SEE YA!

Last year I promised to write a blog a week every week for a year – accomplished.  I hope to never make as stupid a commitment as that again.  To volunteer to perform the exact same task one day every week for a year?  No way!

This year I will try to do something different once a week, every week, and absolutely NOT blog about it.  One day I might have breakfast at a greasy dive; one day maybe visit a homeless man at the Vietnam Memorial Park and talk;  buy flowers for Laura for absolutely no reason;  go into the Apple Store and NOT buy anything.   It really doesn’t matter what I choose to do – just one thing completely different every week.   Fix a few things around the house and then hire a professional to fix whatever I screwed up.  But don’t worry, you’re not going to have to read about it anywhere any longer.

Some things bear repeating – blogs do not fall into that category.  Who knows, I might actually learn something.  At least I won’t be blathering away at a keyboard while the world passes by outside my window.  And you won’t be compelled to watch through the window while nothing happens.  Thanks!  John

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52nd Post This Year

WordPress sent me an email this morning asking me to respond to a number of questions regarding my commitment to blog once a week in 2011.  They asked how my blog has changed over the course of a year (not at all); whether I am ready to commit to a blog post a day in 2012 (hell, no); and a number of other questions prompting me to consider my future in the blogging universe (virtually none).

Despair, Inc. (a website everyone should have on their “favorites” lists) has this quote about blogging:

“Never Before Have So Many People With So Little To Say Said So Much To So Few”

I have now fulfilled my commitment to write a blog for every week of the year, which was a sort of New Years’ Resolution from last year.  Tomorrow will be my last blog and will briefly (I promise) describe my New Years Resolution for 2012, which is a very direct result of what I have truly learned from my experience with WordPress this past year.  ‘Nuff said!

Largess

We know from visual experience that a bunch of Americans are morbidly obese.  I prefer the word “grossly” to “morbidly” as an adverb for obese – but that is mostly because if someone expires from obesity, I would no longer have to look at them, and that would make my daily observations less “gross”.  The most recent data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey estimates that 33.9% of Americans are obese.

Obesity is a very expensive medical cost, estimated at 147 billion dollars annually.  My contention is that this money could be spent in better ways to combat this epidemic.  Bigger and better burgers are not the answer.  

Non hispanic black americans have the highest obesity rate (36.8%) in these studies.  Taking into consideration the higher rate of unemployment, the unintended effects of bigotry (see unemployment), and the assumption that Charles Darwin’s theory regarding the survival of the fittest (when viewed through the historic lens of slavery) should have propagated the healthiest race of people anywhere.  I could find no concrete explanation for this phenomenon – my only guess is that fast food is generally cheaper and unhealthy compared to their healthier counterparts.

Hispanics have an obesity rate of 30.7%, but these are hispanics in America.  My experience with food in Mexico is very healthy.  On the other hand, for many hispanics to reach America, they must be able to swim which is excellent exercise.

It seems to me that using simple American Ingenuity, for which we are famous, would enable us to find a way to make these 33.9 percent of Americans proportionately taller.  This would seem to be a reasonable response to the problem (and a great way to utilize that 147 billion dollars annually), and could also be a huge boon to the NBA and the WNBA.

Asians have the lowest obesity rate (16.7%) which only reinforces my belief that if we could just make people much taller, BMI would drop dramatically.

But the very best idea yet would be to engineer people to be around 4′ tall and weigh no more than 90 pounds.  The effect on our collective carbon footprint would be amazing.  Virtually everything from automobiles, planes, clothes, and furniture (to list but a few), would have a tremendous impact on the effect humans have on this planet.  These issues could possibly even be accomplished within a few generations using the aforementioned funds.