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Happy Monday!

Ooh, snap!

My friend Neil sent this to me. Brilliant!

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I concur with your assessment and suggestions, Mr. Editor.

This past January, I finally got around to getting a full health checkup. Forty is really just around the corner (what is four years anymore? Over in a flash!), and I intend to reach that seminal birthday with an aces bill of health. Last year was a busy year, however, and the exercise regiment suffered a hit, and attention to diet had flagged as well. So anyways I ran the gamut of tests, and everything came out normal, except my “Lipid Profile”, which was not quite optimal:

Triglicerides (Desired: < 150)
My score: 119. I’m well under 150 here, so I guess this is okay…
HDL Cholesterol (Desired: > 40)
My score: 39. HDL is the so-called “good” cholesterol. I could use a boost here.
LDL Cholesterol (Desired: < 100)
My score: 147. LDL is the “bad” cholesterol. I’m definitely high here – needs to come down.
Total Cholesterol (Desired: <200 - closer to 180 the better)
My Score: 210.

So the cholesterol is a little out of whack. I attribute this entirely to bad dietary habits. This is an obvious factor to consider even if you don’t know a lot about what cholesterol actually is or how it impacts the body. When I initially became interested in learning how to improve my cholesterol – I really knew nothing more than that it was bad. I knew eggs were a source of dietary cholesterol – but beyond that I couldn’t say much. In retrospect, I probably knew less than the average person…

I quickly learned, though, that the source of dietary cholesterol is animal fats – it’s present in varying amounts in any creature that walks, crawls or swims – any creature that breathes. Now I’m speaking entirely as a lay observer here, and this is in no way a scientific assertion, but my guess is that the main source of cholesterol issues for those following a more or less traditional “Western” diet is the consumption of too much meat. In discussions with J, it quickly became clear that in my own case I was eating far too much cow. I love cow in all it’s culinary manifestations – hamburgers, ice-cream, etc. Initially I protested – but J made it clear to me that the frequency with which I gravitated to cow products in my diet was far greater than I was initially prepared to accept. I suppose I wanted to play the victim – the way I saw it, I was doing plenty to be healthy – at the time I was running 20-25 miles a week, and dammit I ate a salad occasionally – that should be enough! It should be said, though, that J often possesses a mature, tough minded perspective on things that I frequently lack, largely, I must admit, from an embarrassing streak of willful puerility in my character (J, with typical precocity, gave up cow products many years ago – possibly in her teens). I have other traits though – such as a lifelong interest in maintaining my own health – and this is, again, probably born out of an aggregation of even more unflattering traits such as narcissism and self-absorption – but in any case that, combined with the irrefutable claims of both my minatory January lipid profile and J’s frank observations of my eating habits have forced me into admitting that it was time to pay closer attention to how I eat and why my diet is apparently ill-serving me.

As I’ve learned about cholesterol, I’ve evolved a personal strategy that I’m endeavoring to integrate as lifelong habits, which I’ll enumerate below. It should be said again, though – that I am in no way an expert and assert no scientific rigor to my personal findings upon reading about the subject. When I say this or that is “tested”, I guess I’m really saying that I trust the sources that I’ve derived the information from enough to heed any implicit advice or suggestion that has been made towards improving one’s health. I think that too often when readers – including me – encounter an article that bandies about the notion that this or that is supported by tests or clinical trials – we are susceptible to immediately surrendering skepticism and embracing what we are being told as truth, no longer to be questioned. Many of these “tests” though do not possess adequate controls, are not conducted for significant periods of time, and frequently these articles leave out pieces of information that may be vital to our understanding the significance of said tests. Also, it should be asked – who paid for tests or trials? Who paid the writer of the article? It’s really hard for me, and I suspect most others – to continually chase down these kinds of questions. So, to wrap up this digression – I’ll just say that this is not a static strategy – it will most certainly change – possibly radically, as I continue to learn more about my health and how to maintain it.

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Another “Phoenix Lights” incident occurred last night, similar to the famous event witnessed by thousands in Phoenix in 1997.
According to the Arizona Republic, civilian and military aviation organizations say that the source of the lights remains unknown. Witnesses have claimed that as the lights moved east, they were followed by three jets from out of the west.
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As far as beer goes, for many years I was a hops man – the more hops the better – and so my favorite beers of that period were the likes of Liberty Ale, Sierra-Nevada Pale, and so on. For the past few years though I have really swung in the opposite direction. It’s as if I’ve just totally burned out on that pungent yet noble grain. For a while now I’ve really been favoring brown ales. Newcastle is fairly ubiquitous when out and about, and so I’ll often automatically order that if I’m not in a whisky mood. As far as brown ales are concerned, that’s all your likely to find – although you might chance upon Samuel Smith’s excellent Nut Brown Ale – unless you go to a place bar/pub/restaurant-what-have-you that specializes in beers and other spirits. Here in Atlanta “Taco Mac” comes to mind, and I can’t fail to mention Decatur’s awesome Brick Store Pub, where you’ll often find a brown on tap. I first discovered Brooklyn Beer’s Brown there. I believe the first time I had Ellie’s Brown was at the Brick Store also. This is a great, solid beer – it’s nutty but not crazy nutty like Sam Smith’s correlate. It’s flavorful without knocking you over the head with any particular characteristic – just well balanced. The kind of beer you could enjoyable sip all night – what the folks at the Brick Store refer to as “a fine session beer”.

Most of the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations were ignored by the White House, but not this one: the Bush administration immediately pushed ahead by helping to draft a radical new oil law for Iraq, which would allow companies like Shell and BP to sign thirty-year contracts in which they could keep a large share of Iraq’s oil profits, amounting to tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars – unheard of in countries with as much easily accessible oil as Iraq, and a sentence of perpetual poverty in a country where 95 percent of government revenues come from oil. [...] Iraq’s main labor unions declared that “the privatization of oil is a red line that may not be crossed” and, in a join statement, condemned the law as attempt to seize “energy resources at a time when the Iraqi people are seeking to determine their own future while still under conditions of occupation”. The law that was finally adopted was even worse than anticipated: it placed no limits on the amount of profits that foreign companies can take from the country and made no specific requirements about how much or how little foreign investors would partner with Iraqi companies or hire Iraqis to work in the oil fields. Most brazenly, it excluded Iraq’s elected parliamentarians from having any say in the terms of future oil contracts. Instead, it created a new body, the Federal Oil and Gas Council, which, according the The New York Times, would be advised by “a panel of oil experts from inside and outside Iraq.” This unelected body, advised by unspecified foreigners, would have ultimate decision-making power on all oil matters, with the full authority to decide which contracts Iraq did and did not sign. In effect, the law called for Iraq’s publicly owned oil reserves, the country’s main source of revenues, to be exempted from democratic control and run instead by a powerful, wealthy oil dictatorship, which would exist alongside Iraq’s broken and ineffective government.”

From “The Shock Doctrine” By Naomi Klein; Ch.18 “Full Circle: From Blank Slate To Scorched Earth”

Jennifer drove down to Albany,GA Friday with her Mom and picked him up. They tell us he’s 1/2 Old English and 1/2 Old Southern Bulldog. He has a great little personality – chill but alert and playful, and hardly barks or cries at all. A welcome addition to the family. The image link will take you to more pictures of Baumer and even one which reveals my doozie of a burgeoning bald spot.

A house for those who refuse to die.