3/4 Liberal
Last night’s Oscar® presentation reminded me of a dirty little truth about liberal Hollywood: If your movie celebrates the sick, women, or gay men, you’ll be showered with gold trophies.
Not The Best Of Anything
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If it’s about life in Black America, well, would you step to the rear of the Academy®, please?
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They Got Rhythm
I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that Selma did win an award last night.
“Glory” won the Oscar® for best song. Fitting, no? Those people really have a knack for music, don’t they?
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Let’s Put On A Show
Congrats to B-ton thespians Ken Farrell and Kate Braun. They’ll be trekking up New York state way come summer to appear in a production of Kalamazoo there.
Farrell & Braun In BPP’s “Kalamazoo”
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The two-person play had its world premier here at the Bloomington Playwrights Project last fall. Farrell and Braun will reprise their roles in the comedy about senior love written by Michelle Kholos Brooks and Kelly Younger. Check out George Walker’s WFIU review of the BPP show here.
Kalamazoo will open at the 300-seat Charles R. Wood Theater in Glen Falls, NY, June 23rd and runs through July 3rd.
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Obsessed
People are taking to the interwebs to tut-tut about the latest trend among shrinks to declare orthorexia nervosa an honest and real, um, thing.
ON is Latin, natch, for correct eating nervous disorder. The syndrome is not yet listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-V) as something the pharmaceutical cos. should whip up a quick drug for but, more and more, skull jockeys are ID’ing folks with it and even treating some of them.
Bloomington, perhaps the region’s mecca for healthy, natural eaters, is largely up in arms about this development. The standard rant goes, If eating healthy is a mental illness, call me crazy.
So, what’s the prob. w/ eating correctly? Potentially, plenty.
The shrinks are not saying eating healthy itself is pathological, only the obsession and/or compulsion associated with it. We’re moving toward a world wherein the act of eating is seen, per se, as being somehow fraught with danger and even, y’know, bad.
In fact, anything that goes in your mouth must be analyzed, tested, passed, approved, blessed, and made purer than is humanly possible on top of the fairly rigid set of standards imposed on food and drink by the federal government as well as state, county, and municipal regulators. Those who aren’t constantly on the alert for poisons and toxins in their grub and liquids are saps, the neo-conventional wisdom goes.
To wit: I needed a drink of water out in public the other day and so poured myself a nice glass of eau d’Lake Monroe from a nearby faucet. The person who was with me was aghast. How, she wondered aloud, could you possibly want to fill yourself up with Grandma’s arthritis medications? Apparently she’d read somewhere that our lakes and rivers now are teeming with pissed-out drugs and other horrifying contaminants and so no one should ever drink tap water again.
I don’t know if the woman is suffering from orthorexia nervosa but she’s prob. well on her way.
See, this spanking new diagnosis isn’t for people who get that it’s ill-advised to eat McDonald’s three times a day. We’re omnivores, sure, but even our relatively cast-iron gullets should be spared the indignities of dross like Pringles and Snapple. All of us with functioning cerebra eat reasonably healthy. We’ll snigger and shake our heads while perusing the grocery baskets of folks loading up on jumbo bags of Wavy Lays or Spaghetti-O’s. We eat our fruits and vegetables and shy away from Pop Tarts.
BTW: I found a news report from KRON Ch. 4 about a woman who was busted after police found in her car a plastic spoon with a suspicious residue on it. The cops were certain the spoon was covered with meth. Lab tests were performed while the woman spent a month in jail and the results showed that the residue was — yup — Spaghetti-O’s sauce. Any food that can be easily mistaken for a killer synthetic substance in reality is no food at all. The knowledgable among us grasp that elementary concept; ergo we shun Spaghetti-O’s.
Food Or Meth — Who Knows?
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Nothing pathological about that. But ON sufferers lump Spaghetti-O’s with every and any comestible item that hasn’t been grown by an Amish-bearded farmer who hasn’t used deodorant soap since his teen years.
Folks, eating isn’t all that dangerous.
Anyway, all those Bloomingtonians who believe the American Psychiatric Ass’n is now in league with Monsanto to turn all our food products into so many long-chain polymers should take a deep breath.
The ON memes people are viral-ing originate mainly from the website The Mind Unleashed, a hell-in-a-handbasket hysteria-mongerer. TMU is described by RationalWiki as “a pseudoscientific, woo-peddling, clickbait website with a propensity to misrepresent data from studies and present it as scientific fact for their own gain. With just a soupçon of bigotry for flavor.”
An article in Forward Progressive headlined “How Conspiracy Nuts Are Duping Well-Meaning Liberals” describes such sites thusly:
The Mind Unleashed, NaturalNews and others like them pose as science and education pages when they actually disseminate pseudoscience and utter bullshit, for profit. Go to the links that they post and then search on those websites for articles concerning vaccines, fluoridated water, GMOs and if you’re feeling really adventurous, chemtrails. Yes, the batshit crazy idea that somehow our government has been spraying the US population with chemicals from jet engine exhausts to make them dumb and subservient for decades – they cover it, a lot.
Just helping the populace sort through the madness.
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Out, Damned Spot!
And, finally, speaking of madness, didja catch the report on NPR’s Morning Edition today about how our mania for cleanliness actually might be making us unhealthy?
Yep. See, a Swedish study of more than a thousand kids found that those whose parents washed dishes by hand suffered fewer incidences of eczema, allergic asthma, and hay fever than did those whose families used an automatic dishwasher.
Sheesh, Relax
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Appliance dishwashers generate water temps of plus-180ºF. This sanitizes dishes and utensils, meaning the micro-organism counts thereon are reduced dramatically over those washed by hand. The study posits that exposing kids to more bacteria and such actually builds their immune systems. Kids not as broadly exposed, therefore, have a more difficult time fighting off the aforementioned maladies.
This craze for purity, both in eating and in our households, is turning out to be one of our 21st Century weirdnesses. Again, folks, just chill.
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