Daddy, Papa and Me

…handing me things while I cook. Julia Child’s had it made. Cooking on the shows is not as easy as they make it look of course (and not as hard as a lot of people think either). Micheal Pollan has an interesting article today about the rise of cooking shows and the fall of cooking at home: Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch – NYTimes.com.

And it’s one of the most expensive social programs in the industrialized world, we pay more for health insurance and care than just about any other developed nation. We have a name for our national socialized medicine program…

We call it the emergency room.

If this is true, the Human Rights Campaign can say farewell to my donations (update, HRC says it’s not true):

Finally, Action on Gay Soldiers – Page 2 – The Daily Beast . The HRC was way behind the curve on marriage equality (though they kind of caught up) and is way behind the curve here. Are they actively working to derail repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell?

When over 75% of Americans think it should be repealed?
The architects of DADT are calling for it to be reviewed?
The President supports it’s repeal?
We have 60 Democrats in the Senate and a solid majority in the House.
We have an Army Secretary (A Republican no less) who supports repeal.

So, I have three questions:
What are we waiting for?
Why is the HRC working AGAINST equality?
and…

We don’t have one. But why not?

We go to 24 hour fitness (when I’m in SF, 2-3 times a week) and one has a kid’s corner, which is nice. It allows me or Guy to go to the gym when we otherwise might not be able to. But, it’s just a small room with a TV and a plastic ‘house’. So, Emma plays a bit with the kids and then watches TV. I’ve seen several other gyms with similar ‘kid’s corners’, TV and  a plastic house. Or just a TV. Isn’t that defeating the purpose of a gym? The parent gets fit while the kid watches TV?

Here’s an idea…

Or some other body part. I’ve linked to AP articles before on this blog. Just linked. I only sometimes quote more than a paragraph, more often than not, i just link. Well, AP is deciding this is against their copyright, _including_ links from search engines like Google. Yep, that’s right. The only way  people can find AP content online, unless they have  a paid subscription to it or read one of the increasingly fewer media outlets that use them, is now officially kapu (to use Hawaiian for forbidden).

I suspect that AP might be pronounced dead too in a couple years. I won’t be linking to any AP articles. Of course, that is nothing, but add the thousands of blogs linking and big ones like DailyKos and Andrewsullivan stopping links, and having the articles not showing up on search engines, well.. who is going to be reading AP articles?

A.P. Cracks Down on Unpaid Use of Articles on Web – NYTimes.com.

So, I’ve decided, after 10 months of WeightWatchers and a bunch of books about healthy eating and the American food system, to design a “Perfect Day.” I’ve got a bunch of ‘perfect’ meals, but I want to put it all together and try once and a while to eat exactly that. So, my criteria for a perfect day and my first perfect day…

Killing fish for vanity, is basically what Conor Friedersdorf is saying we are doing with Bluefin Tuna. We’ve overfished that the bluefin tuna so much, that it’s now worth upwards to 40-100 dollars a pound because it’s gotten so rare from overfishing. At that point, eating Bluefin tuna isn’t about greed alone, it’s about vanity.

The second (hopefully last ) post on ‘birthers.’ Jon Stewart takes down the whole insane birther movement:

If one is a card-carrying member of the birther movement and doesn’t feel utterly embarrassed after seeing that, well, all hope for rational thought on this topic is lost.

So, Emma is in an Art Camp here in Hawaii (yes, we are here in Hawaii for July+), more on that later.

She’s loving it and really likes to go for the most part. But the some of the kids aren’t particularly kind. She’s come home with stories about how some boys said she looks pregnant because she’s ‘fat’ (which ah.. she isn’t, she has a bit of a tummy, but in 60 percentile). Yesterday she came home and said one of the girls said she was ‘gay’ because her friend in the class was rubbing her shoulders.

We had a discussion about it, she, Guy and I. We discussed three things…

1. She’s not gay, children aren’t gay or straight or whatever. They’ll know what they are, who they fall in love with, when the get older.

2. Being gay is a good thing, being straight is a good thing. Her parents are gay, her best friends’ parents are gay. She has gay cousins, gay neighbors, etc. She has straight uncles, her best friends parents are straight, straight cousins, aunts, grandparents. It only means that one loves someone of the same gender (gay) or different gender (straight). (we’ll get into bi when she’s older, keeping it simple . She understands all that.

3. If she lets the girl know she isn’t bothered by it at all, she’ll probably stop. If she doesn’t, she can discuss it with the teacher.

I have to say though, she didn’t seem bothered much by either comment. She seems to have a strong enough personality to basically laugh in their face. I’m hoping anyway. If not, we are there for her.

6,000 yo earth creationism, climate-change denial, borderline (and overt) racism, teabag parties and now the resurgent birther movement (among other things like quitting governors, ‘hiking’ governors, adulterous Senators and the like). As the commenter below says…

The sad state of the party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Eisenhower. Are there no intelligent and reflective people left in the GOP?

via ‘Birther’ Boom – The Opinionator Blog – NYTimes.com.