mullaney

Monday Night is Book Club

Tomorrow night is book club night for me. It’s probably the night each month I most look forward to these days. I’m a little shocked how much I enjoy it to be honest.

In college I was an English major, but I never loved literature back then. I had a great class my Freshman year called Introduction to Poetry. This was mainly because the instructor, a grad student at the time, was so jazzed to teach the class. He also held office hours at the local bar. He would make you play pinball with him while you discussed your paper. It was that first semester that I decided to couple an English and Rhetoric major with a Cinema Studies minor. Despite many tedious English classes to follow, I plowed ahead with that plan.

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Are Kids Fat Because They Are Lazy?

The conventional wisdom is that is more obesity in kids these days because they exercise less. If this is true, then you would expect that adding exercise into the routine of school kids would help the problem. However, research just presented at a recent Canadian Paediatric Society conference suggests that it doesn’t:

Harris said researchers looked at 13 trials of six months to three years duration in which pre- and post-BMI measurements were taken.

In studies involving nearly 10,000 children, primarily in elementary schools, none demonstrated a reduction in BMI with those who were assigned to the most phys-ed time, compared to those who didn’t have as much.

“School-based physical activity interventions do not improve BMI although they may have other beneficial health effects,” he said. “There are improvements to bone mineral density, aerobic capacity, reduced blood pressure and increased flexibility,” he added.

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Cholestorol, Triglycerides, and a Mostly Meat Diet

Three months ago, I made the switch to a low carb diet. I had two goals, one was to continue losing weight. The other was to improve my health and reduce my risk of heart disease. After reading a number of things, most recently Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes, I wanted to try a diet with very little carbohydrates and almost no sugar at all. I started a diet of mostly meat, eggs, cheese and vegetables (plus nuts and berries).

I have lost some more weight, another 10 pounds since I started. But I was also interested in the effect it would have on cholesterol and triglycerides. I hoped that it would lower my triglycerides, raise my HDL cholesterol and not raise my LDL cholesterol too much. Fortunately, I had my lipid profile done last December so I could compare. Here were the numbers then (the normal range is within brackets[]):

Triglyceride (mg/dl): 112 [40-160]
Cholesterol (mg/dl): 153 [<200]
HDL (mg/dl): 31 [29-67]
LDL (mg/dl): 100 [<130]
TC/HDL ratio: 4.94 [<5]

Not a terrible profile by conventional standards. Everything is within normal ranges. Still, HDL is a little low and the ratio is just within normal range. And even though the triglycerides aren’t bad, there is plenty of room to push that lower.

So after three months of meat, eggs, cheese, veggies and nuts, what is my lipid profile now?

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Theory of Poker on the Kindle

I just saw this announced on the forums of Two Plus Two Publishing by Mason Malmuth:

We have just given Amazon permission to create kindle-books from Hold ’em Poker for Advanced Players and The Theory of Poker. We’ll see how these do and then decide if we should do any more.

Finally some decent quality books on poker will be available for the Kindle. These two books by David Sklansky are must reads for any student of poker.

Laugh Out Loud Theater

Last Saturday I got a chance to visit my friend Lillian Frances. Lillie and I were on a team called Frank Booth at ImprovOlympic in the 90s. I was on that team for about 4 years during which we probably performed over 200 Harolds together, mostly at iO, but we also performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and a few other places along the way. We created a show with our friend Tara Davis called the Frank Booth in the Blue Velvet Lounge where we combined torch songs and long form improv, setting scenes in the same lounge where Tara sang. Our swan song was a show called Therapy directed by Miles Stroth where we vented our real life foibles in front of an audience and then poked fun at ourselves through improv.

It’s been years since we’ve seen each other, but we still have a very strong connection. Lillie and I had similar sensibilities and even more similar ambitions. We both wanted to run our own theatres, we both loved improv and we were both frustrated by ImprovOlympic. Don’t get me wrong, it was a wonderful place to learn and grow as performers. It was the kind of frustration you feel when you love something and feel it could be even better if only you were in charge. A feeling that many, many performers have felt over the years as they passed through iO.

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This Is Just To Say

My friend Calan writes a web comic that I love. The graphic style of it is wonderful and the mood of the comic is fun too, sweet Gothic horror. In her own words it’s:

A webcomic about a semi-neurotic goth gingerbread boy, his strange playmates and the sister who wants him dead.

Last week she put up a comic that was inspired by the William Carlos Williams poem, This Is Just To Say. She writes:

I was listening to a podcast of This American Life the other day and it opened with the famous poem ‘This is just to say’ by William Carlos Williams, followed by several spoof versions. Apparently, many writers have done versions of this famous poem. In fact, in classrooms and writing groups it’s not an uncommon exercise, not to mention a fun one, to create a rendition of the poem.

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My first book selection – Little Children by Tom Perrotta

The Kindle is really handy for checking out a lot of books in an efficient manner. You can quickly download samples from several books and then take your time reading through them. The sample is usually about 5-10% of the book. That’s usually enough of a book to get a good feel whether or not you will like it.

So I downloaded about a dozen samples of novels. I finally zeroed in on one by Tom Perrotta, the author of Election. A friend suggested the Abstinence Teacher, I read the sample and bought the book. But after reading a bit, I thought it might be too political and too religious for a first book, when I have no idea who will be showing up to this club. The last thing I want is a heated debate about Evangelical Christianity and sex education in the schools. Besides I realized that it isn’t out in paperback yet. Still, I liked his writing style, and decided to try Little Children instead.

I think this one is a keeper. It’s a quick read, funny, with lots to talk about. I’m a bit nervous about all the adult content in the book. There are several very frank scenes about sex, perversions and a character who is a child molester. It’s probably not a huge deal, but it feels strangely vulnerable to recommend a book to strangers.

The next book will likely be The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak. I’m almost done with that and have really been enjoying it too.

We need an old paradigm of why we get fat

How often have you heard some variation to, “There’s no secret to weight loss, you just have to exercise and eat less.” The implications are clear, if you are fat, it’s because you are lazy (you don’t exercise enough) or you are slovenly (you eat too much). Obesity and the associated diseases are the wages of sin and the only way to overcome these temptations is through will power and virtue.

These ideas that obesity is the result of eating too much or exercising too little or both is treated as a self-evident truth. People invoke the First Law of Thermodynamics and people who argue otherwise are marginalized as not understanding the First Law.

But what if it’s wrong? What if the causality is all mixed up? What if you eat more because your body is getting fat? What if you don’t feel like exercising because you are already obese? What if simple calorie restriction is not particularly effective in losing weight? It isn’t and yet it’s repeated over and over again, “You are overweight because you overeat,” and “If you just eat less, you will lose weight.”

In this lecture by Gary Taubes, he does a great job of showing the fallacy of the conventional wisdom:

It’s a longish video, about 70 minutes, but it’s a nice introduction to his ideas. If you find it all compelling I highly recommend his book, Good Calories, Bad Calories. It’s not a diet book, it’s a science book, and it sets out to demolish some of the conventional paradigms we have about diet, obesity and disease.

UPDATE: Changed the title because we don’t need a new paradigm really, we need an old one. If you watch the video, you will understand what I mean.

The James Family Farm – Sherman, IL

Saturday morning I headed down to Sherman, Illinois, about an hour’s drive to check out the James Family Farm. A few weeks back, I found the farm’s listing on eatwild.com and emailed Andrea James, who runs the farm, to arrange a visit.

The farm is quite close to I-55, so it’s easy to get to. There is a gravel road that connects it to one of the main roads.

I pulled up to the front gate at a little past 9am. It was still closed. But even from there I could see some of the animals and I jumped out of my car to take a couple of pictures.

I called and left a message, saying I would be back and found a nice diner a couple miles south toward Springfield.

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In Praise of Matt Pack

I finally got on facebook. So far it’s been a great tool for me to reconnect with a lot of people that I lost track of the last couple of years. It’s very easy to feel isolated out here from all the great people I met in Chicago and New York. Facebook is a little more engaging than just emails to keep in touch. Plus they just added chat!

One of the first people I had a nice chat with was Matt Pack. He mentioned the radio program he’s working on, Fair Game with Faith Salie. So I added the show to my podcaster and loaded 20 episodes to my mp3 player this morning.

What a great show. It’s mainly an interview format in the same category as say Fresh Air, which I also love, but younger and funnier with comedy bits sprinkled in. Faith Salie is a good interviewer and the show genuinely made me laugh. The first episode I listened to featured a sort of op-ed segment by Matt Pack. It was a nice surprise since Matt only said he was writing for the show. I didn’t realize he did on air segments as well.

I ended up thinking about Matt a lot today on my drive as I listened to the show, and I felt compelled to post something about him. He is one of those rare people who always makes you feel better. I can’t think of time that I’ve seen Matt Pack and haven’t felt happier because of it. He has an infectious smile and is just a great guy to hang out with. Hell, I feel better just thinking about Matt now.

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