nVerse

How Fat is Your State?

The annual obesity report is in…and the winner is Mississippi!

The Ole Miss has an adult obesity rate of 32.5 %, topping the charts for the fifth year in a row.   Three other states (all in the South) with rates above 30% are: West Virginia (31.2 percent), Alabama (31.1 percent) and Tennessee (30.2 percent).  Colorado weighed in as the scrawniest at 18.9 percent.

Oh, and the kids! Mississippi kids (ages 10-17) have an obesity rate of over 44%!!!

For the full report go to Trust for America’s Health

Stuart Smalley For Senate

It’s finally official folks: Al Franken is the new junior senator from the great state of Minnesota. After a much contested and frankly, lame, recount -let-the-courts-deliberate delay, Franken was officialy ruled to be the victor by the state’s supreme court.  Let’s hope that his challenger, Republican Norm Coleman, doesn’t continue to be a sore loser…still.

Anyways, aside from the newsworthy debacle that the Franken v. Coleman tight race made the headlines out to be, this is actually a very significant event beyond the borders of Minnesota - his joining the Senate gives the Dems a 60th vote, and hence makes ‘em filibuster-proof.

Huzzah

Spinal Tap at Glastonbury

Not that I really ever considered shlepping across the Atlantic to attend one of the biggest rock festivals, but I do feel a twinge of forlorn for having missed Spinal Tap play there.  I mean, well, WOW. Spinal Tap.  Think about it.   What a phenomenon.  No, no, really. Bear with me.

This “band” was the subject of the mockumentary film (the first of its kind?) directed by Rob Reiner in 1984, that would lead to such other comedic gems of adlib acting by Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer (and others) - think a Mighty Wind, Best in Show, Waiting for Guffman…

Though it’s great lines have become sooooo annoying to hear other people quote - like those great lines from caddy shack - the movie remains a masterpiece.  And if you haven’t seen the movie because of how annoying and off-putting it is to hear tools and nimrods quote it all the time, I don’t blame you - but you really should see the movie. 

And in the 90’s the band came back with another album and a tour - oh wait a minute, weird, they actually toured.  They actually put out an album.  And now, they took the stage at Glastonbury and are releasing another album.

Outstanding.

Music Ramblings

It’s no surprise that the Bay Area/Silicon Valley is a bit of a tech bubble…our daily technological ingestion may not represent anything close to reality in the other parts of the world.  For example, nearly everyone out here uses Firefox, Safari or Chrome as their web browsers (occasionally you will encounter an early-adopter/tech-rebel that uses Flock)…said another way, i can’t think of anyone that uses Microsoft Explorer to surf the web.  Yet I just saw a report that places the Explorer market share at nearly 70%!!!  really? wow. i guess that makes sense.

In the same way, it’s also a bit of a bubble out here when it comes to music consumption.  MP3s and streaming audio has been the way for many many many years now that when Tower Records and more recently, Virgin Records, packed up shop and left town, I wasn’t surprised.

Makes sense to me.

BUT, I did assume that we are in somewhat of a bubble, and surely CDs are still huge everywhere else.  Not so.  I have read a series of reports and press releases over the past month that made me realize that perhaps the digital musc phenomenon has made a really sizeable dent in the CD business and there really is some big truth behind the big 4 record companies’ cries of pain and woe.  iTunes is now the biggest music retailer with 20% of the market.  wow.  (amazon has 8 percent).  Ok, that’s cool. But here’s what i find to be really astounding and evidentiary that the big hurt really is on record labels: it used to take about 2.5 million CDs sold in its first week for a debut album to hit #1 on the charts, now it takes only 500 thousand.  That’s a factor of 5. And, as we all know, downolading a 99 cent track makes the labels far less money that buying a CD for $14…  so that compounds that factor of 5 to maybe a factor of 10?  that stinks for the labels but not for the consumer…or does it?  A new era of music promotion and rockstar culture is on the horizon.

Ahh The Perils of Industrial Beef Processing

It’s not new.  You have heard about it from a million friends and seen it on many TV shows…the perils of industrialized beef processing on a mass scale.

It’s Bad for us.  Not just ’cause there is a lot of fat and bad cuts-o-meat in the mass processed beef you eat, but also because of the mad cow prions that you just can’t cook away (prions are essentially infectious agents made up of protein chains).  Not many cows in the US have these mad-cow-prions, but there may be one or two steers out there that have it.  So, keep that in mind next time you are at a cookout and someone offers you a pre-made, pre-pressed, perfectly round Kirkland-brand burger disk from Costco - it just may have that infectious agent in there.  One burger patty can contain bits and pieces of hundreds if not thousands of different cows.

Gross.

Anyhoo, apparently, there is another beef recall due to e. coli - this time from the Colorado-based JBS Swift Beef Company.

They are recalling over 41,000 pounds of beef according to the USDA.  The types of beef they are recalling have wondrously curiously ominous names like “Bnls Beef Bottom Sirloin” and “Butt Ball Tip 2/UP S/T.”

mmmmmm Butt Ball Tip 2/UP S/T !!!

can i have some more gravy from the butt ball tip please?

Anyways, for years now i’ve been trying to eat mostly organic beef when i do eat beef, preferably the local stuff.  like from Prather Ranch.

Delicious!

Be careful out there….