something called the "Tap Water Challenge." As she approached the table, a fresh-faced activist behind it told her the "challenge" was a blind taste test to see if passersby could tell the difference between bottled water and tap water. Mahoney turned her back while four water samples were poured into small paper cups -- two of tap water from Boston and a nearby suburb, and one each of Poland Spring and Aquafina.

"That's tap water," Mahoney declared after draining the first cup. "That tastes just like what I drink at home." Her confidence faded, however, as she downed the next three, which all seemed to taste the same. When the cups were turned over, it turned out that what she thought was tap water was actually Aquafina -- and what she thought was Poland Spring was actually the same Boston tap water she gets at home for free. "I couldn't believe it, I couldn't believe it," she says later. "You know I pay so much for that water. Now I am thinking to stop the Poland Spring."

Mahoney wasn't alone in that decision. A student from Connecticut who attends Massachusetts College of Art says that she has cartons of bottled water stocked in her dorm room, because she doesn't want to chance city tap water. After taking (and flunking) the test, she says now she'll start drinking from the faucet. "It tastes the same as the tap water I drink at home in Connecticut, and I drink that all the time," says the student, Katey vanBerkum. "Why spend your money on bottled water if you don't have to."

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In the past decade, the bottled water market has more than doubled in the United States, surpassing juice, milk, and beer to become the second most popular beverage after soft drinks. According to a 2003 Gallup poll, three in four Americans drink bottled water, and one in five drink only bottled water. Together, consumers spent some $10 billion on the product last year, consuming an average of 26 gallons of the stuff per person, according the Beverage Marketing Corporation. At the same time, companies spend some $70 million annually to advertise their products. Typical are Aquafina's ads advertising the beverage as "the purest of waters," Dasani's ads contending the water is "pure as water can get."

In fact, says Kellett, not only does tap water often taste the same as bottled water, but it is also often safer to drink as well. "They are spending tens of millions of dollars every year to undermine our confidence in tap water," she says, "even though water systems here in the United States are better regulated than bottled water." That's because tap water is regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which imposes strict limits on chemicals and bacteria, constant testing by government agencies, and mandatory notification to the public in the event of contamination.

Bottled water, on the other hand, is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which according to federal law is technically required to hold itself to the same standards as the EPA. The devil is in the details, however, since FDA regulations only apply to water that is bottled and transported between states, leaving out the two-thirds of water that is solely transported within states. State laws, meanwhile, are inconsistent, with some mirroring the FDA standards, some going beyond them and some falling far short of the national regulations. What's more, FDA regulations rely on companies to do their own testing, and perform voluntary recalls if products are found to be in violation of standards (if a company fails to do so, the Justice Department can order a seizure of products).

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In fact, many times bottled water is tap water. Contrary to the image of water flowing from pristine mountain springs, more than a quarter of bottled water actually comes from municipal water supplies. The industry is dominated by three companies, who together control more than half the market: Coca-Cola, which produces Dasani; Pepsi, which produces Aquafina; and Nestlé, which produces several "local" brands including Poland Spring, Arrowhead, Deer Park, Ozarka and Calistoga (a fact that itself often surprises participants in the Tap Water Challenges). Both Coke and Pepsi exclusively use tap water for their source, while Nestlé uses tap water in some brands.

Of course, Coke and Pepsi tout the elaborate additional steps they take that purify the water after it comes out of the tap, with both companies filtering it multiple times to remove particulates before subjecting it to additional techniques such as "reverse osmosis" and ozone treatment. Reverse osmosis, however, is hardly state of the art -- essentially consisting of the same treatment applied through commercially available home tap water filters, while ozonation can introduce additional problems such as the formation of the chemical bromate, a suspected carcinogen. In March 2004, Coca-Cola was forced to recall nearly 500,000 bottles of Dasani water in the United Kingdom due to bromate contamination that exceeded the U.K. and U.S. limit of 10 parts per billion. This past August, three grocery stores chains in upstate New York who all used local company Mayer Bros. to produce their store brands issued recalls after samples were found contaminated with more than double the bromate limit; in some cases, contaminated water was apparently sold for five weeks before the problem was detected.

Water originating with groundwater sources, meanwhile, can have its own problems. Citizens in states including Maine, Michigan, Texas, and Florida have all fought against Nestlé, whom they accuse of harming the environment by depleting aquifers and damaging stream systems with extractions of massive amounts of water though their local bottling affiliates, for which they pay next to nothing in fees and then sell at a huge markup. In 2003, Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation (MCWC) won a landmark court victory shutting down a Nestlé plant that was taking water from a stream that fed a wildlife refuge, sensitive marshland and several lakes.

"When you look at the fallen level of the stream, a couple of inches can mean everything to the environment," says Jim Olson, an attorney with the group. "It changed a natural regime that has built up over centuries, drying up ancient marshes of sedge grass relied on by wildfowl, interfering with spawning habits of great northern pike, and creating mudflats in areas where you used to be able to canoe." The injunction against Nestlé was partially overturned last year on appeal, however, in a decision that set a new, looser standard for water rights. The case is currently being considered by the Michigan state Supreme Court.

International Bottled Water Association spokesperson Stephen Kay defends the rights of bottled water producers to extract water, saying that bottled water producers are no different than any other industrial user or food producer that uses water in its products. Nationally, he says that bottled water only accounts for .02 percent of water use in the country, and that even in local cases, water producers are sometimes singled out unfairly as the most visible users of water, while other large users of water are given a pass. "We need to understand all of the uses on an aquifer and make sound and scientific judgements that take all of those uses into consideration," he says.

Kay questions the idea behind the Tap Water Challenges, saying that consumers have chosen bottled water not only for its consistency and taste, but also for its convenience. It isn't competing so much against tap water, he says, as it is against other beverage options. "If consumers are in a convenience store and they want a beverage without calories, caffeine, or sugar, it's just ready to go," he says. "In this era of obesity, it's irresponsible to try and sway consumers away from a healthful beverage choice."

While he allows that some tap water might taste as good as bottled water, he says, not all water users are so lucky. In some parts of the country, water is tinged with a sulphurous taste or suffers from a noticeable taint of chlorine. Indeed, at the Tap Water Challenge in Boston, one participant, Leila Saba, says she drinks tap water in Boston but chooses bottled water when she visits her parents at home in South Florida, where the water has an unpleasant taste. "I think tap water is always safe to drink," she says, "but they could make an effort to make the water taste better."

For the activists behind the taste test however, the growth of bottled water undermines the public's willingness to invest in the kind of infrastructure investments that could improve all public water supplies -- opening up the door in some cases to privatization of water systems by for-profit corporations. "People get in the habit of paying a lot more for their drinking water, and they say if we are paying for bottled water, there is no reason we shouldn't be paying a lot for these water services," says Tony Clarke, director of the Polaris Institute and author of "Inside the Bottle," a report critical of the bottled water industry. The downside, he says, is increased cost. "Whenever there is a public service utility taken over by a private service the first thing that happens is that rates are jacked up."

That's exactly what happened in the city of Cochabamba in Bolivia in 2000, when takeover of its water by the Bechtel Corp. sparked a popular uprising known as the Water War, in which citizens successfully reclaimed their water supply as a public right. Today, some 300 million people around the world still get their water from private suppliers. In the United States, water privatization has been a disaster, with cities such as Atlanta, Indianapolis and New Orleans seeing rates soar and quality suffer after contracting with private companies such as France's Suez and Veolia.

The struggle over control of water is only bound to get more heated over the next few years. Currently, more than 1 billion people lack access to safe drinking water, a number that is only bound to rise with increases in population and environmental stresses. This past March, environmental and indigenous groups converged on Mexico City to protest the World Water Forum, a meeting of industry and government leaders from around the world, sponsored by Coca-Cola., in which leaders failed even to agree that water was a basic human right. This month, citizens in 30 countries have planned demonstrations on the issue in an effort dubbed "Blue October," which will include a street celebration in La Paz to commemorate the Water War, and culminate next week in a three-day conference on water rights in Montevideo, Uruguay, from Oct. 28-31. In 2004, Uruguay became the first country to enshrine the right to safe water through a citizen-led constitutional amendment banning privitization and guaranteeing piped water and sanitation to all citizens. A similar effort kicks off this month in Mexico.

Activists like Kellett see a direct relationship between the commodification of water on the international level and the rise in bottled water among individual consumers. "Worldwide, people spent $100 billion on bottled water last year," says Kallett. "That's three times more than the amount that we'd need to spend to meet the United Nation's goals of giving everyone access to water by 2015." In the meantime, the activists with CAI will continue to bring their Tap Water Challenges on the road in an effort to convert people one by one. Purity, they contend, is only a twist of the faucet away.

CAI will hold a Tap Water Challenge at 1 p.m. today (Oct. 26) at Denver's Writer Square. Student groups will also hold Tap Water Challenges across the country next month on Nov. 14. For more information, visit Corporate Accountability International.

Michael Blanding is a freelance writer living in Boston. Read more of his writing at MichaelBlanding.com.
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People are being hoodwinked into giving huge amounts of money to an industry that takes advantage of our environment and brings in more profits than the pharmaceutical industry. ONE HUNDRED BILLION dollars could have done a lot to bring potable water to the over one billion people in this world now without it. What a scam. Water is NOT a commodity, it is a human right. Fresh water resources are dwindling in many parts of the world, and all companies like Coke and Pepsi can think about is profit at the expense of the poor in countries that are vulnerable to them, and in this country where they think they own our acquifers. It's time to boycott their bottled water.

My other writings on this:

Stand Up To Corporations That Kill

Globalization/Time To Take Action

Who Owns The Water?

The BBC reports that Nicole Richie has checked herself in to a treatment centre. It is probably to help deal with her anorexia.

The filming for The Simple Life, in which she stars with Paris Hilton, has been postponed. She has gotten extremely skinny and frail. But her publicist says she is not there because she is anorexic, but rather because she needs to focus on nutrition. He says this is not about treatment for an eating disorder.

Regardless of any public statments, for Nicole Richie to do this of her own volition, it seems like a very good sign for her future good health.

It was a dark and stormy night. The air was quiet. Too quiet. Yet stormy. Suddenly, a beep rang out from a bedside pager. The engineer woke up, grabbing a soda to sharpen his senses. Blogger was down. He needed to bring it back up.

When I get the chance to write my pulp story of a gritty Blogger engineer struggling to keep the site alive, I may look back on this past week as a prime source of choice dramatic fodder. Until then, I, like many of you, will look upon this past week with irritation, disappointment, and maybe even a bit of anger.

You need to look no further than our status blog or perhaps your own experiences to know that Blogger had a significant number of unplanned outages this last week (forgive me my euphemisms?) and a handful of planned ones to clean up from the unplanned ones. It’s been a Murphyesque cavalcade of power failures, fileserver trouble, and wonky network hardware, and I hope you’ll believe me when I say that the Blogger staff is even more sick of it than you are.

First up, our apologies. We really regret these outages, which were a nuisance (or worse) to you. The past week’s performance was not representative of the kind of service we want to provide for you.

More importantly, though, what are we doing to prevent this in the future? Some good news:

• In the short term, we’re replacing quirky hardware and increasing our monitoring to stop problems before they start (forgive me my clichés?). This afternoon’s planned outage did just such a thing.
• In the long term, we’re developing a new version of Blogger with some great new features that is built on technology and hardware that has proven, Google-quality reliability. The current Blogger infrastructure is — albeit in a very Lincoln’s axe way — the same that Google acquired four years ago. Sure, we’ve built on it and expanded it significantly since then, but the truth is we’ve more than out-grown it. The new version is ground-up more scalable and less error-prone.
  

PastaQueen has one of the best personal stories of weight loss progress online. She is 25 years old and used to weigh 372 pounds. This week she is down to 203 pounds. Her goal is to lose 43 more and get down to 160 pounds. (She is 5'9" tall.)

She tells us her new weight every Monday. (It doesn't always go down each week.) This Monday she could potentially get below 200 pounds and that would mean, that for the first time in her adult life, she will be crossing the threshold from obese to simply overweight.

That's a huge accomplishment, especially considering that when she first started losing weight she was not only morbidly obese, but super morbidly obese (according to BMI calculations). She had a couple of false starts at the beginning of her online diary but started losing weight in earnest two years ago.

See her inspiring weight loss progress photos here. (You can rotate them 360 degrees.)

Congrats to PastaQueen and wishing you a very happy 26th birthday!

Drought in Africa: Ethiopia's bitter harvest

By the time the October rains arrived last week, five of the 13 heads of families in the village of Magado had hanged themselves, tormented by the loss of their cattle and livelihoods. Cahal Milmo reports from southern Ethiopia on what has become an international failure

Published: 24 October 2006

The skeletal acacia trees that surround Magado village are testimony in more ways than one to the drought that has destroyed the lives of its inhabitants. The bare branches and parched earth are evidence of the six months of rainless heat that has wiped out up to 70 per cent of the livestock owned by the 11 million nomadic pastoralists spread across the Horn of Africa in the worst drought for a decade.

But in Magado, a tiny isolated community of herdsmen deep in the arid bush of southern Ethiopia, the acacia trees have helped extract a terrible price for the drought and the failure of the outside world to react quickly to their plight. Humanitarian aid to Africa has grown almost six-fold in the past eight years from $946m (£556m) to $5.6bn (£3.3bn). Magado's share of this windfall came too late.

One day, three months ago, Worish Catalo, a 60-year-old herdsman from the village, walked out to one of the acacia trees under which he had regularly watched his herd of 80 cows from dawn to dusk. He slung a rope over the tree's thorny branches and hanged himself among what were by then the wasted corpses of his starved cattle. Mr Catalo, who had six children, was only the first. By the time the October rains arrived last week, the inhabitants of Magado had cut down four more men who had walked to other acacia trees never to return. Five of the 13 heads of family have killed themselves because of the shame and despair of watching their cattle, raised from birth and cherished like offspring, dwindle and perish before their eyes. Of the 2,000 cattle owned by the families of Magado before the drought struck at the beginning of 2006, just two now remain, an attrition rate of 99 per cent.

The people of Magado belong to the Borena, a proud and once-feared tribe of nomadic herdsmen who, according to legend, hold their livestock in such high esteem that when two kinsmen meet they will enquire about the wellbeing of their herds long before that of wives or children. Nine million Borena live in an increasingly lawless region straddling the Ethiopian and Kenyan border.

No one in Magado has died from starvation. In March, long after the cattle were beyond salvation, emergency food aid arrived which kept the pastoralists alive, if only to survey the destruction of their livelihood during what they call the ola, or dry period.

The village is grim proof of what an increasing number of experts say is an international community failing to provide help when it is needed most. Across the Borena lands, it is estimated that 150,000 cows have died, at least two thirds of the entire stock. Galamo Dima, 45, a village elder, now has a meagre supply of beans and maize to feed her seven children. The milk and meat her 10 cattle once provided are a stomach-cramping memory.

Dressed in the colourful shawls and bead necklaces of the Borena women, she sits on a stool, watching a sudden deluge that eight months ago would have been greeted as a salvation. Now the rain has turned the empty cattle enclosures into quagmires and washed the dust from five new stone tombs. Most of the herdsmen stand around doing nothing, trying to keep dry the piles of firewood they have collected for sale at the nearest market, a backbreaking eight-hour walk away.

Ms Dima said: "The aid came too late for us. We were provided with lifestock feed. But there were no animals to give it to. They were already dead. Yes, we have survived. But because we have lost our source of income, we can no longer send our children to school. It has been a terrible time. We must make a living from small things, firewood, wild crops. We have lost people and animals. We are proud; we have no wish to live off others. But now we are a marginalised people. Perhaps it is better for the men who have gone."

Near by is Bonaya Afatu, a traditional rabies doctor who treats humans and animals for the disease transmitted from wild dogs roaming the scrubby landscape occupied by the Borena. He knew three of the men who committed suicide, all of them aged between 50 and 75. He said: "These men had seen other droughts; our land is prone to such things. But never before has it been so severe or have we suffered such a tragedy. Our traditions say that a man without cattle is nothing. To be a man of that age and lose all your cows means you cannot recover. These men took their lives because the shame was too great."

end of excerpt.

There are no words. You know, sometimes when I write about this issue and read about it, I cry. This was one of those times.

Outgoing Longwave Radiation Anomaly
This graph from NASA clearly shows the extent of the severe drought gripping Africa.

Also see my entry here:
Their Animals Are Dead, These People Are Next

Also, Al Gore's recent bestseller, An Inconvenient Truth covers the drought and precipitation patterns in Africa due to climate change on pgs. 114-115.

This is the moral challenge of our time on a global scale. However, do we truly have what it takes as a species to meet it? We must, because this certainly can't go on. WE in America who are putting out most of the greenhouse gases that are causing repercussions around the world must see our duty in taking a moral stand on this issue now... EVERY ONE OF US.

We Must Take Africa's Climate Burden

Australian Farmers Committing Suicide

Australian farmers commit suicide as hope evaporates
By Michael Perry Thu Oct 19, 2:44 AM ET

SYDNEY (Reuters) - One Australian farmer commits suicide every four days, defeated by the country's worst drought in 100 years which has left them with dust-bowl paddocks and a mountain of debt, says a national mental health body.

As drought rolls into a sixth year, stoic farmers are reduced to tears under the stress of trying to produce a crop and hold onto land sometimes farmed by the same family for generations. One male farmer every four days is committing suicide," Jeff Kennett, chairman of beyondblue, said on Thursday.

"My fear is that when under prolonged stress and when they see their assets totally denuded of value, that we will see an increase (in suicides)," Kennett told local radio.
The rate among male farmers and farm workers is more than twice the national average, the NSW Farmers Association says.

The figure is all the more worrying because only about 10 percent of Australia's 20 million population live in rural areas and the number has been declining for years as the rural economy struggles. The vast majority of Australians live in cities. The latest Australian Bureau of Statistics suicide report says 2,098 Australians took their lives in 2004.

Crop losses stretch across the country, 92 percent of economically dominant New South Wales state is in drought, and farmers have started off-loading stock before the hot, dry summer when they would be forced to buy feed and water.

With an El Nino weather pattern, which will bring more dry weather and soaring temperatures, now on the horizon and little prospect of rain until early in 2007, rural hope is evaporating like water in Australia's mud-cracked dams and rivers.

Farmers' wives calling talk-back radio in the city describe their husbands' depression at trudging out into their dry paddocks, day after day, knowing they are losing money.

Prime Minister John Howard has announced a $350 million (US$263 million) aid package, but Kennett says farmers also need help coping with the depression and stress of years of drought.
End of excerpt.
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This is about as bad as it gets. SIX YEARS this drought has lasted and it is now killing people. WHERE is the Australian government? WHERE IS THE AID? This also happened in India and does bring another repercussion of climate change to the forefront... the toll it will have on the human spirit. It is immoral to allow this to continue, and for the Australian government to continue to bury its head in the sand regarding the causes of this drought, chief among them human induced climate change.

There's a saying in the software industry -- it's always good to eat your own dog food. Wikipedia has a great article about this:

"... the company has not merely considered the value of the product for consumers (that is, whether the dog will eat the dog food), but actually is a consumer of the product. When properly executed, this can add a new level of sincerity to advertising and customer relations, as well as helping to shape the product."

"I can completely sympathize with this. About two weeks ago, I posted something to the Search Engine Watch Blog that I meant for my personal blog Daggle. Both use Movable Type, on completely different systems. But I had browser windows open to both of them and just picked the wrong one."

I go for a walk in the park. My local park is very pretty – far more so than one would expect for the area. It’s also very well cared for, and its proximity was actually the deciding factor in buying my flat. I always like going for a walk in it, even though this is usually on my own.

But today I see something that I recognise – two corgis out with their owner. I recognise them because I searched for my local area on Flickr recently and found dozens of beautiful pictures of the park. And quite a lot of them had these very distinctive dogs in them. Whoever took the pictures is surely the owner of the dogs.

Whoever took the pictures also surely thinks that the park is lovely as well. I want to share my appreciation with him – to reach out and make contact with my neighbour instead of passing silently by like so many city dwellers. Isn’t this what the world wide web is about? Bringing together people with similar interests?

Looking back on it, I am not sure that the best way for one man to approach another in a park is with the line “Hello, I think I’ve seen your pictures on the internet”.

It really could have gone one of two ways:

1) “Hello, nice to meet you too. Yes, it is a lovely park, isn’t it? Very nice to find someone else who thinks the same. Perhaps now every time we see each other we can have a brief conversation along the lines of “Lovely day, isn’t it?” “Yes, roll on global warming!” That would be nice.”

2) “Hello, nice to meet you too. Yes, not many people subscribe to www.doingitupthebumdressedasanun.com. Very nice to find someone else who thinks the same. Perhaps we can go back to my place now and do it up the bum dressed as nuns. That would be nice.”

OK, it was 1). Maybe I needed to bring my own wimple.

Greg Overholtzer made the decision to change his life and begin dieting and exercising about four years ago. At that time he weighed a dangerously obese 600 pounds. Today he is down to 242 pounds.

He started by working out to Richard Simmons tapes (which he had bought several years previously but which had been collecting dust up to then). He worked out in his bedroom consistently and though it exhausted him at first, he soon saw encouraging results. He then starting using the Richard Simmons Food Mover tool which is a program with windows that you shut after you've eaten a particular item for the day and when all the windows are shut you have to stop eating.

The main change he made to his diet was to drop all foods that contained sugar or wheat and to emphasize vegetables and proteins.

Today he has a new lease on life. See the full story in the Evening Sun.

I am against ethanol as an alternate energy source. I have always been against it because it takes more energy to make it than it saves using it. It also uses corn which is a very water intensive crop, and in this age of drought and a soaring population that will need water resources to sustain itself it is neither ethically nor economically feasible in the longrun to continue to push ethanol as the savior alternate energy source.

But it is then no wonder that the U.S. government is subsidizing this to the tune of 3 billion dollars to corporations who mix it with gasoline to keep the oil companies in play. That while 40 million Americans are without healthcare, millions more slip into poverty every year, and our world also gets closer to that ten year window on our environment closing.

And the process of fermenting ethanol is a big water waster. In the fermentation process of ethanol you have 8% ethanol and 92% water that must be distilled and separated before the product is made. To my knowledge I have read nothing thus far that relays what is done with that water once it is distilled from the corn in the fermentation process (as the illustration above fails to show as well,) but I would think it could and should be reprocessed in some way to be of use in the growing of crops that people can use to eat. Any research on that will of course be posted here as I find the information.

In the following article this position regarding water scarcity and biofuel is also shared by Fred Pierce, author of:

"When The Rivers Run Dry":

Water Scarcity Seen Dampening Case For Biofuel
By David Brough
Thu Oct 19, 11:30 AM ET

GENEVA (Reuters) - Water scarcity harms the case for using food crops to make biofuels, a leading environmental author and journalist said on Thursday.

"The downside of growing food for fuel is water," said Fred Pearce, author of the book "When the Rivers Run Dry."

Surging crude oil prices have strengthened the argument for green energy created by cultivating food crops such as sugar cane to make ethanol fuel and vegetable oils to make biodiesel.

The politics of water will become critical as demand for water from rising populations and the needs of industry increase, said Pearce, editor of Britain's New Scientist magazine.

About one billion people lack access to clean drinking water, Pearce said in a keynote speech to the two-day Sugaronline conference in Geneva.

Vast quantities of water were needed to cultivate crops, with two-thirds of the world's water used in agriculture, Pearce said.

"Sugar is one of the thirstiest crops in the world," he said, estimating that 600-800 tonnes of water were required to grow one tonne of cane.

Brazil, the world's biggest sugar producer, has a thriving biofuels industry, converting about half its cane into fuel ethanol to power vehicles.

Pearce said the booming sugar business aimed at powering cars for the affluent had become a key component in water politics because of concerns over water scarcity.

In the past 30 years world food production had doubled to meet food demand from a growing population, but the amount of water used had tripled.

Part of the answer was to boost the efficiency of irrigation infrastructure.

"You can't irrigate the world's ethanol needs without huge gains in irrigation efficiency," Pearce said.

The Sugaronline conference ended on Thursday.
~~~~~~~~~~~
Also See:

David Pimental, a leading Cornell University agricultural expert, has calculated that powering the average U.S. automobile for one year on ethanol (blended with gasoline) derived from corn would require 11 acres of farmland, the same space needed to grow a year's supply of food for seven people. Adding up the energy costs of corn production and its conversion into ethanol, 131,000 BTUs are needed to make one gallon of ethanol. One gallon of ethanol has an energy value of only 77,000 BTUS. Thus, 70 percent more energy is required to produce ethanol than the energy that actually is in it. Every time you make one gallon of ethanol, there is a net energy loss of 54,000 BTUs.

Mr. Pimentel concluded that "abusing our precious croplands to grow corn for an energy-inefficient process that yields low-grade automobile fuels amounts to unsustainable subsidized food burning".

Neither increases in government subsidies to corn-based ethanol fuel nor hikes in the price of petroleum can overcome what Cornell University agricultural scientist, David Pimentel, calls a fundamental input-yield problem: It takes more energy to make ethanol from grain than the combustion of ethanol produces.

At a time when ethanol-gasoline mixtures (gasohol) are touted as the American answer to fossil fuel shortages by corn producers, food processors and some lawmakers, Cornell’s David Pimentel, one of the world’s leading experts in issues relating to energy and agriculture, takes a longer range view.

"Abusing our precious croplands to grow corn for an energy-inefficient process that yields low-grade automobile fuel amounts to unsustainable, subsidized food burning", says the Cornell professor in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Pimentel, who chaired a U.S. Department of Energy panel that investigated the energetics, economics and environmental aspects of ethanol production several years ago, subsequently conducted a detailed analysis of the corn-to-car fuel process. His findings are published in the September, 2001 issue of the Encyclopedia of Physical Sciences and Technology.

Among his findings are:
Ethanol Fuel from Corn Faulted as ‘Unsustainable Subsidized Food Burning"
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
There are more efficient ways to sustain our planet and in the process also save water which is our most precious natural resource. Hopefully, the ethanol process can either be refined to save water and streamline the fermentation process wherein less energy is used to produce it. Otherwise, it is a wasteful fruitless exercise only meant to be used as a political wedge issue to bring profits to corporations beholding to the government not the people.

For my money solar energy is the only answer and one that does not use water in the process of it's production, and it needs to be pursued much more vigorously by the United States. The 21st Century is one where innovation and technology can lead us to a brighter and more productive future, but only if we take into account the moral and ethical codes that have existed for all times that must guide our choices. And we must not allow governments such as our own to use this crisis to exploit this issue for their own gain.

In Touch Weekly has Oprah on their cover this week and the caption reads "WOW! Oprah lost 30 pounds!" In the meantime, Life & Style Weekly said last week that she's lost 15 pounds! So what is the truth here? At any rate Oprah does look slimmer these days. Though whether she's sticking to a sub 1,000 calorie diet and exercising daily are debatable. Here's what some people had to say about Oprah's weight loss at the Skinny Website;

Oprah goes up and down in her weight so often that you will never really know what it is that she is doing. Like the last time that she lost a ton of weight and it was this huge deal, and it was “for good”. I remember hearing on more than one occasion that she didn’t even have a piece of her own birthday cake at that huge 50th birthday pary that she threw for herself. What happened next? She went on vacation and ballooned again. I have a very hard time believing that even if she is eating that way, it will be for any lengthy period of time.

Her body looks very fit and glam, but her face is looking elder…Maybe becouse of the yo-yo dieting. I hope she’s not going too far! Skinny isn’t a synonyme for beautiful.

sadly, i am not convinced that this weightloss is going to last. with that diet, barely over 1000 calories, she’s setting herself up for an intense face-stuffing fest. i admire that she lost the weight, but there’s only so much time before your body cannot handle that sort of deprivation.

That can’t be heatlhy… I ate more than that even when I was severely anorexic. And def. not sustainable. I bet her body will force her back into over-eating to make up for starving herself.

she’s starving herself. a woman her size should not be eating less than 1400 cals a day. no way can she sustain it. f’cking up her metabolism even more than it already is from her past diet failures. i don’t understand why somebody with her kind of money doesnt have people cooking and weight training with her constantly. sheesh… if i could afford to have my meals prepared i’d be eating the finest seafood, fish and lean meats and i’d have a hot personal trainer working me out every day. poor Oprah. she must not have time to do anything but starve herself. her diet sounds nasty. i rather have a cup of coffee and a cigarette than the slop she’s eating. her face looks bad. SEND IN THE BOTOX!

See here for more on Oprah's weight loss experiments over the years.

Want to add labels to all your old posts? There's a new labels management feature to make this easy. On the Edit Posts page, you can select batches of posts and add or remove labels to all the posts at once.


Let loose your internal librarian! Happy labeling.

I was rather worried to hear the latest instalment from David Blunkett’s diaries on Radio 4 this morning, in particular an entry from September 2001 regarding national security. He described the problems of damping down fear by telling the public that the government knew what was happening, whilst simultaneously having to get to grips with officials to make sure that things were actually done. He wrote of an old school-friend and his wife, Christine, who lived in Vancouver:

“Christine said that a patient in her physiotherapy clinic had told her a curious story. A relative who’d been in London had found someone’s wallet, and having returned it to them were offered money as a reward. They turned this down. So the owner of the wallet, who was an Arab, said, “Well, I’ve got to do something for you. Don’t be in London on the 11th of November.” I immediately registered the significance of this. The 11th of November is Armistice Day – the one day in the year when all leading politicians from the three parties, the Queen, other members of the royal family and the leading personnel of the armed services are in the same place at the same time. A known time. In Central London. I decided that I should at least tell Tony as it was absolutely clear that nobody had fully thought through the significance. We agreed that there was no way we could cancel Armistice Day, but we were certainly going to have to take increased precautions.”

I know it was five years ago, but is there anybody who hasn’t heard a variation on this story and instantly dismissed it as an urban myth? It’s usually Birmingham in the version I’ve been told, and I tend to reply, “Yeah, I’ll stay away – it’s a right dump.”

What if our whole country were being run according to things that had happened to a friend of a friend?

Education
All exams to be replaced by one that just has one question: “Is this a question?” Anyone who answers “Yes, if this is an answer” will get an A. All exam pencils to be sharpened down to less than 4cm in case pupils stick them up their noses and bang their heads down to commit suicide. Because that happened at my mate’s school. And they gave everyone an A.

Health
All money from Aids and malaria programmes to be diverted into eradicating the world of spiders. Because this woman got bitten by one once and a few weeks later this lump came up on her arm, and she went to the doctor, and he cut it open and loads of little spiders came out and she went mad.

Also more money urgently needed for stomach pumps for Marc Almond. Or was it the other one out of Soft Cell?

ID Cards
Passports to be combined with organ donor cards. Because I heard about this guy who went abroad and he woke up in a bath of ice and they’d taken his kidney. It’s true. You can’t trust them.

Arts
All theatres to be closed down to prevent criminals stealing your car, then returning it with a note saying sorry and two theatre tickets to compensate, so they then know that you’ll be out all evening and can burgle you. Subsidies to be spent instead on a memorial for the kid from the Frosties advert.

Also Countdown to be moved to a post-watershed slot. Did you know that the letters once spelt W-A-N-K-M-E-O-F-F?

Transport
Urgent recall of all 32m cars currently on the road to have their door handles redesigned so that they can’t be opened by serial killers who have hooks for hands. Did you hear about that poor woman? The policeman told her not to look back...

Crime
All homes to be fitted with constantly-monitored CCTV cameras in case a burglar ever breaks in and puts your toothbrush up his bottom then takes a photo of it with your camera. And much stiffer sentences for this crime because it happened to friends of mine and I retched when I heard.

Sport
Sarah Greene and a pool table to be drafted in to boost the morale of all national teams.

Social Security
Channel Tunnel Rail Link to be extended in an extra 250 mile loop winding through the back gardens of everyone in Kent. Then a train will be sent through at 6am every day to wake them all up. Too late to go back to sleep; too early to get up; only one thing to do: baby boom, end of pensions crisis. There was this village this really happened in, you know...

Foreign Affairs
There’s this guy at the Foreign Office, yeah, and he says that Iraq have got these WMDs or something and in 45 minutes we could all be dead. It’s true – a friend of a friend told me...

The bottomline to this is the same as in many parts of the world. Humans overusing the water for economic gain not thinking of the future, and in the end having nothing. Excessive fines will either have to be imposed for overusing the water from the aquifer, or a way to import water from parts of the aquifer that have more water will have to be explored if possible but then again that gets people into battles over water rights. Another option could be to grow less water intensive crops combined with lessened growing of corn in order to conserve water.

Also, better water mangement to reuse irrigated water along with dry land irrigation and perhaps even introducing drip irrigation could be possible solutions to be put forth, but something has to be done soon. And of course, the fact that water is not seen as a viable issue to be discussed in a campaign because it is not a vote getter is tragic. Water is an issue that sustains our lives. How much more important can an issue be?

This isn't going to go away, and it isn't going to be remedied by replacement of water to the aquifer in large enough quantities to bring it back unless the required rainfall comes to Kansas and other areas, and in that case it would flood. Here we see many factors coming together. Human activity as far as waste and inefficient management of water resources, and climate change leading also to drought which brings inadequate rainfall to replace what has been used by the farmers.

And it will be hard to wean farmers off of growing corn or even halving their harvest which not only is a staple throughout he world, but is also their main cash crop. Again, balancing common sense practices with economic benefit seems to be becoming the hardest part of this crisis. And with the population reaching 300 million, there will also be more mouths to feed. I wonder as well what effect this will also have on the ethanol industry, as ethanol is made from corn, and corn is a very water intensive crop.

There will be updates to this as I find them.

Water Crisis Needs Attention

Water crisis demands attention
By Scott Rothschild (Contact)

Sunday, October 15, 2006

Beneath the soil of landlocked Kansas lies a vast, life-sustaining source of water called the High Plains aquifer. Formed millions of years ago, the aquifer — also referred to as the Ogallala — underlies an area of 174,000 square miles in parts of eight states, including most of western Kansas.

Since the 1940s, farmers have ferociously pumped the aquifer to produce food for a hungry nation and world. An estimated 15 million acre-feet of water per year are withdrawn for irrigation. One acre-foot of water is 325,851 gallons, or the amount it would take to cover an acre of land with one foot of water.

Now, in some areas of western Kansas, the aquifer has been sucked dry or is close to it, and farmers are shutting down wells. The effect of draining the source of water that grows a major portion of the nation’s crops has seismic repercussions.

“It’s a big, complex problem,” said Susan Stover, manager of the High Plains unit at the Kansas Water Office. “There will need to be a lot of changes. We can’t have near the amount of irrigated corn and alfalfa that we have. We don’t have the water.

Farmer Bill Spillman, viewed through the front window of a grain hauler driven by his employee Richard Rachel, heads into the fields to cut corn last Friday in Hoxie. Spillman uses both irrigation and dry-land farming methods. “The bottom line is, if everything was sustainable, we wouldn’t be tinkering with it,” she said.

Competing forces

It’s a simple equation. Agriculture is drawing more water from the aquifer than percolates back down through rainfall and runoff. The water table drops lower, making it impossible or financially impractical to pump water from below. The issue is made even more difficult because of the current seven-year drought and because some areas of the aquifer are nearly depleted while others have enough water for generations of irrigation.

More at the link
~~~~~~
High Plains Aquifer Information


Water level changes in High Plains Aquifer from 1980-2002
















USGS Image And Information

My girlfriend and I are out for a meal with some of her family. When we arrive at the restaurant, the waiter hears her mother and her uncle speaking in German (they are German – it’s not a party trick or anything), and immediately addresses us all in German, gesturing towards the table that we should sit at. I spend most of my life not really wanting to make a fuss, and I’m so impressed by his linguistic capabilities and welcoming nature that I feel it would be churlish to mention that as I am English, he is English, and we are in an English restaurant in England he and I could just converse in English. Instead, I make the subconscious decision that I will go through the whole evening just saying “danke schön” to him and pointing intently at the menu.

We take our seats. Here is a table of languages spoken, going clockwise around the table:

Fantastic, useful, educational, and important program.

Water Policy Around The World

Talk of the Nation, October 13, 2006 · Increased demand for water around the world means that some sources are running dry, leaving areas without enough fresh water. More affluent areas are turning to untapped sources of water including desalination and creative reuse or recycling of existing water sources.

Guests:

Brent Haddad, associate professor of environmental studies, University of California


Sandra Postel, visiting senior lecturer in environmental studies at Mount Holyoke College, director of the Global Water Policy Project

Jerry Maxwell, general manager, Tampa Bay Water

Is Nicole Kidman wearing a girdle beneath this beautiful dress? Or is it the all new 'bumbum'? It's very likely something. Most celebrities probably wear some kind of girdle or shapewear when on the red carpet.

Forbes magazine has a good article saying that the latest hot topic for bridesmaids chatter is a new type of girdle that firms up the butt, tucks in the tummy and doesn't have the unwanted side effect of creating "muffin top"; the inch (or more) of skin that pours over a tight waistband.

And they attribute all this talk to SPANX, a relatively new shapewear company. SPANX sells a lot shapewear but last year they created the high-waisted control-top girdle that goes right up to the bra line. It's their biggest seller, the Slim Cognito, (pic shown here) a seamless midthigh bodysuit. It appeals to both slim and overweight women.

Forbes also reveals that In Touch Weekly plans to feature SPANX as "Hollywood's Big Secret" in an upcoming issue and to highlight all the celebrities (including Oprah, Jessica Alba and Beyonce Knowles pictured here) who are into wearing girdles. I'll link to this feature here when it comes out. (P.S. Thanks much for the tip, Roger.)

Weight loss is not a typical topic for Wired magazine, but this month they have a cover feature story on The Thin Pill.

The article is all about what's called the metabolic syndrome, "a condition that though only concretely defined five years ago, is now said to afflict as many as 75 million Americans – whether they know it or not. We sit, indeed, amid an epidemic of metabolic syndrome, a fact all the more remarkable because so few people are familiar with it. For this is no virus on the loose, no plague that has spread unchecked. Rather, metabolic syndrome is just a new way to think about a cluster of well-known and increasingly prevalent conditions. Metabolic syndrome is characterized by five risk factors: high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high triglycerides (fatty acids in the bloodstream), low HDL ("good") cholesterol, and obesity. Of the five, obesity – which is itself often referred to as an epidemic – is the most important, because the rise of the morbidly overweight is directly driving the rise in the syndrome. Metabolic syndrome is, in fact, almost indistinguishable from obesity – at least 85 percent of those who have the syndrome are obese or overweight."

The article debates whether 'metabolic syndrome' is a disease that was invented by the pharmaceutical industry in order to push diet pills at us in the guise of medical authority.

Star Jones lost a lot of weight a couple of years ago (about 150 pounds) and has kept it off.

In June, she says she was kind of fired from The View, a very popular show she had been cohosting for nine years.

So the question is, what is Star Jones up to now?

She has not updated her website as to her current activities since July. In July she hosted a week of a program called "House Hunters in New York City". Here she helped New York house hunters find their dream home. This program got the highest ratings in HGTV's cable channel's history while she was hosting.

But since then there has been no update posted on her site. So it seems she is taking a well deserved break to relax and regroup from her nine years of TV.

Star Jones is hugely ambitious; she grew up with a single parent, in a housing project, became a lawyer and then became famous on TV. I have no doubt she will be in the public eye again sometime soon.

Update November 17th: Here's a very recent photo of Star Jones at the after party for Dancing with the Stars taken in November 2006.

From ET Online: "ET breaks the news that STAR JONES REYNOLDS will be executive producing and appearing on a new TV program. "We are executive producing the first year ender on Black America," Star told us Wednesday night in Los Angeles. "We are doing a full look at the issues, the people, the conversations that were held in Black America, something that... has been a project that I've always wanted to do." Star told us that her show will air on TV One, a cable/satellite network geared towards African American adults."

Enviga is a new soda that we'll soon be hearing about everywhere. This is because it's a new product from Coca Cola and likely to get massive advertising dollars.

Enviga is being promoted as a negative calorie green tea. It can be considered negative calorie because it speeds up your metabolism. Ingredients include caffeine and EGCG (a naturally occurring antioxidant that increases metabolism).

Coca-Cola says that if you drink three servings of Enviga you will burn between 60 to 100 calories more than normal that day.

Nestle partnered with Coca-Cola to develop this tea, which is sparkly and served as a cold drink.

Enviga first launches in New York and Philadelphia next month.

Found via The Guardian

P.S. To me it looks like the logo branding of this 'negative calorie' soda, with that little flame above the 'i', along with some of their marketing materials, looks and sounds a lot like their competition; the Celsius drink.

We've made it really easy to put AdSense ads on your blog using the new Blogger in Beta. If you're using the new layouts-enabled templates, try out the new AdSense Page Element.

You can sign up for an AdSense account from within Blogger, if you don't already have one. We offer a variety of recommended color schemes for the ads, or you can customize the colors. To get started, go to the Template tab of your blog, click Add Page Element, and select AdSense. Learn more.

If you're not using the new layouts-enabled templates, you can still add AdSense to your blog by clicking on the AdSense subtab of the Template tab of your blog.

Water At Risk For Millions Due To Melting Glaciers

Water for millions at risk as glaciers melt away ·
Crisis threatens parts of South America and Asia·
Decline accelerates as global warming takes hold

David Adam, environment correspondent
Wednesday October 11, 2006 The Guardian

The world's glaciers and ice caps are now in terminal decline because of global warming, scientists have discovered. A survey has revealed that the rate of melting across the world has sharply accelerated in recent years, placing even previously stable glaciers in jeopardy. The loss of glaciers in South America and Asia will threaten the water supplies of millions of people within a few decades, the experts warn.

Georg Kaser, a glaciologist at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, who led the research, said: "The glaciers are going to melt and melt until they are all gone. There are not any glaciers getting bigger any more."

Loss of land-based ice is one of the clearest signals of global temperature rise, and the state of glaciers has become a key argument in the debate over climate change. Last year, New Scientist magazine published a letter from the television botanist David Bellamy, a renowned climate sceptic, which claimed that 555 of 625 glaciers measured by the World Glacier Monitoring Service have been growing since 1980. His claim was quickly discredited, but the perception that glaciers are both growing and shrinking remains.

Dr Kaser said that "99.99% of all glaciers" were now shrinking. Increased winter snowfall meant that a few, most notably in New Zealand and Norway, got bigger during the 1990s, he said, but a succession of very warm summers since then had reversed the trend. His team combined different sets of measurements which used stakes and holes drilled into the ice to record the change in mass of more than 300 glaciers since the 1940s. They extrapolated these results to cover thousands of smaller and remote glaciers not directly surveyed.

The results revealed that the world's glaciers and ice caps - defined as all land-based ice except the mighty Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets - began to shrink far more quickly in 2001. On average, the world's glaciers and ice caps lost enough water between 1961 and 1990 to raise global sea levels by 0.35-0.4 mm each year. For 2001-2004, the figure rose to 0.8-1mm each year.

Writing in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the scientists say: "Late 20th century glacier wastage is essentially a response to post-1970 global warming." Dr Kaser said: "There is very, very strong evidence that this is down to human-caused changes in the atmosphere."
Emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide trap heat in the atmosphere, warming the surface. One of the first impacts of glacier melting is likely to be in South America. In August, a report from 20 UK-based environment and development groups warned that Andean glaciers are melting so fast that some are expected to disappear within 15-25 years.

This would deny major cities water supplies and put populations and food supplies at risk in Colombia, Peru, Chile, Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina and Bolivia.

Other countries are noticing the effects. Studies show snow and ice cover in the eastern Himalayas has shrunk by about 30% since the 1970s. Melting glaciers have created lakes in the mountains which could burst and cause widespread flooding. Of 150 glaciers that once stood in Glacier National Park in the northern US, only 27 remain. The US Environmental Protection Agency says the biggest are a third the size they were in 1850. Continued warming could melt them completely by 2030.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Once again, the Chacaltaya Glacier in Bolivia:
http://www.reisebilder.ch/bolivien/chacafern_e.htm

Collapse of the Perito Moreno Glacier in Argentina
http://www.argentina.org.au/glacier_collapse.htm
And this was over two years ago with melting continuing.

And from NASA:
South American Glaciers Melting Faster

Glaciers Melting At Their Fastest Rate For 5000 Years



Retreating Glaciers Of Patagonia


View from the top ...
Two images of the Upsala glacier in Argentina show the retreat of the ice (top: 1928; bottom: 2004).
Photograph: Greenpeace/Reuters

~~~~~~~~~~~
Water scarcity is simply not just the process of fixing leaky pipes. Although infrastructure is absolutely one of the top concerns and priorities regarding this global crisis, it has been proven that human behavior regarding the burning of fossil fuels is also contributing to the water crisis in our world. Weather patterns particularly regarding rainfall also show in some cases not just a shift in patterns, but a complete reversal, and snows are not coming where they are needed to reverse this melting process.

The effects of these glaciers melting completely will then be past crisis stage if the people who depend on the freshwater provided from them and a rain/snowfall they cannot depend on are left with nothing to use for farming and other needs. Higher elevation farming will only lead to soil erosion and deforestation which in turn will then lead to flooding of crops, and effect the very way of life for thousands of people who without water to survive would then have no choice but to migrate elsewhere.

WE MUST FACE THIS NOW or we will suffer the consequences even more than we already are now, and it will be the poor of this world who will suffer more than any other group.

I have just sold some musical equipment to a friend, and as a result I have six £50 notes in my wallet. I am usually more of a chip and Pin man (there’s extra protection on purchases plus the opportunity to collect points, which really makes sense if you pay off your balance in full each month as I do), but I like having these large-denomination notes in my pocket. It makes me feel like a Cockney wheeler-dealer who pays for everything in cash from a big wad. As a result I have been dropping aitches all day. I am now at Tesco.

“That’s £44.92 please”, says the check-out girl.

I hand her one of my prized notes, just about managing not to say “‘Ere you go, Princess – buy yerself somefink nice.”

She takes her security pen to check that the note is genuine, and to my horror it makes an incriminating black mark right across Sir John Houblon’s boat race (face).

I immediately start to sweat. When I think about it, my friend is a bit dodgy. He certainly didn’t go to university. The woman in the queue who tried to push in front of me watches with interest, now in no hurry to go anywhere.

The check-out girl makes another mark on the note. Same result. She holds it up to the light. I have heard stories that they get bonuses for catching fraudsters – she’s certainly looking at me like Christmas has come early. I consider making a run for it, but realise that she has already swiped my Clubcard.

Idiot! Cockney hard-men don’t leave loyalty cards at the scenes of their crimes.

I hand her another note. “Perhaps you could try this one”, I say, my glottal stops magically disappearing. Same result.

Idiot! You’re now a repeat offender.

I want to be middle class again.

The check-out girl presses a button and after an agonising wait during which the growing queue happily regard me in the manner of an audience at a public execution, a supervisor appears.

I try to affect the nonchalant air of an innocent man, but inwardly decide that I will squeal on my friend at the earliest opportunity. That slag would do the same to me. The supervisor tries the security pen, putting a thick line right across the Queen’s forehead. Both banknotes now look like either a toddler or a deranged anarchist has been let loose on them. The spectre of prison looms large. I really, really, really don’t want to get bummed.

“Hang on a sec”, says the supervisor. “This is just a marker pen.”

We all have a right old giraffe about it – me, the checkout girl, the supervisor and the woman in the queue, and I head back to the trouble and strife for a knees-up with half a monkey.

Gwyneth Paltrow, 34, is reportedly on a very strict diet now. She's fed up with not being able to lose the last of the post-baby weight. Her second baby, Moses, was born in April this year. She also has a two year old daughter, Apple.

Above is a photo of her from last month and a before pic (right) taken a few years ago.

Paltrow is known to practise yoga regularly. She has followed a macrobiotic diet for a very long time. But in 2005 she told People Magazine that she's not as stringent as she once was and that "Now I'll have cheese once in a while or white flour, but I still believe in whole grains and no sugar."

But now Life Style Extra is reporting that she is going on a special diet designed by health guru Dr Joshi where she will only be eating the following foods for the next few weeks;

* turkey

* chicken

* white fish

* vegetables

* bananas (the only fruit allowed)


She is not to eat any;

* dairy products

* wheat

* tomatoes

* peppers

* fruit

* sugar

* gluten

* red meat

The diet regime she's on also requires taking herbal supplements to flush out toxins, regular colonic irrigation, reflexology and cupping treatments. (Cupping treatments? What the heck is that?)

The British newspaper also says Gwyneth has taken to wearing corsets to make her appear slightly thinner but she hopes to ditch these when she's finished with this temporary diet.

Tara Reid has never been overweight. She says she weighs 110 now and has fluctuated about 10 pounds over this point at times. (Her height is 5'4".) But despite being very slim, Reid decided a couple of years ago that she would like a flatter stomach. She wanted her stomach to be taut, like a six-pack.

She went ahead with a liposuction operation (at the same time as she was having her breasts enlarged). But this week she told Us Magazine that the lipo work was a disaster. Her stomach became "the most ripply, bulgy thing".

Last month she went in for reconstructive surgery to try to get this fixed. It's one more case of warning about the risks of liposuction surgery for people who are seeking an easy way to quickly lose belly fat.

Hotter Planet Brings Chilling Outlook For Water In California

Earlier than usual Sierra snowmelt, along with expected greater rainfall, threatens to hamper the ability of reservoirs such as Hetch Hetchy to manage the runoff and keep valley flooding at bay.
A Look A Global Warming
Sunday's Water Works Stories
Monday's Water Works Stories

By MICHAEL G. MOONEYBEE STAFF WRITER
Last Updated: October 10, 2006, 07:26:03 AM PDT

Assuming the experts are correct, the day will come when there won't be enough water to go around in the Northern San Joaquin Valley, let alone the state. While no one can predict exactly when that day will arrive, a growing number of scientists and researchers insist it's an unstoppable force -- carrying with it any number of potentially devastating consequences.

A complex web of factors, including climate change, explosive growth and galloping urbanization, will reduce -- dramatically in some years -- the supply of clean surface and underground water. That could put the valley's ag-based economy in harm's way.

"We have droughts and floods," said Dennis Gudgel, Stanislaus County's ag commissioner. "It's always been that way. It's the availability of water that's more of a concern for farmers. It's a very serious issue." Experts say the competition for water will grow ever keener as the century pushes ahead. As for droughts and floods, the experts say they will become more frequent and harsh as temperatures rise.

Precipitation patterns also will change, but Michael Hanemann, director of the California Climate Change Center at the University of California at Berkeley, said that likely will prove to be far less significant than increasing temperatures.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Is this worth continuing to waste water filling your large swimming pools, and not giving a care for the ecosystems affected by your own waste and apathy? This isn't just a problem a world away, for those who think they can dismiss it and continue to waste water.

Desertification is environmental degradation caused primarily by human activity. Overgrazing, slash and burn techniques, deforestation, over population, climate change, and in varied instances drought that is prolonged leads to desertification. And in the case of the Aral Sea, the diverting of water resources:




Improving Access To Water In Drylands

UN Conference On Desertification

Policy Briefs

Once the fourth largest lake in the world, this is what human activity did to her.
The Aral Sea

And 2006 is the: International Year Of Deserts And Desertification

We can reverse this. We must reverse this. That is the hope.

It's been a while since Suzy Preston was on the Biggest Loser show and lost 95 pounds. (She went from 227 to 132). Has she managed to keep the weight off since then?

Suzy Preston and Matt Hoover got married last month. It's the most recent photo I've been able to find of them. They both look like they've put on a few pounds but they look fabulous and very much in love. Their wedding photographer had this to say about whether they've managed to keep the weight off;

"They both look great. They may have added a few pounds since the finale of the show but they still exercise and eat right."

Ever since being given a copy of I-Spy Car Number Plates as a child I have always been just a little bit interested in these commonplace identifiers. Those long journeys used to fly by as I looked up each of the 650 basic ways of combining two letters. Sometimes, pre-2001 BDs, KVs and WKs still remind me of spotting them far from home on the motorway and wondering if they were going all the way back with us. I would never find out though, as my Dad drove so slowly. It's a wonder that I spotted any at all – every other vehicle was just a blur. Those near-neighbours would have been watching Pan’s People, eating Arctic roll and playing on their space hoppers long before us. (That was all anyone did in the 70s.)

I have mixed feelings about personalised number plates though. On the one hand, everyone who has one is an idiot with more M0 NEY than S3 NSE (yes, I know that first one isn't strictly allowed – they would have to do something like M10 NEY or N\0 NEY (that's N10 NEY with an illegally sloping 1)). It's like a designer label that says "I couldn't find a car expensive enough to show how rich I am, so look at what else I've wasted my money on!" You could achieve the same effect by fitting a device to the exhaust that burns a £20 note every mile.

On the other hand, I like the way that even in something as mundane as a rigid alpha-numeric system designed solely to identify vehicles in case of crime or collision people still like to express their creativity, albeit often in a piss-poor way that requires putting in extra screws to make one letter look a bit like another. Americans have a much more flexible approach to vanity plates though – you don't need to have even a single digit that you have to pretend is an E or, with a bit more squinting, an A. I find that a bit too easy – like writing poetry that doesn't have to rhyme. The only restriction is that it can't be offensive, so how this slipped through the net is anyone's guess...



I used to see this car around Cleveland a lot in the early 90s, and eventually had to explain to my then girlfriend what was so funny. I really wanted to get a picture of it, but as soon as I decided to carry my camera with me at all times it went into hiding. I would stalk my quarry along I-77 as others would go after big game in the Serengeti. Then, the day that we parted (it was the old story – boy meets girl, girl finds out boy is obsessed with number plates), there it was, parked majestically like a wildebeest at a watering hole.

(Note the Cleveland Rocks sticker. For anyone who hasn't been to Cleveland, "rocks" is perhaps pushing it slightly.)

My baby recently started daycare three days a week. (I keep calling him 'baby' all the time even though he will be three years old in four months.)

So I've been making daycare lunches for him for the first time.

I'd like to make healthy lunches but I find it hard to think of good ideas for his lunch container. He's not a 'sandwich' eater yet. When we're at home for lunch I usually reheat leftovers from the previous dinner, or make him some scrambled egg and toast, or open a can of tuna or sardines or salmon and give it to him with healthy crackers. Then there is fruit, yoghurt and basically the entire contents of the fridge and cupboards are open for me to offer him, as he can often be a finicky eater.

But at the daycare they ask that the food does not require refrigeration or heating-up. So that limits it a bit. They also don't allow any kind of nuts which is hard because nuts are so good for him and he can eat a lot of them. I once included a flax granola bar in his lunch but was quickly educated that this is not allowed as it may contain traces of peanut products.

I would love to get some ideas from people as to what they put in their toddler's lunch box. Here's what I've been doing so far;

Yoghurt
I often include a yoghurt in his lunch. I prefer to buy the large (non-premixed) containers and give him an individual serving in a small re-washable plastic container rather than buying the individually portioned cups. It's usually a lot cheaper and much better for the environment.

Fruit
I usually include a piece of fruit, most often a banana, but sometimes grapes or berries (rasberries, strawberries or blueberries as they have been in season). I put the berries in a small plastic container as above.

Sandwich
I often make a cheese sandwich (with a bit of ketchup, as this multiplies the odds of him eating it), cut the rinds off, and cut it into little squares. He often doesn't eat it.

Crackers and Cheese
This is a current food fad with him. A little cracker with a slice of cheese on it.

Leftover Chicken
I often include little pieces of chicken in another plastic container if we happen to have some leftover.

Carrot Sticks
He seems to like finely cut carrot sticks right now.

Heavily Diluted Juice
I give him a sippy cup filled with about 1/4 cranberry juice and 3/4 water.

So, other than the carrot sticks, the vegetable quota in the lunches is almost zero. And it seems I must be missing on some good stuff. I'm thinking there must be more good ideas for what to make. Would love to hear from people about this!