Is the blog hungry?

I made a very ugly (but utterly delicious) tortilla española tonight. I'm pretty okay with the result.

Also: I've been loving the hell out of this song (via eekbeat) for the last 24 hours.

Hey, wait a second. I was told, as a wee lad, never to touch birds, because the human scent would mark them as outcasts in the flock and they'd DIE. Is this just some dreck told to kids to avoid bird germs? Was I fed a pack of lies?

I heard about this guy's new book, and this anecdote caught my ear:

It's perhaps fitting, then, that the quietest place in New York, by Foy's measure, is deep in the old apartment of the newspaperman and endower of prizes for those who best manipulate silence and noise to tell stories—Joseph Pulitzer, whose specially-designed sound-proofing chamber comes in at 37.1 decibels.

I didn't know that about Mr. Pulitzer!

So, the recent mishegas over on the Korean peninsula is pretty mishegassy, right? This (from here) is possibly the oddest part of the story I've seen so far:

North Korea warned Wednesday that it would "totally ban" South Koreans from Kaesong if Seoul installs propaganda loudspeakers at the border, as it threatened to do early this week. The speakers were taken down in 2004, when relations between the two Koreas were less frosty.

The North is also threatening to blow up any speakers the South erects near the border.

Here's an image of some of the old speakers. (Those are some big fucking speakers!)

An idea: get some high ranking South Korean official some copies of apo's masterful Unfunkked series. Even the most bellicose of warmongers couldn't resist those smooth, pacifying grooves.

In a study of 21,773 teenage girls, researchers found that compared with normal-weight girls, overweight and obese girls had sex earlier, had more partners, and were less likely to use birth control. Obese girls had higher rates than overweight girls in each of these categories as well. (Explanations include earlier puberty onset and low self-esteem stuff.)

This reminds me of our old conversations about whether or not having sex in your teens is a priori a bad thing for girls. The point was made that while plenty of teen girls have healthy, happy sex, and their traumas are within the normal range of being a teenager, that cultural factors (in the US, at least) create a more fraught situation for girls than for boys.

I assume we all agree that unprotected sex is a hallmark of an unhealthy situation, so this study provides some extra evidence of the perils of sex. It's not the sex per se, but unhealthy sex is clearly showing up at higher rates for girls who have much less social cache than their thin peers.

I imagine this result does not extend to overweight and obese teenage boys.

Enjoy Republicans having to wade through the fruits of their labor.

Also, the site itself is fun. Clearly it's getting hijacked by good people:

- I think every food product NOT endorsed by Sarah Palin should carry a warning label stating we are ingesting socialism.

- People are always worrying about deforesting trees and stuff. What they should do is attach an old coffee can full of seeds to the bottom of airplanes with some holes poked in the bottom. That way, when they fly across the country, they'll also be REFORESTING the nation for close to nothing.

-It is far too difficult to tell the difference between real Americans and what the liberals call a "Poe". Therefore, in the name of free and truthful speech, all people with Internet connections should be required to register their political views so we can make sure they are expressing their own views and not some caricature.

-Let's change all Christmas songs to have happier endings.

I don't know why this fellow in Missoula:

The use of fractions always leads to errors. For example, calculate the hypotenuse of a right triangle with leg dimensions of 100 and 150. The answer is 180.2776. Now, try jamming 0.2776 into a fraction. There is no fraction in the world that will fit without error. You can get close but if you round up, it's wrong. If you round down, that too is wrong. In today's world, such errors cannot be tolerated.

would want to make me cry so.

Way back in the archives Ogged had a post on weight loss, stating essentially that if you eat reasonably, and do a half hour of cardio exercise daily, you will lose weight.

I've conducted a natural experiment along these lines recently, with the bike commute. I'm varying between five and ten hours a week of biking, so well more than Ogged suggested. And I'm eating the same as I was before I started biking -- reasonable or unreasonable, it was a diet on which my weight was stable. When you add in 5-10 hrs/week of cardio exercise? My weight is still rock steady.

This is not a problem -- while I'd vaguely like to lose the twenty pounds I put on when I had kids, I don't actually care much; the point of the bike commute is that it's fun. Just a note that authoritative-sounding weightloss advice from twentysomething male athletes is the sort of thing where YMMV.

Commenter will inquires:

I want to be like the cool kids and make pizza. What is the dough recipe to maximize deliciousness and easiness?

The future captains of industry:

A new drinking game is spreading around college campuses. Quite simply the simplest, funniest drinking game ever created. It's quite easy. Buy Smirnoff ice, present it to one of your bro's in any manner, your bro must instantly get on one knee and chug the Smirnoff ice on the spot regardless of setting.

Bro's might ask... what's the fun in that? Well it's all about creativity. Planting an ice in a discrete location where your bro might not know where it is. For example... one of my bro's gave an ice to a bartender and asked him to hold onto it until his other bro showed up. Bro 1 asks Bro 2 if he wants a beer. The bartender then presents Bro 2 with the ice. An instant chant of "you got iced" precedes and Bro 2 chugs the ice on the spot. The best part of the game is that you can ice anyone in on the game at any moment in any place. Bro's have been iced in restaurants, walking down the street, and at complete inappropriate times, which makes the game all the better.

To really fuck over your bros try and buy the most disgusting flavored ice or a 24oz ice. Pineapple, mango, and grape are top of the list for the most gut wrenching, mind numbing, throw up in your mouth, Smirnoff ice flavors.

Yeah, that sounds awesome, doodz.